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

[QooEr]

For the sake of a thought experiment, lets say you can exchange the DPS kit of any job in the game with your healer of choice, but in exchange, you lose all your OGCDs, save your 120s steroid. (So Temperance, Neutral Sect, Seraph). Angel whisper will also just be a standard raise, and White Wind isn't exactly a "Healer" skill, as it's used more by the DPS / Tanks to help.

You do not, however, get the Blue Mage's traits nor healing succ bonus. (For those wondering, this is a baseline of 1.3 against 1.8 multiplier for healing potency, or, put simply, ~28% weaker than what the Blue Mage achieves).

How do you see this playing out?

In your hypothetical, id pick white mage with lv 50 black mage's or dancer's proc based dps style. most of whms healing depth comes from lilies anyways.

that said, i dont think blu healing is that much better than regular healing because being constrained by the gcd makes recovery nigh impossible sometimes. I'm sure theres a decent middle ground to be found somewhere.


also healers' healing kits are also not particularly interesting either. i think the best designed heal is earthly star, but almost everything else is pretty much interchangeable unless you're spreadsheeting a fight. COpp or CU, whispering dawn or recit indom, astlum or medii? eh.. i miss when ast had time magic which could double as healing if you planned stuff right, or when scholar could micromanage the fairy embraces. but that too was lost in shb.

[Kabooa]

In your hypothetical, id pick white mage with lv 50 black mage's or dancer's proc based dps style. most of whms healing depth comes from lilies anyways.

that said, i dont think blu healing is that much better than regular healing because being constrained by the gcd makes recovery nigh impossible sometimes. I'm sure theres a decent middle ground to be found somewhere.

also healers' healing kits are also not particularly interesting either. i think the best designed heal is earthly star, but almost everything else is pretty much interchangeable unless you're spreadsheeting a fight. COpp or CU, whispering dawn or recit indom, astlum or medii? eh.. i miss when ast had time magic which could double as healing if you planned stuff right, or when scholar could micromanage the fairy embraces. but that too was lost in shb.

Yeah that makes sense.

Personally I don't think it's better at all. I think Blue mage healing being seen as favorable is confusing being overtuned with being well designed. Being overpowered is fun - for a while.

Given how segregated the healing and damage dealing kits are, I'm of the opinion we can't say blue Mage is a fun healer - Because it's not the healing parts that are fun. The healing parts are no less (or more) interesting than the basic kits of the healers, they're just amped up.

It'd be like saying Red Mage would have good healing design, if it had Vermedica at 600 potency and Vercure got bumped to 800.

[Rilifane]

You can’t compare dancer and their 1 cooldown heal to an actual healer job lol.

They specifically said DR which lets you use Lost Actions and Essences.
So healing on a dps is entirely possible while keeping your regular dps rotation and utility. Just to clarify that one because you seemed to have gotten the impression that they were only talking about healing an entire raid with CW.

[QooEr]

Yeah that makes sense.

Personally I don't think it's better at all. I think Blue mage healing being seen as favorable is confusing being overtuned with being well designed. Being overpowered is fun - for a while.

Given how segregated the healing and damage dealing kits are, I'm of the opinion we can't say blue Mage is a fun healer - Because it's not the healing parts that are fun. The healing parts are no less (or more) interesting than the basic kits of the healers, they're just amped up.

It'd be like saying Red Mage would have good healing design, if it had Vermedica at 600 potency and Vercure got bumped to 800.

i agree with you. if i could have it my way, both dps and healing mechanics would be interesting. emphasis on both. i think the reason players seem to focus on dps buttons for healers is because as many healing actions we have, all of them have little to no synergy and the depth is minimal. lilies being a big exception.

also i think i forgot to mention when i say i like blue mage healing, i also like how we have access to things like bad breath and addle. being a healer and having control over mitigation that dps very often neglect is something i miss a lot from heavensward.

[Kabooa]

i agree with you. if i could have it my way, both dps and healing mechanics would be interesting. emphasis on both. i think the reason players seem to focus on dps buttons for healers is because as many healing actions we have, all of them have little to no synergy and the depth is minimal. lilies being a big exception.

also i think i forgot to mention when i say i like blue mage healing, i also like how we have access to things like bad breath and addle. being a healer and having control over mitigation that dps very often neglect is something i miss a lot from heavensward.

Yeah, that's more than fair. There's something satisfying about putting together your own kit and executing, even if it's not top tier BIS super meta. It's something I wanted to see more of before we started hitting expansions and having the overall style of the game pushed away from the potential that was the early armory system.

Reminds me a fair bit of Guild Wars 1. thousands of actions, each with varying damage, interactions, bonus effects, non-specific combos, but only 8 slots to fit skills on to.

Funny enough, it was also an 8 man focused game usually dividing into 2 tanks (one shield, one dps), 2 healers (one 'pure' healer, one non-) and a random assortment of 4 pseudo DPS (As everyone contributed to damage, but built it as a team). I should load that up and stop pestering you fine folk for a while.

[SweetPete]

They specifically said DR which lets you use Lost Actions and Essences.
So healing on a dps is entirely possible while keeping your regular dps rotation and utility. Just to clarify that one because you seemed to have gotten the impression that they were only talking about healing an entire raid with CW.

Anyone can be a healer, tank or dps in bozja. That content doesn’t count for the conversation at hand. I understand what you saying though.

[Navnav]

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.

What the heck did I just read???? Some of you posters are different, really different...
How can obviously bad design be considered good design because other players are just bad? What? The one thing I miss about the WoW community is, when something is stupid, the vast majority will rally against it's stupidity and you will never hear you are small brained because it is stupid. Like, do you think this game is 3D chess or something? It isn't, the job is badly designed, end of.

[Beddict]

What the heck did I just read???? Some of you posters are different, really different...
How can obviously bad design be considered good design because other players are just bad? What? The one thing I miss about the WoW community is, when something is stupid, the vast majority will rally against it's stupidity and you will never hear you are small brained because it is stupid. Like, do you think this game is 3D chess or something? It isn't, the job is badly designed, end of.

What you read is a copypasta shitpost. They're taking the piss outta people that try to argue that SCH's flaws, such as the dumb as hell Pet AI, aren't actually flaws.

[Truen]

What you read is a copypasta shitpost. They're taking the piss outta people that try to argue that SCH's flaws, such as the dumb as hell Pet AI, aren't actually flaws.

It's just nonsensical posturing. SCH flaws are due to bad design.
Yoshi should be barred from touching healers ever again.

[Grimoire-M]

It's just nonsensical posturing. SCH flaws are due to bad design.
Yoshi should be barred from touching healers ever again.

SCH’s flaws are Ruin II tuning and pet AI issues that preceded ShB but became more annoying due to the disconnect between a player ordering a pet to do something and being able to control them independently of the player’s actions. You can guarantee pet actions go off now, whereas before you had to keep mashing the relevant action until it fired properly. It was never consistent when it happened, so people’s impression of it has changed. Whatever they did made it better for me on the east coast but worse for people closer to the servers.

As much as I miss Bane and extra DoT management, I do not think removing it was a problem from a balancing perspective. Less fun? Absolutely. Fun comes first.

Personally I just want content creators that actually main healers to get more spotlights so this can be dealt with.