Playing SCH is so awkward and bad

[Melichoir]

I wouldn't say SCH is weak compared to WHM, I think it's in the best spot on healers currently, but I find SCH more boring than anything. They took away everything and just turned scholar into "spam broil x times, reapply your 1 dot, then back to spaming. Sometimes you stop to throw and oGCD on the tank, then back to spamming" fairy has been made so weak and unresponsive that she's only good for dissipation fodder. Not to mention poor Selene.

I want someone to explain to me how its so much more boring now with some of the changes:


-Miasma II and Shadowflare. So two dots pretty much with one of them being on a 60 second CD. Mind you one of the dots you lose was on a different timer than Bio, so that seemed like itd be great to manage.
-Sustain is irrelevant now that your pet is more or less invincible
-Bane is your dot spreader, so I guess that might hurt a little bit in pack pulls, but I do wonder if AoW maths out to better damage anyways
-Rouse to buff your pet output, but again, some changes to pet meant that this was gonna get thrown under the bus. Its still an oGCD with a 60 Second CD.
-The "Poor Selene" point I never understood. Selene only had 2 skills that were of note: an AoE Esuna and a small buff to AA/Cast/Recast. AoE esuna is a moot point now because most bosses dont apply a debuff to multiple members unless people mess up mechanics, and the recast buff is a raw damage booster which makes Selene in this case a more optimal pick if DPS is the key. I guess it does have the advantage of providing an Esuna off GCD for an extra broil or something. But the more of these small little differences start shifting the class into being very optimal for savage compared to other healers, something the devs were actively trying to account for. For balancing sake, this probably wouldve been a problem. Oh and she gets a silence. Guess thats cool too? Yeah I suppose that since both are now essentially just cosmetic skins of one another that does suck, but Im not recalling a thing where people were actually using both fairies in equal sums. IIRC it was just use one of the two, and considering that DPS was king, I would think it was Selene who got picked most often between the two. Afterall, its the fairy that gets complained about being gutted.

The old SCH still had Broil spam. You just had to manage a regular dot and one on CD a bit more in your dps rotation. Theres a few oGCDs like cleric stance being gone, but I wonder if it matters now damage wise. So Im not seeing where this great difference is coming from that says "Oh its super boring now, but back in SB, oh that was super fun!"

So could someone explain it to me? Cause Im struggling to understand how just having 'more skills' = more fun.

[HyoMinPark]

]So could someone explain it to me? Cause Im struggling to understand how just having 'more skills' = more fun.

It’s the idea of having more to do. Reapplying 1 DoT every 30 seconds and filling in the other non-healing GCDs with Broil is a lot less interesting than:
—keeping up with 2~3 DoTs each with their own separate timer (4.0 SCH had 3 DoTs to manage—Bio II, Miasma, Miasma II; 3.0 SCH had even more than that),
—managing mana to have as many Miasma II casts as possible (because it was pretty hard on the MP),
—making sure Shadow Flare remains on CD/optimizing its usage around things like raid buffs that would occur around the time it would come off CD,
—using Ruin II for this weaving,
—and then using Broil as a filler.

Being active and having more timers to pay attention to can make a job feel far more interesting. It’s why I miss Straight Shot on BRD: I like things like self-buffs that require upkeep. Having more oGCDs to engage you keeps gameplay interesting (so long as these oGCDs are able to be handled in a non-cumbersome way—see: 5.0 AST cards and Sleeve Draw for the definition of cumbersome).

[Melichoir]

It’s the idea of having more to do. Reapplying 1 DoT every 30 seconds and filling in the other non-healing GCDs with Broil is a lot less interesting than:
—keeping up with 2~3 DoTs each with their own separate timer (4.0 SCH had 3 DoTs to manage—Bio II, Miasma, Miasma II; 3.0 SCH had even more than that),
—managing mana to have as many Miasma II casts as possible (because it was pretty hard on the MP),
—making sure Shadow Flare remains on CD/optimizing its usage around things like raid buffs that would occur around the time it would come off CD,
—using Ruin II for this weaving,
—and then using Broil as a filler.

Being active and having more timers to pay attention to can make a job feel far more interesting. It’s why I miss Straight Shot on BRD: I like things like self-buffs that require upkeep. Having more oGCDs to engage you keeps gameplay interesting (so long as these oGCDs are able to be handled in a non-cumbersome way—see: 5.0 AST cards and Sleeve Draw for the definition of cumbersome).

