Making a better Scholar through Lilly and a couple others (Rawr'z SB variant of SCH)

[Rawrz]

Rawr! So two things have mainly bugged me about SB's SCH. One is that we lost allot of our weave power and clip our GCD so much we might as well be ASTs (lul.) The other is how disconnected SCH feels from their fairy. I know, how dare I say this when 4.1 includes the buff to Selene that we've all been begging for!



Direct Fairy Changes

I mostly want to emphasize how I want to see Lilly become more integrated.

Right now, when it comes to fairies its either: Summon Eos for better heals or Summon Selene for the tiniest DPS buff in the world. People summon Selene at this point, to shoulder the healing burden on the coheal so the entire rest of the party can get a .01% dps increase. I would like to shift your summoning options from "More heals or More DPS" to "More AOE heals or more Single Target Heals."

Eos would namely stay the same, but her CDS would be adjusted, to keep her more active to compete with a shorter CD Selene.

• Embrace 250 Potency. Is now instant cast to allow better pet management.
• Whispering Dawn. No change.
• Fey Covenant Cool down reduced to 60 seconds, duration decreased to 15 seconds.
• Fey Illumination cool down reduced to 90 seconds, duration decreased to 15 seconds. Reverted from 10% back to 20%. [I feel like Eos felt a nerf to fey illumination to keep her closer in line with Selene than to make SCH less powerful than the other healers.

Selene would have a few major changes. Silent Dusk and Fey Wind would be removed. In its place would be Fey Charm and Twilight's Touch (names are completely subjective obviously.)

• Embrace 250 Potency. Is now instant cast to allow better pet management.
• Fey Caress. No change.
• Fey Charm. Damage received is reduced by 10% on a single target. Cool down 120 seconds.
• Twilight's Touch 750 potency. 2 second cast time. Cool down of 20 seconds. [750 fairy potency converts to a 500 potency SCH heal spell.]

Whispering Dawn and Twilight's Touch, Fey Caress and Fey Illumination, and Fey Covenant and Fey Charm would be assigned shared recast times to avoid over stacking mitigation or healing.

Fey Union (Also enhancing the differences between Eos and Selene)

Fey union would also be adjusted depending on the fairy summoned.

While Eos is summoned, a 200 potency tick with a radius of 10 yalms would be used.
While Selene is summoned, the current 480 potency tick at 15 yalms would remain.

Another change to fey union I would like to see is that Dissolve Union, be a fairy skill so that a second OGCD wouldn't be necessary to remove it. The fairy would be able to do the command on her GCD and not ours.


To me, this really cements how the two fairies have different roles.

Getting more Diverse fairy use using Dissipation

Dissipation has so much potential. During the bugged dissipation period where SCH were able to both use dissipation for stacks and summon a fairy it felt very entwined with the job. With MP reductions on summon and summon II and recast times changed to 3 seconds in 4.1 dissipation is already seeing a small buff. I want the skill to become a very synergistic part of our 70 toolkit.

Dissipation currently sends your pet away while granting your a full stack of Aetherflow and a 20% healing up buff (that doesn't affect healing abilities), while making summon and summon II unavailable for 30 seconds. Instead I would like it to do fundamentally the same thing, except two changes:

1. Summon and summon II would no longer be unusable during the duration. Instead, upon successful summon, the buff is removed.
   
2. While active, the fairy gauge does not go away upon use and is filled at a rate of 20 instead of 10. [Obviously this part won't take affect until 70, but it really ties in the skill, especially if fey union becomes less clunky.]

Scholar Healing adjustments


Adjustments would need to be made to SCH's core healing kit to accommodate the shift in healing prowess, namely the buffs from 4.06. Excog and indom would need their potencies lowered, but I would like to just shift the focus on what excog does.

Indom from 500 back to 400.

Excogitation would be changed from an 800 potency heal that is automatically applied after the target drops below 50% to, a 400 potency heal that is applied when the target drops below 50% and when excogitation falls off, a galvanize of 350 potency is added. Making it a 750 potency ability. This galvanize would compete with Adlo's galvanize, making it ineffective to adlo a target who has had or is about to have excog procced. This would also allow strategies like Excoging your fairy and spreading off of it for a 350 potency shield. Right now, there is nothing seperating Lustrate and Excog in function, when the tank is below 50%.

