Current thoughts on SCH vs AST (Fun casual)

[TatoRazzino]

I have CNJ to ... I cant remember, 15ish, for paladin already. But as my guild has a WHM main already I didn't want to dedicate time to making another one (unless it turns out it's the only one I enjoy playing as!) Figured I would test out the other choices first.

Also I do have heavensward, but I have done a lot of tanking lately and thought I deserved a break haha. 50 seemed a good idea as it gives me a lot of content unlocked, and I can buy my room in the FC house ^^

Then you could start leveling ACN until you unlock SCH. You need to complete the Main Story until you get access to The Holy See of Ishgard to unlock AST anyways, so you might as well do it as SCH. You'll have plenty of time to see if you like the job.

SCH has a healing style based on shielding and burning cooldowns/stacks to deal with spike damage when needed. It has less tools built in their GCD to deal with damage, though, which makes it a more complex healer than WHM. Basically, you have to be able to predict damage before it's dealt for a lot of the SCH tools to be effective. If you can't do that or if the damage was too big for your shields to hold, you'll have to burn stacks/cooldowns to heal through damage you couldn't prevent from happening.

This is actually very fun, but it requires more practice. WHM is far simpler in this aspect, since you have healing tools to deal with any kind of damage after it has been dealt.

AST has both healing styles, which you can choose from according to your personal preference in healing or when you need one of the styles to meet duty requirements. Since it can buff the party with cards, it has some weaknesses in healing/shielding, mostly in the AoE department, but their single target healing/shielding (when critical hits are not happening) is possibly the highest in the game. It's a complex job to master because you need to know a lot about how the game works, including the basics about the DPS rotation of every single job in the game; if you don't know that, you won't be able to play AST properly or at least make it equivalent in performance when compared to WHM/SCH.

I main AST, and it's my favorite healer so far, but I acknowledge that it's harder to play than the other two in some aspects and that may be frustrating to a lot of players out there.

If you're more interested in Dungeons than in hardcore end-game content, I'd choose SCH and not AST.