Seriously, when are you guys gonna nerf ASTs again? Its highly needed.

[Khalithar]

Healers don't need nerfs until they adjust melee and mch.

I have to say I disagree. But I will add that I am against healing in PVP in general, but if we absolutely must have it I'd want to either see the healing debuff warrior and nin get apply to PVP targets or healing receive a flat 50% nerf in PVP situations only. I'm a firm believer that healing in PVP should delay death but not prevent it. There is a notable difference between those two concepts.

[TiramisuMacaron]

I have to say I disagree. But I will add that I am against healing in PVP in general, but if we absolutely must have it I'd want to either see the healing debuff warrior and nin get apply to PVP targets or healing receive a flat 50% nerf in PVP situations only. I'm a firm believer that healing in PVP should delay death but not prevent it. There is a notable difference between those two concepts.

Odds are super stacked against healer. If a healer has no purify, I can easily solo them on monk if I get running crits. If a monk and mch time their attacks, they can do like 12000+ damage in a second. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't played much high level feast, or have even touched a healer in ranked feast. Any healer in the top 100 will agree with me that you CANNOT heal against good players, someone will die if they are playing correctly. Let's not even bring melee LB into this argument.....

[Zojha]

If a healer has no purify, I can easily solo them on monk if I get running crits. If a monk and mch time their attacks, they can do like 12000+ damage in a second.

That would kill everything except tanks, which means the odds are also super stacked against every other job except tanks. Not a very good argument. And one second implies they can do that with only two skills, since there's a 0,5-0,75 animation lock between skills. My personal crit record is like 6,7k with a fully buffed Between the Eyes in close quarters. Can't do that twice in a row, tho, so...number seems a tad exaggerated.

The odds are stacked against healers, yes, because the point and purpose of a healer is to make a game boring and stale by creating a perpetual stalemate of maxed HP on all players. Hence, games with all healers tend to be rather boring and only end thanks to the timer - the game doesn't work when everyone is actively working against it due to their role. Hence, culling time, vulnerability stacks and limit breaks were developed - those are the actual odds stacked against the healer. By design, they have to be denied their endgame and those mechanics were put in place to ensure just that.

Moreover, it says a lot that "playing correctly" in this context always means:"Countering the healer" via coordinated burst. That's not a given in game design, that's only contextually true because healers are so powerful that nothing but burst matters until culling time, as healers can undo everything else. In fact, when you look at job viability in PvP, the main criterion for viability seems to be how well and frequently you can counter the healer.
Summoners are a good example - Truckloads of damage, but so slow that healers can react, hence not favored. MCH - less damage, but so quickly that a healer has trouble reacting, hence meta pick. You name melee Limit Break, but ranged LB actually does more damage if it hits two or more targets. Why is melee limit break considered so powerful or even an issue then? Because it deals the damage to 1 target and thus gives the healer less opportunity to react. That's how powerful healers are, to twist and twirl the entire meta around them.

No surprise that every group wants to have at least one healer. Consequently, I, at least, never saw anyone beg people to please please switch to Monk or Machinist to stand a chance but frequently see people do that for healers. Their only weakness is that since by design, they are working against the winning condition of the mode, stacking them can't lead to success, because it leaves nobody working towards the winning condition of the mode, which is killing. That doesn't take away from their power however, it only shows their basic design flaw.

[TiramisuMacaron]

That would kill everything except tanks, which means the odds are also super stacked against every other job except tanks. Not a very good argument. And one second implies they can do that with only two skills, since there's a 0,5-0,75 animation lock between skills. My personal crit record is like 6,7k with a fully buffed Between the Eyes in close quarters. Can't do that twice in a row, tho, so...number seems a tad exaggerated.

A crit clean shots damage calculates at the same time as BTE. As does tornado kick into axe kick.

If you stun -> buff clean shot + BTE all of that damage will calculate at once because of the cleanshot damage delay. Same with tornado into axe kick. Tornado calculates slow and axe calculates fast... it isn't an exaggeration, you are just using a false assumption of damage calculating the millisecond you press the skill.

If you don't understand this, I can't take the rest of your post very seriously. How much do you even play high level PvP?

[KusoWat]

Snip

He/she doesn't play high level. They exist solely to contradict.

EDIT: SMN isn't favored because it lacks MP Regen, not because people fail to burst correctly with the job. MCH is meta pick because of their burst and tons of utility.

[Enlial]

A crit clean shots damage calculates at the same time as BTE. As does tornado kick into axe kick.

If you stun -> buff clean shot + BTE all of that damage will calculate at once because of the cleanshot damage delay. Same with tornado into axe kick. Tornado calculates slow and axe calculates fast... it isn't an exaggeration, you are just using a false assumption of damage calculating the millisecond you press the skill.

If you don't understand this, I can't take the rest of your post very seriously. How much do you even play high level PvP?

You're talking about animation cancelling which is a really weird thing. Using an instant "fast" ability immediately following a slow one will make the slow abilities damage appear on your screen, and in your combat log, much faster. Clean shot has about a 1 sec delay, but by following it up with an off-gcd you reduce that delay to about .05 seconds (no really, I fraps'd and checked it frame by frame xD). The weirdness comes into play when you consider that the game exists in multiple states. What you see, what the server sees, and what others see. The game has to make some sort of compromise between those different states and it seems to have a lot of strange rules for how it does that. As an example, anyone who's ever raid tanked as war knows that butchers block is a horrible way to pick up hate because of its delay, so yeah the delay is definitely real in some ways. On the other hand, if I use butchers block on a low level mob, and another character, in my case an alt on a separate account on another computer, shortly after uses an instant cast+fast ability, both attacks appear in the combat log, and the instant cast does appear first, but the kill gets awarded to the butchers block (and this explains a lot of what happens with kills in frontlines xD) So, in some ways, animation delay isnt real and the game considers the attack to have happened much sooner than when you see the damage appear.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that its more complicated than you're making it sound. I'm not really sure I follow the argument here at all, actually xD 2 competent DPS should be able to destroy an equally competent AST. 2 bad dps wont be able to kill a mediocre AST. 2 mediocre dps vs a good AST, well idk, thats a tossup xP depends how good and how mediocre I guess. You shouldnt be comparing AST to DPS, though, because, um, its not a dps? I think ast and whm are pretty well balanced, actually. I feel like ast has an edge at lower skill levels and whm would probably, with the major advantage of sleep, at higher ones, but idk because Im a casul scrub. Sch is def inferior to both, in feast at least. Frontlines all 3 are perfectly viable for the most part. So really I think you'd need to either bring sch up to whm+ast's level, or bring ast+whm down to sch's, and then decide if the role of healer is too great in pvp.

But... really, and frankly, I think people aught to stop looking for scapegoats to blame their failures on.

[Cleanse]

Hence, culling time, vulnerability stacks and limit breaks were developed - those are the actual odds stacked against the healer.

You can also look at it in a different light. There are bad dps that need the culling, vuln and limit break just so something dies. Playing at the highest level all around, DPS and crowd control are king.

Moreover, it says a lot that "playing correctly" in this context always means:"Countering the healer" via coordinated burst.

This is not true. Playing correctly in a team game is more than countering the healer. Stopping enemy burst is more important. Not bursting into tank cooldowns is important. Etc. It's a lot more complex than countering the healer.

No surprise that every group wants to have at least one healer. Consequently, I, at least, never saw anyone beg people to please please switch to Monk or Machinist to stand a chance but frequently see people do that for healers.

I have been in many games where people have been asked to change from healer/tank to dps.