I hate to, but I think I put down healing for now. Please make it engaging again, SE.

[Punslinger]

If you follow the trail of discussion you'll find my first post, in which I say that this will always be a problem so long as encounters are scripted. And that this is a problem for every job. I'll repeat myself, but - the fights are not designed to be fun forever and certainly not when you are overgeared/have 20 clears experience. This is true for every single job.

Do you know what going through Titan is like for a DPS player? It's 3 minutes of trying to fit the predefined rotation (stored in muscle memory) that you've been doing for weeks while making minor adjustments, followed by 9 minutes of a dummy fight with minimal movement.

You're not wrong, but my point is that healers hit this wall much faster than tanks or DPSers, because healers have fewer ways to optimize their play. As the group becomes more skilled, whether you're in a static or just enjoying the average improvement over time in the PF pool, less healing is required. A healer can fill that downtime by doing DPS, but it's trivially easy for a healer to maximize their DPS, because all that's required is to press 1 until the boss dies, and press 2 every half-minute. Tanks and DPSers can practice higher-uptime strats, or iron out the slop in their rotation during mechanics. There's more headroom for a tank or DPSer to improve their play in any given fight, compared to a healer, and that's why I find healing unengaging.

Simply put: any given piece of content stays fun, for me, for longer if I play it as a tank or a DPS job.

[Maltothoris]

On a side note, you can't really solo heal TEA because healers are the only class that can esuna on demand with the BRD being on a cd. You have to clean 6 debuffs in 10 seconds, at most a single healer can only get 4 cleanses. Not to mention the auto attack damage during that bit. And there are some really tight heal checks here, with the nisi dot ticking while photon goes out, the autos from Brute Justice and Cruise Chaser and the fact if one person dies everything can easily snowball from there so I'll say that this fight can't be solo healed.

On that note, while the heal is intensive here, it's a shame it isn't anywhere else.

[Sloprano]

If you follow the trail of discussion you'll find my first post, in which I say that this will always be a problem so long as encounters are scripted. And that this is a problem for every job. I'll repeat myself, but - the fights are not designed to be fun forever and certainly not when you are overgeared/have 20 clears experience. This is true for every single job.

This is the crux of my issues aswell: Dungeons are as scripted as they've always been, but our skillset's potential has gone down. Before, after I had healed and shielded there was another world of oppertunities waiting on me, today I heal and shield and only thing left to do is Broil III.

The strength of a scripted sequence is that you can take every chance to improve, if you want to. That's why in my first run of Wanderer's Palace I was at the edge of my seat, finger ready over Adlo, Lustrate and the fairy hotbar for the slighest new dent in the tank's hp. By the twentieth I was sprinting with the tank, seeing if I ccould apply all dots while pulling, when to cast Shadowflare or prevent aero from dropping off the boss and stilling finding new openings where it was safe enough to Cleric Stance.

And the good thing is: If I didn't find Scholar interesting beyond healing and shielding, I could still run those places successfully. It's not like a DPS job, it's exactly the same for different reasons: I kept getting more and more active because the job would let me get more and more out of it for each run.

I keep bringing up Arcanist skills, fairy hotbar and Cleric Stance, not entirely because, if just very partially, for nostalgia, but also because I've come to dread the expansions. Instead of being filled with wonder of what kind of interesting new spells like Emergency/Deployment or Dissipation they will reveal or start a expansion Live Letter "Hey Scholars, we're sorry to say we're removing X for x.0 after being in the game for six years, but oh boy! Are we excited about these new things you're gonna get!", they've instead proven two times in a row an expansion is a harbinger for removing choices, backtrack on what they removed, introduce more oGCDs and buff Broil.

[GhostXO]

I keep bringing up Arcanist skills, fairy hotbar and Cleric Stance, not entirely because, if just very partially, for nostalgia, but also because I've come to dread the expansions. Instead of being filled with wonder of what kind of interesting new spells like Emergency/Deployment or Dissipation they will reveal or start a expansion Live Letter "Hey Scholars, we're sorry to say we're removing X for x.0 after being in the game for six years, but oh boy! Are we excited about these new things you're gonna get!", they've instead proven two times in a row an expansion is a harbinger for removing choices, backtrack on what they removed, introduce more oGCDs and buff Broil.

