A SCH Rework for fun

[ty_taurus]

Something I really enjoy is thinking about and coming up with my own game design ideas for games I enjoy. I've come up with class redesigns before and just really enjoy doing it, so if anyone else likes looking at this kind of stuff and talking about it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Here is a Google Doc with the full specifics if anyone really wants to examine the idea, but I'll give a more digestible overview as well.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

First, I want to establish the goals I had in mind for this idea:
1. Restore SCH's old identity of being a combat medic with a more aggressive healer playstyle.
2. Give Eos and Selene their own unique playstyles and encourage the player to swap between them mid-battle.
3. Create a clear identity between what the SCH's Aetherflow actions do and what their Faerie Gauge actions do.
4. Create a lot of decision-making within the GCD where SCH needs to think about which spells are best to cast rather than follow a specific 'rotation.'
5. Give a purpose to barriers that differentiates them from raw healing and regens.
6. Preserve Square Enix's desire for healing to be easier and approachable while creating room for more experienced players to min-max their gameplay and feel rewarded for doing so.

To properly explain this concept for SCH, I'll need to start by explaining changes to Adloquium and Aetherflow actions.

--Aetherflow--
Aetherflow actions have been reworked. They now include:
- Excogitation
- Indomitability
- Chain Stratagem
- Meltdown: 500 Potency line AoE (all enemies after the first take 50% reduced damage)
- Rasp: 50 Potency DoT that lasts 60 seconds.

The main attraction to Aetherflow is now its potential for added damage. Excog and Indom still exist as emergency tools, but Recitation can be used to access them for free.
What makes this more unique is that the Aetherflow action is gone. Instead, you gain 1 stack of Aetherflow anytime your Galvanize from Adloquium is broken, meaning you'll actively want to prioritize casting Adloquium on allies you know will take damage to get more damage than what Broil will offer to you. Note that Aetherflow actions now no longer generate faerie gauge. More on that later.

Wait, if Chain Stratagem costs Aetherflow now, and you can only get it when Galvanize is broken, what about openers?
SCH will also gain an ability called Conversion which consumes 20 faerie gauge to give you 1 Aetherflow and 10% MP restoration. You'll be able to quickly gain exactly that much faerie gauge to convert into Aetherflow so you can Chain Stratagem right alongside your party's buff window.

What about Succor?
Succor now applies Catalyze instead of Galvanize and does not contribute to Aetherflow. It won't be used often, but does gain a trait that converts overhealing into extra barrier potency. On the topic of GCD healing, I'll also mention that Physick gains double potency when healing allies with Galvanize or Catalyze as a trait. This is there to create that casual player safety net. You'll likely not be using these spells often as a more experienced player, but they will have at least some niche value in the higher echelons of play.

--Faeries--
Let's move onto Eos and Selene. They and Seraph retain Embrace and Seraphic Veil respectively, but everything has been divided into 4 Fey Action abilities that work similarly to the SMN's Egi Assaults. Here's an overview:

Eos' Actions include Whispering Dawn, Fey Gift, Fey Blessing, and Fey Covenant
Selene's Actions include Fey Caress, Fey Gift, Magic Mischief, and Transmogrify
Seraph's Actions include Angel's Whisper, Seraphic Gift, Consolation, and Seraphic Illumination

Fey Gift/Seraphic Gift have replaced Lustrate and function the same way only consuming Faerie Gauge instead of Aetherflow.

Eos' actions should be familiar, though Fey Covenant, an old faerie ability, works differently than how it used to. Instead, it doubles the potency of Embrace for 20 seconds.

Seraph's actions are also largely familiar; however, Fey Illumination has been reworked to grant you 3 Aetherflow. Otherwise, Seraph's main value comes from her abilities not consuming the faerie gauge.

Whispering Dawn and Fey Caress do not require faerie gauge, but have longer cooldowns as a result.

Now, let's talk about Selene
Selene now features damage reduction tools rather than direct healing and will also have offensive utility ideal for dungeon pulls.
Fey Caress is back and removes detrimental effects, but also reduces magic damage taken by the party.
Magic Mischief does what Bane used to and spreads your DoTs from the target to nearby enemies.
Transmogrify is an AoE debuff that inflicts Toad to dungeon mobs and reduces damage dealt to injured party members substantially.
Selene is more niche than Eos, but will have specific moments of great added value, and you'll be encouraged to find those uses as each faerie's abilities do not share a cooldown. She does still have access to Fey Gift--the new Lustrate--as well, so she can maintain some leveling of healing power. Summoning either faerie is also now an ability with a 30 second CD that resets if the faerie is dismissed.

