Scholar – Gamerstips

FFXIV SCH Scholar Job Guide

alext96 — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 20:24:54 +0000

Indomitable

A Thorough Guide To Scholar

Tobio Okuma

This is a guide for the Scholar Job in FFXIV. The goal of this guide is to give insight into how the job is operating in our current raid environment. I will go over all of the job’s skills and describe their usages, as well as break down how Scholar interacts with other healers. I will go through small optimizations, useful macros, and more. This guide is oriented towards people of any level of play.

Of course, there will be some general “how to heal” in this guide, as it is vital to point out the style that SCH uses in its healing. This guide will also go into some pretty in depth things in regards to healing. A lot of this will be assuming you are in an organized group and can coordinate with your cohealer.

I will also be addressing certain inefficiencies in regards to Scholar play in hopes that they will allow people to avoid common mistakes.I will include sections on useful tips/tricks that can improve your overall experience playing Scholar.

This guide will have a LOT of information in it. Feel free to jump around it as necessary to things that are relevant to you. The table of contents will be color coded as to allow easy navigation, as a document this size can be overwhelming.

This guide will continue to be updated going into 5.0, though it will take some time after the expansion drops to get it fully adapted to changes.

Feel free to drop by The Balance discord to ask any questions regarding Scholar or any other job. The mentors and members will gladly help with anything from general questions to log analysis. You can also feel free to message me on discord, FusionSamurai#3427 as well.

Acknowledgements

A massive thanks to Snes Ambros’ia for the work they put in to make this guide possible. The writing, editing, and support was a massive help in getting this finished. Without you, this would not have been completed. I can not thank you enough.

A special thanks to Momo Sama for his help, especially on the section regarding raid buff alignment and opportunity costs. He also made the graph of party mitigations. On top of that, he also proofread this behemoth of a document. Check out his Twitch and YouTube.

Thanks to Zyrkhan Dar’locke for his help in translating my ramblings into English and proof reading my spreadsheets. His AST guide was also a great guideline into how I could approach writing this kind of guide.

Alevia Rohan for bullying me and putting up with my bullying. Also she proofread it as well. Check out her Twitch.

Nemekh for their spreadsheets. Everything we know is because of the hard work you do theorycrafting. Math is hard, but you make it understandable. His Twitch, where you can watch him play SMN.

Video Games, for writing the original SCH guide at the start of 4.0, as well as providing the graph for Critical Hit. You inspired me to write this guide. Can watch him play SCH on his Twitch..

Ayesa Faile for having the Fey Covenant math, as well as answering my stupid questions when I first joined The Balance.

Thanks to all the groups and people I’ve run with who have made me the player I am today. Thank you for putting up with my endless memes and terrified screeches.

Everyone on The Balance for teaching me what I know and helping me to get better at the game. Without you I would be nowhere near where I am today.

Table Of Contents

This table of contents will be organized by color for the sake of easy navigation.

Green = Beginner: Not doing Savage or Extreme Content

Yellow = Moderate: Learning or clearing Savage or Extreme Content

Red = Advanced: Class / Raid Optimization

What Does Scholar Do?

Scholar at first glance appears to be a complicated job, especially for people who are just attempting to get into healing for the first time. Scholar hotbars are often extremely full, which gives the impression that they have many abilities. While this is true, many of them do not get much use in current content. Scholar at its core is a fairly simple job.

Scholar’s main identity revolves around the usage of two fairies, Selene and Eos, which passively heal. These two enable Scholars to pump out incredible damage while constantly having a mini-regen coming from the fairies. On top of this, Scholar has many tools that allow them to quickly heal incoming damage.

As a Scholar, you will be juggling a resource known as “Aetherflow”. You get 3 stacks every 60s, and they give you access to your most powerful abilities. Each time one of these abilities is used, the cooldown on Aetherflow is decreased by 5 seconds. These are your bread and butter abilities that will cover the overwhelming majority of your healing in raids. Each Aetherflow ability we use grants us 10 Aetherflow Gauge, which is used to execute a powerful single target regen with Fey Union.

We also have many tools that can be used to mitigate incoming damage, though most of the time it is unnecessary. There are specific circumstances in which shielding is useful, which will be addressed later in this guide.

The combination of its powerful healing options and raid utilities make it a force to be reckoned with. There are virtually no circumstances that Scholar is a bad choice for a healer slot. It is consistently powerful through early progression, weeklies, as well as speed kills. Scholar has been present in almost every world first clear, the only exception being Neo Exdeath, which really speaks to the power of the job.

Basically, this job is absolutely bonkers when played properly. And getting good value out of its stills doesn’t require you to be a top tier player. There are a few core basics that will push you to become a solid player. This guide will address those, as well as more advanced things for those seeking to push their gameplay to the next level.

Actions

This section will go through every skill that Scholar has, explaining the pros and cons of it. This should give a good general understanding of what each is and when they are used. This section will be separated into GCDs, OGCDs, and then pet abilities.

This section will be separated based on their interaction with the GCD. If the spell makes the GCD roll, it will be listed as a GCD. If it can be used between GCDs with no impact on the GCD, it will be listed as an oGCD.

DPS GCDs

This is your primary spell that you will be casting during any given encounter. This is your filler DPS spell that you cast when your DoTs are already ticking and nothing else needs to be done.

This is the spell that we use to weave oGCDs with. It has a base potency of 100 and a damage over time that adds up to an additional 100 potency, 200 total. It is instant, which gives you 2.5s to throw in things like Energy Drain or Excogitation. Weaving Energy Drain with Miasma II is a DPS gain.Be wary of the MP cost associated with this though, as that cost adds up fairly quickly. Using Energy Drain with this results in it being pretty safe MP wise though. DPS wise, as long as you get 1 tick out of Miasma II, it is worth more than Ruin II. MP wise this isn’t great, generally you want to let this DoT tick its full duration, or at least not clip it until there are >6s left on the duration.This also doubles as your AOE DPS tool.

Note that the full duration of Miasma II is only 30 potency less than Broil II (230). This minor difference is important for oGCD utilization that will be discussed in further detail later.

Ruin II is honestly a pretty bad spell. It is an instant cast, which means that you can use it to weave oGCDs, but we have other options for that. Generally, this gets used if we are forced to do extended movement away from the boss. Unless certain conditions are met, this skill can be a trap for newer players, as weaving with it is a definite loss over alternatives. There are situations where it can be useful. It can be used before the boss goes untargetable if there isn’t enough time to get a Broil II cast.

This ability has a tiny amount of initial damage, 20 potency, but applies a damage over time that will add up to 280 potency over the course of its duration. It has a 300 net potency if it is allowed to tick its entire duration.This should virtually always be ticking on the boss, with a few exceptions. Miasma must tick for 18s for it to be worth more than a Broil II.

Yet another DoT. The net potency of this is 350. Similarly to Miasma, it should be almost always ticking on the boss, with a few exceptions. (More on this later). It also is instant cast, which means the time after it is done can be used to reposition yourself for incoming mechanics. This must tick for 21 seconds to be worth more than a Broil II.

DPS oGCDs

This is going to be the primary use for your Aetherflow stacks. It boasts 150 damage potency, as well as 1,200 MP and a small heal. The heal on this can be nice, as it can sometimes keep you from having to GCD heal yourself. This along with Aetherflow is SCH’s method of regaining MP outside of Lucid Dreaming. This increases your Aetherflow Gauge by 10.

After recent changes, Shadow Flare got an additional tick once it is placed. This skill has 5 ticks of 50 potency, with one when it is placed for a net potency of 300. This only does damage so long as the boss’ hitbox remains inside the AOE it places. It can be worth it to hold this ability if the boss is about to be moved or is about to go untargetable for a short time.This skill has a 60s cooldown, which means if used properly, it should consistently line up with Bio. Use Bio to weave Shadowflare, basically. It is also worth noting that this skill cannot be used at the same time as your other ground AOE, Sacred Soil.

Bane is an interesting ability. It costs you one Aetherflow stack. It increases your Guage by 10. It spreads your Bio and Miasma to all targets that are near the target you execute bane on. This skill really doesn’t get many usages during raid situations. The potency on this ability is entirely reliant on how long the enemies you are using it on will survive. Most adds don’t last long enough to really get value out of it.

If the boss leaves the arena and summons adds, it’s likely not worth it to use two GCDs to DoT one add and then Bane them when you can spam Miasma II. It really depends on the kill time for the adds. If the boss is still targetable and it summons an add, it is possible to get great value out of Bane-ing pre-existing DoTs onto the add. As long as the potency is greater than 150, it is a gain over using Energy Drain. You’re honestly better off spamming Miasma II in most AOE situations.

Healing GCDs

This is your first heal, a carry over from being an Arcanist. This is probably the worst heal in the Scholar kit, and should be avoided if at all possible. The only time this gets used is when you don’t have other options available at the given time and you’re out of MP.

This is one of the most influential abilities Scholar has. This spell heals the target for 300 potency, then adds a shield equaling the amount healed (300 Potency). A critical heal will double the shield. This shield can then be deployed to the entire party. It is not generally worth it to fish for critical adloquium.

MP wise, this ability is pretty pricey, so fishing for a “Critlo” is not generally advised. This shield does not stack with Astrologian’s Nocturnal Field, regardless of the potency of either. If you have a 60,000 Adlo shield, it will be overwritten by a 500 Nocturnal shield. There are specific circumstances that using Adlo is fantastic, but generally we attempt to avoid using this skill if at all possible.

In progression, it can be used to cushion tank busters, especially before tanks have their cooldowns properly mapped out. Other than that, its generally only used as a deployment tool. It is also rather harsh on MP, another reason to avoid it. If it is being used to cheese mechanics, fishing for a Critlo CAN be done, but is generally not advised, as it is a lot of lost damage potency and it costs a ton of MP.

This is Scholar’s only GCD heal for area of effect healing. It is also a fairly weak heal, with only 150 healing potency. That being said, it provides a 225 potency shield on top of its healing. This becomes a 375 potency direct heal when Emergency Tactics is used, but even without Emergency Tactics the effective heal is 375 total potency. Spamming this too much is extremely taxing on both your MP and DPS.

Ideally Succor should be avoided in favor of other less costly options, such as Indomitability. However, there are times where shielding is necessary. Some examples of this are when the party won’t survive without shielding, or when the party has to be at 100% HP. It also is beneficial for one health mechanics, as those do not eat shields like they do health.

Healing oGCDs

This is your first heal that is off the global cooldown. It increases your gauge by 10, as all Aetherflow abilities do. This is a 600 potency heal, which is fairly powerful. This only heals a single target, but has more potency than any of your GCD based heals. Generally though, it is preferred that Excogitation be used over Lustrate, as it has a greater potency. Lustrate is still a powerful panic button in case someone takes an unnecessary hit or you need some emergency tank healing when alternatives are on cooldown.

Lustrate is still very useful through. It also has the added benefit of a 1.00s recast, which means it is possible to spam multiple in quick succession if such a scenario demands it. (Ideally this doesn’t happen often, but mistakes do happen).

This is one of the reasons Scholar is such a powerful job. Again it increases your gauge by 10. The net heal from this is 4,000 potency across the entire party. This is extremely powerful, and with a short 30s cooldown, it is available for most raidwide hits.

This is your strongest source of AOE burst healing. It is vastly superior to casting multiple succors. This does not have to be cast, as with all oGCDs, which means that it can be weaved with Miasma II for minimal DPS loss.

This is the strongest single target heal in Scholar’s entire kit. It of course increases your gauge by 10. This ability procs for 800 potency in the case that your target drops below 50% health, or automatically heals them if the timer on it wears off. This is an incredibly useful tool, and virtually foolproof. You can place this on the tank at any time and get some value out of it. Unless the tanks is full health, you will ALWAYS get something out of Excog.This is useful for healing tanks out of Holmgang/Living Dead, as well as just healing after a large tank buster. If a tank is low at any time, Excog can be used to safely and quickly give a large burst of HP.

It is worth noting that this will not heal someone through a oneshot. If they have 51% health and take a tank buster that is more than their health, Excog will not stop their death. In such a case, opt into lustrate to get their health up.

Emergency tactics gets a worse rep than it deserves. This skill turns the shield on your next Succor/Adlo within 15s into additional direct healing. This means that it essentially turns Adlo into a 600 potency heal and Succor into a 375 potency heal. This is fairly useful if your cohealer dies during progression and you need to utilize back to back succors – the first one can be a normal succor, while you use ET on the second to get the full potency of the heal without losing any to shielding that already exists on the party. It can be used to assist in breaking a DRK out of Walking Dead. It has a few situations that its very useful but these are typically more niche scenarios.

One of the other added benefits of Emergency Tactics is that by turning the shield into a direct heal, the potency is applied immediately to party members vs having the shield delay. This is very important at times where the heal window is very tight before damage goes out, such as multi-hit raid busters or something like Chaos’ Dark Crystal phase, where you have a very brief window to heal the party after destroying the orb and shields will not apply in time before damage.

This is also extremely good for instances of mechanics that bring the party to one health, as it can be combined with an Indom for a rather insane burst heal. This and Indom are the primary methods of burst healing for Scholar. The name really describes this skill, it is used in emergencies for a burst heal, and it does that job fairly well.

These two go together because they are quite literally the same ability. Aetherpact is the command from the Scholar and Fey Union is the ability executed by the Fairy. This will tether Eos/Selene onto your target, funneling a powerful heal over time onto them. This heal is subject to pet scaling, which means it is not as strong as the potency implies.

This is a useful tool that can be used to greatly cut down on healer GCDs that are required. It is used generally to heal tanks through auto attacks, as the ticks from Fey Union are stronger than Embraces. If the party are all at low health, this can also be used to funnel the fairy’s healing on to the tank, as Eos/Selene will heal ANYONE below 80% health, this allows you to force her into healing the desired target. Note that using any of the fairy’s other abilities will break the tether. Aetherpact can be cast again to end Fey Union early. Aetherpact is subject to an oGCD slot, but Dissolve Union (What replaces Aetherpact while it is active) is not. Do note, however, that Dissolve Union will still create a minor clip if utilized after a non-instant cast because it is still a non-pet function. However, Dissolve Union has no oGCD animation lock so the impact is very minimal. In addition, fairy skills other than Embrace can be used to cancel Fey Union. The fairy can not move while casting this ability, but if it is cast on a target that is out of range, the fairy will move into range to execute this skill.

This increases the potency of your fairy’s embrace by 40%. I say embrace because that is the only aspect of the fairy’s kit that is boosted by this healing increase. This skill should basically be used on cooldown. The extra healing over the course of the encounter really adds up.

This does not increase healing on Whispering Dawn. Do not hold this to line them up. Do NOT use this if you plan on using Fey Union in the next 20s, as they do not interact with each other, which results in wasted Rouse time.

Utility Spells/Abilities

Fairly self explanatory. This is something possessed by every healer, as well as Red Mage and Summoner. Generally, you want to avoid hard casting Resurrection if at all possible. Swiftcasting it will minimize your loss. That being said, don’t leave a DPS down for 20 seconds waiting for your swiftcast to come back.

MP wise this is also really pricey. If you have a RDM/SMN, see if they can get the raise, especially in progression settings, as it really snowballs your MP to have to cast raises.

Sacred Soil is another use for your Aetherflow. It increases your gauge by 10. This skill generally feels like a wasted stack. Unless you will not survive without it, or it saves you a GCD heal, it feels unnecessary. This can not be used at the same time as Shadowflare, so be wary of when you will need both of them. It also has a small chance of giving you a free Succor, which, while nice in theory, is not used often in practice.

This is one of the strongest aspects of Scholar’s kit. This can be used to spread the effect of Galvanize from one target to the rest of the party. (Assuming they are within a 10y radius). This means that you can heavily mitigate incoming damage by casting an Adlo onto someone, be it a tank with healups, the DPS, or a fairy, then sending it to the entire party. Ignore the Eye For an Eye bit on this skill, it’s not really used for that.

This skill is fairly self explanatory. This increases the rate at which the boss will take crits by 15%. This is a new utility that was added in Stormblood, and another aspect of the Scholar kit that makes it so influential. This skill gets used at around 6.5s in the opener, and then is used on cooldown. With a 120s cooldown, it lines up naturally with Trick Attack and every other major raid buff. Be sure to communicate with your team when this skill is coming up.

Eos’ Abilities

Note that all Fairy abilities outside Embrace are off the GCD.

This is your pet’s primary ability. Eos and Selene both have the exact same potency for Embrace. They will spam this ability every 3s on anyone below 80% health. It will prioritize the Scholar over anyone else, as their death kills the fairy. This ability is subject to pet scaling.

This ability is very useful. It has 7 ticks of 120 potency, for a total of 840 potency. This is subject to fairy scaling though, which means it has an actual potency of 588. This regen is not increased by Rouse or any other healing increase. This is very useful for healing the party during downtime if there is no raid damage coming.

This ability increases magic defenses of your party. This is especially useful because many tank busters and almost all raid wide instances of damage are magical. This can be very effective for mitigating incoming raid damage. It is important to note that it increases magic defense stat by 20% rather than reducing incoming magic damage by 20ju%. This means it is more effective on casters and tanks than it is physical dps. At item level 400, the damage reduction values are as follows:

Tanks – 16.7% reduction
Casters – 8.8% reduction
Physical DPS – 6.7% reduction

This increases the amount of healing you deal with spells. This does not boost abilities such as Lustrate, Excog, Fey Union, or Indom. This ability doesn’t increase much in the SCH’s kit, but is very useful for cohealers. Communicate the best usages of Fey Illumination with your team to maximize its benefit. It can be stacked with other heal increases such as Largesse for a multiplicatively powerful shield or regen.

Selene’s Abilities

Note that all Fairy abilities outside Embrace are off the GCD

Literally the same as Eos’.

This ability has virtually no real uses. The silence on it has only been useful on one raid in Stormblood, O7s. The primary function of Silent Dusk is to Cancel Fey Union without clipping your GCD or forcing a weave window.

This has a few more uses than Silent Dusk. This will cleanse detrimental effects from everyone in the party, at least, ones that can be cleansed. This had more effect in A11s, where it could be used to cleanse the Limit Cut debuff. Now it has a few niche uses, but not too much going for it. Similar to Silent Dusk, this can be used to cancel an active Fey Union.

This is the main appeal to Selene as a fairy. For the loss of healing and mitigation that Eos has, you get Fey wind. This is a rather small increase, but adds up over the course of an encounter. With 50% uptime, it can lead to a sizeable gain.

Other Abilities

This ability does not heal or DPS directly, but enables your entire kit to function by giving you stacks of Aetherflow. This also gives you 10% of your maximum MP back, so it also functions as an MP management tool. The recast of this is shortened by 5s every time an Aetherflow action is used, so it effectively has a 45s recast time.This is an oGCD.

This spell summons Eos to your side.Summon II summons Selene to your side.

This skill is meant for Summoners who are trying to solo content with Titan-Egi. This doesn’t have much usage for Scholars.

Dissipation is a weird mix of a healing ability and a DPS ability. It sacrifices your fairy, which can be extremely detrimental if done at the wrong times. This ability will receive its own section later in the guide. The healing increase and extra Aetherflow stacks means that this can be used as a panic button if things go wrong and you have no Aetherflow available.

Role Actions

Cleric Stance was gutted from its Heavensward counterpart. Now it acts as a small DPS gain every 90s. It is nothing crazy. It is used prepull for our opener, and then gets used on cooldown. It is an oGCD, and should be weaved with Miasma II, Bio, or Ruin II. (Preferably not Ruin II).

This can be used to fill the gap and give yourself a “Break” on MP. Otherwise literally anything is better. This is a GCD.

Use this prepull, then use it again if someone dies. The mitigation this gives can be the difference between life and death, especially in a progression setting.This is a GCD.

This has usages inside of dungeons more than anything. It can be used to cleanse certain debuffs, such as the burn in o3s. (That nobody should get). If you have a BRD, they can cleanse a debuff without wasting a GCD, so this is relatively niche in a raid setting. This is a GCD.

This is your primary way of regenerating MP. It will slowly tick up mana over its duration. It also allows you to drop threat. SCH threat generally isn’t a large problem, but some encounters, such as Neo Exdeath and Ultima Weapon (Ultimate) could be sketchy at times.This is an oGCD.

Swiftcast is one of your most important role actions. This allows you to instantly cast the next spell. This is a tool for movement, primarily. It is also used to quickly revive a fallen ally, and can be used to quickly get a heal out before a coming mechanic. It can also be used to set yourself up for future weaves by making your next Broil II instant. This is an oGCD.

Eye for an Eye isn’t too great of a skill. That being said, the only downside to it is the oGCD slot you sacrifice in order to use it. You’ll hardly feel the difference this makes. You can throw it on the tank if you have a free oGCD slot, but again, it really doesn’t make a difference.This is an oGCD.

This is also one of your most important role actions. This can be used to increase your spell’s healing potency by 20%. Under this (and only this), Adloquium has a 360 potency, and Succor has a 180 potency. Healing increases such as this do not work on oGCD heals such as Lustrate. This is an oGCD.

Surecast can be used to prevent most knockback and pull effects. This includes the knockback in Omega Male/Female. This allows you to not lose a cast during the knockback. (Or prevents you from having to use Miasma II as you get knocked back to minimize the loss). This is an oGCD.

This is potentially an interesting role action. There are some strats that require it, such as Unreal Hello, World in Final Omega. This will pull the target to you. There are a few more usages for this skill that will be touched upon later.This is an oGCD.

All About DPS

There is an old joke that Scholar is a green DPS. Oddly enough, that isn’t far from the truth. All of the healers in this game have great damage potential. Instances of damage in this game are very spread out, which allows healers to abuse their powerful oGCD healing tools to handle healing while they DPS. The amount of incoming raid damage is consistently decreasing as expansions progress. This allows healers to push their DPS numbers ever further. Healer DPS is very important. It can be the difference between clearing and a hard enrage, especially in earlier weeks.

In a lot of ways, healers are the most influential jobs in any party. Two good healers can seriously carry raid DPS if their DPS players are lacking, or can push their group even further beyond fight requirements. High healer DPS can also provide a safety net in the unfortunate event that a DPS or tank dies. (As long as the death wasn’t because of healers DPSing).

Healer DPS is very important. I can not emphasize this enough. Fights in this game are extremely scripted, with a constant stream of auto attack damage on the tanks and spikes in overall raid damage going out. The amount of damage the party takes is also fairly scripted, with around a 5% damage variance, it is still extremely consistent. Fights work on a timeline, certain mechanics always happen at certain times. Some fights have two possible timelines, such as O7s and O9s, but they still remain consistent.

You can abuse the fact that these fights are so scripted to increase your own damage. After a massive raid wide, there are often large gaps before the next instance of party wide damage. If there is a large amount of time before the next set of raid damage, do not heal the party to full. Allow regens or off global cooldowns such as Indom, Earthly Star, Collective Unconscious, or Asylum handle the healing. During this downtime, you only need to keep the tank healed, which can generally be handled with a regen from your AST/WHM and your fairy’s healing. (Remember to Rouse and Fey Union)

Opener

-7s Summon Eos+Fey Wind (during summon cast)

-5s Infusion of Mind+Cleric Stance

-2.5s Miasma

-Bio (Energy Drain+Shadow Flare)

-Broil II

-Miasma II (Chain Stratagem+Energy Drain)

-Broil II (Swiftcast)

-Broil II (Energy Drain+Aetherflow)

-Broil II

-Miasma

-Miasma II (Energy Drain)

Credit to Video Games.

This is the standard opener for Scholar. This will be used in 99% of fights. There are a few fights where you can not get off a proper opener, such as O6s. If you can not precast, like in O6s, skip the first Broil II. In this case, do not bother clipping your Miasma. The same applies when you are doing your re-opener later in the fight.The final Miasma II only has an Energy Drain weaved with it, you are free to place whatever you need there.

(Sample opener timeline through first Aetherflow usage. Note Chain Strategem timing before Bard uses Iron Jaws)

This opener opts into a Broil II->Swiftcast->Broil II. While clipping your GCD is not generally advised, doing so here allows us to avoid another clip. Clipping Miasma before its duration is complete allows it to be refreshed under all raid buffs, which results in higher damage.

There is another opener. It is a Miasma II lip opener.

-Precast Miasma

-Bio II (Energy Drain)

-Miasma II (Swiftcast + Energy Drain)

-Broil II (Chain Stratagem + Shadowflare)

-Miasma II (Energy Drain+Aetherflow)

This opener is the fastest way to put Aetherflow on cooldown. It allows you to get Shadowflare under raid buffs.This is less used, but it is a viable opener.

After the opener is complete, attempt to maintain high DoT uptime. Weave Energy Drain with Miasma II or when you refresh Bio. You can weave Energy Drain with Ruin II if you’re forced to move, though it is generally not advised, as it is a DPS loss over alternatives.

When people ask how to increase their DPS. The biggest problem is either a low CPM or too much healing. CPM stands for “casts per minute”. Ideally this number for Scholars should be around 30. Anything less and you are losing casts throughout the course of an encounter, which harms your DPS significantly. In an 8 minute encounter, a person doing 27 CPM is losing 24 casts compared to someone doing 30 CPM. If all of those were Broil IIs, that results in over 5,520 lost potency.

The line most people use is “Always Be Casting”. If you are doing nothing, you are losing either DPS or HPS. Literally anything is better than doing nothing. There is no excuse to be idle. Again, low CPM and unnecessary healing are the primary contributors to low healer DPS.

There are a few things to know in regards to maximizing your damage potential and getting the most casts off during an encounter. If you finish casting a Broil II, and the boss is going to go untargetable in one or two seconds, using a Ruin II is absolutely better than getting nothing. In the given scenario, it is impossible to get a Broil II off, so any potency is better than none.

Bosses teleporting or jumping across the map works in a very similar fashion. Most of the time, it will break your cast when they teleport, as they are no longer targeted. If your Broil II cast is going to be cancelled by them teleporting, opt into Miasma II or Ruin II. As long as the boss is targetable on the arena, the DoT will tick. This will guarantee you get at least SOMETHING out of that missing GCD. This is generally the only time that Ruin II is used. When the boss is going to disappear for an extended period of time, it can be used to get one last instance of damage as it leaves. It is not a giant gain, but it can add up. Other than that Ruin II should be minimized as much as possible.

How DoTs Work

FFXIV revolves entirely around server ticks. Every 3 seconds the game will apply the damage from DoTs that you have ticking. This is why DoTs that are applied at different times tick at the same time. You can end up losing DoT ticks because of how they work. Generally, we tend to clip our DoTs. This means to reapply them before the entire duration on the boss has ended. Your goal is to have your DoTs re-apply at around 1s left on the duration.

DoTs also have a feature we call “Snapshotting”. This means that DoTs retain any buff that they had even after said buff falls off. For example. If Miasma is used under the effect of Trick Attack, the Miasma will retain the 10% increase in damage even after Trick falls off.This works both ways. If Trick Attack is applied AFTER Miasma, it will not have the damage buff. This applies to any damage increase, meaning Cleric Stance, Chain Stratagem, Battle Litany, Trick Attack, Contagion, or even Potions. Heal over times work in the same way.

Bane takes this and applies DoTs to all enemies around the target. The snapshotting effect applies here as well. Bane’d DoTs will retain their buffs for the entire duration. This isn’t used practically anywhere now, though.

DoTs almost never tick when the boss is untargetable.

If the boss is about to leave the arena, it can be more beneficial to allow your DoTs to fall off.There are a few exceptions to this, such as O5s, but for the most part this is a consistent rule.

Bio II must tick for 21s for it to be worth more than a Broil II
Miasma must tick for 18s for it to be worth more than a Broil II

This means that if your DoTs are falling off before the boss leaves, it is not worth it to refresh unless you can get those durations out of them. If you can’t, then opt into pure Broil II spam. This is a small thing, but it adds up, especially when there are numerous times during an encounter when the boss leaves the arena.

The GCD and Weaving

FFXIV has a 2.5s GCD. This is the time between your casts before you’re allowed to do another, and is affected by Spell Speed. The main reason this is being mentioned is that some skills are off the global cooldown. These oGCDs are not tied behind the GCD, but have internal cooldowns.

Clipping your GCD is when you do an oGCD after a casted GCD. This causes a delay before you can execute your next action, and results in a DPS loss. The loss isn’t enough to warrant never clipping your GCD. It’s generally preferred that we avoid clipping, but sometimes it is necessary to optimize damage.

Weaving is when you use an oGCD after an instant GCD. For example, you can use Miasma II, which is instant. This gives you 2.5s to use any oGCDs you want with no penalty. Weaving is ideal for maximizing your DPS. To double weave means to use two oGCDs between your GCDs.

All of this is very important to Scholars because most of our healing is off the global cooldown. Energy Drain is also off the global cooldown.

Generally, your priority for weaving is-

Miasma II + Double weave
Miasma II + Single Weave
Ruin II+ Double weave
Broil II + Clip
Ruin II + Single Weave

Bio II also allows you to weave, but it’s a lot less on demand than these other options. Weave with it when it is available. You should generally never hold it to give yourself an opportunity to weave. When it is going to fall off of the boss and needs to be renewed, it takes first priority for weaving.

With all of that being said, you shouldn’t Miasma II (Energy Drain)->Miasma II (Energy Drain). Ideally, you don’t want to refresh Miasma II before the duration ends. If you really need to clip Miasma II’s duration, do so when it is below 6s, as it should be a gain over Broil II clip at that point. If the boss is about to go untargetable, it is worth more to Broil II->clip than it is to Miasma II->Weave. This is because your DoT on Miasma II will not tick when the boss is untargetable.

You generally have enough time after using Aetherflow to never have to clip Broil II->Energy Drain. You have 45s to burn your Aetherflow abilities before you lose value out of the Quickened Aetherflow trait. (5s off Aetherflow’s cooldown after each AF ability is used). Broil II-> Energy Drain can be used if your Miasma II will not get enough ticks to outweigh a Broil. The same 6s rule mentioned above applies here.

If you need to dump your stacks quickly, Broil II->Energy Drain is your best bet for doing so. If Aetherflow comes up right before the boss goes untargetable, you should spam Broil II->ED to quickly drop stacks. The same applies to your Dissipation during the final burn of an encounter.

. Swiftcasting Broil II can be used to give yourself an extra slot to weave. Doing Miasma II (Energy Drain+Swiftcast)-> Broil II (Rouse+Energy Drain) is extremely useful for maximizing your potential damage. Doing Broil II (Swiftcast)->Broil II (double weave) can be used if refreshing Miasma II would be a loss.

How Fairies Work

Fairies are one of the primary draws to Scholar. They provide a constant passive regen at no cost to the Scholar. In addition, Eos offers mitigation and a party wide heal over time, which can save numerous healer GCDs.

Fairies have what we call “Pet Scaling”. Fairies heal at about 70% of the potency of their Scholar. Because of this, the potencies on their skills are less than what is advertised. The 250 potency of Embrace is actually closer to 170. Whispering Dawn is closer to 84 potency/tick, or 588 total potency.

