Potential Fixes to SCH's Ongoing Design Problems

[Dearche]

I've been a SCH main since pretty much ARR after initially raising a DRG, occasionally dipping my toes in AST, only to come back to SCH due to the added complexity of the job.

Over the years, SCH has been suffering from three problems on the player side, and three problems on SE's side.

On the player's side, the problems was the increase in simplification of our favourite job, the unreliable lag when using fairy skills, along with receiving numerous skills that were extremely awkward to use and mostly pointless.

On SE's side was the problematic pet AI, SCH players that want conflicting things from the job, and a lack of ideas for the job itself.

Personally, while most jobs in FFXIV had received a major rework since their introduction, SCH was one of the few that never got one, and the only one of those that has needed a rework for years.

While I don't consider myself some sort of genius that can solve all of the SE development team's woes with a single post, here, I posit an idea as to how SCH can be reworked to satisfy as many people as possible.

The most fundamental aspects of SCH, personally, are three things: The fairy, aetherflow, and shields/mitigation. These three need to stay and continue to be a core part of the job, or it'll lose it's place.

The fairies are the core of most of SCH's issues. From both the player's perspective, as well as SE's, if my observations are anywhere near accurate.

Eos and Selene are the source of countless woes, from the lack of reliability, to their low potency. And from SE's perspective, nothing but frustration, as any fixes they might want to do wouldn't work without removing or at least lessoning the fairy's importance.

Personally, I think there is one way to do it: remove the fairy as a pet.

Now, while I say remove it as a pet, I don't mean remove it from SCH's kit, nor do I mean lessoning it's import. But rather, change the way the fairy works so that it's far more important than before, but in a way that won't be overwhelming to newer players, but still has space for veteran players to exploit advanced techniques. All the while without burdening the server infrastructure nor adding too much work to the development team.

First, remove the fairies AI in its entirety. It'll simply become a minion that follows the player around in duties with the additional benefit that you can place it elsewhere if you desire. The fairy would have to have a zero MP cost to summon for those players that place the fairy but forget to tell it to follow during dungeons though. It doesn't have to be instant like the SMN, as the cast time could be a way to enforce the healer to remember to move the fairy properly.

Second, all fairy skills become the SCH's own skills. The only caveat, is that the fairy acts as the source of the skill when it comes to location, but otherwise it is entirely the SCH's own skill.

[Dearche]

Third, as the fairy would no longer have any skills, the SCH could get a simple regen oGCD as a fairy skill to make up for its lack of AI healing. Instead, embrace could work like how the current aetherpact works, and is the only source of constant healing from the fairy, aesthetically speaking. Just a skill that marks a player and gets a perpetual regen until the mark is moved by the SCH, and the fairy has a green or yellow tether to the target for appearance's sake. In exchange, aetherpact could be a CD that boosts the effects of embrace for a short time, or maybe puts on a regenerating shield?

Fourth, offload some of the SCH's spell effects onto the fairy. Or to be exact, when the SCH casts certain spells, part of the effect originates at the fairy rather than the SCH.

I would say that the ones best for that would be the healing portion of all heal spells except for physick. The fairy heals, while the SCH shields. Perhaps this could be reversed to reduce the pain of a SCH when not having a fairy for whatever reason, but I feel that this is more flavourful than the inverse. The SCH is someone who uses knowledge to protect others' health, while the fairy is a spirit of gentle healing.

This would make the fairy feel much more active than before, and as an added bonus, maybe some veteran players could find a niche where to take advantage of the split effects by having the fairy move out of normal AOE range and split the heal and shield to different players?

Five, with all the changes done already to the fairy, Summon Seraph would have to be changed quite a bit as well. Seraph was originally brought in as a hidden nerf, as when we got it, we had lost rouse, which effectively did almost the same thing but was faster. If the fairy is no longer a pet, then Summon Seraph should reflect that.

First of all, the animation needs to be sped up. It should not take longer than one second to summon. Two at the absolute most, but that still makes it difficult to use for unplanned heal boosts. SE brought in high jump because they thought jump was to slow, so why do they bring in a special fairy that takes so long to come in to heal that the WHM got off Assize, Medica, and Medica 2 all off while giving their SCH partner a dirty look for taking so long to heal the party. It's even worse when the Seraph's special skill, Consolation, is a two charge skill, but half of the weak effect is a shield, which gets cancelled if you use both charges. Doing some napkin potency math, the two shots of Consolation is roughly as strong as a single use of Succor, though succor has a stronger shield while Consolation has a bit more raw healing.

[Dearche]

I believe the cure to the Seraph would be to merge it with a few other skills. First, Consolation shouldn't be its own skill, but a part of the Seraph's summoning itself. When it appears, it'll lay down a AOE heal with a shield. In addition, the Seraph would give a potency buff to the SCH and its own heals/shields. Effectively Consolation two charges and Seraphic Illumination would be built in, and the heal buff would continue until the Seraph returns to the void or whatever.