Lastly, what will also encourage you swap faeries is the new ability Eventide which replaces Dissipation. Instead of dismissing your faerie for increased healing potency and Aetherflow, Eventide swiches your faerie and generates 30 faerie gauge. I mentioned that Aetherflow actions now no longer give you faerie gauge, so how else will you accumulate it?

--GCD DPS--
There are now more GCD actions for the SCH to work with--not many more, but just enough to create some meaningful engagement alongside the new Adloquium.
GCD DPS Actions:
- Broil III
- Biolysis
- Miasmolysis - returning DoT with an 18 second duration
- Helix - An upgrade for Ruin II
- Spark II - A weaker attack than Broil III (240 potency) that has a full cast time, but generates 20 faerie gauge.
- Art of War

With the new Adloquium, you'll need to decide when it's best to apply a barrier to an ally and when it's best to hit as hard as you can with Broil III and DoT management. Additionally, you'll also have Spark II (There is a Spark I that gets upgraded), which is now your main method of gaining faerie gauge. Remember when I mentioned converting faerie gauge into Aetherflow for your Chain Stratagem? You'll want to open with a cast of Spark II. Additionally, Eos is your main method of healing without Succor and Physick, so you'll need to integrate casts of Spark II in place of Broil III to ensure you have the faerie gauge you need to heal with OGCD actions.

--The Summary--
This covers all the major points of the kit design. To summarize, as a healer, you maximize your performance by keeping the party alive and delivering as much DPS as possible while doing this. This iteration of SCH achieves this by opting to cast Adloquium at times on allies that are being targeted for damage rather than just casting Broil III. They also want to toss in casts of the weaker Spark II as well to build some faerie gauge to use when healing is need rather than losing more DPS by needing Succor or Physick.

--The level 90 Capstone--
I almost forgot to mention my thoughts on a level 90 capstone ability for SCH. Since this is the finale of the first major story arc in XIV, it needs to be powerful, so what they have is a short but extremely powerful tool in Supersession. This OGCD ability is not connected to Aetherflow or the faerie gauge, but features a very powerful effect that causes the target of this spell to heal your party instead of deal damage when using magic attacks for a brief 6 seconds. On a 180 second cooldown, it's a pretty tight window, but can potentially be a game-changer. I imagine enrages would pierce through it, naturally

This whole concept was all in good fun at the end of the day, so if that kind of discussion interests you then I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[lbr]

I don't usually like theorycrafting posts but I like this one. Healers should have a better interplay between their healing and damage tools and this captures it.

[Grimoire-M]

Thoughts so far:
- Don't like that Aetherflow Generation is tied to shielding, and only with Adloquium. No healer should have to pay a GCD tax to access DPS actions or Raid Utility consistently, even if you do attempt to solve this in a clean manner with Seraph near the 90 cap, the DPS actions conflict with this goal.
- Personally I'd rather have old Emergency Tactics back. This limits their dungeon healing potential, even with the Physick buff (which is mostly a nerf given the shields break rather easily at their current values and you've removed critlo).
- Selene and Eos kinda feel tacked on in places as expected. You're expecting us to swap with the given skills so I'm assuming the pethotbar is completely gone. As written there's an obvious dismiss exploit. Not sharing cooldowns also encourages its use.
- Removing Fey Union? That's kind of their best skill for tank healing. Fey Gift is an adequate replacement in dungeons. But will be a fiddly mess in Savage.
- Is...Spark supposed to be spammable? That feels like a moderate recast action if I ever saw one. Either too good or completely useless. Lends itself to that kind of variance despite how simple it looks. Same with the upgrade. Needs an AoE component, maybe needs to be instant-cast. I think it would be a frustrating spell to utilize in practice.
- Supersession is AoE Magic Only Hallowed Ground. Blue Mage will probably get something like this. No real job ever will.
- Transmogrify won't happen just for the modelling issues alone. condition's hard to meet.
- There's a lot of fiddly and redundant heals in here. Fey Covenant won't see much use given everything else.
- Eventide is Dissipation for Fey Gauge. I don't like that tradeoff given how hard it is to get Aetherflow.
- Not sure how to feel about tying Bane to the fairy. Also, it spreads DoTs but not Chain Stratagem?
- Greater Catalyze really should just be a direct conversion to pure shields. They're weak as it is.
- Helix is still too weak relative to Broil III to be used for weaving, and it seems like this kit has even more weaving issues than current Scholar.
- Meltdown is an auto-spam button. Big conflict with Galvanize.
- Doesn't seem like much was done to affect the rotation. Three DoTs, sure, at 30, 60s, and 18s. I'd personally suggest 21s for Miasma just for overlap protection. Meltdown is effectively one at 15s too.