Fairies are also boosted by potions and food that the Scholar consumes, as well as raid buffs such as Battle Litany and Mantra. They keep the stats that the Scholar had when they were summoned, meaning that Eos’ Embrace will remain at full power even after the Scholar has removed all of their gear. (Until they re-summon her)

Eos’ Embrace will automatically target anyone in your party below 80% health, but she will always prioritize her Scholar. She will also prioritize herself if her health drops below 80%. This can be a bit of a hassle as she will heal unwanted targets before she heals the tank, even if the party is in no danger of death. To prevent this, you can use Fey Union after a raidwide to guarantee her healing is funneled on to the desired target.

Any non-Embrace ability that you have the fairy use will cancel her current cast, no matter how far she is into it. Keep this in mind when you’re trying to have her cast Whispering dawn, Fey Illumination, etc. Selene has more options for you to use to cancel her cast than Eos, as two of her abilities are throwaways.

Always keep fairies on Obey.

Eos’ AI does not understand how this game works. In its little head, it thinks that anyone in the party taking damage means that it’s time to use Whispering Dawn, Fey Covenant, and Fey Illumination. Keeping her on obey means that you can control when she does her actions, which allows you to get more value out of her abilities. Selene CAN honestly be left on Sic without much as much detriment. It is still bad play, as it prevents you from being able to use her abilities to cancel Fey Union. The only downside is that she will use her Fey Wind on cooldown, even during downtime, which is a DPS loss.

Treat the fairy’s skills like they are an extension of your own tool kit. You aren’t micromanaging anything. You’re using your extra skills. This makes understanding how to use Eos/Selene much easier.

Always place Eos/Selene at the start of an encounter.

Eos/Selene will prioritize following the Scholar over healing the party. To avoid this, place her in the center of the arena. This will maximize the number of Embraces she gets during the course of an encounter. Be careful though, as most cleaves can hit the fairy, which usually results in her death.

DO NOT MACRO FAIRY SKILLS TO YOUR GCDs.

It’s good in concept, but absolutely abysmal in practice. Macros can not be queued. This means that there is a delay between macro’d GCDs that costs you a significant amount of DPS. Macros are extremely clunky in this game. There are a few that are useful, such as mouseover macros for Deployment Tactics.

If you need to have Eos/Selene Embrace someone in particular, such as a Paladin with Divine Veil up, you can use what is called place cancelling. Place cancelling is relatively self explanatory, you place Eos, which cancels her current cast. While she is moving, spam her Embrace onto the desired target, she will then opt into healing them instead of what she was originally going to heal. This also works with mouseover Embrace macros, which is a lot more practical. This is useful for getting Divine Veil without using a GCD on the tank, especially when the party is at low health.

Fairy skills share cooldowns. It is important to know that if you use Fey Wind prepull and switch to Eos, Fey Illumination will be on a 60 second cooldown. Likewise if you did the same for Eos->Selene, Fey Wind would have a 120 Second cooldown.

It is an odd interaction, but it is something we have to deal with. Having one of your abilities on a longer cooldown than it actually has is weird.

Eos Vs. Selene

You have two possible options for your pet, them being Selene and Eos. Selene only offers Fey Wind, a small DPS increase for the raid, whereas Eos offers healing utilities and mitigations. Generally, the more healing intense the encounter, the more favorable Eos is.The less healing intense the encounter, the more favorable Selene is.

Eos is considered to be a better fairy for progression. The extra healing from Whispering Dawn is extremely useful, as are Covenant’s magic defense and Fey Illumination’s 10% increase to healing. These are especially potent in early progression, when the party lacks health and defense stats. Eos is always a solid choice.

Selene gets used in encounters where there isn’t as much healing required, or if both healers are optimized around her. In fights such as O5s, there is not much value to be had from Eos’ Whispering Dawn, as the fight is spaced out enough that a well placed Earthly Star or Collective can cover all of the healing.

However, as you attempt to optimize and push your play further, you can begin to opt into Selene, even on more healing heavy encounters. You may get forced into doing extra healing. A few Indoms or Succors will not outweigh the gain from Selene. This is especially true if the Fey Wind gains the party an extra GCD on the boss before it goes untargetable.

It is hard to exactly quantify the gain when everyone gets an extra GCD on the boss, as every GCD has a different value. Gaining the Ninja an Aeolian edge is worth a lot of damage, but a Heavy Swing on the Warrior isn’t worth nearly as much. Gained GCDs across the party makes for a fairly significant gain, and it will absolutely negate the extra healing that had to be done to compensate for the loss of Eos.

To get the most value out of Selene, you’ll need to organize your healing with your cohealer to minimize GCDs spent healing and figure out what to substitute for Whispering Dawn where you would have used it.

Which fairy you want to use is entirely reliant on your goals. Eos is fine for comfy weekly clears. Selene is if you want to optimize and push your damage further. Eos is extremely comfortable when you’re unfamiliar with your cohealer. Generally, Selene is only strong if there is organization with healers, as it is important to know what needs to be adjusted to make up for the loss of Whispering Dawn.

Likewise, if you are using Eos, always communicate where Whispering Dawn is ticking. Many players heal while Whispering Dawn is ticking. This results in the HoT being mostly overheal, and causes a DPS loss in the GCDs they used to heal. Communicating where HoTs can cover healing is important for maximizing your effectiveness.

Fairy Swaps

Fairy swapping is not often done. During the middle of combat, you lose a GCD swapping fairies, which is an instant 230 potency loss, more if the summon was hard casted. That being said, there are some times that swapping in the middle of a fight can be acceptable. These situations mainly revolve around instances where the boss is not targetable. If you are using Eos as your primary fairy for an encounter, swapping to Selene during downtime for Fey Wind can be beneficial. This is what we do pre-pull to get Fey Wind at the start of an encounter.

For example, in O7s, before the Ultros add spawned, it was possible to dissipate for additional Energy Drains on the boss before the add. During the time after Ultros died, you had time to summon Selene, use Fey Wind, then swap back to Eos.

This applies to most any instance of downtime. As long as you have the MP needed to support spending 2,400 on two summons, it is a gain. It is a very small gain, but it is a slight gain. Again, this gain could be worth a lot more if it nets an extra GCD before any further downtime.

Many fights have opportunities for this kind of swap.Some include-

Exdeath’s Decisive battle
Kefka’s Graven Image
O5s add phase
O7s when the boss flies out of the arena
O9s after the Dark Crystal dies
O10s at the end of Divebombs
O11s during Delta Attack

Opportunity Costs

To truly describe how healing functions within this game, one must first understand the idea of opportunity costs. An opportunity cost what is sacrificed when a choice is made. This is extremely prevalent in healing, and makes up the basis for how healing is done.

Every Succor, Physick, or Adloquium has not only the MP cost associated with them, but they also cost you the 230 potency that would have come from casting Broil II. This is the opportunity cost of using a GCD heal. This is also one of the biggest losses for healers. Too many GCD heals will cost a lot of DPS over the course of a fight. This is why one of the biggest causes of low healer DPS is unnecessary healing.

Generally, oGCD heals are much more efficient than GCD related heals. Scholar’s entire kit revolves around what is called Aetherflow. Almost nothing is free, though. The opportunity cost of using one of your Aetherflow stacks on Indomitability is 150 potency of damage and 1,200 MP, both lost from not using Energy Drain.

That is not to say that using Indom is bad. Actually, it’s quite the contrary. The 150 potency lost not using an Energy Drain translates to saving a GCD that would have been a Succor. This GCD becomes a 230 potency Broil II, which results in a net 80 potency gain.

This 80 potency gain applies to any GCD heal you can replace with an oGCD. Scholar has the most expensive oGCD heals of all of the healers, with Rouse’d Embraces and Fey Union being our only “free” source of healing. That being said, they are still more efficient than using GCDs to heal. Everything has a cost. People like to believe that Whispering Dawn is free, but it does in fact have a hidden Opportunity cost, that being Selene’s Fey Wind.

For more on opportunity costs, I recommend checking out Momo Sama’s Healer Optimization Guide.

OCs for CoHealers

Before this guide is continued, let one thing be absolutely crystal clear.

There is no “Main Healer” or “Off Healer”.

This definition is a relic of the past and should not exist now. Both healers have one combined kit that is used to heal the raid. This interaction is important, as many players act as though they are the only healer, or as if they aren’t supposed to heal because they are a Scholar. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

It is important for you as a Scholar to understand some of the basics of your cohealer. Because of this, I recommend you check out Zyrk’s Intro To Astrologian. It will give a lot of insight into how their kit functions. There is no proper White Mage guide at the moment, but one will be linked here as well when one is made.

Both healers should be working together to maximize overall raid DPS. This means using whatever has the lowest opportunity cost to benefit your cohealer. A 150 potency loss from using an Indom can result in a net gain of 70 potency for AST and 100 potency for WHM.

Healing is all about minimizing losses. On Scholar, eating the 150 potency loss results in a gain for your cohealer, which in turn is a gain for overall raid DPS. With both healers minimizing losses, the increase in raid DPS is massive. This results in much better kill times and more comfortable clears.

Single Target Healing Priority

Healing is all about following a priority system. oGCDs with no cost are usually the first to be used, with the ones with the highest cost, GCDs, being a last resort. Below is a list of all single target heals, listed based on their damage potency lost.

This provides a good example of what healing priorities look like. Your goal as a team of healers is to minimize costs, which will in turn maximize your potential damage. There is a system of priorities used to determine what heal should be used at any given time. The priority is of course scaling down from whatever costs the least to what costs the most. GCD heals have the lowest priority, though there are some circumstances in which a GCD can outweigh an oGCD, discussed later.

Priority (Single Target)-

Tetragrammaton/Essential Dignity/Benediction
Fey Union/Rouse
Aspected Benefic/Regen
Lady Of Crowns
Excogitation
Lustrate
Synastry+Benefic II
Benefic II
Cure II
Adloquium
Synastry+Benefic
Benefic
Physick
Cure I

This is more or less the priority system used to judge what single target heals should be used in a given situation. The only reason Cure II is above Physick is raw potency. Casting a Physick isn’t going to heal enough in most circumstances. It would likely require you to cast another heal, which is why it is lower on the priority system.

While it isn’t listed, proper usages of White Mage’s Devine Benison can save heals throughout the course of the fight. If it were put on the list, it would be around where Fey Union is.

Unless your cohealer is holding Benediction for a Holmgang or Living Dead, it should be one of your highest priority heals. It has quite literally the highest potency of any heal in the game, and should be treated as such.

When organizing and optimizing heals, you’re generally going to use this priority system for determining what heals are necessary for a situations. There are some niche situations that can also apply with AOE regens. Which will be addressed later.

Keep in mind that Fey Union may need to be held as a tool for forcing Eos/Selene to focus on your tank when the party is low. Be wary of all the cooldowns, GCDs are generally a last resort for healing, as they cost the most in terms of damage potency.

AoE Healing Priority

It took more columns to make a chart to map out how effective oGCDs are. It requires more information in general to get the full picture. Because of this, adding a full picture with the chart will end up looking awful. The charts for both single target, AOE, as well as the math for later topics such as Deployment Tactics, check out my Spreadsheet.

Priority- AoE Healing

Earthly Star/Whispering Dawn
Asylum/Collective
*Earthly Star (Uncharged)
Indom
*Assize
*Aspected Helios
*Cure III
*Medica II
Succor
Emergency Tactics Succor
Helios
Medica

This is your general priority for AoE healing. Anything with a * has a caveat to their potential rankings. This is more prevalent in AoE healing than in single target healing, as more factors come into play here.

Assize has an asterisk because it is a DPS tool first, it should be treated as such. Its 45s cooldown means that significant delays will result in a very large DPS loss,as well as misaligning it from raid buffs. It is not worth it to hold this, as the loss in DPS is not worth the healing. Making it fall out of raid buffs is a loss for the rest of the encounter, every usage after will lose potency.

An uncharged Earthly Star can be a gain over using an Indom. Earthly only loses 50 potency for being uncharged, whereas a usage of Indom is 150 potency. This isn’t a very common application, but it can be useful if you’re looking to Min/Max your DPS potential. If Earthly comes off cooldown a few seconds before a raidwide, it can be beneficial to place Earthly and immediately Detonate it if it will get you above the HP threshold for survival.

Aspected Helios or Medica II can potentially be a gain over using an Indomitability as well. They have 1,280 and 1,600 more potency respectively than Indom. If the potency of an Indom won’t get the party to the threshold to survive an incoming raidwide, but Aspected Helios or Medica II would, they are a gain over using Indom. In this case, Indom would have likely forced you to use another AoE healing tool as well. This is also a relatively niche thing, but it can again be important when considering how to maximize your healing potential.

When there are no raid wide instances of damage incoming, it is fine to let Whispering Dawn or Collective Unconscious tick the party to full during downtime. This is superior to using Indom or a GCD heal. Using collective to mitigate a raid wide and letting it tick to heal the party is incredibly useful when there is downtime.

Cure III is over Succor in this case. The reasoning for this is that the raw healing potency from Cure III can make it better than a Succor. If you’re trying to top the party before an AOE, Cure III will generally do the job better than a Succor. If you need a small amount of healing before a raidwide, opt into Succor.

Medica II can take priority over Cure III if the WHM can swiftcast it, otherwise the 3s cast time makes it undesirable in terms of overall potency and how much potency you lose for using it.

How Shielding Works

Shielding in its most basic sense acts as an extension of our own health. This means that when we take damage, the shield will take damage before our actual HP bars do. For example, if we have 10,000 health, and a 2,000 shield, a 3,000 hit would leave us at 9,000 health. Multiple shields stack additively, meaning a 6,000 Succor Shield and an 8,000 Shake It Off results in 14,000 net shielding.

For Scholar, we have two methods of shielding. Adloquium heals for 300 potency and then provides a shield equalling the amount. If it crits, the shield is doubled. Succor shields for 150% of the value healed, so a 150 heal and a 225 potency shield. A 4,500 succor will have a 6,750 shield, whereas a 9,000 Adloquium will only have a 9,000 shield, unless it crits.

Shielding has a few interesting aspects to note. One of which is the delay before a shield actually applies. This can be to both the Scholar’s benefit or their detriment. If Succor is cast too late, the delay on the shield may mean that it won’t take effect until after damage has already happened. For mechanics such as Ion Efflux in O12s, a shield can be life or death for the survival of the party. Heals and shielding do not apply at once They go based on distance to the Scholar.. This can result in server ticks killing people when the last person to get the shield doesn’t have it registered when the raidwide happens. This usually can results in a death.

This delay in itself is not always a hindrance. If there are two back-to-back raid wide instances of damage, it is possible to time a Succor so that the heal will get the party before the first hit, and the shield will register after the damage. Heals apply as soon as the cast completes (though they do not hit everyone at once).

Nocturnal AST Shields override SCH shields, they do not stack.

This is important because you could have a 50,000 shield on someone and a 500 NOCT shield would override it. It is extremely frustrating that this interaction is a thing, but it has been like this forever. The shield size is irrelevant. NOCT/SCH don’t go well together unless the group has a set plan for shielding that prevents this interaction from happening.

When To Shield

A common mistake that new Scholars often make is an excess of Shielding. This is common even into the middle levels of Scholar play. Many Scholars attempt to shield incoming damage, especially large instances of damage. This is not always necessary, and is often a loss. Shielding is generally not needed for most raidwides.

The party will not survive without shielding.
Shielding one instance of damage prevents having to heal another.
You have no oGCD options for AOE healing.
You’re opting into strategies to cheese Limit Break.

An example of scenario one include Ion Efflux spam at the end of Final Omega.These mechanics generally require some kind of shielding to survive comfortably. This is especially true during early clears, as your defense stats and health haven’t scaled to their maximum yet.

The second example is if shielding a mechanic could save you a GCD heal. This is especially prominent in instances where a deployed Adloquium is used, as a crit Adlo can basically negate the AOE, preventing any further healing from being necessary.

The third scenario ideally never happens. Casting Succor or Adloquium to cover not having an oGCD heal is unfortunate, and rarely happens, but there are some times that we have to take the loss and use it.

The fourth instance is for highly optimized groups. This involves taking what should be lethal damage, but surviving it due to your shields. This means that if you take a 55k hit, but only have 51,000 and a 6,000 shield, it generates an absurd amount of limit break.

How Healing Buffs Work

Healing increases, such as Largesse and Fey Illumination, increase the amount your healing spells will heal. There are many ways to increase the amount of healing your spells will do. This is an important distinction. Spells are your casted heals, such as Physick, Adloquium, and Succor. Abilities are your oGCD heals, such as Indomitability and Excogitation.

These increases ONLY increase your spells. Using Largesse does not increase the amount of healing that your oGCD spells will heal. This means that you should only use Largesse if you have the intention of casting a heal manually. The general rule is, “If you cast it, it will be increased by heal-ups.”

These can be categorized by who uses them and who they benefit. Largesse will increase any casted heal done by that healer. Fey Illumination will increase the healing received by anyone with the buff it gives. Monk, Warrior, Bard, Scholar, Tanks, and Healers all have ways to increase healing.

Healing increases, such as Largesse, scale multiplicatively, not additively. This means that stacking these will result in massive heals, which can be extremely helpful when you want to maximize the potency of your healing.

For example, Adloquium is 300 potency. When used with Largesse, the potency becomes:

300+(300*.2)=360

If we decide to add in Nature’s Minne from a Bard, another 20% increase, the math then we get:

360+(360*.2)=432

It is important to know the difference between them being additive and multiplicative. If they WERE additive, the potency would have been 420. The more percentage increases you add in, the more the math begins to stray from the actual value.

This is all important because this also scales into how can address certain mechanics. Your shields will scale based on how much you heal. This means that stacking Convalescence, Largesse, Nature’s minne, and Defiance can result in an Adloquium with a potency of 622.08. This Adlo has a higher healing potency than your Lustrate, and provides a shield equalling that value. This shield being Deployed to the entire party can negate entire mechanics, especially if this 622 potency Adlo crits.

The loss from casting this Adloquium is still 230, the lost Broil II. That being said though, this shield can prevent another heal from having to be used, especially in the case of a crit.

Being able to stack these healing increases results in some insane numbers in terms of shielding. Stacking Largesse+Fey Illumination+Mantra turns Succor into a 237 base heal and 356 shield. If you are going to have to use GCDs to heal, it is worthwhile to use these to maximize the value of your GCDs. If you’re going to be forced to take a loss, better to get the most out of it.

Deployment Tactics

Deployment Tactics at face value is fairly simple. It will deploy the effect of Galvanize off of the target and spread it to anyone in a 10 yalms. When reading the tool tip, the general idea behind this skill is obvious. You cast a shield, such as Adloquium, then spread the strong shield to the party.

This will spread the Current value of the shield to the party. This is important. If you put a shield on the tank, then that tank gets hit by an auto, the shield will be much smaller. A surprising amount of Scholars make the mistake of casting an Adlo onto the main tank and deploying a weaker shield because of autos.Generally, you’ll try to deploy off of the tank that is not tanking the boss at the time.

Deployment Tactics can also be done off of the fairy. This is important for situations where tanks can not go to a position where a deploy will hit the entire party. This is especially important when you consider that many AOEs do not damage the fairy. An Adlo can be casted onto the fairy, then be deployed after a raidwide. This allows you to get a fully powered shield onto the party after a raidwide. This is useful for things such as O12s’ “Hello, World”, as the fairy will not take damage from the initial cast.

There are other reasons that knowing where fairies take damage can be important. One of these is the usage of Deployment Tactics on Succor. This generally confuses many people, but there are some instances where using Deployment Tactics on Succor is actually superior to using it on Adloquium. These are not extremely frequent, but are nice when it is applicable.

This is a spreadsheet showing the potencies of Adloquium or Succor Deploy. Do remember that this is assuming that the deploy happened off of a fairy that took no damage from an AOE. Also, this assumes that things like Mantra, Largesse, and Minne weren’t used. It takes four 20% healing increases (Largesse, Minne, Defiance, Convalescence) for an Adlo deploy to beat a raw Succor deploy. It is extremely powerful when circumstances allow.

This does not, however, mean that you should use Succor as your primary spell for deploying. There are very specific circumstances that Succor deploy is powerful, and others where Adloquium is superior.Using Indom/Star is always preferable to using a GCD, but they aren’t always up when they are needed.

Succor deploy shines when there are multiple AOEs that happen quickly. It especially shines when there are three back-to-back AOEs. You can allow the first AOE to happen without any shielding. Then you cast Succor to give your party a shield. This guarantees the healing potency is not wasted. After the 2nd AOE, assuming the shield on the fairy was not eaten by the AOE, you can deploy off of the fairy for another 225 potency shield.

This type of deploy is very consistent. It has less usages during the current raid tier. In O6s there were numerous places that this type of deploy was strong. In O7s it could be used on the triple Defractive Plasma. In the current tier, the one spot where it truly shines is during the finale of Omega M/F. When you are using tank LB to cheese the meteor, you can Succor after the damage, then deploy after Cosmo Memory so that you have a guaranteed shield on Laser Shower without another GCD being used. In this case, you needed the shield to survive Cosmo Memory. The Deployment Tactics is nice because it is a 225 potency shield essentially for free.

So basically, Succor deploy is strong when there are back-to-back AOEs that won’t damage the fairy to remove its shield. They aren’t incredibly frequent, but again, it is a very useful thing to know for circumstances where it applies. Ideally triple back-to-back AOEs are where this shines the most. It can get use during double, but can have less value, especially if the initial heal from Succor isn’t actually healing anything.

Adloquium deploy is strong in other circumstances. Adlo is better if you need a lot of upfront damage reduction. It is also better if you will not survive without the stronger shield from Adlo. Adlo can also potentially save healer GCDs if it crits. In this circumstance it is better to Adlo deploy over a Succor deploy.

In O12s, for example, most Scholars tend to use Deployment Tactics on “Hello, World”. There are many reasons for this. The party will be taking an absurd amount of damage across the board throughout the course of the mechanic. The party will also be spread out during this mechanic, making an eight man Succor deploy near impossible. To further push it ahead, a critical Adloquium can result in saved healer GCDs throughout the course of the mechanic, as the only healing that is required at that point is the final Ion Efflux of the mechanic. The party is too spread out during the mechanic to get heals to everyone, further pushing Adlo deploy ahead.

Another place where Adloquium deploy was strong was during the Tumults in The Weapon’s Refrain (Ultimate). A critical Adlo can potentially save your cohealer a GCD heal. On the topic of Ultima Weapon, there is a strategy for handling Ultimate Predation where you allow the entire party to be hit by one of Ifrit’s dashes. This is extremely heavy hitting, and requires high shielding to survive. This is another case where Adlo deploy is extremely strong.

It is also worth knowing that if you attempt to use Deployment Tactics too early, it will have no effect. This can be a problem if your strategy for healing requires a shield. If this happens, it is unfortunate. Communicate the mistake to your team and compensate by doing extra heals. It sucks when this happens, so attempt to avoid it.

Deployment Tactics also spreads An Eye For An Eye. This is a much less important aspect of the ability. This can only proc on physical damage, which makes it really weak in our current raid environment, where most AOE damage is magical. This is why I say that it is really not worth mentioning its interaction with Deployment Tactics.

MP Management

MP management isn’t particularly hard on Scholar. We have a lot of options to regenerate our MP and a pretty constant flow of MP through Aetherflow and Energy Drain usage. Dissipation is another tool for MP regeneration, but should only be used in extremely dire circumstances. On top of this built in MP regeneration, we also have Lucid Dreaming, a 15s MP refresh on a 120s cooldown.

Aetherflow should be used as soon as it comes up. You risk losing an enormous amount of damage, healing, and MP by not keeping this ability on cooldown. Every Aetherflow ability you use will reduce the recast on Aetherflow by five seconds. This means that stacks must be used within ~45 seconds of using Aetherflow to gain the full effect. Not taking advantage of this trait can cost Aetherflow usages over the course of an encounter, which is negative in DPS and HPS, as well as MP efficiency.

Dissipation is not a great way to gain back MP, and should only be considered in extreme emergencies. Using all three gained stacks on Energy Drain grants 3,600 MP. Resummoning the fairy costs 1,200, which results in a +2,400 swing for MP. The loss of Embrace can result in more healing being required, which can damage efficiency. In the case of an MP Dissipation, there will usually be a DPS loss. If not for the Scholar, but their cohealer having to cast an extra heal to compensate for the loss of Embrace for the duration.

There isn’t particularly an “optimal” time to use Lucid Dreaming, as its really dependant on how you’re healing a fight. Depending on differing strategies, different people could need it at various places. With that being said, don’t hold Lucid for half of an encounter. Ideally you would want to get as many uses out of it as possible, while holding it when it is needed for a specific portion of the encounter.

Having problems regarding MP is often due to either too many Succors, or too many Miasma IIs. Succor is not very MP efficient, which is yet another reason to avoid using it if at all possible. The 2,040 MP cost is extremely significant, especially if it is being spammed for AOE healing.

Miasma II is an interesting case. It has a 1,680 MP cost, which means that many uses add up in terms of MP costs fairly quickly. However, when used to weave Energy Drain, the cost is effectively only 480, and it is DPS positive. Miasma II is the best tool that Scholar has for weaving oGCDs. Using it with Energy Drain and any other oGCD that is required is ideal, but there are sometimes when we aren’t afforded that luxury. Attempt to avoid doing non-ED Miasma IIs unless necessary.

Dissipation

Dissipation is an interesting ability. It sacrifices your pet and grants you three Aetherflow stacks. It also grants a 20% increase to healing spells for 30s. During this 30s you can not resummon Eos or Selene. The healing increase from this cannot be clicked off. This is an extremely situational skill. It has a few niche uses, and is very useful when it is good.

The major downside of Dissipation is the loss of Embrace. This means that when used at the wrong time, it can force either the SCH or their cohealer to do extra GCDs to heal. Assuming that the fairy would have gotten 10 full embraces during the 30s downtime, you’re missing out on ~1,750 net potency on the tank. This GCD lost guarantees that Dissipation is a loss.

Generally, Dissipation is only a gain in these situations-

There is no incoming damage on the tank, so the loss of Embrace isn’t relevant.
The extra healing from Dissipation saves a GCD heal.
You are absolutely desperate for MP.
Emergency heals are desperately needed.

These are the general instances where Dissipation can be used. This provides the broad guideline as to where Dissipation can be used for a gain. There are several examples of each particular instance.

For instance one, there are many possible examples, as this is the most common time to use it. If the boss is getting ready to go untargetable, it is almost always a gain to use Dissipation. This is because the loss of Embrace during down time is not really relevant. Being able to summon back Eos/Selene during the downtime is also a significant gain, and is important for minimizing the losses around Dissipation for optimal usage.

In our current raid tier, there are many instances where this happens. In O9s, after casting Bowels of Agony, Chaos will leave the arena. During this time, the add phase happens. Dissipating before he leaves will net you extra damage before he leaves, and you can summon as his ultimate happens so that you never have to drop a Broil II cast for it. In O11s, Dissipating after the second Fey Wind nets extra potency on the boss as well, and the fairy can be summoned during Delta Attack.

The same thing applies during the final burn of any encounter. Generally, Dissipation is done within the last 30ish seconds of a fight to gain one final burst as the boss dies. Not doing this is essentially wasting potency. The boss can’t be targeted after it dies, and it won’t be able to auto long enough to kill the tank. This is the most common usage of Dissipation.

For instance two, look at fights like God Kefka. During the first Forsaken, Dissipation was incredibly powerful, as it could save a GCD heal due to the 20% increased healing. This also doubles for instance two, as the tank was not taking autos during this time, and was covered entirely by AOE healing. During O9s, many Scholars opt to use Dissipation to get a stronger shield for the second Earthquake. This saves a GCD heal, especially when combined with tank shields such as Divine Veil and Shake it Off.

The third example was discussed much earlier. Generally it will be a ~2,400 MP gain to Dissipate. This often forces your cohealer to cast extra heals to compensate for the lack of a Fairy, so this use is extremely niche.

The final scenario is more of a concern in progression. A well timed Dissipation can easily save runs, especially when your cohealer dies during AOE healing heavy parts of encounters. Examples of this are Almagest in Neo Exdeath if your cohealer dies.

The math behind how much of a gain Dissipation is is muddled. Your goal is to get full benefit out of Quickened Aetherflow, which means that ideally you need to burn off six stacks within 30s of an Aetherflow cast. It is extremely hard to do this without clipping several times. This muddles the exact math. Depending on when its used, you can have tools such as swiftcast to avoid a few clips, so the exact math varies for different uses.

On top of this, the extra -15s on Aetherflow could net an extra usage throughout the course of an encounter, which would add even more of a gain to this ability.

In a perfect vaccuum, in a wonderful universe, Dissipation with a summon when the boss is untargetable is a 450 potency gain. The clips will reduce this potency pretty significantly, but it is still virtually always a gain when you aren’t going to be punished for the loss of the fairy.

We do not use Dissipation when the boss is targetable unless it saves a healing GCD. If you have to resummon while the boss is still targetable, you are losing at LEAST 230 of the gain.That is if you swiftcast the summon. If you hard cast it, due to its ~3s cast time, additional potency is lost. This should result in a 270ish potency loss from resummoning. On top of the clipping, it ends up being either barely neutral for DPS.

Movement

Movement is another place that many Scholars struggle to master. Scholar has a lot of strong options for moving. We aren’t quite the “I can run around the entire arena for 10s-20s while spamming my primary DPS spell and lose absolutely 0 DPS” that AST has, but we don’t get destroyed by it like White Mage.

There are four options to handle movement in a raid setting. What you will use will vary depending on many various factors. For example, how quickly you need to move and how far will play a big role in deciding which movement option will be best suited for a given situation.

In terms of movement, Scholar has, in no particular order, Miasma II, Bio II, Ruin II, and Swiftcast. These are all tools that need to be considered when movement is coming. Miasma refresh timing works the same as mentioned earlier. It’s generally alright to clip the Miasma II DoT if it is below 6s on the DoT. Bio CAN be used for movement, but it’s generally not unless reapplication lines up with when movement is required.

If you are being forced to break off of the boss, always try to start with Miasma II. It can be planned ahead to not have it ticking so that you aren’t clipping the DoT. This gives the Scholar 2.5s to move. This also gives a chance to use oGCDs. Miasma II (Energy Drain+Swiftcast)->Broil II is essentially 5 seconds of free movement. The Energy Drain isn’t always there, but it is nice for minimizing the MP cost of Miasma II.

Swiftcasting and eating a Broil Clip is superior to using Ruin II. The second Broil II can also be used to weave as well. If you have more time to move, it is possible to Miasma II, then Broil II (Swiftcast)->Broil II, which covers a lot of ground.

Bio II can be used for movement if the duration is at 9s or less. At that point, the previous DoT will have done more damage than a Broil II. However, you are eating a 105 potency loss (35/tick*3 ticks) if you do this. It is better to just let Bio II tick out and use it for movement if it naturally aligns with movement. Clipping this DoT means it also loses alignment with Shadowflare. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, it is very convenient that they naturally align.

The idea generally is trying to cut out as many Ruin IIs as possible, as its 100 potency is really not worth it when you can do literally anything else.

Another trick for movement is called “Slidecasting”. This is abusing the spaghetti coding of the game to get casts off as you move. To do this, you simply move when the duration of your cast is less than .5. It will not cancel your cast at this point. Doing this over and over lets you slowly move across the map while maintaining DPS. This will take some getting used to, and you can lose casts if you aren’t careful.

