Genuine Scholar feedback

[Liam_Harper]

When the hell are you getting to use ED? I'm still progging P2S and if I don't use them on heals people die.

Taking a glance at your recent P1s kill, you're not utilizing your free oGCD's enough. For example there, you're missing 3 Dissipations and 4 Aetherflow casts, which is a lot of Aether heals and/or Energy Drains lost. You also didn't use Recitation, which is essentially a free Indom that always crits, Expedient: which is 10% mitigation, Protraction: which is free tank upkeep and you missed a lot of Seraph usage which means losing Consolation casts.

By utilizing those oGCD's more, you'll have far more Aether to heal with, cutting down the need to use Succor too and giving more freedom to use ED. It's also a matter of practice and learning and mapping the fight.

It also depends on your co-heal too. A good Sage or AST can heal the bulk of P1S and P2S without needing any GCD heals so you're barely needed for more than Broil and supplementary heals. A bad co-heal will end up putting you to a lot more work.

[GrimGale]

Only if you're concerned about your personal DPS to the exclusion of all else. As a healer, you spend resources healing because you expect that the party's overall DPS will be better for it in the long run. The alternative is letting people tank the floor, which is a far greater loss to the party than the measly 85 potency you personally "lost" because you didn't cast four Glares instead.

In savage, healing is basically worthless. The "mistakes" you can fix with healing or shielding are basically zero, since most mistakes will either involve a one-shot mechanic or an outright wipe.

Sometimes, someone will step in the bad right before a mechanic and you'll essentially have a split second to throw an oGCD heal at them before it resolves and the next immediate raid-wide hit kills them.
They may survive but they'll get heavily punished for it with damage down.

So even in the cases where you can "save" someone, the person hit and the healer that "saved" them both got punished after the fact.

[ty_taurus]

SCH is fine.

It can be better but I would rather remove and consolidate their actions than outright rework their systems. Their systems finally work to a tolerable degree. The problem is player perception and kit bloat. I will happily trade in potential damage for additional comfort and enjoy finding ways to shave heals I thought were necessary with Energy Drain. What’s not fine is Deployment Tactics, Protraction, and the sheer number of buttons the Fairy takes up while providing minimal support. Even expedient feels redundant, and it’s not a bad skill. We just don’t need it.

I’d much rather take measures to make Dissipation and Seraph more interesting than outright remove them too. I can see how they could be universally positive with some forethought put into them. It’s just not worth their current bloat. But they’re far from the only bloat.

Seraph I'm on board for, but I've been wanting Dissipation to get sacked since the day it was introduced. Sure, it functions now unlike when it was originally added to the game, but it has never felt good to use and continues to present itself as a blatant contradiction of sacrificing your healing to get more healing. It just doesn't make sense. Fey Union too I'd like to see removed or changed drastically. At best, SCH's identity of sacking your healing for more healing is buying a $10 bill for $5, and at worst it's buying a $5 bill for $10.

[Grimoire-M]

-snip-

That feeling I stopped agreeing with once I started pressing Dissipation consistently to get a feel for it. If we still were in Stormblood where we had to resummon the fairy after I might agree with you still because that was annoying in practice and shown to be almost mathematically not worth it (still did it back then in dungeons because QA was a mechanic). I haven't since Shadowbringers, where I was more annoyed at clipping Energy Drains than anything Dissipation did directly. And I think anyone who says it feels bad doesn't really get how it works, developers included.

Since Endwalker I've viewed Dissipation as a straight up DPS cooldown rather than a healing one, though it has use in emergencies, I agree it isn't practical to use it in that manner most of the time. To me a simple duration nerf to 15-20s instead of the 30s it is at now and changing the healing spell potency increase to a generic Spell Potency increase sets more appropriate expectations out of its use, while also removing enough of the downside to actually clean up the problems people have with it. Most times I ever encounter frustration with the skill anymore come from it taking far too long to give the fairy back when I am trying to make use of it mid-fight, even when I've planned for it, and those mostly come down to the duration it lasts. That last 5-10s is all that really should go. The only reason to make it shorter than that is to lower the DPS gain that making it generic spell potency represents. The Fey Gauge shouldn't rely on the fairy being out either but wouldn't change much without first giving the Fey Gauge more use.

The only other reason I want to merge it with Seraph is because you frankly will never run into a situation where you want to use both back to back. They're already mutually exclusive so it's a free button. There's very little downside to merging them as long as we do something about Consolation (like put it on Fey Blessing), put Dissipation first (having access to it in the opener gives you more control over both in the actual encounter than Seraph first), and give them charges (so 60 or 90s CD, alternate between both, grant the cooldown change and charges when you unlock Seraph so Dissipation doesn't wind up in the same spot Bahamut did on Summoner), which allows you to use both to a better degree of flexibility than now as not only does it still allow for back to back use of both but it lets you adjust Dissipation AND Seraph into specific windows losslessly if that's what you're after. It's an extra affordance that I consider reasonable to again shave a potential disadvantage of using the skill, even though I don't think it's necessary beyond killing button bloat, which is a greater problem with Scholar's kit than 'healing taxes'.

