The fairy deal (thoughts about future SCH fairy possibilities, incl. a third one)

[Midaja]

Notes:

• Suggestions in this thread are not meant to buff SCH in relation to other healers. Any changes / toolkit-enhancements are meant to go hand in hand with comparable additions to the other classes.
• All numbers in suggested skills represent only an idea of how strong I think it should be and would, of course, need well thought balancing.
• I'm healing as a SCH since T5. Most of my experience / thoughts comes from endgame (savage) raiding and with that in mind.

I'm not happy with the current player / fairy balance. Letting the fairy heal while the player himself uses most of his GCDs to deal damage is not exactly what I would expect when playing a healer. I don't oppose the idea of having to DPS in healing downtimes, since it makes thinking about how much healing is really needed necessary. But in my opinion, the fairy should just support the Scholar in his doing and not take care of them all for herself, so that you can focus on something else.

Of course there are other possibilities to rebalance this, but since I would very much like to see a third fairy some day with the three of them all being viable and having different strengths / weaknesses in different encounters, I did some thinking about Scholar - fairy interaction changes that could be realised in an upcoming addon, and would like to share these with the devs and the community.

cursive - new stuff and changes


Fairies:

Eos - Strongest Healing

• Embrace
  Cast Time: 2s
  Recast Time: 3s
  Description: Grants healing over time effect with cure potency of 50 to target for 9s. Stacks up to 3 times.
  Additional Effect: If 3 stacks of "Embrace" are present on the target, restores HP of target with a potency of 150.
  
• Whispering Dawn - same as now
• Fey Covenant - same as now
• Fey Illumination - same as now

Selene - Strongest DPS

• Punishment (replaces "Embrace")
  Cast Time: 2s
  Recast Time: 3s
  Description: Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 5 for 9s. Stacks up to 4 times.
  Additional Effect: If 4 stacks of "Punishment" are present on the target, deals unaspected damage with a potency of 20.
  
• Fey Light (replaces "Fey Wind")
  Recast Time: 60s
  Radius: 20y
  Description: Increases damage done of self and nearby party members by 3% for 30s.
  
• Silent Dawn - same as now
• Fey Caress - same as now

Helios - Strongest Support

• Disgrace
  Cast Time: 2s
  Recast Time: 3s
  Description: Increases damage taken by target by 0.5% for 9s. Decreases damage done by target by 1% for 9s. Stacks up to 3 times.
  Additional Effect: If 3 stacks of "Disgrace" are present on the target, restores MP to the Scholar with a potency of 3.
  
• Refreshing Dawn
  Recast Time: 60s
  Radius: 20y
  Description: Increases base MP and TP regen of self and nearby party members by 5% for 20s.
  Additional Effect: Increases effectiveness of non-percentage-based MP and TP refreshing effects by 20%.
  
• Fey Wings
  Recast Time: 120s
  Radius: 20y
  Description: Increases movement speed of self and nearby party members by 20% for 20s.
  
• Fey Radiance
  Recast Time: 90s
  Range: 30y
  Description: Reduces damage taken by target by 7% and delivers unaspected damage with a potency of 20 every time it suffers physical damage for 15s.
  Additional Effect: Increased Enmity.
  

Since, with my changes, all fairies would completely focus on one aspect there might be the need to add the ability to compensate their lacking support in the other aspects (or boost their native one even further). For this I would add a job-ability in the likes of this (more stances, yay):

Spiritual Bonding
Cast Time: 3s
Recast Time: 15s
Effect: Grants a continious, positive effect, depending on your currently active fairy. Does not change if you summon a different fairy, while the effect is active.
- Eos: Increases your and your fairy's healing by 10%.
- Selene: Increases your and your fairy's damage done by 10%.
- Helios: Increases your and your fairy's "attack" speed by 5%.



Some thoughts explained:

Why replace Selene's "Embrace"?
Selene should boost overall-DPS by the downside of having yourself to think more about MP management and healing. Embrace would be a far too strong healing relief.

Why making the primary casts over time and stacking like that?
First of all: Embrace would still have the effect it has now, if spammed on one target, since the HoT and direct heal would add up to the actual 300 potency / 3s.
The idea is to make the skills less flexible. You can have the effects up on a maximum of 2 targets (although the micromanagement for that would be insane, would need 2 target-locks for the fairy to really make this legit).
Burst healing should be the healer's worry.
Burst DPS should be the DPS' worry.
Burst mitigation should be the tank's worry.
Therefore those benefits should only be applicable over a certain amount of time to not take away the responsibility from where it should be.

Why adding MP / TP - regen to the Scholars toolkit, are you insane?
This might really be a bit too over the top.
The additional effect of Disgrace is meant to make Energy Drain less important, so that you're not dependant on it to hit and you might use your Aetherflows differently.
Refreshing Dawn is not meant to completely replace an ASTs Spire / Ewer or a MP / TP-Song, but to hopefully reduce the need / uptime of them, so that especially BRDs and MCHs might have less damage penalty uptime.
Targets for this effect are mainly Shroud, LA, Goad, Spire / Ewer, MP- / TP-Songs and Invigorate.

