What makes WHM special? Nothing anymore.

[Fevelle]

Mind bonus? Best burst healing? You should feel threatened about SCH that got Indomitability and Emergency tactics.

Emergency Tactics isn't taking anything from me, it swaps shield for healing power, Indomitability also isn't taking anything from me as it uses Aetherflow and Scholar needed something more reliable than Succor. I do not feel threatened, I feel like my class is being forgotten and transformed into something that, like you said, only have a mind bonus to offer now.

[Muahbec]

Because I pay as much (really, even more because I have 8 retainers) as you to play this game. I don't really care how many jobs you have at 60, our opinions have the same weight when it comes to game design. If you're okay with seeing your class lose Proshell, Graniteskin and having the only thing that made it stand up taken away (raw-healing power), I am not.

BUT LOSING YOUR TRAITS HAVE ABSOLUTELLY NOTHING TO DO WITH AST!
You KNEW ast would be a hybrid from the start and i saw no complains, when AST was almost useless i saw no complains, and now that it can be a competitive healer you start whining?
Grow up.

[Fevelle]

BUT LOSING YOUR TRAITS HAVE ABSOLUTELLY NOTHING TO DO WITH AST!
You KNEW ast would be a hybrid from the start and i saw no complains, when AST was almost useless i saw no complains, and now that it can be a competitive healer you start whining?
Grow up.

I'm all for it being a competitive healer, but in his own, unique way. I can't really believe you think the best way to balance AST was getting it potency increase, instead of buffing, reworking or increasing its uniqueness and cards enough to make a difference and be a viable exchange for its weaker heals.

[Coltvoyance]

BUT LOSING YOUR TRAITS HAVE ABSOLUTELLY NOTHING TO DO WITH AST!
You KNEW ast would be a hybrid from the start and i saw no complains, when AST was almost useless i saw no complains, and now that it can be a competitive healer you start whining?
Grow up.

When the Expansion hit WHM's weren't worried about AST because WHM could still say "We still have the most Powerful Raw Healing Numbers". With this latest AST buff, almost EVERY SINGLE HEALING SPELL is matched number for number with WHM. The exact same potency across the board! ITS A COPY PASTE! (With the exception of the Paltry 10 measly ass potency in regen and medica 2). They even duplicated our Divine Seal and tacked it onto an AST skill that was already really good. Raw Healing Power is no longer a flag that belongs to WHM, the class is generic now and has nothing special to call its own.

[Lastelli]

Meanwhile AST has the most extensive source of party buffs in the game.

Why do people seem to forget that cards are random and more often than not you'll draw a card that you don't actually need?

This has been discussed already, but an AST with perfect luck provides a raid dps increase of about 2%. Thus "No worries for the AST though who can boost party DPS to massive levels" is false. Of course this 2% dps increase will happen assuming you only use expanded balances, so you'll have to forget about "the most extensive source of party buffs in the game" (seriously, lol at this). It also seems that you don't know how lightspeed works, or what the difference between instant cast and reduced general cooldown is. Yet another thread based on completely false premises.

[Eudyptes]

These threads are so dumb. I have all 3 healers at 60 and have raided extensively with them all, as well as raided with the new ast all day yesterday. I promise you, ast is still the weakest of the three, and the whm/sch combo in raids is still king.

The only difference is now ast isn't a complete joke. In fact, it's only slightly weaker than the other two. Granted, it's much more comparable to whm than sch, but whm is still better and still has more tools/reasons to bring to a raid. I'd go as far as saying (and have said) ast is actually still in need of some buffs. Not to healing of course, but to the card system as a whole.

Anyway, stop being acting like the sky is falling just because whm/sch aren't OP as hell in comparison to ast now. You're all acting like little children who had two cookies while their little brother had one, and are now trying cause mommy finally gave him a second cookie.

[BroodingFicus]

BUT LOSING YOUR TRAITS HAVE ABSOLUTELLY NOTHING TO DO WITH AST!
You KNEW ast would be a hybrid from the start and i saw no complains, when AST was almost useless i saw no complains, and now that it can be a competitive healer you start whining?
Grow up.

