Wall of text warning... End game schar healing

[Seryl199]

Endgame scholar healing

To start, a few disclaimers. Everyone heals differently. Healing has no "rotation" so my methods may not work for someone else, just as theirs may not do it for me. It also requires flexibility and awareness to evolving conditions that develop in every battle. However, I've seen a lot of scholars that either lack efficiency in their class, or simply don't realize their responsibility as MT healers in full party content. Therefore, this guide is for the scholar looking to pair and heal smartly alongside a white mage partner. Rather than talk about specific end game heals, it's about translating your skill set into a very precise job (healing the main tank) that will give you better synergy when you start healing with another player. It's a bit long winded and more than a little scatter brained, but hopefully this guide helps a few scholars get started on taking on the big baddies!

This guide assumes that you have a basic grasp of healing, and that you know and understand the basic pieces of the scholar toolkit. I assume that you will be using eos, and that you are capable of basic pet managing. I'm classifying endgame content as content starting at titan HM, since it is the first encounter to have a steep heal check the likes of do not come up in previous bosses and trials. You can follow these guidelines as you progress to more challenging eight man content.

First up, play a white mage if your play time allows it. The more you play a white mage, the better your feel will get for their heals, and how their abilities will interact with scholar heals. As a scholar, your ideal partner will always be a white mage. As such, having a working knowledge of how their abilities and cooldowns work will allow you to maximize your tools. Learn to let a white mage's regens tick the raid back to full when safe and watch for vital cooldowns like benediction and divine seal. If you can play with a static partner, both of you will become stronger healers over time as you come to learn each other's nuances. This will help you define your role as a scholar.

The most powerful ability you can possibly acquire is to respect the synergy between healing classes. Being able to place faith in your white mage to patch up the raid while you focus on the tank is equally as vital as knowing when to spread your heals among the raid with succor and whispering dawn. Likewise, your counterpart is going to rely on you to put as many heals onto the main tank as possible. Because mp is such a strain to white mages, they shouldn't need to do much more than maintenance cures or regen on the tank when spike damage isn't a threat. Outside of this, you should be the one to focus on the tank and keep them as healthy as possible using all of the scholar's expansive skills.

The scholar toolkit
Physick is and always will be your bread and butter heal. If you have nothing else to do, you should be precasting physick for the next hit. Coupled with your fairy's embrace, physick spam will suffice for almost any fight that is not healing intensive. If the tank's hp begins to dip, you'll want to quickly correct with your next heal.

Adloquium. You all know how it works. You've been using it since level 30, and you know all about its value when it crits. The problem with most scholars is WHEN to cast adloquium. Adlo has the most value when applied before spike damage such as mountain buster, death sentence, etc. so that the tank doesn't dip close to the red zone. In case you haven't set foot into titan hard mode yet, mountain buster is a move that will chunk a good 5000 damage from your average tank. A well placed adlo can shield the tank from at least 10% of the blow, depending on the potency of your heals, and ensure that the tank doesn't meet a swift end from the next auto attack. Of course, this means the best use of this skill will come from having knowledge of when these spikes will occur. On intense fights, especially those with unpredictable damage, you should apply adloquium, followed by physick (one to two casts), followed by adloquium. Ideally, this will keep your tank at or above 80% before needing to use lustrate (which will be discussed shortly). Note that this healing is for maintaining hp during intense, bursty damage that you would want a shield up all the time for, such as caduceus (turn 1)or dreadnaughts (turn 4). If physick spam can cut it, that should be your go to choice

You should be well aware of your available cooldowns and when the best time to use them is. Eye for an eye is best placed well ahead of spike damage, while virus is best applied shortly before. Eos' whispering dawn is a great HoT that costs nothing, and fey illumination is a very nice straight boost to healing. Rouse your pet if things start getting out of hand, and don't be afraid to do this often. 60 seconds is a very short cooldown, and one that shouldn't go wasted. But of course, the most important cooldown of all-

Aetherflow
Again, you know what aetherflow does. It's a vital skill, infinitely so once you've gained access to lustrate. 20% mp boost aside, aetherflow will grant you those three precious stacks. How you use them is critical to your success. Energy drain loses some value in the endgame where accuracy becomes an issue, and energy drain hits less reliably. Bane is quite simply not going to be used in most endgame encounters. That leaves us with...

