No love for Sch

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

Fluid aura deleted? Perfect

I'm using Fluid Aura regularly in POTD to get a free cast in before I get pummelled again.
It was a nice utility spell with a niche use, and I don't know why it gets deleted.. but removing options is not a good thing.

You don't have to have all your spells on your hotbars at all times. I have special layouts for deep dungeons, without anything I don't need there.

Currently, Scholar is actually pretty nice in DD (except for the damage, "green dps" my ass, lol), would be very cool if they doubled down on that.

[Kahnom]

That ground-punching AoE looks cool though.

[Absurdity]

That ground-punching AoE looks cool though.

It's just Art of War but with a new effect, because if you look at current Art of War it is extremely underwhelming...it actually kinda looks like old Shadowflare to me, just without the persistent ground effect.

[Nethereal]

I think its a bit dishonest to reduce SCH's kit to being a soil bot, spreadlo and chain are also pretty decent, as are excog and indom as well as both fairy abilities (not fae gauge.) Soil is the peak of its kit though I can agree there. But that still doesn't explain why it should be reworked or how its kit is poorly designed. Saying SCH is bad when its still being picked in every optimal comp (which is the only time these arguments actually matter) is wrong in my opinion. Its identity is solid, and the devs not changing anything fundamental only proves this. Are there things that can be better? Yes, namely the pet AI, but the pet AI being bad is an engine problem because SCH isn't the only one who suffers from it.

Chain is chain, its convenience is only having to be able to hit the boss relative to Divination.

Spreadlo isn't anything special (especially for people who have played SCH before it got reworked because it could remove mechanics) relative to celestial opposition. And if you're not using recitation it's especially not special.
Spreadlo requires a GCD for a 375 shield along with an oGCD. If you're lucky it will be a crit 375 shield if not AST is better because in those two actions you will have a 500 potency shield and more actual healing potency regardless of if SCH crits or not. Before pets were reworked spreadlo was much more useful and had many niche uses because you could deploy off fairy now you use it because it's your strongest shield, not because it's a good ability.

All aetherflow abilities and fairy abilities are quite fine except maybe Lustrate but there's nothing particularly special about them that AST doesn't match except Sacred Soil. So there really is no reason to pick SCH over AST unless:

don't want to deal with star/cards.

Noct AST beats SCH in everything except personal dps and mitigation. It has more consistent shields with less micromanaging, it heals more, it has an instant single target heal that does 200 potency healing and 500 potency shielding on demand that blows adlo out of the park unless it crits, and if you were to consider Star's skill ceiling it has the most room for growth and optimization out of all 3 healers.

The reason SCH is consistently picked is because the best composition for healers is AST and SCH because there's no need for WHMs super heals and big dps relative to the freedom of movement the other two healers give along with the combination of chain and Divination. You have to work quite a bit more on mitigation sheets if you bring a WHM AST comp vs a SCH AST comp.
It also just so happens that WHM is the best prog/leveling healer and is very easy and essentially takes no managing outside of blowing all your mana on back to back cure 3s.

So while SCH can be fun and people do have fun playing SCH now and again at the bare bones you pick SCH for Sacred Soil because the skill in and of itself is essentially two additional jobs worth of mitigation.
Not because you like micromanaging fairy and making sure its in range of your party when you press the button because it decided to stop moving to use embrace or because you enjoy the skill delay on fairy abilities, or because you enjoy making sure you don't eat your fairy abilities before you use seraph, or dear god after you use seraph, or because you enjoy pretending you like to micromanage fairy tether, or because you like to remind your party to stack on you so you can shield them with your super secret extra big shield that really is barely any better than succor unless you crit, or back in the day because you enjoyed wasting all your mana baiting for a crit adlo so you could ignore a mechanic.
Lightly glossing over another aspect of SCH it is the only healer that has to fight its own kit to properly optimize.

The list goes on, healers in general aren't fun for most, SCH is the least fun healer to play of the 3, soon to be 4. So if we were to fully go down this road at the same pace we are now the next meta comp is going to be AST & SGE with an occasional WHM.
Sacred Soil is good but it's not that good. Now that you have an option that actually provides mitigation that can be paired with AST you will have no reason to pick SCH.
So really SCH's identity is the fairy, Noct AST walks all over any other identity it used to have.

