SCH concept changes

[Nizzi]

Any time someone says they want they want Energy Drain deleted, I will say it again; PLEASE go play Sage. It's there for you, stop trying to change Scholar even more. Aetherflow and Energy Drain optimization is the only thing that is interesting and offers anything close to a skill ceiling with healer DPS kits, as small as it may be. If Energy Drain bugs you so much, just don't play Scholar.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

The only thing I can see them change is fey union and permanently remove energy drain.

But SGE exist... they don't need to throw out any 'energy drains'.

May as well give union 2 buttons to replace energy drain, just keep the single regen and the other just a party nuke that gives all the above that sch does, small cure, shield, mitigation, and regen depending on cost. Another auto queen/soul voice tool. Simple, yet effective.

The more I play SCH, I don’t want it to be DPS focused, but more focused on shield/mitigation. Sage can be the more DPS focused.

Why do they want even more "small cure, shield, mit, and regen" when they're already bloated with those?

[WaxSw]

I feel that a lot of these changes are misguided, they have problems as removing even more depth (ED), competition with existing tools without implementation of ways to make them coexist (Selene's kit which is basically Eos's but way worse, 120s of Recitation when Indom and Excog are 30s and 45s, Fey union...) or simply reward bad gameplay (Exploitation gives more returns the less mitigation there is when Sch and the party want to mitigate) without significantly changing the way Sch gameplay is, basically the 1 button spam, which is one of the main problems of the job

[ForsakenRoe]

Any time someone says they want they want Energy Drain deleted, I will say it again; PLEASE go play Sage. It's there for you, stop trying to change Scholar even more. Aetherflow and Energy Drain optimization is the only thing that is interesting and offers anything close to a skill ceiling with healer DPS kits, as small as it may be. If Energy Drain bugs you so much, just don't play Scholar.

I think the problem with Energy Drain is that it's a relic of the old HW design SE wants to get away from, but can't remove because every time they do people complain until it comes back. It's a skill that is supposed to, by design, 'reward the player with extra damage if they dont need the stack for healing', but because this is FFXIV and damage is everything, this has morphed over the years into 'this is a skill that you lose uses of if you are forced to heal', feeling more like a punishment than a reward. It's the same issue people have with TBN and it's 'time it right and get a refund': it feels bloody awful when you DON'T get the refund. You can do this thought experiment with a lot of different classes too, 'imagine if X skill on Y class lost you damage, but you're expected to use X to do your role'. There's a reason defensive skills don't share resources with offensive skills (with the exception of TBN and Energy Drain): When given the choice between damage and not-damage, people will choose damage. The only time they don't is when they're completely forced to (early prog) and even then some people don't want to drop the damage. If an Oath Gauge spender got added to PLD that did damage, everyone would use that instead of Sheltron. If WAR had a defensive skill that costed Wrath, it'd never get used because that's Fell Cleave juice. TBN is on very thin ice, and Energy Drain's already had the ice crack under it and fell in, twice.

I'm torn over ED as a skill, part of me wants it gone, I'm tired of seeing people grief and refuse to put a Soil down for a raidwide because they were trying to parse good, and it's been nerfed in potency so many times it's just pathetic in terms of how hard it hits. On the other hand, I can't be sure that if it were removed, SE would replace it with a different form of 'optimization' complexity. If it could be guaranteed that ED's removal would bring a new thing to optimize in it's place I think a lot of people would be on board with it. I suggested an idea where using Aetherflow skills gives resources on a new gauge, and a new button allows you to dump that gauge as one big hit, with a stack of debuff applied for each 10 gauge spent to increase the potency of the next Broil (or AOW for AOE situations). The optimization there would be similar to MCH's battery gauge, you'd want to use it at lower amounts outside of raidbuffs, to have it lined up that you'll be at 100 when you go into the raidbuff window.

