It's a shame that the SCH nerfs went basically unnoticed to the vast majority of the healer community due to the incessant amount of whining from White Mages. When you look at the kits in a vacuum, SCHs lost the most out of the three healers.


-Passive Healing. Embrace nerf by 50 potency, even when you include the addition of Fey Union, means SCH's overall passive HoT-style healing has gotten worse. Assuming Fey Union ticks on the same time Embrace would, Fey Union is essentially a 230 potency spike on Embrace and counteracts approximately 5 ticks of Embrace nerf in this spike. You essentially get 30 charge per minute and it costs 10 charge per activation. At 20 ticks /minute SCHs essentially have 10 ticks of "normal" Embrace" and 10 ticks of "nerfed" Embrace. This value gets better as you hold onto more gauge but it's clear based on this line:
The Faerie Gauge increases when a faerie is summoned and an Aetherflow action used by you inflicts an effect on a target.
SCH's would need to resummon their fairy to get Embrace back into the baseline it had pre-SB.

-MP issues. Until we see how much Lucid Dreaming restore at 70, it'll be hard to say if the nerf to SCH's MP regeneration is a net loss, gain, or neutral with the change to from 20% MP restore to 10% MP restore. With that being said, SCH still has the highest MP cost per potency in the game. Physick is now behind due to changes in Cure for WHM and Sects for AST, Adlo and Succor have both always been more expensive than their counterparts in the AST and WHM kits. The consolidation of DoTs and the removal of Shadow Flare as a GCD means there are much less filler Potency/MP efficient DoTs SCH can apply during their downtime. This means SCH has to fill these voids with their significantly less efficient Broils if they want to remain active. For reference, SCH lost 3 GCD-type DoTs with the changes. With a lower overall passive healing, SCH will also have to heal more frequently than they have had to in the past. Conversely, if the SCH has to resummon the fairy often to get their fairy gauge up to snuff, that's even more MP to use (as well as Swiftcast).

-AoE damage has gone down just with the radical change to Bane and the removal of Blizzard II.

-Mitigation. Nocturnal AST now provides more consistent and powerful shields at less MP cost with the only saving grace SCH has as a shield healer is in their Deployed Adlo. Non-shield mitigation tools have been shifted to DPS so they'll be more readily available for any healer composition. While SCH still has Sacred Soil and Fey Convenant, Nocturnal provides higher shields overall and if push comes to shove can mitigate even further than SCH with the use of Expanded Bole. Mind you, Deployed Adlo under extremely good circumstances (Critlo, Defiance, Convalescence, Largresse, Fey Illuminate, Mantra, etc.) is obscenely powerful but that shouldn't be the one single trump card SCH brings to the mitigation table now.

WHM didn't lose too much compared to SCH - just the fact they gained a "core mechanic" that is counter-intuitive but WHM's core kit remains well intact otherwise.