Scholars used to be awesome; I hope 7.0 goes back to the basics.

[ForsakenRoe]

wanting more DPS abilities, Fester, Bane, Tri-Disaster / Iron Jaws, DPS Fairy, DPS stance dancing.

- Since DPS is the only thing that matters in this game, and everyone gets excited over new damage actions way more than heals/mits (compare SGE's reveal to SCH's, everyone thought SGE looked amazing because it used every possible attack it had and painted an inaccurate picture of it's gameplay. Or how excited people got for Misery. Or how excited people got seeing Purgation's animation in the PVP part of the 6.1 trailer), it is no surprise to me that people asked for more damage buttons even when we had more damage buttons than we have now. I do think there is a limit on how many a non-DPS should have, and HW was probably 'it', SB went down a little and SHB/EW are a tragedy. I'd say giving us back two more DOTs (so we have 3 in total) is a good place to start, to test the waters. It'd probably get left at 3 total DOTs forever if they did but that's fine by me

- Fester was probably called for because A: it doesn't really fit SMN aesthetics and B: it's a spender that, unlike Energy Drain, actually synergises with the rest of the kit's focus (getting stronger based on number of DOTs applied). Doesn't scale like that anymore, but based on 'at the time' that'd be my observation

- It literally had Bane in 4.0

- TriDisaster/IJ was likely called for by people who hate DOT management, and lucky them, they got it in 5.0: It's called Biolysis. Turns out it's quite boring when you only have to press one button to auto-refresh every DOT at the same time

- DPS fairy is a stupid ask because it'd just become 'the fairy' and the non-DPS options would be ignored, see how Egi's were used on SMN at the time. Titan completely ignored because he does less damage.

- DPS stance dancing was literally a thing in 3.0, but it was clunky and too punishing. A suggestion on here where being in 'damage stance' merely boosts the potency of the DOTs by, say, 5 per tick (snapshotting on cast), would allow for the dance to have a place as part of optimization, but 'missing the dance' on a refresh would be low on punishment since the DOT would still do the majority of it's damage

[AnotherPerson]

- DPS stance dancing was literally a thing in 3.0, but it was clunky and too punishing. A suggestion on here where being in 'damage stance' merely boosts the potency of the DOTs by, say, 5 per tick (snapshotting on cast), would allow for the dance to have a place as part of optimization, but 'missing the dance' on a refresh would be low on punishment since the DOT would still do the majority of it's damage

Personally, I rather not have a 'low punishment' skill if it contributes nothing meaningful to gameplay decisions. Whether I press it or not doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things outside of maybe week 1 enrage. I rather reserve that hotbar slot for something more meaningful.

[TheDustyOne]

Personally, I rather not have a 'low punishment' skill if it contributes nothing meaningful to gameplay decisions. Whether I press it or not doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things outside of maybe week 1 enrage. I rather reserve that hotbar slot for something more meaningful.

I think Roe was talking about the suggestion I had for Scholar months ago where I had a healing stance that turned basic heals into shields, and a DPS stance that turned the DoTs into more powerful DoTs, although it was a 20 potency per tick difference rather than 5, I thought anything lower than 20 was too lenient. That suggestion was in context of a bunch of other changes for the job I had, like shield breaking giving a big DoT as a refund, Eos and Selene having different abilities (the faeries would also change with the stances), and so stance-dancing was a major part of that suggestion. If you frequently weren't in DPS stance when a DoT needed refreshing, it would affect your overall output (DoTs were at 21s and 30s, so a loss of 20 potency per tick would be an overall loss of 140 and 200 potency respectively), but if you didn't use the healing stance, you couldn't take advantage of the stronger shields.

[ForsakenRoe]

Personally, I rather not have a 'low punishment' skill if it contributes nothing meaningful to gameplay decisions. Whether I press it or not doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things outside of maybe week 1 enrage. I rather reserve that hotbar slot for something more meaningful.

Yes, well, the amount of times I've seen complaints of 'well now it's harder to do optimal damage on healer, so this idea is a no-go' means that apparently we're not allowed 'meaningful gameplay decisions'. So, if 'the 'punishment' factor of failing your optimization literally does not matter' is the bitter pill we have to swallow to get anything more than the Broilspam we have, I'll take it. Optimizers can optimize over a literal 60p per minute difference, and casuals can completely ignore it and suffer zero negative consequences. And that should, theoretically, mean that everyone gets upsides from such a system. Also, I'm not entirely sure what is 'meaningful', compared to something that would literally create a gameplay loop like a 'stance dance' button would. We see RDM in PVP is entirely themed around Black/White Shift, and it works very well. Either an added skill is 'useful' or it's not, and damage, as has been demonstrated time and again, is always useful. It might be 'autopilot', an 'always use this or you are bad' kind of button, but we can say that about literally any button that does damage that is added to any other class. Primal Rend, use it or you are bad. DoubleDown, pool 2 for it and use it in No Mercy or you are bad. Raiju on NIN, use it after Raiton or you are bad, if you use something else and lose the stack you are double bad. You're never not going to use Primal Rend, or Double Down, or Raiju in your rotation, they're not 'situational' things, and a stance dance to refresh DOTs would be much the same: it's the foundation of an actual rotation, instead of this 'press 1 150 times in the fight' we have currently. But of course, the fact that there's a way for an optimizer to get 'more damage' in any way, that is locked off to a casual because of 'skill gap' (even though content would presumably be tuned such that said gap only matters in the absolute highest content levels, and is ignoreable in literally 99% of the game), means it cannot happen.

It's not right that someone who's good at climbing rockfaces can stand atop Everest because of their skill, we should flatten the mountain so that everyone can reach the peak regardless of their skill level - SE apparently

I think Roe was talking about the suggestion I had for Scholar months ago where I had a healing stance that turned basic heals into shields, and a DPS stance that turned the DoTs into more powerful DoTs, although it was a 20 potency per tick difference rather than 5, I thought anything lower than 20 was too lenient.

Was it yours, I don't remember it's been a while. Either way I thought it was a good, sensible middleground of 'optimizers want more' vs 'casuals need accessibility'. But I put 5 per tick because both A: I forgot the value originally posted (so I guessed), and B: I got told that one idea of mine, which would have an effective punishment of about 6.6 potency per GCD if you used Glare instead of 'the new move', was too much damage loss and casuals would cause enrage because of it. So I'd imagine '20p per tick, per DOT' would be just pure anathema. Even 10p per tick would be pushing it, based on how 'safe' SE has to make the healers