I've asked in the past and I'll ask again: Energy Drain used to be 150 potency in the past. Now it's 100, having been nerfed. Say the devs decide that next expansion, it's nerfed to 50. Is it still worth it to keep it around, knowing that it's potentially the anchor around the neck of the job's design? If so, what is the lowest potency value you'd accept it going to before deciding 'okay it's kinda crap lets just axe it'? Is an Energy Drain that hits for 10 potency still 'worth it to keep', because it's 'optimization'? Because I'm already at the point where I wouldn't mind if it was removed, if it was replaced with something else. EG, if they don't want to give us the DOTs back, give us 2-3 debuff skills that do eg, Crit rate against the target increased by 1%, DHit rate by 1%, flat damage by 1%, and have us juggling the timers of those 100% uptime debuffs, to make SCH be the 'debilitation' class, with Chain Strat being the 'big burst' window. Would that count as 'optimization' tools?

[fulminating]

Buff energy drain to 250, but make scholar take 9% extra damage from raidwides. That way soil's necessary for the scholar to parse anything other than grey.

Edit: really though, you can't just keep killing aspects of jobs because some people are incompetent.

[KarmaYraeon]

Buff energy drain to 250, but make scholar take 9% extra damage from raidwides. That way soil's necessary for the scholar to parse anything other than grey.

Edit: really though, you can't just keep killing aspects of jobs because some people are incompetent.

I feel like making a player take extra damage for using part of their kit would be inherently really unhealthy and a one way ticket to give it the Dissipation treatment of 'never use unless absolutely necessary' because that extra damage taken is going to almost certainly force you into more GCD healing, which really isn't compensated for. Even if you went so far as to make it something ridiculous like 400 potency.
There's also the fact that in a lot of cases that's like sticking a couple vuln stacks on yourself which, for some fights/mechanics, is just a death sentence. Bad enough if the 9% extra damage is just for a duration after using energy drain. Making a permanent debuff to the job as a whole would just feel terrible and make the job far less viable. Also trying to incentivize the use of an ability by punishing you first like that isn't really going to fix anything. It would kind of suck to feel pressured into using soil just to compensate for having pressed another button.

Somewhat unrelated I suppose, but something that might be interesting is a job that has a gimmick of taking more damage than other jobs, but using that to their advantage in some way. Like a melee raw healer that coin flips between losing health and regaining it.

[fulminating]

I didn't mean that energy drain should debuff scholar, but that scholar should be inherently weaker to raidwides.

[Nizzi]

snip

Forgive me if this is a bit all over the place, I wrote this in between doing stuff at work so it's probably not replying to everything. Feel free to say if I missed something you wanted to be addressed and I'll reply to that, I'm not trying to brush anything off!

I think Energy Drain is a good barometer for the question that Square Enix has been trying to solve since Shadowbringers with healers (or maybe Stormblood with the removal of old Cleric Stance): is letting healer players fail or mess up something that should be allowed to happen when it may come at the cost of their healing?
Bad players using a skill improperly shouldn't be justification for the removal of Energy Drain or else we quickly loop into agreeing with SE on why healers had their DPS abilities removed as much as one might think they disagree with it. Yoshida's stated reason for the removal of SCH's DPS kit going into ShB was that SCH players would focus DPS and leave WHM players to heal, so therefore if we remove the skill, the bad players will now be able to focus more on healing, right? In reality though, we can see that it's not really the case; bad players remain bad regardless if they're Glarebots or Medicabots, and no amount of removal will make these kinds of players strive to truly be better.

It's the exact same logic with Energy Drain - bad players will always be bad, but that doesn't mean we need to remove skill expression even more to try and 'fix' it.

but because this is FFXIV and damage is everything, this has morphed over the years into 'this is a skill that you lose uses of if you are forced to heal', feeling more like a punishment than a reward.

