Genuine Scholar feedback

[Grimoire-M]

Honestly, that's how I feel too. SCH's a mess and it feels like SCH gameplay is largely about trying to mitigate the inherent downsides, restrictions and poor design in order to try and make it perform well. Then many SCH players claim doing so is "engagement and skill". It's sort of like when WHM was clip-mage last expansion, you had that small crowd of players who would argue to the death that it was good design, more fun and a skill based class because you had to plan movement. Meanwhile BLM existed as a perfect example of engaging gameplay where you planned movement. But no, mandatory Assize clips, blowing heals to move and limping around the arena were "fine".

There are better ways to design engaging gameplay than heal taxes, poor AI and half your toolkit vanishing because you pressed an oGCD. These just aren't necessary components of good class design.

Clip Mage and Energy Drain are not the same thing. One of those is a QoL gap the other is an option. I’m fine saying SCH has poor design elements, but most aren’t exactly unique to them. The primary one is the fairy sucks. Even pre-ShB pet interactions are pathetic relative to what Sage can do and they are loved by people. Frankly, most of the fairy actions just play off of her working from a centerpoint independent of the player, which is actually valuable, sure, but they aren’t impactful. And I’m not expecting that to change. I’d rather make her subsystem (Fey Gauge) matter more in general and scrap Seraph entirely if Seraph wasn’t trying to do a shoddy Panhaima impression.

Really I think the burnout from not getting proper attention across the whole role has just blinded people to what made these elements fun in the first place. To me it reads like we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. I’m not okay with trusting the developers with coming up with an alternative given what they’ve done to all classes from Stormblood onward either.

[Nizzi]

Energy Drain and Dissipation's respective places in Scholar's kit gives you a tangible reason to care about how you optimize your healing and DPS in the first place.

I’m not okay with trusting the developers with coming up with an alternative given what they’ve done to all classes from Stormblood onward either.

While I definitely agree with the second quote - it's the reason I don't want to see ED removed solely because I don't trust that they would replace it with anything better (I'm fairly certain they just wouldn't replace it at all and SCH would have its 1 DoT 1 Nuke) I'm not really sure how much it gives you a reason to care about optimizing healing, rather than just making your cohealer AST or SGE do it because they don't lose DPS for the things you do. Dissipation especially just functions as an "okay, I can't heal at all now outside of GCDs and Recitation if that's up, cohealer adjust" button, which seems to be what it felt like the developers were trying to move away from. Given the changes to ED to be even more spammable and now a 100 potency gain over the 10 in ShB, I really have 0 clue what exactly the design decision is for Scholar at the moment. (outside of them not even considering this at all, which I think is likely the case considering the state of Lilies on WHM too.)

Back in ShB, Ruin II and Energy Drain were the two most important buttons in Scholar's entire kit, because they allowed Scholar to both move and utilize free healing from the fairy, on top of being a slight potency gain. Throughout the entirety of ShB, ED usage was not on the level of a potency gain that it is now even pre-nerf. But what optimization do they offer now? With 1.5s cast times, you just never want to hit Ruin II, at all. Its 'optimization' is no longer as a movement/healing tool, its optimization is just never using this button. How is that fun? Same with Energy Drain, with it's 1s recast time changes and it being more of a potency gain, the 'optimization' is just "dump your ED during every 60s buff window for the maximum DPS." Sure, you can hold Aetherflow until it's close to being off CD and then dump it then, but that's not really being optimal with it even if you are getting DPS out of it.

If SCH needs an Aetherflow dump, why not make it a GCD DPS neutral button for both a dump and a movement tool? Just have Ruin II be able to dump Aetherflow at 295 potency when you have it and then stay at 220 when you don't. That frees up a button, or two if Dissipation is removed because like you said, it's just really a DPS tool at this point. This also should allow Aetherflow to be used outside of combat again, since it'd no longer be tied to DPS at all, and should IMO also lead to button bloat heals like Fey Blessing being removed and put into something like another charge of Indom to make up for it. Consolidating SCH's healing kit bloat can only begin once we start looking at how SCH is using its healing kit and what its priorities are; and as long as Aetherflow's priority is always DPS, SCH will keep getting shoved full of superfluous heals that are meant to work around the fact that you want to use Lustrate/Indom/Excog and Soil as little as possible.

I dunno. I see the merits of ED and I like it because it's unique and no other healer has the choice that Scholar does, but I also see the arguments for why it's bad for the job in the era of two healers being able to heal entirely free. Personally, if the removal of Energy Drain and Aetherflow as a DPS gain were to facilitate SCH getting a more fun DPS rotation, I'd be all for that. I'd rather have more things to manage in the form of DoTs or debuffs than the current system of spamming ED 3 times immediately every 60s with no thought on how I'm using it.