SCH is trash in its current state

[YanderePrincess]

In regards to healer balance, they don't. At no point did I say they don't listen to the community /at all/ and I'd thank you not to put words in my mouth.

What you said implied they don't listen at all when it comes to any balance issues. Even limiting it to healers, though, the past 6 years do not agree with your statement. Just because they haven't necessarily gotten it right doesn't mean they're not listening. The community is not inherently right about how to balance things.

[Bastionus]

Sorry for the negative title but I don't think I'm exaggerating. What's horrible about scholar:

1. Can't use aetherflow unless engaged in battle.
2. Your rotation is so dull and boring it hurts. At 70 is Bio > Broil for 30 seconds and maybe Art of War if doing a dungeon and dealing with multiple enemies. You only get to have what seems to be a 2nd DoT at 72 in the form of Biolysis and then Broil 3. That still leaves you with a boring, dull rotation.
3. Mana is awful on SCH now, you will run out of mana very often, and there is no more BRD mana regen or Caster mana transfer.
4. If in dungeons, all you do now most of the time is wait for enemies to hit the tank and heal him/her, even though there is plenty of downtime to dps and kill mobs, but if you do it, you will probably run out of mana. The system punishes you for trying to dps with SCH -- I am not sure that WHM has these issues with mana as SCH does btw.
5. Why did Yoshi P and his team decide to get rid of Shadowflare, Bane, and Miasma/Miasma 2? From what I have experienced running dungeons, there is still PLENTY of downtime with bosses to do dmg on the side, even with the bosses using more aoes/etc, demanding more healing. This makes the flow of the fights awkward because you know that you could dps but if you do, your mana will suffer, or you are aware that you don't have the tools you used to have to deal dmg properly.

Please consider restoring some parts of the SCH kit. The most nuanced, fun, flexible healer is a sad shell of his former self in its current condition. It deserves better and the people who played the job certainly didn't ask for it to be this way.

Try to remember that this is part of the homogenization of healers, Astro had that rotation of a dot and a nuke for like...ever!

I have done 2 dungeons and 1 trial in the new expansion. I have noticed that healing is in more demand than dpsing. Which I think was Square Enix's answer to lack of dps from healers. But really all it has done for me is raise my blood pressure and give me stress O_O

Maybe at lvl 80 it will be different with the whole kit. But srsly WOW!

Also can Divination not be on such a long cooldown? And can it and Celestial Opposition have a bigger aoe radius? K thnx

[Enla]

What you said implied they don't listen at all when it comes to any balance issues. Even limiting it to healers, though, the past 6 years do not agree with your statement. Just because they haven't necessarily gotten it right doesn't mean they're not listening. The community is not inherently right about how to balance things.

What we aren't fine with is the dev team who clearly has no healer mains amongst themselves and a deep seated allergy to actually listening to the community in regards to how balance needs to be carried out

This was the entire sentence. I didn't break it apart to avoid the very idea you think I implied. I apologize for the confusion but there's a reason there's no periods or breaks between those thoughts.
Thing is though they usually are. People from every side of the healer spectrum have offer input and it almost always is leagues better than what the developer's come up with, especially since none of the developers actually main healer as per their own words. The entirety of 3.0 was a mess for healer balance and the community offered critiques of many varieties to help the devs out. Not one bit was listened to and they instead made it /worse/ in 4.0 where it was clear that not a single person on that team knows what they were doing or actually talked to high end healers for their feed back. They spent the entire expansion trying to fix things and in the end /over buffed/ SCH after nerfing it into the ground, couldn't figure out how to make WHM viable, and now in 5.0 it's pretty clear they've thrown in the towel for how much complexity each healer has lost.

I love this dev team to death but they have a vision for healers that is very much at odds with almost any healer in the game, be they pure healer minded or high end Savage-DPS monsters. If they are listening at all it's with wool between their ears and an inability to look past what they think healing should be about in this game instead of what it actually is. Above all else they desperately need to hire a healer main for the design team, or coordinate with top level players for feedback. Because all the things the community have been warning about since we got the skill list and information about the upcoming nerfs? Proved true. Every. Single. One. And with added 'what the fudge' bonuses like the Aetherflow shenanigans to top it off. Something any healer main would tell them is not a good idea.

You can like the dev team and still take them to task for being inept at one part of their job. The two are not mutually exclusive and now three expansions worth of evidence show they don't know what they're doing.

[Hysterior]

Only done one dungeon so far but I could like this new pace. Only thing is I miss energy drain. If they removed it because of the mp absorb they could just get rid of it and just keep it as a low potency offensive skill... still need to play more to give a verdict on SCH

[Sebazy]

I fail to see what the issue is. I've been playing it all day today, and it plays very well to me. It still has the general flow of high dps uptime and weaving ogcd heals. Even with dungeon pulls as long as you ride the lucid dreaming and aetherflow cds your mp sustains itself well enough.

Honestly, can you seriously not see the problem with not having Aetherflow charges on large pulls in dungeons? If the SCH doesn't start tagging mobs with dots to get themselves in combat asap, they have no oGCD heal incase the tank needs a top up mid pull. This was noticed big time by our tanks last night.

