Quote Originally Posted by FoxyAreku View Post
Stuff
You're correct. It boiled down to 'Sure, an AST can match a WHM, but you need to do so much more work for it and be lucky to have the stars align. Comparing to SCH is pretty pointless.' You could sort of say WHM is the pubstomper healer, but WHM and AST even out in a vacuum at higher skill levels.

Noc AST becomes better than SCH when you make high mobility requirements, fights with a lot of setup and small burst segments and/or have fights that benefit a lot from having instant-cast shields. The latter is really just a few cases in T10 (double Prey), the former two are, as Namo said, more apparent in Thordan where DPS over the whole fight isn't such a big requirement compared to burst DPS on the checks (given, I have not done the entire fight yet but I know where the idea comes from). As Noc you sacrifice a ton of HPS for instant cast shields and mobility, in a game that is so slow and scripted you really don't need it for anything else but Frontlines, and tuning fights towards this mobility/rate of resisting interruption isn't fair to not only SCH and WHM, but also to BLM and arguably BRD/MCH/SMN.

I think Thordan might be the first fight where I prefer Noc over Diu when pairing with a WHM (without noc being a necessity), all things considered.