Top Tier Scholar Fix for Endwalker

[ty_taurus]

I'm also in the camp of viewing the sprint effect as a good one; however, there are several factors at play here that just make Expedient feel like a slap in the face.

1. Sprint and Damage Reduction clash with one another. The point of sprint is to create more room for error. Mechanics shouldn't enforce sprint, but there can be tighter dodge windows on certain mechanics that sprint can make easier especially during prog--not to mention it can help players catch themselves if they're in the wrong place during prog as well. It essentially is invalidating the point of damage reduction in many cases. It basically narrows Expedient's full value down to something where there's unavoidable damage at the same time which doesn't really happen.

Know what would pair really well with Expedient? A raid-wide Lightspeed effect--reduce the cast times for casters (but not the recast time). That concept synergizes with casters giving them increased mobility as well since making their casts instant or 1 second helps them dodge mechanics more easily, especially since sprint has the secondary effect of helping melee return to attack range more quickly.

2. It doesn't feel like a great capstone. I feel like this is an issue with healers as a whole in that SE doesn't really understand what makes a healer ability "good" or not and thus has multiple instances of capstones that just don't feel impactful or are outshined by abilities acquired earlier. Assize is the star of WHM's 50-60 span, not Tetragrammaton. Penary Indulgence was a joke when it was first released and even now is a relatively tepid OGCD. Temperance is literally a buffed Divine Seal 40 levels later than it was obtained prior to Shadowbringers. Need I even bring up Dissipation and Fey Union? At least Summon Seraph doesn't negate all of SCH's faerie interactions and feels like it's offering a genuine value. They only ever seem to get AST right. At least during those expansions, Celestial Opposition and Sleeve Draw were interesting and useful, core abilities, and Neutral Sect is just powerful.

To get back on topic, Expedient has niche value, but that's not what we really want in a capstone.

3. SCH's playstyle was torn apart when transitioning into Shadowbringers and got nothing of value to compensate. Regardless of their stance on healers, I cannot fathom how anyone would look at how much they wanted to gut from SCH and thought that Recitation, Fey Blessing, and Summon Seraph would make up for that. Not to mention the pet system was botched to add more salt to the wound. Moving forward, none of that shredded identity issue was addressed, and "have a team sprint" really isn't the answer that any SCH player wanted to see regardless of how affected they were from the Shadowbringers changes, particularly when 2 of the other actions its getting for the expansion are just mild potency boosts for Broil and Art of War.

I just don't think there's anyone genuinely thinking about what SCH players would want to see or feel good about receiving. If there was, we wouldn't see SCH getting nothing but a brief max HP increase buff and a poorly-thought-out team-wide sprint.