Feedback on 4.05 Scholar

[MeliaAntiqua]

This is a follow up to my original post right after SBs launch. After having played scholar in savage for a few days now and having cleared O1 and O2 (working on O3) I feel like I have experienced the changes enough to warrant another post.

To start off let's talk about the changes made in 4.05:

• Excogitation: The buffs to potency and duration/cd are nice and the skill has seen good use in savage content. I would still like the heal to go off after the duration on its own and/or to have the option to spread its effect via deployment tactics (at half potency) but overall the skill is way better than before.
• Indomitability: I was not expecting them to buff Indom. It was great before and got even better now. Nothing to complain.
• Emergency Tactics: The cd reduction does nothing. I was never in a situation where the cd of emergency tactics was relevant. With the buff to Indom, Succor is even more niche and Adlo has other issues (see below).
• Fey Union: The fixes to range and no gauge cost when out of range were absolutely needed. So just some quality of life changes. I will discuss the implications and my thoughts on Fey Union below.
• Quickened Aetherflow: In my after SB launch post I really hated the rng nature of this trait and SE listened. Well done. This might be the most impactful of all the changes as it turns the SCH into a class build around its aetherflow even more which I like.
• Miasma II: A godsend ability. Finally a SCH in dungeons is contributing good aoe dps. Miasma IIs potency is great, useful for spam and just keeping it up between heals. Bane + Shadowflare + Miasma II is really good. Thanks SE.

However we must talk about some things that still need to be looked at. Keep in mind this is just my opinion and you may disagree with what I am going to present here:

• Adloquium: Nothing has changed here. It is still way to weak for the high mana cost and cast time. With the aetherflow changes SCH is going more into a direction of emergency ogcd healer and I'm fine with that. SCH does not need to be "the shield healer". Noct AST can be that. However Adloquium is not acceptable. A WHMs Divine Benison is a more useful and powerful shield than Adlo. It can be used ogcd and at no mana cost (or the cost of a cure I). The 15% shielding on a tank outclasses the strength of Adlo. I feel like it is time for a complete overhaul of Adlos effect or a significant buff. SCH still does not have a stronger single target heal and in the past Adlo + Embrace were enough to cover huge damage. With both nerfed there is a gap in SCHs toolkit.
  
  How do we fix it? Multiple suggestions:
  1) Keep Adlo as weak as it is but reduce its mana cost significantly (to cure IIs level) and make it instant cast. That way it would fill the role of a cure II and small mitigation but used more often.
  2) Keep or even increase its mana cost but in return make it super powerful (you can even reduce or remove its healing effekt) to 200/600 in healing/shield or 0/700. The high mana cost would restrict it's usage to just tank busters and high aoe damage (deployed) but would make it strong in those cases.
  3) Make it cd and/or aetherflow gated and be just a shield (600 potency).
  
  The second and third suggestion would need a Physick II to compensate and the double shield on crit needs to go anyway because I feel like this interaction with crit is what holds Adloquium back. SE cant buff Adloquium because the crit shields could get out of control. I know that some of these suggestions would homogenise the healers even more but Adlo is one of SCH weakest skills atm although it was and should be one of its defining features. Whatever happens to Adloquium, it cant get any worse. So I just hope for a change.
  
  
• Fey gauge and Fey Union: The Fey gauge itself feels tagged on. No matter what you change about Fey Union, introducing a gauge at level 70 for just a single skill is just bad design. Most other Jobs get their gauge because it shows some old mechanic (like AST, WAR, BLM) or they get it as their first mechanic at lvl 62 with multible skills to use it for (like ninki for NIN). The Fey gauge is just there for a single ability and this ability is not universaly useful in every situation. Yes there are situations of constant medium strength damage on a single target in which Fey Union fits perfecty. But in every other situation the gauge is utterly useless. I find myself often sitting at a full or nearly full gauge and just looking for any opportunity to use it on. Having a gauge on a healer that functions like that of a DD just does not work. A DD can usually just use a skill that costs all or part of their gauge for additional damage. As a healer there are just situations in which using Fey Union is not a benefit.
  