Sacred soil and lustrate. Sacred soil has a fairly limited utility when it comes to efficiency of aetherflow stacks. About 15k damage needs to be sustained by those under the effect of sacred soil for it to be more efficient than using lustrate to heal 1.5k on a 6k hp paladin. Considering how uncommon this is, the majority of your aetherflow charges should be spent on... Lustrate!

Like adloquium, when you use lustrate is going to define a lot of your success when it comes to the endgame. I see lustrate as easily the most powerful heal in the game. It's near instant, and even on dps it will usually heal around the same as physick. However, you should stop looking at lustrate as an emergency heal starting now. If your tank is below 50%, there is a huge risk of something like caduceus hood swinging your tank to death with an unlucky crit before you ever have to chance to react. By using lustrate as a maintenance heal to weave between adloquium and physick, you can ensure that your tank stays not only topped, but shielded as well.

However, lustrate does have a weakness, which is, of course, that it can only be used three times every sixty seconds. If you use lustrate as an oh s--- button, this problem only gets worse. Needing two or three stacks to bring your tank up means you'll be sitting at zero stacks for the next 50 seconds, which is no good. Ideally, the need for lustrate should come up every few GCD's, so that their use is spread across the 60 second aetherflow cooldown.

Finally, let's talk about how you should put these skills together to make a powerful mitigation and single target healing machine. For raid damage, usually one or two succors along with whispering dawn will help your white mage in topping everyone off. If you anticipate this damage and know that the party will take at least 1-2k damage, you may want to consider sacred soil, which will go a long way towards preventing your incoming damage.

When it comes to spike damage, make sure your tank is topped (using lustrate as a maintenance heal if needed), immediately followed by adloquium. Ensure that your white mage companion applies stoneskin if possible, which is more effective than your cross classed version, and brace for impact. If virus is available, use it! Time your physick cast so that it goes off right after the damage hits while your partner does the same, and be prepared to lustrate if things get dicey. Once the tank is back in the green, immediately fall back into your healing rhythm, whether it's physick spam or adloquium rotation. Maximizing your mitigation on this kind of damage will keep your healing as smooth as possible, and will decrease the likelihood of you, the white mage, or the tank from panicking and possibly blowing a vital cooldown that could have otherwise been saved.

Getting 100% out of your scholar isn't easy, and the clunky pet controls don't help any. However, with smart healing and good synergy with a white mage, you can be well on your way deep into the binding coil, and push your potential to the max. Good luck out there, and happy healing!

[Niadissa]

Very nice, I've never played a scholar myself (though I did just unlock it yesterday) It's nice to be able to get a glimpse of how their abilities work.

[GunsBlazing]

There is some pretty good advice in your post, but there are some things I personally do differently. I've only been sch 50 for 4 days, and I'm only I80, but I like to think I do pretty well based off the reception I've had from everybody I've ran with.

The very first thing I do once a run begins and everybody has ate their food is check out the tanks hp and figure out at what number i should cast adloqiuim, physick or lustrate to get them as close to cap while minimizing overhealing. I know about how much my heals are going to do (uncrit) and I base which I cast off of the amount of damage sustained. Say that your average physick will heal for 950, and your average adloqiuim will heal for 650 HP, and you are healing a paladin with 6500 hp. Casting physick at any time the paladin is at or above about 5650 HP in this case is going to be a waste. You're better off to go ahead and use adloquium if the tank is at or above that HP threshold. If you hit him with an adloquium at that point, he'll be at 6300/6500 hp, and the next regen tick is going to make up the difference. You should always budget your heals, because even scholar CAN run into MP problems, despite it being a much more efficient main tank healer than WHM. When it comes to using lustrate, I typically will not start using it as a 'maintenance heal' until aetherflow is halfway off cool down. That way, if you DO encounter a moment that can only be saved by a couple quick lustrates, you have the charges to do so. By the time aetherflow is halfway ready again, you're probably going to be alright, so I go ahead and work them in like a normal heal to save MP, since you'll have 3 fresh charges in just 30 more seconds. Succor is also very effective if you can time it to go off right after an AOE you know is about to hit. Start casting it when predictable AOE damage is about 1 to 1.5 seconds away from going off, that way the healing portion and the shield effect of the spell are equally useful. The sooner you get that heal with the shield off after the AOE hits, the less likely your WHM is to panic and spazz out on over heals (this happens a LOT in pugs, and it kills their MP).

