4.1 and us healers

[Erakir]

Prior to 4.0 WHM DPS was unsustainable due to MP issues; that's why SCH was the definitive single-target attacker despite WHM's greater burst.

Sure, prior to 4.0, but we're past that now and it's still holding water to an extent. Now WHM and SCH appear to pretty similar with their personal numbers.

Despite Stone sea sky having a ~10% DPS advantage for WHM with the superior MP economy, for the various fights:

-WHM and SCH roughly share damage output on Neo with an edge to WHM. This is a fight in particular where I constantly hear that you become a "Green DPS" for long periods at a time, which ties into points below.
-SCH appears more often with than WHM on Exdeath, Hali, Catastrophe, and Alte Roite, but you still see both.
-AST is pretty much nowhere to be seen in comparison as expected.

Take these as you will as they're gonna be speed based, and most combined healer damage ones are using AST + SCH/WHM, etc etc.

Hali's gonna be annoying to deal with just cause of ninjas that can be used to pad.

The takeaway is obvious. Due to overall healing kits, damage kits, and expected playstyle in raids, despite a whopping 10% theoretical expectation from SE on raw numbers, WHM does not maintain that edge in a raid environment. Nor does it bring a nifty little crit buff.

It means that Scholar damage is ultimately more practical to maintain (or approach optimal) in raid environments and WHM does not have the stationary time to tunnel into damage that they need to see that 10% advantage. There are going to be tons of factors to look at for *why* that's the case, but such things will include WHM needing to spend 10% of its GCDs to maintain regen on a single target with reasonable uptime, having to make the choice to heal via regen or DPS via Aero when moving (and also only having the option to clip Aero, compared to choosing between Ruin 2, Bio 2, and Miasma 2). They will include the difference of maintaining DoTs with longer durations requiring less GCDs (SCH) than ones with more potency per second that fade quicker (WHM). They'll include the ability to dump Aetherflow into ED even though that's not necessarily the ideal way to spend a charge.

They'll include each job's role and responsibilities, as WHM and SCH don't exactly do the same things. It's a very long comparison to really do thoroughly, and I'm not going to try at the moment. It's even harder when you try to go digging for -real- maximization of combined damage which includes healers sharing healing burden whenever possible so they're both able to make use of their strongest personal DPS spells more often and not have one go into nuke spam while the other has to spam healing for 30 seconds.

I'm not really complaining, either - but the data's out there. WHMs are not pushing the damage difference SE has given them the potential to, meaning it's just likely not as practical to use enough GCDs on damage with the healing GCDs they're fitting in + mobility options. We're not the ones that bring a crit buff or raidwide mitigation, either. We do, however, bring the nuke that makes you KNOW we're DPSing. Ka-chunk~

Edit: And to try and be fair, on the flipside if you go looking at healing numbers themselves it's quite a different story as scholars are hard to come by, but that again has to take into consideration who's shielding and who's HoTting in comps and a whole other variety of factors like general utility. Plus you've got the bit that the better your group is, the less healing is required, so these numbers are often a show of who can put out the most emergency wipe-prevention sort of healing. The whole thing is messy and is part of why raw number comparisons are only going to show so much. It's just never as easy when you add in the variable factor of healing to try and compare these sorts of things. Ever.

Double edit: To re-iterate, this isn't a complaint, just an observation. If their idea is WHM should bring superior personal damage numbers in raid content due to a lack of ability to buff others' damage, then I'd say they should look into some adjustments since theoretical maximums aren't really being reached - but that's far from the only way to balance things, and like others I believe healers are ultimately in an alright state right now. Could be better - hence succor tweaks, Adlo tweaks, etc, but feels like one of the better periods that I've been playing in representation-wise that I personally remember.