Scholar has the worst design of any job in the game, and here's why.

[FusionSamurai]

This is going to be a fairly comprehensive post about how poorly designed Scholar is in 5.0.

Before I begin on my long winded post about how awful SCH is now, I need to get a few disclaimers out of the way. I know, Endwalker is coming, but I do think that continuing to hammer on why the current job isn't well designed is important. Furthermore, it is important to note that while SCH feels absolutely awful to play now, numerically (in terms of raid dps) it is doing well in raids.

Now, with that out of the way, allow me to present a long rant about how bad the design of this job is.

Scholar has the most restrictive kit of any job in this game right now.Seraph locks you out of using Fey Union and Fey Blessing, as well as Dissipation.Dissipation locks you out of using Fey Union, Fey Blessing, Whispering Dawn, Fey Illumination, as well as Seraph. This feels awful because Dissipation is a small dps gain in general, and a fairly large dps gain when used when you are forced to move in raids and the like.

For the record, I'm not necessarily against Dissipation losing some healing for a while, but the issue with it comes from the fact that this is stacked ON TOP of the other abilities that already lock you out of your kit. When all is said and done, this job locks you out more than any other in the game, and it feels awful.

Since I'm on the topic of locking people out of abilities, Fey Union feels terrible as well. While it doesn't actively lock you out of abilities, it soft locks you, or the ability is cancelled. If you execute any other fairy action, Summon Seraph, or Dissipation, you cancel the tether. This is all well and good when you need to break tether, or you are fine with it, but the issue comes when you don't need union broken. It makes Union feel so much worse to use because it doesn't automatically retether when it is broken, which is really frustrating.


On top of locking you out of your abilities, you don't get gauge when you use Aetherflow stacks when you use Aetherflow-based abilities when you are in Dissipation. I partially understand why, it counts as you not having the fairy, and you can't generate fairy gauge with no fairy. That being said, the entire idea behind Dissipation is to grant you free stacks and healing. WHY does it not generate gauge? On top of other things that feel bad, Dissipation only increases spell-based heals. These are the ones on your GCD, so it doesn't boost any of the Aetherflow heals you get from it.

[FusionSamurai]

Well, it isn't like your gauge matters much anyway. Fey Blessing has a 60s cooldown, and it only consumes10 of your total gauge. You know, 1/3 of the amount you get per minute. (1/4 if you are using dissipation on CD).Reminder that Fey Blessing is also only a ~224 potency heal. It has double Indom's CD for a little over half the potency. What do you do with the rest? Use Union? You have to be willing to let your fairy funnel on one person, and not use any other fairy abilities or Dissipation in that time. Because of how disappointing Union is. SCH has no meaningful way to spend their gauge, which means that you sit on full gauge a lot of the time.

Now, we move on to a relatively big aspect of SCH's kit, the fairy. The fairy had some already clunky design last expansion, but it did it's job well. There are some aspects of this pet that are entirely counterintuitive. A lot of people may not realize it, but the pet does not scale with player potency. In actuality, in a raid-setting, the fairy scales at around ~64% of the player's. That means that your fairy abilities heal for-

Embrace-96 potency.
Whispering Dawn-76.8 Potency (537/person total)
Fey Union-288 Potency
Fey Blessing-224 Potency
Seraphic Veil-128 Potency (128 Shield potency)
Consolation-192 Potency (192 Shield Potency)

Yep! Your fairy's potencies are that low compared to your own. Why? Heck if I know! I get Square being afraid of the pet being too powerful if the potencies matched our own, but why not just list the real potencies of the abilities, rather than actually lying to the players?


Now, beyond pet potency being absolutely dumb. The fairy got significant changes this expansion, most of them are absolutely for the worse. The fairy now sometimes has a massive delay from when you give a command and when she executes it. I've personally seen gaps as long as six seconds when multiple fairy abilities are used at the same time.

Among other things that are annoying, you have to re-place your fairy after Dissipating. Why? In the game's coding, it probably assumes that this is a new fairy, which spawns on follow. It's a minor complaint/inconvenience, but it's very annoying that this is even a thing. Also, Seraph gets stunned at the start of her appearance for 2 seconds. I get that there was an issue with people getting three consolations instead of two, but that's no reason to make it less responsive. Just increase Consolation's CD, which they did, to 22s.

