Scathe

[Taranok]

I'd raise the potency of Scathe to match Ruin 2 as it is now on Scholar, but not refresh the Astral Timer. It doesn't benefit from Astral Fire but if you absolutely have to move and keep DPS, it'd at least be tolerable. Or make it a new Drain spell. I miss Drain.

And this is a big part of the reason why Scathe is awful. To fully put scathe into perspective, it could be 400 potency (before eno/maim and mend) and it would still be a massive potency loss. And at that point, it would approach parity with Scholar. Scholar is -90 potency to ruin 2. Since Scathe competes with fire 4, not fire 1/paradox, putting it at 400 potency would make it the equivalent to losing about 82 potency compared to fire 4. (540 / 2.8 * 2.5 = 482 potency, which would be our baseline for comparing a 2.5s GCD to what it's costing you.) So slightly more favorable than SCH's loss of potency. This would still make it the single most expensive loss that wasn't casting a second fire 1, but if you're comparing the potency to another class, you're already on the wrong footing for trying to balance it.

The problem with 400 is that BLM in EW will average about 167 pps, and at 400 for scathe, it's at 160. You could almost approach parity with the full rotation by just chain-casting scathe, which would be an interesting option but would still require maintaining AF/UI for enochian, but you'd have to keep it roughly in this ballpark or you're just not going to do enough damage to justify it even as panic movement.

And this is all while trying to consider Scathe's current MP cost and how it fits in with AF/UI timers, which is another reason why I want AF/UI timers gone, but that's secondary in this discussion because the problem is, even making Scathe 300 potency per GCD would still be nowhere near enough to make it worthwhile, and you're asking for a mere 200 potency to make it equivalent to Scholar, while also doing nothing for the AF/UI timers.

At that point, provided I'm not dropping AF/UI, it's better to flat out do nothing and try to recover the standard rotation than it is to use scathe, which is the entire reason people don't use scathe to begin with. Straight up make an Aetherial Manipulation macro, hard clip the GCD to get where you need to go in 5-700ms, and go right back to casting would be more favorable than casting a scathe that's not at least 300 potency.