Fey Radiance
Additional enmity helptool for tanks, especially when building initial enmity on groups or after target swaps. Also decent damage push (fairly high one for larger groups).


As I said all the numbers would have to be tweaked, but these are some general ideas of Scholar progression I would kinda like in future patches / addons.
And of course there are lots and lots of other stuff they could do.

So, what do you think?

[Lyrica_Ashtine]

"What do we think"
Not this shit again

[Lyrica_Ashtine]

Took a bit to find them on mobile, but here you go:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/196805
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/202226
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/204316
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/212432

[Twilite]

Took a bit to find them on mobile, but here you go:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/196805
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/202226
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/204316
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/212432

I guess your phone is shitty like mine when it comes to this site because all those links lead to the main page.

Anyway, I give the OP, E for effort and actually taking the time to format it like that.

[FeliAiko]

Lore-reasons prohibit a third fairy (weak, I know, but SE have cited lore as a reason for their Egi designs before, so...). You don't get 'two' fairies as a SCH, you get one (Lily) with two aspects to their personality that you bring forth at will (i.e. Eos and Selene). Mechanically, the support aspect of a third fairy could just be distributed across the existing two instead. Personally instead of a third fairy, I'd like the encouragement to switch between them mid-battle without MP cost. Was hoping Dissipation would be this, but oh well.

As for limiting the reliance on the fairy when not healing, a simple solution could be to make Cleric Stance nerf the potency of Embrace and other pet skills.

[Midaja]

"What do we think"
Not this shit again

As this seems to be your standard post in all of the threads you linked, I guess you didn't read what I wrote and / or didn't think about it.

1st of all its not only a "give us a new fairy!"-, but also a "rebalance the player / fairy weight"-thread, combined with a rather well-thought concept, in comparison to any of the threads you just linked.

If we let Helios aside, even the change with Embrace / Punishment and Spiritual Bonding would have a rather large impact, since Selene would completely loose the ability to heal, while the DPS you gain as a Scholar through Eos taking over much of the healing, should (numbers would have to be tweaked accordingly) not be as much as you gain from Selene.

So if you want to deal max DPS you would have to always be ready to switch back to healing, but you would do more damage when actually healing.
On the other side Eos would boost your healing greatly and still allow for you to focus on DPS with the actual fairy heal-output (on the tank at least), but it will just be less DPS than with Selene.

So thinking "Not this shit again" is, in my oppinion, a bit narrow-minded in this case, because... Well... It's not really the same shit

[Midaja]

Lore-reasons prohibit a third fairy (weak, I know, but SE have cited lore as a reason for their Egi designs before, so...). You don't get 'two' fairies as a SCH, you get one (Lily) with two aspects to their personality that you bring forth at will (i.e. Eos and Selene). Mechanically, the support aspect of a third fairy could just be distributed across the existing two instead. Personally instead of a third fairy, I'd like the encouragement to switch between them mid-battle without MP cost. Was hoping Dissipation would be this, but oh well.

As for limiting the reliance on the fairy when not healing, a simple solution could be to make Cleric Stance nerf the potency of Embrace and other pet skills.

Who said a new fairy would have to have something to do with the old one. Basically the same class can summon carbuncle(s), egis and a fairy. Heck if it's not a fairy, just take Alphinaud's red carbuncle... Lore can always be written accordingly, if they would want to do so.

edit: oops, sry for double post

[Lyrica_Ashtine]

snip

I've read some of it, including the "ideas" where the third fairy is incredibly overpowered as what other jobs have to offer in similar aspects.

If adding more power to the combination as a whole is your idea of "rebalance", you really need to consider the other jobs too.

Scholars are already pretty mandatory for the more serious content. Not because of their DPS capacity, but for their toolkit in general. Thinking scholars are only there to off dps and not heal at all is a common misconception created by the masses, much like how gossip gets twisted and shaped till it's a lie from person to person.

So let's assume your "ideas" were to be implemented and Scholars became signifcantly more overpowered compared to other jobs. We'd get a similar scenario with the tank trinity:
Warriors are so well shaped for the endgame meta, running two warriors is better than a mix of any job. Scholars would be pretty much that for the healers.

[Midaja]

I've read some of it

Well, then you obviously didn't read it well.

Notes:

• Suggestions in this thread are not meant to buff SCH in relation to other healers. Any changes / toolkit-enhancements are meant to go hand in hand with comparable additions to the other classes.

Apart from that I'd really like you to show some examples in where those skills should be overpowered in comparison with other classes / the other fairies. Apart from that:

Notes:

• All numbers in suggested skills represent an idea of how strong I think it should be and would, of course, need well thought balancing.

[Daws]

I don't think we need a third fairy but I would love an Enkindle like ability that made them do something cool. Maybe it could push Selene into dps mode for example (e.g., turn Embrace into Punishment) but since it's a cd and limited duration (something I wish Cleric Stance was...), it wouldn't fundamentally change how we use the fairies. No clue what it would do to Eos...maybe just turn her into a white mage complete with peppermint robes

Side note: WTB barding for our fairies. I want to dress them up.