Scholar Lore issues..?

[Cleretic]

Scholar is a little funky in some ways, mostly relating to the fact a lot of its base at-launch ideas sorta flopped. The idea of 'maybe we do two jobs off of a base class' turned out to be a bad one for largely the reasons Connor said, as was the Eos/Selene split; the intention was that Eos was more focused on healing and Selene more focused on non-healing support, but over time the stuff Selene specialized at just... didn't really work out, so Selene basically just became a trap choice, only being used by people who weren't in the know about the game's meta. (While I wish the game did develop in a way that stuff like Selene worked, because I like non-healing support, the devs are good at realizing that sometimes their ideas just didn't pan out and shouldn't be stuck to.) She went to 'separate but identical button' in Shadowbringers until becoming a glamor in an Endwalker patch.

Leeches was a somewhat similar victim; it was just Scholar's Esuna, but once they implemented role abilities in Stormblood (as a replacement for cross-class skills, which were also a bad idea) it was removed and Esuna made into a role ability because that just made more sense. I believe AST had a similar 'basically Esuna' spell, but I wasn't playing AST in Heavensward.

The game's lore is mostly solid, but you do see some funky stuff when you look at early jobs that have gotten some level of retooling over the years, so abilities that used to have some lore-based weight now just... don't exist in that form. Another example there is AST, which used to have time magic as a big tentpole of its skillset but just doesn't anymore, so there's some fluff about it but every time you get taught a spell it just veers away from that. My read from the fact Eos and Selene still have that in-story distinction is that in-universe, they do still have that split in specialties, it's just not really useful to us that they do.

EDIT: Incidentally, I should say that I think the fact that job lore stays the same even if the job doesn't is a positive for the game. Look at it from the perspective of someone who roleplays as their job; they rarely rerun that job story (and for a long period of the game didn't have the ability to), so it's helpful to them that what they've built their roleplaying around didn't change on a story level, even if the job did. If you made Selene a significant part of your character's identity for some reason, you didn't have to throw it all out.

[Vyrerus]

Specifics on Selene

Initially Selene's abilities were an AOE Esuna, a Silence, and a buff that specifically increased Spell Speed of the whole party by something like 20%. It was like this up into HW, and the Spell speed buff was changed to 3% haste in Stormblood.

All in all, this made early Selene use quite good for mage comps and BLM boosting. The silence also allowed SCH to take the role of interrupting, allowing DPSes to use their then DPS tied interrupts for DPS rather than for holding for interrupts, and the AOE Esuna was just more or less an oh shit button/icing on the cake (really useful for Thordan Ex PUGs screwing up paralysis towers). This somewhat meant that Eos was the raid prog fairy, as her abilities revolve around AOE heals and damage mitigation instead, and Selene was the DPS fairy.

The SCH has the ability to switch between them at any time (MP issues notwithstanding), though the skills do share cooldowns, so to play optimally you use both. But most folks just default to Eos, because she heals and Scholar is a healer!

My guess is they gutted Selene because balancing the haste buff on top of Chain Stratagem was more than the devs wanted to do, mixed with the same reasoning they got rid of Heavy Thrust from DRG. "Most players don't use it, in spite of it being for optimal performance, so we'll just get rid of it and raise the skill floor!"

[Cleretic]

Initially Selene's abilities were an AOE Esuna, a Silence, and a buff that specifically increased Spell Speed of the whole party by something like 20%. It was like this up into HW, and the Spell speed buff was changed to 3% haste in Stormblood.

Thanks for the confirmation on this one; I did play Scholar back in Heavensward and Stormblood, but even back then I knew that Selene was a trap choice at best and 'min-max for a slight DPS boost that is most likely not worth it' at most, so I didn't exactly use her much.

Selene's kit was definitely a pile of 'things the developers realized were a balancing nightmare'. Selene's spell speed/haste buff was pretty undertuned, but haste buffs themselves proved to be a terrible idea to include (AST suffered from that too--or rather, AST's melee DPS teammates did), and an AoE Esuna turned out to be the nemesis of every mechanic designed around Esuna because one job was just objectively way better at dealing with them. And on the other side, Silence was basically worthless the entire time Selene had it, because if they ever made it strong it would be game-breaking. And all that is of course coupled with the headaches that came from the pet AI being pretty awful and prone to missing commands, which was its own pile of issues.

Honestly, a lot of pre-Shadowbringers Scholar suffered from the same thing; it was just this game's absolute embodiment of 'it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turns out it wasn't'. Would I like to play a game where pre-ShB Scholar could reach its full potential without breaking the game by every definition of 'break'? Yes, I probably would, but that's just not the game we got.

[Vyrerus]

Dunking on poor Selene

Q.Q But she wore thigh highs, Cleretic. THIGH HIGHS!

I'm pretty sure the nerf to Selene's spell speed buff was so they didn't have to worry about a mage meta happening and pushing melees out again, as had somewhat happened in ARR with loads of groups totally opting out of using DRG or MNK for Binding Coil due to the sheer advantage of BRD, BLM, and SMN having things that overlapped far better while also being able to play with impunity due to most boss AOEs being designed to punish ceaseless melee. In HW I guess they hadn't really decided on a direction/the retunes to melee had made them more than a match for any mage comp.

So in Stormblood they opted to make it a flat DPS increase by itself, but one that could be used to ensure more consistent burst windows for all members of the party. Something kind of ignored/misread/not cared about at the time, what with BLM and SAM competing for top DPS rawdog dat parse, having no raid buffs and caring way more about the ultra potent AST cards (RIP all of you kings, except you, Spire. Also RIP Stella, but that's beyond the scope of this tangent).

Silence from Selene was great for:

Silencing ADS in Binding Coil T1/T2.
Silencing ADS again in T11 add phase iirc(been so long I forgot if Ball does high voltage)
Silencing Gobskin in A2s
Silencing Flan speed boost in A3s
Silencing Mind Blast (or w/e the aoe charm was called) in A6s(and phase 2 of A8s I guess?)

I'm sure there's more. Basically anything you might care about silencing.

But by comparison, the Eos buffs were so potent that SCH was still competitive/better at blocking incoming damage in spite of having weaker AOE shields after the enormous Noct AST buff (and honestly a less consistently strong single target shield too).


Selene was given a raw deal, I tells ya! Probably because she wears her hair up in buns. *sigh*