Seraph….

[NobleWinter]

For game so heavy on lore and enjoyable more for it I find it baffling we got tossed Seraph as an action and 2 expansions passed with no explanation for why she's being summoned. Technically 4 expansions have passed since Seraph was in the Limit Break animation before ShB. I just wanna know why she's there and no one talks about it.

[SweetPete]

For game so heavy on lore and enjoyable more for it I find it baffling we got tossed Seraph as an action and 2 expansions passed with no explanation for why she's being summoned. Technically 4 expansions have passed since Seraph was in the Limit Break animation before ShB. I just wanna know why she's there and no one talks about it.

I always wondered why scholar has seraph too. She’s not a fairy.

[Kimmay]

Angel winged fairies are common for Japanese media. Scholar fairies are supposed to have a myriad of forms, with Eos and Selene begin the most common. Seraph is most likely their true form, since it was originally only seen when the aether required for a limit break was used to summon her.

[Calysto]

Angel winged fairies are common for Japanese media. Scholar fairies are supposed to have a myriad of forms, with Eos and Selene begin the most common. Seraph is most likely their true form, since it was originally only seen when the aether required for a limit break was used to summon her.

Care to share some of those common media ? because I can't think of any (serious question, may be ambiguous since I kinda disagree with the rest of the post :x).
As for the "myriad forms". Before the last variant, there wasn't much lore-wise beside Lily, from a single soul crystal, one of the few relic from Nym (and even that just set the "fairy summon" before that era, which is completely new).
As I often say concerning that subject, the "angelic-aesthetic" of tied to Amdapor, and it wasn't really Nym's ally. I mean, sure, some knowledge trade may have occurred, but that wouldn't be a "true form" and we may as well have a "demonic fairy" from Mach before they went all full war. (maybe we'll get that with the time-travel expansion that send us then ? XD )

[ThorneDynasty]

With the new variant dungeon, there is now in-game lore to explain a Feo Ul glam option to replace Seraph. There was before basically since 5.0, but now this latest lore tidbit cements it

SE pls I don't want to see the stupid angel thing anymore it looks so 'not SCH thematic'

What exactly is the SCH thematic anyway? Is it tech? Is it nature healing? Pixie? Orator? Who can say.

[ty_taurus]

What exactly is the SCH thematic anyway? Is it tech? Is it nature healing? Pixie? Orator? Who can say.

Yes, but also no.

[Kimmay]

Care to share some of those common media ? because I can't think of any (serious question, may be ambiguous since I kinda disagree with the rest of the post :x).
As for the "myriad forms". Before the last variant, there wasn't much lore-wise beside Lily, from a single soul crystal, one of the few relic from Nym (and even that just set the "fairy summon" before that era, which is completely new).
As I often say concerning that subject, the "angelic-aesthetic" of tied to Amdapor, and it wasn't really Nym's ally. I mean, sure, some knowledge trade may have occurred, but that wouldn't be a "true form" and we may as well have a "demonic fairy" from Mach before they went all full war. (maybe we'll get that with the time-travel expansion that send us then ? XD )

For Final Fantasy, we have Faerie. In Kingdom Hearts 2, Yuna's "wings" are the angel wings in her hair. Obviously Seraph in 14, which is stated to be the scholar's fairy in the lore book. For Digimon, there are various fairy Digimon with feathered wings, such as Piximon and Luminamon. Card Captor Sakura has Keroberos as a feathered winged pixie sort of stuffed animal, Sakura wears a fairy costume that has a feathered wing for the lower set, and I believe that one of the cards is a pixie of sorts with feathered wings. In Yugi-Oh, we have various Fairy cards. While most of the "Fairy" are actually Angel in Japanese, some like Dancing Fairy are explicitly called fairies. In Pokemon, while not literally winged, Blissey of the fairy egg group and Mega Audino of the fairy type both have an angel wing motif. In Guardian Fairy Michel, Michel has angel wings. For Sailor Moon, Queen Serenity and Neo-Queen Serenity have fairy wings on their dress. In her transition to Neo-Queen Serenity, Usagi gets wings as Eternal Sailor Moon. While they are angel wings, they are also two sets: one large and one small, in the typical shape that fairy wings take. Is that enough?

The lore book specifically states that the fairies come in at least 2 forms, while also talking about a third: Seraph. Obviously that's written that way to allow the team to create as many forms as they please, even if nothing ever came of it. The same book makes it clear, without a doubt, that Seraph is not only the scholar's fairy but that it is her healing the party when a scholar uses their limit break.

