Thoughts on 5.0 SCH (so far)

[SpiralMask]

I wanna preface this by saying that this whole expansion has been absolutely spectacular so far--the MSQ is interesting and varied (and having more player input is great!), the role quests are charming, and the zones and instances themselves are positively oozing character. two thumbs way up for the dev team, they knocked the whole expansion outta the park, and the complaints i have for scholar may very well be addressed with or without this input either on full release, the two-week raid balance or the four-week savage raid balance patches.

for the sake of my PoV without spoilers, I'm currently level 80 and completed the story, as well as working on the EX trials presently while waiting for the raid (still in prog so far). I mained SCH for all of stormblood.
the sacred soil change is interesting, but the skills beyond that don't really shake things up (including seraph and consolation) or seem to alleviate any of the complaints i have.

overall/TL;DR:

the class is incredibly feast or famine: if you're doing well you're incredibly bored, and if you're doing poorly you've basically already wiped.
all your resources are on a drip-feed via long cooldowns or knock-on reliance of aetherflow (itself on a long cooldown), and none of your cooldowns line up well now that aetherflow's back at 60s. this more often than not leads to odd moments of either having to anxiously wait and bleed MP waiting for your aetherflow stacks to refresh or having a drought of things to actively spend those stacks ON, which can delay your next aetherflow and wastes your time, MP recovery, and fairy gauge gain.
MP is a SERIOUS problem for the class. even keeping your few sources of recovery rolling constantly you still end up at a net loss if you are constantly Doing Things (even simply spamming ruin), effectively putting a time limit on encounters.
For standard pulls and in the overworld/fates you function largely the same as in stormblood: you put on adlo (then you have to tag something with biolysis to count as "in combat" to actually get your aetherflow stacks, wasting time), activate excog, and then spend time doing [something else] until the tank's shield falls off and they've taken a bit of damage to not overheal the next adlo. except now instead of maintaining dots, managing your aetherflow stacks (and therefore fairy gauge), or generally dpsing you only have the choice of dpsing in the most uninteresting way possible, and everything is incredibly expensive.

(more detailed reasonings posted below)


the good:

- the changes to shields make them incredibly durable: almost too durable, though the big shields are really all the class has going for it right now--even considering that the catalyze can't be passed around (for good reason, honestly). between a crit adlo and excogitation, you can end up with a lot of time that you don't need to be healing, but sadly this leads into...


the bad:

- downtime on scholar is incredibly boring: you have exactly three actions (and only one that isnt going to suck up all your MP) that aren't actively healing, on a class that specializes in preventative measures rather than active healing. previously one could use free time to apply your various dots, dump extra aetherflow stacks on energy drain to both keep the aetherflow cooldown rolling (for more aetherflow stacks and faerie gauge by extension) and recover mp, or do damage (generally in that order). all of those options have been removed, especially energy drain, which contributes towards...

- incredibly tight MP constraints*: with the loss of the aetherflow trait (a 15s or ~30% overall nerf), the potency nerf of lucid dreaming (the cooldown buff is good, but it basically needs to be on cooldown 100% of the time now), the loss of energy drain (a source of MP gain, mechanical efficiency via the aetherflow trait, and minor damage), and even the mana shift role action for other casters means you have very few means of maintaining your MP now. paired with the fact that your most often-used spells are expensive or strict time/resource requirements means that most of the time you are generally either actively hemorrhaging MP or standing around doing nothing in order to conserve it (see the boring negative above). your MP-less actions suffer from...
*- until level 80, when seraph's additional free resources lighten the load enough that simply keeping aetherflow and lucid on cooldown will keep you stabilized


- cooldowns are incredibly long (either directly or indirectly through aetherflow), or not useful at all: you get three aetherflow stacks per minute, full stop. you can certainly eat your fairy; an action which doesn't recover your MP, locks you out of it's actions/free healing, forces you to dip even more aggressively into your shallow MP pool, and with your aetherflow actions likely already on their (rather long) cooldowns you generally can't use them immediately, and NOT using them efore aetherflow comes off cooldown delays that, which slows everything down. meanwhile, your aetherflow actions are wildly different in their usefulness (indomitability will only ever be available once every 2-3 raid-wide damages due to it's own cooldown and aetherflow cooldown, excogitation is a constant-upkeep for maximum usefulness, sacred soil exists only for stack mechanics or large pulls until you get the regen trait at 78, and lustrate is only used if someone is bad or just revived, as generally succor or adlo where appropriate allows physic to do the job more effectively), so even if something is available to spend a stack on, it may just be a waste of resources.

