Quote Originally Posted by Sparkthor View Post
Seeing many people with different opinion of what to do to improve the scholar shows IMO players don't really know what to do either. I think they need to somepoint just delete some healing abilties what feel uninteressant, unwhelming or clunky to use. Dissipation is probably one what can be simply stripped away and few people would regret it.

I also get Seraphine could just be a ability what reinforce the fairy for some time, but people want flashy ability, and seraphine at least is pretty. On the other hand, i always feel fey union as e "meh" abity. It feels so clunky to use, and the fact the entire fairy gauge which deplete itself when you die is only for this skill disapoint me. But it's a very flexible tool so maybe it's just me.

About why dissipation is still here, I also suspect they are not confident about deleting last ability gain from one extension.
The devs said 'we didn't really know what to do with SCH', implying they didn't have any new ideas. While the players here do have ideas, just different ones. The point is that, despite not agreeing on one solid direction, the fact is the players can suggest multiple different directions the devs could have gone in, but didn't. Consensus on one idea isn't the point. The existence of any idea at all is the point, because it shows the devs were not as 'out of room to move SCH' as they seemed to imply they were.

I hadn't considered it before, but it's possible there's some kind of 'bias' towards keeping capstone skills (mostly as they're usually the flashiest ones). I can't think of any that have been outright deleted, only moved around in the levelling process (eg MCH Ricochet was the 60 capstone at one point, now it's 50) or reworked in effect. Well, unless you count full reworks of things, eg the card system for AST leading to Sleeve Draw being killed. It'd also serve to explain why some, frankly, not great skills have survived the chopping block for so long too, such as Tornado Kick for Monk living all the way till now, where it's actually useful (as a pre-90 version of Phantom Rush), or Dragonfire Dive (please god give it a trait upgrade it's so lame) or Sidewinder (same as DFD, it's kinda lame to hit for 300p in this world where even tanks have 900-1200p hits). If there were such a bias at work, it's more likely that a skill that is a 'crapstone' would be kept around with a reworked effect, rather than deleted outright.

And Fey Union is probably kept around because without it, there's no reason for the Fey Gauge to exist. With the cost removed from Fey Blessing, Union remains the only spender. Personally I thought partway through SHB that Blessing should have been made an AOE equivalent of Union, pulsing an AOE HOT effect for each 10 gauge it consumes. But then that'd give SCH another regen-type effect and that'd run counter to the Pure/Barrier split I didn't know they were going to go for