Quote Originally Posted by Connor View Post
Isn’t this thread about Scholar?

Remember Eye for an Eye? It felt like a ‘staple’ Scholar ability but I guess it got thrown into the ‘fluff skill’ bin.
To be fair, it was kinda garbage. It was Reprisal applied in the style of Arm's Length's slow, but with only a 20% chance of activating each time an enemy hit you... and on a 3-minute cooldown. Against slower-attacking enemies, you could go the full duration without it activating. Boss both AAs slow and you popped E4E before a long cast? Wasted.

But, sure, they could have done something more/else with that theme of reactive/retributive barrier tech.

I don’t get why Shadow Flare was removed either, since when you think about it wasn’t it kinda helpful for healing as well as damage?
Similar story here. It was 1-minute-CD Salted Earth lasting 15s per cast at 50p/tick... with a 5% slow. Across the whole of a 7-minute fight, it wouldn't likely save you a single GCD of healing.

attack frequency naturally leads to the party taking less damage overall
That only really applies to the tank, as iirc the slow only affects AAs and AAs are single target... and directed at the tank.

so doesn’t replacing it with Art of War just adds more pressure to healers instead of less? Like, they kinda went against their own designs lol.
Similarly, that depends. If it was a substantial sustain nerf for which SCH wasn't compensated and if SCH would otherwise have been balanced, then its removal would have been bad since it would leave SCH undertuned. But... there was compensation, so it isn't really "against" any particular design.

It just traded out percentile sustain only useful proportionately to incoming tank AA damage (and likely to be anti-synergetic with tank defensive CDs) for flat sustain that can be used on anyone (and better synergizes with tank defensive CDs).