Quote Originally Posted by Miste View Post
Um....do you realize what you just said?

If they simply need to be able to heal all the content in the game then all healers right now are 100% fine.

WHM, AST, and SCH can all heal and complete A12S which is the hardest piece of content atm. So you just invalidated any argument you had about nerfing AST or buffing WHM.

Well I guess that settles that.
I think you're taking a bit too simplistic of an approach, tbh. The point isn't that AST can heal all the raids in the game while having better utility, it's that they can heal all the raids in the game with the same ease as a WHM but with vastly better utility. It basically boils down to two approaches - homogenize the healers further so that one isn't really bringing anything different from the other, or acknowledge that skill gaps are a thing and make the healers with higher payoffs require better players to play them.

For what it's worth, I tried Googling my question I asked you earlier, and while I couldn't find any numerical data, it was interesting to see that the general thought on Reddit shortly after AST was released was that while Noct Sect didn't do as well at "off healing" as SCH that Di Sect was fine and nobody actually missed the 5% less healing potencies all that much. Even a criticism on this forum from one of the first ASTs to clear AS3 was more about the cards being too random and moves like Lightspeed/Disable having stupid criterion that limited their use, not about 5% less healing potency.

Searching further, the decision to boost AST healing potencies and re-tool a lot of their unique moves to more WHM/SCH-esque clones rather than adjusting card effects or card interactivity was also highly criticized both on Reddit and our very own healer subforum. I'd dare to posit that quite a few healers would be fine with AST being hit with a healing nerf bat to compensate for their various card QoL buffs received over the past year, rather than WHM getting their own version of a Balance card.

I still wish I had some hard data, though. People threw potencies around but no one seems to have run any numerical tests to see how exactly the actual values stacked against one another. Doing napkin math, at i261 it seems like my Benefic IIs would go from 8300 to about 7900, but that's a linear comparison and I know healing formulas aren't calculated bare-bones like that. Still, 400 HP is like 1.5% of a tank's HP bar, and AST has lower MP costs to boot. It just strikes me that a lot of fuss was made over their initial heal potencies for absolutely no reason.