[Kalinas]

There's lots of things SCH's faerie should be able to do. The Summon Seraph ability Seraphic Illumination should be more powered up version of Fey Illumination (10% magic healing up and 5% magic damage reduction) and the same with Whispering Dawn/Angel's Whisper (both 80 potency for 21 seconds...extra second to try to fix the quirky ghosting and animation). Instead, they're just the same abilities with a different coat of paint. The fact that Seraph locks you out of Fey Blessing while turning the Summon Seraph ability into two uses of Consolation is also odd. At least Embrace (180 potency) powers up a little when it changes to Seraphic Veil (180 potency + shield).

I do wish using Seraph was more responsive, but the animations delay things with the SCH pets. Maybe having Consolation go off right as she's summoned would be nice. It's just one of those things that you get used to and plan around once you learn fights or pulls in dungeons. If you're trying to use Seraph's AoE shields while a boss is casting a raid wide attack, then it's usually too late and the shield will apply after the bosses damage has already gone out.

As for the lore of why we have Seraph....a SCH's faerie is kind of like an advanced Arcanist Carbuncle (I mean we can turn the faerie into one of 3 Carby colors now) and Seraph is more advanced/powerful construct form of the faerie. I feel like the reason why they put Seraph into SCH's toolkit in the first place was that Faerie and Seraph were healing summons in other FF games. Faerie was first seen in Final Fantasy Tactics as a healing summons if I recall and she actually had feathered wings in that game. Then Seraph was in FFVI and was a big early healer summon/magicite (Angel Feathers being the signature ability). This makes sense as SCH branches off of Arcanist with the Carbuncle summon and then has Summoner with Ifrit, Garuda, Titan etc as a sibling job. The Faerie we use in XIV is a construct that was created by Surito Carito and saved in his soul crystal essentially.

This is from an old interview at a 2014 Fanfest with Koji Fox:

A: To follow up on a question from the stream earlier- the taxonomy that fairies fall into. Is there an origin to how they become fairies of Scholars. Were they fairies and then bound to scholars or did the scholars create them?

MCKF: Yes, the second one. Fairies again, while they fall under the taxonomy of elementals, they are actually beings that were created. They did not exist before. The Scholar would take the energies and elements from around them and would basically create these beings that were made of the elements.

A: Those are bound to the soul crystal then and passed from one person to the next where carbuncle is more one per person.

It also gets discussed more in this forum thread https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post3980681

[Calysto]

For Final Fantasy, we have Faerie. In Kingdom Hearts 2, Yuna's "wings" are the angel wings in her hair. Obviously Seraph in 14, which is stated to be the scholar's fairy in the lore book. For Digimon, there are various fairy Digimon with feathered wings, such as Piximon and Luminamon. Card Captor Sakura has Keroberos as a feathered winged pixie sort of stuffed animal, Sakura wears a fairy costume that has a feathered wing for the lower set, and I believe that one of the cards is a pixie of sorts with feathered wings. In Yugi-Oh, we have various Fairy cards. While most of the "Fairy" are actually Angel in Japanese, some like Dancing Fairy are explicitly called fairies. In Pokemon, while not literally winged, Blissey of the fairy egg group and Mega Audino of the fairy type both have an angel wing motif. In Guardian Fairy Michel, Michel has angel wings. For Sailor Moon, Queen Serenity and Neo-Queen Serenity have fairy wings on their dress. In her transition to Neo-Queen Serenity, Usagi gets wings as Eternal Sailor Moon. While they are angel wings, they are also two sets: one large and one small, in the typical shape that fairy wings take. Is that enough?

The lore book specifically states that the fairies come in at least 2 forms, while also talking about a third: Seraph. Obviously that's written that way to allow the team to create as many forms as they please, even if nothing ever came of it. The same book makes it clear, without a doubt, that Seraph is not only the scholar's fairy but that it is her healing the party when a scholar uses their limit break.

Thanks.
I'm not really agreeing with some of these being classified as fairies but maybe that's just me. (I'd also argue about the wing-count thing as it's also sometime used for angelic ranking)
I don't own the lore book so I'll trust you on that.

[rawker]

This. I would rather reintroduce Rouse than Seraph. In my opinion this was just their way to say SCH can have a demi summon much like SMN.