When is SCH’s turn?

[Renathras]

I think the better question is "Do you really want/trust the devs to rework SCH?"

Of the reworks you mentioned, PLD is the only one that has been somewhat widely praised as far as I can tell. And it's been more "neutral" or "50/50" than outright praised.

SMN has been widely attacked (though a lot of players seem to like it), MNK is super love/hate with people, same with MCH, the WHM change (ShB) is praised by people that compared it to how bad the SB incarnation was, but decried by those who liked SB SCH and AST and want Aero 3 no matter how much worse that version of WHM was. The SCH change in ShB was disliked. AST's changes have ALL been disliked. SAM's will never shut up about Kaiten. BRD's changes have consistently been criticized. DRK's changes have been hated. A lot.

They seem to get some 50/50s here and there, and rarely get one done really well (5.0 WHM) with it still being attacked by people.

I'm not sure there's a way to do a rework that wouldn't just infuriate tons of people, since they very likely wouldn't give people quite - or...at all - what they want.

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EDIT:

If only they could give back even ARR gameplay, which had infinitely more depth than the current sch iteration.

And the devs have shown that they can do great things with the gameplay, see sage in pvp for example, which is what many players want. Do damage, get shield. Break shield, get strong damage. The interactions are perfect.

Yes, but a lot of people also dislike SGE in PvP, even that like it in PvE. SCH in PvP plays COMPLETELY different than SGE, and in a way many people find more fun because it doesn't have its healing tied to damage.

As for ARR: The modern community is so in love with oGCDs and "healing plans" they'd have a meltdown if told they have to use GCD heals again.

To be honest, maining SCH, I don’t want them to change it at all. I don’t see or felt that issue of, “something is extremely wrong in the state of this job.” It’s actually in a very good spot. Well, other than Fey Union, but that’s about it.

Somewhat agreed, but not entirely.

As I've said since ShB and still believe - SCH is the most powerful healer Job (though AST gives it a run for its money), it's just several kinds of clunky and has anti-synergies. The big things I'd change is to cut down a bit on button bloat since it has a few too many buttons, and make some more useful in the process. I did a write-up not too long ago, but the short version is:

1) Do SOMETHING ELSE with Dissipation - it's anti-synergy and hella annoying. Just having it not dismiss Eos would be a start. It's not "intelligent use", people use it for Energy Drains most of the time anyway, and when they're not, they're using it for bit Adlos. No one's doing an active cost-benefit analysis in their head of "Can I lose Eos for the next 30 seconds? I'll lose access to these abilities...should I use them first before Dissipation...? etc". NO ONE is doing that. It's just dumb, clunky anti-synergy for the hell of it. It was never a good ability, not from the start and certainly not now, and it's both antithetical to SCH lore AND anti-synergistic with SCH's kit. It's the single worst offender in the entire kit.

2) Combine Fey Blessing with Whispering Dawn - it's already trying to be Medica 2, just have it trait upgrade when Physis does and call it a day.

3) Make Aetherpact worth using. Boost its healing, give it a shield, SOMETHING.

4) Make Energy Drain consume Faerie Gauge instead of Aetherflow - the gauge just sits there most of the time, and it would still give you the "heal or damage" gameplay while not disallowing use of AF abilities which are cool AF (see what I did there?) and we avoid using because of blasted Energy Drain's whole 100 potency!

5) Have Fey Illumination upgrade into Expedient at some point and give Expedient the extra effects. Same CD already and Expedient is good against all damage types so would be a flat upgrade.

6) Have Seraph work like Rouse and actually boost Fey Dawn/Whispering Blessing and stuff.

7) Make Emergency Tactics have no CD. Modifier abilities are cool...though I guess this one's already pretty short (though not AS short as Eukrasia...but some difference in Jobs is good, so this one...meh, take or leave it)

8) Have Lustrate upgrade into Excogitation and remove the CD on Excogitation. It's an 800 potency heal, not a Bendiction Re-Raise.

9) Have Physic upgrade into Adlo. Increase Adlo's healing potency to match Physic's (lower the shield to where it's unchanged from today) and lower the MP cost to 700 or so. It won't be OP and SGE's higher MP cost is paid for by the fact theirs is instant cast. This is what we call "balance". SCH's having a lower MP cost is paid for by having to stand and hardcast it. This is fine.

