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

[Alex073088]

Scholar

*Removeable of the animation locked on all fairy commands that was introduced in SHB, and giving us back the ability to control fairy embrace.
*An increased high potency on fae union or a complete rework/redesign of the ability to make it feel impactful and exciting.
*More uses for fae gauge
* An engaging DPS rotation on this class in particular. I can not count how many times I have fallen asleep in content playing healers and the changes to the DPS rotation have only made that worse.
* Give back bane and remove Art of war, or rework ART of war and still give back BANE.
* Give back quickened aetherflow.
* Healer combos, like Lustrate healing twice as much on the second cast or healing procs of some kind that can even be tied to unlock dps skills
* Barrier indicator on the part list for Seraph
* And instant on-demand shield healing ogdc action.
* Rework Crit aldos
* Deploy more than just aldos.

[IceBlueNinja]

All they need to do is have all healers have about 3 regens 1 single strong shield and party shield and a few more dps, decent emergency situation heals and a few less ogcs stuff as there is way too many. instead of this classist pure healer shield thing with ast cards strongly be their power, sch their fairy and uh whm stronger aero water stone elements like yholta.

Heard though similar to healer during sbh release they was gonna try make it be 2 tanks be main and 2 off but scrap the idea from ytd I saw entitle death of noct ast so maybe they may scrap the pure heal and shield one too.

[Dearche]

All they need to do is have all healers have about 3 regens 1 single strong shield and party shield and a few more dps, decent emergency situation heals and a few less ogcs stuff as there is way too many. instead of this classist pure healer shield thing with ast cards strongly be their power, sch their fairy and uh whm stronger aero water stone elements like yholta.

Heard though similar to healer during sbh release they was gonna try make it be 2 tanks be main and 2 off but scrap the idea from ytd I saw entitle death of noct ast so maybe they may scrap the pure heal and shield one too.

To be honest, the more I think about healing in FF, the more I think that there's just no point in having a lot of healing skills in general. We could probably snip everything down to about five or six abilities. One standard heal, one powerful heal, one standard AOE heal, an emergency heal, and maybe a regen/shield/mitigation. Anything more would have to take from that list and split it into something interesting, but otherwise it's superfluous.

Even healing buffs are quite superfluous and shouldn't exist IMO, unless if they're built into the kit to be a necessary part that would make raids impossible without its use. But every one of them have too long of a CD to actually make the duty take them into consideration as anything but a for of MP management at most, not a critical way to keep the party alive.

Of course, 5 skills does not a job make, but once SE acknowledges that the state of healing in this game is that bad, that's when they can finally make some concrete plans to actually make things better.

But of course, their stance is that healers should heal over anything else, and any tools beyond that that isn't required to get through the MSQ should be culled. So that's why we healers effectively have seven skills on our bars, with a bunch of buttons that simply look a little different from the others.

This isn't acceptable for the DPS in the slightest where SE thinks so hard about removing any skill because there's almost no reduncancy and everything is neccessary for their rotations. This isn't acceptable for tanks, that actually have rotations along with their role specific mitigations. Why is healers the only role that SE thinks we can just have the same five skills repeated three or four times and call it a day?

I know this is quite an exaggeration, but frankly, I don't believe that we're that far away from it as we might like to think.

[IceBlueNinja]

To be honest, the more I think about healing in FF, the more I think that there's just no point in having a lot of healing skills in general. We could probably snip everything down to about five or six abilities. One standard heal, one powerful heal, one standard AOE heal, an emergency heal, and maybe a regen/shield/mitigation. Anything more would have to take from that list and split it into something interesting, but otherwise it's superfluous.

Even healing buffs are quite superfluous and shouldn't exist IMO, unless if they're built into the kit to be a necessary part that would make raids impossible without its use. But every one of them have too long of a CD to actually make the duty take them into consideration as anything but a for of MP management at most, not a critical way to keep the party alive.

Of course, 5 skills does not a job make, but once SE acknowledges that the state of healing in this game is that bad, that's when they can finally make some concrete plans to actually make things better.

But of course, their stance is that healers should heal over anything else, and any tools beyond that that isn't required to get through the MSQ should be culled. So that's why we healers effectively have seven skills on our bars, with a bunch of buttons that simply look a little different from the others.

This isn't acceptable for the DPS in the slightest where SE thinks so hard about removing any skill because there's almost no reduncancy and everything is neccessary for their rotations. This isn't acceptable for tanks, that actually have rotations along with their role specific mitigations. Why is healers the only role that SE thinks we can just have the same five skills repeated three or four times and call it a day?

I know this is quite an exaggeration, but frankly, I don't believe that we're that far away from it as we might like to think.