Finally, the summon condition, instead of being on a CD, should be based on the fairy gauge. You can summon it whenever you want as long as you have half a gauge at the cost of 20-30 points, but it'll stay until the gauge empties or is unsummoned. With all this, the Seraph will feel less like some cheap little flashy extra, and more like the healer equivalent of a DPS's burst phase. And even if the extra healing potency isn't useful, at the very least, you can summon it for the AOE shield/heal.

These changes to Seraph would also fix the main issue of the fairy gauge, which is that most SCH end up just letting it fill up because Aetherpact is so worthless most of the time. Aetherpact, as it is, is basically just WHM's regen but slightly stronger, at the cost of not being able to use any of the fairy related skills without a significant delay by breaking the fae union. Not useless, but extremely restrictive and the effect is quite hard to notice when the fairy was already applying what was effectively a weaker regen without any of the new restrictions.

These five changes, while quite extensive, are probably on the simpler side to actually implement, and would both do wonders to fix and even improve the fairy. From the responsiveness to how active it'll become, and it'll really strengthen the feeling that the SCH is a different healer from the others, all without introducing any complex hard to implement mechanics.

The next part is Aetherflow.

Personally, I don't think much has to be done with it at all. While I would like it to be more mechanically driven than simply being a resource to gain with one button and used on some skills, it is technically fine on its own. Maybe being able to reduce the CD on it like in SB would be nice, though I would be down for a reduction on Excogitation's CD instead.

The third part of SCH's fundamentals is shields/mitigation.

Frankly speaking, I think SCH's in a decent place here. The thing about mitigation is that it's something which can easily break content due to SE having to account for a wider range of possible effective HP pools. Is most players going to have 100k HP? 120k HP? 140k HP? But a 10% mitigation means that the 140k is effectively 154k. And with a shield, it could be worth more than 200k.

[Dearche]

For the most part, due to that, you can't buff SCH's mitigation at all. What I would like would be an aetherflow version of adloquium and succor though. SCH is wonderful as an oGCD healer, and for some reason, SCH doesn't have an aetherflow shield? Though that's more of a personal desire than a plea for change.

Now, SCH's problems go beyond simply these three aspects, but they are by far the most important ones. The next section is much more secondary, but I believe would add to the enjoyment of the job. And with Sage arriving, it could give additional differentiation.

To me, SCH has been feeling like there isn't much to do when there isn't much healing to be done. And while it's true that the same could be said for the other healers, back when I first started to play SCH, it wasn't like that. I had lots to do when healing wasn't required. Cleric stance, miasma, bio, bio2, shadow flare, maybe bane, and only then did I start ruin spamming. It was a workout that felt like I was pulling my weight to help beat the enemies.

I understand that we can't go back to that, as it's too complex, but the oversimplification has made any content that didn't involve lots of healing to be boring. Which was basically anything that wasn't raid content, and even then only if most players were close to the minimum iLevel.

This is actually the fault of the holy trinity, and trying to stick to it as closely as SE has been lately. This is also (personally) the cause for some similar problems for tanks, but I'm not familiar enough on that department to give much judgement there.

The solution to any holy trinity problem, when you can't remove the trinity itself, is to simply spread it out. While you can't make anyone but the tank tank, healing and DPS are different. Tanks already have a bit of healing in them, though sometimes it's just in the form of shields, and lots of DPS have their own self heals or even raid-wide mitigations. And everyone does at least a little bit of DPS. In fact, tanks and healers each do more than half as much work as the fully fledged DPS, and hence they theoretically do a third of the raid/party's total damage.

If that's the case, why does it have to be boring for us healers? Throw one dot then spam one ability over and over ad infinitum? Personally, I think that's tiresome, and with Endwalker coming out soon with a new healer, and splitting the healers into pure/shield healers, I think we can further split the healers into simple and complex healers as well.

A simple job is a job with a low skill floor, even for more difficult content. It's easy not only to pick up, but to play proficiently. A complex job on the other hand, while it may or may not be easy to pick up, it is more difficult to play at a high level. But rather than simply meaning that the skill ceiling is higher, it's more like it requires more effort to play at a raid level.

[Semirhage]

I think we can further split the healers into simple and complex healers as well.

A simple job is a job with a low skill floor, even for more difficult content. It's easy not only to pick up, but to play proficiently. A complex job on the other hand, while it may or may not be easy to pick up, it is more difficult to play at a high level. But rather than simply meaning that the skill ceiling is higher, it's more like it requires more effort to play at a raid level.

"Simple and complex healers"
Oh no. This is "Keep White Mage boring and make Scholar overpowered again" isn't it?

SCH was one of the few that never got one, and the only one of those that has needed a rework for years.

Getting whittled down to the point where you have effectively nothing interesting to manage is pretty bad design, isn't it? Scholar is the only remaining healer suffering from this catastrophe. Nobody else has seen such horrible game design for years. Wink wink. Wink wink.

[Dearche]

"Simple and complex healers"
Oh no. This is "Keep White Mage boring and make Scholar overpowered again" isn't it?



Getting whittled down to the point where you have effectively nothing interesting to manage is pretty bad design, isn't it? Scholar is the only remaining healer suffering from this catastrophe. Nobody else has seen such horrible game design for years. Wink wink. Wink wink.