How Mitigations Work

Mitigation is one of the most important aspects to raiding. Reducing the damage taken by an attack reduces the healing required, which then increases the amount of DPS healers can do. It is important to know how mitigations work, and how much mitigation is needed for any given mechanic.

Mitigations, similarly to % healing increases, scale multiplicatively downward. This means that they are subject to diminishing returns. What does this mean? Each % mitigation you stack reduces incoming damage by less than the last used.

For example. If the party is going to take a 100,000 hit, a tank using Reprisal will reduce the damage of this by 10%, or 10,000.

(100,000-(100,000*.1))=90,000

This means the hit is now 90,000. If the Scholar now uses Sacred Soil, it will reduce the 90,000 damage by 9,000, making the new value 8,100.

90,000-(90,000*.1)=81,000

Another 10% mitigation will further reduce the benefit.

81,000-(81,000*.1)=72,900

The damage reduction will continue on this downward curve. This is what is called diminishing returns. A few of them graphed out looks like this. Note that this is showing how much damage will taken with all of these mitigations being stacked on top of each other.

This means that stacking too many of these reductions is actually a major loss. There are currently no mechanics that absolutely require all mitigations to be stacked at once. The closest thing is Morn Afahs in the final phase of Unending Coil. Even then, you only need three 10% mitigations+Succor to survive.

Sacred Soil is generally avoided unless absolutely necessary. Everything being used on one AOE means that there will be nothing left for the next. Using too much on one attack can mean that an extra heal might be necessary for future damage.

It is important to map out everyone’s mitigations to maximize the effectiveness of them while not wasting them. Using a Sacred Soil when there are already numerous mitigations stacked on an AOE will likely not save a heal. Communicate with your party when things should be used to maximize their uses and effectiveness.

Party Mitigations

Everyone has some form of mitigations. This was a change going from Heavensward into Stormblood. The developers wanted to take some of the responsibility off of the healers and give it to the rest of the party. Because of this, every job now has something they can use to reduce incoming damage taken.

Below is every mitigation for Tanks/Healers.

Table courtesy of Momo Sama.

This visual really shows how much responsibility needs to be on the DPS and tanks in any group to help reduce incoming damage and help mitigate. If a tank drops dead after a buster, it is worthwhile to check and make sure that these mitigations were present. Especially in fights like O10s, Palisade and Feint can make a MASSIVE difference in the damage that a tank will take from the the tank buster.

Make SURE your DPS are using these mitigations. This is important for all healers, including Scholar, as your party members using their tools is essential for you to maximize your potential damage output. Proper usage of these tools can result in a fairly significant gain for healer DPS.

Treat party members like Eos. They will absolutely never use their tools where you actually need them unless you specifically tell them to use them. As a healer, you need to be vocal and specify where a mitigation will save you a heal. For example, if an AOE requires Shielding, it can be better to have Shake It Off, as it saves a Succor cast.

Second Wind and Bloodbath are also important tools when it comes to saving GCD heals. Proper usage of these skills can save healing over the course of an encounter. Bloodbath essentially heals the user for 22% of all damage dealt for the entire duration. Across all skills used and auto attacks, this results in a fairly large amount of healing. This can be used to cut healing out, especially if the user only needs a small amount of extra health to survive a coming AOE.

Things like Feint almost always have some purpose in an encounter. If all of the tank busters are magical, Feint and Palisade can be used on heavy auto attack segments of the fight to help ease healing. Do not underestimate how much healing is saved through auto attack Feints throughout the course of an encounter.

Ask your DPS where they are using these skills, and if you think there is a better place, tell them. Check logs to make sure they are actively using their skills, if they aren’t, tell them where to put them. This is not negotiable. They have these skills for a reason, and need to use them. If they aren’t, they are not maximizing their effectiveness and are holding the entire group back. You can clear while not using these abilities, but it makes the entire run infinitely harder than it has to be.

Raid Buffs

Raid buffs are one of the most important aspects of raiding in FFXIV. The meta of XIV revolves around stacking raid buffs for massive burst windows. Most DPS jobs, bar Samurai and Black Mage, have an ability that increases DPS for the party. Tanks lack direct raid DPS increases, as does WHM. Generally, jobs that have these buffs are preferred over alternatives. These are always on cooldowns with multiples of 30s, which means they will all eventually line up if used properly on cooldown.

Listed out, all major raid buffs are-

Raid buffs, like most other % increases, scale multiplicatively. This means that a Broil II under Trick and Foes is around 261 potency. Stacking these is the best way to maximize their benefits. Again, notice that all of them are on thirty second intervals. This means that when they are all used properly, they will naturally align, causing strong burst windows that will be your biggest DPS phases.

Scholar has two raid buffs. Chain Stratagem increases the rate at which the target takes critical strikes by 15% for 15s. Fey wind is a slight haste buff that adds up to a pretty significant gain over the course of the fight.

Critical Hit is a stat that scales multiplicatively in terms of DPS gain. The more of the stat that you get, the more frequently you will crit, and the bigger the multiplier on those crits. Stacking multiple of these can result in absolutely crazy damage numbers.

Fey Wind is used in every pull before the encounter begins. A Selene->Eos swap before the pull has virtually no cost. This isn’t a massive gain, but it is something. A gain is a gain, and we take what we can get. If you are opting into Selene 100%, it is a much more significant gain, especially if it gains GCDs over the course of an encounter.

Buff Alignment

Generally, raid buffs should be used on cooldown. This is because everything will naturally align if they are used properly. Here is a graphic showing off exactly how it looks when raid buffs are used on cooldown. This is done with only NIN/BRD/SCH/DRG for the sake of making a smaller chart.

This is assuming a 12 minute pull. This shows exactly how all of these buffs will naturally look when used on cooldown. Buffs don’t actually happen at 0 seconds, Chain Stratagem goes out at ~6.5s. The choice to use 0s for the sake of this chart was just to give an easier time showing how raid buffs align.

Raid buffs should almost always be used on cooldown. Holding on to raid buffs for extended periods of time can deny usages throughout the course of an encounter. This is a very large loss in most circumstances. With that being said, there are a few instances where raid buffs can be held. Listed out, they are-

The buff comes up during an add phase.
Slightly delaying a buff can allow for better uptime without losing a usage.
Holding it can allow for a better opener on a later phase.
Using it on cooldown will result in a usage where you can not get good value.
There will not be time for another usage, so delaying it allows for a greater burst window.

The first is the most common. Gaining extra burst damage on the boss is always superior to using it to damage an add. Certain raid buffs, like Trick Attack, can often be used on adds because they have a short cooldown and will be back before the boss returns to the arena. For the sake of Scholar, it is safe to always hold Chain during adds for the burst window when the boss returns. Fey Wind can be used on adds if it will return before the boss returns.

The second is less common, but is still useful. There are certain times in encounters where there is limited uptime for some party members. This can be problematic, as it limits the gain you can get out of your buffs. During scenarios like this, it can be beneficial to slightly delay usages to get the full duration out of the buffs. This is, of course, if you won’t lose a usage because of the delay. This entirely depends on your group’s kill time if you will lose a usage.

For an example of scenario #2. This applies for specific kill times.. If the kill occurs at under 7:00, but over 6:15, when the last set of buffs fell off, there is around 40s worth of time that raid buffs COULD potentially be delayed if necessary without losing any uses.

There are several times this has actually been applied within the current expansion. During Exdeath, Chain Stratagem came up during the Black Holes phase. This was awful for uptime, as multiple people were being forced to move during the mechanic, as well as a mechanic that required healers to top the party. Holding Chain here to get it during Meteor, where there was no other outgoing damage, was a pretty sizable gain.

Another example of this is the second Celestriad in God Kefka. This mechanic forced the party to break away from the boss and move into positions that weren’t friendly for positionals. Delaying Trick and Chain here resulted in better usage.

The third scenario mainly applies to Ultimate raids. The structure of all current Ultimate tier raids has been two or three minibosses before a final encounter. These minibosses tend to be extremely short, with Twintania in UCOB at around a three minute enrage. While you could use the second Chain Stratagem on her, using it there would mean that it wouldn’t be up for the Nael opener, which was a significant loss. The same applies for Garuda and Ifrit in Ultima Weapon.

The fourth scenario mainly involves instances where you can’t get the full value out of a usage. These include where the boss will go untargetable in the middle of the duration or if the boss will die during or immediately after a usage.

Take for instance, this eight minute pull. If the boss dies at 8:00-8:10, you aren’t getting the full value out of the final Chain. In this instance, you will be getting four full usages of two minute cooldowns, and three full usages of three minute cooldowns. Because you’re not going to get the full value out of the last Chain, it is worthwhile to hold earlier usages. This results in one less Chain over the course of the encounter, but it allows for three full burst windows with Trick+Chain+Litany. The lost chain isn’t that much of a loss due to how gimped it was going to be anyway. This does require the DRG to hold their second Litany for 60s.

This basically guarantees three massive burst windows, which is extremely effective for increasing raid DPS. Of course, this is all subject to change based on party composition. Having 90s raid buffs changes the timings in such a way that it allows for full use of the 90s buff windows. Below is an example of one such setup using MNK. This setup has the same three major burst windows, but loses a Trick Attack through the course of the pull.

The fourth and final instance of holding raid buffs is easier.. If you are not going to get another usage of raid buffs during the encounter, it is best to get that last usage when other buffs are active.

If this pull ends at 9:20-9:59, there is no possible way to gain another Chain Stratagem during the course of the encounter. The final Chain used only falls under Trick Attack. Holding this Chain an additional minute to get it with Battle Voice and Litany will result in higher damage overall than if it was used properly on cooldown.

Again, these changes need to be communicated with the party, as a delayed Chain will not be as effective if the party does not know that it is happening. This can be especially important for BRD, which relies on Chain for increased chance of Procs during their songs.

The final scenario also applies to Cleric Stance, which, while not a raid buff, is important for maximizing your personal DPS. If your last Cleric Stance happens between Trick Attacks or under no buffs, it can be worthwhile to hold it for the last burst window for a tiny gain. This isn’t very significant, but any gain is a gain.

Stat Priorities

Your priority as you attempt to gear is always going to go something like this.

Weapon Damage
Main Stat
Piety (to threshold needed to heal an encounter)
Crit
Direct Hit/Determination
Spell Speed
Piety

This is basically the main priority stat wise.The above list applies heavily to when you are gearing and attempting to get to BIS. During progression, generally you will take whatever has the most item level, as the main stat difference is extremely important. The difference between the high quality crafted chest piece and the Omega Coat of Healing is 37 Mind. Almost no amount of substat will make up for that loss of main stat.

There are some very niche situations where you will hold on to a lower Ilvl item. The main situation of this is for Piety reasons. If getting the Omega Coat costs you the 271 PIE from your crafted coat, it can be beneficial to hold on to the crafted coat until you’ve made up for the Piety loss elsewhere in your set.

Weapon Damage

Weapon Damage is the most important stat for every class in terms of damage. For healers, there are some niche situations where a higher item level weapon will be worse due to inferior substats. Scholars face this dilemma in the current tier. Our tome weapon, while boasting higher weapon damage, has an abysmal substat selection. The Crit/Det Suzaku book actually outweighs the WD gain from the 390 tome book. This is because unless you desperately need the PIE from the tome book, it is a dead stat, and SPS is generally not a desirable stat. Because of this, it is worth more to keep the 385 Suzaku book unless you can augment the 390 book into a 400.

Main Stat

Main stat is the second most important stat, generally. It plays a massive part in how much damage we deal, as well as how much we heal. Generally we opt into whatever the highest item level gear is because it has more of this main stat. There are some BIS sets that opt into crafted accessories. This is because the main stat loss here is MUCH less significant than on body pieces and weapons. A crafted ring only has 15 less main stat than a savage ring. This, combined with the extremely high amount of substats that can be gotten through crafted rings make them a valuable option. The overmelds on these pieces can often meet substat tiers that couldn’t have been gotten otherwise, which can be a sizeable increase to DPS.

Piety

People vastly underrated how useful Piety is as a stat. People often say “Piety is a dead stat”. This is both true, and untrue at the same time. If you run out of MP, you will be unable to DPS or heal. Because of this, Piety is actually the most important substat for healers up until a certain threshold. Once you get to the threshold required to get through a fight without running out of MP, Piety becomes a dead stat.

Many people think that because there are sets that run extremely low MP, it is a useless stat. The extreme speedkill sets that go with almost no piety are meant to be used in groups that will do everything they can to reduce healing. This means that those healers have many more Energy Drains to help support their lack of MP. Playing with a low PIE set is extremely risky in groups that aren’t attempting to optimize.

Finding the right amount of PIE for yourself takes a lot of trial and error, it is useful to keep other pieces available so that you can sub in more piety if it is needed. This is also incredibly important for progressing in Ultimate Raids.

Piety scales slightly differently for each healer class dependent on their MP Modifier. For SCH this is 119, for AST and WHM it is 124. This is a small difference, but does impact the required piety gains to maintain a neutral pie/sps ratio if you want to reduce your GCD. The function for calculating MP is as follows (courtesy of TheoryJerks).

MP = ⌊ ( Job _{Job, MP} / 100 ) × ( ( 6000 × ( PIE – 292 ) / 2170 ) + 12000 ) ⌋

Increase piety also increases the amount of mana regenerated naturally in battle. Natural MP regen is 2% of max mp every three seconds, so increases to piety impact not only your maximum cap but also the amount you recover over the course of a fight. As a rough estimate, each point of piety gives you 3-4 MP (roughly 3.33 per point, floored) and it takes roughly 15 piety to see an increase to your natural MP regen. In simpler terms, a Piety VI materia will give you ~130MP and an extra 2-3 points of MP in each natural regen tick (or up to 60 extra MP per minute).

Critical Hit

Critical Hit is our most influential stat when it comes to DPS and healing. The more of this stat that you get, the more crits will happen, and the harder they will scale. Because of this, crit scales multiplicatively. Because of this, the more of it we stack, the greater returns. This stat is further benefited by the interaction with Adloquium.

Credits to Nemekh.. Source.

This shows how crit scales. The more crit obtained, the more damage they will deal and the more it happens. This chart exemplifies that gain. Stacking multiple crit buffs results in massive gains in in terms of DPS gain. This is the most important substat for Scholar. This stat also has the benefit of its interaction with Adloquium. While this is an important interaction, it is not why crit is taken. It is, however, a very nice bonus that they work so well together.

Spell Speed

Spell Speed is a double edged sword, particularly for healers. In a vacuum, spell speed is a powerful substat as it increases the damage done by auto attacks, damage over time (DoT) attacks, and healing from healing over time (HoT) spells while also reducing your cast and recast time, meaning you can (in theory) attack more often. As a result, it appears to be a stat that scales quadratically, similar to critical hit. However, it is important to note that there are two “tiers” to spell speed scaling: One of these tiers impacts your DoT/Hot and AA damage scaling, while the other is your GCD tiers. GCD tiers are the largest direct gain to Spell Speed, but these tiers are very far apart relative to other substats. As an example, DoT/AA Scaling tiers are ~25-27 points apart, but GCD tiers are generally 60-70 points apart instead (For 2.5s cast times specifically). In BiS calculations, SPS melds are exclusively done to meet GCD tiers rather than the very small DoT/AA scaling tiers. See graphs below for examples of spell speed scaling (courtesy of Nemekh, source).

(DoT and AA Scaling shown above relative to Spell Speed, note the small multiplier even as numbers grow exceedingly high)

(GCD tiering for various cast times with increasing Spell Speed)

With that said, the largest benefit of spell speed (GCD reduction) is also the greatest detriment, for multiple reasons. First, substats function as a “zero-sum game”. This means that any stats you put into Spell Speed are taken away from other damage gaining stats such as Determination, Critical Hit, and Direct Hit. Consider now that the largest gain to spell speed is gaining GCDs to deal more damage. By reducing the impact of your other stats in favor of gaining more casts, you’re also directly increasing the dps losses from losing casts due to movement, clipping, canceled casts, or boss mechanics. As a result, optimizing higher spell speed requires much greater attention to positioning for mechanics to minimize unnecessary movement and canceled casts. It also requires more thorough planning of your GCDs and oGCDs to minimize clipping.

Second, reducing your GCD also means it is necessary to have more piety to maintain your mana economy. Piety, while a very important stat for healers, is also the only “zero dps” substat. Again, recall that substats are a zero-sum game. Any stats put into piety are being taken directly from critical hit, determination, and direct hit. This means that if a spell speed meld or piece of gear forces you to add piety to compensate, you are likely taking an overall hit to your dps vs utilizing another substat instead. Regarding piety/spell speed balance – Scholar mana economy is fairly decent and party comp plays a factor in your GCD/PIE ratio, but each GCD tier increases your mana usage by an estimated 0.4% to 0.5% over the previous tier. To compensate, if you are at your “wall” in terms of current GCD/Piety ratio, you’ll want to increase your piety by at least 18 points if you want to reduce your GCD by one tier (ex: 2.37 to 2.36). As a result, an decrease of two GCD tiers will typically require one extra Piety VI Meld to compensate for the increased GCD assuming you’re at the limit.

Finally, reducing GCD can also create clipping issues for oGCD heavy classes. Scholar is in a unique situation where it is heavily reliant on oGCDs and reducing the GCD too significantly can create serious clipping concerns, especially when utilizing Energy Drain in consecutive weave windows because Energy Drain has a 3s cooldown (unaffected by your GCD tier). As your GCD decreases, the time available to fit in double weaves also decreases, which can create clipping issues when double weaving oGCDs. Clipping your GCD is a direct potency loss, and if your spell speed tier means clipping is inevitable you will want to consider going with a slower GCD to make weaving more viable.

Determination

This stat increases damage dealt and healing dealt and the det base functions as a divisor for other primary stats (increasing det has no impact on these other stats, however). The damage gain from Determination is linear. This means that it does not scale as quickly as critical hit in terms of damage gain. Below is a chart with the damage gain from determination.

Credits to Nemekh. Source.

Determination is not a bad stat. It just does not scale at the rate of crit. DET is a consistent increase in damage/healing, whereas Crit is an RNG gain. Crit will likely always be better, but DET is solid. It is the “base” substat, even utilizing a lower base value from other substats (Det base at 70 is 292, same as primary stat vs 364 for crit/dh/ss).

Direct Hit

Direct hit functions as sort of a “mini crit”. It is essentially 25% increased damage when you get a Direct Hit. It scales linearly. The damage gain is consistently 25%, but the more DHIT you obtain, the more likely they are to occur. When going for maximum damage sets, it is better to opt into direct hit over spell speed or determination.

Credits to Nemekh. Source.

Direct Critical Hits are the real star of having DHIT. Both of these occurring at once can result in +20k Broil IIs. These are fairly common in the opener, when all crit buffs are stacked together and Battle Voice is coming out of the BRD.

Vitality

While not listed out as one of our most important stats, VIT has its own niche. During progression, VIT can be melded onto all accessories to increase health. This is important for early prog, as there are some instances where you will survive mechanics with VIT melds that you wouldn’t have without. This can save many deaths. Vitality melds in prog are an absolute must until you have enough health from other gear to remove them.

Determination Vs. Direct Hit

This was a controversial topic during early parts of 4.0. Most DHIT builds have less than 1% higher damage than those with DET, and have less than 4% reduced healing. Honestly, you won’t feel the difference either way. For maximum DPS for speed kills and optimized runs, DHIT is absolutely better DPS wise. That being said, the difference is so tiny, you really won’t be able to tell. Pick whichever you prefer, and stop arguing about which is better.

Useful Macros

Generally, macros are frowned upon. Macros are not handled well in FFXIV. If you macro your healing/DPS spells, it means they can’t be queued. This means there is an extra delay before the next cast, which results in a DPS loss. That being said though, there are quite a few useful macros that improve quality of life. Repeated lines in macros will improve responsiveness. None of these are mandatory, but they can make life easier.

There are different types of Macros. will basically will target whatever has aggro on what you have selected. will target whatever you have targeted. Mouseover will go on whatever you are hovering your mouse over.

Shadowflare target macro This macro makes it to where you don’t have to click the ground to place shadowflare. It will automatically place it where your target is standing, in the center of their hitbox. Manual Embrace macro for main tank Useful if you want to heal a tank above 80% or heal specific party members. Manual Embrace mouseover This is useful for when you need to proc Divine Veil on the PLD. It allows you to save a GCD. You may need to place cancel in order to get the fairy to do what you want. Also useful for healing party members over 80% health manually. Excogitation mouseover Useful way to use excogitation if you don’t want to stop targeting the boss. You can hover your mouse over them on the party list and use it without ever having to deselect the boss. Lustrate Mouseover Basically the same as a mouseover macro for Excogitation. Good if you need to emergency heal. General Tips There are lots of small things that can be really helpful for playing any job, especially healing. A lot of these will be repeats from things earlier, but it is worthwhile to repeat them to drill them in. Keep your GCD rolling. If you have 3s where you didn’t do anything, that is a Broil II lost. Your CPM, or casts per minute, is one of the most important part of playing this game. Most people who come asking why their DPS is low are simply not casting enough, which is resulting in a ton of lost DPS. Don’t be afraid to trust Whispering Dawn to heal the party. It is a massive amount of healing. Don’t heal during its duration if possible, as its ticks are wasted if you use an Indom to cap the party during the duration. Remember to use Rouse on cooldown and use Fey Union and Excogitation. They are powerful tools that a LOT of Scholars seem to forget. Use them to your advantage. Roused Embraces heal for a lot. Keep it on cooldown unless it overlaps Union. Communicate with your party. Always let your party members know what you are doing. Let your cohealer know that they don’t need to heal if you are going to Indom. Let the party know you are going to delay a Chain Stratagem. Communication is absolutely key when playing in a raid setting. You need to be vocal about things that will make the raid easier. If moving a Divine Veil will save a healing GCD, let the PLD know. They can not make your life easier if they don’t know what will help you. The same applies to all DPS mitigations. Tell them where to put things. Additional Resources These are some additional resources that are useful for anyone attempting to further their play. There will be guides for general healing, AST, as well as optimization guides. It is worthwhile to look into these, as they are useful guides from talented players. Zyrk’s Bullshit Guide to the Principles of Healing A general guide to the principles of healing by Zyrkhan Dar’locke. It is a fairly long read, but if you’ve managed to slog through 80 pages of Scholar, it is also a worthwhile read. It has many of the concepts discussed here, but in much greater detail. It also goes much further beyond the scope of this Scholar guide. I highly recommend anyone read it. Healer Optimization Guide This video guide by Momo Sama is incredibly useful for learning how to optimize with your cohealer to push for higher dps. This video is the holy grail of information in regards to optimizing. This is a MUST watch for anyone wanting to learn how higher level play operates. Intro to Astrologian A guide to Astrologian by Zyrkhan Dar’locke. Reading this as a Scholar can be useful, as it gives insight into how their kit operates. Knowing your cohealer’s tools well is important for maximizing the effectiveness of your own play. FFXIV 70 Statistic Intervals (Public) Large spreadsheets done by Nemekh and the Theory Jerks. Useful for seeing how much of a substat will net a certain gain. Healing Analysis:O9S O10S O11s A video of Momo going through two encounters from Omega: Alphascape speed runs and analyzing their healing strategies. Very useful if you want to see the mentality and thought process behind high level healers. Healer spreadsheets My spreadsheets that were used in the process of making this guide.

