Thread: Scholar feels kinda wonky

Originally Posted by queenevilfluffy

Am I doing scholar wrong?

There are a few things just from your post I can see that are a bit of a misconception.

Adloquium is your Cure 2, not Lustrate. Lustrate is by far the lowest priority for Aetherflow use. The only time I've ever needed/wanted to use it is if the tank is hemorrhaging HP like it's going out of style or if I'm in lower content where the other Aetherflow abilities aren't yet available. Lustrate used to be SCH's best abilities, but the other Aetherflow abilities outpace it as the Scholar levels up. E.g. Sacred Soil, particularly at 80 when it gains a regen, is one of the best heals we have. Excogitation is straight up a more powerful heal with better utility than Lustrate. And even Indomitability is more useful than Lustrate 90% of the time since if one person has lost HP it's most likely that they're not the only one that needs healing.

The fairy can definitely feel weak since its healing is second hand to yours and delayed, but it's definitely more powerful than it feels. On a typical dungeon run, my fairy accounts for about 60% of all the healing I do for example. During a full pull in a dungeon, as another example, Seraph can handle most of the healing herself as long as you use her abilities, have a pre-cast Adloquium and Excogitation in place and plop down a Sacred Soil. Only if the DPS is a little slow do I have to worry about tossing out another Adloquium or Excogitation. Sometimes the initial Excog doesn't even trigger. In general, you get the most use out of her (and Scholar in general) by knowing fights and planning ahead. Making good use of abilities in conjunction with each other is also key. E.g. Recitation with Excogitation most of the time, Whispering Dawn with Fey Blessing, knowing when it's best to use Emergency Tactics with Adloquium, etc.

The problems with Scholar aren't with how well it heals, it does that just fine. Problems do exist with it, however, but they are more that when doing single target damage any oGCD healing results a larger dps loss than it does for AST/WHM, and using the fairy can be clunky with most of the fairy abliities being somewhat disjointed from each other. Since there's a delay before she executes the action, you have to be really careful with using multiple fairy abilities in a row since you can easily cause her to put an ability on cooldown but not have her use it. My rule of thumb to avoid this is never double weave any fairy abilities if at all possible, and if I do double weave then I make sure to not use a fairy ability on the following GCD. The fairy gauge is mostly useless too since it's only tied to 2 abilities, one of which has a really long CD of 60s so has no meaningful impact on the gauge level so the gauge really is only used for the one ability. The other disjointed thing is that several fairy abliities are mutually exclusive. Disjunction completely takes away the fairy, Fey Union prevents the fairy from using anything else while linked (although it doesn't outright prevent it - using a fairy ability during Fey Union just causes the fairy to cancel the link to use the ability) and Seraph locks you out of both of those.

If I had to sum up the difference between WHM, SCH and AST in a single sentence for someone who has never played them before it would be that WHM is the most straightforward healer, AST is the busiest/speediest healer, and SCH is the most complex healer.

I’m enjoying the new tools we got and the fact that QA is gone and Dissipation is good now does add more to its gameplay for me, but I miss a lot too. I wish timing Deploy for double shields wasn’t so difficult now (You can do it, it's not worth it), and more DoTs and a better Ruin II would be appreciated. Fairy oGCDs feel better at my ping and latency levels (stable, but around 200) than it used to, but I get why people prefer the old system. It's consistent now, but you get a variable delay that can eat the input entirely, and you have to weave it in your GCD. Back then, you could mash and it would go off immediately, even while you're hard-casting. The same Place override nonsense still works if you're willing to do it, and Place itself can be done while hardcasting still too, but it's not worth it nearly as much as it used to be.

For dps, restoring some of SCH's former DoTs (One hardcast with a super long duration, 45s maybe, one instant GCD with 21s for more weaving opportunities), and adding an independent charge based dps cooldown for extra double weaving opportunities is all I really want. Healing wise I feel all three healers need tuning down so they achieve similar throughput in unique ways, while actually needing to engage with their GCDs more, including SCH. For them specifically I think reintroducing Bane then upgrading it to Deployment Tactics would be ideal, but beyond that I'm not sold on anything 'extra' healing wise. I don't feel SCH needs a lot, just enough to make using what they do have less obnoxious or overbearing when put in an environment where they're 'good' relative to the other two like they used to be. Most of the Tank and Healer interactions from pre-ShB were worth keeping around, just not Quickened Aetherflow and Rouse specifically.