Some Big Issues I Have With Scholar.

I placed this forum here since I can't make a screen name on the FFXI forum. ><

Not a QQ. Feel free to comment your thoughts on the issues.

This is all my opinion on Scholar and some of my issues on it. Some of these ideas may be close to others ideas so I'm not taking credit for it I'm just trying to get this job back on its feet and point out some ideas.

*Scholar is a strategic mage, so it should be a superior mage job using it strategically*

1.) I agree that SCH does need Cure V or at least something some SCH unique healing spells that can cure more than a simple Cure IV.

- A simple thought: Why not make a Scholar healing spell that is directly enhanced with -Enmity and capable to be modified w/ stratagems. The less enmity the SCH has the more the healing spell will do. This will put the spell Animus Minuo in great effect upon a SCH and also put "Libra" to more usage. I say this spell should be at a tier I-V spell starting from low levels and increasing in tier at certain levels.

2.) The set bonus "Augments Grimoire" is pretty much a waste if its just "Quick Cast." We should have something like occasionally gives free stratagems.
- Bottom Line: First off "Quick Cast" isn't a big boost for us. The funny thing is that "Quick cast" would only be really useful towards Nukes and maybe casting a reraise/raise/stone/blink/aqua spell. BLM has Elemental Celerity II and armor that reduces the casting time to a very short time for nukes which really just kicks a nuking SCH with "Quick cast" in the balls.. There's also an issue when using Immanence on a closing nuke and "Quick Cast" procs it doesn't SC from what I see.

3.) the Savant's Gown +1/+2 enhanced Addendum: White/Black WTF does it do??? If its less enmity for spells under current art that would just be a waste unless the Healing/Nuking spells are enhanced w/ enmity for example Nuke damage increase w/ +enmity, healing magic increase potency w/ -enmity. And using add. white gives -enmity and add. black gives +enmity

4.) SCH is known for the strategic mage that can AoE spells. We should be the only job that can AoE all spells while others are limited to certain spells. Look at BLM they have -ja spells now so it still keeps BLM higher. SMN has hastega with Garuda so there should be another source that can give hastega also. Another thing I don't understand why SCH can't AoE helices spells..Its a SCH unique spell why wouldn't it be capable w/ our job abilities /facepalm.

5.) Klimaform the recast time is long as hell and it lasts for 1 min..either increase the duration or reduce the recast time.

6.) Make some gear or a weapon that "Enhances the potency of Adloquium Schema" that could also stack with other gear with the same enhances.

7.) Modus Veritas missing is just so damn lame it should be 100% but if stacked the percentage goes down further.

8.) Enlightenment should not only reduce the MP cost of both spells with your next magic spell (as if your light arts or dark arts),
but also allow you to use the both dark/light stratagems for next spell.

**(Optional)** our 2 hour should change to "Crimson Grimoire" once you defeat Gunther in Survival of the Wisest. This grimoire is the ultimate grimoire which would have all our stratagems completely free and spells at our usage w/o the addendum.

I mean seriously SCH is like the most unused job so far. SE needs to focus a bit more on trying to make it useful.

I agree that sch should be able to aoe haste least with sch set to main; make it cost as much mp as garudas haste.

1) Neat idea. Would be cool to see that put into effect. Though I really think RDM SCH should get Cure V @99 and WHM should get Cure 7 to counteract that.

2) I think Quick Cast is useful, when it procs. It resets Recast timer too! Most people don't realize this. Increase proc rate maybe?

3) I think it should have had 2/tic Refresh like the other AF3+2 bodies.

4) Haste-ga Yes, please. Thats the only thing that pissed me off about SCH when the 75+ level caps came along.

5) Use Alacrity with it. Though I agree, one or the other please.

6) 2/tic would be fine, 1/tic is just terribad. Gear that enhances it woulda been nice. Some AF3 enhances the 80+ abilities (look at COR!), why not SCH as well?

7) Agreed.

8) OMFG AGREE 10,000,000%!!!! I thought I was the only one who thought this!!

Optional) Sounds cool.

I agree with a lot of things, being a sch myself, but the census disagrees with this. Us pups need love :<

The problem is split between the community's initial perception and SE's lack of resources/attitude when it comes to designing games for audiences outside of Japan.