FFXIV FF14 Scholar Healer Guide alext96 — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 10:28:11 +0000 The way of the Scholar. An Extensive guide on Healers. By Video Games of Insomnia on Phoenix. This guide will be mainly touching on the Scholar class, while also incorporating information as to how Scholar synergizes with other Healers, and how to become a better Healer overall. I apologize for any typos made in this guide. English isn’t my native language. The goal of this guide is as following. Explain how Scholar works in it’s basic solo play habitat and in group synergy. How to optimize Healing between two Healers for maximum uptime and raid DPS. How Scholar’s buffs and debuffs work and how pets work in general. The Advantages and Disadvantages of Scholars compared to White Mage and Astrologian. How to become a GREAT Scholar instead of a GOOD Scholar. This guide is going to be long. Very long. A table of contents will be listed below so that you can easily find what you’re looking for. I will also make some TL;DR sections in the guide for a quick oversight of a section. If you have any questions, you can either ask me on Discord, Ingame or send me a message over Reddit. I will always respond to Discord messages and ingame messages. Suggestions are also always welcome. Discord: @DickTornado#6317 Reddit: /u/Razgri Ingame: Video Games – Phoenix Server. Twitch: www.twitch.tv/videosch Thank you for your time, and i hope you enjoy this guide. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Title Page 1 Table of Contents 2 What does a scholar do? 3 Why should i play Scholar instead of the other Healers? 5 Pros and Cons compared to the other Healers. 6 Fairies and how to deal with them. 9 Healers and DPS. 16 How do DoT’s work? 16 The rotation and oGCD weaving 18 DPS skills and utility. 21 Scholars and Healing 29 How do i heal as a Scholar? 29 Healing skills and Utility. 31 Mana management and how Mana recovery works. 37 Mana regeneration 37 Role Skills 39 Credits 44 Changelog 45 Previous Versions 45 Last updated on 23-5-2018, (Patch 4.3) What does a Scholar do? A Scholar heals. That’s it right? They’re a Healer after all. WRONG. I will mention Healer DPS a lot in this guide and why it’s vital to deal damage as a Healer. Scholars and Healers in general do have the role of Healing and keeping the party alive. But this isn’t everything they do. Healers also have the opportunity to buff allies and debuff enemies. Using these skills is vital in becoming a GOOD player. A GREAT player however, will use these skills at key times to maximize their effectiveness and in turn increase the damage output of the group while reducing incoming damage, allowing them to use more of their GCDs to dish out damage. Every GCD you spend Healing is a GCD you lose DPSing, which may seem insignificant at first, but can affect your DPS greatly over the course of a long fight. Most heals will also eat a considerable amount of MP. Learning how to heal effectively will save you quite some mana over the span of a fight. This guide will teach you all the ins and outs of Scholar and their skills and how to use these skills effectively. Once you know the basics of these skills and how to use them effectively, you can start combining them with utilities from other classes. A good example of this would be having a caster use Addle on the boss, while you have Fey Covenant up to minimize the damage taken by the group. Of course, this can also lead into Overkill mitigation which i’ll touch on at a later point in this guide. Mitigation is good, as long as you don’t go overboard with it. You should see your mitigation skills as tank cooldowns, except for the whole party. If you use all your cooldowns for one big raid hit and have nothing for the next big raid hit then you’re essentially shafted. Planning your cooldowns around a raid fight with teammates is vital for high level play and early progression. Last but not least. ALWAYS KEEP CASTING. A lost GCD is a waste. You could’ve done something in that timeframe. This is arguably even worse than ineffective Healing because you straight up do nothing and might aswell not exist for that GCD. Thankfully, your fairy is there to pick up the slack for you. The only time where you can get away with not casting if there is extensive downtime in a fight, such as A12 Savage when Alexander decides to use his ultimate move. If you can hit the boss and nobody needs to be healed, then you should hit the boss. While a Scholar, or any Healer in that regard does not do as much damage as DPS players or Tank players, they’re still vital in helping to skip phases. A good example for this would be A11 Savage. The Lapis Lazuli phase can be skipped entirely provided you have good raid DPS, which requires everyone to pull their weight including the Healers. Balancing your Healing and damage output is where the true skill of a Healer lies and separates the BAD players from the GOOD players. To recap this in a TL;DR version. Excessive and Inefficient Healing kills your damage over time. You should always attempt to heal raid damage with HoT’s and oGCD Healing. Inefficient Healing also kills your mana and might get you in trouble later down the road. Mitigation is good, but too much mitigation leads into overkill and potentially not having mitigation for the next raid wide damage going out. Always try to plan your mitigation with the group (Caster Addle/Apocatastasis, Tank Reprisal, Ranged Palisade) ALWAYS KEEP CASTING. I can’t stress this enough. A lost cast is a wasted cast. You might aswell not be present in the fight if you’re not casting. In addition, good Healer DPS contributes to phase skips, which leads to less mechanics overall and allowing you to have an easier time through the content. Why should i play Scholar instead of the other Healers? Scholar provides an unique playstyle when it comes to Healing. Not only do you have your own heals, but you also get your very own pocket fairy. The fairy is Scholar’s strongest tool by far and is greatly underappreciated by the more casual playerbase. A BAD Scholar will leave their fairy on sic and lets her do her thing independently of the Scholar. A GOOD Scholar will use the fairy as an extension of their own toolkit, complementing some of the glaring weaknesses Scholars have compared to the other Healers without their fairy. Scholar has two pets to choose from. Eos and Selene. Both of the fairies do vastly different things, and have their own uses. Eos is a Healer type fairy that mainly focuses on supplementing the Scholar’s AoE Healing and AoE raid mitigation. While also providing a 10% Heal up boost for the entire party with one of her skills. Selene is a Buffer/Cleansing type of fairy that buffs allies and removes debuffs, ontop of silencing the enemy with one of her skills. (Who am i kidding, that skill is unreliable and almost never gets used.) Both of the fairies also have an ability called Embrace. This skill acts as their main heal which they will use on ANY Allied target that is below 80% HP. The skill has a potency of 250 and can be seen as a passive regen of some sorts. This makes Scholar a versatile Healer that can utilize the fairies passive heal while they put out more DPS. In turn, the other Healer will also benefit from this since both of you will have to heal less, indirectly this leads to an increase in Healer DPS. Try Healing a party using an Astrologian and a White mage, and then replace one of those Healers with a Scholar. You will notice the difference that one of the fairies will make. If you like a flexible Healer that is capable of having a lot of DPS uptime while still being able to heal, then you should definitely give Scholar a shot. If you however do not like pet management, then try one of the other Healers. Pros and Cons compared to other Healers. Of course, while Scholar excels in some parts of Healing, they also lack in some ways when compared to a White Mage or an Astrologian. Below you’ll find a quick rundown of each Healer’s strengths and weaknesses. Scholar Pros and Cons: Scholars are capable of having a higher DPS uptime than other Healers thanks to their fairy. This makes them highly flexible when it comes to both Healing and DPS. They have a glaring issue with sustained Healing once they expended their cooldowns though. They also provide reliable utility to the group, making them a good pick for progression. They also have the best AoE mitigation out of all the Healers, though this comes on a 120 second cooldown. Pros: Ability to both heal and DPS at the same time thanks to the fairy. Good on demand burst Healing thanks to Lustrate, Embrace Excogitation and Indomitability. Reliably capable of providing utility to a group thanks to their fairies and skills. Decent on demand burst at the cost of Aetherflow stacks. Good, reliable MP recovery thanks to Aetherflow and Energy Drain More mobile than the other healers thanks to Miasma 2 and Ruin 2 The most versatile class when compared to AST and WHM Cons: With a dead fairy, you’re a gimped version of the other Healers. Sustained AoE Healing is A LOT weaker once your cooldowns are expended. Extremely expensive MP costs compared to other classes when it comes to healing. Sustained AoE DPS is weaker than the other healers. White Mage Pros and Cons: White Mages excel at both dealing damage and Healing at the same time. They have an incredibly high raw Healing output and the potency on Stone IV puts the other Healers to shame. On top of that, they’re also the king of AoE with Thin Air and Holy spam.Their glaring weakness compared to both Scholar and Astrologian is that they do not provide nearly as much party utility compared to the other two Healers. Pros: Highest DPS by far out of any of the Healers thanks to Stone IV Highest Healing output out of any of the Healers thanks to Medica 2 and Cure 3. Amazing AoE potential thanks to Thin Air, Aero 3, Holy and Assize. By far the cheapest HoT on demand. Thin Air provides great MP conservation if paired with expensive heals Has benediction, which is the best ‘’Oh shit’’ Healing button in the game or can be used as an extremely powerful heal. Cons: White Mage provides no Offensive buffs to the party. White Mage provides no Active mitigation to the party, only single target mitigation. The Lily mechanic does not bring anything special for White Mage. Did i mention White Mages bring no utility to the group? Astrologian Pros and Cons. Astrologian is the jack of all trades when it comes to Healers. Thanks to their sect mechanic they are capable of either shielding the party like a Scholar, or pumping out raw heals with regens like White Mage. Astrologian also provides some amazing offensive utility with The Balance, which is the strongest and arguably most overpowered skill in the game. An Astrologian’s weakness is their personal DPS. They have the lowest damage in the game but more than make up for it with their utility. Pros: Balance, Spear and Arrow provide good buffs. Bole is an excellent mitigation tool. Extremely strong shields when in Nocturnal stance. Good heals with strong HoT’s when in Diurnal Stance. Good burst AoE Healing thanks to Earthly Star, and decent sustained Healing afterwards. Good single target burst Healing thanks to Essential Dignity and Benefic 2. The ability to be insanely broken if you win the RNG lottery. Good burst damage if you have a Lord Card held. Best sustained AoE mitigation. Cons: Buffs are not reliable. You could only draw ewers and spires the entire fight. Worst MP sustain/recovery out of the 3 healers. In Conclusion: White Mage If you like having a lot of personal DPS and very strong heals while not having to think about utility too much, then white mage is the class for you. They excel in raw upfront Healing moreso than the other Healers and also deal more damage than both Scholar and Astrologian. The downside is that they do not nearly provide the amount of utility that the other Healers have. This makes them strong in solo content and dungeons, but makes them feel weaker in Raid scenarios where utility is important. Astrologian If you’d rather have a chance of really strong utility and like some RNG to that, then Astrologian is your go to class. The Balance is an extremely strong buff which makes everyone jealous. A 5% AoE Damage buff that lasts for 30 seconds and can be extendable is just too good to pass up. Ninja’s Trick Attack pales in comparison. Astrologian is the Utility king. Their personal DPS may be low, but if they happen to draw a lord card they’ll be able to unload a quick burst of Damage. This is especially helpful if you need to burn an add down fast. Scholar If you’d rather spend most of your time slinging out DPS spells, and want a pet to do the brunt of the Healing then Scholar is going to be a great pick for you. On top of having good burst Healing and the ability to heal while DPSing thanks to their fairies they also get some great Utility in the form of Chain Strategem, Fey Wind, Fey Covenant and Fey Illumination. This gives Scholar Utility in both a Defensive form and Offensive form and makes them a highly versatile class to have around. TL;DR. Astrologian is the king of offensive utility if they play their cards right, but their personal DPS is the lowest. White Mage is the king of Healer DPS and raw Healing while providing next to no group utility. Thin Air and Holy spam also makes them great for AoE nuking. Scholar provides reliable burst AoE Healing thanks to Aetherflow stacks, while doing decent single target DPS. Their MP Costs are incredibly high however, and their AoE damage is weaker. If their fairy dies, they become the laughing stock of the three Healers. Fairies and how to deal with them. Earlier on in the guide i touched quickly on the subject of fairies, though this wouldn’t be a real Scholar guide if i didn’t go into full detail on how our lovely little companions work. Fairies are the most important part of your toolkit. Without your fairy you are the laughing stock of the 3 Healers. This means you will need to manage your fairy properly if you want to be a GOOD Scholar. As i wrote earlier, a BAD Scholar will let their fairy do whatever they want, while a GOOD Scholar will use them as an extension of their toolkit. Below is a summary of the fairies and their associated skills. However, there are also some oddities about fairies that you wouldn’t notice until you play the class. One of these things is Pet Scaling What is Pet Scaling? Pets from both SMN and SCH scale off their owner’s current stats. This includes their Weapon Damage, Mind values and substats such as critical hit rate. Pets scale to ROUGHLY 70% of their owner. We don’t know the actual math behind this yet, but this is a good number to start with. This also means that pet potency is slightly misleading, and the 250 potency from embrace isn’t actually 250 but closer to 170. This applies to all the Healing your Pet does. Pets are also affected from Food and Mind potions and any stat changing buffs when summoned. Summon / Summon II – Summons a Healer/Support pet to your side. MP Cost: 1200 GCD: Yes. Instant Cast: No. Cast: 3 seconds. To make use of your fairies, you’ll have to Summon them first. Once summoned, your fairy will remain with you until one of the following actions happens. You are out of range of your fairy (Almost impossible to happen in raid scenarios) Your fairy dies and reaches 0 HP You command it to go away You used Dissipation. As long as these criteria are not met, your fairy will stay with you and heal any allies that are below 80% of their maximum HP. In the following sections i’ll explain everything you need to know regarding how fairies work and how to optimize them properly. Lv. 42 Rouse – Increases pet healing and damage by 40%, while making them immune to most status effects. Cooldown: 60s Rouse increases your pet’s Healing abilities by 40%. Taking embrace as an example you’ll end up with the following math. 250 * 140% = 350 potency. Rouse is only used for embrace and does not affect any other pet skills such as Whispering Dawn or Fey Union. To get the most out of Rouse, you should use it in your “Union downtime” windows. This means you are still capable of providing strong single target healing even when union isn’t up. Eos : Lv. 1 Whispering Dawn. – Applies a regen to anyone in range with a potency of 120. 60s Cooldown, 21s duration. 15y Radius This is your version of Medica 2/Aspected benefic. Whispering dawn is an extremely strong HoT on it’s own and is one of strongest AoE regens in the game. It gets even better though, since Whispering Dawn is NOT affected by any healing buffs since it is an Ability. This has been changed in 4.3. Whispering Dawn ticks 7 times, providing a total potency of 840. Keep in mind that Whispering dawn is subject to Pet Scaling and doesn’t actually heal for it’s advertised potency the actual potency is about 588, or 84 potency per tick, which still makes it a very strong “Free” AoE regen. Lv. 20 Fey Covenant. – Increases Magic Defense by 20% 120s Cooldown, 20s Duration. Cast time 3s. 15y Radius This skill increases your magic resistance by 20%. On paper this might sound amazing, but it’s the same as foresight. It’s still a very good skill but nowhere near the advertised 20%. The actual resistance is closer to Approximately 6-7% for DPS, 9-10% for Healers and Casters and about 17% for Tanks due to their different Magic Resist values. The higher your magic resist, the more effect this skill has on you. You should still actively use this to mitigate raid wide damage, or perhaps even magical tank busters to help out your tank. This value constantly changes due to the fact that it scales off your magic resist. Lv. 40 Fey Illumination. – Healing Magic is increased by 10% 120s Cooldown. 20s Duration. 15y Radius As if Eos didn’t provide enough support already. Fey Illumination provides anyone in range of the spell with 10% Increased Healing. This stacks multiplicatively with Largesse. If both are combined you gain a total of 132% Healing. (120+10%) Scholar is the only Healer that is capable of providing their Co Healers with a beefy heal up buff. This makes it an extremely versatile skill to use. whether it is to shave off a few Healer GCD’s or to survive a big heal check, this skill is going to help you a lot. Selene : Lv. 1 Silent Dusk. – Applies a silence to the target and interrupts the current cast. 40s Cooldown. 1s Duration 25y Range On paper it’s an useful skill, though it’s rarely if ever actually used in a raid. The issue with Silent Dusk is that you need to wait for selene to either finish her embrace cast, or interrupt her cast and lose useful Healing potency. In my personal opinion, this skill is worthless as it is and thus doesn’t sit on my hotbar. Silent Dusk is good for canceling out Fey Union though, as it is on the pet GCD cycle and not your own, meaning you can use it while you are in the middle of a GCD and free up an oGCD slot Lv. 20 Fey Caress. – Removes one debuff from all party members in range. 60s Cooldown. 20y Radius Pretty much an AoE Esuna. Extremely useful if needed, though there aren’t many places where you need Esuna right now. This might change with stormblood raids. However, if debuff cleansing is not needed then this skill is completely useless. Fey Caress is good for canceling out Fey Union though, as it is on the pet GCD cycle and not your own, meaning you can use it while you are in the middle of a GCD and free up an oGCD slot Lv. 40 Fey Wind. – Increases Spell speed and Attack speed by 3%. 60s Cooldown. 30s Duration 20y Radius This is pretty much the reason why you bring Selene. It’s a speed buff that lasts for 30 seconds and is extremely useful in a raid scenario. Selene is best used in fights where Healing output matters less. And this is the sole reason why you’d bring her into a raid fight. Fey wind also lines up really nice with other utility skills from other classes, which i’ll go into detail on later in this guide. Both : Embrace. – Heals the target with a potency of 250. Cooldown 3s. Cast time 2s. 30y Range Both of the fairies also have an ability called Embrace. This skill acts as their main heal which they will use on ANY Party Member that is below 80% HP. The skill has a potency of 250 and can be seen as a passive regen of some sorts. Eos and Selene will also heal themselves with Embrace if nobody is below 80% and if they have taken damage. Embrace is the most important skill your fairy has, and could be seen as a mini physick. Embrace is also the reason why Scholars have such an easy time dishing out damage. While the Scholar is casting Broil II, the fairy will be casting Embrace. This allows tanks to survive more damage due to the passive Healing from a fairy. A GOOD Scholar will be able to judge whether a tank will be able to be sustained with Embrace, or if they need to step in. A BAD Scholar steps in too early and wastes GCDs on Healing which in turn costs MP and precious DPS. Never ever use Embrace on a Macro tied to Physick, Adloquium or any DPS related spell. If you absolutely feel the need to Macro Embrace, make a Macro for it. But for the love of god, don’t Macro this to your actual skills. It makes skill queueing impossible and makes the class feel sluggish. On top of that you’ll lose time casting your next spell. Dissipation. – Discard your fairy and gain 3 aetherflow stacks and the Dissipation buff. Dissipation lasts for 30 seconds and increases your Healing output by 20%. You will be unable to summon a fairy while under the effect of Dissipation. Cooldown 180s. Duration 30s. Dissipation is a double edged sword. The Aetherflow stacks you gain and the heal up buff you receive are very nice, but losing your fairy is a tremendous drawback. It wouldn’t be nearly as much of a drawback if you could just resummon it, but being locked out of your fairy for 30 seconds means you’ll have to try and use this skill with some planning. Dissipation also synergizes with the new faster Aetherflow trait Scholars get, Reducing their Aetherflow recast by 5 seconds per skill used. This means you could potentially get another Aetherflow off in a fight. Dissipation is a good skill for whenever one of the following situations occur. There’s going to be a lot of downtime soon and your fairy won’t be needed. Dissipation can be used in these situations for free Aetherflow stacks to pump out that little bit of additional damage. The following situations are a good example of downtime. A12S Ultimate and Inceptions, A11S Active Time Manoeuvre, Zurvan’s ultimate attack, Sephirot’s ultimate attack, Nidhogg’s ultimate attack You’re in a pinch. You do not have any aetherflow stacks, your co Healer is dead and you need some burst Healing NOW Dissipation is an excellent tool for both of those situations. At the cost of losing your fairy and resummoning it which costs around 1200 mana, it’s not a cheap skill. The mana cost can be negated though if you decide to use all your newfound aetherflow stacks on Energy Drain, which restores a total of 1200 MP per drain, and 3600 MP in total while also providing 450 potency in raw damage should you decide to use dissipation like that. This could also turn dissipation into a MP positive skill if desired. However, Dissipation can also be used for a more defensive and supportive approach. Your party could be on the brink of wiping, Indomitability is off cool down, your co Healer is dead but you have no Aetherflow stacks. If only there was something to give you those stacks! That’s where Dissipation comes in. It allows you to get your most important Healing skills out if you really need them. A good timed Dissipation can turn an ugly situation into a salvageable situation. Fey Union/Aetherpact. – Restores HP with a potency of 480 to the targeted member. Fairy cannot execute other actions while Fey Union is active. Party member must be within 15 yalms Effect: 480 potency 15y Range Fey Union is a great single target skill that provides a decent regen that makes sure that whoever is tethered by it is topped off quite quickly. Fey Union drains 10 Fairy gauge per regen tick/every 3 seconds and requires 10 fairy gauge upon execution. Microing Fey union properly will cut down on Healer GCDs and allow you to DPS more. Fey union is subject to pet scaling, meaning it will not do as much healing as the potency advertises. The drawback with Fey union however is that if a party member moves out of range that The fairy will do nothing until the link is restored. It also takes around 5 seconds to set up due to the fact that it’s treated like enkindle. You cast Aetherpact, and the fairy moves towards the target. She then sets up the tether and starts Healing. This gives the skill a very clunky feeling which could have been executed better. The Faerie Gauge The Faerie gauge is our new mechanic. It gives us a bar with fairy energy. This shows us how much energy the fairy has for Fey union. We can fill the gauge by using Aetherflow skills. Each Aetherflow skill fills the gauge by 10 points. Note that if we dissipated the fairy or if the fairy is currently not present on the battlefield that the Fairy gauge will NOT increase if we use Aetherflow skills. Roughly every 2:30 minutes we will fill the gauge completely. Balancing your Fairy gauge will be helping you in pushing out more DPS GCDs and using less healer GCDs by using Fey union on points where single target healing is of utmost importance. Which fairy do you use, and why do you use it? In most fights Scholars tend to prefer Eos over Selene. This is due to the fact that Eos provides a tremendous amount of support for both Healers and is easily capable of shaving off those vital Healing GCDs with her utility, allowing both of the Healers to DPS more. Selene however shines if there is only one player taking damage all the time. Things such as the early stages in Zurvan Extreme, A9 Savage and the beginning of Ravana Extreme are all good spots to use Selene. Selene is also useful to have prepull. You can start summoning Eos right before the pull starts and use fey wind right before the cast completes. Selene will use her Fey wind ability to buff the party before being sent away to allow Eos to come into the fight. This means your opener will have the best of both worlds. The utility of Eos and the buffs from Selene. Fairies, however do share cooldowns with each other and the cooldown timer for the other skill will be exactly the same. This is tied to the level at which the skill gets unlocked. For example, if you use Whispering Dawn, both Whispering Dawn and Silent Dusk will be on cooldown. Silent Dusk however will also be on a 60 second cooldown as opposed to 40 seconds due to the fact that Whispering Dawn has a 60 second cooldown. How do you maximize your fairy’s efficiency? Managing your fairy’s skills is just as important as managing your own skills. As i said earlier into this guide, a fairy is an extension of your own skillset. NOT an independant pet that you should ignore and let it run free. Sure, it’ll get some stuff done but it won’t be nearly as efficient as if you were trying to manage her skills yourself. Take the following situations for both Eos and Selene as example. Eos : Eos is extremely basic when it comes to her AI. If left on sic she will pretty much do her own thing and use skills as they come off cooldown. This means whispering dawn when there is no AoE damage going out, Fey Covenant when nobody is taking magic damage of any sorts, or Fey illumination when you’re not even Healing in the first place. For example, at the start of A12 Savage there will be a Healing check approximately 30 seconds in the fight. Consisting of 2 preys that deal high single target damage, an AoE that needs to be shared and deals around 80.000 / Amount of people stacked in magical damage, and two Mega Holies dealing approximately 20.000 Magical Damage each unmitigated. Eos her skillset is extremely useful here and essential for saving GCDs instead of wasting them on Healing which costs you both valueable mana and time spent DPSing. If i were to leave Eos on Sic, all these skills would have expired by the time we even get to this mechanic. However, if we use Eos on obey we can command her to use these skills right as we need them. And to top it off we can also use Rouse to amplify her skills like this as opposed to when leaving her on sic. A well timed Fey Illumination makes the Healer check easier by giving BOTH Healers a Healing boost of 10%. Fey Covenant in turn can be used to reduce the incoming damage from all of these skills, allowing you to use less GCDs spent Healing, and more GCDs spent DPSing. This all translates to a higher effective raid DPS and a faster, smoother clear. Selene : Selene performs a lot better while under the effect of Sic, even though it is far from optimal. Selene uses Fey Wind as soon as it comes off cooldown, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing about this is that you will get a high uptime on Fey Wind, and the fact that Fey Wind synergizes really well with other 60 seconds cooldowns such as Ninja’s trick attack. The BAD thing about Fey wind being mashed off cooldown by Selene is that she’ll also do this right before hitting a huge spot of downtime, potentially wasting a lot of your valuebale buff and utility. Fey Cleanse is almost always wasted if you put Selene on sic. Selene will try to cleanse ANY debuff with Fey Cleanse, even debuffs that can’t be removed in the first place. This is especially bad if you actually need Fey Cleanse later on but then notice that she already used it on some uncleansable debuff. (As of 4.1, Selene will only use Fey Cleanse on debuffs that can be dispelled. Still, it’s better to do it manually if multiple debuffs come out in rapid succession.) Fairy Placement : Another important part of managing your fairy is fairy placement. By default Eos or Selene will follow you wherever you go. If you decide to move, they move. Not only is this annoying if you have to spread out for a mechanic, and have the fairy follow you to the edge of the arena instead of staying put in the middle and Healing people, but it’s also extremely inefficient for fairy Healing in general. Each time your fairy moves, she isn’t Healing. If she isn’t Healing you’ll be forced to heal more. In a way you could say that bad fairy management lowers both your own DPS and your Co Healer’s DPS, even though you won’t notice it at a first glance. Fairy placement is a vital part of playing Scholar and is something you should really pay attention to. If you happen to resummon a fairy mid fight, they will automatically follow you again, so don’t forget to reassign their position! Healers and DPS. B-But i’m a Healer! While Scholars are classified as Healers, i feel that i should touch on this subject for the sole reason that Healer DPS is overlooked upon. A lot of Healers that i see in PF often refrain from dealing any damage at all, saying that it is not their job to do so. Why wouldn’t it be your job to contribute as much as possible to the group? Would you rather twiddle your thumbs and throw out a Physick every 10 seconds? I don’t think you do. Besides, everyone expects Tanks to deal damage and they technically aren’t a DPS role either. So without further ado, let’s delve into how Scholar deals damage, how their buffs synergize with the group and how Scholars synergize with other Healers. With the introduction of Stormblood, our rotation has become a lot simpler. Back in Heavensward we had 5 DoT’s to keep up. (Shadow Flare, Bio 2, Bio, Miasma, Aero) With Stormblood this changes to only 2! (Bio 2 and Miasma) Shadow Flare technically still exists but has been reworked completely and thus can’t be considered as a DoT that you need to keep up. How do DoT’s work? Before i go into the finer parts of Scholar, i first have to explain how DoT’s work in this game. Every DoT you apply is applied on a server time. A DoT ticks once every 3 seconds and all DoT’s share the same timer. This means that the server will check if the DoTs are on the boss every 3 seconds. If it is, it deals damage. If it isn’t then there will be no damage applied to the boss. Below is a simple visual explaination of how Miasma works. 23 20 17 14 11 8 5 2 -1 -4 In this situation when i apply Miasma the first DoT tick will happen at 23 seconds left on the DoT, the next one at 20 and so on. however, if we look further into the graph you’ll see that after we hit two seconds, the next tick will be at -1. What this means is that the last tick this Miasma does is at 2 seconds, and the next tick will be one second after Miasma falls off. As losing DoT uptime is bad, we can choose to Clip the DoT. Clipping essentially means overwriting your DoT with a new one while it’s still up. In this scenario it would be safe to Clip the DoT while it has 2 seconds remaining, or let it fall off and reapply the DoT before the next tick happens, which occurs at -1. This means the sweetspot for applying Miasma would be between 2 and -1. Assuming we apply our new Miasma at 1, the next Miasma will tick as following. 22 19 16 13 10 7 4 1 -2 -5 Since we applied Miasma at 1 on our last DoT cycle, and the next tick was happening at -1 this means we’ll have to wait two seconds for the next DoT tick to appear. Starting at 22, then 19 and ticking up all the way until 1. At 1 the last tick happens, and the next tick afterwards will be -2. If you would want to not lose a DoT tick in this situation you would need to reapply your Miasma between 1 and -2. You could choose to either let your DoT fall off for a second and then reapply it, or to reapply it as the timer hits 0. Since both of these situations fall between the 1 and – 2 timer as seen above, you will not lose a DoT tick in either situation. Judging DoT ticks however is fairly hard, and to be honest i generally do not bother with it. If you want a safe bet that you’re not dropping DoT’s though, you can use the following ruleset. Try to refresh as close as possible to 0. For example, if you refreshed at 2 seconds left on the last Miasma, you would’ve lost a tick. However if you refreshed at -1, you would have kept all DoT ticks. As a general rule though, i recommend that you do not let your DoT’s fall off and instead try to keep them rolling. This isn’t however the whole story about DoT’s. DoTs also have a mechanic called ‘’snapshotting’’ Snapshotting is that when you apply a DoT under the effect of a buff that the DoT will tick for it’s full duration with said buff. An Example would be Chain Strategem. Chain Strategem has a duration of 15 seconds, while bio 2 has a duration of 30 seconds. If we apply Bio 2 while Chain Strategem is active on the enemy then the DoT will have the Chain Strategem buff for the entire duration, even after Chain Strategem falls off. This also is the case if we decide to use Bane. Bane ‘’Copies’’ all your DoTs to the new target, including any buffs you had when you applied them and any debuffs that were present on the enemy. If RNG shines on you and you get a DoT refresh proc from Bane, you could DoT back from the add to the boss and get another set of buffed DoT’s out. I will explain this in a greater amount of detail in the skills section. The Rotation and oGCD weaving. Since we’ve lost most of our DoT’s in Stormblood our rotation has become far easier. No longer will you have to juggle 5 DoT’s and attach a priority system to them to ensure you were able to weave your oGCDs. The issue that arises however is the fact that we both lost Bio 1 and Aero. These skills were crucial for weaving oGCDs. The only instant cast we have right now is Bio 2, which lasts for 30 seconds. This means we will be clipping a lot of our oGCD skills. Clipping in this sense means that you are using an oGCD skill while the global cooldown is available. You want to avoid this as much as possible to maximize cast times and spell output. Clipping an oGCD takes approximately 1/3rd of your GCD. This may be longer on certain skills if they have punishing animation locks. The opener in itself is fairly simple. As mentioned above we only have two DoT’s to track instead of five, which makes judgement calls a lot easier. This opener assumes you have Selene summoned prepull and have 3 stacks of Aetherflow along with Aetherflow being off cooldown. SOLO OPENER. PREPULL STUFF. -7.5s Summon Eos -3s Fey Wind (Cleric Stance if crossclassed) -2.5s Broil 2 PULL. 0s Swiftcast 0.5s Broil 2 + Mind Pot + Chain strategem Bio 2 + Energy Drain + Shadow Flare Miasma Miasma 2 + Energy drain Broil 2 Broil 2 + Energy Drain Broil 2 Miasma 2 + Aetherflow + Energy Drain Broil 2 Broil 2 Broil 2 Broil 2 Miasma Bio 2 + Energy Drain + Lucid Dream This is the best opener for your personal DPS. But of course, most content won’t be done solo and we’ll need to orientate ourselves on a more group focused scenario. GROUP OPENER PREPULL STUFF. -6.5s Summon Eos -5s Fey Wind + Mind Pot + (Cleric if Crossclassed) -2.5s Miasma PULL. Bio 2 + Shadow Flare + Energy Drain Broil 2 Miasma 2 + Chain Strategem + Energy Drain Broil 2 Broil 2 + Swiftcast Broil 2 + Energy drain + Aetherflow Broil 2 Broil 2 Miasma Broil 2 Broil 2 Bio 2 + Energy Drain + {oGCD} This opener is better for group content. Chain Strategem gets delayed a few GCDs and goes out on the third GCD, right before everyone hits their third GCD. The Ruin 2 + Chain Strategem can be freely moved up and down in the rotation, though if you want to use Strategem earlier than this i would advise using the Solo opener. This gives you far more worth for Strategem, allowing you to unleash your full burst inside it. If a ninja is present, do Chain Strategem on the 4th GCD so that it falls off as Trick expires. NOTE: These openers are subject to change. Once the opener is done, Scholar turns into an extremely simple class to maximize DPS. Just reapply Miasma and Bio 2 when needed, Use Energy Drain right after Bio 2. Shadow Flare should be applied every other Bio 2 since it’s oGCD and on a 60s cooldown. Your rotation should look as following after the opener. Energy Drain and Aetherflow can be fit in where you feel it’d work best. Make sure there’s atleast a GCD between two energy drains due to the fact it has a 3 second recast. Broil 2 > Broil 2 > Broil 2 > Broil 2 > Miasma > Broil 2 > Broil 2 > Broil 2 > Broil 2 > Bio 2 > Shadow Flare + Energy Drain It literally b(r)oils down to keeping your DoT’s up, and making use of the fact that Bio 2 is instant cast. It’s almost impossible to make this any simpler. The exception to this is if a boss is about to disappear. If that is the case then it’s time to count DoT ticks to see if it’s worth it to reapply DoT’s or to just spam broil and let DoT’s fall off. Miasma needs 18 seconds/6 ticks to even out with Broil 2 thanks to it’s 20 potency damage on application. If this is the case then Miasma is preferred due to the lower MP cost. Bio 2 needs 21 seconds to pull ahead of Broil 2 and is weaker than Broil 2 if it’s not up for 21 seconds. However, Bio 2 allows you to use oGCDs since it’s an insta cast. This raises the debate whether