Scholar Lore issues..?

[Vyrerus]

Dunking on poor Selene

Q.Q But she wore thigh highs, Cleretic. THIGH HIGHS!

I'm pretty sure the nerf to Selene's spell speed buff was so they didn't have to worry about a mage meta happening and pushing melees out again, as had somewhat happened in ARR with loads of groups totally opting out of using DRG or MNK for Binding Coil due to the sheer advantage of BRD, BLM, and SMN having things that overlapped far better while also being able to play with impunity due to most boss AOEs being designed to punish ceaseless melee. In HW I guess they hadn't really decided on a direction/the retunes to melee had made them more than a match for any mage comp.

So in Stormblood they opted to make it a flat DPS increase by itself, but one that could be used to ensure more consistent burst windows for all members of the party. Something kind of ignored/misread/not cared about at the time, what with BLM and SAM competing for top DPS rawdog dat parse, having no raid buffs and caring way more about the ultra potent AST cards (RIP all of you kings, except you, Spire. Also RIP Stella, but that's beyond the scope of this tangent).

Silence from Selene was great for:

Silencing ADS in Binding Coil T1/T2.
Silencing ADS again in T11 add phase iirc(been so long I forgot if Ball does high voltage)
Silencing Gobskin in A2s
Silencing Flan speed boost in A3s
Silencing Mind Blast (or w/e the aoe charm was called) in A6s(and phase 2 of A8s I guess?)

I'm sure there's more. Basically anything you might care about silencing.

But by comparison, the Eos buffs were so potent that SCH was still competitive/better at blocking incoming damage in spite of having weaker AOE shields after the enormous Noct AST buff (and honestly a less consistently strong single target shield too).


Selene was given a raw deal, I tells ya! Probably because she wears her hair up in buns. *sigh*

[IlluminaMentia]

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.

They could just add it as a Scholar skill early on, they clearly don't mind removing skills between job change so why not add one, and it'd mean that a class Like Sage dosent have its entire naming convention broken by a random Esuna.

It just feels like a lot of healers have had these changes that contradict with their Lore, White Mage now has no elements in its entire moveset despite every bit of it being an opposite to black mage, using Stone, Wind and Water, now all there is-is Aquaveil, I don't know if I'm dumb for caring so much but the game clearly wants me to be invested in the lore, hence why the story campaign is required for progression but I feel like I'm being punished for trying to read more into it!
Let's not even talk about healer damage being so low that every story related battle is a slog meaning the only time I had fun was when I got to play as other characters, a stance or anything to buff damage while alone would also be appreciated, I've heard tanks struggle too but not to the same extent as trying solo content with an Astrologian...

[Brightamethyst]

They could just add it as a Scholar skill early on

That's probably not as easy as it sounds. If it was possible to retroactively add low level skills not attached to base classes they probably would have just made leeches level 16 or something and called it a day.

Even now we can still see this. It if was that easy to slot in low level job specific skills we'd probably have long since seen things move around. Succor at level 10 to match Medica/Helios/Prognosis, etc.

[Jade_Tyrant]

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.

Yup, Scholar on the Job Guide has a "Scholar-only" version of both Ruin and Physick. Ruin has less potency (and as you said, likely scales off of Mind) while Physick has higher potency. Both are clearly marked with the SCH symbol while Resurrection is still marked with an ACN symbol, and in-game the skills only list SCH for which job the skills belong to.

That's probably not as easy as it sounds. If it was possible to retroactively add low level skills not attached to base classes they probably would have just made leeches level 16 or something and called it a day.

Even now we can still see this. It if was that easy to slot in low level job specific skills we'd probably have long since seen things move around. Succor at level 10 to match Medica/Helios/Prognosis, etc.

But it's something we've seen them do plenty now? As I mentioned earlier in the thread, almost all of Scholar's low level skills are Scholar-only, not Arcanist - both the ones that share the same name and effect but with different potencies, and the spells like Bio and Bio II that no longer exist at all on Arcanist. It might not have been possible originally, but it definitely seems to be doable now.

[Grimr]

If you think scholar is bad check out ast. The cards used to make sense bole used to be for tank now its ranged dps balance used to be for ranged dps now its melee or tanks.

[Cleretic]

They could just add it as a Scholar skill early on, they clearly don't mind removing skills between job change so why not add one, and it'd mean that a class Like Sage dosent have its entire naming convention broken by a random Esuna.

The name 'Leeches' isn't worth all of that effort to retain. Hell, it was never a great name for the ability either; I get that it's a name that evokes ancient medicine, and especially combat medicine which is ostensibly Scholar's vibe, but 'leech' implies some form of life drain rather than 'remove debuff', especially in gaming where 'leech healing' is... y'know, an actual thing, albeit a thing FFXIV doesn't do.

White Mage is a whole different thing, that largely stems from the fact it's the only instance where the starting job actually doesn't match the classic FF job it became: classical White Mage casts Holy and Dia, not Stone and Aero, so one of them has to give. That said, Aquaveil is a sign that they're not completely rejecting it; they do want that elemental edge to be part of White Mage, they just don't want it to come at the expense of 'classic White Mage'.

(Also, as someone who played AST during the EW MSQ: the problem isn't that it was a struggle, it was actually the opposite, it was very easy but very dull. Healers aren't much fun without people to heal.)

If you think scholar is bad check out ast. The cards used to make sense bole used to be for tank now its ranged dps balance used to be for ranged dps now its melee or tanks.

Uhm, no, you're quite wrong here. Balance used to be for everyone, it was a flat damage boost, and ironically given the name, quite possibly the single worst idea in the entire game as far as balance goes. The Balance was the only card always worth drawing, everything else ranged from, depending on when we're talking, 'situational' to 'useless' to 'actively detrimental to some teammates'. Also, I'm not sure why you think either of those cards 'made sense' where they were, nothing about either of those cards explicitly says 'tank' or 'ranged DPS'.

Now if we were talking about the fact Arrow is for melee DPS we could talk, but that's not really something that 'used to be better'. Even with Old AST Bard was a 'yeah, you'll do' choice for Arrow.

[fulminating]

ff3 white mage had aero/ga and devout tornado, it's not a terribly recent addition.

If referring to specifically ff1, monk/pugilist don't have enormous hp pools/unquestionably highest damage and black mage doesn't have any utility e.g. haste.

[Cleretic]

ff3 white mage had aero/ga and devout tornado, it's not a terribly recent addition.

If referring to specifically ff1, monk/pugilist don't have enormous hp pools/unquestionably highest damage and black mage doesn't have any utility e.g. haste.

I was talking about 'their overall image and reputation, across all games'. Outside of XIV, white mage has only used Aero once, in FF3; after that point Aero becomes a blue mage staple, and hasn't been native to a white mage skillset since (outside of Bravely Default, but even that gave it to red mage in BD2). Stone is even less represented, that's never been in a white mage kit; water doesn't even have a consistent lineup of spells across the franchise, and when it turns up it's usually blue or black magic.