SCH needs some nerfs

[Exiled_Tonberry]

SCH present in roughly 77% of uploaded logs.

I do wonder what they're going to do about this. Leaving a job completely busted for an entire expansion then nerfing it at the start of the next doesn't work. The outcry is so huge they end up buffing it right back up.

I'm a bit tired of this lopsided healer balance that's for sure...

[MoroMurasaki]

58k uploads between WHM and AST (27/30k) for Alphascape. 44k for SCH alone. This means of the 102k individual healer parses uploaded about 43% are for SCH.

About 30% are AST - a bit behind an ideal 33% split but not horrible.

On the other end of the spectrum we have WHM with about 27% of total healer parses for Alphascape. A quarter of the parses and yet there are only 3 healers.

It's clear where the missing numbers from AST and WHM are.

But please, SCH mains, keep telling me that this isn't abysmal healer balance and that you aren't clearly overpowered and overrepresented

The community has spoken - another expansion where WHM will end solidly in last place and SCH is so OP they'll nerf it going into 5.0. Don't worry though! With just a week or two of complaining they'll get buffed back to godhood and we can all lather, rinse, repeat.

[Miziliti]

This cry of SCH being too good is a bit ridiculous. SCH received many adjustments throughout 4.x because some of them were too unreasonable. Remembered the succor and adlo costing tooooo much to cast? They had to adjust that and aetherflow so SCH can sustain mp. Before the change, SCH was too annoying to play constantly oom. SCH is in fine place right now. WHM and AST are the ones being too weak. As far as this direction of boss damage continues, it only emphasize how important shield healer is. Because of that, it's obvious that raw healing is showing it's weakness by the increased difficulty of keeping up with the constant big raid wide damage. You can notice the regen from medica II and A.Helios is starting to become not enough for the party to tank the following raid wide if there's no shield healer. Raw healers have to heal extra more.

I hate this direction, but this is not SCH's fault. Just because they gave shit to WHM and bone to AST does't mean SCH should be degraded. New skills in SB do nothing as well. That fairy gauge has almost no real usage in harder content. Not to mention the new skills of all three healers barely even help with healing. (exo maybe)

They either have to buff potency of raw healing or adjust their damage formula, otherwise SCH is here to stay.

[Jonnycbad]

Indom is perhaps the single best heal in the game. It costs almost nothing, is more flexible than ES by a mile and is instant.

People need to stop viewing things like Lustrate or Indomitability as "costing nothing". All Aetherflow skills cost 1500 MP unless it's Energy Drain.

[Jonnycbad]

Honestly square needs to think of a new healing role that isn't regens or shields. They need a fourth healer that can synergize well and bring something else to the table that will pull away from sch desirability

I can only imagine there being 3 ways to heal:
1) Heal
2) Heal over time
3) Prevent damage.

They could go the Dancer route from FFXI whereby using the skill Drain Samba allowed for players to restore an amount of HP based on their damage/delay (basically it gave everyone the equivalent of FFXIV's Bloodbath). Dancer also could spend TP to cast instant Cure Waltz (ST) and Divine Waltz (AoE). TP in FFXIV was gained from auto-attacks, similar to Ninki though. In FFXIV, Dancer could spend TP to cast heals instead of using MP, with each healing dance costing 50-100 TP or something.

But style/mechanics aside, you can only really heal via direct cure, regen, or prevent the damage. A life-drain healer would be awkward given how mechanics work, they'd still need a way to instantly heal large amounts of raid damage and single target (for tank busters). Moreover, they have to homogenize any new healer to deal with mechanics like how they gave SCH many of the tools WHM had, and vice versa, in order to allow for WHMx2 and SCHx2 parties to
Like SCH lacked good raid-wide healing, so they got ET and Indom. WHM lacked MP healing, so they got Asylum and Thin Air.
Any new healer that comes out will have to fall in line and have the same core kit of:
weak heal, stronk heal, oGCD emergency heal, aoe heal, stronk aoe heal, some kind of ground placed or channeled barrier, and regen. Any gap in their kit would mean having to excel in another area to make them unique.

