Potential Fixes to SCH's Ongoing Design Problems

[Rilifane]

I completely agree. One of the myriad reasons WHM has traditionally fallen so far behind after an expansion gets past its first major patch or two (obscene overbuffs to the competition aside) is that its personal damage is so rough to upkeep compared to the other two. If we're aiming at a landscape like the caster DPS, where you have the utility-heavy casters doing less personal damage than BLM but bringing raid buffs to (mostly) make up for it, it's harder to get working just because of the way that AST and SCH's healing/damage kits aren't mutually exclusive. It doesn't matter if SCH does *slightly* less personal damage than WHM against a training dummy, because SCH is just head and shoulders more capable of keeping the blasting rolling while making sure the the party stays alive. Add utility on top of that, and the healer that has to eat into their healing commitment time to do damage stands no chance of keeping up with the wonder twins.

It was really sad to watch how quickly WHM got outperformed once again by SCH.
The first tier, AST/ WHM was great and SCH was the red-headed stepchild. After that it only went downhill. The only boss where even AST/ WHM comps playing at average level pulled ahead was e6s because of the extremely low healing requirement coupled with frequent transitions for lily dumps and the low movement requirement.
But the healing potential SCH has is completely bonkers; they have so many tools to deal with all kinds of situations that they will not suffer a signifcant dps loss unless a party is really, really bad. WHM suffers in anything but perfectly coordinated parties even with an AST as co heal.
And with lilies having to be used for weaving, movement and healing, competing for 3 different functions and all with different timings, while being on a 30s cooldown, what good a are a few hundrep dps more on paper? The moment a WHM cannot freely use lilies as movement and weaving tools and having to hold them back for healing, they fall behind big time. Then they get to chose between being Ser Clip-a-lot and Ser Medica Spammer or (more likely) a lot of both.
Even in coordinated parties I felt like I was griefing my co heal no matter how well I tried to time my movement lilies with healing.

Right now it's not a choice between "take a team of two healers with high healing potential for safety" and "take a team with less healing potential but good dps if you feel brave". You get both by ditching WHM. It could very well be the high risk/ high reward healer but that probably goes against SE goal of making it the beginner-friendly healer. Even risks that only become apparent in endgame content are probably not acceptable in SEs book.

A few things I'd like to see for SCH are:
- an option to turn Succor/ Adlo into a full shield, similiar to ET and on a low CD aswell
- make the next 3 AF skills crit after Dissipation, maybe let the heal bonus affect oGCDs aswell, because right now the skill is pretty lackluster, boring and mostly an optimization tool
- Aetherpact and Fey Blessing can still be used when Seraph is summoned, because it's supposed to be an overall stronger version of the fairy, not a limited one
- fairy always remembers the position it got placed. Seriously, the frequent repositioning is annoying and costs valuable time until you can use the fairy skills effectively again
- fix ghosting. Enough said.

But for the fairy itself I pretty much lost all hope unless they reverse the change made to fairy skills. But not having them as oGCDs would make SCHs free heal explode and would require signifcant rebalancing, escpecially for WHM. Pretty sure that's not going to happen.

[Dzian]

Scholar is "supposed" to be "the DPS healer". That's a perception that would need to change for it to work. Scholar can't be "the DPS healer" AND "the utility-rich healer" AND "the smart healer" etc etc etc. One of the major beefs I've had with Scholar as a job over past expansions is that community perception sort of hogged up all of the identity space due to being good at everything; it lead to a lot of "well you can't do this to improve WHM, that would be stealing SCH's identity!".

SCH imo was basically the proactive utility dps. It wasn't about healing damage it was about preventing it. So in this guise it wasn't a healer at all. You has has fairy that could do some reactive healing when needed. And a fairy that was more utility and support.

The biggest problem with being proactive though is that's its ultimately far to punishing.. if you don't absolutely 100% know a fight script your done for. If you cast a shield the exact millisecond you see the cast bar going g off for a tank buster or raid wide. It's already too late to mitigate that damage.

This is where people complained that noct ast was superior with its insta cast Shields. Slightly weaker but infinitely more usable and effective. Though at one point I think they were even stronger than a school Shields.

Scholars were never meant to be reactive healers and thats why they gave them emergency tactics as a kind of oh crap button that could convert shields into raw heals in a pinch.. but they kinda killed that before they even implemented it by giving us indomnibility as well...

As for utility in general they've gutted and simplified so much that there's really no room to be unique and offer much by way of utility... resource management is all but gone. Crowd control is non existent... mitigation in general has become a joke.. the only thing utility can do is just make dps numbers bigger.. like how every set card now does the exact same thing.

Ast had some great potential andnits cards would have fine if some of them weren't deliberately restricted. Like Ewer my refresh but doesn't work on a blackmage or a dark Knight.... what the hell? That could have been interesting. Letting blms bust out an extra fire 4 or 2 or drk uses there arts more.. could have been a good card. And not just fodder for balance spreads.

Old school scholar fey wind was pretty good to. Serene was often a decent choice for that. And her aoe cleanse could have worked much better if devuffs actually lasted longer than 4 seconds. Someones paralysed. No point casting leeches or esuna as it'll have wear off in a couple of seconds anyway.

It was never meant to be the reactive style healer so there's the big gap in its identity. It was meant to prevent damage not heal it.

[Dearche]

Dissipation just plain needs to disappear. The only use I ever saw with it was to let you spam more drains. All the actually good heals SCH got has CDs long enough that dissipation wasn't useful.

I'm sure that SE's intent was to have a 30s mega heal phase since it gave your GCD heals a buff, but the damn thing is way overkill. At most, you only need about two GCDs to heal the entire party to about two thirds from 1HP, and the SCH just plain loses steam at that point due to the CDs. And that presumes that SCH is solo healing, which runs counter to both encounter and job design.

Nobody at SE thinks shield healers should be able to solo heal True Living Dead on its own even on casual, yet SCH can get pretty close. Why should SCH get a skill that pushes their healing even further up then? And for 30s? What a waste. You can only justify it at ten seconds, but then you're sitting on so much extra aetherflow that all you can do is either throw it into lustrate so that you can make sure that you never have to do any GCD heals during a fight, or you pump it all into Energy Drain, something SE doesn't even want SCH to do, looking at how they removed it once and nerfed it hard recently.

Personally, making Indom or Excog the capstone skill is good enough if that's the real reason why Dissipation still exists. At least it's a skill we use on a regular basis, and they really boosts SCH's healing capacity, even if it runs counter to the very definition of a shield healer.