SCH in 3.0. Some thoughts while healing A3S.

[Jonnycbad]

Are you using Eos for progression? Staggering fey illumination, rouse, whispering dawn should help, emergency tactics for dropping a heal bomb on tanks and saving an aetherflow. I wouldn't even try wasting a stack on energy drain because it's highly likely to miss. Would rather cap a tank out with physick then adlo them at 90% or save adlo for if they drop below 50% HP as a buffer, to tide them over until another lustrate/physick.

Whm will always be better for bleeding edge progression because when you're undergeared, you need potency on demand, not gimmicks. Sch will likely be drastically more efficient than whm once tanks get more hp, and kill speed increases by 15-20% with better gear. As for now, whm delivers high potency with the best reliability, and since by SE's standards, everyone is still undergeared for savage, you want reliable cures, not rng.

Fairy is under healing but as they said, they balanced the curve to fit a much higher ilvl than now. Stupid I guess, but perhaps it cannot be helped.

[Remilia_Nightfall]

snip

I started with Selene, as our monk loves it and we had troubles with the hands dps check. I have recently switched to Eos tho.

Regardless of fey illumination, keeping both tanks up in dps stance is still a challenge. A crit Adlo at the right moment really changes things - but as we both said, consistency is paramount in progression.

Anyway yes, I agree with you on all the line.

[DarkerOrange]

While your complaints may be justified, posting a thread about mana issues as a SCH is unlikely to get you any sympathy, lol. Most classes would kill for the resource management we have.

[Ghishlain]

@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.

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.

[PetiteMalFleur]

@OP Comments in general...

I am current working on A3S and have done both mechanics where I must solo heal Equal Concentration as well as having our whm solo heal. Whoever solo heals this does dump a LOT of mana. There are cds to make this easier for both healers. I will use sacred soil regardless who is healing it. I will E4E and virus the cleave which applie the 4th stack. This eases healing immensely and It helped me go from oom to being able to continue without songs. I also asked my whm to solo heal the aoe damage in the first part of the fight while I focused on more single target MT healing so I could enter the phase with enough mana.

Whoever is dpsing has the easier job no doubt but typically white mage gear stacks more piety so for mana efficiency I think scholar dps is better for this particular mechanic. The difference in burst dps between WHM and SCH is negligible if there is any at all. Apply dots to appropriate hand while weaving in energy drains, then spam broil with energy drains. I use Dissappation here if I enter the check with little access to aetherflow stacks. Dissapation works well here since your heals remained buffed until phase change and the remaining damage is extremely light if tanks are managing cds correctly.

OP, if you are having difficulty managing the Pistons and Gears by all means have your WHM dps. There is no aoe healing that your indominability can't handle coupled with single target physicks. The healer should probably be mostly slowing adds anyway which can be handled by either healer just fine. However, the "burst" dps difference between broil and stone 3 on an add that dies so fast is so negligible I never thought about it. Personally, I find energy drains, Miasma 2 and ruin 2 to be quite useful on adds which are about to hit the water.

This fight for healer is about synergy and coordination. Scholar mitigation is unmatched. Scholar dps is needed but so is whm dps. Howerver, building a strat around assumptions is never a good thing and if one way isn't working try something else and you may be surprised.

Watch the world first clear video by Elysium. Ballad was never played even once the entire fight. They cleared with i190 Hive weapons which have no piety on them. Healers were coordinated and shared the burden of dps and healing in a way that didn't leave one tapped out while the other sat on a full bar of mana. If your group is having that issue discuss it with your whm because either you are not trusting him/her enough or they are just not doing enough to support you.

[Sidra]

Crit rates aren't any different now than there were in 2.05. It will continue to scale upwards as more and more gear is released. It wasn't until the end of 2.0 where we had consistent 25-30%. And the stats seem to be trending that way this time again. One thing I will say is that a lot of the current best gear doesn't seem to have it or much of it - which means most likely it will be prevalent on the 3.1 24 man raid gear.

[Slark]

I find it hard to believe that someone who downed a boss like twintania pre-nerf (assuming without exploits) would fail to adapt to a new situation.

Emergency Tactics is always relevant regardless of situation.
Any group up large aoe chunk of damage makes Deployment Tactics relevant.
Indominability is always relevant as a safety net for quick and potent AOE healing.

