It has begun!

[loreleidiangelo]

I agree with the above.

AST is a beautifully designed and versatile job but WHM is literally so simple it's hard to mess it up, it's an absolute animal built from the ground up to not let people die. If they tweak that stupid lily mechanic to work with skills that actually matter: It'll be even better.

SCH on the other hand...

I'll respectfully disagree here; I do not think AST is a well-designed job at all. I think it's the product of developers so afraid of designing a healer that might be off-meta or compete with one of the two existing healers that they in their infinite wisdom created a healer who by its nature will compete with both...forever.

At the risk of being off-topic, in my ideal world...

1.) AST would be the pre-eminent HoT/sustain healer; a kit entirely focused around stacking multiple HoTs, increasing their power, increasing their duration, frontloading their HoTs for a burst of healing when they need it. Hugely efficient mana costs but outside of a few cooldowns lack burst healing when it might be needed. They wouldn't be completely helpless against back-to-back damage, but it would be their weakness and they'd have a clearly defined niche.

2.) Subsequently, WHM would have a decent (not all) portion of its HoTs removed to prevent role overlap. They would be the ultimate burst healers instead, with relatively higher mana costs to reflect their power but a whole kit of awesome healing cooldowns that could drag parties back from the brink. In drawn-out fights where they're forced to spam they might struggle, but there needs to be some penalty for being the gods of HPS lol.

3.) SCH shields would see hefty reductions in mana cost in return for losing some of their redonkulous reactive healing. Shields should BE how they "heal" people; by preventing the damage done in the first place. If they lose a lot of their reactive healing though, I really think shields should stack - even if just partially (ie the second shield only adds 50% of its value if the target already has Galvanize). Double SCH comps DO happen in DF and no one wants a return to double SCH Titan HM lol. I just think the bulk of their power should be in shielding and manipulating those shields, not in spamming Lustrate and Indom. This is probably the most controversial of my wish list. No, I do not want to remove the fairy: I think she'd work well as SCH's only real form of reactive healing. I'd like Selene to have more value, but I'm not exactly sure how in regards to the changes I've posted here.



To be honest, there's a lot more that would need to go into that, like making HPS have a more equivalent value to eHPS (right now you want eHPS since preventing damage lets you DPS more and damage isn't frequent enough to put a lot of stake in quickly recovering health bars - just let Eos and AOE regens do the work), and adjusting mana costs and cooldowns and all that jazz, but that's my rough ideal. I'd love for all three healers to have their own strengths and weaknesses, even if that means some healers may have to work harder on certain fights than others (and vice-versa).

An easier fix would just be to scrap Noct AST and have now-Diurnal-only AST be WHM's competition for another expac, then introduce a new shielding healer with DPS in 5.0 that's meant to match SCH. I think that boxing healers into archetypes like that is systemically poor class design overall, though, and lends itself to more kit homogenization that I already think we have too much of.

Sorry for text wall; it's 6 AM and I'm stuck at work. Boredom is a scary thing.