gear and merits sugestionsFollow

For merits, the Defaults are:

Overall:
8/8 Enfeebling.
8/8 Elemental.
8/8 MP.
5/5 INT.
4/4 -Enmity (Be careful with this; specially if you play other jobs).

For SCH Specific:

5/5 Helix Potency/M.Accu.
5/5 Stormsurge.
Unlocked Enlightment.

The other SCH specific merits are trickier. For Cat1 Sublimation vs Modus Veritas is up for personal preference. For Cat2, you're left over with 4; which you can use to finish up Enlightment (What I did), or use them on Focalization.

If don't know where to start, unlocking Enlightment; and then maxing Enfeebling/Elemental is a good start.

For gearsets.. that's a bit too many things to answer right now (sleepy). I'm sure others will chime in for this.

Because of what I usually do end-game, my 2 most important gear sets are my nuking and enfeebling sets. If your playstyle is anything like mine, then I cannot stress how important these 2 sets are. Elemental obis are a must. *I personally believe that elemental obis give a 100% chance at the macc bonus that day/weather gives you* If you don't use windower, then I recommend having a single macro toward the end of each page of your SCH book that does nothing but equips gear that is static across the rest of the macros on that page. Each set will have quite a bit of these.

I personally view sublimation merits as a waste, but that's my own opinion. Alongside that, MV merits fit into my own play style quite well, so it was a no-brainer for me. The 5/5s that drak mentioned are written in stone. If you do something other than those, you fail and plz quit playing SCH. I'm 100% possitive that everyone will agree with me that those categories are so much more useful than the others that there is no excuse to trap yourself into not being able to maximize them. The rest of the merits are so mediocre at best that it's a toss up. Enlightenment is indeed handy every once in a while, but nothing ama-za-zing. Focalization is very rarely useful. The enmity merit stratagem for black magic, I could see some good use if it didn't involve 2 charges. For balls-to-the-wall Tabula Rasa unloading, this, while 4/5, would prevent your face from being eaten, while you're lighting the mob's @$$ up.

Are the Ice, Thunder, and Dark the main elemental obi's that we should focus on having? i know ICE is a must.

Edited, Oct 7th 2009 11:23am by Akibakei

Ice Thunder Dark Light are the bare minimun.

Fire Obi is also highly recommended; mostly for Firesday.

I'm not a huge fan of Enlightenment personally since you still get the penalties associated with casting outside of the correct arts (eg. +20% MP cost and time), but it definetly has it's merits. I mostly use it for casting spells which require an Addendum of the current art (eg. Reraise II) so I don't have to waste a Strategem.

My recommended merits:

Tier 1

Modus Veritas Duration 5/5:
If you use Helix spells, I strongly advise taking this one. When fully capped, Modus Veritas will only reduce the duration of a Helix spell by 25% as opposed to the 50% norm. Consider that Modus Veritas DOUBLES the damage of a helix spell 'tic', and that means you see a bonus of 50% damage dealt. Thats an incredible amount of damage for such a low MP cost, and has some devastating results if you stack it with other Scholars (see the Yovra video)

Helix Attack/Accuracy 5/5:
Again, if you're using Helix spells this is a big benefit. Maximising this and MV duration gives you the absolute maximum possible damage output with them along with decent gear. Our already strong helix spells can become cripplingly powerful if you put in the effort to strengthen them. It's one of my favourites.

Tier 2

Stormsurge 5/5:
It's just THAT good. +7 to any stat you want to boost is a boon to both you and your party. You can use it to buff yourself with +7 INT for your Blizzard IV spells, and when combined with the Hyorin Obi you can put a dent in the Earth. It's just that awesome.

Enlightenment 1/5:
Useful at times, but nothing particularly impressive. It allows you to cast a spell from either art with the effective skill cap of it's respective arts (ie. B+ rank Elemental skill for Blizzard IV). It also gives you access to both Addenda allowing you to cast Reraise II in Dark Arts and tier 4 nukes in Light Arts. The downside, as mentioned above, is the recast and MP cost penalties remain. That's why I don't recommend maxing it out. Useful in some situations, but not particularly amazing.

Focalization 4/5:
This one probably needs some explaining since there's a lot of bad press for the meritable strategems. Focalization is an expensive strategem (2 charges) but adds a significant accuracy bonus to any Black Magic spell you cast. This accuracy bonus stacks with Klimaform, giving you an unparalleled amount of accuracy with attacks. It's amazing when used for Helix spells against otherwise bothersome opponents, or even for nuking. Of course, it's huge cost means it must be used sparingly. The reason I advocate a whopping 4 merits for this is because the accuracy bonus is only very significant when you pile them on (each merit adds to the overall total), but fully powered can be insanely strong.

For shared stuff, I recommend 8/8 enfeebling + elemental skill and MP merits naturally, but it depends on what other 75 jobs are using your magic or combat skills.

Edited, Oct 9th 2009 12:28pm by Crystan

Forgot to address this above:

If you leveled SCH to 75, get all 8 Obis!

