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?

[IllyaPrisma]

Fey illumination was a sneaky little nerf that IMHO just wasn't needed

Fey Illumination needed to be nerfed because of Largesse. Eos isn't any weaker, because her core value with Whispering Dawn remains very strong. Embrace is still stronger than single target Regen from WHM/AST and Fey Union also makes up for the 50 potency loss. Union is an amazing ability that way too many Scholars complain about because of mismanaged use. Also, Selene does not have ".01%" DPS increase, like the OP incorrectly said. It's actually very significant if you do the math.

I hope this community realizes that SCH can't just keep receiving buffs. Yes, it was undertuned at the beginning of SB, but it's perfectly fine now. There is so much negative stigma about SCH though and the community can't seem to stop complaining. The 4.1 changes are meant to raise the skill floor, for new Scholars who spam way too many GCD. SCH doesn't need anything else.

[Rawrz]

Selene does not have ".01%" DPS increase, like the OP incorrectly said. It's actually very significant if you do the math.

I hope this community realizes that SCH can't just keep receiving buffs. Yes, it was undertuned at the beginning of SB, but it's perfectly fine now. There is so much negative stigma about SCH though and the community can't seem to stop complaining. The 4.1 changes are meant to raise the skill floor, for new Scholars who spam way too many GCD. SCH doesn't need anything else.

One extra gcd every 2.5 minutes, if you never get a cast cancelled and you manage to hit the boss the last second of any invulnerabilities or animations. It is a negligible skill.

[IllyaPrisma]

One extra gcd every 2.5 minutes, if you never get a cast cancelled and you manage to hit the boss the last second of any invulnerabilities or animations. It is a negligible skill.

3% attack speed increase can be computed by 1/0.97 = 3.1% DPS increase for the duration of the buff with regards to GCD and Auto-Attacks only. It also has 50% uptime if the Scholar is exclusively using Selene (which not many Scholars do, of course). Please do not call it a negligible skill when you have no idea how effective it actually is.

[Rawrz]

3% attack speed increase can be computed by 1/0.97 = 3.1% DPS increase for the duration of the buff with regards to GCD and Auto-Attacks only. It also has 50% uptime if the Scholar is exclusively using Selene (which not many Scholars do, of course). Please do not call it a negligible skill when you have no idea how effective it actually is.

Derailing at this point, but whatever. 3% for 30 seconds, every 60 seconds. MAXIMUM 50% upkeep. This works for and against the buff. If an SCH holds off casting fey wind to not waste just during invulnerabilities/ animation, it's up for more active battle, but less than 50% uptime.

At a 3% speed increase it would take 33 GCDs to make the buff actually trigger a dps increase. Imagine casting 31 over the course of THREE fey winds spells and then on the 32nd cast, the boss jumps and cancels your cast at .13 seconds. All three casts of fey wind was just negated.

The dps buff is 1.5% in the most perfect world. Over actuality though, any broken cast or stutter in performance negates it completely.

[Kabzy]

I hope this community realizes that SCH can't just keep receiving buffs. Yes, it was undertuned at the beginning of SB, but it's perfectly fine now. There is so much negative stigma about SCH though and the community can't seem to stop complaining. The 4.1 changes are meant to raise the skill floor, for new Scholars who spam way too many GCD. SCH doesn't need anything else.

You're kind of missing the point here. If you read the entire OP you'd see that they have made suggestions of where SCH would also need to be nerfed to include any buffs to their kit. I'd say the general consensus on SCH is that it works fine, but it doesn't feel as fun to play as it previously was.

It also seems to be generally accepted that healers are the most balanced they have ever been, and that we don't want a repeat of ASTs 3.x cycle slapped on to SCH. But you should also realise that a lot of SCH mains will want to theorycraft new ideas into the job, given its current state and that we're pretty much guaranteed a job split from SMN at some point.

Edit: And just on the point of Selene, making more of the SCH kit viable is not necessarily a buff as much as it is giving options. There is no reason for any job to have part of their kit made completely irrelevant, that's just bad job design. Selene and Dissipation do need a rework, regardless of if SCH can function without them or not.

[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. ;_;