SCH concept changes

[KarmaYraeon]

They did write healing 'actions' here, not spells, so that 20% would presumably buff Union, W.Dawn, etc too. I like this idea as it'd bring back Rouse in a sense, being able to juice up a W.Dawn in ye olde days was always nice and rewarding feeling. The loss of Embrace for those 30s would be absolutely negligible compared to the extra healing provided to the other OGCDs by that 20%. My question is, the fairy has to stand still to channel Fey Union, and can't do any other action or the tether breaks. Does this restriction still apply to the player when Assimilation is in effect?

I was thinking about this question again and, while I've already responded, the question paired with the more recent comments about Seraph made me think about Assimilation acting like a situations Neutral Sect for scholar.
Allowing Assimilation to be cast regardless of what faerie is currently out would maybe make the ability more interesting as well. You can cast it at any time to consume and effectively become your faerie with a 20% healing boost to its abilities, but at the consequence of being centered on you. On the other hand, if you can get cooldowns to line up when you absolutely need it, you could consume Seraph instead of Selene or Eos to get access to Consolation over Fey Blessing. Without embrace/seraphic veil the difference between the two doesn't really matter too much, but it would be an interesting min/max option to go for. Furthermore, we could assume that consuming Seraph gives the abilities of Seraph for the full Assimilation cooldown, which in turn also means Getting 4 casts of Consolation with a single Seraph cast, rather than the usual max of 2, since you could cast seraph, and just before its timer runs out, cast Assimilation to gain its abilities for Assimilation's full 30s cooldown as well, in turn making Seraph more valuable as well.

[KarmaYraeon]

This still doesn't work because you're losing all the free healing you get from your faerie for half a minute.

To be fair, ideally it would be great to just change dissipation to something else entirely like sch flavour Temperance, but the idea was that you would basically get the bulk of faerie healing but souped up while also empowering your own healing. If they basically turned you into your fairy while buffing your healing by 20%, I imagine you would be able to cover 10 casts of Embrace pretty easily. Souped up Whispering Dawn for instance would be 112 extra potency per person. In an 8-man that is already worth almost 5 casts of embrace in a single gcd. Throw in Fey Blessing for another 64 potency per person is almost 3 more Embrace casts on its own too. This is of course ignoring other healing you might do as well. For instance its more likely that as a scholar you're probably going to Dissipation/Assimilation during downtime/before a big mechanic to get the added healing on a critlo which would mean over 216 potency on everyone's shields, and 432 extra potency on the initial target. The adlo cast alone already covers the embrace healing lost and then some.

This all being said, like I started with, this is just grasping at straws for if they absolutely insist on keeping dissipation as it is with eating the faerie. Ideally it is changed to literally anything else but oh well. Working with what we can I guess. Also the aesthetic bias of being interested in the idea of sch getting wings as well...

[AnotherPerson]

This still doesn't work because you're losing all the free healing you get from your faerie for half a minute. Deleting a chunk of your healing toolkit to get more healing just doesn't make sense no matter how you want to spin it. And I'm not trying to say you're a strong proponent of erasing the faerie; you're trying to find a way to make this idea work since SE seems hell-bent on swatting the faerie out of gameplay as frequently as possible, but it's on them to just accept that this is shitty design and no one wants it.

If you're going to yeet your faerie across the room and kill a chunk of free healing, the rewards needs to be pretty extraordinary. More healing doesn't and will not cut it. A major burst of damage might, but then you now have to gimp your own healing output at regular intervals in order to engage with your burst window, which isn't a great thing either. There's really no answer that isn't awful in some regard.

Rather than trying to bargain for a less awful Dissipation, just delete Dissipation. It's what SCH players have wanted since 3.0.