Energy Drain and Dissipation's respective places in Scholar's kit gives you a tangible reason to care about how you optimize your healing and DPS in the first place. Frankly, I think Sage and Astrologian should play by the same rules, with cards getting healing/mitigation alternatives while we shave off bad cooldowns from its kit, while Sage gets a second pass on Toxikon and Phlegma (Maybe if you have full Addersgall the bar begins to charge up Addersting and Toxikon refunds MP on use, while Phlegma gets a slight cooldown refund if you use an Addersgall heal). They're stylistically different ways of achieving the same goal of "Make Healer DPS interesting" as far as I'm concerned. I'm more okay with tradeoffs because they signal to players "Hey, care about this!" way better than straight up refunds do, which is where your feel-bad moment comes from. And they're a better balancing lever against gearing, as they allow for additional power to the casual and progression meta where it's needed while giving the speedkill players something to actively shave and juggle based on your composition, which again tells the design team 'Hey we don't need this much healing in X context' which helps them tune them better in the long run. And they're less clunky to implement in most cases as it's often just adding a choice based on manipulating a resource tied to a subset of your kit. Dissipation just happens to be a pet cooldown and that's why it sucked for as long as it did.

It's pretty clear to see that it adds the kind of gameplay I actively want to see more of in healers. It's like playing a black deck from Magic the Gathering in an MMO for me. Only the last life point matters. Here's a powerful ability, but you have to play with its drawbacks if you want to get the most out of it. It simply looks like it sucks until you learn how to use it and see the rewards pan out. I want it to be good rather than 'eh, fine', and it really doesn't take much to get it there from where it is now if you've been using it. That's how little the flaws matter.

[RinaShinomiya]

*snip*

If our ST Nuke being the most used GCD ability and us actively trying to avoid GCD healing didnt tell the devs we want more DPS options rather than healing options, what makes you think that giving more healers trade off mechanics will do that? The devs don't care and you ask for changes that make jobs clunkier to play simply because you yourself find enjoyment in it.

I personally cant stand playing scholar for the things you tout as enjoyable game design. And it's not because i don't understand it, i do and thats why i don't like it. Having a "addersgall charge changes to addersting" charge mechanic would be worthless at best and disincentive using your primary healing source at worst. These conflicting priorities are what makes players hate the Scholar job rather than draw people to it. Meanwhile the devs couldnt care less about people using intended healing abilities as DPS abilities.

[Silver-Strider]

Snip

SCH is just a jank class that people have attempted to salvage as best they could and claim its all intentionally like that because of reasons. If that was even remotely true, the Devs wouldn't have constantly tried to remove ED in the 1st place and when that failed, they nerfed the skill to be as pitiful as it is today to try and disincentive its usage in ShB only to go about in EW making the healer cast time changes that once again encourages its usage as a DPS gain since SCH no longer needs Ruin 2 for mobility weaving as often as before. Healer Design as a whole is riddled with so many half baked changes that it's really clear that the Devs have no clue what to do with Healers.

People are also so quick to say that SCH needs ED as an Aetherflow dump but really, it's 100% not needed. It pads SCH's DPS and allows for SCH not to need to overheal to get rid of stacks for when Aetherflow is off CD but realistically, that's just because the class is designed so poorly that it needs those things. If extra stacks of Aetherflow could be converted into an alternative resource that would benefit the SCH in another way, then that issue wouldn't exist and both Dissipation and Energy Drain could be changed or removed without issue.

[Liam_Harper]

SCH is just a jank class that people have attempted to salvage as best they could and claim its all intentionally like that because of reasons.

Honestly, that's how I feel too. SCH's a mess and it feels like SCH gameplay is largely about trying to mitigate the inherent downsides, restrictions and poor design in order to try and make it perform well. Then many SCH players claim doing so is "engagement and skill". It's sort of like when WHM was clip-mage last expansion, you had that small crowd of players who would argue to the death that it was good design, more fun and a skill based class because you had to plan movement. Meanwhile BLM existed as a perfect example of engaging gameplay where you planned movement. But no, mandatory Assize clips, blowing heals to move and limping around the arena were "fine".

There are better ways to design engaging gameplay than heal taxes, poor AI and half your toolkit vanishing because you pressed an oGCD. These just aren't necessary components of good class design.

[RobynDaBank]

Make Dissipation a union of the character and the summoned faerie: healing potency increases, Aetherflow is gained, and faerie abilities would still be usable, except their spread will be dependent on our position for the duration. Perhaps it sounds a little too OP coupled with the healing potency increase - but then again, it's not like that increase affects OGCDs, right? Dunno...

