SCH is no longer fun to play! Detailed review

[EaMett]

I apologize for the hyperbolic title but #baitclick #fakenews.

I made it to lvl 80, I've done the ex trials, solo healed them too, got one of the two mounts, working towards the second one. Am currently BiS-ish, at least my best approximation atm. Not fully melded but this shouldn't change much.

There's so much to go over that it's hard to structure this. I decided to tackle it on a per content basis


Solo content and open world leveling:

Ok, not going to lie. I have quite a few positive things to say about SCH but this is not one of them. It's basically like being in sastasha. You're pressing 1 button 99% of the time. You have no use for your stacks. Not having ED, shadowflare, miasma, miasma II to fill time really doesn't give you anything to do. If you have multiple mobs or want to farm multiple mobs the mana requirements for AoW really limit you.
Hands down the least fun I've had since I was lvl 15... And this was at lvl 70+. Honestly, I find this shocking.
Thankfully the amazing msq and zones we had this expansion took my mind off of it. But it's otherwise very grim.

Leveling dungeons:

60 and bellow are just tedious. You don't have anything worthwhile to use your stacks on. It's basically 60 levels of playing with 4 skills. Bio, Ruin/broil, whispering dawn and lustrate. In a game where the number one complaint is how boring lower levels are, and incidentally the biggest sticking point in acquiring new players, I just don't understand how these changes make any sense.

60-70 dungeons aren't as bad but still suffer from monotony due to lack of skills, it's turned into a one button spam, just that the button spammed has changed. It's made a little better from the fact you have a few more skills compared to 60 and bellow but it's definitely worse than before the changes.
They also suffer from some mana management issues due to the lack of energy drain mana regen. The shorter lucid cooldown does not make up for the loss of ED.

70-80 dungeons are ok at the current ilvl. You can get away with barely using GCD casts once you get used to your kit (even wall to wall). Things are harder because of gear but seem to be on par with SB launch. I personally haven't seen anything as hard as Bardam's, just saying.
There are a few things to say here, namely that the single button AoW spam feels ok at the moment because we're filling with a lot of healing ogcds on our tank. With that said once you hit expert roulettes things seem to become easier and I can foresee this type of content becoming faceroll once we gear up again. AoW spam will eventually become tedious. It's my opinion that another multi-target skill is needed (we have one less than the other two healers too)
The big sticking point here is mana. With 2.2k piety I still struggle with mana in dungeons (comparatively I rarely dip bellow 70% mana on ex trials) there's a problem in calibration here. SCH does not have any Mana management tools (like thin air or lightspeed) so we run out super fast. The shortened lucid does not help.

Normal trials:
Nothing much to say here. Healing requirements are low so we have so many unused stacks, so much mana. End up spamming 1 button for most of the trial. I won't go on about it here since I don't feel like this is what SCH was meant to be measured against.

Ex Trials:
On single target the gameplay changes a bit. Because of the setting with Ruin II not being a viable option for single weaving we end up with a lot of clipping our Broils (#1 feelsbadmoment). In addition to this the healing requirements haven't changed since SB but our toolkits have. The end result is that we don't have to heal as much and therefore many a Bio cast will go without weaves (#2 feelsbadmoment). Both combined make the class feel horribly clunky.

As part of an attempt at optimizing and feeling better about our lives, the gameplay seems to revolve around picking which oGCD skills to use and bundling them in pairs to use with ruin II.
You end up becoming very meticulous about which skills to use and discard skills that aren't suited for the moment or that are simply too weak (looking at you fey blessing).
Now there's also a perverse side effect from not having a stack dump. And that's that optimizing your faery gauge by overhealing or placing your excog/sacred soil on cooldown actually un-optimizes your play because oGCDs cost you dps and your gauge can increases with seraph anyways.

The end result is that you only use the skills you need, in pairs, when you need them. You can weave random stack skills into your bio if you want/can afford it but most of the time you're holding onto your cd for a mechanic and you end up just having stacks sitting around. Mana is a non-issue in ex trials so sometimes you don't even refresh your AF for the 10% MP.
Basically things haven't changed since SB, you just have a little less healing to do in these first trials (think lakshmi) so imagine how many EDs you would use and that's how many stacks you have left.

On the plus side seraph is a really good healing mechanic. Consolation is a good skill. The short uptime, double consolation stacks and fairy gauge boost means that you need to give it some thought and really push it into your rotation. Not being able to use fey union also gives it a risk/reward dimension. 5/5 would recommend to a friend.

Last note is that our pDPS is really low compared to WHM. Like, there's being low to make up for CS and then there's your WHM solo healing the content and almost on par with you in dps low. Usually 1k+ dps ahead if you both properly heal. Considering party DPS is around 65k, CS does not make up for it and most likely won't make up for it this entire expansion (I don't see parties breaking the 100k dps)

Changes that need to be looked at:

- DPS stack dump needs to happen. It can't not happen. It's a mechanic that would give the soloing, open world, 60- leveling content more dimension. It introduces more optimization options for the players that plan on sticking around with the class for a while (which SE should be striving for). It allows for more liberal use of Ruin II, it adds a bit more potency into our rotation for a bit of added extra needed dps. (lets not go nerfing whm, they can keep their top position, lets just balance things)
- Ruin II should standalone work for a single weave. For this it's potency would need to be brought up to 230 at least. Or Broil III nerfed to 260 potency (but another dps skill would need to be provided to make up for this). The solution is probably to nerf broil and buff Ruin a little to find a good median.
- Could use one more multitarget skill. Something similar to shadowflare perhaps. This can go many ways, having it require a stack would probably mean the stack dump would be preferred in single target situations. No stacks means we could enrich our gameplay across content.. I'll leave this one up to the devs but it's a necessity in order to make up for the ilvl race that's about to occur throughout the expansion. It would also go a long way towards making the class a little more appealing at lower levels.
- Reduce AoW cost by about 15%. There's no point in giving another mana management tool to SCH, this is literally the only place they need mana. Reducing the cost to make up for lack of management tools seems appropriate.