This makes the method of throwing a barrier on the tank as the previous pack dies and then using the run as time to regenerate MP out of combat somewhat iffy, significantly more so if you happened to end the last pull without any Aetherflow.

[Brandedblade]

Honestly, can you seriously not see the problem with not having Aetherflow charges on large pulls in dungeons? If the SCH doesn't start tagging mobs with dots to get themselves in combat asap, they have no oGCD heal incase the tank needs a top up mid pull. This was noticed big time by our tanks last night.

This makes the method of throwing a barrier on the tank as the previous pack dies and then using the run as time to regenerate MP out of combat somewhat iffy, significantly more so if you happened to end the last pull without any Aetherflow.

No I have no issue with the in combat aetherflow. It's no different then dotting a mob while the tanks pulling to make sure your Excog gives you fae guage. You where already tagging yourself in combat asap for one resource so doing it for another is far from an issue.

[Connor]

Well, if all these complaints continue we’re almost guaranteed to get buffed back to god-tier. I wouldn’t be surprised if they add both Energy Drain and Energy Siphon to Scholar. Miasma II will make a return, healing potencies across the board will be increased, Fairy will likely see any potency reductions returned to normal. oGCD strength will be returned to normal.

In terms of MP regen I think they’re trying to push Scholar to meld piety. I melded a ridiculous amount last patch (don’t ask lol) and I’ve yet to have serious MP issues. Even spamming Art of War with trusts in the lv71 dungeon, I’ve yet to find myself entirely out of MP with no Lucid.

Honestly, I’ve done some runs of the level 71 dungeon and I really don’t see the problem. Even with the tank pulling mobs balls to the wall I didn’t feel like I was inadequately equipped to deal with it. There was less time to spam Art of War and I had to think carefully about what heals I used instead of just throwing up an Excogitation as soon as it’s off-cooldown.

I also feel like you have to be more tactical with how you use your healing spells and aetherflow. You can’t rely entirely on oGCCs anyone, which I don’t see an issue with really. I mean, Scholar was the only job with an oGCD kit that’s stronger than its base kit with no real requirements to use them besides aetherflow.

Spamming Broil III is boring as hell, I’m not so unreasonable as to disagree with that lol. But I hope the healing requirements continue to get gradually higher to the point that we won’t just be spamming it the whole fight

[zeopower6]

As a SCH main, I disagree that it's trash. It needs an AF dump that isn't a heal though at least but it's by no means trash. Been playing it for like at least 20 hours since launch and it's pretty good tbh.

[TonberiScholar]

I also feel like you have to be more tactical with how you use your healing spells and aetherflow. You can’t rely entirely on oGCCs anyone, which I don’t see an issue with really. I mean, Scholar was the only job with an oGCD kit that’s stronger than its base kit with no real requirements to use them besides aetherflow.

Spamming Broil III is boring as hell, I’m not so unreasonable as to disagree with that lol. But I hope the healing requirements continue to get gradually higher to the point that we won’t just be spamming it the whole fight

"Just" oGCDs, no.

But you can definitely get by with just oGCDs, oGCD-buffed things (mainly using Recitation with Adlo/Succor) and Fey Union, for at least dungeon content. I've only done up to the third ShB instance so far, but I've also ran 50/60/70 dungeons (one in each level bracket), several leveling roulettes and even a comical/frightening amount of Guildhests (friend wanted the Challenge Log).

I'm not all that great a player, either.

We're still not 'having' to use Physick (which seems to be what the 'heal more' people want).

And all this is before Seraph/Fey Blessing, even.

They didn't do anything to make us replace damaging GCDs with healing GCDs. They just snipped out almost all of our DPS options, all of our DPS decision-making, and then gave us Recitation. That's not going to fix any of the actual problems with Healer balance at the high end, and while it makes the low end more forgiving, it also makes it incredibly tedious.

If you use your cooldowns, you'll probably be okay. But that doesn't make it interesting, varied or fun, and they've stripped out or changed every consistent bit of identity it's had since ARR.

Scholar's DPS kit is functionally the same at 80 as it is at 20, and its healing kit basically just transitions from "Eos does all the work" at about pre-30 to "Excog, Lustrate, Eos and Fey Union do the majority of the work and Recitation/ET do the rest".

We could easily lose Repose from the Role actions, replace it with an old Energy Drain clone (iunno, "Aspir"?) and every Healer would be vastly improved.

Return Shadow Flare and make it use an Aetherflow stack, then call it a day.

We're probably not likely to get much more than that.

[loreleidiangelo]

Honestly, can you seriously not see the problem with not having Aetherflow charges on large pulls in dungeons? If the SCH doesn't start tagging mobs with dots to get themselves in combat asap, they have no oGCD heal incase the tank needs a top up mid pull. This was noticed big time by our tanks last night.

This makes the method of throwing a barrier on the tank as the previous pack dies and then using the run as time to regenerate MP out of combat somewhat iffy, significantly more so if you happened to end the last pull without any Aetherflow.

I'm cool with SCH not being rebuffed to god-tier status, but this I agree needs patching ASAP. I'd argue about AST cards not giving seals too but a few people have pointed out that they can stack multiple buffs now so that might be too strong, idk.

Mind you, I've always supported lilies bring generated outside of combat too so there's that. It too has never struck me as a resource so powerful it needs to be artificially limited in some way.