[Eloah]

I just read the OPs comment, and nothing else, this is too rich not to post right away. I love how someone can list off supposed things that need to be "nerfed" but then shoot themselves in the foot, giving a reason that is counterintuitive to their argument, lol. I'll list more soon right after I read some, hopefully, insightful comment.

Ps you can tell OP does not play Scholar, lol.

[Eloah]

Wow, okay lots to think about. and it's clear who has experience with the job and who is using applied knowledge.

SCH is not OP, can it be considered the best healer when all factors are tallied yes, but they are not OP. In fact when SB launched they were the worst, because so much of our kit was gutted. plus I notice a lot of back and forth between these two.

snip

snip

To help explain things look at each piece and its counterparts, if one is applicable. For instance, OP mentioned things about raids. I like how she pointed out how OP SCH heals are, but then said in a raid setting they shouldn't really be healing, lol.

Anyway, several people have pointed out how SCH has high raid-DPS and personal-DPS, and this is true, but its not like the numbers are 10 for WHM/AST and 100 for SCH its more like 9/8/10, to illustrate it more clearly; but there are different kinds of DPS, burst and extended. SCH only has the best DPS in extended DPS, which in a raid setting is most common. But WHM and AST have better burst DPS, and although burst phases may be few and far between they exist.

Now how about AoE skills. when SB launched SCH had the worst by far, and AST was always in a gray area until recently, but this is how they stack now. First lets list of categories that each skill might have and rank them 1-3. In no particular order we have: Mobility, Duration, Degradation, Acquisition, Cost, Potency, Enfeeblement, Distance.

Okay, lets start with Potency, the most commonly looked; Holy is 200, Gravity is 200, and Miasma II 100, so simple it would be 3/3/1, but lets look at Degradation next. Holy and Gravity both lose potency up to the 6th enemy, so 1=200, 2=180, 3=160, 4=140, 5=120, & 6=100. That means that at 6 enemies the spell is doing 900 potency of damage, and the same can be said for Gravity; but Miasma II with only 100 is only doing 600 potency, but that's at 6 enemies what if we had 12: 1500 vs 1200, with 20; 2300 vs 2000, so looks like its still 3/3/1. But what about Duration? Miasma II may only deal 100 damage upfront but it places a dot that after 12s deals an additional 100, bringing the grand total to 200, that brings the total up to 1200, 300 more than the 900 from Holy and Gravity; so for Duration its 1/1/3.

But, I'm not gonna stand still for 12s on WHM and AST, I'm gonna cast those spells over and over again, now we get into Cost. Miasma II is 1680, and that's all it will be for those 12s, but Holy and Gravity are 2400 and 1920 respectively. Now lets say SpS gets the GCD down to 2s, you can cast those spells 6 times that's 14,400 for Holy and 11,520 for Gravity. Even with the initial numbers that make a ranking of 1/2/3, but lets alter that some since WHM has access to Thin Air and can cast for 0 MP for a short duration, lets make it 2/1/3. Now when do you get these moves, their Acquisition, Holy is gotten at 45 from a Job Quest, Gravity at 52 also from a Job Quest, and Miasma II is received at 46 nothing else needed, so to rank those it would be 2/1/3.

Next let's check out Mobility. Miasma II is an instant cast so one can always move and cast it, Holy and Gravity have a cast time, but Gravity is able to take advantage of Lightspeed and Celestial Opposition, giving it an Instant cast; so the rank for this would be 1/2/3. But what about Distance, Mobility might not matter depending on the distance. Holy and Miasma II are centered around the caster, whereas Gravity is cast from a distance, so Holy and Miasma II have different needs when Distance and Mobility are combined, 1/3/2. And lastly what about enfeeblements these skills may cast on the targets. Only Holy actually has one, barring Miasma II DoT, so this tally would be 3/1/1.

