Quote Originally Posted by SilentVoice View Post
good arguments, thank you very much. i'll see if our group will be willing to attempt such group combo, at least in terms of healers, and see if numbers going up significally.
just one more thing. my AST is level 30, so i don't know anything about AST, hence the question. is AST+AST, just with different stances, could also be an effective choice, or they still be in each other ways (like WHM+WHM, SCH+SCH)?
While there would be potential for things like alternating card buffs with double AST, I personally would not recommend stacking double AST. Yes, they bring a lot of utility, especially if you get lucky enough for back-to-back Balances (though that takes a lot of kissing RNG’s behind for) and have two ASTs that can coordinate card usages extremely well (since the card buffs do not stack), but AST personal DPS is pretty weak right now (so double AST would have lower combined healer DPS), and with doubling up jobs, you also take an LB penalty. Best to go with AST/SCH because then not only is combined healer DPS higher, you have more options for party buffs, in my opinion. After all, card RNG is card RNG, and at least SCH can guarantee Chain every 2 minutes (plus Selene has Fey Wind up every 60 seconds), where as Double AST cannot always guarantee high Balance uptime (not even a single AST can do that, to be frank).

If this were HW (or early SB before some adjustments were made to SCH and Balance), then double AST would probably be a more viable option because Balance was ridiculously OP even though SCH was a DPS God amongst the healers (in HW). But, as it stands now, I would try to get optimal combined healer DPS while also keeping things like rBuffs in mind.

All this being said, the healer meta isn’t incredibly important unless your group is aiming to one day compete for world first, or do speed kills/parse runs. Ultimately, I think you should do whatever healer combination your healers feel comfortable with (WHM/SCH or WHM/AST may not be meta, but if your healers are uncomfortable with the other healing jobs, best they play what’s comfortable for them because being uncomfortable in a role will negatively impact performance and, by proxy, rDPS). If you’re just wanting to mess around and see if you can buff rDPS but not really be competitive about it, go for it, and know it’s okay if it “doesn’t work out” running SCH/AST.

My current static runs WHM/SCH because our WHM is more comfortable on WHM compared to AST, and our SCH doesn’t play AST. We cleared Neo as a group this week (some of us had already cleared weeks ago, but this was our first clear as a static), and while we may be super behind as a group compared to others, we still got the job done, and WHM/SCH works for us.