Simple and complex doesn't mean boring vs overpowered, though admittedly it can.
There's actually a perfect example already in FFXIV that does this, and nobody really complains about it. The Casters have RDM as the simple and SMN/BLM as the complex.

What I'm pointing out is that, since we're going to end up with two pure healers and two shield healers, we might as well make one of each a simple, and the other complex.

And if you want an example of how to make WHM simple without being boring, how about if their GCD heals are buffed a bit, and each time they're casted, they give blood lilies? Afflatus Misery would have to be weakened a bit to compensate, and most of their oGCDs would have to be removed, but they'll turn into a slower healer with weaved offence that can be used a ton.

In fact, it would even help solve their boring DPS problems while making them entirely unique in play, all without making WHM newbie unfriendly.

[Deceptus]

Simple and complex doesn't mean boring vs overpowered, though admittedly it can.
There's actually a perfect example already in FFXIV that does this, and nobody really complains about it. The Casters have RDM as the simple and SMN/BLM as the complex.

Unless you're min maxing BLM is ridiculously simple as well.

[Dearche]

SCH's traditionally been the more difficult to play healer. Initially it was due to the high number of offensive skills with lustrate being a percentage heal that could be used through cleric stance, to later on when SCH had been repeatedly nerfed through expansions to become the undeniably weakest healer, to the point now that SCH's aesthetic appeal now clashes with its mechanical appeal.

The changes above would solve those problems, but it wouldn't make a SCH enjoyable when there isn't any boss mechanics nor any healing to do.

Frankly speaking, I really liked the old triple DoT pattern together with bane to spread the DoTs if you were facing a group, and would take it in an instant if it was an option.

But even if it wasn't, there is one thing I want to point out.

The solution to the drought of tanks and healers, I believe, isn't to simplify their damage rotations as much as possible, as what being distracted by your damage rotation to the point of not doing your role properly is only an issue once you've grown comfortable in the role already. What's driving people away is the fear of not being able to perform the basic role in the first place.

For tanks, that is holding aggro without dying. For healers, that is preventing others from dying.

The insane enmity generation buff is by far more than enough for tanks. Healers too, their healing options have expanded so much that almost all of our old healing spells and abilities are now obsolete.

What's really keeping players from taking up these roles is the fact that they never try. New players that pick a healer/tank at the beginning will stick to them for the most part, so the issue is those who chose DPS first, but shy away from trying tank/healer in the future.

The way to fix that is by forcing them to play as a tank/healer in single player duties. This has already happened on the rare occasion in the MSQ, but if it grew much more frequent, it would ease the fear from these sorts of players I believe.

And if that was true, then why not bring back the complexity of our damage rotation? People easily understand that failing at their damage rotation isn't a big deal, and would prioritize it below proper healing until they grow comfortable with the kit.

[Dearche]

Anyways, this post has grown long enough already.

This isn't really some sort of self-important advice to SE or anything, but more of a self-serving release of pent up angst over the current state of SCH, brought on by a friend who I had ranted these same points earlier on, who then suggested I post it.

SCH hasn't gotten a rework despite being one of the original ARR jobs along with DRG and BLM. But of the three, SCH is the only one that had any real problems and in dire need of an overhaul, and it had it from the beginning. Not to mention that much of the skills SCH's gotten in each expansion has been problematic and actively worked against the existing kit. It's clear that SE has no idea what to do with SCH, perhaps due to the fear of fan backlash, but at this point I just wish something was done to fix things.

At this point, we'll at least have Sage to fall back on if SCH ends up breaking even more badly in a rework, though I have a feeling many SCH players will simply jump ship in the hopes that Sage will at least not be a broken job. I know I'll be raising Sage before SCH in EW.

Now, I don't really expect any of these changes to actually happen, but would be happy if at least some people read it, even if it was nothing more than to pass a little bit of time.

Salut!

[Anhra]

The way how Scholars Aetherflow is designed, is more of a hindrance on the long run than it does the job any good. It is in a technical sense, no different on how charged skills for others work (like MNK's gapcloser for example). The PvP version of SCH, has the "Aetherflow Skills" adressed in a good way for PvE, all of those skills should have their own charges.

By doing so, it would give SCH some room for rework, especially when the total amount of Healing abilities from Healers get cut down (Healers in this game have far too many of them and the remaining ones recieve potency adjustments/reworks to make up for it.

As SCH currently is, the Job has 8 raw healing abilities, 3 HoT effects and 3 Shields and 7 utility skills of which 4 affect other players, all distributed within a total of 14 Skills, only for Healing purposes which is far too many, considering, that many of said skills are far too similar in effect, which makes the job boring on both paper and gameplay. All that is left, outside of healing, is a total of 5 dps skills.

So what i am getting here is, if you dont need to heal, you got yourself said 5 dps skills and chain stratagem to work with. 4 of 5 dps skills are RAW (insert gordon ramsay here) damaging abilities and that one DoT you have barely gets noticed since that too, is just raw damage and no additional effect.