This really resonates with me, because while my friends (who play dps and tanks) were all very happy and excited for the expansion, I was very much dreading it because I knew what made Scholar fun for me would be lost once the expansion hit. Sure enough too, I hate what they did with the job. I absolutely loved Scholar too. I loved doing all content with it and it made me love the game so much more. I miss old Scholar a lot now and I only just dread updates now because I have no faith in the development team making these changes.

[Lodi]

Since we're talking about removed spells, Aero III. A new dot, great for si gle targets and groups alike, 24s long so it's not hard to maintain, and it also works as a cheap aoe since Holy burned through your mp in seconds. A cool spell that nobody had any reason to dislike, and it's been there unchanged for four years.

And now it's gone, haha! Zoop! Bye! Now Aero II is stronger instead!


Just... why, Square? What was the point? Was healing so hard that people physically couldn't click another button every 24 seconds? Give us damage CDs and put a bigger emphasis on gcd healing, if you are afraid of us healing too little. And if you're gonna remove useless and niche skills, then maybe take a look at Fluid aura or Cure III first, instead of one of our most used spells? Or why not rework Cure so it's more useful in the later levels? Please?

The current state of healers makes no sense.
We deal more damage than ever, healing is the easiest it has ever been, but our dps is so boring and discouraging us to be involved in our figths.
What are we supposed to do?
Healing all the time? Then why can we get away with so much dps?
Dpsing all the time? Then why was it made so boring and uninspired?
Somewhere between the two? Then why do we have several times more damage skills than healing skills?

I just don't know what Square wants us to be, and the deafening lack of communication from them just makes having faith a harder task.

[Crushnight]

Since we're talking about removed spells, Aero III. A new dot, great for si gle targets and groups alike, 24s long so it's not hard to maintain, and it also works as a cheap aoe since Holy burned through your mp in seconds. A cool spell that nobody had any reason to dislike, and it's been there unchanged for four years.

And now it's gone, haha! Zoop! Bye! Now Aero II is stronger instead!


Just... why, Square? What was the point? Was healing so hard that people physically couldn't click another button every 24 seconds?

Given what happened between HW to SB especially AST but it affected all 3, yes having more than 1 DoT is way too hard we need consolidation everywhere wah wah wah /s

AST from inception had a much easier time with DoT management than WHM and SCH with only having 2 yet even this was cut in SB, i could get behind stuff like malefic/malefic II being consolidated as you just used the most powerful one for your level but DoTs were entirely separate and added a tiny fraction of extra complexity (Do i have time to spend multiple gcds to maintain DoTs, can i afford to DoT at this time for each different DoT duration etc).

But SE don't want to embrace their own encounter design and how the community sees healers being more than healers, no doubt the only reason dps spells exist is because you need to kill things in msq if you didn't i could see them getting rid of everything altogether :/

[EwokAssassini]

This really resonates with me, because while my friends (who play dps and tanks) were all very happy and excited for the expansion, I was very much dreading it because I knew what made Scholar fun for me would be lost once the expansion hit. Sure enough too, I hate what they did with the job. I absolutely loved Scholar too. I loved doing all content with it and it made me love the game so much more. I miss old Scholar a lot now and I only just dread updates now because I have no faith in the development team making these changes.

That was about the same experience I had. I was excited for Shadowbringers until I saw the healer changes at the media tour. I got told "don't overreact, wait until you get your hands on it before judging how it plays." So I spent the rest of SB playing healer and trying to enjoy it while it lasted, and boy, when ShB released, I was just as disappointed as I thought I would be. Every upcoming patch disappoints me again and again. When SE told us SCH got an "improvement on usability" and it just turned out to be that steady paused embrace? It was salt in the wound. I didn't want to support SE's direction for healers anymore, so that's why I decided to put it down (in addition to just being tired of spamming one button).

[Johaandr]

I forgot medica spells existed heck even succor when u got fey and succor.

[Saefinn]

So based on an Amaurot run, I've measured SCH DPS percentages.
Art of War: 51%
Broil III: 7%
Biolysis: 3%
Which totals for 61% of button presses as DPS moves.
Given Art of War and Broil III don't rotate with each other. I'd argue it's effectively 58% of the dungeon being single button presses. Even if we were to just use the 51% for Art of War, that's really high.