  How do we fix it? We look at Warrior:
  A warrior gets its gauge or its old equivalent in the form of stacks right from lvl 30 when the job is unlocked. By leveling up you get more and more skills you can spend your gauge on. By the time we reach lvl 70 there are a total of six skills tied to the gauge. This is what I like about the warriors gauge. You get it early and it provides flexible skill choice based on the situation. Need extra mitigation? Use Inner Beast. Need aoe aggro and heal? Use Steel Cyclone. Just want to deal damge? Use Fell Cleave and Upheaval for single target and Decimate for aoe. This system allows flexiblility and has a useful tool for all situations. The Fey gauge however does not. It is so inflexible in both the fact that there is only one skill to use it on and this skill is even making your faerie inflexible in target choice and skill usage. My suggestion would therefore be an overhaul of the fey gauge to make it an integral part of SCHs identity. Every faerie ability needs to interact with the gauge. Whispering Dawn, Illumination, Fey Wind... all of them need to cost you gauge. In return you could remove their cooldown so that they are purely gated by their fey gauge cost. This way the fey gauge would be implemented just like with warroir at lvl 30 and you would already have two skills per faerie to use it on. The goal of this overhaul would be flexibility. Need Aoe healing? Whispering Dawn. Need single target healing? Fey Union. Need mitigation? Fey Covenant. Need party damage? Fey Wind. Of course this is just a rough idea of what my desired changes to the fey gauge are and it would be up to SE to decide on ability cost and duration, additional means of filling the gauge (I would like every embrace cast to give a few points in addition to the aetherflow mechanic) etc. This would also be a good timing to change some of Selenes skills like the useless silence or the very very situational dispel into something better.
  
  Going back to Fey Union for a bit. My biggest complaint about this skill after the QoL changes is still the fact that it does not scale with any buffs and there a so many out there. Using Fey Union on a Warrior in Defiance who uses Conva and has a Mantra on him is just a waste. You could also just Embrace him for a similar result that does not limit the faeries actions and does not cost any gauge. There is still a lot of finetuning left before Fey Union is skill that I want to use frequently because right now I still cant be bothered with all the thinking required that goes into the usage of a skill that just heals a single target. Even other faerie skills like Whispering Dawn scale with buffs so there is no reason why Fey Union should not.
  
  
• Dissipation: Dissipation was always a very niche skill and I used it maybe a handful of times in the last two years. With the introduction of the fey gauge it contadicts the rest of SCHs toolkit even more than before because you get aetherflow stacks which in return cannot give you fey gauge because your faerie is gone. There are countless suggestions of what to do with dissipation and I wont repeat all of them here. One of the oldest complaint is still valid however. The 20% increase in healing potency needs to effect aetherflow abilties because those are the reason you would use dissipation in the first place. Additionally an auto resummon or a summon of the other faerie needs to happen as well. I personally would like dissipation to resummon you faerie after the 30 second buff wears off with a fully filled fey gauge. That way you could use all your gauge on faerie abilities (with the overhaul I described above), than use Dissipation and rely on you buffed healing from aetheflow stacks for 30 seconds and after that you would get your faerie back ready to throw out all of her abilities again. But no matter what changes are being made to Dissipation, every change would be welcome.

Overall I am happy with the first round of changes SE made. Fixing the AoE problem, making Excog good, no rng based BS, some QoL for Fey Union. These were needed to bring SCH to the level of the other healers in terms of efficency. Especially the change to Quickened Aetherflow helps the class is so many ways. It provides more Mana, more damage and a more reliable way of healing. The flexibility of Aetherflow is still the best thing about being a SCH and not its faerie or its shields (at least for me). I hope SE will listen to all the feedback they can get and do some more severe changes in 4.1 like the ones I suggested here.

