!!!Going to preface this with me being a ShB baby, so you can ignore any opinion I have about SCH!!!

I hear that older SCH players prefer AST due to it being more interactive (due to cards and a lot of weaving).

We have the situation in EW where SCH will be able to weave with Broil, the dev team doesn’t want to go back to pre-ShB SCH, and the dev team kinda likes the design direction of SCH. We also seem to have a distinction of pure vs. barrier and utility vs. power.

So, with that my suggestion. Make SCH more of a counter to AST with Chain Stratagem.

New Chain Stratagem (Ability)
Instant cast, 30 sec recast
Increases critical hit chance on target by 3% for 12 sec (actually 3.125% under the hood, but might need to be adjust upwards)

Reasons:

1. We’ll have a little more to do. A constant complaint of SCH (and healers in general, though I hear it more on WHM and less on AST)

2. We get to use that awesome Chain Stratagem animation more often (the computer sci-fi effects are awesome, props to whoever designed that).

3. It brings the SCH’s closer to its traditional FF identity of identifying something about an enemy to boost the party’s damage into a more regular/accessible action. AKA, we get Libra!

4. Very little work for the dev team, as it doesn’t have to change much. Tweak the numbers and change the text.

5. Reinforces SCH’s focus on utility dps and not personal dps.

6. If that’s not good enough, maybe add a trait to upgrade it to Chain Stratagem II. If CS II is used on an enemy afflicted with Biolysis, Biolysis explodes and debuffs nearby enemies with a 30 pot/12 sec DoT called Autolysis. This’ll sorta bring back Bane and makes Chain Stratagem still useful against packs of enemies and not just single enemies without causing too much button bloat.

Anyway, hopefully this is a nice simple adjustment that can add some fun, flavor, flash, and effectiveness in! It doesn’t solve other problems with SCH, but maybe this is a small thing we can have.


(Math Justification
Each CS lasts 15 sec for 10% increased crit hit chance. So, multiplied together creates 150%sec. So we have 120 sec = 150%sec_effective. Divide by 4 and we get 30sec = 37.5%sec_effective.

Now we just need some good numbers for what makes 37.5%sec. I settled on trying to find a duration that’s meaningful that’s a multiple of 3 to match server ticks. Obvious choices seemed to be 15 sec (which would match up with cards) or 12 sec. 15 sec at 2.5% might look small to the eye and the decimal makes it look…to nit-picky so it might be misconstrued as boring to players. At 12 sec, could have it at 3.125% (which can be shown as 3% in the ability text, but actually 3.125% in the programming). 3% might look a little bit better, so I settled for 3(.125)% at 12 sec.)