Originally Posted by
TatoRazzino
I'm going to be less "beligerant", or something like that, because it seems you're misreading what I said.
You claimed that a Regen + Cure/Benefic is different than a Physick + Embrace because of functionality. That's true, but it's also true that a Cure II/Benefic II is different than a Physick + Embrace in functionality. In potency they're equivalent, and that's what it was being discussed, not functionality. I never ignored it, I just didn't add it to the discussion because your post and the posts of other members in the forum were not including it and they were biasing the discussion into a pure potency thing. Don't blame me for a bias introduced by you and other people. And for the record: everyone in here is biased; there is no such thing as a non-biased discussion, in any level, in any discursive practice ever. Pointing out that someone is being biased is like pointing out that they're breathing. The only reason why I keep posting in here is because, when comparing my bias to your bias, interesting things emerge. It's not about proving my point and convincing you of something you probably will refute; it's about a process of learning by discussion. Isn't this why we all come to the forum? I'm not obsessed with being right, I'm obsessed by learning and discussing things that interest me. So, please, when I said that you introduced a bias I'm not trying to offend you.
Now let's get back into the discussion: I said that SCH's don't have a 300 potency heal built into the GCD. Succor is not a 300 potency heal. It's 150 heal + 150 shield. That's a difference in functionality, not a difference in potency. You have to decide if you're discussing functionality or potency, because I'm answering the claims according to the bias that was set. I'll say it again: if there was absolutely no difference between a 150 heal +150 shield and a 300 heal, there would be no reason for Emergency Tactics to even exist. The main difference I can see is when your shield doesn't register before the hit, but your healing does; the shield goes to waste in those situations. Succor requires pre-casting in a way Medica/Helios/ET+Succor does not. And that's what I was arguing: SCHs burn cooldowns to match that kind of potency in healing. Since you guys brought Nocturnal AST to the table in more detail, the difference becomes clearer: Noct. AST has access to Benefic II and Helios all the time, and also has access to Aspected Benefic and Aspected Helios; SCH can make this transition every 30s, and when Emergency Tactics is on cooldown, they only have access to the equivalent of the two Aspected Spells. This is a weakness of SCH and a strength of AST; however, SCHs have the fairy and Noct. AST gets a 5% potency buff that's barely noticeable - that's a strength of the SCH job, and a weakness of the AST job. When I say that fights are catered to SCH, this is what I mean: they both have strong points and weak points (as every job in the game should have), but the weaknesses of the SCH job don't matter and the strong points of Noct. AST are wasted. This is a problem in fight design, not in the jobs.
Darkmoon mentioned the stack system, that is denied by SCHs in this forum (I read things that simply ignore the fact that you can't burst every single one of your skills at the same time, and whenever I was saying that it was ignored I was not addressing you specifically). Anyway, the stacks are a master mechanic found both in SMN and in SCH. I'll make a quick digression to compare SMN and BLM, but the point in healing will be aparent: when you see how SMN has to manage its stacks, you notice that they burn through them pretty fast to get in Dreadwyrm Stance to do their burst, and after that they go into a sort of low burst DPS rotation (their numbers are kept up by their DoTs still ticking) so the strength of the job lies in its ability to sustain DPS in the long run, because their burst phase goes down really fast; BLMs, on the other hand, are always bursting and that's their strong point. They're both good in different aspects and they all get to shine in basically any fight. Now let's go back to the healing jobs: to get the same burst in healing, SCHs have to burn cooldowns and stacks, and this is something that can be noticed in the way every SCH in here mentions how they do it. However, fights don't require you to burn your stacks fast; one of the reasons is that the main healer can do most of the job by him/herself. This is another way of catering fights to SCH: the weak points of the Aetherflow master mechanic are exploited in DPS scenarios, but are not exploited in the healing counterpart, rendering the difference in having burst built into the GCD useless. Again: this is not a job issue, but a fight design issue. There are very little scenarios in which a SCH gets penalized from having to burn stacks fast, but there are a lot of scenarios in which an AST gets penalized from not having more off-GCD heals and a WHM also gets penalized from not having more mitigation options apart from what's cross-classed. That's catering.
Fights are built around having a SCH, so the nuances and weak points of their toolkit are not apparent. They exist and can be exploited, and I hope SE does that in the future.
And please, for the 100th time, when I mean weak points, I don't mean to say that SCH is weak. Having weak points is about balance, not about being good or bad.