Not necessarily, since Assimilation boosts all healing actions, so Whispering Dawn, Aetherpact, and Fey Blessing will all receive potency changes. The added bonuses of Aetherflow returning basically creates a horizontal shift in resources (moving the power of sustained Embrace casts into Whispering Dawn, Aetherpact, Fey Blessing while simultaneously strengthening aetherflow healing + GCD shields). Provided that Aetherpact doesn't stop the Scholar from attacking on their own and is treated as a tether regen buff, it would be a good change, albeit long overdue.
At least this is much more preferable than the current Dissipation, which just eats up Embrace healing + locks you out of all your faerie skills without strengthening them in any way. It would allow a lot more flexibility in resource management and control without being useful for only DPS gain via Energy Drain spam.

I don't agree with simply deleting Dissipation. Every time they just delete a skill, they don't necessarily give anything back to replace it. IMO, it's a worse tradeoff since you don't even have ways for quick recovery afterwards if you consume all your resources, much less a replacement for what that skill can provide.

[KarmaYraeon]

Exploitation

I considered making Exploitation Tactics a flat potency, having used Warrior's Vengeance as a reference, but I think the concern there is that it would be even cheesier than making it an amount of damage based on shield damage, since if it was a direct reaction for each hit, regardless of how much damage is actually dealt, you get situations such as tanks using mitigation to make a shield last for more hits, or in the case of paladin and gunbrealer - using their invuln to outright ignore damage to the shield while still getting the retaliation damage for having the shield in the first place. Having the damage tied to the shield directly simply means that its a fixed potency regardless of how quickly or where the damage is applied. That being said, I won't deny that it would basically turn into one of those burst window only buttons...

[Sparkthor]

I think an other way to simplify atherflow management :

Aetherflow : grant 2 stacks of aetherflow, restore 1400PM. 40s cd, 2 charges. Max 3.

By doing this, we keep aetherflow a dynamic mechanic, but it solves the urge to use it on cd and create more opportunity to manage Aetherflow. I think we could get rid of energy drain as we would only have 2 lustrate to waste on worst scenari every 40s (which would be rare on ex and savage content)

I agree dissipation is a mess and could simply be removed. I think of something to replace it, but it was way to similar at recitation which i think is a nice ability.

I think fey union could be a classic cd which make the fairy put an huge regen on someone for a few second. It would make it usable when Seraphine is out and free the gauge, which in my opinion could be used as full offensive. My though would be for some of fairy gauge, Ruin 2 is improved to fairy broil which is a instant cast, stronger than broil with aoe decrease. As it, SCH would get a moving and double weaving spell with no dps loose. It could also help feeling wasted lustrate not so waste.

I cannot think of a good separation between Eos and Selene, the only i got in mind would be AOE vs Single target heal, but it would need both summon to be instant ability.

[ty_taurus]

I don’t think that Aetherflow change fixes the issue. It makes gaining Aetherflow more flexible, sure, but it’s still not giving you a way to spend that Aetherflow, which the reality is, you don’t always need them, even in Savage.

It’s not going to help when you pull Smileton, for example, and still can’t spend them because there’s literally no one to heal for an entire boss fight.

[Sparkthor]

Sage got the same issue and need to use Druochole once every 20s for MP regen and I never saw many complains on this especially. What's why i think flexibilty got more chance to happen than getting something like you proposed.

[ty_taurus]

Sage got the same issue and need to use Druochole once every 20s for MP regen and I never saw many complains on this especially. What's why i think flexibilty got more chance to happen than getting something like you proposed.

It’s not a problem in the sense of it’s not a direct hinderance, but it’s very sloppy design and doesn’t feel good to use. A well-designed healer should never promote over healing, and optimized play should always result in an overhead value that is as close to 0% as possible, taking into consideration that sometimes necessary healing may bleed over slightly.

[ForsakenRoe]

It’s not a problem in the sense of it’s not a direct hinderance, but it’s very sloppy design and doesn’t feel good to use. A well-designed healer should never promote over healing, and optimized play should always result in an overhead value that is as close to 0% as possible, taking into consideration that sometimes necessary healing may bleed over slightly.