Lets see how things fared? WHM/AST/SCH

Potency: 3/3/1
Degradation: 3/3/1
Duration: 1/1/3
Cost: 2/1/3
Acquisition: 2/1/3
Mobility: 1/2/3
Distance: 1/3/2
Enfeeblement: 3/1/1

Making the final tally WHM:16 AST:15 SCH:17

Now admittedly when I did this I wasn't expecting SCH to be the winner, since Holy is generally considered the best AoE healer skill. but this "little explanation"(since it's not little at all, lol) shows how there is good and bad to each skill and how if you look things over there isn't too much difference.

Could SCH get some adjustments, yes, but what job doesn't need adjustments, there are still a good number of SCH skills that need fixing, Selene, Dissipation, Deployment Tactics, Emergency Tactics, Eye for an Eye, and to a degree Ruin II but not cause of a utility purpose.

I'm not saying someone can't think SCH is stronger than the other healers but, you need to explain why you feel its stronger, don't use raid data, use experiences and other more personal sources. Explain why you feel it's OP. I'll give a little hint, the reason WAR and SCH seem OP, isn't cause SE favors them or the job is broken. It's because their jobs are and have been solidified from the start, in comparison to the other jobs. Not to mention since these are Tank and Healer positions of course they will be scrutinized a lot more.

[Ghishlain]

===Snip===

SCH is not OP, can it be considered the best healer when all factors are tallied yes, but they are not OP. In fact when SB launched they were the worst, because so much of our kit was gutted. plus I notice a lot of back and forth between these two.

===Snip===

I'm going to take a shot at this because SCH's kit definitely caters to the current raid design that S-E has built. Even if it's unintentional catering, it's still catered too.

Raid design builds around set timelines and mechanics that need to be dealt with. Assuming everyone dodges mechanics correctly, this also means there is an exact amount of damage that needs to be healed for. That's why we have these fancy little time lines that we can build our cooldowns around.

SCH's kit is perfectly suitable for this style of healing. SCH is a cooldown based healer - Lustrate, Indom, Excog, Sacred Soil, Whispering Dawn, Fey Covenant, and Fey Union can all be used to repair or blunt damage on both single target and raid-wide busters without spending a GCD. Deployment Tactics can blunt more damage within a single GCD. When you can plan out ALL these tools, it leads to SCH spending a lot of heals with minimal GCD costs, and thus minimal loss of GCDs for DPS spells.

Let's take the O11S fight timeline I posted earlier and just focus on the raid busters:

SCH can

• [00:07] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [00:26] Fey Covenant and Whispering Dawn the Flamethrower
• [03:02] Indom the Delta Attack
• [03:36] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the Flamethower (GCD)
• [03:43] Indom the Ballistic Impact
• [04:16] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [04:30] Succor the Peripheral Synthesis (GCD)
• [04:48] Indom the Electric Slide
• [04:59] Whispering Dawn the Peripheral Synthesis
• [05:48] Sacred Soil, Fey Covenant, and Indom the Flamethrower
• [06:28] Whispering Dawn the Ballistics Damage
• [06:40] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the double Wave Cannon Kyrios (GCD)
• [06:50] Indom the Long Needle Kyrios
• [07:10] Succor the Atomic Ray (GCD)
• [07:58] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [08:07] Succor, Fey Covenant, and Whispering Dawn the Flamethrower
• [08:59] Indom the Engage Ballistics System
• [09:11] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the Double Wave Cannon Kyrios (GCD)
• [09:22] Whispering Dawn the Long Needle Kyrios
• [10:04] Indom the Charybdis
• [10:29] Whispering Dawn, Fey Covenant, Sacred Soil, Indom all the Atomic Rays

This probably isn't optimized either, nor have I accounted for all the variables. So, 21 AoE attacks and SCH only has to basically spend five GCDs to have some solution to all of that. Add in two or three Succors in between to help out, though your co-healer should be taking some of the healing off you as well.