Yeah been trying to brush up and learn rdm more, sadly i now too just feeling the am about to drop healer main the almost 3 years I do it. heck got vercure just incase am hurt cause while I hate to say it alot green dsps bots are just as annoying or more annoying to me than healer bots and that is my only fear of being dps of not getting heal when need, pld too admits to it lol why tend to clem themselves even in trash pulls.

[BungleBear]

Feelings

OP complains that playing SCH "feels awful". This is obviously subjective. What feels bad to one player may feel good to another. So this is not clearly a design flaw. I'm not sure it's desirable, or even possible, to design a job that feels good to everyone. If you don't like a particular job, there are many others to play.

Restrictions

OP points out that several SCH abilities are mutually exclusive. Using one ability prevents you from using another. But what's wrong with these restrictions? OP says they "feel awful". As noted above, this is subjective. Personally, I like restrictions, because they force you to make significant choices, with opportunity costs. I enjoy playing SCH because it rewards good planning. Without opportunity costs, planning would be less interesting, and playing SCH would be more dull, at least for me. As others have observed, this also fits SCH's identity as a strategist.

Fairy Healing Potency

OP suggests that fairy healing potencies are too low. I disagree. Yes, Fey Blessing has lower potency than Indom. But this doesn't make Blessing worse, at least not in every situation. Blessing has two advantages. It has a larger radius, and it's centred on Eos, not on you. If Eos is placed centrally, then the radius of Blessing often encompasses the entire arena. This is useful in situations where you need to heal your party but everyone is widely dispersed. In my opinion, it's more interesting to have a variety of healing tools with different strengths and weaknesses. (I do agree that the game could communicate fairy healing potencies more transparently. But this seems more a problem with tooltip writing than with job design.)

Fairy Clunkiness

OP doesn't like the delay on fairy abilities. This doesn't bother me so much. You can "play around" they delay and sometimes use it to your advantage. And I feel that it preserves the separation between SCH and fairy. If Eos used her abilities instantly when commanded, this would be more like SCH and Eos had merged into a single entity.

Others complain about fairy abilities "ghosting". To my mind, however, this is a case of player error. If you order Eos to do something and then eat her before she's had time to do it, that's your mistake. Requiring players to think about what they're doing is not bad design, in my opinion.

Another common complaint is that, since ShB, you have to weave an oGCD to command your fairy to use an ability. I'm ambivalent about this. In SB, Whispering Dawn was completely free, with zero opportunity cost. As I like opportunity costs, I like this aspect of the ShB change. On the other hand, it created an imbalance between AST and SCH. ASTs can use their abundant oGCD heals for free, whereas SCHs lose DPS to heal. But this could be remedied either by increasing SCH's free healing or by reducing AST's. So the problem is not clearly in the design of SCH, as opposed to the design of AST.

[IceBlueNinja]

Umm no we do not need our free heals reduced. That is the problem right there since the beginning, how much nerf must ast get? we lost the best card system stormblood to a water down mess in shadow bringer sand we losing our or least to me beautiful big stacking instant casting shields (noct) soon in end walker. We need no more nerfs what so ever. They need to balance all healers and not nerf one to make the other better.

[Grimoire-M]

I almost suspect the default parameters of "your healing" do not include that of your pet anyways. Even if it does, though, it could be easily enough excluded, I would think.

I assume because SCH now gets aggro from the Fairy that it could apply, but it's the kind of thing they'd test while implementing. To me, the important aspect is to have it interact with Scholar using their resources on healing, so I'd probably word it accordingly.

Broil is 290 potency. Ruin II is 200, ED is 100. It's still worth to use Ruin II+ED. If anything, ED should have been nerfed more to 90 potency, which makes ED more open as a weaving tool IMO

At the moment ED + Broil is (100+290)/(2.5+ ~0.5) = 130 potency/second vs Ruin II + ED which is (200+100)/2.5 = 120 potency/second. Obviously dropping Broils isn't ideal and but it's still worth it to hardclip Energy Drain unless you -have- to move long enough to warrant Ruin II usage. That's the issue that needs to be addressed here. The numbers incentivize clunky gameplay. The only options are 1. Buff Ruin II so it's worth using just to weave Energy Drains, or 2. Nerf Energy Drain or buff Broil so hardclipping ED is worth less than Broil spam (which results in the way we played during ShB launch, only using Aetherflow as necessary). Buffing Broil won't happen as hardclipping Energy Drain is worth 200 potency/second in isolation, but you could nerf Energy Drain to 58 potency or less, making it less than 116 potency/second, which is what Broil spam is worth.