I just dont see this being 'more interesting'. It runs into the idea that this more engaging simply because its more to do. As a point from my perspective, if youre not using Shadow flare on CD, you may end up missing a cast and hurting your overall dps. This isnt interesting to me as a mechanic, its simply "Press this button every 60 seconds", and to do that, you need to use something that you can weave with. There isnt much of an argument to say "Oh should I put off using ShadowFlare and hard cast a dot cause thatll be more damage." Only situation I can imagine where you might hold shadowflare is for damage windows, but if that damage window is more than so many seconds out, its not worth while to hold. This isnt any different than SE on DRK in this regards. I dunno if people would be happy if, lets say, they reduced the potency of Bio and gave you miasma back, so that both deal the same amount of damage, but now you have to manage two skills. More to do, but more engaging? Its like saying that to make things harder, just have the boss have more HP and better defense with nothing else.

I didnt play SCH in SB, and Im not going to say SCH right now is the most interesting thing since sliced bread, but Im just not seeing this position of it being that much better from a pure mechanics point. I guess if its just a matter of pressing more buttons ensure things are off CD, then yeah I guess. And I know you can boil that down to it broadly with any class, but I dont see much meta game here or actual thought process going into things that this system was that substantially more interesting. Shadow Flare off CD, press button unless youre within x seconds of TA. Simplistic PoV, sure. But I think saying that this kind of thing made a huge difference in play is a bit of a stretch to me.

This all being said, most of this can be fixed by adjusting almost nothing on the class and adjusting the fight mechanics in the game. This goes back to the issue I see generally is that a lot of complaints come from the fact the game has a low skill floor. Would SCH still be considered boring if you were required to cycle much faster through single target healing, aoe healing, shielding and using oGCD heals in a more managed way, and filling in the rest with Bio, Ruin, and Broil? Whre you had to rely much more heavily on hardcasting heals? I kinda feel this wouldnt be the case. But this requires harder encounters which requires higher skill floor. Heck, considering most players dont play savage, simply increasing the skill floor to be more healing intensive and managing your heals better would actually solve some of the complaints. Itd still be boring in savage, but for the average player, its gonna be more interesting simply because difficulty requires more from the healer than they would do currently.

I think that encounter design is the side of this equation that people rarely ever address. Its always "Its a class problem" and not "Its a fight problem". If the game had way harder mechanics that required more of youre input from the healing side, I dont feasibly see this being as big a problem. Maybe people feel itd be easier for the devs to change class mechanics rather than address battle mechanics.

[Billythepancake]

I want someone to explain to me how its so much more boring now with some of the changes:


-Miasma II and Shadowflare. So two dots pretty much with one of them being on a 60 second CD. Mind you one of the dots you lose was on a different timer than Bio, so that seemed like itd be great to manage.
-Sustain is irrelevant now that your pet is more or less invincible
-Bane is your dot spreader, so I guess that might hurt a little bit in pack pulls, but I do wonder if AoW maths out to better damage anyways
-Rouse to buff your pet output, but again, some changes to pet meant that this was gonna get thrown under the bus. Its still an oGCD with a 60 Second CD.
-The "Poor Selene" point I never understood. Selene only had 2 skills that were of note: an AoE Esuna and a small buff to AA/Cast/Recast. AoE esuna is a moot point now because most bosses dont apply a debuff to multiple members unless people mess up mechanics, and the recast buff is a raw damage booster which makes Selene in this case a more optimal pick if DPS is the key. For balancing sake, this probably wouldve been a problem. Oh and she gets a silence. Guess thats cool too. Yeah I suppose that since both are now essentially just cosmetic skins of one another that does suck, but Im not recalling a thing where people were actually using both fairies in equal sums. IIRC it was just use one of the two.

The old SCH still had Broil spam. You just had to manage a regular dot and one on CD a bit more in your dps rotation. Theres a few oGCDs like cleric stance being gone, but I wonder if it matters now damage wise. So Im not seeing where this great difference is coming from that says "Oh its super boring now, but back in SB, oh that was super fun!"

So could someone explain it to me? Cause Im struggling to understand how just having 'more skills' = more fun.

I dunno man, if 1 button spam was still fun, why would we have ever stopped playing on an Atari, or on an NES? But, let's go down these points in order.