To conclude I would like to take a brief look at the healer balance in general. Most of the SCH changes in the patchnotes were good and I was really glad, but the most important thing was the nerf to the Balance. There was no way the three healers could have been balanced with a 20% damage buff on AST guaranteeing their spot in any group. Now all healers can do different things differently good but you are not forced to take one over the other. My group is clearing savage fights with a WHM/SCH combo and I enjoy the healing power of my WHM buddy while I help with SCHs healing flexibility and sustained DPS contribution.

Thank you for your patience in reading all of my feedback. Feel free to discuss in a mannered fashion.

[LalatinaCross]

I agree with almost everything you said, but there are few points that I think differently.

1. Aetherpact / Fey Union: I really dislike this skill. It feels useless and it locks the Faerie during use.

2. AoE rotation: Miasma II is really helpfull, but the lower duration / high cooldown on Shadow Flare plus 2 underpowered DoTs makes me feel envy when I look at WHM spamming Holy or AST using Gravity. SCH AoE rotation could be simplifed to a single buttom too.

3. Dots: SCH still uses Arcanist's Dots, while SMN got a Trait that upgraded them. Maybe SHC should get a Trait for Dots too, so we don't feel like using old toys discarded by SMN.

4. Button bloat: Ruin, Broil and Broil II are singular spells and when doing synced content SCH have to select the one apropriated for the level. It would be nice to see, at least, Broil and Broil II as upgrades.

5. Selene: That Faerie needs some love. Last time I used her was at Odin for "AoE Esuna". EoS is too strong overall to replace her.

[Phileas]

I agree with almost everything you said, but there are few points that I think differently.

4. Button bloat: Ruin, Broil and Broil II are singular spells and when doing synced content SCH have to select the one apropriated for the level. It would be nice to see, at least, Broil and Broil II as upgrades.

But they are consolidated. Ruin upgrades to Broil (Broil Mastery trait) and then Broil upgrades to Broil 2 (Broil Mastery 2 trait) on a single button. The same button syncs down to the appropriate spell when level sync. They just "appear" as separate spells in the action list.

I would like to see improvements to dissipation - currently its so rare to use it now with the quickened aetherflow trait. I am rarely out of stacks with Aetherflow so far off cooldown that I cant wait..

[inhaledcorn]

I had made a similar suggestion myself with the Fairy Gauge as it really does feel underutilized at the moment. A lot of fairy skills are very important, and gating them behind a cooldown makes them less useful. In addition, this makes the argument of "well, Whispering Dawn is free" less valid as there's more than just a cooldown cost. In addition, I would like the fairies themselves get some love. I'd like some tweaks to the levels at which they learn skills and which skills they learn. For example, an AoE regen is absolutely OP in lower levels and is really not needed there. Granted, this could be locked behind the fairy gauge which could be unavailable until level 30 which could balance that out a bit. However, I feel like the fairies themselves are not well defined. Why does a "healing" fairy have two support skills (a magic defense buff and a healing magic buff)? Why does the "support" fairy have a skill that heals statuses? I'd like to see, for Eos, Whispering Dawn moved up to the level 40 slot, the Esuna skill at 20 (and no longer AoE, it's target command), and the level 1 slot a Medica of sorts while giving the magic defense to Selene. Selene gets single target damage reduction at 1, healing boost at 20, and Fey's Wind (while increasing the potency to 5% and reducing TP cost by 30%) at its current level. I also agree that, with these changes, Embrace should add to the Fairy gauge on top of using Aetherflow actions. Embrace could add 5 points while Aetherflow continues to add 10.

On top of all of this, it seems they're trying to push SCH into a reactionary heal spot, but it lacks the tools to actually do this. I think they're afraid of lowering the cost of Adlo because of how strong Crit-lo under Deployment is. If that's the case, I'd like to see a few things happen:

1) give the SCH a Cure II and Medica equivelent or (my prefered change) make Emergency Tactics a toggle-buff. SCH's can't be really good reactionary healers without Cure II or Medica equivelent, instead relying on Indom and Lustrate to do it. Using those as main heals undermines what they're meant to be: emergency heals. If they decide to go the Emergency Tactics toggle buff route, then make it so that the MP costs of Adlo and Succor while under the effect of Emergency Tactics is reduced.