But on the flipside, is there actually anything 'wrong' with just overcapping eg: lilies or sageblobs? Like, if there's no healing needed for 30 sec as WHM and I'm at 3 lilies, I don't burn a lily just because I'm capped. Maybe that's incorrect because haha Misery, but lets say I'm at 2:20 in the fight and this happens, the raidbuff window isn't for 100 sec. So me burning lilies to get a Misery prepped for 3:00 doesn't seem necessary to me. The only thing it'd be useful for is keeping it lined up that 'ok I've used all the lilies for 'this minute' so I know I'll have up to 3 to use to have Misery up in time for 4:00' but I can't be bothered with all of that and just use Misery when it's ready (unless I know raidbuffs are soon and I can afford to hold it till then). I don't go out of my way to purposely blow Lilies 2 GCDs before the raidbuff window just to force a Misery, because I PF stuff and I'd rather have them available in case the Tank forgets a CD for the TB+Bleed, or a DPS stands in something they shouldn't, or someone doesn't go to their Dog Jump in time and a tank gets that horrific DOT for 30s. Maybe that's not 'optimal' but I don't play in an environment where 'optimal' is possible to achieve, and I've still had fairly ok logs despite playing so 'horribly suboptimally' so /shrug

SCH is a less good example because it's a lost Energy Drain, and 10 gauge (lol), but overcapping is not going to be the end of the world really. SGE though is just 'you get 700 mp'. So if I'm at max mp, and I'm capped on blobs, I don't use one just to use one, I leave them capped. In case I need to spare an unexpected Druochole for something. This also means my Rhizomata usage over the fight is pretty awful (because I'm capped so often), I wish Rhizo would work in a way that doesn't risk overcap as badly. Recitation doesn't suffer this problem, it's like they thought 'damn we gotta make Rhizomata feel different from the thing we blatantly copypasted over from SCH, lets make it have infinitely more chance of overcapping the player that'll make it feel different'.

Overcapping would be bad in a design where it's designed that you want to avoid overcap, but SE has designed the classes in a way where it feels more like 'ah well who cares', because losing healing resources to the void and then having a wipe because of that lost healing resource would be too stressful for the players. So they made it to where overcap doesn't matter at all. I can go through an entire savage fight with Thin Air, Divine Benison capped at 2 the whole time, and Lilies capped out at 3 for like 50% of the fight. My log will be garbo, because I'd have to cover with Medica 2 a bit more, but it's possible, because SE designed it to be possible that way. Maybe not P8S in week 1 gear (well definitely not because the HP was scaled wrong lmao), but I bet it'd work in P5S in week 1 gear

[ty_taurus]

It’s true that the raw concept of over capping isn’t inherently a bad thing, such as with a cooldown like Rhizomata in your example, but both Aetherflow and Addersgall are tied to MP management, which to be fair, is not a prominent concern for healers, but forgetting or not using these resources does cause you to loose MP restored over time.

The problem with this is you don’t know if something bad will happen and you need to throw out raises to try and salvage a botched run. This isn’t a common occurrence either, but the best thing to do is to ensure you’re getting the most MP out of your kit so that you’re as prepared to handle circumstances like that, and pick up the habit of doing that always so that you’re not forgetting to do it when it matters.

If Aetherflow and Addersgall had no connection to MP management, or anything other than specific resource management, it’d be perfectly fine to let sit at cap. It wouldn’t necessarily be a beacon of exciting gameplay either but it wouldn’t feel bad to not have a spender of sorts.

Overhealing also doesn’t actually have a negative impact, so your argument makes sense. If it doesn’t really matter, what’s the problem? Well, from my perspective, it just doesn’t feel good or make me happy as a gamer to know that sometimes I’m just going to burn heals I don’t need. There’s a lot of players who want to feel that the way they’re using their tools is as tactically as possible—that nothing that’s used is going to waste, so to speak. So when you’re wasting healing just to get some MP back, it feels sloppy and defeating—that there was no way for me to make use of both sides of that action and that translates to a negative moment in my gameplay.

Not everyone feels this way, but I’d argue it’s a fairly common way to feel for a lot of gamers. In Persona games, for example, I don’t want to accept someone’s invitation to hang out if I’m already at the point of being able to advance my relationship with that character. It’d feel like wasting the points I earned because they don’t cross over to the next rank in that social link. It’s the same mentality.