Furthermore, the changes to the fairy have made Fey Illumination feel so much worse to use. Back in the day, it had good value because it was free from the fairy, which didn't need to be weaved. Nowadays, you are gaining 5% magical mitigation and 10% spell-based healing. Sounds great, right? Yeah, until you realize that you almost never survive AOEs on 5% margins, and the 10% doesn't apply to +90% of Scholar's kit, which revolves around healing with abilities.

[FusionSamurai]

The last gripe I have about SCH's design comes from Galvanize. My issue is that when you get a critical Adloquium, it applies Galvanize and Catalyze, both equal to 125% the amount healed. It is really cool because you can force a critical Adlo with Recitation! The issue is that if your target gets hit, the part that you can deploy is chipped FIRST. So, if you wanted to Adlo the main tank, you can't deploy the Galvanize because it gets chipped first by the autos. WHY??? Actually why is this design allowed?

How did this job ever get past playtesting? It feels awful. It feels like the job design team don't play it, and have no idea what to do with it, and it really shows. It has made my favorite job in the game infinitely worse to play. I can tell I'm not alone, as most of these sentiments have been echoed by other long term Scholar mains that I know. I'm looking forward to playing Sage instead next expansion. Even if it is numerically a worse job, I won't have to deal with the layers and layers of awful pet clunk that this dumpster fire of a job has.

[ShyTheBard]

Scholar main, 100% agree with everything posted here. Your main skills locking out or not synergizing at all with other skills is just plain awful. Why does dissipation give you a heal boost and aetherflow stacks but the heal boost doesn't affect aetherflow heals? Why would it not synergize?

[AardAppel]

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand how the so-called "flaws" of Scholar are actually its greatest strength. High-level Scholar optimization is extremely subtle, and without a good grasp of the job's fundamentals, like animation locking your fairy to delay ability execution until after a raidwide, most of the techniques will go over a typical player's head.

There's also, as the OP has mentioned, ability canceling, which is deftly woven into the job's implementation -- using fairy abilities, Summon Seraph, or Dissipation to cancel Fey Union draws heavily from the game developers' faith in us as a playerbase to think outside the box and use Scholar's kit to its full potential. The top raiders understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depth and nuance of Scholar's kit, to realize that these supposedly "restrictive" abilities are nothing of the sort -- by forcing players to deeply understand the job before they can succeed, they're making a statement about the game as a whole.

As a consequence, people who dislike Scholar for being "clunky" and "awful" truly ARE low-performing players -- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the subtleties behind the 2.32 gcd rotation and its 13/12 Biolysis refresh cycle, which adds the often-undervalued choice of when in a 60-second Aetherflow cycle to refresh your DoT to maximize its utility for movement and weaving. I'm smirking right now just imagining OP scratching their head in confusion as Yoshi P's genius unfolds itself in this very game. I pity them.

And yes, by the way, I AM a Scholar main.

[WynnDohz]

Something else to consider: When using Fey Union/Aetherpact, the fairy ceases to cast embrace. This means that the amount of healing you actually gain from using it is even lower than the already-pathetic 288. It's effectively something like 180. As you mentioned, Fey Blessing only costs 10/100 gauge and has a 60s CD, so it's basically free. The entire fairy gauge only serves two purposes: adding fake depth to the class, and making you even more useless after a rez.

[NobleWinter]

While it is true that players can use input delays to their advantage it is hardly a grandiose high IQ matter. The other healers can time their casts and abilties to achieve the exact same effects. It doesnt give Scholar any kind of competitive edge over them to use a fairy ability to cancel Fey Union or plan the input to execution delay of a fairy ability to land healing right on time. I highly doubt the design team, after trying to simplify healing acorss the board, thought they could rely on Scholar players to optimize the broken fairy system we have now. Did they plan on fairy abilities going on cooldown without being used becuase the player used Summon Seraph or Dissipation too quickly? Was this intended as a restriction to force us to use our High IQ or as is more likely just an aggregious oversight like Energy Drain being removed from the Scholar toolkit and Consolation being able to be cast 3 times in succession. There are so many things wrong with Scholar like how Selene was removed as an option entirely but the summon Eos and Selene buttons werent consolidated into one. Why doesnt Fey Blessing turn into Consolation when Seraph is summoned. These are obvious things that should have been done and yet we have ridiculous button bloat instead gor no real benefit. Scholar had abilties removed and fairy mechanics wrecked with nothing of substance added to replace the lost besides a huge Seraph animation becuase the Devs thought we as players were too dumb to want anything more than a new flashy summon that is literally just the previous Rouse ability with fresh paint. The fact you can use a broken system well does not mean you have a high IQ. If anything the fact anyone can be happy with how broken and underwhelming the current Scholar is shows an extremely low IQ. All the optimization is gone. The smartest people moved to other classes because they miss it.