[Dearche]

Feelings

Feeling is subjective for sure. But most of us here are people who at one point enjoyed the Feeling of SCH. The problem is that the Feeling which we originally enjoyed is now gone. And while yes, we COULD move on to a different job, there is none which a good feel amongst healers anymore for most of us. Are you telling us to change roles then? What if we didn't want to, and want to spend more time healing? Play a different game? But what about our love for FF? We're as vocal as we are BECAUSE we CARE. If we didn't, we wouldn't even bother talking about this and would have just moved on to a different game a long time ago.

Restrictions

You call the decisions significant, but they really aren't in the slightest. Each part simply does the same thing with slightly different numbers. The issue is that the parts simply don't do as advertised. SCH doesn't reward good planning. It hasn't really since HW. Your choices don't matter. You cycle through your options in whatever order you feel like as long as you hit the CDs as they come up.

Fairy Healing Potency

The issue for this is that SE is blatantly lying to us. Also, Blessing is terrible. Less than 200 potency means that it's only good for either capping off people, or for an extremely slow party regen. It's literally on the level of 'better than nothing'. I would never use it over Indom, because Indom saves lives. Blessing only saves MP and a single GCD. The same can be said for every other fairy skill.

[Dearche]

Fairy Clunkiness

You can't 'take advantage' the fairy's delay, since it's not a fixed amount. Simply speaking, you can't, because there's no reliability. You can only compensate for it on the level of 'between 3-6s', and that doesn't take into account any additional delays due to the AI. But really, you want to bet your party's chances of living through a mechanic on something that might come early, or might come late?

It's even worse when you realize that the capstone ability Consolation is both a heal and a shield, but the shields don't stack and has a variable delay between the two uses if you try to spam them. Frankly, the ability is best on repeated raid damage, as you use it after the first hit, and try to get it all off before the attack is done. That way you get the benefit of both the heal and the shield over four or more hits that take as long as ten seconds. But wait! Ten seconds of damage? But the ability can take anywhere between six and twelve seconds to use! But if something goes wrong with the AI, then it'll take even longer! So you're basically gambling that both effects come out sometime during the boss's attack, after precharging the move as much as eight seconds in advance due to how long the animation is to both summon the Seraph and to activate Consolation.

This is raid memorization on the level of Titan Extreme, and that was a simple and predictable fight in comparison to modern raids.

What you're suggesting, is to Get Gud to the level of world first raiders, just to use SCH at a basic level. I don't know, but if I can do that, then I can also become the world's #1 DOTA2 player before EW comes out, and I haven't even touched that game before.

Look, I'm not trying to attack you personally, but your argument is falls between 'Get Gud' and 'Ignore it'. That's the antithesis of what we're trying to do on these forums.

[BungleBear]

Are you telling us to change roles then? What if we didn't want to, and want to spend more time healing? Play a different game? But what about our love for FF? We're as vocal as we are BECAUSE we CARE. If we didn't, we wouldn't even bother talking about this and would have just moved on to a different game a long time ago.

No, I'm not telling you to do anything. My point was about what SE should do. Should they try to design jobs that will be enjoyable to every player? I don't think so. Ideally, they would design a range of jobs with different playstyles, so there's something for everyone. I won't claim that they've achieved that ideal with current designs. Perhaps the addition of Sage will help with that.

I do sympathise with players like you who don't enjoy playing SCH anymore, and I think it's entirely legitimate for you to voice your dissatisfaction. But I don't think subjective feelings justify the claim that SCH is badly designed (the "worst design of any job in the game" according to OP). Other players like me still enjoy playing SCH. I'm sorry if my post seemed unsympathetic. I just wanted to offer another perspective.

You call the decisions significant, but they really aren't in the slightest.

My point was that the restrictions described by OP made decisions more significant. If I use Fey Union here, then I can't use Whispering Dawn here. So my decision to use FU has more significance, because it excludes using WD. Perhaps you're right that the decisions are still not very significant. But removing the restrictions, as advocated by OP, would make them even less so. It would be a step in the wrong direction.

The issue for this is that SE is blatantly lying to us.

As I said, I agree that there's a communication problem. But I don't see this as part of job design. They could simply update the tooltips to be more transparent about fairy healing potency. That wouldn't be changing the job's design.

I would never use Blessing over Indom, because Indom saves lives. Blessing only saves MP and a single GCD. The same can be said for every other fairy skill.

I already described a situation in which you can heal your party with Blessing but not with Indom. To use Indom effectively you need everyone to be within 15 yalms of you. Not so for Blessing. Because Blessing has this added versatility, it seems right to me that it should have lower potency.