to use it or not to use it if it’s not able to reach the full 21 seconds. Personally, i would apply Bio 2 if it ticks for 15 seconds or more and if i have an oGCD to use. If not, i’d wait for it to tick atleast 21 seconds. If i i have two oGCDs to use, i would use Bio 2 if it ticks for atleast 12 seconds or more. Aetherflow Stacks can be expended on Energy Drain every other Broil 2, if you decide to use them for that. Always make sure you’re capable of refreshing Aetherflow when it comes off cooldown. If Aetherflow is off cooldown and you still have a stack left, burn the stack and refresh Aetherflow. You should try to burn your last Aetherflow stack at around 5 seconds before the refresh happens at the latest for the trait. using it any later will result in missing your cooldown timer. DPS Skills and Utility. Scholar has a core set of Skills used for dealing damage. We may be a Healer at heart but we still have some tricks up our sleeve. Here i will explain each skill and it’s particular use. Note that these skills are for level 70 characters only. Lower leveled characters may have different skills due to the changes to the skill acquisition system/traits. Broil 2. – Deals unaspected magic damage with a potency of 230. Effect: 230 Potency. MP Cost: 720 GCD: Yes. Instant Cast: No Does what it says on the tin. Deals damage and nothing more. This is what we call your ‘’Filler’’ spell. Once both your DoT’s are up, you can use Broil 2 to continue dealing damage. Broil 2 is also your hardest hitting direct hit and can be used on targets that are about to die instead of refreshing your DoTs on them. Ruin 2. – Deals unaspected magic damage with a potency of 100. Effect: 100 Potency. MP cost: 480 GCD: Yes. Instant Cast: Yes. Ruin 2 is your second filler spell. It is far weaker than Broil but costs less MP and has no cast time. This allows you to weave your oGCDs and move while casting Ruin 2 and makes it a versatile tool to be used in those situations. If you are using Ruin 2 to weave skills, make sure you are weaving 2 oGCDs. It is not worth it using Ruin 2 to weave just one oGCD. Ruin 2 should only be used if you cannot afford Miasma 2’s high MP cost or if you happen to be far away from the boss. Bio 2. – Deals Unaspected magic damage with a potency of 35 for 30 seconds. Duration 30s. Effect: 35 potency. MP Cost: 720 GCD: Yes. Instant Cast: Yes Bio 2 is your ‘’strongest’’ attack. It deals unaspeced magic damage with a potency of 35 for 30 seconds. This means it will tick 10 times for a total damage of 350 potency. Bio 2 however only starts exceeding Broil 2 past 21 seconds of uptime, however it might be worth it to reapply Bio 2 even if it only lasts for 18 or 15 seconds due to the fact it is instant cast and allows you to weave oGCDs. You should try to weave in two oGCDs per Bio 2, since it is our only hard hitting instant cast. Miasma. – Deals unaspected magic damage with a potency 20 and deals unaspected magic damage with a potency of 35 for 24 seconds. Duration: 24s. Effect: 35 Potency. MP Cost: 600 GCD: Yes. Instant Cast: No Miasma is your second DoT, which is just as important to keep up as Bio 2. It has the same potency per tick but doesn’t last as long. However, unlike Bio 2 miasma also gets an initial potency of 20. This means Miasma will be doing the same potency as Broil 2 at 18 seconds. (20 + 35 * 6 = 230) It also costs less MP and thus is a valueable tool if it’s allowed to tick for 18 seconds or longer. Unlike Bio 2 however it is not an instant cast DoT and thus does not benefit from being applied even if it deals less potency than Broil 2. When spread with Bane it does NOT reapply it’s initial 20 potency. Shadow Flare. – Deals magic AoE damage with a potency of 50 for 15 seconds Duration 15s. Effect: 50 potency. MP cost: 0 GCD: No Instant Cast: Yes Cooldown: 60s Radius: 5y Shadow Flare is an oGCD skill that synergizes really nice with Bio 2. Since Shadow Flare has a 60 second cooldown and Bio 2 is instant cast it allows you to reapply a Shadow Flare every other Bio 2 without clipping your GCD. In some cases it’s worth it to hold Shadow Flare if adds are going to spawn a bit later than when it comes up, but most of the time you should pair it with your Bio 2. Shadow Flare, is just like your other DoT’s subject to the DoT timer. Shadow Flare’s total potency is 250. (50*5) Miasma 2 – Deals unaspected magic AoE damage with a potency of 100, and applies a 25 potency DoT for 12 seconds. Duration 12s. Effect: 100 + 25 DoT potency. MP cost: 1680 GCD: Yes Instant Cast: Yes Radius: 5y Miasma 2 is our AoE ‘’Filler’’ skill. With a total potency of 200 and a initial potency of 100 it’s a fairly strong skill. When used on a single target it’s weaker than broil, but when used on two targets it starts to pull ahead, assuming that both targets take atleast one tick of damage. It’s biggest drawback is the MP cost which comes at a hefty 1680 mana. This means you won’t be able to freely spam it thanks to it’s high cost. Spamming Miasma 2 is discouraged anyways since half of the damage is gated behind the DoT damage. Miasma 2 however isn’t just an excellent AoE tool, it’s also great for single target damage if you need to push out oGCDs. Since Miasma 2 does 200 potency over 12 seconds it’s only barely behind Broil 2. This makes it worthwhile to even use Miasma 2 if you only need to push out one oGCD, assuming you can afford the crippling MP cost. Energy Drain. – Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 150. Restores HP and MP upon use. Consumes 1 Aetherflow Stack on use. Effect: 150 potency. MP cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Cooldown: 3s. Energy Drain is your main oGCD DPS skill. It is gated behind Aetherflow which means that you can’t spam it. Energy Drain doesn’t only see use in dealing damage though, it’s also an extremely useful tool in recovering MP. Energy Drain restores 1200 MP when used and restores 50% of the damage dealt as HP. The HP part will rarely ever save you as it is fairly insignificant. Energy Drain should be used on an oGCD skill such as Bio 2 if possible. You can reliably use one Energy Drain each time you apply Bio 2 and still have Aetherflow stacks remaining for other Aetherflow skills. The 1200 MP restoration translates directly to a MP refresh potency of 100. You’ll read more about MP refresh potency and how it works in the MP management section. Bane. – Spreads your current Bio 2 and Miasma to targets around it. DoT potencies decrease as amount of targets increases. Starting at 80% for the second target and dropping 20% for every additional target, all the way down to 20% for the 5th target and beyond. Consumes 1 Aetherflow Stack on use. Has a 15% chance of resetting the timer of DoT’s and setting them at their starting values. Effect: Spreads DoT’s. MP cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Cooldown: 10s. Bane is your AoE skill. It copies the DoT’s including any and all buffs/debuffs from your current target and spreads them to targets around them. This means if you hit an enemy with trick attack applied on it and Bane off them it’ll hit all the targets with your buffed DoTs. On top of that there is also a 15% chance that the DoT’s have a chance of reapplying their original timer. This brings us to the ‘’Chain Bane’’ theory. A Chain Bane is generally only done on two and sometimes three targets because of the DoT dropoff on multiple targets. Essentially what you are doing is the following. An add spawns and you press Bane to spread your DoTs. This means your DoTs get copied to the next target. If your Bane procs then your new target will have a fresh set of DoTs on them again. From here on there’s a simple priority system to see if it’s worth it to bane back on the original target with your DoTs. I am going to exclude the 15% chance of resetting your DoT’s again because this rarely occurs. To see if Chain Baneing is worth it we’ll have to look at 3 skills. Broil 2, Energy Drain and Ruin 2. The reason for this is that Bane costs 1 Aetherflow stack which you could have used on Energy Drain to deal damage and recover some lost MP. It also cuts into your GCD due to the fact that you will do less Bio 2 casts thanks to Chain Baneing. Which forces you to either use Ruin 2 over Broil 2, or to cut your losses and Clip your GCD. The first thing that needs to be done is calculating the difference in DoT ticks. Let’s say that we bane with 12 seconds left on both DoT’s. This means Miasma has already ticked for 12 seconds which is 4 ticks and leads to 140 potency (35 * 4) and Bio 2 has already ticked for 18 seconds which is 6 ticks and leads to 210 potency (35 * 6) Adding these values brings us to a grand total of 350 potency if we decide to Chain bane back from the target to the boss. Note that this is a baseline number and does not include any buffs such as Trick Attack or Chain Strategem. You will gain more potency if your original DoT’s were under these effects. Assuming we use Ruin 2 to weave in an oGCD and sacrifice one energy drain we’ll lose 130 potency from using Ruin 2 over Broil 2 and 150 potency and 1200 MP for not using energy drain. We however spare 360 MP by using Ruin 2 over broil This brings us to a net potency gain of 70 (350 – 130 – 150) with an MP cost of 960(1200-240) Since Ruin 2 also allows us to use another oGCD skill, we could fill that in with a Rouse or different skill. Assuming we use Miasma 2 to weave in an oGCD and sacrifice one energy drain we’ll lose 30 potency at the minimum and gain 170 potency at the maximum from using Miasma 2 over Broil 2 and lose 150 potency and 1200 MP for not using energy drain. We however also lose 960 MP by using Miasma 2 over Broil 2 This brings us to a net potency gain of anywhere between 370 (350 + 170 – 150) to (350 – 30 – 150) 170 with an MP cost of 2160 (1200 + 960) Since Miasma 2 also allows us to use another oGCD skill, we could fill that in with a Rouse or different skill. Assuming we use Broil 2 instead of Ruin 2, we’ll clip our GCD by about 1/3rd of the timer. This means we’ll have to subtract 33% from Broil 2’s potency which is 76. Along with sacrificing Energy Drain we’ll lose a total of 226 potency and 1200 MP but do not get the ability to double weave oGCDs. This brings us to a total potency gain of 124 (350-150-76) at the cost of 1200 MP. This also assumes that the DoT’s that we Chain Bane back onto the boss have not dropped off initially. This won’t be the case since we Chain Bane’d at 12 seconds remaining and Bane has a cooldown of 10 seconds. To clear up confusion, this is how Bane works. Amount of Targets DoT potency Original Target (Bane used on this) 100% Add 1 100% Add 2 80% Add 3 60% Add 4 40% Add 5 to 15 20% Chain Strategem: – Increase the critical hit rate on the target by 15%. Effect: Increases critical chance.. MP cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Cooldown: 120s Chain Strategem is your offensive raid wide utility spell which provides a significant DPS boost for both you and your group. Chain Strategem should be used right before your party members start their burst. If a ninja with Trick Attack is present it should be paired with every other trick attack to maximize both buffs and increase their efficiency. As Chain Strategem scales off the Critical Hit skill and Critical Damage also scales off Chain Strategem the actual damage increase wildly varies. Chain Strategem will become stronger the more Crit you have. Down below is a graph that shows the effective DPS gain from Chain Strategem as your crit scales up. This is the effective DPS increase Chain Strategem will do. Battle Litany is also included in the list for a comparison. Blue Line: The blue line represents the base bonus damage you receive from crit. At 3000 crit (Which we won’t be able to attain until way later) this translates to roughly a 18% DPS increase (1.18 eDMG) compared to somebody who doesn’t crit at all. Red Line: The red line represents Battle Litany and Chain Strategem paired with the base crit. As you can see the curve is slightly steeper than the blue line due to taking the base crit in account and then adding the 15% from litany/strategem on top. At 3000 crit Battle Litany/Strategem is roughly a 10% DPS increase. (1.28 eDMG – 1.18 eDMG) Orange Line: This is what happens when you combine both Battle Litany and Chain Strategem. This line is the steepest because it takes in the base crit chance, the 15% from Strategem and the 15% from litany. Combining both buffs puts you roughly at a 20% DPS increase. (1.38 eDMG – 1.18 eDMG) Every third Strategem will be lined up with Litany and Trick Attack. Communicating with your Ninja and Dragoon will be essential to optimalize the usefulness of this skill. Below is a chart of how Strategem, Litany and Trick attack will handle and synergize in a fight assuming all skills get used on cooldown. Time Buff 1 Buff 2 Buff 3 0 Chain Strategem Trick Attack Battle Litany 30 60 Trick Attack 90 120 Chain Strategem Trick Attack 150 180 Trick Attack Battle Litany 210 240 Chain Strategem Trick Attack 270 300 Trick Attack 330 360 Chain Strategem Trick Attack Battle Litany Aetherflow. – Recover 10% of your maximum MP and gain 3 Aetherflow stacks. Effect: 3 Aetherflow stacks MP cost: 0 GCD: No Instant Cast: Yes. Cooldown: 60s Aetherflow is one of the main mechanics of Scholars, the other mechanic being the fairy which we’ve been over earlier in this guide. Aetherflow is your most important skill in the entire skillset and allows you to use your extremely powerful Aetherflow skills. Balancing your Aetherflow usage is the most important thing to do as a Scholar. You will always want to run out of Aetherflow stacks just as Aetherflow comes off cooldown again so that you can keep Aetherflow rolling. Aetherflow is also vital for managing your Mana since it restores 10% of your Maximum MP. This means if you decided to stack on piety, you’ll see greater returns from Aetherflow. On top of that, Aetherflow is also used for your Job gauge and Fey union, which we’ve described earlier. This means that it might not always be effective to straight up use your Aetherflow skills if the gauge is maxed out. There is also a trait that reduces your Aetherflow cooldown by 5 seconds for each Aetherflow skill used. Since you get 3 Aetherflow stacks this means you’ll have a reduction of 15 seconds on each Aetherflow cycle, effectively bringing the cooldown of Aetherflow down to only 45 seconds. If you happen to dissipate and fire off six Aetherflow skills in rapid succession, you can drop the cooldown down to a measely 30 seconds. This allows for a very versatile playstyle with plenty of Aetherflow stacks at your disposal. Which skills are considered Aetherflow skills? The following skills are affected by Aetherflow and need one Aetherflow stack to be used. Healing Aetherflow abilities are NOT affected by buffs/debuffs because they are listed as abilities and NOT as spells. Damage : Energy Drain, Bane. Healing : Lustrate, Excogitation, Indomitability Support / Mitigation : Sacred soil. While these skills may seem not extremely impressive at a first glance it’s actually quite the opposite. Aetherflow skills are by far the most powerful skills Scholar has access to thanks to their low cooldowns and INSTANT cast times. On top of that all Aetherflow skills are off the global cooldown and can be used in rapid succession. A Scholar could use Indomitability, Excogitation and Lustrate all in one GCD if they want to, providing an insane burst in Healing but expending all of their Aetherflow stacks. This is a bad idea however since this means you won’t have any Aetherflow stacks available for other skills when you might need them. A BAD Scholar will rarely use their Aetherflow skills or use them at the wrong time while a GOOD Scholar will use Aetherflow skills when they’re needed, supplementing the party. A GREAT Scholar however will also keep the job gauge in mind, plan ahead in the fight and use stacks in preparation for that. along with communicating with the other Healer to communicate to heal the group with as few Healing GCDs as possible, giving both Healers more uptime and more DPS. TL;DR on Aetherflow: Restores 10% your maximum MP and grants you 3 Aetherflow stacks. Grants acces to powerful Aetherflow abilities which are all instant cast and oGCD. Using Aetherflow abilities increases the job gauge by 10 points and reduce the recast of Aetherflow by 5 seconds per stack used. DPS Skills in a nutshell: Broil is your strongest filler attack at 230 potency. Miasma is a 300 potency DoT, Bio 2 is a 350 potency DoT and should be kept up at all times unless the boss is about to disappear. Bio 2 is instant cast and should have 2 oGCDs used whenever you use it. Ruin 2 is your weaker filler attack at 100 potency, but is instant cast and allows oGCD weaving. Energy Drain is a great oGCD skill that is both used for dealing damage and recovering MP, and is key in managing Scholar’s mana. Shadow Flare is an oGCD skill that does 250 damage in an AoE area. It has a 60 second cooldown and should be paired with every other Bio 2. Miasma 2 is your filler AoE skill. It has a initial potency of 100 and has a total potency of 200. It’s also your strongest instant cast skill and is great for weaving if you can afford it’s crippling MP cost. Chain Strategem should be used in such a way that it benefits the party the most. It’s usefulness increases with the amount of crit you have on your gear. Bane spreads your DoT’s to other targets and has a chance of resetting the DoT time. DoT damage is lowered for each target it hits. Scholars and Healing It took you this long to actually get to this bit? So, as a Healer you just top the tank off the tank whenever they take damage right? Not much to explain here, so surely it’s not going to take 12 pages. WRONG. As mentioned earlier in this guide, the goal of Healing is to make sure nobody dies while accomplishing this in as few Healing GCDs as possible. Inefficient Healing stems from people who think the raid needs to be topped up at all times, these people often end up overHealing, throwing away valueable MP, DPS and in some cases even take aggro from a tank if they are doing excessive Healing. Excessive Healing is thus a suboptimal playstyle and should be avoided if possible. How do i heal as a Scholar? Scholar Healing differs slightly from White Mage Healing and Astrologian Healing. Astrologians and White Mages do not have a fairy that casts spells while Scholars do. This cuts down on Healing enormously and allows you to optimize your DPS enormously. Keeping track of your Fairy’s cast time while looking at the intervals of an enemy attacking your tank also helps. However, don’t go overboard with this. An Autoattack can always crit and murder your tank when you thought it was fine. For general content i use the 20% rule. The 20% rule is a mindset that you try to keep the tank alive for atleast 20% of their maximum HP to prevent deaths from Crit RNG. This however does require a lot of attention and might not be suitable for new Healers until they get comfortable with Healing. IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO KEEP YOUR TANK ALIVE AND PLAY IT SAFE THAN LETTING THEM DIE, JUST TO GET THAT JUICY BROIL 2 OFF. All shields that the Scholar applies have a duration of 30 seconds before expiring. Also keep in mind that Healing is heavily dependant on your group and other factors. Another part of Scholar Healing is that the shields we apply all have innate delays. This can be a GOOD thing or a BAD thing. You’ll find some examples below. The delay is approximately 2 seconds. You will rarely if ever notice these delays if you play normally. Why are delays a GOOD thing? Shield delays can be a good thing for Adloquium if you decide to spread it with Deployment Tactics, especially if you are taking continious damage from a DoT. This allows you to apply your Adloquium to a target, and then spread it to your allies with the full shield intact while your target is taking damage. A good situation to show this would be Zurvan Extreme. Personally i use an Adloquium to heal the wave cannon target, before spreading it afterwards. Due to the innate delay in your shield it won’t be eaten by DoT ticks that are chewing away at your target if you time your deploy properly. This means you can effectively heal someone for 300 potency and then spread the skill to your allies, getting the best of both worlds. Keep in mind that the Deployment Adloquium also has a one second innate delay. Why are delays a BAD thing? While the delay is nice for niche things such as putting out fully intact shields it’s downside is also quite apparent which can be summed up in one simple sentence. You applied the shield and it didn’t actually soak the big hit it was meant to mitigate. This is the downside of shielding delays and is why Scholar can be considered a proactive Healer instead of a reactive Healer. Another issue is that you cannot use Adloquium back to back thanks to the delay. The first shield will not have been registered when your second Adloquium gets applied With that out of the way, let’s take a look at our Healing skills and what they do. NOTE: The cast timers assume a base GCD of 2.5 seconds. Your cast times may vary depending on how much spellspeed you have. Healing Skills and Utility. Protip: All single target heals have a cast timer shorter than the GCD. This allows you to sneak in oGCDs after every heal which will clip far less than clipping after a DPS spell. Physick. – Restores target’s HP with a cure potency of 400. Effect: 400 Potency. MP Cost: 600 GCD: Yes. Instant Cast: No. Cast: 2.00 seconds. A basic heal. Does exactly what the description says. Heals your target for a potency of 400 and nothing more. In all honestly, this particular heal rarely gets used due to how inefficient it is in terms of GCD/Healing. It is however far more cost effective when it comes to mana compared to Adloquium. Physick mainly gets used if you need to throw out another heal right after an Adloquium on the same target. This is because of the innate shield delays as mentioned above, and the second Adloquium would either overwrite the first ‘’fresh’’ shield with a slightly higher number or would not apply something at all, wasting the main use of the skill. Another good use is to use it as a filler heal during downtime. You can use it to top people off for relatively cheap. Adloquium. – Restores target’s HP with a cure potency of 300 potency and applies a shield with the same amount as HP restored. If the heal is a crit, the shield is double the amount of the HP restored. Effect: 300 Potency. MP Cost: 1560 GCD: Yes. Instant Cast: No. Cast: 2.00 seconds. Adloquium is where the fun bit of Healing starts. It is a fairly single target heal costing 1560MP, but makes up for it with it’s versatility and usefulness. Not only does Adloquium heal your target, it also shields them for the exact amount healed. It becomes even better if it decides to crit though. If you get a critical hit on Adloquium the shield gets doubled for the amount it heals you. Say that you crit an Adloquium for 10,000. This means that you will get shielded for 20.000 HP! To make things even better, this also works with deployment tactics allowing you to get some serious mitigation out if you get lucky. You can even pretend that you’re a tank Adloquium is arguably the most versatile healing spell in the game. Succor. – Heals all targets in range with a cure potency of 150 and applies a shield equal to the 150% of HP restored. Effect: 150 Potency. MP Cost: 2040 GCD: Yes. Instant Cast: No. Cast: 2.50 seconds. Radius 15y Succor is your AoE heal. Unlike Astrologians or White mages we only get one AoE heal that we get to spam freely. With it’s 150 potency heal and 225 potency shield, Succor is stronger than it’s respective counterparts, albeit comes at a higher MP cost. Succor also synergizes extremely well with Emergency Tactics, turning it into a 375 potency raw heal, this allows Scholars to give people a quick nudge of healing if desired For sustained restoring of HP however, the other Healers have far more effective means of doing so. Succor also does NOT have the same properties as adloquium where the shield gets doubled if it crits. Succor is also extremely Mana inefficient and should be avoided using too much. Spamming succor leads to drying up your MP pool extremely fast. Just like Adloquium, succor costs more mana than it’s respective counterparts which are Medica and Helios and is the second most expensive healing spell, just behind Cure 3. If AoE healing is needed, it’s better to use Indomitability instead since it’s an instant cast ability that only costs one Aetherflow stack, allowing you to use more GCDs on DPS rather than healing. A Succor with both Fey Illumination and Largesse up is almost as strong as Indomitability. (495 potency vs 500) Lustrate. – Restores the target’s HP with a cure potency of 600 at the cost of one Aetherflow stack. Effect: 600 Potency. MP Cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Recast: 1.00 seconds. Lustrate is an extremely powerful tool when placed in the right hands and can take care of a lot of Healing in a pinch. It heals the target with a potency of 600 and is Instant Cast. The Instant Cast makes this skill really stand out as it allows you to rescue someone if they need a heal immediately. Since a lustrate costs 1 Aetherflow stack we can tie an MP cost to it. Assuming we’d use the stack on Energy Drain instead we would gain 1200 MP and 150 potency. Thus we could say that lustrate costs 1200 MP and is a potency loss of 150, even though you do not see it. This is still far less than the cost of an Adloquium though, since that eats up almost a complete GCD and 1560 MP. Indomitability. – Heals all targets in range with a cure potency of 500 at the cost of one Aetherflow stack. Effect: 500 Potency. MP Cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Recast: 30 seconds. Radius 15y This is hands down the strongest Aetherflow ability Scholar gets in my opinion. Indomitability is a staple of Scholar’s AoE Healing and should always be used over succor if AoE Healing is needed. Just like Lustrate, it only costs one Aetherflow stack and is Instant Cast. It’s cost is easily justified when you compare it to succor since you don’t use a GCD and trade an Energy Drain for it which would net you 1200 mana and 150 potency. Indomitability perfectly covers the glaring weakness that Scholar has when it comes to AoE Healing. With a cooldown of only 30 seconds, Indomitability comes off way faster than White Mage and Astrologian’s counterparts, which are Assize and Earthly Star. This allows Scholar to recover from AoE Healing using far less GCDs than White Mage and Astrologian by using indomitability. If you need to heal raid wide damage, this skill is the first one you should use. Excogitation. – Applies a buff to the target party member that heals them with a cure potency of 800 when their HP falls below 50% at the cost of one Aetherflow stack. Cannot be applied on self. Buff lasts for 45 seconds. Effect: 800 Potency. MP Cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Recast: 45 seconds. Excogitation is our new plaything. With a potency of 800 it’s a lot stronger than lustrate, but that’s pretty much it. Just like Lustrate this is an extremely powerful tool when placed in the right hands. Unlike lustrate though, it doesn’t instantly heal someone but triggers as a heal bomb of some sorts. You also CANNOT use this skill on yourself. Excogitation will be extremely useful on Multi hit tank busters, allowing you to DPS through the buster while Excogitation and your fairy heal up the tank. Again, like all Aetherflow abilities Excogitation is Instant Cast. At the cost of one Aetherflow stack we can tie an MP cost of 1200 and a potency cost of 150 to it when comparing it to Energy Drain. . A note on Healing Aetherflow skills. All Aetherflow skills are listed as ABILITIES instead of SPELLS in the game. This means they are UNAFFECTED by both BUFFS and DEBUFFS. This can either be useful or hindering, depending on the situation. For example, your Fey Illumination and Largesse will NOT buff any of your Aetherflow skills. However, any Healing debuffs that might have been applied to you will also not affect your Aetherflow skills (or your fairy for that matter) This means if the situation calls for it, you still have an answer to deal with Healing when being inflicted with debuffs. Sacred Soil. – Creates an Area that reduces all damage taken by 10% at the cost of one Aetherflow stack. Cannot be used at the same time as Shadow Flare. Has a 20% chance that the next succor will cost no MP. Effect: 10% Reduced damage. MP Cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Recast: 30 seconds. While it may sound impressive on paper, in theory Sacred Soil is by far the Weakest Aetherflow ability that we have in my opinion. It reduces damage by 10% which sounds strong on paper but in theory it’s far weaker than you might think. The thing is, if fights were designed around sacred soil, you’d be forced to bring a Scholar along for every raid fight. It however has some very niche uses in that you can use it to ignore certain mechanics by stacking excessive amounts of mitigation. Sacred soil is extremely useful for that due to its large range. Again, since it’s an Aetherflow ability, Sacred soil can be given the cost of one Energy Drain which is 1200MP and 150 potency. A huge misleading thing about sacred soil however is WHEN the buff is applied. This is not instantly but rather on the next server tick. It could take up to 3 seconds for you to receive the effect so make sure to place it in time if you decide to use it. Sacred soil is very nice for progression however, it gives you that little leeway on mitigation for raidwide damage. This makes some attacks such as Neo Exdeath’s Almagest a lot more manageable, but as your group starts to gain their first pieces of gear it quickly fades into obscurity. Sacred soil can be compared with the Astrologians skill collective unconsciousness . This skill also reduces damage taken by 10%, but unlike sacred soil it also applies a regen with a potency of 150 for 15 seconds, this totals to a regen of 750 potency which is stronger than an Aspected Helios with Largesse. The drawback is that the astrologian cannot move or use any other abilities while using this skill and they suffer from the same issue as Scholar that their skill is based on server ticks. However, Astrologians can decide to cancel the channel after the damage goes out. The regen still persists and heals the group while the mitigation is gone. Thanks to the regen I find collective unconsciousness a far more useful skill. The damage reduction from soil and collective unconsciousness do stack though, but there’s only a rare occasion where such excessive mitigation is needed. Neo Exdeath’s Almagest comes to mind, making the DoT tick far more manageable. Sacred Soil also stacks with Passage of Arms, creating an even bigger safety net if desired. Emergency Tactics. – Your next Adloquium or Succor will restore more HP instead of applying HP and a shield. Effect: Swaps shield for HP. MP Cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Recast: 20 seconds. Emergency Tactics is a skill with a fairly niche use. It swaps out your shields for additional Healing. Shields in general are better than Healing because you can still apply shields even if everyone is topped off. As a general rule, Emergency Tactics does not see a whole lot of use except for when using it on succor, and even then you don’t want to replace your succor with Emergency Tactics all the time. So, it’s useless then? No, not at all. Emergency tactics is as the skill says best used for emergencies. It also complements the AoE Healing Scholar has to offer since they get to use succor twice in a row. Once to apply shields and once to do a full Healing version of succor. Emergency Tactics is useful when paired with Swiftcast to provide a lot of burst Healing in a short timeframe. Succor > Emergency Tactics + Swiftcast > Succor will take care of a lot of Healing. Emergency Tactics should only be used if Indomitability doesn’t cut it for Healing purposes or if you need to hold Indomitability for another heal check for whatever reason. Deployment Tactics. – Spreads Galvanize and Eye for an Eye to all targets in range. Effect: Spreads Eye for an Eye and Galvanize. Potency. MP Cost: 0 GCD: No. Instant Cast: Yes. Recast: 120 seconds. Radius 10y This skill is what makes Scholar the king of mitigation. Thanks to deployment tactics you are able to spread a shield from your party member to all other party members in range. Imagine casting Adloquium on a party member to recover some of their HP before a raid wide attack comes out. The shield they have on them bolsters their defenses for the next hit. If you want, you can use Deployment Tactics to shield EVERYONE in your party in range, turning it into Scholar’s most powerful mitigation tool. Deployment tactics copies everything from your current target, including the duration. This means if a shield had 20 seconds remaining before spreading, everyone else will also receive a 20 second shield. This effect gets amplified further if your Adloquium decides to crit to get that juicy modifier. Deployment Tactics also takes that in account and provides everyone with a massive shield. This is especially hilarious if you were also under the effect of Healing buffs earlier on to bolster your Adloquium and can lead to potentially raid threatening attacks to deal next to no damage on the entire party. Good usage of Deployment Tactics will cut down on Healer GCDs and allows you and your co Healer to deal more damage. As with all shielding abilities, Deployment Tactics also has the shield delay built in. Deployment Tactics can also be used from your fairy, allowing you to position your fairy in such a way where it’ll hit everyone and deploy off her maximizing it’s efficiency. You cannot use deployment tactics on yourself. It can only be used on allies. As you can see we’re provided with a wide arsenal of Healing abilities that synergize really nice with each other. (Succor + Emergency Tactics and Adloquium + Deployment Tactics) We also have a ton of juicy oGCD stuff if the situation calls for it thanks to our Aetherflow skills and we have a fairy providing additional mitigation and support to help us out. This makes us a highly versatile Healer capable of tackling almost any situation that we encounter. Should our fairy die for any reason though or if we use our stacks incorrectly, we’ll be punished for that accordingly by being weaker than the other two Healers and being gated out of our stronger skills. A quick recap on Healing. Physick is your weakest heal. It’s not very effective to spam this due to it’s low GCD/potency conversion. It however does not cost a lot of mana and can be useful in situations where you’re low on MP and do need to heal. Adloquium is a far stronger heal than Physick, but it comes at a heavy cost. It is extremely versatile and an unrivaled tool when paired with deployment tactics. If Adloquium crits, it’s shield value is doubled giving it extreme shielding abilities. Succor is our AoE heal. It recovers a small amount of HP and shields for the same amount. Succor Synergizes well with Emergency tactics if you need a lot of AoE Healing. Lustrate is arguably our strongest single target heal. It instantly heals the target with a potency of 600 and has a recast timer of only one second, allowing you to fire Lustrates off in rapid succession if needed. Indomitability is an extremely powerful AoE heal on a cooldown of only 30 seconds. It is by far the strongest and most useful Aetherflow ability we have in our Arsenal Excogitation can be seen as a delayed lustrate with a far higher potency. It triggers when the target reaches 50% health and heals them with a potency of 800. It has a cooldown of 45 seconds and cannot be used on yourself. Emergency Tactics swaps the shielding aspect from both Adloquium and Succor with Healing. It’s useful when paired with succor but not as useful when paired with Adloquium. Deployment Tactics spreads the current Shield and Eye for an Eye status to your target. It synergizes extremely well with Adloquium. It cannot be used on yourself but can be used on your fairy. All shields last for 30 seconds before expiring. This means you shouldn’t mindlessly spam shields if people are not going to take damage. They also cost enormous amounts of MP. With that out of the way, let’s move on to the next chapter. Mana Management and how Mana recovery works. Note: This section assumes you are level 70. The basics still apply for lower levels, but with different values. Mana management is essential to becoming a good Healer. If your MP pool is completely dry, then you won’t be able to do things. But how does mana work and is there a system behind it? You may have noticed that spells always increase in increments of 120 or 240. This is because the base MP pool we have in stormblood is 12000. You can easily see this by switching to a caster since their MP values are static and cannot be modified. Every spell, both DPS and Healing has an MP value of 1 to 100 which gets multiplied by 120. This dictates their total MP Cost. Physick for example has an MP value of 5. This means that physick costs 120 * 5 MP, for a total of 600, which checks out. The formula for this equation is INT((BaseCostFactor * BaseMpFactor)/100) Or in simple terms again taking physick, the base cost which is 5 gets multiplied by your base MP pool which is 12000, this leads up to 60.000. We then divide this value by 100 to get to our final MP cost for physick, which is 600. Mana regeneration: How does mana regeneration work? Mana regeneration, just like MP costs have a base calculation of how Mana regains. Unlike Mana costs however, some of this is tied to your Base MP and some of it is tied to your Maximum MP. MP Refeshes such as Lucid Dream and Energy Drain are tied to your Base MP, using the following formula: INT(Refreshpotency * BaseMpFactor)/1000 As our Base MP in stormblood is 12000 we can conclude that one point of refresh potency is equal to 12 MP. This means that Lucid Dream will refresh 960 MP per tick (12*80) and Energy Drain has a MP Refresh value of 100 (1200/12) The BRD and MCH crossclass skill Refresh regenerates 600 MP per tick. It lasts 30 seconds and ticks 10 times. This means it’ll recover a total of 6000 MP. Unlike other MP regenerative buffs it does not scale off your base MP, but provides a flat MP recovery. Paladins for example will recover the same amount as a healer does. Natural MP Regeneration and MP Regeneration through Aetherflow scale off your maximum MP. You naturally regain 2% of your maximum mana every 3 seconds, and Aetherflow regains 10% mana on use. If we take an MP pool of 15.000 as example, that’d mean you would recover 1500 MP from Aetherflow, and 300 MP passively each tick. Scholar has 3 main ways to regain Mana. Through the Aetherflow skill, regaining 10% of your maximum mana Through Energy Drain, regaining 1200 mana per cast (100 refresh potency) Through Lucid Dream, regaining 960 mana per tick (80 refresh potency) Taking our 15.000 MP pool as described earlier, A Scholar will be able to refresh 1500 MP from Aetherflow, 3600 MP from Energy Drain and 3360 MP from Lucid Dream every minute. (6720*0.5) This puts our total MP refresh over a minute at 8460 MP from skills. Assuming we get 300 MP every 3 seconds passively, this also adds up to another 6000 MP, putting our MP recovery at 14460 MP every minute. Note that this is done under optimal circumstances and most likely will not happen in realistic scenarios. This number also increases or decreases depending on your mana pool. Knowing how Mana management and Mana recovery works is a key point in becoming a great Scholar. This allows you to calculate whether you can afford heals or not and gives you insight whether you’re getting into trouble later down the fight or if you end up fine. Role Skills. The final part of this guide will touch on Role Skills and which Role Skills in my opinion are the best for Scholar. Some Role Skills such as Swiftcast and Lucid Dream are mandatory picks in high level content, while other skills such as Rescue and Break are extremely situational. All role skills cost 0 MP. The cast and recast values assume a base spellspeed of 0/364 and a 2.5s GCD. Cleric Stance. – Increases attack magic potency by 5% for 15 seconds. Duration 15s. Effect: 5% increase in attack magic potency. GCD: No Instant Cast: Yes Cooldown: 90s Our first Role Skill and quite underwhelming. I personally consider the new Cleric Stance an insult and a slap in the face to the old version. The new version gives you a 5% damage increase with a 16% uptime. This effectively gives it a DPS increase of 0.8% if used without any other cooldowns. If we use it in a raid scenario this number will increase slightly due to lining up with buffs and debuffs. However, It still won’t even come close in making a significant change in your damage output. On top of that, it’s also on the OGCD and forces you to clip, either forcing you to use Ruin 2 to avoid that clipping, or clip even more. This puts the new Cleric Stance into the ‘’useless’’ category for me during progression. There are far better options to take than this. For speedruns, it provides a niche boost and is worth taking. Break. – Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 50 and applies heavy for 20 seconds. Duration 20s. Effect: 50 potency + Heavy. GCD: Yes Instant Cast: No Cast:2.5 seconds Another fairly useless skill. It does 50 potency, is stuck on the GCD and applies a heavy that reduces movement speed by 40% for 20 seconds. Unless you need to kite a certain add in a fight i don’t see this skill getting much use. At least it costs 0 MP and you can use it for free, i guess. Protect. – Increases the physical and magic defense of all party members in range. Duration 30m. Effect: Increased phys and magical defense by 20% GCD: Yes Instant Cast: No Cast:3 seconds The first good role skill. Protect, in a raid scenario is considered a must pick by one of the Healers in my opinion. The free mitigation saves lives and helps you cut down on Healing GCDs. Protect raises the magical and physical defense stat by 20%. Just like Fey Covenant however, this isn’t the advertised 20% but a lower value. This scales by your gear and becomes stronger as your item level increases. This is why i consider protect a mandatory pick if you’re doing any kind of endgame content. The bonus is too good to pass up. Esuna. – Removes a single Detrimental effect from the target. Effect: Cleanses 1 Debuff GCD: Yes Instant Cast: No Cast:1 second. Esuna does what it says on the tin. It cleanses one debuff from the target. It simply boils down to ‘’Do i need to cleanse debuffs in this fight or not?’’ on whether you pick it or not. I consider this a situational but useful role skill. Alternatively you could use selene and have her use Fey Cleanse, assuming debuffs are sparsely needed to be removed. Lucid Dreaming. – Reduces Enmity by half and refreshes your mana with a potency of 80 over 21 seconds. Duration 21s. Effect: Reduces enmity by 50%. 