Top Tier Scholar Fix for Endwalker

[Mezzoforte]

I know what you are about to say, just hear me out. All this blowback about such a great scholar skill. That AOE uptime beast of a skill. It fell flat on its face due to presentation. So let's fix this as a community. If enough people agree with it.

Rename the sprint skill to "OOOOOO! MY LITTLE SAPLINGS!" then have it make a bright Eos/Selina color pallet explosion. Then for the big win, it enchants each player that is subject to the sprint speed bonus small fairy wings like Eos/Selene for the duration of the buff. This way it not only lets me know intuitively I have the sprint speed bonus as a player receiving it by seeing it on my back as run but now everyone will be losing their minds over being able to /gpose with the wings, giving random people invites and winging them in Limsa, or just making your dance team at the Club in Balmung way more fly with those wings and custom emotes to bust out the moves! If anyone has some artwork from their mind of how it would look feel free to post! Lets get down, get down, get down for Scholars!

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

[inhaledcorn]

Ah, yes, that's the problem with Expedient, and not the fact that:

It's a boring capstone skill, especially compared to Macrocosmos and Pneuma which are neutral damage on single target, damage gain on AoE, on top of having extra healing/defense utility.

It's a capstone skill that fights itself by design (the sprint means you need to move to dodge mechanics, making the defense buff weird, or you need the extra defense to absorb a bigger hit making the sprint unneeded).

They said that the sprint wouldn't be significant to prevent SCH from being mandatory.

They didn't fix the problems with SCH other than the Fairy supposedly being more responsive to commands.

Yes, the only problem with the skill is that it doesn't look cool.

You hit that nail on the head.

Good for you.

[Mezzoforte]

Ah, yes, that's the problem with Expedient, and not the fact that:



Yes, the only problem with the skill is that it doesn't look cool.

You hit that nail on the head.

Good for you.

Totally missing the point, but that isn't surprising. The problems elsewhere in the kit are unrelated and their own issues. However, if you need a place to complain I am here to listen! This was very specifically about the issue of the skills presentation and hype for it in comparison to others. Scholars lacks that fun flashy and thematic edge other classes have. If you want to dig into the mechanics then that is entirely separate, and frankly your anger due to that is preventing you from having something enjoyably flavorful. The majority of the people who play don't even care about a lot of the very fine details of the class.

[Dogempire]

Totally missing the point, but that isn't surprising. The problems elsewhere in the kit are unrelated and their own issues. However, if you need a place to complain I am here to listen! This was very specifically about the issue of the skills presentation and hype for it in comparison to others. Scholars lacks that fun flashy and thematic edge other classes have. If you want to dig into the mechanics then that is entirely separate, and frankly your anger due to that is preventing you from having something enjoyably flavorful. The majority of the people who play don't even care about a lot of the very fine details of the class.

Not exactly, it's just not very useful.

If you need the speed boost you probably don't need the mitigation; and if you need the mitigation then you probably don't need the speed boost.

It's a dual-purpose skill, which would be interesting if the utility on either side wasn't so marginal

[ItMe]

This skill dynamically effects players and you're proposing we visually tweak it so it is more evident when it is in effect?
That sounds like a valuable addition.

Also, changing a SCH skill so it's involves the fairies more?
Priceless~

[Nizzi]

I think they should give the Scholar an glasses push up animation when Scholar uses Expedient, and then also give the rest of the team no indication on the buff bar that the Scholar used anything.
Like this:



It seems fitting for when you've doomed your allies into running into AoEs during Forced March mechanics or accidentally running off the stage because they're suddenly sprinting.

[rewd]

Not exactly, it's just not very useful.

If you need the speed boost you probably don't need the mitigation; and if you need the mitigation then you probably don't need the speed boost.

It's a dual-purpose skill, which would be interesting if the utility on either side wasn't so marginal

It's so weird you say that when last raid tier was filled with instances where Expedient would have been good.

[Dogempire]

It's so weird you say that when last raid tier was filled with instances where Expedient would have been good.

Sure, but in situations where you need a speed boost you have a sprint button whose usage you can and should plan, and unless there's a mechanic that practically requires expedient + sprint or a gapcloser to dodge I don't really get how it'll be useful other than as a mitigation cooldown

Anyways, I'm not going to call it a useless skill, it's just boring if that's their best attempt at making an exciting new Scholar skill that'll really make people want to play the class over Sage.

Heck it's boring if you want to get people to play a healer in general

[PaulH]

So if we execute sacred soil and the expedient whilst still standing. Isn’t stacking 10% damage reduction and only receiving upto 90% of incoming damage inflicted useful?

I am assuming these are stackable.

[ty_taurus]

I'm also in the camp of viewing the sprint effect as a good one; however, there are several factors at play here that just make Expedient feel like a slap in the face.

1. Sprint and Damage Reduction clash with one another. The point of sprint is to create more room for error. Mechanics shouldn't enforce sprint, but there can be tighter dodge windows on certain mechanics that sprint can make easier especially during prog--not to mention it can help players catch themselves if they're in the wrong place during prog as well. It essentially is invalidating the point of damage reduction in many cases. It basically narrows Expedient's full value down to something where there's unavoidable damage at the same time which doesn't really happen.

Know what would pair really well with Expedient? A raid-wide Lightspeed effect--reduce the cast times for casters (but not the recast time). That concept synergizes with casters giving them increased mobility as well since making their casts instant or 1 second helps them dodge mechanics more easily, especially since sprint has the secondary effect of helping melee return to attack range more quickly.

2. It doesn't feel like a great capstone. I feel like this is an issue with healers as a whole in that SE doesn't really understand what makes a healer ability "good" or not and thus has multiple instances of capstones that just don't feel impactful or are outshined by abilities acquired earlier. Assize is the star of WHM's 50-60 span, not Tetragrammaton. Penary Indulgence was a joke when it was first released and even now is a relatively tepid OGCD. Temperance is literally a buffed Divine Seal 40 levels later than it was obtained prior to Shadowbringers. Need I even bring up Dissipation and Fey Union? At least Summon Seraph doesn't negate all of SCH's faerie interactions and feels like it's offering a genuine value. They only ever seem to get AST right. At least during those expansions, Celestial Opposition and Sleeve Draw were interesting and useful, core abilities, and Neutral Sect is just powerful.

To get back on topic, Expedient has niche value, but that's not what we really want in a capstone.

3. SCH's playstyle was torn apart when transitioning into Shadowbringers and got nothing of value to compensate. Regardless of their stance on healers, I cannot fathom how anyone would look at how much they wanted to gut from SCH and thought that Recitation, Fey Blessing, and Summon Seraph would make up for that. Not to mention the pet system was botched to add more salt to the wound. Moving forward, none of that shredded identity issue was addressed, and "have a team sprint" really isn't the answer that any SCH player wanted to see regardless of how affected they were from the Shadowbringers changes, particularly when 2 of the other actions its getting for the expansion are just mild potency boosts for Broil and Art of War.

I just don't think there's anyone genuinely thinking about what SCH players would want to see or feel good about receiving. If there was, we wouldn't see SCH getting nothing but a brief max HP increase buff and a poorly-thought-out team-wide sprint.