A lot of the main issues with SCH are not being addressed with Endwalker

[Saefinn]

Yes remove energy drain. You shouldn't have to choose between healer and dps

Whether somebody chooses between healing and DPS is not down to the complexity of your DPS kit. It's down to the content and how effects your healing tools handle it.

It's why playing as a Blue Mage healer is more engaging. It's less efficient at healing and despite you having a bigger DPS kit? You are DPSing less because you have to focus on your heals more.

And healing jobs have always had non-healing options in just about every RPG I can think of that has a healer, simply because there's periods of time people don't need healing and the healer still needs a purpose.

[Sebazy]

Same, healing the Bozja duty as a dancer is the most fun I've had in this game outside of Savage prog in years.

[ty_taurus]

Same, healing the Bozja duty as a dancer is the most fun I've had in this game outside of Savage prog in years.

You know, it's funny--For the hell of it, I was messing around with re-theorycrafting Dancer as a healer using largely the same kit, and honestly, it works pretty smoothly. We would undoubtedly need casted healing in the form of Curing Waltz, Divine Waltz, Astral Waltz, etc. (Though rename the existing Curing Waltz as your staple OGCD heal and keep it). You could probably get away with just 3 casted spells as your Cure, Medica, and Raise equivalents, but Dancer certainly has the hotbar real estate to afford that. We'd also need to lower potencies and damage because obviously keeping DPS numbers would be a big no-no for a healer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their rotation would need to go.

Cardia is basically plagiarizing Closed Position already, so it could've easily turned out the same in practice.

We could add healing to Standard Finish and Technical Finish. Yeah it runs into the Assize problem, but since the playstyle would really lay into the offensive healer identity, you'd be sure to benefit from that healing regularly, not to mention you'll know when your next burst heal would be coming when your party has some damage given how frequently standard comes around.

I'd say we could convert feathers into OGCD healing gained through your DPS rotation as usual. As mentioned above, we need to lower the damage anyway to make Dancer a healer, and since you store them as a resource anyway, they'd be perfect for your core healing resource. We could do something similar with Saber Dance and make it damage and healing since Esprit also gives you room to save it.

Honestly the only thing that truly breaks in functionality is MP. I mean, you could simply add MP costs to Dancer's actions and call it a day, but that's a bit odd I feel. A different idea I had was linking Dance Partner to MP similarly to how Foe's Requiem worked--as in it drains your MP (though more slowly than foe's), and we could perhaps include more MP management as secondary effects of things, perhaps make your steps restore your MP instead of act as additional healing and put more emphasis on maintaining feathers for HP. This would guarantee you had MP going into your bursts which would be important, but it would also limit your DPS buffs more which would also lower your overall damage a bit more in that process of balancing Dancer with other healers.

Beyond that one big thing that would need some design work to rectify, everything else I think would flow pretty well into a fun and exciting healer that wouldn't be for everyone certainly, but would be exactly what a lot of people want in healer that we're not getting even with Sage.

[Con_Moo]

I would suggest gaining Miasma, Bane and Fester from the soon-to-be-defunct Shadowbringers SMN and using Fester as the new Energy Drain. 100 potency with no dots on your target, 200 potency for one dot, 300 potency for two. Would be a major upgrade in DPS life for SCH and gets rid of Energy Drain which is even more underwhelming in Endwalker.

[Liam_Harper]

It seems their method to fix the issues with SCH was to create Sage.

It's smart in one way, they can straight up delete the fairy and Energy Drain, while pretending they actually didn't.

"We don't really know what to do with SCH" ...of course they don't. All the rework ideas went to Sage.

[Deceptus]

It seems their method to fix the issues with SCH was to create Sage.

It's smart in one way, they can straight up delete the fairy and Energy Drain, while pretending they actually didn't.

"We don't really know what to do with SCH" ...of course they don't. All the rework ideas went to Sage.

And SMN. . . You know, the other Arcanist subjob ><

[Pandatwin]

It seems their method to fix the issues with SCH was to create Sage.

It's smart in one way, they can straight up delete the fairy and Energy Drain, while pretending they actually didn't.

"We don't really know what to do with SCH" ...of course they don't. All the rework ideas went to Sage.

My thoughts exactly. Here's to hoping we get a major Scholar rework in 7.0 or even a mid-expansion one. Otherwise, I'm completely jumping ship to Sage.

[Grimoire-M]

You know, it's funny--For the hell of it, I was messing around with re-theorycrafting Dancer as a healer using largely the same kit, and honestly, it works pretty smoothly.

I have an old Dancer healer kit thread from Stormblood (here) that basically had Cardia as the go-to mechanic well before it became a thing, though it did a lot more than that. It used a basic 1-2-3 combo and augmented it in a few ways and let that be the core of the DPS rotation. It had guard heals (think HW/ARR Inner beast, but the heal was delayed so you were encouraged to time your use of it perfectly) augmented by a DPS version of Cardia to refund the loss (which got used in a few cooldowns) and relied on burst heals and mixture of debuff and buff based support. No regens, no shields.

It was from a time where that seemed realistic, that's for sure.

[Zeran_Moonpaw]

My thoughts exactly. Here's to hoping we get a major Scholar rework in 7.0 or even a mid-expansion one. Otherwise, I'm completely jumping ship to Sage.

I think sadly this is what a ton of SCH are doing, just jumping over to Sage. 3 expansions now Sch has had either parts of their kit taken away and given to the new healer or just had new capstone abilities just not function with the core ideal of the job. Sch has always been my main healer in the game prominently playing it as my main job in ARR, parts of HW, SB, and ShB but I don't think I can do it anymore... The idea of what the job is and how it actually plays are just so against its self... Even if the numbers on it are amazing and it ends up being the "best" healer because of dps or whatever. The general feel of the job is just not good to me anymore.

I have some weird ideas for what they could do for most of Scholar's janky feeling but they probably would mostly be OP so I won't really go into them here.

[Acidblood]

Snip...

A healer version of DNC is exactly the sort of healer that FFXIV needs; i.e. mostly oGCDs heals (with cast-time heals as backup); simple, flexible, instant, and no-cost damage abilities; a few buffs, utilities and cooldowns sprinkled in; and best of all, it's all integrated so the more active you are the more prepared and better you'd be at dealing with whatever happens.

The sad part is, this is also exactly the sort of healer FFXIV will likely never get