I'm not sure where else a Scholar can "lose" healing potency without become strangely crippled or without inadvertedly buffing themselves. Giving Adloquiem less base healing, would make adlo less "spammable" without making it a MP drain like they tried to do in SB. Something like 200 potency heal with 400 potency shield. The downside is that increasing its Galvanize makes it difficult to balance with Deploying it and even worse factoring in Adlo's Crit multiplier trait. Adjustments to the trait could be made so that the healing potency is increased upon crit, but that would just start a riot. :[

Changing Miasma II to fix the "Weave Problem"

Change Miasma II to be based on a target's location. Similar to an instant cast Aero III and reduce its MP cost to 175% that of broil instead of the current 233%. Blizzard II was 133% the cost of broil. Miasma II would then become a SEAMLESS replacement to Aero and Blizzard II, coming out stronger in every way except MP cost with both of these changes. [Anyone else notice that Malefic II and Stone IV costs 20% less than Broil II? Aero III, costs the same as Broil II.... What!|


In all, to me, Scholar is a very resource dependent healer. They by definition are weak healers and depend on their coheal and fairy for raw healing. They are strong mitigators and have much more complex ways to create an effective healing environment. They should be linked more closely to their fairies. This is how I see the evolution of scholar anyways. THE DREAM.

[Sebazy]

Definitely with you on most of these changes.

Instant cast embraces are a common sense change that makes so much sense <3

Fey illumination was a sneaky little nerf that IMHO just wasn't needed given the beat down Eos had already taken.

Revamping Selene makes a lot of sense too, her buffs have been far too weak for too long and giving her a legitimate use will do wonders. The only thing I'm unsure about is twilight touch, whilst the ability itself makes sense, that'll still make 3 single target heals on the pet alone, perhaps that's a missed opportunity for something a little more unique? Something like a 'increases healing received on the target by x% for xs' or such? Perhaps even something that adds a galvanise effect to all heals received?.

Aim higher with your Dissipation change too imho. One of my favourite ideas in my revamp wall-o-text was changing Dissipation into a fairy swap button and I think that'd work fantastically well with your fairies too.

The Excog change is a really solid idea that's perhaps hamstrung a bit by the inherent delay in Galvanise effects. If the barrier could take effect immediately then it would be an incredibly powerful ability to help stop those all too annoying deaths to an auto attack immediately following a tank buster. I'm not sure that that's possible though which would render it quite a bit weaker than it could be. How would spreading off the fairy trigger the Excog btw? Would you have to wait for the initial buff to time out first?

Am I the only one who likes the fact that Miasma II is a PBAoE? =( Your point regarding the MP costs is spot on and I can definitely see the logic behind making it targetable ala Aero III.

Good post+++

*edit*

Thinking about the Excog thing more, did you mean simply spreading the initial heal buff so the entire party has the 'dip under 50% and get a heal plus galv thing'? I think that'd be a bit dependant on how AoE damage is delivered in an encounter no? Frequently AoEs such as O3S or AoEs that either tick or just come at you repeatedly aka O4S would work really well with that. But if Ultimate Coil goes back to the 2.x thinking of huge transitional single hit AoEs and othewise fairly slow paced AoE damage then it's use is perhaps going to be a bit limited there as well?

[Ghishlain]

+1 - always fun to read out posts like these and see what ideas people have. Here are my thoughts / comments

This is going to be an unpopular decision but if you want to make it easier to adjust the power levels of Deploy and Adlo, they may just need to remove or reduce the critical bonus attached to Adlo. This means you can tweak the potency of the spell more without having it became the immovable wall that can occur with a Crit Adlo + Deploy.

I like the Excog change though deploying off the Fairy may be a problem due to the fact pets have a -50% damage received modifier, I think? I don't think pets get down to sub 50% HP very often unless they're getting cleaved a lot? XD

I also actually wish they'd take out the whole stat difference / level correlation thing from the pet and just adjust the potency values directly so it's more reflective of what the fairy is actually capable of. Ah well.

[Rawrz]

One of the issues with excog now is that it can simply fall off. With this skill change that's not necessarilya bad thing. The duration may need changed to something like 30 seconds but the idea is, as a scholar you know the heal checks and youre trying to optimize. Raid wide danage is coming out in 35 seconds. Place excog on Eos. 30 seconds go by and obviously the first effect of excog didn't go off. The second effect triggers, since the buff now falls off. Galvanize at 350 potency. We can then spread it. The advantage to doing this would be deployment completely by the ogcd, since you wouldn't have to adlo, as long as you knew the time table of the encounter.

So in a tank buster situation it would, heal by 400 potency when you drop below 50% then place a galvanize after the heal goes off to help protect against the following auto attacks from just melting your tank.

