Hi I main Scholar since a realm reborn. I have noticed a lot negativity surrounding the class at least on the forums while leveling through stormblood content.

I have hit 70 completed the main scenario and have ran the expert dungeons a few times and currently working on gearing up to get into the casual deltascape raid.

So now that background is out of the way lets move on to real feedback.

What I like about the job is the variety of tasks scholar can do and the different ways they can heal. Excogitation is one of my new favorite skills and the Aetherpact skill is pretty dandy unfortunately that is all the gauge is for.

My gripes with Scholars current state are as follows. There seems to be no longer any situation in which our basic tools are able to accomplish basic healing tasks. I'm talking about the use of Physick, Adloquium etc.

Running stormblood content in order to heal and keep people alive your basic healing tools must always be accompanied with aetherflow skills do to how hard enemies hit and fairy cooldowns like whispering dawn will be thrown in as well to try put out enough healing to where the tank is having an actual net gain in health instead of just dying slower.

I have been playing through stormblood content as tank and have noticed my non scholar healers appear to be way less skills in order to accomplish the task of basic healing and this where it hit me scholar could use a look at.

Simply put healing as scholar as of right now feels very hectic and stressful as it takes multiple resources to do the job the other healers can perform with way less buttons. Which means playing as scholar is like playing on a higher difficulty level and explains a lot of the discontent with the class as of right now.

From what I understand the purpose of the stormblood expansion was to reduce button bloat and de-emphasize cooldowns etc. Basically making jobs feel less convoluted to perform at a competent level. Scholar feels like it has gone in the opposite direction since multiple resources are being used to accomplish one task creating the problem of too much work too little pay.

I understand scholar got nerfed in the expansion one of the nerfs being in fairy healing potency so I would like to suggest instead of just outright removing that heling from eos, instead take that healing and roll it back into some of scholar's basic healing tools so it doesn't feel as frantic and stressfull while also making it so the fairy has less 'carry' potential.

Other issues would be dissipation works against the fey gauge mechanic.

While we're on the topic of the fey gauge and aetherflow abilities Scholar seems a tad too reliant on aetherflow usage as of right now our basic healing kit has been demoted to MP expensive form of damage mitigation while aetherflow is where the real healing is at making our basic skills feel like trash.

To add to this Aetherflow skills add to the fey gauge to make use Aetherpact which would in all honesty would an amazing tool for freeing up the scholar to provide dps for a time, but I often hang on to it as an extra source of emergency healing in the even I run out aetherflow and not enemies are dead yet for whatever reason.

The bigger issue I see with the fey gauge is it encourages or teaches inefficient use of aetherflow abilities since for example you can cast bane on a boss with no adds around solely for the sake of building fey gauge or casting sacred soil which actually has a cooldown again for the sake of earning fey gauge points.

So they fey gauge in a way can be argued that it actually takes the main purpose of the aetherflow abilities away instead of being skills that need to be well timed and are amazingly rewarding for doing so they have been somewhat reduced to 'point generators' rather than valuable tools that should be used wisely yet I'm using them nearly all the time now so they don't feel as great or rewarding to use because ALL the time is the time to use them.

So my suggestions for when SE does eventually look over scholar again are:
Take the potency you took from eos and find a way to roll that in back into scholar's main healing tools to make the job less stressful and frantic to play, this could be done via a trait that increases physic potency for example.

Then check to see how this affects aetherflow usage and make adjustments to the fey gauge gain per aetherflow skill or even adjust how the fey gauge gets built up say for example dabbling with eos/fairy skills adding to the fey gauge instead.

In short basic healing tools in my opinion would need to be bumped up in effectiveness and Aetherflow/Fey Gauge interaction could be rebalanced accordingly if deemed necessary after potency adjustments.

Hope this was constructive until next time.