Quote Originally Posted by GrimGale View Post
I was never too fond of the "fey" aspects of Scholar, though I admit the idea of pairing up with a pet and heal is an archetype that is interesting and somewhat unique.
I feel like if not for some flavorful explanations across SCH's quests, its Fey aspect would have only tenuously linked to its thematic bases in XIV. Like SMN, it introduced a summon, but like its attention to aetherpool over aethertrails, it stuck only to metamagics / unaspected magics. The Selene/Eos choice, in turn, played a bit into the more decisive/tactical nature SCH originally suggested, but more than that it just seemed to harken back to the Light/Dark stance dance of earlier SCH iterations.

To be fair, that would still be totally fine if they just went further with it, such as by pushing Selene more to indirectly temporal aspects of metamagic, while Eos went more for aether "resonance" or whatnot (it doesn't matter which so long as the procedure selected is cohesively applied) to vivifying effect.

metamagic (In the sense that you can modify the potency, duration and effect of your spells by using stratagems)
This would be a perfect fit in XIV as well, and it has annoyed me to no end that we never got them. They don't even have to be direct actions, per se; they might instead be general strategies organically arrived at in gameplay, so long as the job questlines made some reference back to them.

and weather effects with Helix spells and Klimaform.
These, though, I'd rather leave to WHM, if only because of its Conjurer roots here in XIV.

Other Scholar iterations in the Saga revolve around Identifying monster weaknesses and gaining bonuses with the Libra and Analysis abilities.
These, too, should absolutely be a thing beyond just generic bonuses to damage or received-crit-chance. That said, getting full value out of that would probably take some heavy rework or addition to the game's undermechanics such that there'd actually be things worth figuring out about an enemy.

Just as a random spitball example, imagine if casting Libra on an enemy caused its attacks to pre-roll their Crit chances, and the party could see on the enemy (even if just by an red-orange [specials] or yellow-orange [autos] tint over them and/or a 3D icon above their head) that their next strike would crit, which would in turn be useful for quick on-demand mitigation. (Granted, at minimum 7s duration even for 25s CDs, the value of that niche, too, has decayed over time.)

Seems like SCH's identity is a bit all over the place in the series. It's a "caster" associated with books and grimoires but that's about it.
Indeed, but I do feel like we can still carve out something both compelling and cohesive between metamagics, stances (Selene/Eos, only rarely upgrading to offer the benefits of both), analysis, and stratagems.