Sebazy I really want to feel the fluidity of one fairy replacing the other on one ogcd too, but i just wanted to keep the skill somewhat similar to what it is now.


Ghishlan I agree that adlo crit is a nightmare to balance but people would throw a hissey fit. xD

[Kabzy]

Ghishlan I agree that adlo crit is a nightmare to balance but people would throw a hissey fit. xD

I think I would be one of those people. :'D I just love that Adlo is unique to Scholar in that crit sense, but I'd probably get over it after a day or two.

I don't really have anything to add but I love both your suggestions and the post that Sebazy made. While there is no chance of anything like this happening right now, we all know that SCH/SMN should be getting big changes once they are finally split, and I really hope they take this direction. We play a pet job for a reason, it just makes so much sense.

I do want a ranged Miasma II now though! Make it happen please SE. ;_;

[inhaledcorn]

You're not really addressing the real problem with the fairies. The real problem is that Eos's healing is far and above any support that Selene brings. Even with your proposed changes, that's likely not going to change. Heck, you even got rid of the one thing people use Selene for now. Strong single target healing isn't going to make Selene better since the SCH already has pretty decent single target healing in a semi-spammable Lustrate. Selene's support has to be far-and-above any sort of healing Eos can bring in order to make Selene worth it, but then we have the problem that Selene becomes too good and Eos is just for these specific parts. This is why I'm saying the fairies should be completely redesigned as regen and shield focused (to act like both stances and pets). This removes the problem of one pet being relatively useless (they both have their uses depending on fight and co-healer).

I'm still of the mind that Dissipation should be a free fairy switch. Nothing else is really needed (though with the change to Summon, this may not be necessary). (I am also still of the mind that the Fairy gauge should be like Kenki for the fairy cooldowns.)

[Kabzy]

-Snip-

I think having Dissipation, or a new 5.0 ability, actually promote a Faerie swap would be the solution to this issue. I would personally like Selene to remain the support Faerie, and I honestly do think that people would use her if there was an instant, no penalty ability of switching the Faeries.

Your point on ST heals is a little dodgy though. We do have Lustrate, which is great, but optimal play requires you to use it as little as possible. So while I don't reeeeally want a ST focused Faerie, I can see why the suggestion was made and how it would actually be more beneficial in certain situations. Again, having an instant switch would really allow you to pre-plan which Faerie you want for different mechanics.

Unfortunately your own suggestion is actually more detrimental in my opinion. If you have one shielding and one using regens, you'll almost exclusively use the shielding one, which creates the exact same problem again. I say this because you would choose it based on your co-healer, which as it stands will always be a WHM or D.AST. I don't think it would be worth going with a N.AST partner just for a Faerie regen, when in turn they negate your shielding power. That just sounds a little confused to me.

[inhaledcorn]

Unfortunately your own suggestion is actually more detrimental in my opinion. If you have one shielding and one using regens, you'll almost exclusively use the shielding one, which creates the exact same problem again. I say this because you would choose it based on your co-healer, which as it stands will always be a WHM or D.AST. I don't think it would be worth going with a N.AST partner just for a Faerie regen, when in turn they negate your shielding power. That just sounds a little confused to me.

Uh, did you miss the part where the shielding aspect is removed from Adlo and Succor? They're turned to straight heals and Emergency and Deployment can make them either Regen or Shield spells. The shield idea is moved to the fairies so that you choose the fairy depending on the situation and the cohealer. This also opens the door for a true shield healer, since, as we learned when N.AST came out, SCH wasn't a true Shield healer since it had passive healing in the fairy.

[Kabzy]

Uh, did you miss the part where the shielding aspect is removed from Adlo and Succor?

It's late, I might be going blind, but where exactly is this stated? I can't see it in the OP or your suggestion.

And if that is the case, then I disagree with you even more. The only way I could see that working is if the majority of our spells were linked to our Faerie, but that would work better with the revamp suggestions that Sebazy made imo. A job doesn't need to be defined by only one aspect, we can be mitigators as well as pet focused. I'd rather SCHs keep their shields unless, as just stated, they rework the entire job to basically execute everything via a Faerie.

[Rawrz]

Scholars aren't the greatest at healing, therefore they use Psuedo-Elementals to do the brunt of their raw spell based healing. Thats the concept of why Eos would have a regen on whispering dawn as well as embrace and why selene would get an additional larger heal. They don't get raw HPS based shields, because SCH can already do that well and thats not why they were created. Will post more after this duty. zzz