Scholar Lore issues..?

[IlluminaMentia]

Hello! So I love Scholar, it's my favourite job and yet it seems that with each update different pieces of the lore seems to break, as a newer player I've found it incredibly confusing to invest myself with this job due to this...

For example: Within the Scholar questline Eos and Selene are described as having seperate powers and yet within the game Selene not only dosent exist but is merely a glamour for Eos!

Alongside that within Encyclopedia Eorzea it mentions a spell called Leeches that seems to function as an Esuna and yet it has been removed (not even a flavour version of esuna and yet each job as one for a Raise)

Is Seraph meant to be Lily? I don't understand why it wasnt called Lily when summoned it just dosent make sense, not only that but it dosent look like it captures a middleground of Eos and Selene (Sunlight and Moonlight) and is instead just reflective effects...

Why is Scholar the only job to not retain a single skill from its previous job aside from Resurrection? Arcanist and Scholar are almost two different jobs and not an evolution at all (I was sold on the idea of a DPS becoming a healer)

Am I just petty, I really want to invest deeply into this game but so many things just irk me, Energy Drain on scholar and summoner do the exact opposite with one giving aether and the other using it, Why does Scholar have Ruin II? A spell thats naming convention was removed by the time Heavensward starts!

Sorry for my little spiel, I just was curious if anyone else cared about the lore here and if there were alterations that I'd missed!

[Connor]

I’m not a ‘lore expert’ but I’ll try to answer as best I can.

Eos and Selene used to be separate pets with different unique abilities. However it’s also made clear that they aren’t two separate entities, simply two different manifestations of the same entity. The change to delete Scholar’s Summon II and turn her into a glamour was only in the most recent patch (more or less), and they don’t generally adjust lore when it becomes detached from the gameplay (i.e Astrologian cards all do the same thing despite quest dialogue specifically saying they have unique effects)z

Following from that, Seraph’s true ‘identity’ isn’t exactly clear. From what I understand, I think Seraph is the true ‘entity’ which Eos and Selene comprise. That is to say, they’re two halves of a whole, and when you squish them together, you get Seraph. But there’s no official lore to confirm to deny that theory (as far as I’m aware).

Scholar’s separation/non-separation from Arcanist is a tricky one which goes back to even before 2.0. They needed a new healer (otherwise it’d only have been White Mage), but they’d also spent a ton of time/resources and were running thin on both. So they decided to try having their newly added job as a ‘branching’ job that could go into either Summoner or Scholar. The problem was, because those jobs had a shared base, it made balancing the two extremely difficult. Either Scholar ended up being affected by Summoner changes, or vice-versa.

Then there was the difficulty of them having to deal with essentially two different spell sets squished into the one job. The result was Scholar ending up with a bunch of DoTs that were meant for Summoner, and Summoner ended up with a bunch of utility like Eye for an Eye and Physick (which still scales off mind even though Summoner uses int lol), and Resurrection.

As a result, they decided to simply separate the jobs toolkits as much as they possibly could. But because of ‘netcode’ or whatever, it’s simply not possible for them to remove
Arcanist as a base class from either Summoner or Scholar, which is why we still some of these relics (like the aforementioned Summoner Physick)

[Cleretic]

Scholar is a little funky in some ways, mostly relating to the fact a lot of its base at-launch ideas sorta flopped. The idea of 'maybe we do two jobs off of a base class' turned out to be a bad one for largely the reasons Connor said, as was the Eos/Selene split; the intention was that Eos was more focused on healing and Selene more focused on non-healing support, but over time the stuff Selene specialized at just... didn't really work out, so Selene basically just became a trap choice, only being used by people who weren't in the know about the game's meta. (While I wish the game did develop in a way that stuff like Selene worked, because I like non-healing support, the devs are good at realizing that sometimes their ideas just didn't pan out and shouldn't be stuck to.) She went to 'separate but identical button' in Shadowbringers until becoming a glamor in an Endwalker patch.

Leeches was a somewhat similar victim; it was just Scholar's Esuna, but once they implemented role abilities in Stormblood (as a replacement for cross-class skills, which were also a bad idea) it was removed and Esuna made into a role ability because that just made more sense. I believe AST had a similar 'basically Esuna' spell, but I wasn't playing AST in Heavensward.

The game's lore is mostly solid, but you do see some funky stuff when you look at early jobs that have gotten some level of retooling over the years, so abilities that used to have some lore-based weight now just... don't exist in that form. Another example there is AST, which used to have time magic as a big tentpole of its skillset but just doesn't anymore, so there's some fluff about it but every time you get taught a spell it just veers away from that. My read from the fact Eos and Selene still have that in-story distinction is that in-universe, they do still have that split in specialties, it's just not really useful to us that they do.

EDIT: Incidentally, I should say that I think the fact that job lore stays the same even if the job doesn't is a positive for the game. Look at it from the perspective of someone who roleplays as their job; they rarely rerun that job story (and for a long period of the game didn't have the ability to), so it's helpful to them that what they've built their roleplaying around didn't change on a story level, even if the job did. If you made Selene a significant part of your character's identity for some reason, you didn't have to throw it all out.

[Brightamethyst]

Leeches was replaced by Esuna for balance reasons. Since Scholar evolves from a DPS class instead of a healing one is it has no low level healing spells besides Physick and pet abilities. EVERYTHING else is learned at 30+. That led to problems when you were trying to do dungeon like Toto-rak and Brayflox but couldn't cure poisons until level 40. Leeches was removes and replaced with Esuna as a role action to fix that issue.