80 potency MP refresh. GCD:No Instant Cast: Yes Cooldown: 120s Lucid Dreaming is our second must pick skill. It provides essential MP regeneration which is needed thanks to our massive MP costs on Healing spells. Lucid Dream ticks 7 times over it’s 21 second period and restores 960 MP per tick for a total of 6720 MP over its whole duration. This means it essentially regains you 3360 MP per minute. In the Mana Management section you can read more about how these calculations work. Swiftcast. – Next spell will be cast instantly. Duration 10s. Effect: Next spell is instant cast. GCD: No Instant Cast: Yes Cooldown: 60s Swiftcast is our third must pick skill. It turns your next cast into an instant cast when used. This is great for if you need to resummon your fairy, or if you need to raise someone. It is also useful for turning one of your broils into an instant cast, allowing you to weave 2 oGCDs in it’s spot. Not having swiftcast really harms your versatility as a Healer Eye for an Eye. – Erects a magical barrier around a single party member or pet that has a 20% chance of applying a 10% damage debuff to anyone who hits the barrier for 10 seconds. Duration 20s. Effect: 20% chance of reducing damage by 10%. GCD: No Instant Cast: Yes Cooldown: 180s A good skill, but with an incredibly and argueably too long of a cooldown. When it procs it’s amazing and really helps you in reducing damage, but if it doesn’t proc it’s useless. Eye for an Eye should be applied at least 10 seconds before the to be mitigated damage goes out, this is to maximize the chance that it procs. Eye for an Eye also only procs on phsyical attacks and not magical attacks. But once it procs, it mitigates both physical and magical hits. Eye for an Eye can be spread on the group using Deployment tactics, but this doesn’t do much in general, unless both the tanks are taking damage from seperate mobs. This Role skill isn’t a must, but still extremely useful. If Eye for an Eye regained it’s old 120s cooldown along with it’s old barrier duration it would be a must pick. Largesse. – Increases Healing magic potency by 20% for 20 seconds. Duration 20s. Effect: 20% heal up. GCD: No Instant Cast: Yes Cooldown: 90s In my opinion our fourth ‘’Must Pick’’ ability. Largesse provides you with a 20% Healing up boost which is significant and makes Healer checks a lot easier and helps you cutting down on Healing GCDs, saving you mana and allowing you to spend more time DPSing. It’s cooldown of 90 seconds isn’t too bad either, allowing you to make good use of it during a fight. Largesse stacks with other healing up skills such as Fey illumination, Mantra and Convalescense. Surecast. – Next spell is cast uninterruptable while ignoring Sleep, Stun, Knockback and Draw in effects. Duration 5s. Effect: Next cast is uninterruptable while Ignoring sleep, stun, knockback and draw in effects. GCD: No Instant Cast: Yes Cooldown: 30s A situational skill if you ask me. Surecast can be good if there is a lot of knockbacks and stuns going around during raids, though this generally is not the case. The low cooldown of 30 seconds makes it a nice, spammable spell though. Personally i wouldn’t use this skill much, unless there’s heavy crowd control going on in a fight. Rescue. – Instantly draw target party member to your side. Effect: Draw target to you. GCD: No Instant Cast: Yes Cooldown: 150s Range: 30y Another situational skill. It allows you to pull out a party member which is in danger and would otherwise die if not rescued. With it’s range of 30y it’s also fairly long. Rescue also interrupts casts from casters if they happen to be casting. Alongside being useful it also has the potential for being a troll skill by pulling melees out of melee range and forcing them to run back to the boss, or interrupting the casts from a caster. Rescue can also cancel out LB animation locks, making LB3 take far less time to finish. Just Rescue a melee DPS as their LB3 cast finishes and you’re set. This makes Rescue an Useful, yet situational skill. This allows melees to move freely instead of being locked in. TL;DR on role skills. Cleric Stance is stripped of it’s former glory and isn’t nearly as good as it used to be. the 5% damage for 15s on a 90s cooldown is pitiful. Break is useless unless you need to kite adds. It’s 50 potency and GCD lock are bad. It costs no MP and still deals some damage though. Protect is a mandatory role skill for one of the Healers. It’s 20% physical and magical defense increase is really good. Esuna is mandatory if you need to cleanse debuffs in a fight. If not, it’s useless. A situational skill Lucid Dreaming is your second mandatory role skill. It provides you with 6720 MP on a 120 second cooldown over a 21 second period, on top of dumping half your aggro. Swiftcast is your third mandatory role skill. It’s an extremely versatile skill with only a 60 second cooldown. It’s essential for raising people and resummoning your fairy. Eye for an Eye is an useful role skill, helping in mitigation. It’s not as good as the mandatory role skills, but still a top pick on my hotbars. Largesse is arguably your fourth mandatory role skill. the 20% heal up for 20 seconds on a 90 second cooldown is a far better deal than most other skills. Surecast is a situational skill. Good if there’s a lot of crowd control going out, bad if not. Rescue is another situational skill. Good for getting DPS out of AoEs, but good players won’t be there. It also has troll potential. Role skill tiers. Below is my opinion on how good the role skills are. These are ranked from best to worst. in each role skill’s description you can see why i ranked these skills as is. Mandatory: Largesse, Lucid Dreaming, Protect, Swiftcast Useful: Eye for an Eye, Rescue Situational: Surecast, Esuna Why would i use this?: Cleric Stance, Break. CREDITS: Hereby i want to thank the following people for helping me to make this guide. Without them i wouldn’t have done it. My static for letting me play Scholar in an excellent environment. (Thoro Heavypunch, Polka Lullaby, Spool Spoolington, Dave Ackerman, Jo Musse, Neelia Eris, Pasuno Gremory) The Math Warlocks from the Balance Discord, Nemekh and Pimoh Orinx in particular. Nemekh for providing the graph of Chain Strategem You, for slogging through over 40 pages of an elitist rambling about the good old days. Changelog 18-7-2017 – Guide created, Patch 4.0 27-10-2017 – Updated the tooltips for patch 4.1, minor cleanup on text. (Succor and Adlo) 27-10-2017 – Fixed various tooltip errors that have been changed (Excogitation crit, Fey union meter usage) 23-5-2018 – Changes to Fairy Updates Previous Versions https://docs.google.com/document/d/18mlqzGKN3KpC8l9ujQFixNrSrFkWBVSwmNWxw3lthgA/edit#heading=h.a2idhy849fkg (4.0) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LrZP8VUnDhChjxtocBS_a-ZWQdjM-ZOEE7sryUu1LXY/edit# (4.1 / 4.2) FFXIV FF14 Scholar Job Guide 2023 alext96 — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 14:56:03 +0000 Indomitable A Thorough Guide To Scholar Tobio Okuma This is a guide for the Scholar Job in FFXIV. The goal of this guide is to give insight into how the job is operating in our current raid environment. I will go over all of the job’s skills and describe their usages, as well as break down how Scholar interacts with other healers. I will go through small optimizations, useful macros, and more. This guide is oriented towards people of any level of play. Of course, there will be some general “how to heal” in this guide, as it is vital to point out the style that SCH uses in its healing. This guide will also go into some pretty in depth things in regards to healing. A lot of this will be assuming you are in an organized group and can coordinate with your cohealer. I will also be addressing certain inefficiencies in regards to Scholar play in hopes that they will allow people to avoid common mistakes.I will include sections on useful tips/tricks that can improve your overall experience playing Scholar. This guide will have a LOT of information in it. Feel free to jump around it as necessary to things that are relevant to you. The table of contents will be color coded as to allow easy navigation, as a document this size can be overwhelming. This guide will continue to be updated going into 5.0, though it will take some time after the expansion drops to get it fully adapted to changes. Feel free to drop by The Balance discord to ask any questions regarding Scholar or any other job. The mentors and members will gladly help with anything from general questions to log analysis. You can also feel free to message me on discord, FusionSamurai#3427 as well. Acknowledgements A massive thanks to Snes Ambros’ia for the work they put in to make this guide possible. The writing, editing, and support was a massive help in getting this finished. Without you, this would not have been completed. I can not thank you enough. A special thanks to Momo Sama for his help, especially on the section regarding raid buff alignment and opportunity costs. He also made the graph of party mitigations. On top of that, he also proofread this behemoth of a document. Check out his Twitch and YouTube. Thanks to Zyrkhan Dar’locke for his help in translating my ramblings into English and proof reading my spreadsheets. His AST guide was also a great guideline into how I could approach writing this kind of guide. Alevia Rohan for bullying me and putting up with my bullying. Also she proofread it as well. Check out her Twitch. Nemekh for their spreadsheets. Everything we know is because of the hard work you do theorycrafting. Math is hard, but you make it understandable. His Twitch, where you can watch him play SMN. Video Games, for writing the original SCH guide at the start of 4.0, as well as providing the graph for Critical Hit. You inspired me to write this guide. Can watch him play SCH on his Twitch.. Ayesa Faile for having the Fey Covenant math, as well as answering my stupid questions when I first joined The Balance. Thanks to all the groups and people I’ve run with who have made me the player I am today. Thank you for putting up with my endless memes and terrified screeches. Everyone on The Balance for teaching me what I know and helping me to get better at the game. Without you I would be nowhere near where I am today. Table Of Contents This table of contents will be organized by color for the sake of easy navigation. Green = Beginner: Not doing Savage or Extreme Content Yellow = Moderate: Learning or clearing Savage or Extreme Content Red = Advanced: Class / Raid Optimization Acknowledgements Table of Contents What Does Scholar Do? ActionsDPS GCDs DPS oGCDs Healing GCDs Healing oGCDs Utility Spells/Abilities Eos’ Abilities Selene’s Abilities Other Abilities Role Actions All About DPSOpener How DoTs work The GCD and Weaving How Fairies Work Eos Vs. Selene Fairy Swaps Opportunity Costs OCs For Cohealers Single Target Healing Priority AOE Healing Priority How Shielding Works When to Shield How Healing Buffs Work Deployment Tactics MP Management Dissipation Movement How Mitigations Work Party Mitigations Raid Buffs Buff Alignment Stat Priorities Weapon Damage Main Stat Piety Critical Hit Spell Speed Determination Direct Hit Vitality Determination Vs. Direct Hit Useful macros General Tips Additional Resources What Does Scholar Do? Scholar at first glance appears to be a complicated job, especially for people who are just attempting to get into healing for the first time. Scholar hotbars are often extremely full, which gives the impression that they have many abilities. While this is true, many of them do not get much use in current content. Scholar at its core is a fairly simple job. Scholar’s main identity revolves around the usage of two fairies, Selene and Eos, which passively heal. These two enable Scholars to pump out incredible damage while constantly having a mini-regen coming from the fairies. On top of this, Scholar has many tools that allow them to quickly heal incoming damage. As a Scholar, you will be juggling a resource known as “Aetherflow”. You get 3 stacks every 60s, and they give you access to your most powerful abilities. Each time one of these abilities is used, the cooldown on Aetherflow is decreased by 5 seconds. These are your bread and butter abilities that will cover the overwhelming majority of your healing in raids. Each Aetherflow ability we use grants us 10 Aetherflow Gauge, which is used to execute a powerful single target regen with Fey Union. We also have many tools that can be used to mitigate incoming damage, though most of the time it is unnecessary. There are specific circumstances in which shielding is useful, which will be addressed later in this guide. The combination of its powerful healing options and raid utilities make it a force to be reckoned with. There are virtually no circumstances that Scholar is a bad choice for a healer slot. It is consistently powerful through early progression, weeklies, as well as speed kills. Scholar has been present in almost every world first clear, the only exception being Neo Exdeath, which really speaks to the power of the job. Basically, this job is absolutely bonkers when played properly. And getting good value out of its stills doesn’t require you to be a top tier player. There are a few core basics that will push you to become a solid player. This guide will address those, as well as more advanced things for those seeking to push their gameplay to the next level. Actions This section will go through every skill that Scholar has, explaining the pros and cons of it. This should give a good general understanding of what each is and when they are used. This section will be separated into GCDs, OGCDs, and then pet abilities. This section will be separated based on their interaction with the GCD. If the spell makes the GCD roll, it will be listed as a GCD. If it can be used between GCDs with no impact on the GCD, it will be listed as an oGCD. DPS GCDs This is your primary spell that you will be casting during any given encounter. This is your filler DPS spell that you cast when your DoTs are already ticking and nothing else needs to be done. This is the spell that we use to weave oGCDs with. It has a base potency of 100 and a damage over time that adds up to an additional 100 potency, 200 total. It is instant, which gives you 2.5s to throw in things like Energy Drain or Excogitation. Weaving Energy Drain with Miasma II is a DPS gain.Be wary of the MP cost associated with this though, as that cost adds up fairly quickly. Using Energy Drain with this results in it being pretty safe MP wise though. DPS wise, as long as you get 1 tick out of Miasma II, it is worth more than Ruin II. MP wise this isn’t great, generally you want to let this DoT tick its full duration, or at least not clip it until there are >6s left on the duration.This also doubles as your AOE DPS tool. Note that the full duration of Miasma II is only 30 potency less than Broil II (230). This minor difference is important for oGCD utilization that will be discussed in further detail later. Ruin II is honestly a pretty bad spell. It is an instant cast, which means that you can use it to weave oGCDs, but we have other options for that. Generally, this gets used if we are forced to do extended movement away from the boss. Unless certain conditions are met, this skill can be a trap for newer players, as weaving with it is a definite loss over alternatives. There are situations where it can be useful. It can be used before the boss goes untargetable if there isn’t enough time to get a Broil II cast. This ability has a tiny amount of initial damage, 20 potency, but applies a damage over time that will add up to 280 potency over the course of its duration. It has a 300 net potency if it is allowed to tick its entire duration.This should virtually always be ticking on the boss, with a few exceptions. Miasma must tick for 18s for it to be worth more than a Broil II. Yet another DoT. The net potency of this is 350. Similarly to Miasma, it should be almost always ticking on the boss, with a few exceptions. (More on this later). It also is instant cast, which means the time after it is done can be used to reposition yourself for incoming mechanics. This must tick for 21 seconds to be worth more than a Broil II. DPS oGCDs This is going to be the primary use for your Aetherflow stacks. It boasts 150 damage potency, as well as 1,200 MP and a small heal. The heal on this can be nice, as it can sometimes keep you from having to GCD heal yourself. This along with Aetherflow is SCH’s method of regaining MP outside of Lucid Dreaming. This increases your Aetherflow Gauge by 10. After recent changes, Shadow Flare got an additional tick once it is placed. This skill has 5 ticks of 50 potency, with one when it is placed for a net potency of 300. This only does damage so long as the boss’ hitbox remains inside the AOE it places. It can be worth it to hold this ability if the boss is about to be moved or is about to go untargetable for a short time.This skill has a 60s cooldown, which means if used properly, it should consistently line up with Bio. Use Bio to weave Shadowflare, basically. It is also worth noting that this skill cannot be used at the same time as your other ground AOE, Sacred Soil. Bane is an interesting ability. It costs you one Aetherflow stack. It increases your Guage by 10. It spreads your Bio and Miasma to all targets that are near the target you execute bane on. This skill really doesn’t get many usages during raid situations. The potency on this ability is entirely reliant on how long the enemies you are using it on will survive. Most adds don’t last long enough to really get value out of it. If the boss leaves the arena and summons adds, it’s likely not worth it to use two GCDs to DoT one add and then Bane them when you can spam Miasma II. It really depends on the kill time for the adds. If the boss is still targetable and it summons an add, it is possible to get great value out of Bane-ing pre-existing DoTs onto the add. As long as the potency is greater than 150, it is a gain over using Energy Drain. You’re honestly better off spamming Miasma II in most AOE situations. Healing GCDs This is your first heal, a carry over from being an Arcanist. This is probably the worst heal in the Scholar kit, and should be avoided if at all possible. The only time this gets used is when you don’t have other options available at the given time and you’re out of MP. This is one of the most influential abilities Scholar has. This spell heals the target for 300 potency, then adds a shield equaling the amount healed (300 Potency). A critical heal will double the shield. This shield can then be deployed to the entire party. It is not generally worth it to fish for critical adloquium. MP wise, this ability is pretty pricey, so fishing for a “Critlo” is not generally advised. This shield does not stack with Astrologian’s Nocturnal Field, regardless of the potency of either. If you have a 60,000 Adlo shield, it will be overwritten by a 500 Nocturnal shield. There are specific circumstances that using Adlo is fantastic, but generally we attempt to avoid using this skill if at all possible. In progression, it can be used to cushion tank busters, especially before tanks have their cooldowns properly mapped out. Other than that, its generally only used as a deployment tool. It is also rather harsh on MP, another reason to avoid it. If it is being used to cheese mechanics, fishing for a Critlo CAN be done, but is generally not advised, as it is a lot of lost damage potency and it costs a ton of MP. This is Scholar’s only GCD heal for area of effect healing. It is also a fairly weak heal, with only 150 healing potency. That being said, it provides a 225 potency shield on top of its healing. This becomes a 375 potency direct heal when Emergency Tactics is used, but even without Emergency Tactics the effective heal is 375 total potency. Spamming this too much is extremely taxing on both your MP and DPS. Ideally Succor should be avoided in favor of other less costly options, such as Indomitability. However, there are times where shielding is necessary. Some examples of this are when the party won’t survive without shielding, or when the party has to be at 100% HP. It also is beneficial for one health mechanics, as those do not eat shields like they do health. Healing oGCDs This is your first heal that is off the global cooldown. It increases your gauge by 10, as all Aetherflow abilities do. This is a 600 potency heal, which is fairly powerful. This only heals a single target, but has more potency than any of your GCD based heals. Generally though, it is preferred that Excogitation be used over Lustrate, as it has a greater potency. Lustrate is still a powerful panic button in case someone takes an unnecessary hit or you need some emergency tank healing when alternatives are on cooldown. Lustrate is still very useful through. It also has the added benefit of a 1.00s recast, which means it is possible to spam multiple in quick succession if such a scenario demands it. (Ideally this doesn’t happen often, but mistakes do happen). This is one of the reasons Scholar is such a powerful job. Again it increases your gauge by 10. The net heal from this is 4,000 potency across the entire party. This is extremely powerful, and with a short 30s cooldown, it is available for most raidwide hits. This is your strongest source of AOE burst healing. It is vastly superior to casting multiple succors. This does not have to be cast, as with all oGCDs, which means that it can be weaved with Miasma II for minimal DPS loss. This is the strongest single target heal in Scholar’s entire kit. It of course increases your gauge by 10. This ability procs for 800 potency in the case that your target drops below 50% health, or automatically heals them if the timer on it wears off. This is an incredibly useful tool, and virtually foolproof. You can place this on the tank at any time and get some value out of it. Unless the tanks is full health, you will ALWAYS get something out of Excog.This is useful for healing tanks out of Holmgang/Living Dead, as well as just healing after a large tank buster. If a tank is low at any time, Excog can be used to safely and quickly give a large burst of HP. It is worth noting that this will not heal someone through a oneshot. If they have 51% health and take a tank buster that is more than their health, Excog will not stop their death. In such a case, opt into lustrate to get their health up. Emergency tactics gets a worse rep than it deserves. This skill turns the shield on your next Succor/Adlo within 15s into additional direct healing. This means that it essentially turns Adlo into a 600 potency heal and Succor into a 375 potency heal. This is fairly useful if your cohealer dies during progression and you need to utilize back to back succors – the first one can be a normal succor, while you use ET on the second to get the full potency of the heal without losing any to shielding that already exists on the party. It can be used to assist in breaking a DRK out of Walking Dead. It has a few situations that its very useful but these are typically more niche scenarios. One of the other added benefits of Emergency Tactics is that by turning the shield into a direct heal, the potency is applied immediately to party members vs having the shield delay. This is very important at times where the heal window is very tight before damage goes out, such as multi-hit raid busters or something like Chaos’ Dark Crystal phase, where you have a very brief window to heal the party after destroying the orb and shields will not apply in time before damage. This is also extremely good for instances of mechanics that bring the party to one health, as it can be combined with an Indom for a rather insane burst heal. This and Indom are the primary methods of burst healing for Scholar. The name really describes this skill, it is used in emergencies for a burst heal, and it does that job fairly well. These two go together because they are quite literally the same ability. Aetherpact is the command from the Scholar and Fey Union is the ability executed by the Fairy. This will tether Eos/Selene onto your target, funneling a powerful heal over time onto them. This heal is subject to pet scaling, which means it is not as strong as the potency implies. This is a useful tool that can be used to greatly cut down on healer GCDs that are required. It is used generally to heal tanks through auto attacks, as the ticks from Fey Union are stronger than Embraces. If the party are all at low health, this can also be used to funnel the fairy’s healing on to the tank, as Eos/Selene will heal ANYONE below 80% health, this allows you to force her into healing the desired target. Note that using any of the fairy’s other abilities will break the tether. Aetherpact can be cast again to end Fey Union early. Aetherpact is subject to an oGCD slot, but Dissolve Union (What replaces Aetherpact while it is active) is not. Do note, however, that Dissolve Union will still create a minor clip if utilized after a non-instant cast because it is still a non-pet function. However, Dissolve Union has no oGCD animation lock so the impact is very minimal. In addition, fairy skills other than Embrace can be used to cancel Fey Union. The fairy can not move while casting this ability, but if it is cast on a target that is out of range, the fairy will move into range to execute this skill. This increases the potency of your fairy’s embrace by 40%. I say embrace because that is the only aspect of the fairy’s kit that is boosted by this healing increase. This skill should basically be used on cooldown. The extra healing over the course of the encounter really adds up. This does not increase healing on Whispering Dawn. Do not hold this to line them up. Do NOT use this if you plan on using Fey Union in the next 20s, as they do not interact with each other, which results in wasted Rouse time. Utility Spells/Abilities Fairly self explanatory. This is something possessed by every healer, as well as Red Mage and Summoner. Generally, you want to avoid hard casting Resurrection if at all possible. Swiftcasting it will minimize your loss. That being said, don’t leave a DPS down for 20 seconds waiting for your swiftcast to come back. MP wise this is also really pricey. If you have a RDM/SMN, see if they can get the raise, especially in progression settings, as it really snowballs your MP to have to cast raises. Sacred Soil is another use for your Aetherflow. It increases your gauge by 10. This skill generally feels like a wasted stack. Unless you will not survive without it, or it saves you a GCD heal, it feels unnecessary. This can not be used at the same time as Shadowflare, so be wary of when you will need both of them. It also has a small chance of giving you a free Succor, which, while nice in theory, is not used often in practice. This is one of the strongest aspects of Scholar’s kit. This can be used to spread the effect of Galvanize from one target to the rest of the party. (Assuming they are within a 10y radius). This means that you can heavily mitigate incoming damage by casting an Adlo onto someone, be it a tank with healups, the DPS, or a fairy, then sending it to the entire party. Ignore the Eye For an Eye bit on this skill, it’s not really used for that. This skill is fairly self explanatory. This increases the rate at which the boss will take crits by 15%. This is a new utility that was added in Stormblood, and another aspect of the Scholar kit that makes it so influential. This skill gets used at around 6.5s in the opener, and then is used on cooldown. With a 120s cooldown, it lines up naturally with Trick Attack and every other major raid buff. Be sure to communicate with your team when this skill is coming up. Eos’ Abilities Note that all Fairy abilities outside Embrace are off the GCD. This is your pet’s primary ability. Eos and Selene both have the exact same potency for Embrace. They will spam this ability every 3s on anyone below 80% health. It will prioritize the Scholar over anyone else, as their death kills the fairy. This ability is subject to pet scaling. This ability is very useful. It has 7 ticks of 120 potency, for a total of 840 potency. This is subject to fairy scaling though, which means it has an actual potency of 588. This regen is not increased by Rouse or any other healing increase. This is very useful for healing the party during downtime if there is no raid damage coming. This ability increases magic defenses of your party. This is especially useful because many tank busters and almost all raid wide instances of damage are magical. This can be very effective for mitigating incoming raid damage. It is important to note that it increases magic defense stat by 20% rather than reducing incoming magic damage by 20%. This means it is more effective on casters and tanks than it is physical dps. At item level 400, the damage reduction values are as follows: Tanks – 16.7% reduction Casters – 8.8% reduction Physical DPS – 6.7% reduction This increases the amount of healing you deal with spells. This does not boost abilities such as Lustrate, Excog, Fey Union, or Indom. This ability doesn’t increase much in the SCH’s kit, but is very useful for cohealers. Communicate the best usages of Fey Illumination with your team to maximize its benefit. It can be stacked with other heal increases such as Largesse for a multiplicatively powerful shield or regen. Selene’s Abilities Note that all Fairy abilities outside Embrace are off the GCD Literally the same as Eos’. This ability has virtually no real uses. The silence on it has only been useful on one raid in Stormblood, O7s. The primary function of Silent Dusk is to Cancel Fey Union without clipping your GCD or forcing a weave window. This has a few more uses than Silent Dusk. This will cleanse detrimental effects from everyone in the party, at least, ones that can be cleansed. This had more effect in A11s, where it could be used to cleanse the Limit Cut debuff. Now it has a few niche uses, but not too much going for it. Similar to Silent Dusk, this can be used to cancel an active Fey Union. This is the main appeal to Selene as a fairy. For the loss of healing and mitigation that Eos has, you get Fey wind. This is a rather small increase, but adds up over the course of an encounter. With 50% uptime, it can lead to a sizeable gain. Other Abilities This ability does not heal or DPS directly, but enables your entire kit to function by giving you stacks of Aetherflow. This also gives you 10% of your maximum MP back, so it also functions as an MP management tool. The recast of this is shortened by 5s every time an Aetherflow action is used, so it effectively has a 45s recast time.This is an oGCD. This spell summons Eos to your side.Summon II summons Selene to your side. This skill is meant for Summoners who are trying to solo content with Titan-Egi. This doesn’t have much usage for Scholars. Dissipation is a weird mix of a healing ability and a DPS ability. It sacrifices your fairy, which can be extremely detrimental if done at the wrong times. This ability will receive its own section later in the guide. The healing increase and extra Aetherflow stacks means that this can be used as a panic button if things go wrong and you have no Aetherflow available. Role Actions Cleric Stance was gutted from its Heavensward counterpart. Now it acts as a small DPS gain every 90s. It is nothing crazy. It is used prepull for our opener, and then gets used on cooldown. It is an oGCD, and should be weaved with Miasma II, Bio, or Ruin II. (Preferably not Ruin II). This can be used to fill the gap and give yourself a “Break” on MP. Otherwise literally anything is better. This is a GCD. Use this prepull, then use it again if someone dies. The mitigation this gives can be the difference between life and death, especially in a progression setting.This is a GCD. This has usages inside of dungeons more than anything. It can be used to cleanse certain debuffs, such as the burn in o3s. (That nobody should get). If you have a BRD, they can cleanse a debuff without wasting a GCD, so this is relatively niche in a raid setting. This is a GCD. This is your primary way of regenerating MP. It will slowly tick up mana over its duration. It also allows you to drop threat. SCH threat generally isn’t a large problem, but some encounters, such as Neo Exdeath and Ultima Weapon (Ultimate) could be sketchy at times.This is an oGCD. Swiftcast is one of your most important role actions. This allows you to instantly cast the next spell. This is a tool for movement, primarily. It is also used to quickly revive a fallen ally, and can be used to quickly get a heal out before a coming mechanic. It can also be used to set yourself up for future weaves by making your next Broil II instant. This is an oGCD. Eye for an Eye isn’t too great of a skill. That being said, the only downside to it is the oGCD slot you sacrifice in order to use it. You’ll hardly feel the difference this makes. You can throw it on the tank if you have a free oGCD slot, but again, it really doesn’t make a difference.This is an oGCD. This is also one of your most important role actions. This can be used to increase your spell’s healing potency by 20%. Under this (and only this), Adloquium has a 360 potency, and Succor has a 180 potency. Healing increases such as this do not work on oGCD heals such as Lustrate. This is an oGCD. Surecast can be used to prevent most knockback and pull effects. This includes the knockback in Omega Male/Female. This allows you to not lose a cast during the knockback. (Or prevents you from having to use Miasma II as you get knocked back to minimize the loss). This is an oGCD. This is potentially an interesting role action. There are some strats that require it, such as Unreal Hello, World in Final Omega. This will pull the target to you. There are a few more usages for this skill that will be touched upon later.This is an oGCD. All About DPS There is an old joke that Scholar is a green DPS. Oddly enough, that isn’t far from the truth. All of the healers in this game have great damage potential. Instances of damage in this game are very spread out, which allows healers to abuse their powerful oGCD healing tools to handle healing while they DPS. The amount of incoming raid damage is consistently decreasing as expansions progress. This allows healers to push their DPS numbers ever further. Healer DPS is very important. It can be the difference between clearing and a hard enrage, especially in earlier weeks. In a lot of ways, healers are the most influential jobs in any party. Two good healers can seriously carry raid DPS if their DPS players are lacking, or can push their