Quote Originally Posted by Rilifane View Post
WHM regularaly got out-dpsed by both SCH and AST while being a deadweight in terms of free healing and was still by far the most popular healer across all tiers and bosses. It only recently saw a decline in participation with Endwalker coming up. There were many times when you saw as many WHMs as ASTs and SCHs combined. And current SGE would feel like a phys ranged compared to current WHM.
SCH still has a conflicting toolkit and in most fights, the displaced healing doesn't offset the horrible and slow pet AI one bit, even with the slight changes to responsiveness.
There will still be plenty of SCH players but I'm pretty sure SGE will end up more popular.
Not better, popular.
Efficiency was never the primary concern of most people when picking a class, ootherwise WHM wouldn't haven been so popular even after years of constantly being behind the other two.
Even if rDPS ends up slightly behind SCH, SCH still has many issues that haven't been adressed with Endwalker and that alone is reason enough for many SCH mains to switch to SGE.
Pet AI can only be fixed by upgrading the game's engine, not happening, or by gutting the pet entirely like they are doing with Summoner, which quite a few Summoner mains aren't a fan of. Scholar mains are going to need to be very careful with what they ask for or you'll see Eos/Selene become Embrace bots, because Kardia exists and each healer needs to be a copy of each other. With Whispering Dawn/Angel's Whisper, Fey Illumination/Seraphic Illumination and Fey Union inevitably becoming generic Scholar oGCDs that are entirely unlinked from the fairy or completely removed from the game and changed into totally different Scholar oGCDs that mirror Sage's non-addersgall oGCDs. While Fey Blessing and Consolation would end up sharing a button and be the only abilities you can command the fairy to use just like 6.0 Summoner with Bahamut's Akh Morn and Phoenix's Revelation. Which would make Seraph become an even more generic super Eos. Because that's the cheapest, dirtiest, quickest and easiest solution to the pet problem. At least then Dissipation would only lock you out of 10 Embraces and Fey Blessing and Summon Seraph for 30 seconds. Who knows, maybe Scholar's would actually like that.