That gets rid of most of the anti-syerngies, gets rid of the button bloat, and overall just makes things better.

You're missing out then. We had some pretty cool tools before ShB- Eye for and Eye, Virus, Shadowflare, Bane and Miasma III. They had in-built mitigation effects and we're pretty nice to use in dungeons and some raids.

Osmand is right about the button bloat, but that aside:

Eye for an Eye was an unreliable "mitigation" that often didn't work. It was cool you could Deploy it for all of one expansion, but it wasn't a great ability.

Virus was nice, but we have other mitigation instead. Though it's basically Addle at this point. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind that being a Healer Role Action, but it's not exactly something to write home about.

Bane was nice, but more for perception. You wouldn't be using it in most boss fights today (though with these giant radii, I suppose it could be used for add phases), and at any rate the reduced DoT gameplay makes it far less interesting. They could give its effect to something like Art of War, though.

Shadowflare was interesting in ARR, it wasn't after that.

Miasma 3 was never interesting.

By that logic, new healing buttons are also useless and should also be trimmed down to be the same as our DPS rotation. 1 Spammable, 1 HoT and 1 AoE Heal.

On the one hand:

That's stupid hyperbole, and even you know it. Healer is the role, so having more healing buttons than damage buttons makes sense. Not to mention we have more Damage buttons than that. Single target, AOE, Job gauge related, and "something else". Every Healer Job has at least 5 damaging buttons: Glare/Dia/Holy/Misery/Assize, Broil/Bio/Art of War/Ruin 2/Energy Drain (and arguably Chain Strategem), Malific/Combust/Gravity/Earthy Universe/Macrocosmos, Dosis/Eukrasia Dosis/Dyskrasia/Phlegma/Pneuma. In fact...I think they all have exactly 5. So having 2x that would be 10 heals.

On the other hand:

I also think we have too many healing buttons on MOST Healer Jobs. SCH is actually the exception since it only has 3 GCD heals (Physic/Adlo/Succor), and arguably 7 oGCD heals (Whispering Dawn, Fey Blessing, Lustrate, Indom, Aetherpact, Soil, Excog); the others are all modifiers, not heals themselves, and arguably Aetherpact falls into that camp (since it effectively is a modifier placed on Embrace), and Soil is more a mitigation that has a heal as an added bonus. Seraph is a modifier, Recitation is a modifier, Emergency Tactics is a modifier, Deployment Tactics is a modifier, Fey Illumination is a modifier, Protraction is a modifier, and Swiftcast is a modifier.

(Like, seriously, contrast it with AST and WHM, WHM in particular, which have multiple versions of THE EXACT SAME ABILITY - WHM has 3x Cure 2s between Cure 2/Tetra/Solace, and 2x [3x] Medicas between Medica/Rapture/Assize; at least each of SCH's heal buttons are healing for different amounts and effects [mitigation/shields/origin of character or faerie/none], be they GCD or oGCD.)

SCH actually has the least "here's another button that just heals" toolkit of all the Healers. It only has 10 direct healing buttons, which is exactly 2x its damage buttons (if we aren't counting Chain as one). What would be interesting is if they made some other buttons work both ways - for example, what if Emergency Tactics could be used on Biolysis to give it the Thundercloud treatment of its full duration damage in one attack? Maybe using it with Broil makes it instant cast like RDM's Acceleration? And obviously Deployment Tactics getting the PvP treatment, but it would need a shorter CD. This would make up, though, for having a few less mitigations like if Fey Illumination were trait upgraded into Expedient; the extra party mit you could just pull from more frequent Deployments if you felt the need, especially since you wouldn't be Deploying Bios on single target boss fights.

Balance! \o/

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Honestly, there ARE a lot of things we could do with SCH to make it better. Even pretty small tweaks. Won't happen because the combat system and "balance" are too rigid right now, though.

I really wish they weren't, though - Emergency Biolysis and more frequent Deploys for both healing or for DoT spread would be fun to me.