All in all I'm getting some additional pet micro-management, more difficulty accessing Aetherflow heals which comes coupled with DPS Aetherflow not having enough baseline resources to be consistent. It's probably stronger but I don't know how much it really adds over current scholar in terms of facilitating flow. Instincts want to compare this to AST in terms of clunk and power. It's not bad, but I think SE would shy away from this. I'd double check your generation/consumption rates.

[ty_taurus]

snip

You bring up some interesting criticisms, so let's talk about them.

I struggle to see how tying your main method of Aetherflow generation to Adloquium is a tax. Your main Aetherflow tools are either superior to Broil III in terms of damage and Chain Stratagem. Effective use of Adloquium then translates to a DPS gain, not a loss. The outliers are Excogitation and Indomitability as using those will result in a DPS loss. These exist for emergencies and can be used with Recitation without their Aetherflow cost just as Excogitation can be right now.
That said, I can understand being apprehensive to the idea that you can't generate Aetherflow without your barrier breaking. This is one of the reasons why I added in the Conversion ability. You can generate faerie gauge freely, and can easily convert some of it into 1 Aetherflow every 30 seconds. Perhaps this should be learned right away as Aetherflow becomes available?

I think there's some confusion about how Spark II and Meltdown work. Spark II is a GCD DPS action. It generates 20 faerie gauge, has the same cast time and recast time as Broil III, but deals less damage. You could spam it in theory, but doing so would be a DPS loss. Instead, you need to think about how much faerie gauge you realistically need. You can generate as much of it as you want at any time, but how much of that is worth the DPS loss? It's all about decisions and trade offs that you need to make and have the power to make. Meltdown is an Aetherflow action. It's OGCD and requires 1 stack of Aetherflow. I'm not really sure how this a conflict with Galvanize when Galvanize is what enables you to use Meltdown. Can you explain?

Would Helix being the same DPS as Broil III invalidate Broil III entirely? I suppose we could raise the potency up to 290, but make the MP cost 600 like how Ruin II used to work. Enables weaving, but isn't meant to be spammed.

Regarding the Emergency Tactics situation, I can being worried about the weakened barriers on Adloquium and Succor being a concern in some ways. I think ultimately it's just a numbers game. If I were actually the developer in charge of SCH, I would be testing these values in a prototype, so I'd have a clearer picture of whether or not these nerfs would be too weak. One reason for it was to make it easier to break Galvanize since that's now the goal for SCH, but maybe it's a little too much. I'll do a little adjustment.

Regarding the faeries...
First, I will say that I had in mind that this build would exist in a world where the pet AI got fixed/improved. Let's be honest, that probably won't happen, but it is just a theorycraft for fun at the end of the day so let's just say for the sake of argument that it does improve.

Overall, the pet hotbar does still exist, though you make a good point on the ability to manually dismiss your pet. Honestly, I forget this option even exists. I was just trying to prepare for if you accidentally get too far from your faerie. Perhaps it's best to remove the CD reset on Eos/Selene dismissing.

With Eos, I understand where you're coming from with Fey Covenant. That was my way of trying to find an alternative to Fey Union that didn't just drain faerie gauge while disabling the faerie, but it might not work that way in practice. We could just have Eos use Fey Union in this spot instead. Thoughts?

With Selene, I don't think the toad debuff is a modeling issue. We already have an example of Imp being used against enemies in PotD/HoH. On the damage reduction, though, maybe the threshold should be a little higher. We could add Chain Stratagem to new Bane, though.

Eventide generating faerie gauge instead of Aetherflow is mainly to give you a way to get faerie gauge fast if you haven't been casting Spark II enough. Because Aetherflow is not dishing out a lot more damage, I wanted to avoid creating too many ways to get it quickly. Remember that you can cast Adloquium on multiple party members to get multiple stacks of Aetherflow right after a raidwide.

Lastly, I agree that Supersession would most likely not happen with Square behind the wheel. I won't say it could never happen. I think the restrictions on its timing are tight enough that it could be seen as not quite BLU level shenanigans, though it's easily the most ambitious idea for a single action. It's tough thinking about a capstone tool at this point though. What else to you add? Another heal? More damage? I don't think it would be game-breaking personally, not with such a tiny duration.

I'll work on some small adjustments based on some of the feedback.