Miasma II and Shadowflare: for Miasma II I miss that because of what AoW lacks, usefulness no matter the situation. Miasma II was a better weaving tool than ruin II, at the cost of MP and the cost of having to get close to the boss, you had to be careful in it's use or you would regret it, as well as, yes, being good for AoE and Single target, unlike AoW which may as well not even be on your hotbar while you're in a single target situation. And Shadowflare, I'll be real, I don't miss it THAT much because it was a pain in the ass to use, either placing it down manually or using a macro that didn't work half the time, still, I'll take anything that breaks the monotony.
As for Bane being more or less damage than AoW, I don't care either way, if you're curious, yes I do believe AoW does more damage, but SCH's damage is not my problem, give Broil and AoW potencies of 500 each, making SCH laughably OP, and it would not fix my issue, because spamming 1 button is not as interesting as miasma -> bio -> shadow flare -> bane -> miasma II, and I genuinely refuse to believe otherwise. Numbers are numbers, I don't care how high those numbers are, I just want to feel like I worked for them, not sat here and spammed the one button.
I never said anything about rouse, it was hardly useful, funnily enough, didn't stop them from making that my capstone ability under a different name. Shame about that too, because I love the idea of Seraph, but she is just rouse with 2 oGCD succors. Sure, she's slightly better than rouse, but nothing to write home about.
as for the "Nobody used selene anyway" thing, in savage I'd be inclined to agree, EOS was better 99.9 percent of the time. Unless you were shooting for that 99th/100th percentile parse, Selene was not worth it, but there's more to the game than just savage content isn't there? In the rest of the game, where healing was so lax, I found Selene to be the preferable fairy in the vast majority of situations, especially in POTD and HoH when a silence trap hit the team. And the ability to just speed things up with fey wind was always nice for normal content. Even if EOS was better the vast majority of the time, it comes off as extremely lazy that, instead of doing the better solution of making Selene better and more competitive with EOS, they just outright gut her and make her a skin, because actually working on fairies and making them balanced with each other, or at least attempting to, is too much effort, and healers are just not worth the effort in SE's eyes.

Yes, old SCH had broil spam, I cannot deny that, and we all told the joke of "spam broil to win" etc, but it seems SE was not in on the joke, because there was more to it than that. I'm not asking for a complex DPS rotation, if that was all I wanted I would genuinely just play a DPS, as many have suggested, I do enjoy the responsibility of healing, but I feel with the current system I am punished for effective healing because I have nothing interesting to do in that down time. I have no risks to take outside of maybe using 1 too many energy drains (which they even attempted to take THAT away at launch, and I have 0 doubt come 6.0 they'll do it again, mark my words.) I have no pet to manage because it cannot die and because it doesn't heal, I have to weave in every ability now on top of the other 10000 other healing abilities I have to weave in, just for them to not work half the damn time, I have no pet to choose, I have no timers to watch besides 1 30 second dot, I have nothing that rewards me for good aetherflow usage (quickened aetherflow) I have very little reason to use abilities like deployment tactics anymore. They even went and made healing easier, despite them trying to make it harder, in savage? this tier was soo much easier than the last, the only genuinely hard part was the very last phase of Titan, so I don't even have THAT to fall back on. Can SCH do its job and do it well? Sure, but if I were not obligated by my friends and by my static to raid with them, I'd be unsubbing and finding something else to do with my time.

[AbelArchaniEA]

In summation: Pets need a re work in responsive output. You’re welcome ...

[hynaku]

All I know scholar needs some major changes done to it. I use to use scholar all the time when I healed now can't stand the class how bad it is compared to other two healers.

[SomeRandomHuman]

All I know scholar needs some major changes done to it. I use to use scholar all the time when I healed now can't stand the class how bad it is compared to other two healers.

I fail to see how it is bad. The shield is always useful regardless of which healer its paired with, whispering dawn is a great HoT, Sacred Soil is a better version of Collective Unconscious, Indom is still one of the best AoE healing spells, Seraph makes Barrier stacking so dumb in terms of mitigation, it has no MP issues unless you're rezzing a lot, excog and lustrate are wonderful panic heals, the dps is still solid, AND that crit buff is still nuts.

[Melichoir]

Snips

So some of this gives me the impression that the issue isnt the dots, oGCDs, or the like, but identity of class and QoL on fairy management. Which leads me back to another point regarding the identity of the SCH. I think there is a misconception of what arcanist and SCH are. I dont think "Theyre a dot mage" but rather theyre a mage with a pet that has some dots. If you view SCH in this light, it has an identity currently. Much like WHM and AST. Adding back in DPS skills doesnt emphasize that pet usage, it emphasizes having a pet heal for you while you deal damage. You become an caster with a healing pet, dots or not. I think that this concept does appeal to some healers. You can have your cake and eat it. But this outlook may not be what Devs had in mind for SCH (or even arcanist). Im just not sold that the devs wanted SCH to be a dot mage who leaves the healing to their pet and this outlook was simply something the player base latched onto because of how strong fairy healing was and oGCD healing.