If we got those four changes SCH would be in a good spot. I don't care about potencies as much but mostly gameplay here. 2 new skills and 2 potency/mana fixes seem reasonable and would go a long way towards improving the class.

[EaMett]

A few more things worth mentioning (I'll add to this list as I remember them):

• Love the consistency across the animations. I'm personally digging the tech vibe.
• The faerie can be really hard to notice at times. I have to look for her shadow under the boss, or move her back into place just in case (even though she's still there), etc. Please give us the option to display her name in combat at the very least. Settings > Character > Control > Target > untick "Dissable targeting of pets and minions in battle"
• Recitation and the Galvanize/Catalyze split was a great move. Looked good on paper but is also great in practice.
• Dissipation just no longer works well with our toolkit. It's basically relegated to the "oh shhh my tank is about to die I need three stacks" button in dungeons (which is very rare and will probably get rarer), or some very precise min/maxing.

[AristocraticCorgi]

Mandatory viewing:

https://youtu.be/TSK_lnZpRfY

He sums up many of the things we have said, plus talks about the good aspects of the job. He said, however, that this is the worst version of SCH we have had in the game so far, and I think he's right.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

So, pretty what was expected. The balance changes seem to be entirely based around minimizing inter-player drama (job-meta feel bads, healer DPS debates, more complex jobs leading to wipes leading to drama) rather than correctly interfacing with content and being engaging.

Only have SCH at 54 on my main and 70 on an alt, but I can corroborate that old content, at least, is utterly dire as Scholar now. I was already unmotivated to play WHM for anything less than solo-healing EX's in Stormblood, and new SCH at <71 is by far worse than that.

Dev team, if you want pure healers, where's the freaking damage?

[Endeleon]

My biggest beefs after playing are: Aetherflow usable in battle only WHY!!!!! Why why why why why! This is beyond stupid, it literally makes me rage if I think about it. And then the fact that our Faerie abilities tooltips literally just say "Uses [Faerie Ability name]" Are you... serious? Of course I know. It's literally the name!

[RyuDragnier]

Dev team, if you want pure healers, where's the freaking damage?

In the Shadowbringers dungeons. Most wall to wall pulls have ended with me having used everything to keep the tank up, the tank having used everything to keep themselves up, and the DPS having spammed AoEs in a frantic panic to avoid the tank going down. The damage is there if you're doing multipulls, it's not there much outside of a few dungeons if you're doing singles.

[EaMett]

My biggest beefs after playing are: Aetherflow usable in battle only WHY!!!!! Why why why why why! This is beyond stupid, it literally makes me rage if I think about it. And then the fact that our Faerie abilities tooltips literally just say "Uses [Faerie Ability name]" Are you... serious? Of course I know. It's literally the name!

This was mostly done so there was no more need to wait on players before pulling. I disliked it on paper, in practice I got used to it really fast because I don't have much to do with my stacks anyways.

[EaMett]

In the Shadowbringers dungeons. Most wall to wall pulls have ended with me having used everything to keep the tank up, the tank having used everything to keep themselves up, and the DPS having spammed AoEs in a frantic panic to avoid the tank going down. The damage is there if you're doing multipulls, it's not there much outside of a few dungeons if you're doing singles.

You can cut down on requiring GCDs for wall to wall pulls. There are a couple of really spicy pulls in some dungeons but most wall pulls are pretty easy to handle with your ogcd cooldowns if your tank is awake and trying. You have to be awake yourself though, which is good because we'd be dying with our single button AoW spam if not.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

In the Shadowbringers dungeons. Most wall to wall pulls have ended with me having used everything to keep the tank up, the tank having used everything to keep themselves up, and the DPS having spammed AoEs in a frantic panic to avoid the tank going down. The damage is there if you're doing multipulls, it's not there much outside of a few dungeons if you're doing singles.

From what I've seen, groups with both HLR and TNK at full ilvl for a given leveling dungeon (so far, the first three) don't have issues multi-pulling unless someone screws up. Damage spikes up and down, but it's the same "nuke it" healing tactics from the Heavensward multi-pull days. Which isn't particularly interesting when it's the one flavor for sale besides utter boredom, in my opinion (no mechanics besides orange-stuff on trash, difficulty is highly swingy based on ilvl). Also it doesn't exist in the current endgame EX trials/dungeon bosses apparently. Healing output feeling like Lakshmi EX, per this thread's testimonial, is NOT a great place to be when mashing one button or checking out between heals FF11 style is what you do when not healing.

[RyuDragnier]

You can cut down on requiring GCDs for wall to wall pulls. There are a couple of really spicy pulls in some dungeons but most wall pulls are pretty easy to handle with your ogcd cooldowns if your tank is awake and trying. You have to be awake yourself though, which is good because we'd be dying with our single button AoW spam if not.

Gear unfortunately takes a role as well. I ended up spamming the 75 dungeon just to gear out my SCH and had quite a bit of difficulties at first. It really didn't help that several of the tanks and DPS were undergeared themselves, whether by just gunning through the story or because it's an alt job, I'm not sure.