SCH concept changes

[KarmaYraeon]

Dissipation

Very true. While the idea was mostly just working under the assumption that the ability otherwise remained the same. If they are adamant on getting rid of the faerie, maybe they could do something like the following;

Dissipation > Assimilation
Unifies you and your faerie, granting you a full Aetherflow stack. Also increases HP recovery via healing actions 20%. In addition, allows the execution of Whispering Dawn, Fey Illumination, Fey Union and Fey Blessing without a faerie for the duration.
Duration: 30s
Current faerie will return once the effect expires.
Summon Eos or Summon Selene cannot be executed while under the effect of Assimilation.
Can only be executed while in combat.

Energy Drain

I think its important to note that overcapping on aetherflow is mostly a nonissue given you can always spend it on energy drain as it currently is, but I suppose to that end consolidating them into one button kind of defeats the purposes of having energy drain as an aetherflow spender in the first place. I was also considering the alternative idea of changing how they use aetherflow and faerie gauge entirely;

Energy Drain (60s)
Deals unaspected damage to target and all enemies nearby it with a potency of 100 to target and all enemies nearby it.
Additional effect: Aetherflow III
Additional effect: Restores 20% of maximum MP.

Aetherflow
Now a trait rather than an ability, each stack of aetherflow is a new spender resource.

Ruin II
New effect: Action changes to Sear while under the effect of Aetherflow.

Sear / Sear II / Sear III / Sear IV
Spell, instant cast, 2.5s recast, 400 MP, 25y range, 5y radius.

Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 220 / 240 / 255 / 295 (matches Ruin/Broil potency) for the first enemy, and 40% less for all nearby enemies.
Additional effect: Increases Faerie Gauge by 10
Aetherflow Gauge cost: 1

(Mostly just for the instant cast broil potency, Sear 4 would also be a DPS gain over AoW 2 vs multiple targets up to and including 38 targets)

Embrace, Whispering Dawn, Fey Illumination, Fey Blessing
New additional effect: Increases Faerie Gauge by 5

Faerie Gauge
Now only increases with Sear and faerie actions. Lustrate, Sacred Soil, Indom and Excog instead use 10 faerie gauge to cast. Fey Union could perhaps cost 5 per tick instead of 10, and tick every 1s for 150 potency rather than every 3s for 300 potency.

This would all generally allow for SCH to consolidate energy drain and aetherflow without having to completely change any of its gauges or base functionality. It would give faerie gauge far more interaction, and also give sch an opportunity for better skill expression and optimization through the use of Sear to keep up time without dropping DPS. I suppose to that end, the only problem is when you don't need to use any of these fae gauge spenders, though separating it from DPS means that it isn't really a problem to not have to use them all the time.

[ty_taurus]

Very true. While the idea was mostly just working under the assumption that the ability otherwise remained the same. If they are adamant on getting rid of the faerie, maybe they could do something like the following;

Dissipation > Assimilation
Unifies you and your faerie, granting you a full Aetherflow stack. Also increases HP recovery via healing actions 20%. In addition, allows the execution of Whispering Dawn, Fey Illumination, Fey Union and Fey Blessing without a faerie for the duration.
Duration: 30s
Current faerie will return once the effect expires.
Summon Eos or Summon Selene cannot be executed while under the effect of Assimilation.
Can only be executed while in combat.

This still doesn't work because you're losing all the free healing you get from your faerie for half a minute. Deleting a chunk of your healing toolkit to get more healing just doesn't make sense no matter how you want to spin it. And I'm not trying to say you're a strong proponent of erasing the faerie; you're trying to find a way to make this idea work since SE seems hell-bent on swatting the faerie out of gameplay as frequently as possible, but it's on them to just accept that this is shitty design and no one wants it.

If you're going to yeet your faerie across the room and kill a chunk of free healing, the rewards needs to be pretty extraordinary. More healing doesn't and will not cut it. A major burst of damage might, but then you now have to gimp your own healing output at regular intervals in order to engage with your burst window, which isn't a great thing either. There's really no answer that isn't awful in some regard.

Rather than trying to bargain for a less awful Dissipation, just delete Dissipation. It's what SCH players have wanted since 3.0.

[ForsakenRoe]

This still doesn't work because you're losing all the free healing you get from your faerie for half a minute. Deleting a chunk of your healing toolkit to get more healing just doesn't make sense no matter how you want to spin it. And I'm not trying to say you're a strong proponent of erasing the faerie; you're trying to find a way to make this idea work since SE seems hell-bent on swatting the faerie out of gameplay as frequently as possible, but it's on them to just accept that this is shitty design and no one wants it.

If you're going to yeet your faerie across the room and kill a chunk of free healing, the rewards needs to be pretty extraordinary. More healing doesn't and will not cut it. A major burst of damage might, but then you now have to gimp your own healing output at regular intervals in order to engage with your burst window, which isn't a great thing either. There's really no answer that isn't awful in some regard.

Rather than trying to bargain for a less awful Dissipation, just delete Dissipation. It's what SCH players have wanted since 3.0.

