Healer adjustment in 4.05

[Wilbow]

I agree with the sentiment that there is fault in looking at the absolute best and an average in the 80% is more pragmatic. For those wondering here are the 80 percentile results:

Lakshmi EX
Susano EX

Inb4 "SEE! SCH IS BETTER DPS!!!!"

I will disagree with your sentiment that setting up Expanded Balance is easier for a AST and rather push the argument that both setting up Expanded Balance on AST and providing heavy DPS while on WHM while not shirking your healing duties have similar skill sets - setting up your oGCDs to minimize your GCD clipping.

The thing about SCH having the best healer DPS is actually more depressing if you look into it deeper. At 80 percentile, AST and WHM HPS are basically neck and neck at around 4k HPS, while SCH is sitting at 2.5k (I have no idea how it calculates shields into its calcs, so take it with a small grain of salt).

Coupled with the fact that WHM personal DPS on a dummy is higher than that of SCH, the best interpretation is that AST and WHM are doing the heavy lifting of healing because SCH isn't really as able to, leaving SCH to sit there spamming Broil II and thus accumulate a higher DPS in comparison than it otherwise would.

Healer balance is mainly down to the specifics of SCH/WHM changes on Tuesday, really.

As for the second point, when I say "easier", I don't really mean from a skill ceiling perspective. To be more specific, AST can set up Expanded Balance while healing with GCDs, while DPSing vs. healing with WHM is a mutually exclusive choice outside of things like Assize. This is largely in part because oGCDs, even at maximum clipping, only eat up around 1/3 - 1/5 of a GCD, while GCDs eat up 2.5 seconds. In addition, ASTs can barely clip, if at all, if they use a oGCD after the 2 second cast of Benefic or Benefic II, not just after Aspected Benefic.

Say you have a raid encounter where the incoming damage is low and you spend 80% of your GCDs DPSing and 20% of them healing; both healers won't really have much of an issue giving the raid DPS then, right? But if the incoming damage goes up (phase change, mechanic is failed, etc.) and now you're spending only 20% of your GCDs DPSing and 80% of them healing, WHM DPS is hurt way more than AST because AST can probably still find the time to put out Expanded Balance, but a WHM has no way to recover extra Stone IVs except *maybe* (s)he might find a way to spend 30% of their GCDs DPSing instead if they're wise with oGCDs. This is somewhat troubling for WHM in Savage because I can only presume that the healing requirements in the upcoming Savage will be higher than those of the Ex primals.