New SCH questions (Please help)

[Raminax]

I'm not a Scholar expert by any means, but I could attempt to answer a few of your questions.

1. How exactly is SCH played? Do I just do it the same as WHM and heal with Cleric Stance off and DPS with it on? Rotations? I already have the cross class skills such as Cleric Stance. I saw a video that said something about if the party member's health is above 80% you use a certain healing spell, but if below 80% you use a different one of the multiple healing spells.

For DPS, it's a matter of keeping your DoTs and Shadowflare up, throwing in Ruin while they're ticking, and refreshing your DoTs and Shadowflare when appropriate. If you want to really tryhard, you could spam Ruin II as filler instead and stand in melee range, auto-attacking with your book between GCDs. That said, Ruin II might likely affect your MP reserves harder than you like, and sometimes standing in melee range is impractical for you. Evaluate the situation and adjust. Physick is your bread and butter heal, Adloquium is used to mitigate heavy single-target hits and Succor is obviously used to mitigate multi-target damage. Succor could also work for picking the group up in dire situations, but in most cases, it's enough to let your faerie slowly top the group up, or using Whispering Dawn if you're using Eos, because unavoidable raid damage usually isn't frequent enough to require you to top everything off immediately.

2. How exactly are the pets used? In a video I saw that Selene is preferred for 4p dungeons, and Eos or Selene for the easier raids (CT), and Eos for harder raids (Coil Turns). I know there's a fairy thread here on the forums, but it assumes you already know the basics, so a lot of the stuff in it was confusing me. Do the pets heal automatically or do I have to target party member and manually use a pet's ability? I know they heal me automatically.

As far as I know, faeries will automatically heal everything within 20 yards of the faerie that's at least below 80% of their maximum health with Embrace, prioritizing you, the Scholar. If your faerie is on Sic, it will use abilities automatically. On Obey, it will still use Embrace automatically, but it won't use the other three skills at its own. Selene is generally used for easier content, or when you need additional DPS to get through an encounter. Eos is used for times when you need to mitigate and heal constant, heavy raid damage.

3. Why are macros a must for SCH? I heard one needed for cancelling pet's abilities. Why can't I just heel or steady like with SMN pet? I would hate to do my first party duty as a SCH and have it go disastrous because of me. I do have multiple macros on my SMN, but these are more for saving space on the hotbars and convenience.

Sometimes, letting the faerie heal on her own accord might not be enough, requiring you to use macros. The basis of your macros should look something like:

/pac "Embrace"

Followed by some kind of target designation. A few examples:

/pac "Embrace" <t> will cause the faerie to cast Embrace on your current target.
/pac "Embrace" <tt> will cause the faerie to cast Embrace on the target's current target. Useful for when you're spending lots of time DPSing, as you will essentially keep spamming the tank, because they're (hopefully) the boss' target most of the time.
/pac "Embrace" <f> will cause the faerie to cast Embrace on your currently set Focus target. Might be useful if you Focus the tank and want to keep the tank topped off at all times, because it's entirely possible that bosses or adds will sometimes switch targets suddenly.

Similarly, you can macro the other skills if you wish, working with things such as /pac "Whispering Dawn" and /pac "Fey Light" and so on.

4. I have never healed endgame before. One thing I always wondered is how does a healer keep party members healed during raids when everyone is spread out so far apart? I ask this due to my experience as a SMN when I would try to Swift Res a fallen party member, but they aren't in reach, so I have to look around for them. I imagined this same scenario if I was a healer trying to heal someone.

Everyone is responsible to be within healing range if you need to setup AoE heals. Depending on how merciful you are, you could let the rebel die and hopefully teach them a lesson... or you can just throw them a Physick or two if you can spare the GCDs. If they do need to run away with some kind of debuff from the group, you could Adloquium them before they get out of range. Regardless, if they persist in running away from you, I'd just relegate them to the naughty list for Santa this year. No point in chasing someone who wants to die that badly.

5. For Leeches and removing debuffs, how do I know what's a debuff and what isn't? I use PS4 controller and no mouse, so I can't mouse over a status effect to see what it does. I recognize some status effects by their symbol, but others I wouldn't know if buff or debuff. I know what poison, slow, and heavy look like.

Buffs are usually indicated by pointing up; debuffs are usually indicated by pointing down. Example screenie:



If you pay attention, you can see that Adloquium is a square, with a pointed edge pointing upwards at the top. Meanwhile, Poison is a square with a pointed edge pointing downwards. Most buffs and debuffs have similar structure, with only the icon varying most of the times. That said, do keep in mind that you can't Leeches/Esuna every single debuff, though it doesn't hurt trying at least once to see what's removable and what isn't.

6. Should Sacred Soil only be used on mobs and certain boss abilities where you know big damage is incoming, or every time available?

Generally speaking, the first scenario. However, if Sacred Soil really isn't needed (i.e. doing content that you're overgearing, or a simple Succor/Virus is enough to mitigate most of the damage), it might be wise to save your Aetherflow stack for things like Lustrate and Energy Drain. Using it all the time is impractical, because you can't maintain Shadowflare and Sacred Soil at the same time, and generally speaking, the Slow from Shadowflare will outweigh the damage mitigation of Sacred Soil.