I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex DPS rotations

[Connor]

Where are you getting this idea that SCH has "tried to set out" for a "utility buff/debuff" identity versus it's historic FFXIV and FFXI identity of a job that uses DoTs in combat? Expedient and Chain Stratagem?

Embrava, Adloquium and Regen V say hi lol. Also wasn’t Scholar used either as a support healer or a skill chainer / magic burster with Immanence lol? So…it focused on buffs, debuffs and support lol. Helixes (Helices? Lol) were cool and valuable, but I don’t really think they were supposed to be the entire focus of the job. An important aspect, undeniably, but I don’t think they conceptualised Scholar as a ‘poison Mage’ in ff11 or ff14 lol.

Even if you don’t count ‘buffs that amount to generic healing’ like Whispering Dawn, Protraction and Excogitation (which honestly I think SE mistakenly categorises as ‘buffs’ rather than ‘healing’) you still have general damage reductions, magical damage reductions, critical hit rate against target increased by 10%, movement speed increase. Then if you start looking into things they removed, there’s AoE Haste, AoE Esuna and further debuffs like Enemy Silence (not particularly reliable but it existed lol), Eye for an Eye, Virus, Shadow Flare.

To turn the question back at you, where are you getting that Scholar is a job that uses DoTs in combat lol? The fact it used to share spells with Summoner? And if that were truly part of the job’s core design, how could the devs still think it does that with a single, uninteractive DoT lol? If anything it’s ‘historic identity’ is that of a versatile caster that can change tactics depending on the situation, i.e Dark / Light Arts, which in turn means it’s buffing, debuffing and attacking the enemy equally. But I don’t see how it could be categorised as an ‘offensive DoT job’ in either game really - it seems a little reductionist