2) Deployment change: If they don't want us to Deploy Crit-los so much, then make it either: a guaranteed crit chance on the next Adlo or Succor or make the next Physick cast a pure Galvanize shield. This keeps the shielding aspect of SCH alive but makes Deployment less OP in the one circumstance that SE is so afraid of.

3) Adlo and Succor changes: Current, the base shield is only equal to the healed amount. How about 150% of the healed amount is the Galvanize strength. In addition, Succor also gets the Crit shield bonus of 200%. While AST shields are still overall stronger, SCH shields are nothing to sneeze at.

4) Fey's Union: One last look at the fairies, Fey's Union is really underwhelming. I'd like there to be a different effect depending on the fairy. If it's Eos, the current effect is maintained, but 1) it can be affected by healing boosts, and 2) the target takes 15% reduced damage while under the effect. It's not much, but it does allow the SCH to put out more personal dps while the fairy is locked up. For Selene, it's instead a 15% damage boost on whomever is tethered. It's a risky venture, but one that can be worth it if you can maintain it.

Edit: I like the idea of Dissipation completely filling up the Fairy gauge after a resummon, though. I had originally suggested that it acts like a SAM's Meditate if we go with the Fairy gauge changes (it locks up the fairy to grant Fairy gauge and can be additionally canceled after another button press).

[Riyshn]

/snip

Please no. Can we please stop trying to homogenize the healers? 'Cause that's all most of your suggestions would do.

(Running out the door for work, will explain more what I mean when I get home tonight, assuming someone else hasn't by then.)

[inhaledcorn]

Please no. Can we please stop trying to homogenize the healers? 'Cause that's all most of your suggestions would do.

There y'all go again with "BUH MUH HOMOGENIZATION-"

STOP. You throw that word around without understanding what it is I'm asking for. I'm asking for SCH getting the same tools to heal the same content that the other two have. I don't see y'all crying that "BUH BENEFIC II IS JUST CURE II AND PHYSIC AND BENEFIC ARE JUST CURE!" I don't see y'all complaining, "BUH CHAIN STRATAGEM IS JUST A DPS INCREASE LIKE THE BALANCE!" or "BUH INDOM IS JUST ASSIZE! AND TETRA IS JUST LUSTRATE!" But as soon as I ask for the same basic healing tools as the other two, we can't have that or else every healing job is just WHM with a fancy skin.

It's not like SCH has a pet with its own set of cooldowns or AST has cards or anything. NOPE THEY'RE ALL THE FREAKING SAME. It's not like WAR got a gap closer because DRK got one and WARs wanted one too. It's not like all Melee jobs have gap closers, or, before the cross role system, every job had Stuns. Or, before the role system, BRD and MCH both had TP/MP restore. Or RDM and SMN can both raise people. They're all the same jobs, right? Why does anyone play MCH or BRD when NIN can already hit enemies with Vuln up?

Why should SCH pigeonholed into the off heal spot when they potentially have the tools to be either? That's what I'm asking for. Granted, WHM does not have the tools available to be an off-heal, and that's something WHM does have the right to be upset about. But, maybe the expansion there will be a more pure shield healer. That's what originally SCH did, but it's clear they want to move SCH away from that. Then, fine, do that, but give the SCH tools to let it be the healer SE is trying to make them.

"BUH STRATERGY-" I GOT IT. YES, SCH'S LORE STATES ITS STRATEGIC, BUT IT WAS NEVER A PURE SHIELDING CLASS BECAUSE THE FAIRY ALWAYS EXISTED. Its shields were fine in 2.0 because they were the only healing job that had shields attached to heals. WHM covered the bulk of the healing that the SCH couldn't handle - and it was fine because they were the only two healers in the game. HOWEVER, that changed when 3.0 rolled around and we got the AST, then 3.4 happened and AST's shields were just flat-out better than the SCHs. People complain that SCH no longer has an identity as a healer, so I'm suggesting one - flexibility. They can main heal and off heal at the same time, but they lack the raw healing power, cooldowns, and support the other two have, they just make up for it with more oGCD healing.

