Openly admitting to ignoring the players

[tinythinker]

A low skill floor is fine when the ceiling hasn't collapsed. I recall leveling SCH as a second job in 3.2 and no, I didn't know how to use many buttons. But I could still shield, direct heal, place my faerie/execute faerie commands, and use DOTs in a simple and often reactionary way. I'll admit, the more "advanced" thinking and planning was beyond me, so it was really rudimentary play, but for dungeons and normal trials that was fine. Yet there was a high skill ceiling for those who were progging or just bored.

Even without the skill ceiling being as high as before, Scholar could still be more interesting. First, of course, would be to make sure the skills flowed together better. Second, they could have the faeries be more interesting since they are the standout feature. Something similar to what they appear to be doing with SMN. Add a third faerie, then leave Seraph to kind of be the healer's Bahamut. So you then builder-spender (or us charges on a timer) that can activate the different faeries to alter the effects of existing skills or have a new button light up. These don't have to be overly complicated, and can be designed in a way that even a clueless person still gets some benefit no matter which faerie they use for regular content. But, for high end content, the differences could really result in at least a somewhat more significant advantage. (And honestly even just having cool new visual effects really standing out for faerie summoning would make SCH more interesting.)

The floor would still be low (yay for me and my super-smooth gaming brain), the ceiling is not as high as it was in HW (sorry :\ ), but it could still be a significant upgrade.


EDIT upon re-reading: Yes, I recall the faeries having their own unique abilities that we could activate or leave to the pet "AI", but that isn't what I'm referring to in my suggestion taking a page from the new SMN. The little pet is still there just like for SMN but there would be phases initiated by activating one of the faeries. To use a poor example made up on the fly, perhaps one of the faerie's causes Biolysis to do more damage for X seconds each time Broil or Art of War is activated giving a kind of damage window. Another Faerie might allow Art of War to Blind targets. They would also have a unique affect on at least one healing spell as well. Sorry for the bad examples, I'm sure SCH mains can think of better ones.