They did write healing 'actions' here, not spells, so that 20% would presumably buff Union, W.Dawn, etc too. I like this idea as it'd bring back Rouse in a sense, being able to juice up a W.Dawn in ye olde days was always nice and rewarding feeling. The loss of Embrace for those 30s would be absolutely negligible compared to the extra healing provided to the other OGCDs by that 20%. My question is, the fairy has to stand still to channel Fey Union, and can't do any other action or the tether breaks. Does this restriction still apply to the player when Assimilation is in effect?

[KarmaYraeon]

Does this restriction still apply to the player when Assimilation is in effect?

Honestly I think it would be really nice if you weren't restricted like the fairy is. It would give scholar a really solid consistent heal while moving. Of course its likely that fey union wouldn't actually be available at all and the only faerie actions available would just be WD, FI and FB but those are still solid options to have +20% on.

[KarmaYraeon]

They did write healing 'actions' here, not spells, so that 20% would presumably buff Union, W.Dawn, etc too. I like this idea as it'd bring back Rouse in a sense, being able to juice up a W.Dawn in ye olde days was always nice and rewarding feeling. The loss of Embrace for those 30s would be absolutely negligible compared to the extra healing provided to the other OGCDs by that 20%. My question is, the fairy has to stand still to channel Fey Union, and can't do any other action or the tether breaks. Does this restriction still apply to the player when Assimilation is in effect?

I was thinking about this question again and, while I've already responded, the question paired with the more recent comments about Seraph made me think about Assimilation acting like a situations Neutral Sect for scholar.
Allowing Assimilation to be cast regardless of what faerie is currently out would maybe make the ability more interesting as well. You can cast it at any time to consume and effectively become your faerie with a 20% healing boost to its abilities, but at the consequence of being centered on you. On the other hand, if you can get cooldowns to line up when you absolutely need it, you could consume Seraph instead of Selene or Eos to get access to Consolation over Fey Blessing. Without embrace/seraphic veil the difference between the two doesn't really matter too much, but it would be an interesting min/max option to go for. Furthermore, we could assume that consuming Seraph gives the abilities of Seraph for the full Assimilation cooldown, which in turn also means Getting 4 casts of Consolation with a single Seraph cast, rather than the usual max of 2, since you could cast seraph, and just before its timer runs out, cast Assimilation to gain its abilities for Assimilation's full 30s cooldown as well, in turn making Seraph more valuable as well.

[KarmaYraeon]

This still doesn't work because you're losing all the free healing you get from your faerie for half a minute.

To be fair, ideally it would be great to just change dissipation to something else entirely like sch flavour Temperance, but the idea was that you would basically get the bulk of faerie healing but souped up while also empowering your own healing. If they basically turned you into your fairy while buffing your healing by 20%, I imagine you would be able to cover 10 casts of Embrace pretty easily. Souped up Whispering Dawn for instance would be 112 extra potency per person. In an 8-man that is already worth almost 5 casts of embrace in a single gcd. Throw in Fey Blessing for another 64 potency per person is almost 3 more Embrace casts on its own too. This is of course ignoring other healing you might do as well. For instance its more likely that as a scholar you're probably going to Dissipation/Assimilation during downtime/before a big mechanic to get the added healing on a critlo which would mean over 216 potency on everyone's shields, and 432 extra potency on the initial target. The adlo cast alone already covers the embrace healing lost and then some.

This all being said, like I started with, this is just grasping at straws for if they absolutely insist on keeping dissipation as it is with eating the faerie. Ideally it is changed to literally anything else but oh well. Working with what we can I guess. Also the aesthetic bias of being interested in the idea of sch getting wings as well...

[AnotherPerson]

This still doesn't work because you're losing all the free healing you get from your faerie for half a minute. Deleting a chunk of your healing toolkit to get more healing just doesn't make sense no matter how you want to spin it. And I'm not trying to say you're a strong proponent of erasing the faerie; you're trying to find a way to make this idea work since SE seems hell-bent on swatting the faerie out of gameplay as frequently as possible, but it's on them to just accept that this is shitty design and no one wants it.

If you're going to yeet your faerie across the room and kill a chunk of free healing, the rewards needs to be pretty extraordinary. More healing doesn't and will not cut it. A major burst of damage might, but then you now have to gimp your own healing output at regular intervals in order to engage with your burst window, which isn't a great thing either. There's really no answer that isn't awful in some regard.

Rather than trying to bargain for a less awful Dissipation, just delete Dissipation. It's what SCH players have wanted since 3.0.

Not necessarily, since Assimilation boosts all healing actions, so Whispering Dawn, Aetherpact, and Fey Blessing will all receive potency changes. The added bonuses of Aetherflow returning basically creates a horizontal shift in resources (moving the power of sustained Embrace casts into Whispering Dawn, Aetherpact, Fey Blessing while simultaneously strengthening aetherflow healing + GCD shields). Provided that Aetherpact doesn't stop the Scholar from attacking on their own and is treated as a tether regen buff, it would be a good change, albeit long overdue.
At least this is much more preferable than the current Dissipation, which just eats up Embrace healing + locks you out of all your faerie skills without strengthening them in any way. It would allow a lot more flexibility in resource management and control without being useful for only DPS gain via Energy Drain spam.

I don't agree with simply deleting Dissipation. Every time they just delete a skill, they don't necessarily give anything back to replace it. IMO, it's a worse tradeoff since you don't even have ways for quick recovery afterwards if you consume all your resources, much less a replacement for what that skill can provide.