Hey! That's weird... results show a sudden influx of votes for RDM and BRD, but no supporting evidence in the comments of the last post! Someone's stuffing the ballot box!
Anyway, this post is about Scholar and my initial impressions for the lowbie levels.
Magic
First up... the magic side of things. Having access to both black magic & white magic at essentially the same time feels very much like playing RDM. Basic play seems to be the same in a party... throw out some enfeebles, regen the tank, maybe throw out some nukes. Unlike RDM, I didn't really feel like meleeing with the weak staff or club, so after taking care of the party, I'd end up /healing once I'm comfortable that the party has enough health to last till the end of the mob.
After getting Light Arts & Dark Arts, it took a little more thinking and planning as to when I was going to cast spells. Due to the 1 minute recast on switching arts, I'd throw out all the White Magic enfeebles and cast regen before switching to Dark Arts and finishing off with Black Magic enfeebles and nukes. Regen really makes main healing easy, and SCH getting it earlier than WHM makes me a happy schoolgirl!
As expected, I'm enjoying the healer side of the job a lot more than the nuker side...Nuking just isn't that fun, and level sync is making it even worse since my elemental magic skill is lagging behind what it should be. While level sync has made it a lot easier to put parties together, I'm finding it a little annoying cos my skills are lagging behind, and the satisfaction of leveling up is taken away when I realize that I can't use the new skills or spells I just obtained until the sync'ed person levels >.>
Strategems
So, I found that the fun part on SCH came with the various strategems... saving half MP cost when casting a big nuke makes for very efficient nuking, and being able to regen a couple of melees back to back helps a lot when you're trying to get through a cycle. Basically, it feels a lot like forcing Conserve MP & Fast Cast to come on whenever you want!
Tabula Rasa really shines with these active... It kinda feels like a miniture version of Chainspell or Manafont. I tried Tabula Rasa out twice in parties, once for an emergency situation where we needed some Cures fast among many people, and another to nuke the last mob in an exp party down. Being able to regen a whole party without waiting for that recast timer is quite effective, and doing a ton of nukes for half MP cost almost made it feel like a manafont nuke!
Sublimation
Sublimation is niiiiiiiiice! Being able to pool up a bunch of MP and taking it out when you need it is just too cool. It effectively expands my MP pool by 25%. Since I don't have Stoneskin yet, it's necessary to turn Sublimation on when getting up from /heal, then switching it out before /healing again. I've taken to essentially using up my MP while Sublimation is up, then taking out the store before /healing, or using it as necessary.
Subjob choice
I didn't realize what a difference the various subs would do for SCH. I had originally figured on just going SCH/WHM until level 40, then switching to SCH/RDM for en-ga spells. Turns out, there are good reasons for choosing one sub over another.
SCH/WHM: Gains access to White Magic enfeebles (Dia, Paralyze, Slow), the Bar-ra spells. Especially important when you need to Bar-ra groups of people. In the Jungle, I went as SCH/BLM once, and regretted it as I lost access to Barsleepra
SCH/BLM: Gets the Black Magic Enfeebles (Bio, Blind, Bind), and the other ones like Choke, etc. and of course, Elemental Seal. My last party had me coming as a nuker, but I showed up as SCH/RDM... could probably have done a little more damage if I came as SCH/BLM
SCH/RDM: Gets all the enfeebles from both schools of magic, but loses the -ra spells and elemental debuffs... probably still the best overall choice for versatility, but there are some situations that call for the other two subs.
Soooo... looks like I'll have to finish leveling /BLM & /RDM at some point so I can switch between all 3 as necessary. Both BLM & RDM are at level 18, so that's another 19 levels to finish them up as subjobs. I'd really want to get RDM up before leveling SCH past 40 since I still think Ascension & En-ga is nice and broken!
Scholar as a Sub
This will be quite interesting... the obvious benefit is of course, Sublimation. Other benefits include:
- Job traits: /SCH gets Clear Mind II, Conserve MP and Max MP boost. This means I no longer have to set my Conserve MP spells
- Light Arts: Since this boosts healing skill... supposedly it actually helps with BLU heals like Magic Fruit & Healing Breeze
- Strategems: Being able to cast Raise faster, or for less MP should be useful in various situations
- Addendems: Access to Dispel, and Aspir... this still needs some testing to see how effective it will be subbed.
The main place I'll be trying this out is Nyzul Isle since in Nyzul, just having Sublimation would be a huge upgrade as we do not have a RDM or BRD in our group!
Unfortunately, SCH will have to be put on hiatas for the time being... I want to level up at least the RDM sub, possibly both subjobs before going further, and I actually need to raise some gil! SCH spells are starting to get expensive, especially those that can only be purchased from vendors, and I do need some gil before taking it further!
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3 comments:
Little more on BLU/SCH after trying it out for the first time last night during ZNMs.
First: Wrong sub for this mob -.- I forgot the evil Bio that this Soulflayer puts out is so evil that it needs to be Erased ASAP. We spent a lot of time curing people when we could save a lot more MP just by casting a few Erases.
That said... a few good thing about /SCH. First, Celerity really helped in casting those -na spells, Regens & Raises. It was even useful when kiting since I could throw it on while running, then use it to quickly cure or cast a Regen without being caught.
Sublimation is useful, though not THAT useful since Nuyu was there on RDM and was Refreshing me. I only used it for two things... to get a store of MP before the fight (effectively giving me 1.2k MP on BLU), and later when we were kiting the mob, to get just that little bit more MP while on the move to be able to cast a few more cures.
One interesting note... when under the various Arts, my magic skill was raised to 246 for my SCH skills, even though my main job was BLU. Soooo... 246 skill level for Healing, Enfeebling, Elemental Magic, Enhancing, and... well, Dark Magic is a little behind ^^; I'm going to have to try landing a few enfeebles and Aspir on some non-BLM-NMs to see how well that actually works in practice.
Basically, that was the main highlights for BLU/SCH yesterday. I'm going to continue using it exclusively for the rest of this week to see how it performs.
i thought sub sch gave you erase if you have one of the light art traits or addendum or something on.
Nope! No such luck... Scholar gets Erase at level 39, which puts it juuuuuuust out of sub range. Reraise is 40, and Viruna is 46, which prevents these spells from being subbed on /SCH, while they are available on /WHM.
Other things to note: SCH has no native enfeebling spells, so the dream of Paralyzing and Silencing mobs with /SCH won't work. Strangely, it does have Dispel, Drain, Aspir & Sleep natively, allowing for some interesting possibilities.
I tried BLU/SCH on Limbus last night even though was along and could Refresh me. Here's the interesting part... it does not matter what level your magic skills are, the appropriate Arts will bring it up to a skill level of 246. This meant that as BLU/SCH, I could actually Sleep Limbus mobs, as well as Dispel, Drain, Aspir, etc. I think that SE really did put in two strong subbable jobs with DNC & SCH... Melees know how powerful DNC can be for soloing, but I think /SCH is only just being tapped. Think about a DRG/SCH with Sublimation, being able to solo and if they get into trouble, Sleep a mob...
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