If you ever try to rely on a crit for anything other than a pre-pull crit shield, you are doing something wrong.
Adlo is not reliant on crit. Rather, Adlo scales to absurdly broken numbers when it is crit. There's a difference.

WHM offers insane radius AOE healing and has more sustained raw throughput.
SCH offers a near unlimited amount of emergency cooldowns, has way better mana regeneration, is more mobile, does WAY better DPS, is not nearly as limited by accuracy, can heal two targets at once, is a better spot healer, and offers more raid utility than WHM.

Honestly, I have never seen SCH as RNG-based. I would say WHM suffers from RNG far more.
-all of WHM DPS is RNG based.
-Freecure/Overcure is RNG based.
-WHM relies on crits about just as much as SCH does (meaning that neither class relies on it... Scholar just happens to make more use of their crits when they happen.)

WHMs "amazing burst" is also purely accuracy-based, and sucks up a good portion of mana to do, especially compared to SCH burst, which actually regens mana if you throw in a few energy drains.
If you wanna talk about a class being RNG based, go play WHM, pop PoM, and miss 5 Stone III's, wasting ~3,500mp and an emergency CD on nothing. Keep in mind, during that SCH vs. WHM bursting, SCH is also healing with fairy at absolutely no extra cost and can quickly exit for spotheal indom/lustrates whereas WHM is restricted to regen timers and cannot exit cleric for spot healing without A) Taking time to cast a spell or B) blowing one of their few emergency CDs (when compared to SCH's plethora of emergency CDs).

AST is not as wanted not because cards are unreliable.
AST is not as wanted because it lacks potency, mana regen, radius on AOE heals, emergency cooldowns, and it cannot really substitute for a SCH right now, meaning those issues are glaring issues because almost everything AST is subpar at, WHM excels in.

I have only heard praise of SCH throughout this entire expansion. I honestly think SCH is overpowered when compared to the other two healers.
You see way more successful groups running with scholars than without. Just because you run into a single phase on a single boss fight does not mean you should doubt the class that has literally been in one of the best spots throughout the entire course of this game.

[Adrasteia]

I have only heard praise of SCH throughout this entire expansion. I honestly think SCH is overpowered when compared to the other two healers.

They're currently ahead in pretty much every area beyond pure healing throughput. They need to do something about the healer accuracy situation in general (you shouldn't have to sacrifice 50 ilvl and several million gil to have a reasonable chance to not totally whiff), and do a pass on WHM/AST DPS to make it less mana-intensive (or at least provide opportunities for them, e.g.: a random proc when you cast Cure I that reduces the mana cost of offensive spells for X seconds after). Right now, I can spend almost the entirety of A2 doing nothing but DPS as a SCH (current record is about 1025) and generally end it with a thousand mana or so left. Any WHM/AST trying to pull those numbers would be out of mana on wave 5. It's a little ridiculous.

[Gallus]

So SCH is all about landing a crit with an adloquium, good to know.
It's not like you don't have a 20% mana recovery ability every 60 seconds (Any AST would kill both their parents for such thing), a fairy that, despite healing a bit less proportionally than in 2.0, it is still resourceless, a 400 potency aoe heal spell every 30 seconds (this is insulting on so many levels), 2 unmissable DOTs and an area of ground damage which can't miss either (shadow flare). You talk about reliability when 3 of your DPS spells can't miss while I constantly see WHMs miss 3 DoTs in a row on their godlike opener xD. Let's talk about reliability lol...oh the irony...
Furthermore, if that wasn't enough, bane has been buffed, holy has been nerfed. I sit at 1200 DPS on the first pulls of A2S, and my poor WHM always goes nuts about it, saying how I play a broken class and all, because he can't even smell my damage spamming holy nonstop and ending up with 4k mana while I'm sitting on 10k mana without even trying.
I'm too in A3S btw. Here's the thing TC, be happy if the job you are "complaining about" is not nerfed.

[Remilia_Nightfall]

I find it hard to believe that someone who downed a boss like twintania pre-nerf (assuming without exploits) would fail to adapt to a new situation.

I never said I "failed to adapt". This is your assumption.

My opening post was just about my current thoughts, mainly about SCH in A3S. I do not care about the rest of the content (except A4S), as everything else is easy anyway. That is all. If you want to read it as "this person believes SCH is UP" feel free to do so - but it is not what I wrote.

Whatever - I guess that opening a thread here was mildly useless