The community is to blame here, I need to stress that first. While everyone is just laid back and answer everything with "LOL<insert random job>" mentality, we're too focused on top/god tier options in America.

Just because someone in the community posted up parsing results of X job versus Y and proving that Y is a joke of a DD class, you have to remember that some people are just better at the game than others. You can have someone with the best gear possible and the most fleshed out macros they can find to copy/paste, but absolutely fails parsing against a non-relic version of the job... it just boils down to a player's skill ingame.

Would you rather pick up someone that obviously bought a $4,000 FFXI account, but only has played for less than a year or someone that knows the ins and outs of the ingame mechanics of the game? This includes how to cheat parses, the exact safe range to cast a tier V nuke without the "out of range" message, the timing required to cast Stoneskin while kiting, etc. Let alone levels and knows how mage jobs work and not just play a f'n DD job all day. It just ultimately comes down to experience and the people they work with.

Just like any profession, you're only as good as the people you surround yourself with.

With SCH's case, it was released as a half-assed job, it got a few buffs, but SE clearly never gave the job anything OP enough where the community was talking. Even after the whole Helix/Modus video, SE immediately nerfed the job and still hasn't really found a clear focused nich in the game other than a swiss army knife. Sadly, if SCH ever receives any buffs beyond the big 3 mage jobs, you can be sure there's gonna be a lot of bitching in the community. You can't seem to make everyone happy if this happens.

SCH's a pretty powerful job, but only in the hands of a career mage in XI. There's such a huge difference in play style when you compare someone that's played XI for 7+ years on mage jobs vs. someone that only has SCH as their only mage job or a job supplementing their BLM. SCH is a very skill intensive job that rewards skillful players.

That's not say that SCH doesn't have it's own small problems and tweaks. I agree with the OP on some levels, but realistically, would SE care? Which brings us to the next part.

Second, SE just isn't in the position to care anymore. Why would they? If you recapped almost every tweet and response on the community boards, they're either too busy or it's too hard to implement a new system in XI. They're too focused on saving XIV and all the potential shitstorm with the shareholders.

Not just that, they have fallen behind of Western developers. This includes almost all Japanese developers, sans Nintendo because they always play it safe with family oriented games. What was cool back then, is just too stale and linear now, including the art direction in many of Square's games. Seriously, take a look at XIII. Tell me with a straight face that game had good art direction, let alone an actual tone or a protagonist we should care about. There wasn't even a real antagonist in the series that made it memorable. Where's the Ganon to Link, the Fox News to John Stewart, the Joker to Batman. There was no human connection in that game, let alone any recent SE game. SE's lost their touch and has forgotten what makes games iconic.

If it wasn't for their acquisition of Eidos, Square would have almost nothing, outside of pleasing Otakus and Cosplayers with more Final Fantasy based IPs at E3 this year.

If SE gave rat's *** about the game, they would've had more Qs and As publicly at game trade shows/blogs/twitter, instead of hand selecting certain ones to address and saying it's too hard to implement or when they have time. The community boards were a good start, but I don't realistically see them supporting the game much longer considering a huge chunk of their subscribers in Japan are PS2 users. When I say much longer, I don't mean within a year, but I don't see it lasting beyond the next gen-systems. They'll eventually face the problem with dropping PS2 support altogether.

This post derailed the thread entirely but I like it better.

Agreed. Anyone else see SE publishes manga now? Doesn't that just scream businesspeople, not game developers? Anyone else play Chaos Rings and noted that it compared itself to FFVII (in the blurb before downloading it) yet it has terrible translation and plays like any age old RPG? It reminds me of the horsebird fiasco that lead people to believe they're having Chinese developers work their games.

The best part is they aren't even excellent businesspeople in that they are putting out XIII-2, the least requested thing among fans. If it is an entirely different game with entirely different personnel working it, its world could be expanded on as well as XII's was.

XII was a creative vision from its director who brought us other inspired games in the earlier days. But creative vision isn't worth the sales when the name can sell a product no problem. This is the downfall of the industry - another unrelated to Square thing - Nintendo isn't localizing half of the good games that are actually appreciable gaming experiences. (The Last Story, that whole business).

Sorry for derailing further. I love me some videogame discussion.

I wasn't trying to derail, but there's just so much stuff SE's been F'n up and they have done little to change their current model. instead of admitting they made mistakes, they just publicly humiliate Hiromichi Tanaka for political reasons and moved on to promote XIV for PS3... wait, that's still in production limbo right?

