SCH concept changes

[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?

[Nizzi]

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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.