- (still) no real use for the faerie gauge since stormblood: you've got fey unity that's effectively a 30s regen on a 4 minute cooldown (3 if you use dissipation), and fey blessing, which amounts to 1 aetherflow stack on a 60s cooldown (without the benefit of MP recovery) and is incredibly weak for a 60s cooldown, especially compared to indomitability. which is to say you're either spending all of your gauge for very little gain, or spend basically nothing from it, and is kind of a waste of the whole resource-management angle that could be going on for the class.

- death (your own especially) is incredibly punishing for the class: this goes without saying, but in SCH's case you have a very small pool of actions you can take to try and recover (both yourself and the run/attempt) due to the cooldowns and restrictions mentioned above (one swiftcast/minute and at massive MP cost to res--the same cost as other healers, has less MP recovery to work with to actively use them), and should YOU die you lose: all your MP (which you dont really have an opportunity to recover), your aetherflow stacks (meaning all heals must come from MP), your fairy gauge (which isn't all that useful anyway, but that's a whole different problem), and your fairy itself (a valuable source of free-if-small healing and MP-less actions).
the worst case being that you die with aetherflow and/or lucid dreaming on cooldown--and as both need to be used as soon as available to keep your MP from bottoming out, it's likely that one or both will be. if that's the case, congratulations! it's a wipe. the alternative being you sitting as a sack of potatoes while you wait for your MP to recover enough to do something (like summoning your fairy, raising anyone else who likely died with you, and yknow, actually healing the damage on the party that likely killed you and continues to happen while you're standing around post-res), during which time one or both of the tanks (depending on content) will likely have died.


the nitpicks:

- you don't appear to count as being "in combat" for aetherflow's new (and frankly terrible) activation requirement until you actually hit something or are targeted by an enemy, even when someone in your party (such as the tank when they pull) is in combat. aside from causing all sorts of problems with delaying various mitigations (like excog or sacred soil, which you need either before the pull from a spare aetherflow gained previously (likely wasting AF cooldown and therefore faerie gauge gain, further delaying the use of fey unity)), simply feels like it's just wasting your time, which is terrible. the damage that comes in on the party while you're without aetherflow stacks also immediately puts you on the back foot, which is counter-intuitive for a mitigation-based healer.

- there aren't really any good spenders for leftover aetherflow stacks (currently). not using them before the aetherflow cooldown is a waste, and lustrate is a complete waste if nobody needs a massive heal (i.e. you are doing your job correctly in light party or are communicating with your co-healer in full-party content). you end up either wasting aetherflow stacks or delaying your already slow fairy gauge gain.

- the fairy, being a minion, still occasionally "eats" your order inputs (much like SMN's egi's), doing nothing but putting the ability on cooldown anyway. this happens fairly rarely but is incredibly frustrating when it does.

- eos and selene are two separate actions, rather than glamours: all told, the class lost almost a dozen actions (between base and role removals), yet the second button gets to stay and take up space that could be a more directly useful skill instead. there isn't a button to glamour your egis or carbuncles for a reason, and now that that's basically what the fairies are, they should probably follow suit.

- the shield "hp" bar being above the hp bar leads to larger shields covering the level and nameplates of the target, which seems rather sloppy. laying directly over it could cause some issues in readability, so i'm not sure what change could really be made.

- it is easy to lose your fairy in the chaos: fairly self-explanatory, this can make positioning for it's abilities rather difficult. if you don't wish for her to be in the party member list, consider adding a small marker on her position similar to the focus target pseudo-marker, and a buff on your status noting that your fairy is summoned (perhaps clicking it could highlight your fairy's current position?).