If I compare to DNC and SMN rotations. The most used I got for DNC was Fountain, which accounts for 20% and SMN it's Ruin III, which accounts for 16%.

Taking roughly the same percentage on SMN there is:
Ruin III: 16%
Ruin IV: 13%
Fester: 13%
Tri-Disaster: 6%
Fountain of Fire: 6%
Crimson Cyclone: 6%
Total: 60% with 6 skills

In the 61% bracket for DNC there's the following:
Fountain: 20%
Cascade: 16%
Fan Dance: 13%
Fountainfall: 6%
Fan Dance III: 6%
Total: 61% with 5 skills

Versus the 61% with 3 skills on SCH, two of which account for 58% and are basically single button rotations. At least DNC's 20% cascade is broken up by all skills that follow, SCH's 58% here is a lot of repetition in a row before throwing a heal or a Biolysis. Historically this would be broken up with 2 or 3 DoT's instead of 1, a Bane and Shadowflare. And if we go back to pre-SB I'd argue the downtime was shorter too, particularly in ARR.

This is likely why healer DPS is brought up so much, because whilst it's -only- a part of what we do, DPS is secondary to our role and that was have a tonne of healing spells at our disposal, those healing spells are effective enough to make it so that most of the time we are DPSing. I'd argue for a lot of content our healing is our secondary role, though I'd actually prefer that not to be the case. For all the people who say "if you wanna DPS, play a DPS class" it's not like I have anything else to do once I've got people to health.

I realise Amaurot isn't exactly difficult content, but there are damage spikes on the tank, particularly on the bigger pulls, and also Amaurot is more representative of the kind of content people do on a daily basis as it's a part of their roulettes, which in my mind should be the base level for jobs to feel fun to play, at least at level cap (and IMO are for tanks & DPS and used to be for healers too). There's dungeons that also require much less healing than Amaurot too.


And whilst I get Laria's argument that there is a fall off in terms of enjoyment once you've done things 100 times. But as you can imagine, that fall off is a lot sooner when you have much less to do by comparison.

[Sloprano]

So based on an Amaurot run, I've measured SCH DPS percentages.
Art of War: 51%
Broil III: 7%
Biolysis: 3%
Which totals for 61% of button presses as DPS moves.
Given Art of War and Broil III don't rotate with each other. I'd argue it's effectively 58% of the dungeon being single button presses. Even if we were to just use the 51% for Art of War, that's really high.

Thanks Saefin, never did consider getting statistics for it. Because what you found definitly reflects how it feels to play Scholar today, which I think is more important than balance when the creators expect us to run Duties with these for daily miniscule rewards. Just getting to play it should be a reward in itself. The crown example of this being why I'm so enamored with old, archaic Cleric Stance. Don't mind the description of "swapping stats, increase X% and decrease Y%. The important bit being it made a big enough difference so you could feel it's effects. You could see more damage done and almost half healing done. Being locked in for five seconds was enough to get off a BMB2+Bane or enough time for a tank to go from healthy to dead if you didn't see what he pulled. When leveling ShB with a friend I came to grow envy of the joy in his voice as he told about ever increasing Fire 4 critss. Not for the high damage numbers mind you, but that he had something in his favorite job to build towards a big payoff. It's the same kind of joy I remember getting when I manage to Bane just right or deploy a critlo and laugh at the text "0 damage taken" or brown my pants when I activated Cleric Stance when I thought I was turning it off. It's memory even further put in positive bias compared to the flaccid spells that replaced it, looking at you Chain Strat and 4.0 Cleric Stance.

Also to add above, after running the dungeons for twenty to thirty times, I did lose count, I might've gotten all I needed, or a new one had come out in that time. Point being that I wasn't a soulless husk that never wanted to enter those place again. I still have very fond memories of Baelsar's, Sohm Al (HM), The Burn despite running them countless times for the Fending and Healing sets. While beautifully orchestrated, presentation gets lackluster after the severalth viewing, that's why I had an arsenal of endlessly untapped potential to not only to help the fights go faster, but to have a bloody good time while doing it. While the job stopped short at dispensing endorphin the moment you equipped the job stone, it was sublime when I got into the flow of it.