Right and how long will it be before Sony announces PS4? Not too long. If SE realistically releases in 2012, there isn't any doubt that Sony will announce their Next Gen system in the same year or even 2013. That's not a whole lot of time for the user base for XIV to grow/expand.

In a perfect world, SE would have XIV secretly developed for the Wii2 at launch, but you know what? It's not. That's what you get when you have SE and their horrendous development cycles.

SCH used to be an effectively healer, its supposed to be powerful on both White Magic and Black Magic, but not competing with the specialists for power. I suppose SE's fear is Cure V + Rapture, but with 5 charges and their recast, Cure V + Rapture won't be anything like Cure bombing with Cure VI, plus I'm sure a SCH would prefer to use their charges for other stratagems (unlike now where I end up using Rapture a LOT).

I find my SCH still effective at healing outside Abyssea. But when I get in Abyssea and everyone is close to 3k hp and taking a thousand hitpoints off at a time... not so fun to heal.
RAPTURE. RAPTURE. RAPTURE. I can't use anything else half the time.
Regen III is a waste of time in Abyssea. I'd rather have gotten cure V.

it's quite predictable that sch and rdm will get cure 5 and blizzard5 on cap 95, i honestly think that is the only spell that sch needs to be so good again on the healing department, i don't complain about the nuking capabilities of sch, a good sch can out dd any blm with just tier4 nukes easy with less mp, because the huge selection of weather compatible gear, af3+2 gear, specially the head and boots piece that increases MAB so crazy, i agree is dumb that sch cant get native haste, but they have raise2 and reraise2/regen3 even tier5 nukes, i expect raise3 on cap 99

Yeah I need to echo this statement. I good SCH can out DD a BLM in almost all situations. The AFv3+2 set supplies a ridiculous boost to our capabilities. There's nothing like letting off a full AeroV and finding out the set proc-ed and you can just reload and fire again.

Not true. A BLM could set proc and do almost double your nuke w/ one spell. Now given yes you can recast faster w/ set proc if we're just going w/ main jobs. but if a BLM was /sch and a SCH was /blm, BLM wins hands down. No offense but whatever BLM you went up against must not be well geared.

there is no reason for a sch to sub blm really, that being said I now have a feeling you have no clue what a sch can do

It's really nice that you have ideas and all, but if you're going to post suggestions, it's probably best to do it on the official forums :|

Elemental Celerity was the last nail in the "SCH vs BLM debate" coffin.

So you cast one second faster then you did at 75, it just means you're spending over 290 mp for something I can do with only 50 mp that much faster, and I still cast it faster because not only am I benefiting from dark arts, but also from fastcast as /rdm and an enhanced reduced spellcasting time (also affecting recast) effect on dark arts using sch af feet and relic head.

why even bring set procs? those are not relevant , any set hardly procs, almost non-existent

The MP efficiency argument is nearly null now with all the refresh you can get. On BLM, outside of Abyssea, you can get 6mp/tick refresh in gear alone, 9 for refresh, 12 for refresh II. around 20 or so with Ballad. Without these things, yes, SCH would be better. However, just having a RDM and a BRD would make it so you really don't need -- especially because you won't be spamming nukes enough for you to actually run out of MP, even outside. This would make Parsimony nearly useless.

Even if you didn't have all of that refresh, you -need- Ebullience to keep up with Black Mage's damage(well, a good Black Mage's damage). Using Parsimony and Ebullience -will- kill your charges. What happens when you have no charges left? You become the mediocre nuker with no real advantage over blm. Even weather wise -- at 99, Black Mage will have Hailstorm, giving Black Mage a way to increase the damage that SCH only previously had.

I'm not saying SCH is bad. I'm saying a good SCH can do comparable damage to a good BLM, but it won't win. Ever.

It's a bit presumptuous to say there are nails in the coffin when we haven't even reached the lvl99 cap. Elemental Celerity isn't what is currently making BLM better than SCH, it's !! procs and Bliz5 which i expect SCH to get next update. I doubt you've even seen a scholar who was serious about the job and uses it to its potential.