In an ideal world, SCHs myriad of options means they should be the primary healer in the engagement, with the other healers providing back up with their own planned CD usages (Earthly Star, Asylum, Assize) or when necessary with GCD options because SCH's higher end GCD spells are significantly more MP-expensive than AST or WHM.

With SCHs taking the vast majority of the healing responsibilities, this opens up many more healer GCDs to use and thus be an overall rDPS increase to the party. This doesn't include the consistent damage SCH adds to the raid via Chain Strategem and of course the free GCD-free regen they have going for 3,696 potency/minute on the MT when you account for Rouse; let alone the 2,851 potency Fey Union gives when fully charged and consumed.

===

What sucks with the situation is that buffing WHM or AST to SCHs level doesn't really help for two reasons:

• All healers are viable to clear the content. If we increase the power level of the healers, it just trivializes the content even further, from a healing perspective.
• All buffing a healer beyond each other is change the meta composition without changing the competitiveness of each healer. The kits are too similar to the point where the inferior healer will be deemed unsuitable because there are very few things in each healer kit that stands out.

I expect a shift in 5.0 because new expansion brings new tools. I don't quite know how they're gonna balance SCH though. I'm of opinion the SCH kit will always be meta because of how well crafted it is and how well it works with content design. The only time this isn't the case is when SCH is nerfed so hard it's skill ceiling is far too hard to attain without a ton of effort.

===

TLDR: And combination of SCH's single target healing kit, raid healing kit, DPS buffing kit, and how well the SCH's kit design compliments the current raid designs allows SCH to shine as a healer at a much higher peak versus the other two healers.

[Eloah]

explaination

I'm not entirely sure what to say to this, nor why I was quoted. You didn't disagree with me, just broke down my concise point.

But one thing you have to take into account, is that the logic you stated can be applied at almost any time during the games duration. As you stated battles have a flow. The thing is that flow isn't constant and hiccups happen. From a healer perspective SCH, is good when things are planned, or right place right time. Have an "Oh Shite" moment, and a SCH might not be too great. It comes down to burst vs extended again, which SCH excels at, through no fault of their own, it's just the nature of the encounters.

[technole]

I'm not entirely sure what to say to this, nor why I was quoted. You didn't disagree with me, just broke down my concise point.

But one thing you have to take into account, is that the logic you stated can be applied at almost any time during the games duration. As you stated battles have a flow. The thing is that flow isn't constant and hiccups happen. From a healer perspective SCH, is good when things are planned, or right place right time. Have an "Oh Shite" moment, and a SCH might not be too great. It comes down to burst vs extended again, which SCH excels at, through no fault of their own, it's just the nature of the encounters.

I'd argue Scholar is the best healer for oh crap moments, raids or any content. Deployment Tactics is the single most important skill when you can't get people to full HP right away for mechanics. It's all about survival at minimal health. I even watched a Tiamat group basically abuse this in O11S to build LB3 faster.

SCH was not horrible at the beginning of 4.0, the cries in this forum were mostly people who couldn't even play the job correctly. Many were asking to cut Adlo and Succor costs, yet they were sitting on their darn Aetherflow too long. The timer reduction encourages Aetherflow usage and keeping it on cool down for optimal play and to keep MP flowing. You probably see a few players in normal content who still can't get this right.

Fast-forward to Sigmascape, where they finally were able to add the biggest QoL change to many jobs, activating instant skills right away. Such as AST CU and SCH fairy skills. It was at this point they were able to nerf Eos WD potency and Fey Illumination. I still believe they had this in-mind for awhile and they felt they couldn't just nerf Eos then when her skills weren't really "instant".

This raid tier design does favor oGCD healing, but that would apply to every raid tier. Anytime a healer doesn't have to spend a GCD to heal that adds more raid DPS potential. Part of the issue is crafted gear is very powerful along with Vitality melds at the beginning of a raid tier, that meeting the lower HP thresholds where healing doesn't require several more GCDs to make up for.

Until the battle designers get on-board with the idea of realizing they could amp up some numbers and mechanics to really make healers heals more, along with tuning minimum ilvl play harder.