- dissipation is in a weird place right now. the fairy returning at the end is nice, but with the heavier focus on fairy actions and the addition of seraph you aren't incentivized to really ever get rid of the fairy (the personal potency boost generally isnt worth losing out on those actions), and the sudden extra aetherflow stacks generally have nothing to be spent on due to those actions' longer cooldowns.
using it also inadvertently lets you build up the gauge for your fairy more quickly... by not using your fairy. I'm not really sure how to make this mesh better with the class.

- the sound effect for broil III is incredibly annoying, especially with as often as you're using it during downtime.


possible solutions:
- bring back the aetherflow trait, or simply reduce the cooldown to 45s: this would both serve to reduce "drought" moments where none of your aetherflow cooldowns line up, as well as helping alleviate the class' current MP issues, and effectively increasing the rate at which you can fill/use your fairy gauge.
edit: somemone brought up the point that this was lengthened again to lessen the players' reliance on free aetherflow actions with as numerous as they are and focus more on your actual spells. a fix for that is that i'd suggest moving some current aetherflow actions to instead use the fairy gauge, so there's a sort of time-release or more investment of resources before you can use them.

- introduce some other means of regaining MP, such as:

an aetherflow spender: perhaps a non-damaging energy drain equivalent is simplest solution, but some other aetherflow-for-mp ability would work fine as well. this would also alleviate the issue of having to waste spare stacks before aetherflow comes off cooldown so you don't delay that (and fairy gauge by extension)
a fairy gauge spender: perhaps costing 20-30 gauge, which would give a decent amount of resource management for said gauge, where currently there is very little.
*forum/reddit idea* someone posted an idea for aetherflow (when activated) to consume any left-over aetherflow stacks and convert them into fairy gauge and/or MP, which i think is a brilliant idea.

- increase the number of things to do during downtime (non-healing): i understand that the devs want to push healers away from simply DPSing when they aren't healing (or DPSing when the team feels they should be healing) and won't ask for the return of more DPS tools for that reason, but the class needs something to do that isn't DPS at those times. my suggestion is to increase the number of actions that gain and use the fairy gauge, perhaps touching on some of the removed fairy abilities (such as selene's party buff)

[Pyitoechito]

In the future you can add all this to a single post. The character limit is only when you initially post, if you edit that post you can ignore the character limit.

[SpiralMask]

i generally don't use the forums, so i didnt know that. thanks for the info!

[SpiralMask]

alright, fused all posts into one for easier reading and deleted the others, thanks to Pyitoechito's helpful advice.

[RyuDragnier]

MP problems? Are we playing the same job? Even when I accidentally DPS too much with Art of War I've found it incredibly easy to regain MP.

[Inkpot]

Aetherflow turning unspent aether into MP/Faerie gauge would fix so much of the class. Sustain your AoW spam in big pulls with judicious use of oGCD heals, get a reason to use fae gauge over aetherflow abilities when possible.

Give me this + either miasma or shadowflare and I’ll be pleased.

[Lannybaby]

So basically... roll white mage instead until scholars get some core issues fixed?

[EaMett]

I have to disagree with the mana comments. SCH mana issues are only in dungeons because of AoW. In trials so far I have so much mana I don't know what to do with it. Recovering from death isn't that hard either since all our heals are mana free and lucid is on a 60s cooldown.

[SpiralMask]

quick update after reaching 80 and more days of playtime:
while many of the other issues do persist (particularly the "downtime is real boring" as i've gotten a better handle on things), the MP problems mentioned in the OP do largely disappear after internalizing that lucid and aetherflow generally need to be kept constantly on cooldown rather than an "as you need a bit extra MP" situation, and after getting seraph at 80. with seraph's addition you generally have enough "free" resources to pull from that mp management only becomes an issue if you aren't paying attention to lucid/AF's timers (nowadays the only time that comes up for me personally is in amaurot's MASSIVE bigpulls and second boss, which is on my end not the class').

on a small side note, sacred soil is great now. like "i kind of expect it to get nerfed a bit" great.

[Nethereal]

Manage your lucid, mana is a non issue right now. Also you should have an average 1500 piety at 80 even without melds, this matters.