How to SCH?

[Titor]

Everyone here is saying that you should micromanage your pet. I... kind of disagree. Or at least it is my preference not to. 

 

I think that if I micromanaged my pet, a lot of her healing would end up being overheal. The pet AI is not awful, it seems to heal the lowest target in range, and it uses its abilities as soon as they cool down (I use Selene, so this is probably what makes it easier than using Eos.)

 

I am a pretty confident standalone healer (Talking about not having my pet out, not having another healer in the party), I do not rely on my pet much to keep people up. I do enjoy having her as a 'backup' healer, say if two DPS get hit by an AoE, she heals one, and I heal the other (Like how the ranged get hit at the same time in t7). Thais actually ends up working pretty well for me. Or if I see a DPS is getting low, but will not likely take damage again in the near future, whereas the tank is getting wailed on, I focus on keeping the tank up while my fairy heals the dps/other low party member. 

 

This strategy has gotten my pretty far, with a lot of complements on my healing. I have managed to pug up to T7 (which I am pretty sure I can down if I get into a clear group). I am not in a static or anything since I do not like to COMMIT a night to raiding, but I often fill in for statics when they post in DF, and so far I have not received any bad comments or were replaced, so I think this method works for me. Also note that SCH is my main and I just started raiding T5+ about a month ago. I never really had any trouble with any of the primal EX (sans Ramuh, which I had not really attempted yet)

 

Micromanaging is just not my playstyle, and I think if I did do it I would end up with a lot of overhealing or dead people. I might try it sometime, though, but why fix something that is not broken, really.

[Melkire]

STOP PULLING BEFORE I CAN BUFF YOU

 

What Haeden yells in my ear over TeamSpeak every time we phase into Expert Roulette dungeons.

 

Dear SCHs: your WAR tanks are so sorry for causing you grief. It's just that long pulls are so tempting that the W button calls to us. Must. Move. Forward. ASAP.

[synaesthetic]

I never micromanaged my pet on SCH except on certain fights. When silencing ADS in Turn 2, or healing single tank Twintania and the offtank during Melusine's melee adds (using the physick+embrace macro). It's not usually necessary. SMN is a different story, of course.

[Phayte]

Everyone here is saying that you should micromanage your pet. I... kind of disagree. Or at least it is my preference not to. 

 

Micro'ing really has different degrees of control and contextual uses. For most situations it's completely unnecessary I would say and it really depends on a person's taste. For me, I'm always going to be doing other things besides healing if I can help it and micro'ing really helps.

 

While the fairy AI isn't bad, I wish you could set the threshold for healing. The absolute HP threshold for it to trigger embrace gets lower and lower as the tank's max HP pool rises, leaving the fairy's idle time wasted. If a tank has 10k HP, the fairy only starts to heal at 8k, If a tank has 20k HP, it only starts to heal at 16k. Extreme case, but there's definitely a gap there where heal would be useful earlier. It just bothers me that the fairy could toss a heal to top off the tank (and not even overhealing) but is waiting for that magic threshold number to trigger it's AI. (If the threshold is wrong, feel free to correct, just giving an example).

 

Hitting that embrace key by itself in the beginning of a fight might save you a couple heals and other down times when DPS is low or there isn't any spike damage. This is one of the reasons I actually don't macro physick and embrace together.

[LiadansWhisper]

Everyone here is saying that you should micromanage your pet. I... kind of disagree. Or at least it is my preference not to. 

 

I think that if I micromanaged my pet, a lot of her healing would end up being overheal. The pet AI is not awful, it seems to heal the lowest target in range, and it uses its abilities as soon as they cool down (I use Selene, so this is probably what makes it easier than using Eos.)

 

I am a pretty confident standalone healer (Talking about not having my pet out, not having another healer in the party), I do not rely on my pet much to keep people up. I do enjoy having her as a 'backup' healer, say if two DPS get hit by an AoE, she heals one, and I heal the other (Like how the ranged get hit at the same time in t7). Thais actually ends up working pretty well for me. Or if I see a DPS is getting low, but will not likely take damage again in the near future, whereas the tank is getting wailed on, I focus on keeping the tank up while my fairy heals the dps/other low party member. 

 

This strategy has gotten my pretty far, with a lot of complements on my healing. I have managed to pug up to T7 (which I am pretty sure I can down if I get into a clear group). I am not in a static or anything since I do not like to COMMIT a night to raiding, but I often fill in for statics when they post in DF, and so far I have not received any bad comments or were replaced, so I think this method works for me. Also note that SCH is my main and I just started raiding T5+ about a month ago. I never really had any trouble with any of the primal EX (sans Ramuh, which I had not really attempted yet)

 

Micromanaging is just not my playstyle, and I think if I did do it I would end up with a lot of overhealing or dead people. I might try it sometime, though, but why fix something that is not broken, really.

 

Micromanaging primarily has to do with how much control you want, and how much you want to lean on an AI.  Overhealing is not a true concern, because mana is not a true issue for a Scholar.  If you're worried about mana, then something else is wrong, not overhealing.  Mana is only an issue when you don't have any, so I would not worry about running overhealing unless you are having a mana shortage, and even the, I'm still not sure it would matter.  The idea that overhealing is automatically bad and terrible is incorrect.  All overhealing is is overhealing.

 

I micromanage my fairy because I want to get the absolute best out of her.  Not everyone will want to go to that extreme, and that's fine.