group even further beyond fight requirements. High healer DPS can also provide a safety net in the unfortunate event that a DPS or tank dies. (As long as the death wasn’t because of healers DPSing). Healer DPS is very important. I can not emphasize this enough. Fights in this game are extremely scripted, with a constant stream of auto attack damage on the tanks and spikes in overall raid damage going out. The amount of damage the party takes is also fairly scripted, with around a 5% damage variance, it is still extremely consistent. Fights work on a timeline, certain mechanics always happen at certain times. Some fights have two possible timelines, such as O7s and O9s, but they still remain consistent. You can abuse the fact that these fights are so scripted to increase your own damage. After a massive raid wide, there are often large gaps before the next instance of party wide damage. If there is a large amount of time before the next set of raid damage, do not heal the party to full. Allow regens or off global cooldowns such as Indom, Earthly Star, Collective Unconscious, or Asylum handle the healing. During this downtime, you only need to keep the tank healed, which can generally be handled with a regen from your AST/WHM and your fairy’s healing. (Remember to Rouse and Fey Union) Opener -7s Summon Eos+Fey Wind (during summon cast) -5s Infusion of Mind+Cleric Stance -2.5s Miasma -Bio (Energy Drain+Shadow Flare) -Broil II -Miasma II (Chain Stratagem+Energy Drain) -Broil II (Swiftcast) -Broil II (Energy Drain+Aetherflow) -Broil II -Broil II -Miasma -Miasma II (Energy Drain) Credit to Video Games. This is the standard opener for Scholar. This will be used in 99% of fights. There are a few fights where you can not get off a proper opener, such as O6s. If you can not precast, like in O6s, skip the first Broil II. In this case, do not bother clipping your Miasma. The same applies when you are doing your re-opener later in the fight.The final Miasma II only has an Energy Drain weaved with it, you are free to place whatever you need there. (Sample opener timeline through first Aetherflow usage. Note Chain Strategem timing before Bard uses Iron Jaws) This opener opts into a Broil II->Swiftcast->Broil II. While clipping your GCD is not generally advised, doing so here allows us to avoid another clip. Clipping Miasma before its duration is complete allows it to be refreshed under all raid buffs, which results in higher damage. There is another opener. It is a Miasma II lip opener. -Precast Miasma -Bio II (Energy Drain) -Miasma II (Swiftcast + Energy Drain) -Broil II (Chain Stratagem + Shadowflare) -Miasma II (Energy Drain+Aetherflow) This opener is the fastest way to put Aetherflow on cooldown. It allows you to get Shadowflare under raid buffs.This is less used, but it is a viable opener. After the opener is complete, attempt to maintain high DoT uptime. Weave Energy Drain with Miasma II or when you refresh Bio. You can weave Energy Drain with Ruin II if you’re forced to move, though it is generally not advised, as it is a DPS loss over alternatives. When people ask how to increase their DPS. The biggest problem is either a low CPM or too much healing. CPM stands for “casts per minute”. Ideally this number for Scholars should be around 30. Anything less and you are losing casts throughout the course of an encounter, which harms your DPS significantly. In an 8 minute encounter, a person doing 27 CPM is losing 24 casts compared to someone doing 30 CPM. If all of those were Broil IIs, that results in over 5,520 lost potency. The line most people use is “Always Be Casting”. If you are doing nothing, you are losing either DPS or HPS. Literally anything is better than doing nothing. There is no excuse to be idle. Again, low CPM and unnecessary healing are the primary contributors to low healer DPS. There are a few things to know in regards to maximizing your damage potential and getting the most casts off during an encounter. If you finish casting a Broil II, and the boss is going to go untargetable in one or two seconds, using a Ruin II is absolutely better than getting nothing. In the given scenario, it is impossible to get a Broil II off, so any potency is better than none. Bosses teleporting or jumping across the map works in a very similar fashion. Most of the time, it will break your cast when they teleport, as they are no longer targeted. If your Broil II cast is going to be cancelled by them teleporting, opt into Miasma II or Ruin II. As long as the boss is targetable on the arena, the DoT will tick. This will guarantee you get at least SOMETHING out of that missing GCD. This is generally the only time that Ruin II is used. When the boss is going to disappear for an extended period of time, it can be used to get one last instance of damage as it leaves. It is not a giant gain, but it can add up. Other than that Ruin II should be minimized as much as possible. How DoTs Work FFXIV revolves entirely around server ticks. Every 3 seconds the game will apply the damage from DoTs that you have ticking. This is why DoTs that are applied at different times tick at the same time. You can end up losing DoT ticks because of how they work. Generally, we tend to clip our DoTs. This means to reapply them before the entire duration on the boss has ended. Your goal is to have your DoTs re-apply at around 1s left on the duration. DoTs also have a feature we call “Snapshotting”. This means that DoTs retain any buff that they had even after said buff falls off. For example. If Miasma is used under the effect of Trick Attack, the Miasma will retain the 10% increase in damage even after Trick falls off.This works both ways. If Trick Attack is applied AFTER Miasma, it will not have the damage buff. This applies to any damage increase, meaning Cleric Stance, Chain Stratagem, Battle Litany, Trick Attack, Contagion, or even Potions. Heal over times work in the same way. Bane takes this and applies DoTs to all enemies around the target. The snapshotting effect applies here as well. Bane’d DoTs will retain their buffs for the entire duration. This isn’t used practically anywhere now, though. DoTs almost never tick when the boss is untargetable. If the boss is about to leave the arena, it can be more beneficial to allow your DoTs to fall off.There are a few exceptions to this, such as O5s, but for the most part this is a consistent rule. Bio II must tick for 21s for it to be worth more than a Broil II Miasma must tick for 18s for it to be worth more than a Broil II This means that if your DoTs are falling off before the boss leaves, it is not worth it to refresh unless you can get those durations out of them. If you can’t, then opt into pure Broil II spam. This is a small thing, but it adds up, especially when there are numerous times during an encounter when the boss leaves the arena. The GCD and Weaving FFXIV has a 2.5s GCD. This is the time between your casts before you’re allowed to do another, and is affected by Spell Speed. The main reason this is being mentioned is that some skills are off the global cooldown. These oGCDs are not tied behind the GCD, but have internal cooldowns. Clipping your GCD is when you do an oGCD after a casted GCD. This causes a delay before you can execute your next action, and results in a DPS loss. The loss isn’t enough to warrant never clipping your GCD. It’s generally preferred that we avoid clipping, but sometimes it is necessary to optimize damage. Weaving is when you use an oGCD after an instant GCD. For example, you can use Miasma II, which is instant. This gives you 2.5s to use any oGCDs you want with no penalty. Weaving is ideal for maximizing your DPS. To double weave means to use two oGCDs between your GCDs. All of this is very important to Scholars because most of our healing is off the global cooldown. Energy Drain is also off the global cooldown. Generally, your priority for weaving is- Miasma II + Double weave Miasma II + Single Weave Ruin II+ Double weave Broil II + Clip Ruin II + Single Weave Bio II also allows you to weave, but it’s a lot less on demand than these other options. Weave with it when it is available. You should generally never hold it to give yourself an opportunity to weave. When it is going to fall off of the boss and needs to be renewed, it takes first priority for weaving. With all of that being said, you shouldn’t Miasma II (Energy Drain)->Miasma II (Energy Drain). Ideally, you don’t want to refresh Miasma II before the duration ends. If you really need to clip Miasma II’s duration, do so when it is below 6s, as it should be a gain over Broil II clip at that point. If the boss is about to go untargetable, it is worth more to Broil II->clip than it is to Miasma II->Weave. This is because your DoT on Miasma II will not tick when the boss is untargetable. You generally have enough time after using Aetherflow to never have to clip Broil II->Energy Drain. You have 45s to burn your Aetherflow abilities before you lose value out of the Quickened Aetherflow trait. (5s off Aetherflow’s cooldown after each AF ability is used). Broil II-> Energy Drain can be used if your Miasma II will not get enough ticks to outweigh a Broil. The same 6s rule mentioned above applies here. If you need to dump your stacks quickly, Broil II->Energy Drain is your best bet for doing so. If Aetherflow comes up right before the boss goes untargetable, you should spam Broil II->ED to quickly drop stacks. The same applies to your Dissipation during the final burn of an encounter. . Swiftcasting Broil II can be used to give yourself an extra slot to weave. Doing Miasma II (Energy Drain+Swiftcast)-> Broil II (Rouse+Energy Drain) is extremely useful for maximizing your potential damage. Doing Broil II (Swiftcast)->Broil II (double weave) can be used if refreshing Miasma II would be a loss. How Fairies Work Fairies are one of the primary draws to Scholar. They provide a constant passive regen at no cost to the Scholar. In addition, Eos offers mitigation and a party wide heal over time, which can save numerous healer GCDs. Fairies have what we call “Pet Scaling”. Fairies heal at about 70% of the potency of their Scholar. Because of this, the potencies on their skills are less than what is advertised. The 250 potency of Embrace is actually closer to 170. Whispering Dawn is closer to 84 potency/tick, or 588 total potency. Fairies are also boosted by potions and food that the Scholar consumes, as well as raid buffs such as Battle Litany and Mantra. They keep the stats that the Scholar had when they were summoned, meaning that Eos’ Embrace will remain at full power even after the Scholar has removed all of their gear. (Until they re-summon her) Eos’ Embrace will automatically target anyone in your party below 80% health, but she will always prioritize her Scholar. She will also prioritize herself if her health drops below 80%. This can be a bit of a hassle as she will heal unwanted targets before she heals the tank, even if the party is in no danger of death. To prevent this, you can use Fey Union after a raidwide to guarantee her healing is funneled on to the desired target. Any non-Embrace ability that you have the fairy use will cancel her current cast, no matter how far she is into it. Keep this in mind when you’re trying to have her cast Whispering dawn, Fey Illumination, etc. Selene has more options for you to use to cancel her cast than Eos, as two of her abilities are throwaways. Always keep fairies on Obey. Eos’ AI does not understand how this game works. In its little head, it thinks that anyone in the party taking damage means that it’s time to use Whispering Dawn, Fey Covenant, and Fey Illumination. Keeping her on obey means that you can control when she does her actions, which allows you to get more value out of her abilities. Selene CAN honestly be left on Sic without much as much detriment. It is still bad play, as it prevents you from being able to use her abilities to cancel Fey Union. The only downside is that she will use her Fey Wind on cooldown, even during downtime, which is a DPS loss. Treat the fairy’s skills like they are an extension of your own tool kit. You aren’t micromanaging anything. You’re using your extra skills. This makes understanding how to use Eos/Selene much easier. Always place Eos/Selene at the start of an encounter. Eos/Selene will prioritize following the Scholar over healing the party. To avoid this, place her in the center of the arena. This will maximize the number of Embraces she gets during the course of an encounter. Be careful though, as most cleaves can hit the fairy, which usually results in her death. DO NOT MACRO FAIRY SKILLS TO YOUR GCDs. It’s good in concept, but absolutely abysmal in practice. Macros can not be queued. This means that there is a delay between macro’d GCDs that costs you a significant amount of DPS. Macros are extremely clunky in this game. There are a few that are useful, such as mouseover macros for Deployment Tactics. If you need to have Eos/Selene Embrace someone in particular, such as a Paladin with Divine Veil up, you can use what is called place cancelling. Place cancelling is relatively self explanatory, you place Eos, which cancels her current cast. While she is moving, spam her Embrace onto the desired target, she will then opt into healing them instead of what she was originally going to heal. This also works with mouseover Embrace macros, which is a lot more practical. This is useful for getting Divine Veil without using a GCD on the tank, especially when the party is at low health. Fairy skills share cooldowns. It is important to know that if you use Fey Wind prepull and switch to Eos, Fey Illumination will be on a 60 second cooldown. Likewise if you did the same for Eos->Selene, Fey Wind would have a 120 Second cooldown. It is an odd interaction, but it is something we have to deal with. Having one of your abilities on a longer cooldown than it actually has is weird. Eos Vs. Selene You have two possible options for your pet, them being Selene and Eos. Selene only offers Fey Wind, a small DPS increase for the raid, whereas Eos offers healing utilities and mitigations. Generally, the more healing intense the encounter, the more favorable Eos is.The less healing intense the encounter, the more favorable Selene is. Eos is considered to be a better fairy for progression. The extra healing from Whispering Dawn is extremely useful, as are Covenant’s magic defense and Fey Illumination’s 10% increase to healing. These are especially potent in early progression, when the party lacks health and defense stats. Eos is always a solid choice. Selene gets used in encounters where there isn’t as much healing required, or if both healers are optimized around her. In fights such as O5s, there is not much value to be had from Eos’ Whispering Dawn, as the fight is spaced out enough that a well placed Earthly Star or Collective can cover all of the healing. However, as you attempt to optimize and push your play further, you can begin to opt into Selene, even on more healing heavy encounters. You may get forced into doing extra healing. A few Indoms or Succors will not outweigh the gain from Selene. This is especially true if the Fey Wind gains the party an extra GCD on the boss before it goes untargetable. It is hard to exactly quantify the gain when everyone gets an extra GCD on the boss, as every GCD has a different value. Gaining the Ninja an Aeolian edge is worth a lot of damage, but a Heavy Swing on the Warrior isn’t worth nearly as much. Gained GCDs across the party makes for a fairly significant gain, and it will absolutely negate the extra healing that had to be done to compensate for the loss of Eos. To get the most value out of Selene, you’ll need to organize your healing with your cohealer to minimize GCDs spent healing and figure out what to substitute for Whispering Dawn where you would have used it. Which fairy you want to use is entirely reliant on your goals. Eos is fine for comfy weekly clears. Selene is if you want to optimize and push your damage further. Eos is extremely comfortable when you’re unfamiliar with your cohealer. Generally, Selene is only strong if there is organization with healers, as it is important to know what needs to be adjusted to make up for the loss of Whispering Dawn. Likewise, if you are using Eos, always communicate where Whispering Dawn is ticking. Many players heal while Whispering Dawn is ticking. This results in the HoT being mostly overheal, and causes a DPS loss in the GCDs they used to heal. Communicating where HoTs can cover healing is important for maximizing your effectiveness. Fairy Swaps Fairy swapping is not often done. During the middle of combat, you lose a GCD swapping fairies, which is an instant 230 potency loss, more if the summon was hard casted. That being said, there are some times that swapping in the middle of a fight can be acceptable. These situations mainly revolve around instances where the boss is not targetable. If you are using Eos as your primary fairy for an encounter, swapping to Selene during downtime for Fey Wind can be beneficial. This is what we do pre-pull to get Fey Wind at the start of an encounter. For example, in O7s, before the Ultros add spawned, it was possible to dissipate for additional Energy Drains on the boss before the add. During the time after Ultros died, you had time to summon Selene, use Fey Wind, then swap back to Eos. This applies to most any instance of downtime. As long as you have the MP needed to support spending 2,400 on two summons, it is a gain. It is a very small gain, but it is a slight gain. Again, this gain could be worth a lot more if it nets an extra GCD before any further downtime. Many fights have opportunities for this kind of swap.Some include- Exdeath’s Decisive battle Kefka’s Graven Image O5s add phase O7s when the boss flies out of the arena O9s after the Dark Crystal dies O10s at the end of Divebombs O11s during Delta Attack Opportunity Costs To truly describe how healing functions within this game, one must first understand the idea of opportunity costs. An opportunity cost what is sacrificed when a choice is made. This is extremely prevalent in healing, and makes up the basis for how healing is done. Every Succor, Physick, or Adloquium has not only the MP cost associated with them, but they also cost you the 230 potency that would have come from casting Broil II. This is the opportunity cost of using a GCD heal. This is also one of the biggest losses for healers. Too many GCD heals will cost a lot of DPS over the course of a fight. This is why one of the biggest causes of low healer DPS is unnecessary healing. Generally, oGCD heals are much more efficient than GCD related heals. Scholar’s entire kit revolves around what is called Aetherflow. Almost nothing is free, though. The opportunity cost of using one of your Aetherflow stacks on Indomitability is 150 potency of damage and 1,200 MP, both lost from not using Energy Drain. That is not to say that using Indom is bad. Actually, it’s quite the contrary. The 150 potency lost not using an Energy Drain translates to saving a GCD that would have been a Succor. This GCD becomes a 230 potency Broil II, which results in a net 80 potency gain. This 80 potency gain applies to any GCD heal you can replace with an oGCD. Scholar has the most expensive oGCD heals of all of the healers, with Rouse’d Embraces and Fey Union being our only “free” source of healing. That being said, they are still more efficient than using GCDs to heal. Everything has a cost. People like to believe that Whispering Dawn is free, but it does in fact have a hidden Opportunity cost, that being Selene’s Fey Wind. For more on opportunity costs, I recommend checking out Momo Sama’s Healer Optimization Guide. OCs for CoHealers Before this guide is continued, let one thing be absolutely crystal clear. There is no “Main Healer” or “Off Healer”. This definition is a relic of the past and should not exist now. Both healers have one combined kit that is used to heal the raid. This interaction is important, as many players act as though they are the only healer, or as if they aren’t supposed to heal because they are a Scholar. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It is important for you as a Scholar to understand some of the basics of your cohealer. Because of this, I recommend you check out Zyrk’s Intro To Astrologian. It will give a lot of insight into how their kit functions. There is no proper White Mage guide at the moment, but one will be linked here as well when one is made. Both healers should be working together to maximize overall raid DPS. This means using whatever has the lowest opportunity cost to benefit your cohealer. A 150 potency loss from using an Indom can result in a net gain of 70 potency for AST and 100 potency for WHM. Healing is all about minimizing losses. On Scholar, eating the 150 potency loss results in a gain for your cohealer, which in turn is a gain for overall raid DPS. With both healers minimizing losses, the increase in raid DPS is massive. This results in much better kill times and more comfortable clears. Single Target Healing Priority Healing is all about following a priority system. oGCDs with no cost are usually the first to be used, with the ones with the highest cost, GCDs, being a last resort. Below is a list of all single target heals, listed based on their damage potency lost. This provides a good example of what healing priorities look like. Your goal as a team of healers is to minimize costs, which will in turn maximize your potential damage. There is a system of priorities used to determine what heal should be used at any given time. The priority is of course scaling down from whatever costs the least to what costs the most. GCD heals have the lowest priority, though there are some circumstances in which a GCD can outweigh an oGCD, discussed later. Priority (Single Target)- Tetragrammaton/Essential Dignity/Benediction Fey Union/Rouse Aspected Benefic/Regen Lady Of Crowns Excogitation Lustrate Synastry+Benefic II Benefic II Cure II Adloquium Synastry+Benefic Benefic Physick Cure I This is more or less the priority system used to judge what single target heals should be used in a given situation. The only reason Cure II is above Physick is raw potency. Casting a Physick isn’t going to heal enough in most circumstances. It would likely require you to cast another heal, which is why it is lower on the priority system. While it isn’t listed, proper usages of White Mage’s Devine Benison can save heals throughout the course of the fight. If it were put on the list, it would be around where Fey Union is. Unless your cohealer is holding Benediction for a Holmgang or Living Dead, it should be one of your highest priority heals. It has quite literally the highest potency of any heal in the game, and should be treated as such. When organizing and optimizing heals, you’re generally going to use this priority system for determining what heals are necessary for a situations. There are some niche situations that can also apply with AOE regens. Which will be addressed later. Keep in mind that Fey Union may need to be held as a tool for forcing Eos/Selene to focus on your tank when the party is low. Be wary of all the cooldowns, GCDs are generally a last resort for healing, as they cost the most in terms of damage potency. AoE Healing Priority It took more columns to make a chart to map out how effective oGCDs are. It requires more information in general to get the full picture. Because of this, adding a full picture with the chart will end up looking awful. The charts for both single target, AOE, as well as the math for later topics such as Deployment Tactics, check out my Spreadsheet. Priority- AoE Healing Earthly Star/Whispering Dawn Asylum/Collective *Earthly Star (Uncharged) Indom *Assize *Aspected Helios *Cure III *Medica II Succor Emergency Tactics Succor Helios Medica This is your general priority for AoE healing. Anything with a * has a caveat to their potential rankings. This is more prevalent in AoE healing than in single target healing, as more factors come into play here. Assize has an asterisk because it is a DPS tool first, it should be treated as such. Its 45s cooldown means that significant delays will result in a very large DPS loss,as well as misaligning it from raid buffs. It is not worth it to hold this, as the loss in DPS is not worth the healing. Making it fall out of raid buffs is a loss for the rest of the encounter, every usage after will lose potency. An uncharged Earthly Star can be a gain over using an Indom. Earthly only loses 50 potency for being uncharged, whereas a usage of Indom is 150 potency. This isn’t a very common application, but it can be useful if you’re looking to Min/Max your DPS potential. If Earthly comes off cooldown a few seconds before a raidwide, it can be beneficial to place Earthly and immediately Detonate it if it will get you above the HP threshold for survival. Aspected Helios or Medica II can potentially be a gain over using an Indomitability as well. They have 1,280 and 1,600 more potency respectively than Indom. If the potency of an Indom won’t get the party to the threshold to survive an incoming raidwide, but Aspected Helios or Medica II would, they are a gain over using Indom. In this case, Indom would have likely forced you to use another AoE healing tool as well. This is also a relatively niche thing, but it can again be important when considering how to maximize your healing potential. When there are no raid wide instances of damage incoming, it is fine to let Whispering Dawn or Collective Unconscious tick the party to full during downtime. This is superior to using Indom or a GCD heal. Using collective to mitigate a raid wide and letting it tick to heal the party is incredibly useful when there is downtime. Cure III is over Succor in this case. The reasoning for this is that the raw healing potency from Cure III can make it better than a Succor. If you’re trying to top the party before an AOE, Cure III will generally do the job better than a Succor. If you need a small amount of healing before a raidwide, opt into Succor. Medica II can take priority over Cure III if the WHM can swiftcast it, otherwise the 3s cast time makes it undesirable in terms of overall potency and how much potency you lose for using it. How Shielding Works Shielding in its most basic sense acts as an extension of our own health. This means that when we take damage, the shield will take damage before our actual HP bars do. For example, if we have 10,000 health, and a 2,000 shield, a 3,000 hit would leave us at 9,000 health. Multiple shields stack additively, meaning a 6,000 Succor Shield and an 8,000 Shake It Off results in 14,000 net shielding. For Scholar, we have two methods of shielding. Adloquium heals for 300 potency and then provides a shield equalling the amount. If it crits, the shield is doubled. Succor shields for 150% of the value healed, so a 150 heal and a 225 potency shield. A 4,500 succor will have a 6,750 shield, whereas a 9,000 Adloquium will only have a 9,000 shield, unless it crits. Shielding has a few interesting aspects to note. One of which is the delay before a shield actually applies. This can be to both the Scholar’s benefit or their detriment. If Succor is cast too late, the delay on the shield may mean that it won’t take effect until after damage has already happened. For mechanics such as Ion Efflux in O12s, a shield can be life or death for the survival of the party. Heals and shielding do not apply at once They go based on distance to the Scholar.. This can result in server ticks killing people when the last person to get the shield doesn’t have it registered when the raidwide happens. This usually can results in a death. This delay in itself is not always a hindrance. If there are two back-to-back raid wide instances of damage, it is possible to time a Succor so that the heal will get the party before the first hit, and the shield will register after the damage. Heals apply as soon as the cast completes (though they do not hit everyone at once). Nocturnal AST Shields override SCH shields, they do not stack. This is important because you could have a 50,000 shield on someone and a 500 NOCT shield would override it. It is extremely frustrating that this interaction is a thing, but it has been like this forever. The shield size is irrelevant. NOCT/SCH don’t go well together unless the group has a set plan for shielding that prevents this interaction from happening. When To Shield A common mistake that new Scholars often make is an excess of Shielding. This is common even into the middle levels of Scholar play. Many Scholars attempt to shield incoming damage, especially large instances of damage. This is not always necessary, and is often a loss. Shielding is generally not needed for most raidwides. The party will not survive without shielding. Shielding one instance of damage prevents having to heal another. You have no oGCD options for AOE healing. You’re opting into strategies to cheese Limit Break. An example of scenario one include Ion Efflux spam at the end of Final Omega.These mechanics generally require some kind of shielding to survive comfortably. This is especially true during early clears, as your defense stats and health haven’t scaled to their maximum yet. The second example is if shielding a mechanic could save you a GCD heal. This is especially prominent in instances where a deployed Adloquium is used, as a crit Adlo can basically negate the AOE, preventing any further healing from being necessary. The third scenario ideally never happens. Casting Succor or Adloquium to cover not having an oGCD heal is unfortunate, and rarely happens, but there are some times that we have to take the loss and use it. The fourth instance is for highly optimized groups. This involves taking what should be lethal damage, but surviving it due to your shields. This means that if you take a 55k hit, but only have 51,000 and a 6,000 shield, it generates an absurd amount of limit break. How Healing Buffs Work Healing increases, such as Largesse and Fey Illumination, increase the amount your healing spells will heal. There are many ways to increase the amount of healing your spells will do. This is an important distinction. Spells are your casted heals, such as Physick, Adloquium, and Succor. Abilities are your oGCD heals, such as Indomitability and Excogitation. These increases ONLY increase your spells. Using Largesse does not increase the amount of healing that your oGCD spells will heal. This means that you should only use Largesse if you have the intention of casting a heal manually. The general rule is, “If you cast it, it will be increased by heal-ups.” These can be categorized by who uses them and who they benefit. Largesse will increase any casted heal done by that healer. Fey Illumination will increase the healing received by anyone with the buff it gives. Monk, Warrior, Bard, Scholar, Tanks, and Healers all have ways to increase healing. Healing increases, such as Largesse, scale multiplicatively, not additively. This means that stacking these will result in massive heals, which can be extremely helpful when you want to maximize the potency of your healing. For example, Adloquium is 300 potency. When used with Largesse, the potency becomes: 300+(300*.2)=360 If we decide to add in Nature’s Minne from a Bard, another 20% increase, the math then we get: 360+(360*.2)=432 It is important to know the difference between them being additive and multiplicative. If they WERE additive, the potency would have been 420. The more percentage increases you add in, the more the math begins to stray from the actual value. This is all important because this also scales into how can address certain mechanics. Your shields will scale based on how much you heal. This means that stacking Convalescence, Largesse, Nature’s minne, and Defiance can result in an Adloquium with a potency of 622.08. This Adlo has a higher healing potency than your Lustrate, and provides a shield equalling that value. This shield being Deployed to the entire party can negate entire mechanics, especially if this 622 potency Adlo crits. The loss from casting this Adloquium is still 230, the lost Broil II. That being said though, this shield can prevent another heal from having to be used, especially in the case of a crit. Being able to stack these healing increases results in some insane numbers in terms of shielding. Stacking Largesse+Fey Illumination+Mantra turns Succor into a 237 base heal and 356 shield. If you are going to have to use GCDs to heal, it is worthwhile to use these to maximize the value of your GCDs. If you’re going to be forced to take a loss, better to get the most out of it. Deployment Tactics Deployment Tactics at face value is fairly simple. It will deploy the effect of Galvanize off of the target and spread it to anyone in a 10 yalms. When reading the tool tip, the general idea behind this skill is obvious. You cast a shield, such as Adloquium, then spread the strong shield to the party. This will spread the Current value of the shield to the party. This is important. If you put a shield on the tank, then that tank gets hit by an auto, the shield will be much smaller. A surprising amount of Scholars make the mistake of casting an Adlo onto the main tank and deploying a weaker shield because of autos.Generally, you’ll try to deploy off of the tank that is not tanking the boss at the time. Deployment Tactics can also be done off of the fairy. This is important for situations where tanks can not go to a position where a deploy will hit the entire party. This is especially important when you consider that many AOEs do not damage the fairy. An Adlo can be casted onto the fairy, then be deployed after a raidwide. This allows you to get a fully powered shield onto the party after a raidwide. This is useful for things such as O12s’ “Hello, World”, as the fairy will not take damage from the initial cast. There are other reasons that knowing where fairies take damage can be important. One of these is the usage of Deployment Tactics on Succor. This generally confuses many people, but there are some instances where using Deployment Tactics on Succor is actually superior to using it on Adloquium. These are not extremely frequent, but are nice when it is applicable. This is a spreadsheet showing the potencies of Adloquium or Succor Deploy. Do remember that this is assuming that the deploy happened off of a fairy that took no damage from an AOE. Also, this assumes that things like Mantra, Largesse, and Minne weren’t used. It takes four 20% healing increases (Largesse, Minne, Defiance, Convalescence) for an Adlo deploy to beat a raw Succor deploy. It is extremely powerful when circumstances allow. This does not, however, mean that you should use Succor as your primary spell for deploying. There are very specific circumstances that Succor deploy is powerful, and others where Adloquium is superior.Using Indom/Star is always preferable to using a GCD, but they aren’t always up when they are needed. Succor deploy shines when there are multiple AOEs that happen quickly. It especially shines when there are three back-to-back AOEs. You can allow the first AOE to happen without any shielding. Then you cast Succor to give your party a shield. This guarantees the healing potency is not wasted. After the 2nd AOE, assuming the shield on the fairy was not eaten by the AOE, you can deploy off of the fairy for another 225 potency shield. This type of deploy is very consistent. It has less usages during the current raid tier. In O6s there were numerous places that this type of deploy was strong. In O7s it could be used on the triple Defractive Plasma. In the current tier, the one spot where it truly shines is during the finale of Omega M/F. When you are using tank LB to cheese the meteor, you can Succor after the damage, then deploy after Cosmo Memory so that you have a guaranteed shield on Laser Shower without another GCD being used. In this case, you needed the shield to survive Cosmo Memory. The Deployment Tactics is nice because it is a 225 potency shield essentially for free. So basically, Succor deploy is strong when there are back-to-back AOEs that won’t damage the fairy to remove its shield. They aren’t incredibly frequent, but again, it is a very useful thing to know for circumstances where it applies. Ideally triple back-to-back AOEs are where this shines the most. It can get use during double, but can have less value, especially if the initial heal from Succor isn’t actually healing anything. Adloquium deploy is strong in other circumstances. Adlo is better if you need a lot of upfront damage reduction. It is also better if you will not survive without the stronger shield from Adlo. Adlo can also potentially save healer GCDs if it crits. In this circumstance it is better to Adlo deploy over a Succor deploy. In O12s, for example, most Scholars tend to use Deployment Tactics on “Hello, World”. There are many reasons for this. The party will be taking an absurd amount of damage across the board throughout the course of the mechanic. The party will also be spread out during this mechanic, making an eight man Succor deploy near impossible. To further push it ahead, a critical Adloquium can result in saved healer GCDs throughout the course of the mechanic, as the only healing that is required at that point is the final Ion Efflux of the mechanic. The party is too spread out during the mechanic to get heals to everyone, further pushing Adlo deploy ahead. Another place where Adloquium deploy was strong was during the Tumults in The Weapon’s Refrain (Ultimate). A critical Adlo can potentially save your cohealer a GCD heal. On the topic of Ultima Weapon, there is a strategy for handling Ultimate Predation where you allow the entire party to be hit by one of Ifrit’s dashes. This is extremely heavy hitting, and requires high shielding to survive. This is another case where Adlo deploy is extremely strong. It is also worth knowing that if you attempt to use Deployment Tactics too early, it will have no effect. This can be a problem if your strategy for healing requires a shield. If this happens, it is unfortunate. Communicate the mistake to your team and compensate by doing extra heals. It sucks when this happens, so attempt to avoid it. Deployment Tactics also spreads An Eye For An Eye. This is a much less important aspect of the ability. This can only proc on physical damage, which makes it really weak in our current raid environment, where most AOE damage is magical. This is why I say that it is really not worth mentioning its interaction with Deployment Tactics. MP Management MP management isn’t particularly hard on Scholar. We have a lot of options to regenerate our MP and a pretty constant flow of MP through Aetherflow and Energy Drain usage. Dissipation is another tool for MP regeneration, but should only be used in extremely dire circumstances. On top of this built in MP regeneration, we