I'll use PLD as an example: the core component of the job is having a shield to block portions of physical attacks, which makes them good at dealing with that kind of damage; they also have a number of support skills that help the party deal with incoming damage: they can heal, they can cover and they can add magic shields to the party. That's their strong point, and their weak point is, because of having that many defensive options, they get less DPS options and dealing damage while tanking is their weak point. I saw a lot of PLD mains switching to DRK when they got into A3S, because the PLD's toolkit became obsolete in relation to the extra DPS and mdef DRK has. In A4S, PLDs are useless according to people who play DRK. Go to the tank forums and you'll see the amount of complaints about PLD's toolkit and threads asking it to be changed. The thing is, this is not a job problem, it's a fight design problem. They built a lot of interesting skills into the PLD toolkit and then designed fights to render it useless or less valuable than pure DPS output or mdef cooldowns. This is what I call catering. Of course you can do those fights as a PLD, but why would you when you can't use a big portion of your toolkit?
I brought PLD up because you claimed that it was a mitigation thing that made people chose SCH for high end groups. Mitigation is not a decisive factor in A1S and A2S; I've done both fights as an AST in Diurnal sect without a SCH back when ilvl was not inflated. AST had not been buffed by then, so there wasn't any kind of shields and Collective Unconscious only had a healing component. We also didn't have a PLD, so no Divine Veil was available. Tell me, then, why SCHs were so valued if not because of their DPS? If shielding was any issue at all back then, I could simply have gone Nocturnal and the amount of shielding I got from Aspected Helios would be more than enough since we weren't using any kind of shields in the first place? It was safe to not have any shields, and AST's shields could make it safer; Deployed Adloquium is excessive in there with a Cure III + Assize available – for the record, "excessive" means not necessary; having that kind of shielding would bring the benefit of allowing a WHM to save Assize for later or not cast Cure III at all. That was a fight design thing that allowed shields to be helpful but not needed. This is what I argued, not that SCH couldn't shield.
I also argued that a SCH can't use Deployed Adloquium to shield every cascade in A3S, which makes them use Succor for every other cascade. This means a Nocturnal AST can shield Cascades as well (if they couldn't, parties could wipe even with SCHs). The 20% fairy buff is actually very good, but some groups don't use it because some SCHs likes to have Selene out. That's the case of my group and, since we run AST/SCH, that's not an issue because I can mitigate damage as well. However, ASTs weren't favored in end game groups even after the buff they got, and that leads me to believe that mitigation is not as favored as people claim it to be. I already said that, if shielding was the issue, PLD's Divine Veil and ASTs mitigation toolkit (even in Diurnal) would be more valued in parties than they actually are. PLD + AST + SCH = the most party mitigation available in the game. If DPS wasn't the decisive factor, we would see more job combos than we actually see in play. My claim was never related to the fact that SCHs can or can't shield (that would be absurd), but that the shielding and mitigation difference is not what's making them special. It's a DPS obsession thing. Nowadays, with the extra gear we have, DPS checks shouldn't be an issue anymore; and yet you see people claiming that you can't bring PLDs into raid groups because they suck at DPS and you can't bring ASTs because their DPS support is based in RNG and they don't allow a SCH to DPS as much; shielding is not something that makes people bring this or that job. It should be, but it isn't.
About the WHM/AST cooldowns: I addressed that already, but I'll say it again in a different way. A lot of SCH cooldowns are there to fill gaps in healing that are addressed by the other jobs with their GCDs. There are cooldowns in the other jobs that help them catch up to SCH in emergency heals, but they're different, specially with WHM; they got Tetra because they were the only job that couldn't have an emergency off-GCD short cooldown heal before 50, so they got it at 60. The catching up ends there, in relation to SCH. Assize and Indomitability were introduced in the game at the same time; SCHs got it early in their quest line because WHMs already have Cure III and Medica available all the time. If you want to compare Essential Dignity and Lustrate, you'll see that Essential Dignity can reach a lot more potency and, if you consider stack management and healing rotations in a well learned fight, it can be used as frequently as SCH uses Lustrate. For emergencies, yes, SCH can use it three times in a row, but in normal healing situations they have to burn Lustrate sometimes to match what a WHM/AST are doing with Cure II/Benefic II. This is the reason why I didn't make comparisons with the cooldowns of the other healers. SCHs don't have something as reliable as Divine Seal to boost their healing potency; the fairy skill can replace it in solo heal situations, but with two healers in the party the buff will reach both of them, so the gap won't be filled. Asylum is something that SCHs don't have, since Eos' Whispering Dawn is only a little above Medica II's AoE regen when it's not roused (that's due to the scaling in stats). I can keep going, but the point remains the same: a lot of the cooldowns in the SCH toolkit are there to do stuff that the other healers have in their GCD; the cooldowns for the other healers usually add something extra or further enhance what they naturally have. This is why I didn't mention them and this is why they have different functions in the game. Since we're talking about functionality now, this can't be ignored.
Finally, I'll say that I didn't change anything I said and I didn't get to different conclusions. I was always trying to address the points that were said by others and I mentioned the particulars I disagreed with. There is no point in discussing things that are not in debate, so I thought they were implied. I hope I could address everything you asked me to.
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