SCH needs some nerfs

[KDSilver]

So to be clear I said SCH needs some nerfs and you argued against that but now you're only saying you don't want an absurd nerf.

Please show me where I have suggested absurd nerfs. I'll wait.

Oh look! I didn't! So your protest is essentially pointless. [/b]

No... you misunderstood my point.
When I talked about "absurd" nerf, I never mentionned that it's what you want.
It's what I'm afraid dev team might do, because, like I said several times, I feel like they don't know how to nerf properly.

I'm not putting words on your statment you never said.

So please, no more passive agressive tone, I'm not fightning.
And if you can't understand me this time, I'll just give up explaining myself.

[Brightamethyst]

Honestly square needs to think of a new healing role that isn't regens or shields.

You say that like it's so easy, but what do you suggest? Damage and healing are pretty straight forward. You either prevent the damage from happening in the first place (shields), or heal it back up after the fact (cures, regens.) What's the third option?

[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.

[AbelArchaniEA]

Remove thread for lack of understanding of their own job

[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.

[Sylvain]

The only thing that needs to be nerfed (or streamed down) on SCH is Deployement on Adlo.
The problem with that is that it's either "fine" when it's not a crit. (altough you can abuse buff from Largesse, Convalescence and Defiance) or it's simply OP when it's a crit.
The SCH is strong enough even without that and I personally find deployement tactic to be a very boring and clunky spell (boring =/= strong).
I mean, there's only one thing you can deploy and since most of the time we fish for a crit they might as well make (Your next Adloquium will crit and be applied to every player around your target). Problem is, on top of being too strong, (adlo crit spread) it would then become reliable (because that's litterally the only weakness this thing has)

Personally I would really like a rework of Deployement Tactic for 5.0. (or its entire removal)
I'd preffer it to be less potent but more reliable so you can properly make up your strategy around it. And even if we can already do that to some extent (especially during phase transition), spamming Adlo until it crit is just play stupid.

I'm not even talking about how you can abuse lb generation

[Ghishlain]

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'm just explaining why I think SCH is too strong compared to the other two healers and also why at this juncture it may be better to knock SCH down a few pegs versus knocking the other two healers up a few pegs, since you were asking for asking for reasons why some players may feel the job is OP.

I also disagree with your premise that:

1. SCH shouldn't be healing in a raid setting - it has the best tools to deal with healing while not spending the precious commodity known as GCDs
2. Deployment Tactics needs fixing - it's one of the best mitigation tool in the game and enables so much LB cheese in the process; if anything I'd say it needs a nerf

I guess we'll see what happens in 5.0 since I don't expect any serious reworks of any kits until then, but I am hoping SCH can be brought a little bit more inline with the others.