I've written many threads and posts critiquing Scholar before, and I don't really disagree, but I think the reason it's morphed into this over the years is because Scholar has nothing left but Energy Drain. If you use your Aetherflow on healing, you have a DPS rotation of Broil Broil Broil Broil Bio for until Aetherflow is back up within a 60s time period. If you compare that to Stormblood where you had Aetherflow every 45s as long as you were spending it, Miasma, Miasma II, and Shadow Flare along with Bio II and Broil in your ST rotation, you still had more even if you needed to spend your Aetherflow on healing over damage. Not a big deal to lose out on one of your methods of dealing damage since your DoTs would still be ticking and it wouldn't be too long until you got more Aetherflow to optimize Miasma II again - you still got to have fun and had more to track even if you used Aetherflow for healing over ED. Compare that to now, where your downtime is cut from 3 buttons to 2 for a minute. I don't think it would feel like as much of a "punishment" to use Aetherflow for healing if this weren't the case.

I've asked in the past and I'll ask again: Energy Drain used to be 150 potency in the past. Now it's 100, having been nerfed. Say the devs decide that next expansion, it's nerfed to 50. Is it still worth it to keep it around, knowing that it's potentially the anchor around the neck of the job's design? If so, what is the lowest potency value you'd accept it going to before deciding 'okay it's kinda crap lets just axe it'? Is an Energy Drain that hits for 10 potency still 'worth it to keep', because it's 'optimization'? Because I'm already at the point where I wouldn't mind if it was removed, if it was replaced with something else. EG, if they don't want to give us the DOTs back, give us 2-3 debuff skills that do eg, Crit rate against the target increased by 1%, DHit rate by 1%, flat damage by 1%, and have us juggling the timers of those 100% uptime debuffs, to make SCH be the 'debilitation' class, with Chain Strat being the 'big burst' window. Would that count as 'optimization' tools?

Yes, even a 10 potency Energy Drain is worth keeping around, same as a 5 potency gain over a Broil cast DoT like Miasma would be worth keeping around. To me, Energy Drain is the thing that makes Scholar's healing kit actually interesting, something I do not think any other healer has. (an interesting healing kit, I mean.) Because of Energy Drain, Scholar is the only healer I like because its existence encourages Scholars to have a healing plan beyond "use your GCDs last lmao". The priority of faerie>aetherflow>gcds personally helps not bore me as much, because while you can just use your more powerful Aetherflow heals for everything, there's a good reason to find out where you can get by on maximizing your faerie in reclears that no other healer has because their heals don't have anything tied to them. This is a huge part of why I cannot stand SGE and consider it the worst job in the game; I think it's horriblly boring and I really don't think the SGE-ification of SCH is what SCH needs. SGE confirms to me that removing ED from SCH is not the ticket to making SCH better, nor is it an anchor around SCH's neck.

Removing Energy Drain permanently would, in my opinion, require a complete and total rework of Scholar, and I don't think SCH needs that even if it has "HW era design" baked into it. I think that design is why SCH shines and it's why I love SCH. If you remove Energy Drain, you remove the only thing interesting SCH has going for it, and you remove the last healer that is not incentivized to vomit heals. Fundamentally, I do not think that exchanging something that gives SCH both DPS and heal kit depth for something that offers one or the other is a great idea. I would love for SCH to get something like DoTs again or debuffs that it's juggling, but it shouldn't come at the cost of removing the thing that makes it kit flow in a way that the other healers don't. We shouldn't have to sacrifice any more for the hope that we may get something that would also be interesting, we should instead keep the interesting things we have and get more interesting things added as the job grows.

[ty_taurus]

The solution to Energy Drain is pretty easy really: Make Aetherflow a resource exclusively used for DPS. If your optimization aspect is managing some combination of DPS resources, and that's the consistent expectation for every use of Aetherflow, then there's no more punishment aspect other than performing your rotation correctly, which is the same expectations every DPS job has.

But what do we do with the resources that use Aetherflow currently? Well, fortunately (or unfortunately) SCH already has a second gauge that has absolutely no uses of notable value currently and is basically just a decoration on your screen at the moment that we can just shift healing cooldowns onto.

[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.