You can easily solo every mob that drops the necessary organs, they are far and away the best option for their slot when they're active, and you can activate any of them at will with Storm spells.

8/8 Obis is standard equipment, same way Elemental Staves are standard equipment. Ice > Thunder/Light/Dark > Fire/Wind/Earth/Water, in order of importance.

It's quite easy to use them now that /Satchel was added; just add them to the end of each appropriate macro. Whenever a situation arises that an Obi would be useful, pull it out of your /Satchel and it'll be equipped instead of your normal waist slot.

Farming organs sucks, I know, but considering how powerful these are for SCH, the time/reward factor is one of the best you'll find in FFXI.

heh,

I just dinged 75 about 30 minutes ago (yay!) and have 9 merits stored up which I wanna pump into SCH once I figure out what I wanna merit and in what order. Glad I read this first cuz I was leaning toward something else. TBH, I havent used helix spells all that much and I don't anticipate joining a roaming gang of SCHs and pwning yovras (just saw that vid for first time and DANNNNNNNNNNNNNNG!) that was pretty sick lol.

TBH, I'm not sure how i'm gonna use my SCH in end game or even if I will that much. I'm a COR main so usually end up on that, and SAM is my #2 job and both are pretty well geared. I lvled SCH primarily because 1) I had no true healing job and figured versatility would be nice and 2) cuz I max merited all the other 75s I had lol. Needed something to merit. Also, the only endgame stuff i currently do is einherjar, ZNMs and salvage. Well nyzul too i guess lol.

Anyway, i'm definitely on board with stormsurge. Unlocked enlightenment sounds good for saving a charge once in a while. The "cost 2 stratagem" ones.... just seem too expensive from a stratagem standpoint. I usually generate enmity issues when Stoneskinga a pt. So it'd cost me 3 charges, 2 for the merit ability and another for accession. Just seems like too much. Not sure if I wanna go 5/5 enlightenment but not feeling the other 4 all that much. Maybe the magic acc dark arts one.

Other thing I have to admit up front is I really haven't utilized helix spells all that much. One day I messed with them on low lvl mobs and today I stuck them on marids once in a while while duoing at lvl 69 sync. I've actually never used modus veritus (don't hit me! lol).

So gonna ask a couple noobish helix questions >.>. So if one SCH casts cryohelix, for example, if another one cast a different one, would they stack or overwrite? If they cast the same one, would they stack? Cuz I noticed in the yovra video, only one SCH cast it, all the others just used MV. With all those MVs, does that increase exponentially? Like (for argument's sake) lets say it did double dmg every time. So 190 x2 = 380. Then if a 3rd guy used it, would it be another 190 tacked on or would it be 380x2 for 760 total? I'm guessing the latter cuz of how fast that ufo went down.

Just wondering why not much love for max sub and grimoire recast merits? Is it because it's rare to need to use strats more often than once a minute already allows? I'm guessing max sub isn't all that great because even if you do get 50 more MP, you gotta wait longer for it anyway and if you're riding sublimation often, it ends up making no difference.

Always match staves

If you notice in the post I never put a weapon in the "Super INT Build" because if you look at the formula:
[(user int-mobs int)+25]*(user mab/mob mdb)*(nq/hq staff bonus)*weather*day

Staff multiples after INT and MAB meaning it will always give you a bigger bonus than using anything else in game.

Lets use my example build from the post which would give this equation:
Using Storm(Non Hailstorm) and HQ Elemental Staff: [147-70)+25]*(1.26/1)*(1.15)*1.1 *1(N/A Day) = 162
Using Hailstorm(Maxed Merits) and Aquilo's: [(147+7+5)-70)+25]*(1.26/1)*(1.15)*1.1 *1(N/A Day) = 181
Using Hailstorm(Maxed Merits) and +20 INT: [(147+7+20)-70)+25]*(1.26/1)*(1)*1 *1(N/A Day) = 162
Using Hailstorm(Maxed Merits) and +40 INT: [(147+7+40)-70)+25]*(1.26/1)*(1)*1 *1(N/A Day) = 187

So you'd need to have a +20INT staff and use Hailstorm to be able to match Helix damage for all but Cryohelix and about +40 INT to beat Aquilo's.

I know this wasn't targeted towards me by here's my opinion. I only disagree with this comment and only because of play style. You reasons are valid and for the things I do in game it can come in handy compared to Max Sublimation mainly because in adding 50 HP > MP you're adding more time needed to reach the cap. I use sublimation Complete about 50-60% of the time so for 40-50% of the time I'll never get that extra 50MP but I'll still get a benefit from MV even if its only every 10 min. My play style gains more from MV merits than it would from Max Sublimation.

Understandable ^^ I use it exactly every 10min or just about on Brother's Duo and Lamia 13 if she lives 10 min. I try to on HNM/ZNMs but haven't done many of those lately.

Another benefit to meriting MV is when you have multiple SCHs there. Well until they nerf/change the way it stacks.

Edited, Oct 28th 2009 6:24pm by Zagen