[Connor]

Off topic, but Astrologian’s Esuna was called Exalted Detriment, and was removed for the same reason as Scholar’s Leeches. It was also to do with the introduction of the role skill system that created standardised abilities for one’s that used to have different animations but identical effects (i.e Esuna, Rampart)

[Jade_Tyrant]

Leeches was replaced by Esuna for balance reasons. Since Scholar evolves from a DPS class instead of a healing one is it has no low level healing spells besides Physick and pet abilities. EVERYTHING else is learned at 30+. That led to problems when you were trying to do dungeon like Toto-rak and Brayflox but couldn't cure poisons until level 40. Leeches was removes and replaced with Esuna as a role action to fix that issue.

If that was the case at the time, it seems to no longer be the case now. Scholar has multiple "Scholar-only" spells available before level 30; looking at the job guide, the only spell that is an Arcanist spell rather than a Scholar spell is Resurrection at level 12. Even Ruin (level 1) and Physick (level 4) are Scholar spells, not Arcanist spells.

[WhiteArchmage]

It was indeed the case at the time. The Job Stones worked by giving you new spells after level 30, exactly one new skill every 5 levels, so SMN and SCH shared the exact same skillset until lvl 30 and even then, they shared ACN skills up until 50, this meant that SCH shared Ruin 1 and 2 and both levels of Bio and Miasma, which incidentally made SCH the more "DPS-oriented" healer, SMN still has Physick I don't know if you mean SCH gets a Scholar-only version or something because I haven't seen SCH's skillset in a while (it was certainly useless for SMN since HW, because it scales off MND and not INT), I'd guess they made SCH Ruin also scale off MND instead of INT for SMN with the removal of Cleric Stance.

Yes, this indeed created a huge problem when one of your healer jobs couldn't use any of its actual healing skills bar Physick pre-Haukke Manor, and meant you had to be spamming Physick in Brayflox due to the boss's undodgeable poison DoT. However, the fairy is otherwise so OP in that content that a SCH didn't really need to HEAL because the fairy would take care of everything. (another fun tidbit was that Cleric Stance swapped your MND and INT attributes, and your fairy's heals were based on your MND at the time of summoning, so you could summon her without CS, then turn it on and DPS, and she wouldn't be affected; however, summon her with CS ON and you'd nerf her heals for no reason)

So, yes, SCH was kind of a mess in ARR up to ShB because of the Job System and being the only job that shares the same base class, while also being the only job that's a whole different ROLE than its base class.

[Vyrerus]

Specifics on Selene

Initially Selene's abilities were an AOE Esuna, a Silence, and a buff that specifically increased Spell Speed of the whole party by something like 20%. It was like this up into HW, and the Spell speed buff was changed to 3% haste in Stormblood.

All in all, this made early Selene use quite good for mage comps and BLM boosting. The silence also allowed SCH to take the role of interrupting, allowing DPSes to use their then DPS tied interrupts for DPS rather than for holding for interrupts, and the AOE Esuna was just more or less an oh shit button/icing on the cake (really useful for Thordan Ex PUGs screwing up paralysis towers). This somewhat meant that Eos was the raid prog fairy, as her abilities revolve around AOE heals and damage mitigation instead, and Selene was the DPS fairy.

The SCH has the ability to switch between them at any time (MP issues notwithstanding), though the skills do share cooldowns, so to play optimally you use both. But most folks just default to Eos, because she heals and Scholar is a healer!

My guess is they gutted Selene because balancing the haste buff on top of Chain Stratagem was more than the devs wanted to do, mixed with the same reasoning they got rid of Heavy Thrust from DRG. "Most players don't use it, in spite of it being for optimal performance, so we'll just get rid of it and raise the skill floor!"

[Brightamethyst]

The AoE Esuna was also fantastic for WAR tanks because Selene would instantly cure Berserk pacify (assuming Fey Caress was off CD.)

[Cleretic]

Initially Selene's abilities were an AOE Esuna, a Silence, and a buff that specifically increased Spell Speed of the whole party by something like 20%. It was like this up into HW, and the Spell speed buff was changed to 3% haste in Stormblood.

Thanks for the confirmation on this one; I did play Scholar back in Heavensward and Stormblood, but even back then I knew that Selene was a trap choice at best and 'min-max for a slight DPS boost that is most likely not worth it' at most, so I didn't exactly use her much.

Selene's kit was definitely a pile of 'things the developers realized were a balancing nightmare'. Selene's spell speed/haste buff was pretty undertuned, but haste buffs themselves proved to be a terrible idea to include (AST suffered from that too--or rather, AST's melee DPS teammates did), and an AoE Esuna turned out to be the nemesis of every mechanic designed around Esuna because one job was just objectively way better at dealing with them. And on the other side, Silence was basically worthless the entire time Selene had it, because if they ever made it strong it would be game-breaking. And all that is of course coupled with the headaches that came from the pet AI being pretty awful and prone to missing commands, which was its own pile of issues.

Honestly, a lot of pre-Shadowbringers Scholar suffered from the same thing; it was just this game's absolute embodiment of 'it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turns out it wasn't'. Would I like to play a game where pre-ShB Scholar could reach its full potential without breaking the game by every definition of 'break'? Yes, I probably would, but that's just not the game we got.