If its about QoL to fairy/pet management, and having more to do, you can solve that by fixing the pet management system and possibly reworking how the pets operate. You wouldnt need to change encounter design if it was approached if thats a concern. As a thought experiment what if pets were reworked to deal damage as long as party HP was above 80% and it was MORE efficient dps for you to be making sure party is above 80% to keep pets engaged and then use skills on the fairy to assist in your healing at the cost of damage. The choice is do you heal or do damage, and how often do you use pet healing at the cost of their dps.

Or how about if they let you choose embrace targets where you have to manage your fairys embrace so you dont drastically overheal, add different restorations to the fairies (A shield fairy and one with aoe regens) and you can insta cast swap them with fairy gauge so you can pull out the fairy you need depending the situation. Seraph being on a long CD because its literally both fairies at once. If were talkinga bout identity, why does it have to be about using dots and not about managing your pets?

As for Encounter design, itll get changed if people start demanding it. If we keep defaulting it being a class issue, they wont address encounter design. Theres plenty of ways to make SCH have an identity and more interesting outside of "We need our Miasma, old Selene, and Shadowflare". But Im not seeing these points typically. It's just a rehash of what SCH was.

[Billythepancake]

As for Encounter design, itll get changed if people start demanding it. If we keep defaulting it being a class issue, they wont address encounter design. Theres plenty of ways to make SCH have an identity and more interesting outside of "We need our Miasma, old Selene, and Shadowflare". But Im not seeing these points typically. It's just a rehash of what SCH was.

Encounter design will not change to require more healing, because to do that would make the game more difficult, and would drive away a huge chunk of this game's playerbase. This game has a lot of casual people in it, people who do not want to be challenged, and there is nothing wrong with that, I have no qualms with anyone who just wants to have a good time in a game, experience the story, and move onto the next game. To make things more difficult to give those of us who are bored more to do, would drive those people away. The only fights that can be considered even somewhat difficult are Savage and ultimates, (and even those seem to have gotten easier, so far*, in this expansion, to better allow more people to do them.) It is another reason I do not ask for content to be harder, hell, when I look at the amount of people who complained Titania normal was too hard on launch day, I know I cannot expect SE to do a sudden 180 and make content challenging. It is why I ask for more to do in my class, so when I have to do normal content, which is what, 99% of the game? 90% at minimum, I have SOMETHING to do. I do not want less people to play this game, but I DO want something to do no matter what content I'm in. I shouldn't be relying solely on the 5 fights that come out every 6 or so months just to have something to do.

[Gemina]

Encounter design will not change to require more healing, because to do that would make the game more difficult, and would drive away a huge chunk of this game's playerbase. This game has a lot of casual people in it, people who do not want to be challenged, and there is nothing wrong with that, I have no qualms with anyone who just wants to have a good time in a game, experience the story, and move onto the next game. To make things more difficult to give those of us who are bored more to do, would drive those people away.

If this was SEs assessment, I'd tell them they're getting wrong. Changing encounter design to require more healing doesn't make it more difficult. It puts more pressure on healers to perform their primary role. ShB exacerbated a healer issue that's been around for a long time now, and it's the downtime. Because of this, it isn't even the game's casual healers, or the strong healer minded that worry me if SE was the switch things up; it's actually the optimal healers who have grown so accustomed to weaving offensive skills between ogcd healing. Not necessarily because I think they can't handle the healing requirements, but rather that they have the biggest adjustment to overcome.

Bad job and encounter design is how things like the AFK SCH back in 3.0 was exploited. When I think back on it now, this was like a seed that has now blossomed into the healer issues we have today. It should have been crystal clear at this point to the devs that healers were bored, and something needed to change before it became a blob-like menace. Keep in mind that 3.0 SCH was the most powerful version of it to date. All those skills didn't prevent the SCH from being bored to tears, and going AFK to let Lily handle the payload.

It would be more accurate to say SE is afraid to put more pressure on healers, but I don't think this is true either. Dungeon bosses like Mist Dragon are a testament that SE isn't afraid to put their thumb down on those who bare a green icon. Just about everything that has been nerfed in the game is a result of player's screaming for those nerfs, and I would wager the majority of those gripes come from savage raiders who feel the casuals can't handle the content.

SE has a lot to take in mind when it comes to encounter design, and no one wants to look at themselves as the reason why things remain stagnant and more simplified than ever. Reflect on this the next time you queue up for something and one or more players leave immediately.