Though I do think the 1.5 sec GCD is going in the right direction and will help close the gap between all 4 healers.
A very big thing AST had over all the other healers was it had actual free healing due to their free weaves, now that every healer is being afforded that luxury it will be a lot better all around.

I'm using Fluid Aura regularly in POTD to get a free cast in before I get pummelled again.
It was a nice utility spell with a niche use, and I don't know why it gets deleted.. but removing options is not a good thing.

You don't have to have all your spells on your hotbars at all times. I have special layouts for deep dungeons, without anything I don't need there.

Currently, Scholar is actually pretty nice in DD (except for the damage, "green dps" my ass, lol), would be very cool if they doubled down on that.

I would usually agree with that mindset but if you literally only have 1 use for a ability that you get fairly early on in 1 specific instance of content then it really is just an eyesore.
I use it on bosses when I have a free cast because I'm bored. Now if it had an effect similar to BLM's sleep I would agree they shouldn't remove it but it really is too niche.

[VirusOnline]

Its trailer was boring and uninspired and its evolution of abilities were terrible.

They didn't even make a draw off of SMN and give our faerie multiple summons. Perhaps she could evolve into an even stronger form than Seraph ?
Give us Bismark and Lakshmi - both which can be related to elements of healing - as summons each with respective and unique healing abilities. Now this would set it apart from sage.

Maybe on the end of Sacred Soil everyone within it when it ends is rewarded with a 5% self shield.
Perhaps Excog could have been made so that you can share it between two players with the first player getting 100% return and the second getting 25% return on consumption or end.
Aetherpact gauge - do something about this. Its use is grossly too specific.
Dissipation ? Let's be real this is my dps rotation. Reward me for using it with a 10% healing increase, 10% dmg increase, 10% shield to the lowest health player everytime I use one of the aethercharges from dissipation.

And these aren't things that should be done all at once, just ideas to spice it up.

[zcrash970]

my bestie, who plays a sch main healer, thinks SCH is fun, is looking forward to the added buff and doesnt think the job is in any way "broken"

I play healers and main whm, have little interest in SGE because it looks like the combat healer the people who whined about SCH losing its dps focus have been waiting on. SCH always was a barrier healer. what more did you expect them to get?

The problem is that they don't know how to develop for sch.
They give us all these tools with aetherflow costs but we used all of it on EDs.
Fairy ghost actions. SMN probably doesn't have this issue anymore.
They could easily develop party support skills with aetherflow costs. Like give the haste selene use to have with that new movement speed buff.
Maybe a counterpart to sacred soil, that have mobs take more damage.
Just something interesting that makes sch more than spamming broil and ED and letting fairy do the work and throwing out the occasional shield

[GrimGale]

Is the Broil/Glare spam not a problem in people's minds? The prevalent healing downtime, that forces a healer either to sit on their thumbs or mindlessly press one button over and over and refreshing 1 dot every 30s not a problem? Nobody sees anything wrong about it?

"If you want better DPS options play a DPS."

I want to play a healer. I want to heal. But If you design fights so that there is barely anything to heal, I am stuck DPSing all the time. And DPSing as a healer is as entertaining as watching paint dry.

"Oh but you get to weave in heals that is fun."

Yes. Weaving is fun. But you always weave it with the same goddam spell. The same boring dot/blue blast. Check the parsers from Savage encounters, they are the ones technically requiring more healing. 130 casts of your filler spell VS 30 casts of your healing spells. For a "filler" spell we use them much more often than any other ability.

"Play any other healer."

Hey MNK mains, play any other melee dps. Hey SMN mains play any other caster. Oh, you got your third rework? How come SE lets you have three reworks?

"Your role is to heal."

God I wish it was. With the amount of damage spells I use per encounter It really doesn't feel like it. It feels like my role is to broil/glare and heal on the side. Was dot management really such a big problem. AST has card management. Was it really that hard to give a "debuff" management thing to fill downtime. Was it really that hard to give WHM a more varied Nuke management to fill downtime.

"There is really nothing else we could have done to SCH."

I have nothing else to say. It's such an admission of failure. No imagination and no will to examine anything.
Hey it's numbers work.

Sure, fine. SMN numbers "worked", but you still gave it a mechanics rework.

[Nethereal]

Is the Broil/Glare spam not a problem in people's minds? The prevalent healing downtime, that forces a healer either to sit on their thumbs or mindlessly press one button over and over and refreshing 1 dot every 30s not a problem? Nobody sees anything wrong about it?

"If you want better DPS options play a DPS."

