Another WHM chicken little sees the sky falling. The sky is an AST.

[Mutemutt]

As a SCH main, I would say that at least your gauge has something to it, even if it is underwhelming. Ours is just a stack which could have been an icon with roman numerals like AF is, and ASTs is literally just UI for cards.

And the funny part is that when the ast gauge was first introduced, it was actually detrimental. I believe all the restrictive parts that came with the change have been undone at this point, but that still leaves the gauge being largely redundant.

[KDSilver]

Cleric Stance though, it's the one thing I would really like back. Though I know with the direction they seem to be taking, it will never be the case. It's a shame because I completely understand that for jobs like WHM and AST it was probably just a hinderance, but SCH has tools that work with the old CS so well and it gave that much more depth to the job. It really is still a snoozefest compared to how it played in 3.x. :C

Not only SCH actually. Yes, he has "more" tools that works with the old CS, but Ast and Whm too.

Actually, the funny thing is, with all the new healing skills they gave us, we would have actually been able to have a better uptime of CS.

SCH still has the fairy/Rouse/Whispering Dawn ect... but now got Excog and Fey Union
As for WHM, he could have avoid dropping CS/or stay a bit longer thanks to Devine Benison, Benediction which got its CD reduced and Plenary Indulgence
And for Ast, of course, Earthly Star incredible potency when you can pretty much ignore damages until those explode.

So with our current toolkit, we would have been certainly more efficient with the old Cleric Stance.

[EaMett]

lots of stuff

I've been meaning to reply to this. I actually compiled a lot of data but never got to finish it up before the patch hit and then got caught up in it.
Now with the current AST status I feel like collecting more data would be a mute point.
Just to respond to this you really need to compare the rdps for a larger sample size (remember whm rdps is lower than their pdps so you need to subtract some). I only collected data from 99 and 75 percentiles but both had AST ahead. The data I collected was going by best kill times to ensure "group over individual" attitude on those same fights and then I curated the data to make sure party members are all of the same level and one of the healers isn't carrying the heals.

My initial hunch was that the lower you go the more this trend reverses. Since entry level on AST is much harder than on WHM I expect there to be a skill gap in the lower tiers for equivalent results. But as WHM starts capping out in higher tiers, AST still has room to grow.

And since higher tiers are all that really matter when it comes to raw class balance.. yeah. (doesn't mean SE sees it this way, clearly AST buff has been pretty big judging from recent parses)

[Fiorinol]

snip

SCH in 4.0 was by far the worst healer balance-wise.

As for the SCH gauge, it's pretty much a stack, but it does something gameplay-wise. Lillies are used for nothing and you never ever look at them; they feel like a mechanic designed solely for PvP where managing your lillies is essential.

snip

+50 percentile is where I tend to play, although my deltascape parses don't speak well for that; we had a healer that barely dpsed or communicated for a few weeks. I didn't bother with sigma because I couldn't find a group that I liked.

But this is also where balance gets concerning; I don't like RNG, the cards cause petty infighting I don't want to deal with (Gimme all the cards cuz muh fflogs), the class has other things I don't like, notably Earthly Star doesn't feel good to me, because of the weird delay on cast/detonation. And I don't like pet management.

I don't want AST to be WHM 2.0 again.