The title of the thread was in fact 'What makes WHM special? Nothing anymore'. This is, in part, due to the fact that square created a hybrid class that was too weak to perform instead of a unique healer. The rng on the cards (as has been mentioned several times here) was not enough to make them equal to the other healers which should have been obvious from the start considering the nature of that sort of design. As a result they had three options: buff the unique abilities of the AST and make the cards more viable, buff their WHM attributes or buff their SCH attributes. The first option would have further made a distinction between a buffing healer, a pure healer and a mitigation/dps healer. The other two options required making the AST's very similar to one of the other classes, thereby stepping on toes. No they were not the reason we lost Proshell and Graniteskin. But pair that with them becoming mini WHM's and we have lost quite a bit of what made us...well us. Hence the point of this thread. This is, I think, the last straw and not the first but a straw nonetheless.

I don't think power wise we are really shouldered out its just they now offer no really unique 'gimmick' of their own like SCH and AST since its a pretty close call on raw healing power and we don't have fairies or cards or any of that. How is this fixed? I have not a clue. Buffing AST cards and reworking that would have helped to keep us all different but what is done is done. On a personal level I just hope they go in another direction in the future. I don't want to see three competitive healers who are just carbon copies of each other in different robes in order to achieve balance. I'd like to have multiple styles of healing that are different, which SCH and WHM are. The line between WHM and AST is too thin now for my liking.

[Semirhage]

I've played the "pure healer" class in several MMOs over the years, and...well, this is normal. This might disappoint you, but this is what I've learned:

Pure healer, without careful balancing, isn't an identity that can last with a lot of clarity when you have multiple healing classes. Not long-term. Not if you want to keep all of your classes balanced and viable. Want to have the highest healing throughput? Great! Except now you can't create a fight that requires your level of throughput, because now you've created a fight where your class is required, and that is a no-no in a game with a large focus on class balance. You need to balance content in a way that all of the healers are viable, which means that your advantage from extra powerful heals becomes overkill. In that sense, stronger heals isn't really an advantage.

Then comes the inevitable buffing class, and the inevitable wacky mechanics class, and so on and so forth. They need identities, because you're already the Pure Healer (tm). So their heals are scaled to an acceptable level for content, and they get extra stuff on the side.

But wait! That's unfair! They have a real advantage, while you have that fake strong heals advantage that isn't really an advantage for balance reasons!

I've seen this scenario several times now. It's a catch-22 that Tank/Healer/DPS MMOs seem to have. You want to have your purist class surrounded by classes with their own quirks, but the community will cry foul if that purist is actually better at their core mechanic than the other classes. So the purist gets nerfed. And diluted. And their skills get copied. And their territory loses ground. And the community tells the purists to stop complaining because they're still "overpowered", because they've still got that slight advantage in the basic function of their class.

This fight is a song that never ends, my friends.

[Muahbec]

Emergency Tactics isn't taking anything from me, it swaps shield for healing power, Indomitability also isn't taking anything from me as it uses Aetherflow and Scholar needed something more reliable than Succor. I do not feel threatened, I feel like my class is being forgotten and transformed into something that, like you said, only have a mind bonus to offer now.

SCH has infinite MP, better DPS (unafected by acc), many MANY tools compared to both WHM and AST
and you only complain about AST.
The only reliable thing AST has
Benefic 1 and 2 and aspected. (and some random procs)
Helios and aspected helios.
ED on a 40 second CD
Now they have Synastry with a longer CD and a Lower heal boost
CU still not that useful.
CO is a joke
Cards still are unreliable since all of them are completely random
WHM has:
Cure 1,2, freecure proc
Medica 1,2 20% chance Medica will cost HALF mp
Assize, PoM, Divine seal, Benediction, Regen, Tetragramaton.
SoS and assize for MP
Asylum which is "place and forget"
Cure 3
stoneskin 2
without mention the great amount of DPS a WHM can provide
SCH has
physic + free embrace (400pot + 300pot)
rouse which increases the fairy heals
Whispering Dawn (strongest AOE regen in game) and if you use Rouse (+40%) and Fey ill (+20%) well...
Fey covenant, fey illumination
selene- Fey wind, Fey caress (which in my opinion could be a WHM spell)
ET, Lustrate, infinite MP, indom, DT, Energy drain for EVEN MORE mp, sacred soil, E4E, supervirus, without mentioning the great DPS unafected by acc.
you SHOULD feel threatened by SCH and definitely not by AST.
Stop the drama.

[Coltvoyance]

snip

Excellently put =/ WHM has no identity now