[Grimoire-M]

Honestly, that's how I feel too. SCH's a mess and it feels like SCH gameplay is largely about trying to mitigate the inherent downsides, restrictions and poor design in order to try and make it perform well. Then many SCH players claim doing so is "engagement and skill". It's sort of like when WHM was clip-mage last expansion, you had that small crowd of players who would argue to the death that it was good design, more fun and a skill based class because you had to plan movement. Meanwhile BLM existed as a perfect example of engaging gameplay where you planned movement. But no, mandatory Assize clips, blowing heals to move and limping around the arena were "fine".

There are better ways to design engaging gameplay than heal taxes, poor AI and half your toolkit vanishing because you pressed an oGCD. These just aren't necessary components of good class design.

Clip Mage and Energy Drain are not the same thing. One of those is a QoL gap the other is an option. I’m fine saying SCH has poor design elements, but most aren’t exactly unique to them. The primary one is the fairy sucks. Even pre-ShB pet interactions are pathetic relative to what Sage can do and they are loved by people. Frankly, most of the fairy actions just play off of her working from a centerpoint independent of the player, which is actually valuable, sure, but they aren’t impactful. And I’m not expecting that to change. I’d rather make her subsystem (Fey Gauge) matter more in general and scrap Seraph entirely if Seraph wasn’t trying to do a shoddy Panhaima impression.

Really I think the burnout from not getting proper attention across the whole role has just blinded people to what made these elements fun in the first place. To me it reads like we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. I’m not okay with trusting the developers with coming up with an alternative given what they’ve done to all classes from Stormblood onward either.

[Nizzi]

Energy Drain and Dissipation's respective places in Scholar's kit gives you a tangible reason to care about how you optimize your healing and DPS in the first place.

I’m not okay with trusting the developers with coming up with an alternative given what they’ve done to all classes from Stormblood onward either.

While I definitely agree with the second quote - it's the reason I don't want to see ED removed solely because I don't trust that they would replace it with anything better (I'm fairly certain they just wouldn't replace it at all and SCH would have its 1 DoT 1 Nuke) I'm not really sure how much it gives you a reason to care about optimizing healing, rather than just making your cohealer AST or SGE do it because they don't lose DPS for the things you do. Dissipation especially just functions as an "okay, I can't heal at all now outside of GCDs and Recitation if that's up, cohealer adjust" button, which seems to be what it felt like the developers were trying to move away from. Given the changes to ED to be even more spammable and now a 100 potency gain over the 10 in ShB, I really have 0 clue what exactly the design decision is for Scholar at the moment. (outside of them not even considering this at all, which I think is likely the case considering the state of Lilies on WHM too.)

Back in ShB, Ruin II and Energy Drain were the two most important buttons in Scholar's entire kit, because they allowed Scholar to both move and utilize free healing from the fairy, on top of being a slight potency gain. Throughout the entirety of ShB, ED usage was not on the level of a potency gain that it is now even pre-nerf. But what optimization do they offer now? With 1.5s cast times, you just never want to hit Ruin II, at all. Its 'optimization' is no longer as a movement/healing tool, its optimization is just never using this button. How is that fun? Same with Energy Drain, with it's 1s recast time changes and it being more of a potency gain, the 'optimization' is just "dump your ED during every 60s buff window for the maximum DPS." Sure, you can hold Aetherflow until it's close to being off CD and then dump it then, but that's not really being optimal with it even if you are getting DPS out of it.

If SCH needs an Aetherflow dump, why not make it a GCD DPS neutral button for both a dump and a movement tool? Just have Ruin II be able to dump Aetherflow at 295 potency when you have it and then stay at 220 when you don't. That frees up a button, or two if Dissipation is removed because like you said, it's just really a DPS tool at this point. This also should allow Aetherflow to be used outside of combat again, since it'd no longer be tied to DPS at all, and should IMO also lead to button bloat heals like Fey Blessing being removed and put into something like another charge of Indom to make up for it. Consolidating SCH's healing kit bloat can only begin once we start looking at how SCH is using its healing kit and what its priorities are; and as long as Aetherflow's priority is always DPS, SCH will keep getting shoved full of superfluous heals that are meant to work around the fact that you want to use Lustrate/Indom/Excog and Soil as little as possible.

I dunno. I see the merits of ED and I like it because it's unique and no other healer has the choice that Scholar does, but I also see the arguments for why it's bad for the job in the era of two healers being able to heal entirely free. Personally, if the removal of Energy Drain and Aetherflow as a DPS gain were to facilitate SCH getting a more fun DPS rotation, I'd be all for that. I'd rather have more things to manage in the form of DoTs or debuffs than the current system of spamming ED 3 times immediately every 60s with no thought on how I'm using it.