[ShyTheBard]

While it is true that players can use input delays to their advantage it is hardly a grandiose high IQ matter. The other healers can time their casts and abilties to achieve the exact same effects. It doesnt give Scholar any kind of competitive edge over them to use a fairy ability to cancel Fey Union or plan the input to execution delay of a fairy ability to land healing right on time. I highly doubt the design team, after trying to simplify healing acorss the board, thought they could rely on Scholar players to optimize the broken fairy system we have now. Did they plan on fairy abilities going on cooldown without being used becuase the player used Summon Seraph or Dissipation too quickly? Was this intended as a restriction to force us to use our High IQ or as is more likely just an aggregious oversight like Energy Drain being removed from the Scholar toolkit and Consolation being able to be cast 3 times in succession. There are so many things wrong with Scholar like how Selene was removed as an option entirely but the summon Eos and Selene buttons werent consolidated into one. Why doesnt Fey Blessing turn into Consolation when Seraph is summoned. These are obvious things that should have been done and yet we have ridiculous button bloat instead gor no real benefit. Scholar had abilties removed and fairy mechanics wrecked with nothing of substance added to replace the lost besides a huge Seraph animation becuase the Devs thought we as players were too dumb to want anything more than a new flashy summon that is literally just the previous Rouse ability with fresh paint. The fact you can use a broken system well does not mean you have a high IQ. If anything the fact anyone can be happy with how broken and underwhelming the current Scholar is shows an extremely low IQ. All the optimization is gone. The smartest people moved to other classes because they miss it.

Uhhh friend, you replied to a shit post.

[NobleWinter]

I can't take it back now. Now that my life has hit rock bottom I can only go up or sideways from here. Much like healer development at Square Enix

[Nethereal]

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand how the so-called "flaws" of Scholar are actually its greatest strength. High-level Scholar optimization is extremely subtle, and without a good grasp of the job's fundamentals, like animation locking your fairy to delay ability execution until after a raidwide, most of the techniques will go over a typical player's head.

There's also, as the OP has mentioned, ability canceling, which is deftly woven into the job's implementation -- using fairy abilities, Summon Seraph, or Dissipation to cancel Fey Union draws heavily from the game developers' faith in us as a playerbase to think outside the box and use Scholar's kit to its full potential. The top raiders understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depth and nuance of Scholar's kit, to realize that these supposedly "restrictive" abilities are nothing of the sort -- by forcing players to deeply understand the job before they can succeed, they're making a statement about the game as a whole.

As a consequence, people who dislike Scholar for being "clunky" and "awful" truly ARE low-performing players -- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the subtleties behind the 2.32 gcd rotation and its 13/12 Biolysis refresh cycle, which adds the often-undervalued choice of when in a 60-second Aetherflow cycle to refresh your DoT to maximize its utility for movement and weaving. I'm smirking right now just imagining OP scratching their head in confusion as Yoshi P's genius unfolds itself in this very game. I pity them.

And yes, by the way, I AM a Scholar main.

I don't know why you're coming off so pretentious and attributing the limitations of SCH as some grandeur plan when they were most likely never intentional as not only do none of the job designers main a healer but Yoshi's goal is to make the game as accessible as possible. This is highlighted by the fact for a time they removed energy drain entirely and somehow you think this is all some grand plan and not just Occam's razor at hand.

It has nothing to with the developers faith in us to play the class at all, they removed most additional damaging abilities from healers, removed the fairies health and hitbox, removed the ability to target the fairy to spreadlo and cure 3 bomb off it, and made it so fairy comes back after dissipation ends.

The only thing remotely interesting or genius here is that aetherpact can be turned on and off by the person who it's tethered to technically by running in and out of its range and even that has pros and cons attached to it. And I'm supposed to believe that when you use whispering dawn 2 seconds before seraph ends and it gets eaten because seraph ended instead of just remaining the duration, using the skill and the ending is somehow related to Yoshi's grand genius of how SCH big brains are secretly ruling the other healers behind the curtains, no thanks.

The only reason you play SCH at all high end is for sacred soil, chain, and because you didn't want to deal with cards or star this time around.

Out of all 3 healers SCH is the most clunky and unresponsive, being good enough at the class and understanding how to utilize its consistent unresponsive doesn't change that, you've just circumvented it.

And if this is a legitimate shit post, good job I honestly can't tell anymore with some of the stuff I've been reading here.