@OP Comments in general

I feel what you're experiencing is perfectly reasonable. If you consider the maximum attainable ilvl for 5 weeks of clears / Esoterics, we're still undergeared for this content. Compound this by the fact the Dev team decided to throw everything including the kitchen sink at everyone this raid cycle and I'm not too surprised many players feel more stressed when compared to Coil back in 2.X. While the SCH kit is powerful, there are weaknesses to this kit and those weaknesses seem to pushed to the forefront as a combination of both the way the floor works and the fact we're still under geared.

While I don't have any advise to give as I haven't physically been in A3S yet, I would say don't get discouraged and keep trying. Easier said than done, but it seems appropriate as you do have a lot of experience under your belt.

Quote Originally Posted by Remilia_Nightfall View Post
Anyway, it is not only a matter of amount of crit rating. It is the fact that SE diminished the importance of secondary stat altogether. Comparing numbers to pre-3.0 is meaningless.
Is there evidence that SE dimished the importance of all secondary stats entirely? From my understanding, secondaries are weaker now than they were before 2.0 is because of how S-E decided to scale the secondaries. Our 3.0 i210 gear would be equivalent to i90 gear back in 2.0 and thus our secondaries would mean less at the current juncture versus five patches down when we're rocking something like i300 gear. I would be interested to see any information that would run contrary to my thought process.

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@ Burst DPS debate

The only time SCH should be able to out burst a WHM in DPS (assuming 10-15s window to DPS something) is when they have access to Energy Drain - which is at most 9 GCDs if you have Dissipation and Aetherflow up and at the cost of the majority of your healing toolkit.

Broil + Energy Drain > Stone III > Broil

I will admit I'm not entirely familiar with A3S but I do know of the DPS check with the hand mechanic and if the add phase in A3S is anything like A3, then you have a very limited time to kill a lot of small adds too which is where WHM front loaded DPS will shine compared to SCH DPS.