SCH needs some nerfs

[Ghishlain]

That's interesting. So even considering the fact WHM doesn't have many skills to juggle you still think it's harder to play than AST? Do you attribute the difficulty to it's turret nature?

...I realized I wrote the < in the wrong direction so I'll correct that with words but I still think you still understood my point.

I would feel AST is the easiest to play, WHM would be the next, followed by SCH.

I mimic's Moro's thoughts in the sense that AST is very streamlined. At it's core, you're essentially smashing Malefic III when not healing and using any and all oGCDs without a care about clipping. Your GCD heals at face value are generally equal to or better than WHM, even in diurnal.

With WHM you have to think about when you want to clip and you have far too many oGCDs to try to use within the windows that applying Regen and Aero II will allow you to. If you want to optimize for DPS, you need to plan out your heals and DoT applications much further in advance than you would have to as AST. And if you don't plan out those usages, you start running into significant clipping issues which in turn leads to significant loss of overall pDPS. Also the WHM oGCDs are less impactful but more varied, so you generally have to stack a few of them to get the same effectiveness as a single oGCD from AST. This also means the WHM has to think about how they want to layer their tools to maximize their effectiveness and give them enough tools to use throughout the fight to minimize GCD healing.

AST just doesn't have to face any of the challenges WHMs have to face when dealing with mechanics and clipping. Even if a party were to go south, the limited number of healing oGCD options for AST means you'll just go straight into turreting GCD heals where as WHMs have to fight with choosing to GCD heal or pop an oGCD and figure out how to make up for the loss of that oGCD later.

[edit] I'll just also add that even if both AST and WHM had the opportunity to turret, AST would have less decisions to make due to the limited number of healing oGCDs they have and even an "incorrect" use of an oGCD would result in minimal DPS loss while an incorrect oGCD on WHM results in a fair chunk of DPS being lost. [/edit]

Also, if I were to reverse your question and ask which jobs have the lowest skill floors, I'd say SCH has the lowest skill floor, followed by AST being on equal footing with WHM.

SCH has an auto healing pet, so it doesn't really get much easier than that if you're geared enough for the fairy to handle everything. AST's GCD heals are equal to or better than WHMs more often than naught, and they cost 10% less MP so "wasiting" GCD heals is less of a problem on AST than it is on WHM. WHM does have the benefit of having a larger eMP pool just because of Thin Air and Assize and have more answers to derps due to the myriad of oGCD heals it has at its disposal.

Do we happen to know how healers compare in a striking dummy dps comparison? Is WHM still leading here?

SSS-wise, WHM is still rated as the highest DPS with it going WHM > SCH > AST in terms of overall damage.

In Savage play, AST and SCH do about equal DPS with WHM lagging behind a good bit. I'd be on board with a DPS bump to WHM since it should have the highest pDPS if SSS is to be any indicator.

With that being said, WHM in Ultima (Ultimate) has the highest DPS of the three healers but a fair margin, which is where it should be. It's a shame it takes content as hard as Ultima to allow WHM to shine in that capacity.