SCH needs some nerfs

[Connor]

Personally, I feel like Scholar was intended to be a lower potency healer in exchange for shields, utility and having extra healing coming from fairy. I always loved the idea of a support healer with less healing output but a set of strategic spells that can be extremely useful when applied to the right situation. But then they started adding a ton of powerful off-GCD abilities with very short cooldowns and barely any requirements (you can pretty much always have at least 1 aetherflow ready if you plan properly). Indomitability, Excogitation, Fey Union, etc.
Then they started buffing these abilities and lowered aetherflow’s cool down. The result that is that you can handle most healing requirements effortlessly almost entirely using your off-gcd. Then all that’s left to do is spam Broil and DoTs, which doesn’t make me feel like much of a ‘Scholar’.

I mean, so many skills that Scholar has have been made nearly redundant by off-GCDs. Adloquium is a waste of MP when you can just use Excogitation for an even stronger heal with essentially no cost, on a very short cooldown. And since they buffed it to always take effect it’s pretty much impossible to waste it unless you somehow end up healing 0HP with it. Succor can pretty much always be replaced with Indomitability, or just left to co-healer or fairy regen. Physick hasn’t been considered worth using for a while, especially with the extremely powerful off-gcd combination of Excogitation, Fey Union and Whispering Dawn. And that’s not even considering Embrace or presence of a co-healer.

I personally think the reason Scholar is too powerful is that it has all these spells that are intended to balance it out (e.g Adloquium/Succor costs, cast times, lower healing potencies) with other healers can be pretty ignored in a lot of cases. I feel like if Scholars were more focused on shielding the party and providing support, rather than being the ‘everything-is-off-gcd-and-super-powerful’ class that has huge DPS potential, then it’d feel a lot more balanced in comparison to other healers.

I also feel like the design of the healing as a whole favours Scholar more naturally than it has the other healers. If healing were more frequent and damage was higher, Scholars would be under more pressure to use GCD healing / shields, maybe even stuff that doesn’t really have a use like Sacred Soil. That way they wouldn’t be able to just hit Indomitability and go back to Broils. I think this can also be applied to Astrologian to some extent, though I am aware that they aren’t as free to use off-gcd for the majority of their healing.

That’s just my opinion though, of course. But I personally find it becoming more and more boring as time goes on. Especially as gear improves and i gradually have less and less to heal. Maybe it’s just me but feel like Scholar was never intended to be designed an extra DPS like it currently is, it’s just became as such as a culmination of years of buffs with no checks put in place to balance things out after said buffs were applied