The Future of SCH's?Follow

I quit playing about two years ago, but have since been sucked back into this amazing game. I was all excited about starting over and working towards the new cap with my favorite job of old...which was SCH. I am a little disheartened to hear all of this about SCH's being next to useless. I enjoyed the immense versatility that SCH had when I left the game.

I enjoyed out nuking BLM's (harder, faster, and more efficiently) and being able to heal as well as WHMs (on 90% of mobs) with better efficiency. The fact that it was somewhat rare of a job made me love it as well. I miss this complexity, and I don't think WHM or BLM can fill that void for me.

Now, not knowing exactly what waits at level 90 makes this difficult for me to choose my path to end game. From what I understand, Cure V separates us from the WHM dominance, and AoE are where BLM pull ahead.

Are we (as SCHs) as weak as I am led to believe? Will the level cap changing to 99 mend this for us?

If the game content moves outside of abyssea, and the rules outside are kept more or less the same as they are now (which means no atmas, no cruor buffs, etc), SCH will automatically come back to the spotlight again. It will return to the #1 nuker spot, thanks to our greater MP efficiency, and we will be better healers/supporters since our buffs will be more relevant outside of Abyssea. Also, finally, and the most important thing, BLMs won't be required for !! triggers, WHMs won't be necessary for those tasks as well.

The truth is, Abyssea killed the necessity of being MP efficient (or more specifically, placed it on a much less important spot, we STILL can get out of MP if nuking nonstop), and killed the ncecessity of many buffs (who needs a 350 HP stoneskin when you have 3k+ HP?). And guess what? SCH placed much of its usefulness in providing MP efficient nukes/cures, and good AoE buffs.

I can see BLM not getting any love outside Abyssea, but I don't think that will be the case for WHMs. WHM was already a popular job for main healing before Abyssea.

I'm not sure I agree with you about the popularity of SCH pre-abyssea.
As far as EXP parties go....
10-55 was great for SCH
55-70 Popularity dwindled a little bit but nothing too bad
70+ The job was completely dead, Lack of haste pushed SCH from the merit scene. If you checked your LFG window and saw a RDM or WHM seeking your chances of getting a invite dropped drastically. You had better chances making your own PT at this point.

Being able to AOE Stoneskin,Regen, and Enpsells was a great asset and SCH wasn't worthless by any means but Haste was just too broken for merit parties to give up.

Pre-Abyssea the only ones who cared about Black Magic was SCH and BLM and it was mostly only for soloing/manaburns/Dynamis. Everyone else was zerging HNMs with K-clubs, Brds, SAMs and DRK.

There are things that only a SCH can do like Weather spells, Helix, AOE buffs, but for whatever reason it never clicked with the community. People just refused to break the cookie-cutter mentality. I remember when a group of SCHs discovered they could deal massive amounts of damage in a short amount of time using Helix spells. No one was able to capitalize on it before SE patched it because it was so difficult to find a group level 75 SCH on your server, not to mention ones that were merited.


With access to Haste, Convert, a beefed up sublimation, more charges and a 1-tick regain I agree that SCH would be much more popular outside of abyssea. To what degree? I am uncertain, But I for one would dread the day that things returned to "Normal"

Edited, May 4th 2011 7:38am by GagBag