Thread: How to make SCH more pet centric by uh.... removing the pet? SCH revamp theory.

This is a pretty huge post, so I'll break it down with lots of formatting to make it somewhat readable

So what is my aim with this? It's a bunch of ideas, some of which are great and some of which are likely awful thrown together with the dream of cooking up a SCH that is both more intuitive, more streamlined and has an ability set that actually flows and rewards combinations of abilities. Obviously the raw numbers are mostly pulled out of a hat so there's definitely going to be some balance issues with my ideas. But I hope you like the concept at least!

So moving onto the revamp itself:

I'm working with the mindset that SMN doesn't exist here. IMHO it's at the stage where the two jobs would be better off completely separated. Otherwise traits could be used to enhance and distinguish abilities as well.

First up and perhaps most importantly, the fairy rework.

The core of my theory revolves around the click bait title. In a nutshell, my idea is to entirely remove the pet as it is currently, replacing it with what would on a technical level, be a dancing wiggling minion moving in time to oGCD actions actually being performed by the SCH. She won't just mindlessly follow you about though and IMHO this change will actually allow her to be more important than ever before whilst also being much more precise to control.

This also removes the second independent GCD issue that's arguably been an anchor for SCH since ARR whilst also ending the confusing disparity between the value of player vs pet potency.

Now before you down vote me to oblivion and set my lawn on fire, read on as I explain as I think it's worth it!

The two summon abilities would effectively be stances with a cast time. They grant a Selene or Eos buff that in turn, causes the relevant 'minion' to appear. The fairy movement commands would be simplified to Heel, Place and Away. Place would be slightly changed in that it drops a marker that will potentially be used for positional Fairy abilities rather than the fairy herself.

Fairy actions would be replaced with 4 oGCD player ability hotkeys that will switch automatically with your fairy in the same way that Stone/Broil/Malefic do with level sync. The idea here is to make it easier to drop in additional fairies with expansions down the line as well as removing the need to macro everything to keep hotbar space vaguely under control.

From a technical standpoint for the following abilities, you hit the oGCD button and the effect will either happen or begin casting immediately, this will also trigger the fairy to perform the corresponding animation and as such, certain abilities would arguably want two animations, one for when she is in position for the ability already and another for when she is out of position and effectively 'throwing' the ability over a distance. Whilst it's not really required, it'd add a nice level of polish to the revamp for a fairly minimal amount of effort.

Abilities would also have a more clearly defined visual effect showing the radius of the ability in action and rather importantly, positional fairy abilities will work off either the fairies current target or the Place marker, which ever came last.

EG, if drop a Place marker 25 yalms away and then immediate use Fey Illumination, she will 'throw' the Fey Illumination to where I Placed her, not at the point where she is currently traveling. This is quite a significant buff IMHO and something to keep in mind.

Lastly, Fairy gauge will primarily be generated by Aetherflow Actions and Embrace casts now, this gauge will be used as a resource by other fairy actions in place of the cooldowns we have now with a typical cost of 50 gauge per action. It's also worth noting that Abilities and actions that interact with the Fairy gauge are all named 'Fey suchandsuch' to make things more intuitive.

Now onto the abilities themselves. Please remember that all of these are now oGCD player abilities.

Eos:

Action key 1: Fey Embrace - Instant cast, 3 second recast - Eos follows the target, restoring HP for 200 potency and prioritising them for further Embraces. - Each Embrace cast generates 5 Fairy Gauge when in combat.

This is where it gets more complex behind the scenes, Action key 1 will work a lot like the current auto embrace but with better defined rules. In a nutshell, if the target isn't full HP, she will embrace the target, if that target is full HP, she will look outwards for someone else to embrace prioritising closer targets. Also note that she will follow and continue embracing the initial target to within ~5 yalms until commanded otherwise. The idea here is to make Fey Embrace the tank healing mode.

Heel and Place will actually have similar functionality but without making her prioritise a single person, in effect, these two hotkeys would be used to have her working on topping the raid as a whole.

Also note that whilst the this might appear a nerf at first glance, it's actually a light buff due to the potency being calculated from the player, not the pet. The reasons for this buff will be explained further on.

Action Key 2: Fey Illumination - 2 second cast, 3 second recast. 15 yalm radius targeted around Eos' current target or Place marker. - Increases spell-based HP restoration of self and nearby party members by 10%. 10s duration. Costs 50 Fairy Gauge.

Sort of business as usual for the most part, the duration nerf is down to the new found precision the ability will have both in timing and placement as well as a further change that will be explained later.

Action Key 3: Fey Dawn - 2 second cast, 3 second recast. - Adds a 75 potency 15 yalm radius splash cure effect to Eos' embraces off her current target or Place marker. 20s duration. Costs 50 Fairy Gauge.

