Fun! The concept is solid, and it's great for a player who wants the flavour of a wizard without the dependency on magic. Tables running a low or no magic game will find this a godsend. It's also gorgeous to look at, with evocative flavour text, PHB-style organization that's familiar and easy to navigate, and writing that's good at helping you visualize ways you would use the various features.
With Artificer out, the Scholar's toes are stepped on a little, but while Artificer focuses on mechanical tinkering and item creation, the Scholar is still pure brainiac. It overlaps much more with the College of Lore bard, the main difference between the two being starter proficiencies, flavour, and use of magic, which brings me to a point that is half-curiosity and half-criticism. Is the desire to play an intelligence-based character who uses their knowledge of a specific art to gain an advantage but doesn't use magic really so common that a whole new class needs to exist for it? Most D&D games include magic: magic is baked into the Forgotten Realms, and it's absolutely everywhere in Eberron. Being a brainiac who couldn't - through virtue of their studiousness - interact with magic or even use a scroll the way a wizard can would feel weird in these settings, arcana proficiency notwithstanding.
It is also a bit over-powered. I think this needed a little more play-testing, which could have revealed issues like, for example, that the Applied Intelligence Erudite Application fails the "is it so good that a player can't not choose it?" test. The physician's healing capacity goes toe-to-toe with life clerics without sacrificing capability in other party roles, which violates the ideal of D&D that each class-subclass combo has 1-2 party roles that it fits well into.
Which brings me to the main reason this is overpowered: the Scholar's capacity to be good at pretty much anything is absolutely wild. This class is less-than optimal if the game doesn't involve a lot of social or skill checks, and there is the aforementioned weirdness of being good at everything except magic, but other than that it's really hard to find a reason you wouldn't want to play this class. You're as good at healing as a cleric, as good at skill-monkeying as a Lore bard, as intelligent as a Wizard, and you can control the battlefield like a Battlemaster, without having to multiclass to get there.
The idea is really fun, and if you're playing a game with lots of homebrew and powered-up PCs, if your game is focused more on social and skill challenges than exploration or dungeon-crawling, or if you want to try out a low- or no-magic concept, then go forth and enjoy, but inserting this into an otherwise standardized D&D game is going to be a problem.
|