also have Lucid Dreaming, a 15s MP refresh on a 120s cooldown. Aetherflow should be used as soon as it comes up. You risk losing an enormous amount of damage, healing, and MP by not keeping this ability on cooldown. Every Aetherflow ability you use will reduce the recast on Aetherflow by five seconds. This means that stacks must be used within ~45 seconds of using Aetherflow to gain the full effect. Not taking advantage of this trait can cost Aetherflow usages over the course of an encounter, which is negative in DPS and HPS, as well as MP efficiency. Dissipation is not a great way to gain back MP, and should only be considered in extreme emergencies. Using all three gained stacks on Energy Drain grants 3,600 MP. Resummoning the fairy costs 1,200, which results in a +2,400 swing for MP. The loss of Embrace can result in more healing being required, which can damage efficiency. In the case of an MP Dissipation, there will usually be a DPS loss. If not for the Scholar, but their cohealer having to cast an extra heal to compensate for the loss of Embrace for the duration. There isn’t particularly an “optimal” time to use Lucid Dreaming, as its really dependant on how you’re healing a fight. Depending on differing strategies, different people could need it at various places. With that being said, don’t hold Lucid for half of an encounter. Ideally you would want to get as many uses out of it as possible, while holding it when it is needed for a specific portion of the encounter. Having problems regarding MP is often due to either too many Succors, or too many Miasma IIs. Succor is not very MP efficient, which is yet another reason to avoid using it if at all possible. The 2,040 MP cost is extremely significant, especially if it is being spammed for AOE healing. Miasma II is an interesting case. It has a 1,680 MP cost, which means that many uses add up in terms of MP costs fairly quickly. However, when used to weave Energy Drain, the cost is effectively only 480, and it is DPS positive. Miasma II is the best tool that Scholar has for weaving oGCDs. Using it with Energy Drain and any other oGCD that is required is ideal, but there are sometimes when we aren’t afforded that luxury. Attempt to avoid doing non-ED Miasma IIs unless necessary. Dissipation Dissipation is an interesting ability. It sacrifices your pet and grants you three Aetherflow stacks. It also grants a 20% increase to healing spells for 30s. During this 30s you can not resummon Eos or Selene. The healing increase from this cannot be clicked off. This is an extremely situational skill. It has a few niche uses, and is very useful when it is good. The major downside of Dissipation is the loss of Embrace. This means that when used at the wrong time, it can force either the SCH or their cohealer to do extra GCDs to heal. Assuming that the fairy would have gotten 10 full embraces during the 30s downtime, you’re missing out on ~1,750 net potency on the tank. This GCD lost guarantees that Dissipation is a loss. Generally, Dissipation is only a gain in these situations- There is no incoming damage on the tank, so the loss of Embrace isn’t relevant. The extra healing from Dissipation saves a GCD heal. You are absolutely desperate for MP. Emergency heals are desperately needed. These are the general instances where Dissipation can be used. This provides the broad guideline as to where Dissipation can be used for a gain. There are several examples of each particular instance. For instance one, there are many possible examples, as this is the most common time to use it. If the boss is getting ready to go untargetable, it is almost always a gain to use Dissipation. This is because the loss of Embrace during down time is not really relevant. Being able to summon back Eos/Selene during the downtime is also a significant gain, and is important for minimizing the losses around Dissipation for optimal usage. In our current raid tier, there are many instances where this happens. In O9s, after casting Bowels of Agony, Chaos will leave the arena. During this time, the add phase happens. Dissipating before he leaves will net you extra damage before he leaves, and you can summon as his ultimate happens so that you never have to drop a Broil II cast for it. In O11s, Dissipating after the second Fey Wind nets extra potency on the boss as well, and the fairy can be summoned during Delta Attack. The same thing applies during the final burn of any encounter. Generally, Dissipation is done within the last 30ish seconds of a fight to gain one final burst as the boss dies. Not doing this is essentially wasting potency. The boss can’t be targeted after it dies, and it won’t be able to auto long enough to kill the tank. This is the most common usage of Dissipation. For instance two, look at fights like God Kefka. During the first Forsaken, Dissipation was incredibly powerful, as it could save a GCD heal due to the 20% increased healing. This also doubles for instance two, as the tank was not taking autos during this time, and was covered entirely by AOE healing. During O9s, many Scholars opt to use Dissipation to get a stronger shield for the second Earthquake. This saves a GCD heal, especially when combined with tank shields such as Divine Veil and Shake it Off. The third example was discussed much earlier. Generally it will be a ~2,400 MP gain to Dissipate. This often forces your cohealer to cast extra heals to compensate for the lack of a Fairy, so this use is extremely niche. The final scenario is more of a concern in progression. A well timed Dissipation can easily save runs, especially when your cohealer dies during AOE healing heavy parts of encounters. Examples of this are Almagest in Neo Exdeath if your cohealer dies. The math behind how much of a gain Dissipation is is muddled. Your goal is to get full benefit out of Quickened Aetherflow, which means that ideally you need to burn off six stacks within 30s of an Aetherflow cast. It is extremely hard to do this without clipping several times. This muddles the exact math. Depending on when its used, you can have tools such as swiftcast to avoid a few clips, so the exact math varies for different uses. On top of this, the extra -15s on Aetherflow could net an extra usage throughout the course of an encounter, which would add even more of a gain to this ability. In a perfect vaccuum, in a wonderful universe, Dissipation with a summon when the boss is untargetable is a 450 potency gain. The clips will reduce this potency pretty significantly, but it is still virtually always a gain when you aren’t going to be punished for the loss of the fairy. We do not use Dissipation when the boss is targetable unless it saves a healing GCD. If you have to resummon while the boss is still targetable, you are losing at LEAST 230 of the gain.That is if you swiftcast the summon. If you hard cast it, due to its ~3s cast time, additional potency is lost. This should result in a 270ish potency loss from resummoning. On top of the clipping, it ends up being either barely neutral for DPS. Movement Movement is another place that many Scholars struggle to master. Scholar has a lot of strong options for moving. We aren’t quite the “I can run around the entire arena for 10s-20s while spamming my primary DPS spell and lose absolutely 0 DPS” that AST has, but we don’t get destroyed by it like White Mage. There are four options to handle movement in a raid setting. What you will use will vary depending on many various factors. For example, how quickly you need to move and how far will play a big role in deciding which movement option will be best suited for a given situation. In terms of movement, Scholar has, in no particular order, Miasma II, Bio II, Ruin II, and Swiftcast. These are all tools that need to be considered when movement is coming. Miasma refresh timing works the same as mentioned earlier. It’s generally alright to clip the Miasma II DoT if it is below 6s on the DoT. Bio CAN be used for movement, but it’s generally not unless reapplication lines up with when movement is required. If you are being forced to break off of the boss, always try to start with Miasma II. It can be planned ahead to not have it ticking so that you aren’t clipping the DoT. This gives the Scholar 2.5s to move. This also gives a chance to use oGCDs. Miasma II (Energy Drain+Swiftcast)->Broil II is essentially 5 seconds of free movement. The Energy Drain isn’t always there, but it is nice for minimizing the MP cost of Miasma II. Swiftcasting and eating a Broil Clip is superior to using Ruin II. The second Broil II can also be used to weave as well. If you have more time to move, it is possible to Miasma II, then Broil II (Swiftcast)->Broil II, which covers a lot of ground. Bio II can be used for movement if the duration is at 9s or less. At that point, the previous DoT will have done more damage than a Broil II. However, you are eating a 105 potency loss (35/tick*3 ticks) if you do this. It is better to just let Bio II tick out and use it for movement if it naturally aligns with movement. Clipping this DoT means it also loses alignment with Shadowflare. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, it is very convenient that they naturally align. The idea generally is trying to cut out as many Ruin IIs as possible, as its 100 potency is really not worth it when you can do literally anything else. Another trick for movement is called “Slidecasting”. This is abusing the spaghetti coding of the game to get casts off as you move. To do this, you simply move when the duration of your cast is less than .5. It will not cancel your cast at this point. Doing this over and over lets you slowly move across the map while maintaining DPS. This will take some getting used to, and you can lose casts if you aren’t careful. How Mitigations Work Mitigation is one of the most important aspects to raiding. Reducing the damage taken by an attack reduces the healing required, which then increases the amount of DPS healers can do. It is important to know how mitigations work, and how much mitigation is needed for any given mechanic. Mitigations, similarly to % healing increases, scale multiplicatively downward. This means that they are subject to diminishing returns. What does this mean? Each % mitigation you stack reduces incoming damage by less than the last used. For example. If the party is going to take a 100,000 hit, a tank using Reprisal will reduce the damage of this by 10%, or 10,000. (100,000-(100,000*.1))=90,000 This means the hit is now 90,000. If the Scholar now uses Sacred Soil, it will reduce the 90,000 damage by 9,000, making the new value 8,100. 90,000-(90,000*.1)=81,000 Another 10% mitigation will further reduce the benefit. 81,000-(81,000*.1)=72,900 The damage reduction will continue on this downward curve. This is what is called diminishing returns. A few of them graphed out looks like this. Note that this is showing how much damage will taken with all of these mitigations being stacked on top of each other. This means that stacking too many of these reductions is actually a major loss. There are currently no mechanics that absolutely require all mitigations to be stacked at once. The closest thing is Morn Afahs in the final phase of Unending Coil. Even then, you only need three 10% mitigations+Succor to survive. Sacred Soil is generally avoided unless absolutely necessary. Everything being used on one AOE means that there will be nothing left for the next. Using too much on one attack can mean that an extra heal might be necessary for future damage. It is important to map out everyone’s mitigations to maximize the effectiveness of them while not wasting them. Using a Sacred Soil when there are already numerous mitigations stacked on an AOE will likely not save a heal. Communicate with your party when things should be used to maximize their uses and effectiveness. Party Mitigations Everyone has some form of mitigations. This was a change going from Heavensward into Stormblood. The developers wanted to take some of the responsibility off of the healers and give it to the rest of the party. Because of this, every job now has something they can use to reduce incoming damage taken. Below is every mitigation for Tanks/Healers. Table courtesy of Momo Sama. This visual really shows how much responsibility needs to be on the DPS and tanks in any group to help reduce incoming damage and help mitigate. If a tank drops dead after a buster, it is worthwhile to check and make sure that these mitigations were present. Especially in fights like O10s, Palisade and Feint can make a MASSIVE difference in the damage that a tank will take from the the tank buster. Make SURE your DPS are using these mitigations. This is important for all healers, including Scholar, as your party members using their tools is essential for you to maximize your potential damage output. Proper usage of these tools can result in a fairly significant gain for healer DPS. Treat party members like Eos. They will absolutely never use their tools where you actually need them unless you specifically tell them to use them. As a healer, you need to be vocal and specify where a mitigation will save you a heal. For example, if an AOE requires Shielding, it can be better to have Shake It Off, as it saves a Succor cast. Second Wind and Bloodbath are also important tools when it comes to saving GCD heals. Proper usage of these skills can save healing over the course of an encounter. Bloodbath essentially heals the user for 22% of all damage dealt for the entire duration. Across all skills used and auto attacks, this results in a fairly large amount of healing. This can be used to cut healing out, especially if the user only needs a small amount of extra health to survive a coming AOE. Things like Feint almost always have some purpose in an encounter. If all of the tank busters are magical, Feint and Palisade can be used on heavy auto attack segments of the fight to help ease healing. Do not underestimate how much healing is saved through auto attack Feints throughout the course of an encounter. Ask your DPS where they are using these skills, and if you think there is a better place, tell them. Check logs to make sure they are actively using their skills, if they aren’t, tell them where to put them. This is not negotiable. They have these skills for a reason, and need to use them. If they aren’t, they are not maximizing their effectiveness and are holding the entire group back. You can clear while not using these abilities, but it makes the entire run infinitely harder than it has to be. Raid Buffs Raid buffs are one of the most important aspects of raiding in FFXIV. The meta of XIV revolves around stacking raid buffs for massive burst windows. Most DPS jobs, bar Samurai and Black Mage, have an ability that increases DPS for the party. Tanks lack direct raid DPS increases, as does WHM. Generally, jobs that have these buffs are preferred over alternatives. These are always on cooldowns with multiples of 30s, which means they will all eventually line up if used properly on cooldown. Listed out, all major raid buffs are- Raid buffs, like most other % increases, scale multiplicatively. This means that a Broil II under Trick and Foes is around 261 potency. Stacking these is the best way to maximize their benefits. Again, notice that all of them are on thirty second intervals. This means that when they are all used properly, they will naturally align, causing strong burst windows that will be your biggest DPS phases. Scholar has two raid buffs. Chain Stratagem increases the rate at which the target takes critical strikes by 15% for 15s. Fey wind is a slight haste buff that adds up to a pretty significant gain over the course of the fight. Critical Hit is a stat that scales multiplicatively in terms of DPS gain. The more of the stat that you get, the more frequently you will crit, and the bigger the multiplier on those crits. Stacking multiple of these can result in absolutely crazy damage numbers. Fey Wind is used in every pull before the encounter begins. A Selene->Eos swap before the pull has virtually no cost. This isn’t a massive gain, but it is something. A gain is a gain, and we take what we can get. If you are opting into Selene 100%, it is a much more significant gain, especially if it gains GCDs over the course of an encounter. Buff Alignment Generally, raid buffs should be used on cooldown. This is because everything will naturally align if they are used properly. Here is a graphic showing off exactly how it looks when raid buffs are used on cooldown. This is done with only NIN/BRD/SCH/DRG for the sake of making a smaller chart. This is assuming a 12 minute pull. This shows exactly how all of these buffs will naturally look when used on cooldown. Buffs don’t actually happen at 0 seconds, Chain Stratagem goes out at ~6.5s. The choice to use 0s for the sake of this chart was just to give an easier time showing how raid buffs align. Raid buffs should almost always be used on cooldown. Holding on to raid buffs for extended periods of time can deny usages throughout the course of an encounter. This is a very large loss in most circumstances. With that being said, there are a few instances where raid buffs can be held. Listed out, they are- The buff comes up during an add phase. Slightly delaying a buff can allow for better uptime without losing a usage. Holding it can allow for a better opener on a later phase. Using it on cooldown will result in a usage where you can not get good value. There will not be time for another usage, so delaying it allows for a greater burst window. The first is the most common. Gaining extra burst damage on the boss is always superior to using it to damage an add. Certain raid buffs, like Trick Attack, can often be used on adds because they have a short cooldown and will be back before the boss returns to the arena. For the sake of Scholar, it is safe to always hold Chain during adds for the burst window when the boss returns. Fey Wind can be used on adds if it will return before the boss returns. The second is less common, but is still useful. There are certain times in encounters where there is limited uptime for some party members. This can be problematic, as it limits the gain you can get out of your buffs. During scenarios like this, it can be beneficial to slightly delay usages to get the full duration out of the buffs. This is, of course, if you won’t lose a usage because of the delay. This entirely depends on your group’s kill time if you will lose a usage. For an example of scenario #2. This applies for specific kill times.. If the kill occurs at under 7:00, but over 6:15, when the last set of buffs fell off, there is around 40s worth of time that raid buffs COULD potentially be delayed if necessary without losing any uses. There are several times this has actually been applied within the current expansion. During Exdeath, Chain Stratagem came up during the Black Holes phase. This was awful for uptime, as multiple people were being forced to move during the mechanic, as well as a mechanic that required healers to top the party. Holding Chain here to get it during Meteor, where there was no other outgoing damage, was a pretty sizable gain. Another example of this is the second Celestriad in God Kefka. This mechanic forced the party to break away from the boss and move into positions that weren’t friendly for positionals. Delaying Trick and Chain here resulted in better usage. The third scenario mainly applies to Ultimate raids. The structure of all current Ultimate tier raids has been two or three minibosses before a final encounter. These minibosses tend to be extremely short, with Twintania in UCOB at around a three minute enrage. While you could use the second Chain Stratagem on her, using it there would mean that it wouldn’t be up for the Nael opener, which was a significant loss. The same applies for Garuda and Ifrit in Ultima Weapon. The fourth scenario mainly involves instances where you can’t get the full value out of a usage. These include where the boss will go untargetable in the middle of the duration or if the boss will die during or immediately after a usage. Take for instance, this eight minute pull. If the boss dies at 8:00-8:10, you aren’t getting the full value out of the final Chain. In this instance, you will be getting four full usages of two minute cooldowns, and three full usages of three minute cooldowns. Because you’re not going to get the full value out of the last Chain, it is worthwhile to hold earlier usages. This results in one less Chain over the course of the encounter, but it allows for three full burst windows with Trick+Chain+Litany. The lost chain isn’t that much of a loss due to how gimped it was going to be anyway. This does require the DRG to hold their second Litany for 60s. This basically guarantees three massive burst windows, which is extremely effective for increasing raid DPS. Of course, this is all subject to change based on party composition. Having 90s raid buffs changes the timings in such a way that it allows for full use of the 90s buff windows. Below is an example of one such setup using MNK. This setup has the same three major burst windows, but loses a Trick Attack through the course of the pull. The fourth and final instance of holding raid buffs is easier.. If you are not going to get another usage of raid buffs during the encounter, it is best to get that last usage when other buffs are active. If this pull ends at 9:20-9:59, there is no possible way to gain another Chain Stratagem during the course of the encounter. The final Chain used only falls under Trick Attack. Holding this Chain an additional minute to get it with Battle Voice and Litany will result in higher damage overall than if it was used properly on cooldown. Again, these changes need to be communicated with the party, as a delayed Chain will not be as effective if the party does not know that it is happening. This can be especially important for BRD, which relies on Chain for increased chance of Procs during their songs. The final scenario also applies to Cleric Stance, which, while not a raid buff, is important for maximizing your personal DPS. If your last Cleric Stance happens between Trick Attacks or under no buffs, it can be worthwhile to hold it for the last burst window for a tiny gain. This isn’t very significant, but any gain is a gain. Stat Priorities Your priority as you attempt to gear is always going to go something like this. Weapon Damage Main Stat Piety (to threshold needed to heal an encounter) Crit Direct Hit/Determination Spell Speed Piety This is basically the main priority stat wise.The above list applies heavily to when you are gearing and attempting to get to BIS. During progression, generally you will take whatever has the most item level, as the main stat difference is extremely important. The difference between the high quality crafted chest piece and the Omega Coat of Healing is 37 Mind. Almost no amount of substat will make up for that loss of main stat. There are some very niche situations where you will hold on to a lower Ilvl item. The main situation of this is for Piety reasons. If getting the Omega Coat costs you the 271 PIE from your crafted coat, it can be beneficial to hold on to the crafted coat until you’ve made up for the Piety loss elsewhere in your set. Weapon Damage Weapon Damage is the most important stat for every class in terms of damage. For healers, there are some niche situations where a higher item level weapon will be worse due to inferior substats. Scholars face this dilemma in the current tier. Our tome weapon, while boasting higher weapon damage, has an abysmal substat selection. The Crit/Det Suzaku book actually outweighs the WD gain from the 390 tome book. This is because unless you desperately need the PIE from the tome book, it is a dead stat, and SPS is generally not a desirable stat. Because of this, it is worth more to keep the 385 Suzaku book unless you can augment the 390 book into a 400. Main Stat Main stat is the second most important stat, generally. It plays a massive part in how much damage we deal, as well as how much we heal. Generally we opt into whatever the highest item level gear is because it has more of this main stat. There are some BIS sets that opt into crafted accessories. This is because the main stat loss here is MUCH less significant than on body pieces and weapons. A crafted ring only has 15 less main stat than a savage ring. This, combined with the extremely high amount of substats that can be gotten through crafted rings make them a valuable option. The overmelds on these pieces can often meet substat tiers that couldn’t have been gotten otherwise, which can be a sizeable increase to DPS. Piety People vastly underrated how useful Piety is as a stat. People often say “Piety is a dead stat”. This is both true, and untrue at the same time. If you run out of MP, you will be unable to DPS or heal. Because of this, Piety is actually the most important substat for healers up until a certain threshold. Once you get to the threshold required to get through a fight without running out of MP, Piety becomes a dead stat. Many people think that because there are sets that run extremely low MP, it is a useless stat. The extreme speedkill sets that go with almost no piety are meant to be used in groups that will do everything they can to reduce healing. This means that those healers have many more Energy Drains to help support their lack of MP. Playing with a low PIE set is extremely risky in groups that aren’t attempting to optimize. Finding the right amount of PIE for yourself takes a lot of trial and error, it is useful to keep other pieces available so that you can sub in more piety if it is needed. This is also incredibly important for progressing in Ultimate Raids. Piety scales slightly differently for each healer class dependent on their MP Modifier. For SCH this is 119, for AST and WHM it is 124. This is a small difference, but does impact the required piety gains to maintain a neutral pie/sps ratio if you want to reduce your GCD. The function for calculating MP is as follows (courtesy of TheoryJerks). MP = ⌊ ( Job _{Job, MP} / 100 ) × ( ( 6000 × ( PIE – 292 ) / 2170 ) + 12000 ) ⌋ Increase piety also increases the amount of mana regenerated naturally in battle. Natural MP regen is 2% of max mp every three seconds, so increases to piety impact not only your maximum cap but also the amount you recover over the course of a fight. As a rough estimate, each point of piety gives you 3-4 MP (roughly 3.33 per point, floored) and it takes roughly 15 piety to see an increase to your natural MP regen. In simpler terms, a Piety VI materia will give you ~130MP and an extra 2-3 points of MP in each natural regen tick (or up to 60 extra MP per minute). Critical Hit Critical Hit is our most influential stat when it comes to DPS and healing. The more of this stat that you get, the more crits will happen, and the harder they will scale. Because of this, crit scales multiplicatively. Because of this, the more of it we stack, the greater returns. This stat is further benefited by the interaction with Adloquium. Credits to Nemekh.. Source. This shows how crit scales. The more crit obtained, the more damage they will deal and the more it happens. This chart exemplifies that gain. Stacking multiple crit buffs results in massive gains in in terms of DPS gain. This is the most important substat for Scholar. This stat also has the benefit of its interaction with Adloquium. While this is an important interaction, it is not why crit is taken. It is, however, a very nice bonus that they work so well together. Spell Speed Spell Speed is a double edged sword, particularly for healers. In a vacuum, spell speed is a powerful substat as it increases the damage done by auto attacks, damage over time (DoT) attacks, and healing from healing over time (HoT) spells while also reducing your cast and recast time, meaning you can (in theory) attack more often. As a result, it appears to be a stat that scales quadratically, similar to critical hit. However, it is important to note that there are two “tiers” to spell speed scaling: One of these tiers impacts your DoT/Hot and AA damage scaling, while the other is your GCD tiers. GCD tiers are the largest direct gain to Spell Speed, but these tiers are very far apart relative to other substats. As an example, DoT/AA Scaling tiers are ~25-27 points apart, but GCD tiers are generally 60-70 points apart instead (For 2.5s cast times specifically). In BiS calculations, SPS melds are exclusively done to meet GCD tiers rather than the very small DoT/AA scaling tiers. See graphs below for examples of spell speed scaling (courtesy of Nemekh, source). (DoT and AA Scaling shown above relative to Spell Speed, note the small multiplier even as numbers grow exceedingly high) (GCD tiering for various cast times with increasing Spell Speed) With that said, the largest benefit of spell speed (GCD reduction) is also the greatest detriment, for multiple reasons. First, substats function as a “zero-sum game”. This means that any stats you put into Spell Speed are taken away from other damage gaining stats such as Determination, Critical Hit, and Direct Hit. Consider now that the largest gain to spell speed is gaining GCDs to deal more damage. By reducing the impact of your other stats in favor of gaining more casts, you’re also directly increasing the dps losses from losing casts due to movement, clipping, canceled casts, or boss mechanics. As a result, optimizing higher spell speed requires much greater attention to positioning for mechanics to minimize unnecessary movement and canceled casts. It also requires more thorough planning of your GCDs and oGCDs to minimize clipping. Second, reducing your GCD also means it is necessary to have more piety to maintain your mana economy. Piety, while a very important stat for healers, is also the only “zero dps” substat. Again, recall that substats are a zero-sum game. Any stats put into piety are being taken directly from critical hit, determination, and direct hit. This means that if a spell speed meld or piece of gear forces you to add piety to compensate, you are likely taking an overall hit to your dps vs utilizing another substat instead. Regarding piety/spell speed balance – Scholar mana economy is fairly decent and party comp plays a factor in your GCD/PIE ratio, but each GCD tier increases your mana usage by an estimated 0.4% to 0.5% over the previous tier. To compensate, if you are at your “wall” in terms of current GCD/Piety ratio, you’ll want to increase your piety by at least 18 points if you want to reduce your GCD by one tier (ex: 2.37 to 2.36). As a result, an decrease of two GCD tiers will typically require one extra Piety VI Meld to compensate for the increased GCD assuming you’re at the limit. Finally, reducing GCD can also create clipping issues for oGCD heavy classes. Scholar is in a unique situation where it is heavily reliant on oGCDs and reducing the GCD too significantly can create serious clipping concerns, especially when utilizing Energy Drain in consecutive weave windows because Energy Drain has a 3s cooldown (unaffected by your GCD tier). As your GCD decreases, the time available to fit in double weaves also decreases, which can create clipping issues when double weaving oGCDs. Clipping your GCD is a direct potency loss, and if your spell speed tier means clipping is inevitable you will want to consider going with a slower GCD to make weaving more viable. Determination This stat increases damage dealt and healing dealt and the det base functions as a divisor for other primary stats (increasing det has no impact on these other stats, however). The damage gain from Determination is linear. This means that it does not scale as quickly as critical hit in terms of damage gain. Below is a chart with the damage gain from determination. Credits to Nemekh. Source. Determination is not a bad stat. It just does not scale at the rate of crit. DET is a consistent increase in damage/healing, whereas Crit is an RNG gain. Crit will likely always be better, but DET is solid. It is the “base” substat, even utilizing a lower base value from other substats (Det base at 70 is 292, same as primary stat vs 364 for crit/dh/ss). Direct Hit Direct hit functions as sort of a “mini crit”. It is essentially 25% increased damage when you get a Direct Hit. It scales linearly. The damage gain is consistently 25%, but the more DHIT you obtain, the more likely they are to occur. When going for maximum damage sets, it is better to opt into direct hit over spell speed or determination. Credits to Nemekh. Source. Direct Critical Hits are the real star of having DHIT. Both of these occurring at once can result in +20k Broil IIs. These are fairly common in the opener, when all crit buffs are stacked together and Battle Voice is coming out of the BRD. Vitality While not listed out as one of our most important stats, VIT has its own niche. During progression, VIT can be melded onto all accessories to increase health. This is important for early prog, as there are some instances where you will survive mechanics with VIT melds that you wouldn’t have without. This can save many deaths. Vitality melds in prog are an absolute must until you have enough health from other gear to remove them. Determination Vs. Direct Hit This was a controversial topic during early parts of 4.0. Most DHIT builds have less than 1% higher damage than those with DET, and have less than 4% reduced healing. Honestly, you won’t feel the difference either way. For maximum DPS for speed kills and optimized runs, DHIT is absolutely better DPS wise. That being said, the difference is so tiny, you really won’t be able to tell. Pick whichever you prefer, and stop arguing about which is better. Useful Macros Generally, macros are frowned upon. Macros are not handled well in FFXIV. If you macro your healing/DPS spells, it means they can’t be queued. This means there is an extra delay before the next cast, which results in a DPS loss. That being said though, there are quite a few useful macros that improve quality of life. Repeated lines in macros will improve responsiveness. None of these are mandatory, but they can make life easier. There are different types of Macros. will basically will target whatever has aggro on what you have selected. will target whatever you have targeted. Mouseover will go on whatever you are hovering your mouse over. Shadowflare target macro This macro makes it to where you don’t have to click the ground to place shadowflare. It will automatically place it where your target is standing, in the center of their hitbox. Manual Embrace macro for main tank Useful if you want to heal a tank above 80% or heal specific party members. Manual Embrace mouseover This is useful for when you need to proc Divine Veil on the PLD. It allows you to save a GCD. You may need to place cancel in order to get the fairy to do what you want. Also useful for healing party members over 80% health manually. Excogitation mouseover Useful way to use excogitation if you don’t want to stop targeting the boss. You can hover your mouse over them on the party list and use it without ever having to deselect the boss. Lustrate Mouseover Basically the same as a mouseover macro for Excogitation. Good if you need to emergency heal. General Tips There are lots of small things that can be really helpful for playing any job, especially healing. A lot of these will be repeats from things earlier, but it is worthwhile to repeat them to drill them in. Keep your GCD rolling. If you have 3s where you didn’t do anything, that is a Broil II lost. Your CPM, or casts per minute, is one of the most important part of playing this game. Most people who come asking why their DPS is low are simply not casting enough, which is resulting in a ton of lost DPS. Don’t be afraid to trust Whispering Dawn to heal the party. It is a massive amount of healing. Don’t heal during its duration if possible, as its ticks are wasted if you use an Indom to cap the party during the duration. Remember to use Rouse on cooldown and use Fey Union and Excogitation. They are powerful tools that a LOT of Scholars seem to forget. Use them to your advantage. Roused Embraces heal for a lot. Keep it on cooldown unless it overlaps Union. Communicate with your party. Always let your party members know what you are doing. Let your cohealer know that they don’t need to heal if you are going to Indom. Let the party know you are going to delay a Chain Stratagem. Communication is absolutely key when playing in a raid setting. You need to be vocal about things that will make the raid easier. If moving a Divine Veil will save a healing GCD, let the PLD know. They can not make your life easier if they don’t know what will help you. The same applies to all DPS mitigations. Tell them where to put things. Additional Resources These are some additional resources that are useful for anyone attempting to further their play. There will be guides for general healing, AST, as well as optimization guides. It is worthwhile to look into these, as they are useful guides from talented players. Zyrk’s Bullshit Guide to the Principles of Healing A general guide to the principles of healing by Zyrkhan Dar’locke. It is a fairly long read, but if you’ve managed to slog through 80 pages of Scholar, it is also a worthwhile read. It has many of the concepts discussed here, but in much greater detail. It also goes much further beyond the scope of this Scholar guide. I highly recommend anyone read it. Healer Optimization Guide This video guide by Momo Sama is incredibly useful for learning how to optimize with your cohealer to push for higher dps. This video is the holy grail of information in regards to optimizing. This is a MUST watch for anyone wanting to learn how higher level play operates. Intro to Astrologian A guide to Astrologian by Zyrkhan Dar’locke. Reading this as a Scholar can be useful, as it gives insight into how their kit operates. Knowing your cohealer’s tools well is important for maximizing the effectiveness of your own play. FFXIV 70 Statistic Intervals (Public) Large spreadsheets done by Nemekh and the Theory Jerks. Useful for seeing how much of a substat will net a certain gain. Healing Analysis:O9S O10S O11s A video of Momo going through two encounters from Omega: Alphascape speed runs and analyzing their healing strategies. Very useful if you want to see the mentality and thought process behind high level healers. Healer spreadsheets My spreadsheets that were used in the process of making this guide.

Amount of Targets	DoT potency
Original Target (Bane used on this)	100%
Add 1	100%
Add 2	80%
Add 3	60%
Add 4	40%
Add 5 to 15	20%

Time	Buff 1	Buff 2	Buff 3
0	Chain Strategem	Trick Attack	Battle Litany
30
60		Trick Attack
90
120	Chain Strategem	Trick Attack
150
180		Trick Attack	Battle Litany
210
240	Chain Strategem	Trick Attack
270
300		Trick Attack
330
360	Chain Strategem	Trick Attack	Battle Litany