Scholar is quite possibly the most complicated job in the game. The complexity of the macros far eclipse that of any other job. Not only do you need to know how to dabble in the dark arts (Mob Weakness, MBs, Enmity Management) but you also have to know the light arts (enfeebling mobs, knowing what enfeebles the mob has,and curing strategy). On top of all that mage b.s. you also have to know how to make skillchains and time them correctly so you can do your water > blizzard or blizzard > thunder immanence chains.

You may consider blm better than sch at nuking, which it prob is atm, but I would be willing to bet that the veteran sch is a better player than the veteran blm, especially if they think it's Elemental Celerity that gives blm the edge.

So a blm who's using /sch (no convert) with only 6mp/tic is expecting to not run out of mp faster than a sch capable of doing extreme damage on nukes with a shorter recast, shorter cast time, and 14mp/tic solo with convert

k

the only thing blm is capable of doing over sch at this point is being able to press 1 macro instead of needing to buff to achieve maximum output, aka squander your mp faster.

I'm not trying to be mean, but can you read?


With all of this, you shouldn't run out of MP, if you're smart. Outside of Abyssea on anything that matters, you should have Ballads at the least. On BLM/RDM, that's 6+3 mp/tick for 9/tick solo. Then add 9/tick from ballads, that totals 18/tick. You can add RDM refresh and COR if needed but still. 18/tick is quite a bit. Even if your BLM was /SCH, you still get the 3/tick from sublimation, so that point is moot too.

Yes, without all of that for Refresh, SCH wins MP efficiency. And you forget you get one charge every 48 seconds. Let's say you use one nuke per minute. Ebullience and Parsimony them both. That's two charges every 30 seconds. Two minutes, you use 4 charges, while recovering 2. Looks like to me you either forego MP efficiency for damage, or the other way around. You don't get it both ways.

My question for you being is in what situation will you be having a rdm and brd both in a party at your beck and call for you to deal magical damage nowadays. This isn't a "blm and all his bffl/triboxed mules vs. sch" situation, this is a blm vs. sch

Also, if we're outside abyssea, my damage isn't limited to a single spell category (blizzard), meaning why would I use ebullience over 2 parsimonied spells, and with af3+2 pants my spells cost less than half of the amount of mp required.

RDM shouldn't get C5.

C4 is enough with decent cure potency it does around 500~550 a cure. That is two C4's to cap most people's HP outside of Abyssea. The game is moving to outside of Abyssea. The games primary healer and as has been in the series should stay that way. WHM is the primary healer not RDM.

I don't mind SCH getting c5 though.

You forget that we have 10 levels of content. Who's to assume that you -won't- need that kind of support? Also, I'm fairly sure(I've never done Voidwatch, mind you) that people doing high tier Voidwatch content will have a BLM for procs(at the very least). And at least a RDM or BRD for refreshing the WHM. There. You have a refresher for your BLM.

But yes, I've already said SCH wins for MP Efficiency(except in sutations with high refresh, aka Abyssea and possible new 91-99 content). But to be able to deal near equal damage to black mage, you have to forego that MP efficiency, because you'll run out of charges. Without Ebullience, where is your damage compared to Black Mage? It won't be nearly as close.

By 99 I could be flying with wings sprouting out my Savant's Loafer's +10, but I'm not making any assumptions about anything that far away, I'm talking about the here and now.

I wouldn't put blm in the same party as the whm, and to that extent the BRD and RDM, your refresh is now lost. Especially since the BRD should be paired with physical DDs capable of dealing higher damage over time in comparison to resistable, slow, hate garnering spike damage.

For procing, if blm is even useful in voidwatch, mp conservation and lower spike damage in favor of hate-stealing high spike damage is even more valuable.

And if you want to fap to your numbers that's fine, just know while you're resting after your 3k Blizzard V I've already done Aero V and Water V for 2k each at less than half the cost in that time, if not more so.

This isn't a contest of who can achieve the greatest orgasm, it's who is capable of the higher DoT, and so far you're losing.

Me fapping to my damage? lol. Look at you posting your Screenshots of your oh all mighty Induration Skillchain. Don't be a hypocrite.

Once CE is capped, what matters is pure damage, anyways. It won't matter if you get 2k nukes off when I get one 3k when the mob comes for you because you've nuked it twice.

the scholar is now diamonds

The Voidwatch debate is pointless! Voidwatch isn't about doing damage it's about not doing damage and seeing how many !!s you can proc before you inadvertently kill the NM!