I want to play a healer. I want to heal. But If you design fights so that there is barely anything to heal, I am stuck DPSing all the time. And DPSing as a healer is as entertaining as watching paint dry.

"Oh but you get to weave in heals that is fun."

Yes. Weaving is fun. But you always weave it with the same goddam spell. The same boring dot/blue blast. Check the parsers from Savage encounters, they are the ones technically requiring more healing. 130 casts of your filler spell VS 30 casts of your healing spells. For a "filler" spell we use them much more often than any other ability.

"Play any other healer."

Hey MNK mains, play any other melee dps. Hey SMN mains play any other caster. Oh, you got your third rework? How come SE lets you have three reworks?

"Your role is to heal."

God I wish it was. With the amount of damage spells I use per encounter It really doesn't feel like it. It feels like my role is to broil/glare and heal on the side. Was dot management really such a big problem. AST has card management. Was it really that hard to give a "debuff" management thing to fill downtime. Was it really that hard to give WHM a more varied Nuke management to fill downtime.

"There is really nothing else we could have done to SCH."

I have nothing else to say. It's such an admission of failure. No imagination and no will to examine anything.
Hey it's numbers work.

Sure, fine. SMN numbers "worked", but you still gave it a mechanics rework.

The issue is the potency of the healing along with a few other things.
It's a catch 22. They're giving healers more healing abilities, not spells, abilities. Understandable because you want to give healers more things to heal with that's why they picked healer, to heal.
The issue is their oGCD heals are too potent and they have too many of them. Like the new WHM ability is an oGCD with a 20 second duration and a AoE heal(presumably 400) every 10 seconds.
If you want to get healers to heal they need to move away from oGCDs but you don't want them to feel useless so you can't exactly nerf them into the ground.
They need to add more abilities that only function after you've used a healer GCD or make more oGCDs have cast bars.
With the amount of oGCD heals everyone has now bosses need to be doing an AoE raid wide every 20-30 seconds throughout the entire fight to force a GCD heal out of someone.

I understand how you feel because for the true healer experience I actually play another game, SOLO. When I queue up as healer all I do is heal. My damage is negligible and it was purposefully made inconvenient for me to DPS.

[Deceptus]

The fact that SCH and Sage both have more Regens than actual Shields yet for some reason are referred to by the devs as the "Shield / Barrier" healer shows how disconnected they are from reality.

[GrimGale]

The issue is the potency of the healing along with a few other things.
It's a catch 22. They're giving healers more healing abilities, not spells, abilities. Understandable because you want to give healers more things to heal with that's why they picked healer, to heal.
The issue is their oGCD heals are too potent and they have too many of them. Like the new WHM ability is an oGCD with a 20 second duration and a AoE heal(presumably 400) every 10 seconds.
If you want to get healers to heal they need to move away from oGCDs but you don't want them to feel useless so you can't exactly nerf them into the ground.
They need to add more abilities that only function after you've used a healer GCD or make more oGCDs have cast bars.
With the amount of oGCD heals everyone has now bosses need to be doing an AoE raid wide every 20-30 seconds throughout the entire fight to force a GCD heal out of someone.

I understand how you feel because for the true healer experience I actually play another game, SOLO. When I queue up as healer all I do is heal. My damage is negligible and it was purposefully made inconvenient for me to DPS.

Honestly, I am not adverse to making the DPS part of healers more interesting. I don't mind DPSing as a healer, heck I think done properly it can be extremely rewarding. Hitting the enemy and healing the party can be inmensely satisfying. Juggling healthbars, then applying a dot. Blasting an enemy with a nuke then throwing a shield. Spreading dots on a group of enemies was one of the most satisfying things you could do with SCH only surpassed by Deploying shields onto your group. The placing, the timing, the abilities all line up and pulling it off is satisfying.

I would love to have more interactions of that type. I like AST cards, even if now they just become sorta repetitive.

One buttom spam kills the fun. Constant repetition of a skill isn't what I'd call riveting gameplay. I understand why they made it that way, so that it was easier to keep dpsing while healing. Now it's made even easier with the shorter cast times. Which means Broil/Glare spam will become even more prevalent.

Regarding optimization: "Why would I bother to bend over backwards to fit yet another boring blue blast?" Well now I don't have to bend over backwards to add a few more casts of Glarebroil to the already existing pile of 130 casts of Glarebroil in this 10 minute fight.