You wanna talk to me about homogenization, fine, but don't throw that word around like it's a bad thing. Don't throw that word around like giving everyone the same tools means they use them the same. Look at Smash. Everyone has - a standard A jab, directional attacks, directional chargeable attacks (smash attacks), a neutral aerial, directional aerials, and 4 specials tied to neutral, side directionals, and up and down directionals. Despite that, THEY ALL USE THEM DIFFERENTLY. The only ones who are basically the same are the clones, and even then, a lot of their attacks have functional differences. Marth and Lucina, despite having the exact same movesets function very differently from each other. Marth wants to fight where he can land the tip of his sword for the most damage, while Lucina can fight at any range with her sword. Roy, though decloned, is still very similar to Marth moveset wise, but he fights up close to get the most out of his sword.

[Dregenfox]

I don't get how people can think most of the big skills like dissipate/Emergency Tactics are useless because scholar never needs to heal that much, and then complain that scholar can't compare to WHM in healing.

WHM has the best sustained healing + burst DPS.
AST has the best buffs/shields.
SCH has the best burst/emergency healing + dps.

The changes all geared scholar towards being a good emergency healer that spends most of the time DPS'ing and filling in for emergencies. That might not be the role most players intended for it but that's what SE has done to the class. SCH is the only class that can burst out 800 potency party heals every 30 seconds + 1200 potency single-target heals whenever it's needed.

Turning Adlo into a spammable heal just turns it into a clone of WHM. If someone just wanted to spam cures on people instead of managing AF stacks and fairy why not just roll a WHM in the first place?

I like the proposed Fey guage changes though.

[Pomelo]

The OP has it all right for SCH, SE please please look at this stuff.

[inhaledcorn]

/snip

Oh, yes, tell me how WHM heals with a pet. Or WHM has all these shields. Or their bubble has damage reduction. Or how they have a heal that only activates at a certain HP threshold. Oh yes, exactly the same as WHM.

If anything, WHM has better emergency heals as they have a lot of oGCD heals that aren't tied to a resource needed to use them. All WHM has is cooldown time management. SCH has pretty much all of their off globals tied to Aetherflow. All of their big heals are tied to cooldowns. The other healers don't have that problem. They have an AoE big heal and AoE heal with effect on demand. All SCH has is the AoE heal with an effect. Heck, WHM has an Indom on demand, everyone just needs to be together. And, they get an added Medica on top of that thanks to PI.

SCH's emergency healing is only as good as the amount of stacks and cooldowns they have available. Yeah, Indom and Rouse+Fey's Ilum+Whispering Dawn and Emergency Tactics+Succor is a lot of healing. However, Indom is only available every 30s and costs Aetherflow (and without the trait, only 2 a minute). Rouse + Whispering Dawn is only available every minute and up for 21s. Emergency Tactics + Succor are only up every 20s, and Succor is very expensive and heals for very little. And, SCHs usually have to plan out their cooldowns carefully for healing. If things go against that plan, they usually can't cover it. If anything goes wrong, SCH has the hardest time recovering from it. And, if anything goes wrong twice in a minute, SCH is just pretty much dead in the water.

SE has changed SCH to a more active healing role, yet SCH lacks the tools to do such a thing. That's the only thing I'm asking for - the tools for SCH to do what the designers want them to do considering all adjustments they got.

[Dregenfox]

Snip

WHM's don't have to option of casting up to 3 oGCD heals every minute. Or with dissipation + stacking beforehand, up to 12 oGCD lustrates in under 35s. That oGCD flexibility is what differentiates scholars from WHM.

The whole point of optimal SCH play is to avoid casting GCD's as much as possible with optimal use of oGCD's + fairy healing, and using those GCD's for DPS instead.

OTOH the whole point of WHM is to make GCD healing as efficient as possible by stacking Regen-effects and their variety of heals effectively. Their oGCD's are there more to cover for mistakes. That difference in playstyle is what separates SCH and WHM.