Edit to note: Even if it's tempting, try to avoid pre-healing with adloqiuim. A LOT of scholars do this, and it's a good way to run your MP reserves dry. You're better off using physick to preheal, and follow it up with an adloqiuim if the tank still isn't back up to full HP after that. The only way to make sure your adloqiuim is MP efficient (since it's so pricey) is to only cast it when the tank is actually missing HP, or you know for a fact they will be missing the HP before the spell goes off. For some situations, the shield effect may be necessary or beneficial to use when the tank is at full HP (like when a target is readying a big attack that could potentially kill the tank), but when it's not necessary, you're much better off to avoid this.

Also you may want to consider macroing your fairy to heal alongside all of your heals, if you're going to be healing the main tank. This effectively doubles your healing power per press of the button. You can do this one of two ways, but as is the case most of the time, the more difficult way is actually the more effective way.

Single button press macro to cast your heal + the pet's heal:
/micon "Physick"
/ac "Physick" <mo>
/pac "Embrace" <mo>
/ac "Physick" <tt>
/pac "Embrace" <tt>

This will make you and your pet (assuming they're set to obey) both cast your heals at the same time on the target with your mouse over it. If you don't have your mouse over anybody and you are targeting the boss, it will heal the target of the boss (should be your tank).

The better, but more difficult to use way (because you have to use two buttons lol) is to split the macro up to where your heal and the pets heals are different macros. This will let you heal two different targets at the same time, or heal the same target with both spells. Just use the pet on one target and your own heal on another. This gives you a lot more utility, but it's more difficult to manage so most people end up going with the first route, despite it being less efficient.

[ReviiLagoon]

Another thing to note about Aldo is that I use it as a tool to buy myself time to do other things. A great example of this is Wave 6 of turn 4, Our strategy involves burning the dread of phase 5, having the MT pick up the dread from phase 6, and the OT tanking all the knights, rooks, and other stuff from waves 5 and 6. Now in this situation I typically start out with eye for an eye on the MT or OT, depending on who my WHM buddy already used it on. My job during that phase is to split focus on the MT tanking one dread (2 Stacks usually), and the OT, while my WHM buddy heals the OT almost exclusively.

Now in this situation, Aldo is great at buying myself time. I cast it after a single auto attack from the dread on the MT, and it will prevent the subsequent attack from doing anything significant. The time this buy's me is time to spent using aldo / lustrate on the OT, who is taking much heavier damage. In essence, It allows me at least one free global cooldown to focus my attetion elsewhere, and if it's a crit that hits, then I have a lot more free time. I find that similar situations arise in turns 1 and 5, where aldo can buy me enough time to heal elsewhere.

Also your comment about using Eye for An Eye preemptively is a good concept. One prime example of using it would be on garuda extreme, right as the twister sisters (Funny name my friends came up with) spawn, E4E on the MT, and hopefully by the time she does double wicked wheel, at least one of them will be affected. Follow this up with a sacred soil + Virus on garuda right after she teleports and you are looking at significantly reduced damage from double wicked wheel, to the point where tanks typically take around 3000 damage as opposed to nearly getting one shot.

Another thing to note is that you should learn when and how you can throw in dps. What makes a SCH such a strong healer is that they can do dps at the same time they are healing. Your Fairy combined with lustrate can buy you a little bit of time to switch to cleric stance and throw up some dots, all dependent on the fight of course. Garuda Extreme is once again another great example, outside of double wicked wheel, the healing necessary for garuda extreme is laughable at best. Even while solo healing, I find plenty of time to throw up dot's very consistently during certain phases. Your dps is nothing to joke at, sure WHM's have holy, but we have much better sustained dps, and we can heal at the same time.

Another thing to note about doing DPS, an Aldo crit will buy you time, a significant amount of time in some cases, you should throw out some dot's if nothing else pressing is at hand, why waste a few global cool down doing nothing when you could help out doing damage. Another example of this is waves 1 and 2 of turn 4, I do more damage than healing during those phases, because I have learned to use lustrate / rouse effectively, and my WHM buddy knows what I am doing. Guess what, the long term effects of me doing damage in these phases show. We haven't ever hit the enrage timer, which can get nasty quickly if the last dread isn't finished off promptly.

It's these little tricks which separates the bad Scholars from the amazing ones.

[Nathan061111]

I know you give a warning in your title but seriously?

A tip break up your points into sections add titles and be as concise as possible.

If you do this I'll give your post a read, as I'm sure it has a lot of great info. But for the meantime I just can't bear it.

[tOnni3]

there is a chunk of good info., you may regret

[GunsBlazing]

I know you give a warning in your title but seriously?