This is kind of a quirky, nerf/change/remix to the ability both to make it a little more unique but also a little more forgiving in use whilst also avoiding it being as all conquering as it has been in the past. On the nerf side, it means that you can't fire off WD and have it still ticking on people who have long since moved out of range. It also means that if Eos cannot see a target to Embrace, you also won't get the AOE healing effect either. On the plus side, it puts an end to the annoyance of narrowly missing someone with the initial WD buff and them promptly being out of luck.

It's also worth noting that the AOE effect will be very precisely controllable with the splash radius coming from either her last Embrace target or Place marker depending on what you used last. EG: if I Placed her in the middle of the arena for O4S Grand Cross Omega then hit Fey Dawn, she would auto Embrace people as they moved around for the mechanics, with the AOE healing pulses happening from where I placed her rather than from the target she was curing.

Action Key 4: Fey Deployment - 2 second cast, 3 second recast. 15 yalm radius targeted around Eos' current target. - Extends Galvanise effects cast by you to party members nearby the target, caps at non crit values. Costs 50 Fairy Gauge.

RIP Fey Covenant, whilst you were a good ability, you wouldn't have played nice with some of the other kit further down in this post. Putting Deployment Tactics onto the Fairy and and effectively removing the recast allowing it to be used a few times in succession is pretty strong, this is countered by it being gated behind having Eos out, and of course weighing it's value up against other Fairy gauge based abilities. Having it spread Excog as well would be a bit too much IMO.

Selene:

Action key 1: Fey Grasp - Instant cast, 3 second recast - Selene follows the target increasing damage dealt by 5%. Effect ends upon using Fey Grasp on another target or using Place.

Please note, this ability does NOT generate Fairy Gauge, nor can she Embrace. I suspect you can guess where I'm going with this.... Oh Selene how I've missed you <3

Action Key 2: Fey Wind - 2 second cast, 3 second recast. 15 yalm radius targeted around Eos' current target or Place marker. - Reduces Weaponskill cast time and recast time, spell cast time and recast time, and auto-attack delay of self and nearby party members by 5%. 30s duration. Costs 50 Fairy Gauge.

This isn't even my final form.

Action Key 3: Fey Stratagem - 2 second cast, 3 second recast. 15 yalm radius targeted around Eos' current target or Place marker. - Increases critical hit rate of self and nearby party members by 5%. 10s duration. Costs 50 Fairy Gauge.

Spoilers: This is naturally the replacement for Chain Stratagem and the reason why Selene can't cast any cures. Even with these small values, I'm somewhat worried that it'll be too powerful in combination with the rest of the kit, but eh, it's fun theorycrafting so YOLO and whatnot.

Action Key 4: Fey Caress - 2 second cast, 3 second recast. 15 yalm radius targeted around Eos' current target or Place marker. - Removes a single detrimental effect from all nearby party members. Costs 20 Fairy Gauge. Generates 5 Fairy gauge per effect removed.

Adding the gauge cost vs generation makes it a more interesting ability whilst keeping it from being spammable. I did think about replacing it with another DPS buff, that would likely either get combo'd with Fey Stratagem and simply be too powerful, or get completely ignored. Whilst this ability is perhaps a bit weak and situational still, it's an interesting alternative with potential at least.

Halfway there!

Now for the SCH's abilities themselves:

Fairy abilities:

Fey Antithesis - Instant cast, 120s recast - Switches your Fairy to the opposite while granting you a full Aetherflow stack. Generates 50 Fairy gauge and can go over the regular cap of 100 up to a maximum of 150. Also increases magic potency by 10%. 20s duration.

Say hello to what I think Dissipation should have been in the first place. This ability is key in driving forward a more dynamic play style for SCH which I'll touch on after the abilities.

Fey Rouse - Instant cast, 60 second recast - Doubles the effect of the next Fey action except Fey Embrace and Fey Grasp. Increases Embrace and Fey Grasp potency by 40%. 20 Second duration.

An upgrade over Rouse and IMHO an interesting ability. As well as a providing a significant buff to the fairy's bread and butter abilities, the doubling effect adds a ton of depth akin to CO making the ability useful for more than just Whispering Dawn. 10% AOE crit for 10 seconds? AOE removal of 2 debuffs? The ability to guarantee a faux crit deployed Adlo? Or how about 20% magic potency (including damage) for 20 seconds? The choice is yours!

Aetherpact & Fey Union - Instant Cast, 60 second recast, 10 second duration - Mostly these abilities would function in the same with with a couple of alterations. Primarily, the Fairy would follow the target around so range would never be a limitation or issue up to the 30y maximum. Secondly, I don't have it tied into the Fairy Gauge anymore.

Cures:

Physick would get a potency bump to 450 to bring it in line with AST and WHM.