A tip break up your points into sections add titles and be as concise as possible.

If you do this I'll give your post a read, as I'm sure it has a lot of great info. But for the meantime I just can't bear it.

Just re-read this whole thread (the contributing posts of all 3 scholars) in just over 12 minutes, WITH plenty of distractions (I'm at work). If somebody feels like they need advice on how to do their best as a scholar, I think they can spare 12 minutes. Most people who play healers typically learn all of this on their own before they're anywhere near level 50, but there are some people who don't have as much experience with MMOs who benefit from having this kind of knowledge available to them. It's much better to be thorough when teaching somebody, so that you don't have to come back and explain the bullet points.


-Cast leeches to remove debuffs.

Does not help as much as a couple sentences detailing how and when the best time to cast leeches is, without compromising the healing output of your party.

[AzucenaC]

This is really helpful and I thank all for posting this.

After getting my SMN up to 50 I was like why not get another insta-50 with SCH? Now I have only done a few of the high end dungeons and some scenario roulette, but I do see that healing with a SCH is a lot different than I expected it to be. I had gone into SCH with the basic healing premise of keep party alive, which I realized after a few runs, does not work so well. I also noticed the huge difference in pet management (only being able to hit "Obey" while targeting an enemy is super silly) compared to Garuda-Egi. I wish there was a way to adjust the embrace to 80% instead of 70%.

Now I don't have any of my pet's abilities done as macros as I was informed that Eos is "pretty good" about using them, but from experience, she tends to not do a whole lot haha. I'm also trying to figure out how best to set up my hotbars and number order.

I do want to get better at being a Scholar so again this is all very helpful!

(got to the 1000 Character limit....so annoying lol)

[Nailkita]

Thanks for this, I main as a WHM but may have to swap to SCH as our raid synergy changes (so many WHM want to join us but no one to replace a lost SCH buddy).

Based on this I use lustrate poorly, and need to be smarter with my Adolquium.

Quick question from scholars, what do you do during the fireballs on Twintania? Last time we tried it our scholar (who has 4200 HP) kept dying with their group, and their group also seemed to be at lower health afterwards, not sure why as my group was usually fine with me just using a cheap cureIII on us, both groups were equally geared as far as I knew, in fact I think his group had more gear between them.

[Ninix]

This is really helpful and I thank all for posting this.

After getting my SMN up to 50 I was like why not get another insta-50 with SCH? Now I have only done a few of the high end dungeons and some scenario roulette, but I do see that healing with a SCH is a lot different than I expected it to be. I had gone into SCH with the basic healing premise of keep party alive, which I realized after a few runs, does not work so well. I also noticed the huge difference in pet management (only being able to hit "Obey" while targeting an enemy is super silly) compared to Garuda-Egi. I wish there was a way to adjust the embrace to 80% instead of 70%.

Now I don't have any of my pet's abilities done as macros as I was informed that Eos is "pretty good" about using them, but from experience, she tends to not do a whole lot haha. I'm also trying to figure out how best to set up my hotbars and number order.

I do want to get better at being a Scholar so again this is all very helpful!

(got to the 1000 Character limit....so annoying lol)

Eos used to be "pretty good" pre 2.1 when manually placing her would cause her to chain-cast Embrace and spam the shit out of it on injured party members. She had instant reaction time and immediately start recasting Embrace as soon as it went off cooldown. Now in 2.1 she isn't as good at this and will often sit around doing nothing for a bit and seems to have a built in delay in her autocasting to make it less efficient. She's also as dumb as ever when it comes to her cooldowns, so you should definitely be controlling those manually. Just get used to targeting an enemy and pressing Obey+Heel every time you resummon her or change zones. It helps if you keybind it.

I macro Embrace into Physick so I can make each one heal for about as much as a Cure II. I *also* have Embrace keybound so I can split healing between two targets when I need to (tell Eos to heal on one target, then use Physick on another, since she's already mid-cast the Physick macro won't interrupt her).

You don't really need macros for her cooldowns. In fact, they don't seem to work very well when you do use macros for them. Just drag them onto your bar from the Pet Actions panel and use them like any other ability. Rouse is great and will increase your healing output significantly when you use it (if you have Embrace macroed to Physick), and Fey Illumination will increase the healing output of you, your fairy, and the other healer if they're nearby. It's incredibly good. I usually pop Whispering Dawn and Rouse at the same time too, since they're on the same cooldown and Rouse makes a pretty big difference in the heal over time.