Adloquium and Succor's MP costs would actually stay as they are, you'll soon see why:

Aetherflow abilities:

Aetherflow - 10% MP restore is gone, still instant cast, 60 second recast. Grants Aetherflow III.

This would be in tandem with another significant change, namely removing Lucid Dreaming as an ability, but instead making it a trait that you get via role actions. Picking this trait would add the 21s duration 80 potency refresh to Aetherflow. This trait feature is something that I would have liked SE to have considered as it could have been used to personalise role abilities to spice things up a little bit. WHM could have kept it's stronger Largesse, AST could have kept it's longer duration Lucid Dreaming etc. It's not the best solution as certain abilities will still be almost entirely required, but it's a step forward IMHO.

Sacred Soil - Instant Cast, 30 second Recast - All damage taken is reduced by 15%, Also grants a 30% chance that Succor will cost no MP when under the effect of Sacred Soil. 15s duration.

A modest buff to Soil's effectiveness to make up for losing Fey Covenant, whilst also reworking the additional effect to make it more impactful in high AOE damage situations.

Energy Drain, Lustrate, Excogitation, Indomitability and Bane are unchanged and generate 10 Fairy Gauge each per use when in combat.

DPS abilities:

Also unchanged, the additional MP alongside Selene's buffs will put SCH in a very solid position, both in terms of personal DPS as well as raid buffs. This is maybe something that could be looked at another day.

Other abilities:

Emergency Tactics - Unchanged.

Chain Stratagem - Removed for Fey Stratagem.

Deployment Tactics - Removed for Fey Deployment.

Summary:

So what's the point of all of this and how do I envision it playing?

It changes quite a lot of important things TBH:

As I've stated above, this buries the two GCDs a SCH is swinging around compared to the other healers which has been both a blessing and a curse since ARR. In it's own right it's a fairly substantial nerf to top tier players who are used to maximising both the Fairy's GCDs as well as their own. Whereas it also makes the bar of entry a little less daunting for people new to the class, hopefully making it a little more popular in the process.

A lot of abilities also got refined, combined and simply chopped where possible. There were some casualties, but it's a worthwhile trade to get SCH down from the potential 40+ hotkeys and multiple macros they need to play effectively as things stand.

As far as gameplay goes, this takes depth we used to see with the SCH class that arguably disappeared with SB and runs very very quickly with it. The dissipation change pretty much brings the bugged fairy swap back with a vengeance and in tandem with the Selene buffs, encourages fairy swapping, building gauge and using Eos for defensive phases, then switching to Selene when you have a window to maximise DPS and finally swift casting Eos back if needed once you've burned through your Fairy gauge.

The difference in positional and timing precision should also go without saying.

There are definitely some potential issues, using Fey Rouse with Fey Deploy to guarantee a deployed 'crit' is arguably a bit too strong, reducing this down to a 50% boost instead would probably be a bit more sensible, but it's a fun idea so I've kept it as is for now. 60 second Lucid is also likely a little bit strong, but tweaking other MP values upward would be an easy solution towards finding a decent middle ground between my above theories and the situation we have now.

Comments appreciated, be gentle!

Looking back over it, one thing that might be confusing, is the oGCD Fairy Action hotkeys triggering abilities with a cast time.

To explain this better:

The ability itself is an oGCD as stated, the SCH won't spend any time casting it. Rather it'll trigger a 2 second animation on the fairy coupled with an aura effect where the ability is going to happen, then the effect will happen once the animation is complete.

The fairy's recast is effectively redundant outside of putting a speed limiter on Embrace and Grasp. If she casts an Embrace right as I hit the Fey Dawn hotkey, her Embrace animation will be clipped and she will start casting the Fey Dawn immediately with no delay.

However if I then hit Fey Illumination as well, Fey Dawn's cast will be interrupted and Fey Illumination will start casting instead, similar to using a hold/heel macro to cancel casts currently.

Hopefully that makes sense!

Oh and to expand on the Lucid Dreaming trait, this would also mean adding back Shroud of Saints for WHM, and Lumi Aether for AST with their prior agro reduction and the Lucid dreaming trait also giving both of these abilities their MP refresh in the same manner as I've described for Aetherflow.

Originally Posted by F_Maximillian

As a controller player, this screams button bloat. Interesting idea otherwise.

Quite the opposite, it's actually a reduction of around 8 hotkeys depending on how and what you macro.

SCH is incredibly ability heavy especially if you don't directly hotkey the pet ability bar.

Originally Posted by Sebazy

Quite the opposite, it's actually a reduction of around 8 hotkeys depending on how and what you macro.

SCH is incredibly ability heavy especially if you don't directly hotkey the pet ability bar.

I actually find sch to be not as ability intensive. the pet bar is just a bumper hit away.

that being said, I like your ideas. Thank you for taking the time to share them!