SCH needs some nerfs

[Ghishlain]

I don't necessarily agree with the damage part. There's a lot of things you have to do to optimize damage as an AST. Lining up cards so that it doesn't decrease rDPS but let's you get potential lords under raid buffs like trick, litany, contagion etc takes a bit of thought as well as using sleeve draw optimally so you can potentially get 2/3 lords under raid buffs.

For example 3 Lord trick would be have a held lord and save it for trick > use it > draw > redraw and and minor arcana it (only if its a bad card) > Lord > Sleeve Draw > Lord. That's not even the maximum potential either since there's 4 Lord trick (generally only used prepull) since it takes a bit to pull off.

4 Lord trick: Have Lord held > Use redraw and hold it for 20+ seconds (bad card only) > Use Lord > GCD > MA draw card + Lord > GCD > Draw + Redraw > GCD > Lord + Sleeve > GCD > Lord.

And if you let your Sleeve Draw shift even a little bit you're losing quite a bit of damage so making sure delayed draws don't interfere with SDs CD is pretty crucial.

Where as White Mage is just hit Assize under TA if it doesn't save a heal and holding PoM for 30 seconds so it aligns with 3 minute burst but if you lose a use you just use it on CD. Not thinking too much about what you're doing.

There's also more you have to know and study up on as an AST vs WHM to maximize it's potential. If you draw an Arrow during a point of the fight who does it benefit the most? The NIN will get an extra Spinning Edge but the DRG will gain a Full Thrust but if you don't know that and give it to the NIN it's an easy loss of potency. It's also important to know how giving that Arrow during the point of the fight will affect their rotation at that point i.e giving the DRG an Arrow can make BoTD and oGCD usage a little funky. So you basically have to study everybodys own timings. If the Arrows value wouldn't exceed 230 potency (Broil II) then you're left at 2 options. Either give it to the SCH as they are almost guaranteed to get an extra GCD from that Arrow or gamble it to try and get 300 potency.

It's the same if you pull an extra Balance. You gotta know how much damage each person is doing relative to the timer on the fight. Giving it to the NIN during 2:00 intervals so it catches their full burst. Giving it to the BRD during it's Raging Strikes + Minuet window. Giving it to DRG when they are about to enter Nastrond. The problem with Balance is because it's 30-45 seconds even if it catches their burst it might not be worth it if the seconds after burst is bad i.e MCH where they have a pretty powerful 10 second window but drop afterwards.

That's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of AST optimization, there's a lot more minor stuff but those alone make AST harder to play than WHM. It's why I think AST is the hardest job to play as they have to optimize healing, optimize the raids DPS and optimize their personal DPS. As a SCH with a high end cohealer all I do is fill in the gaps where my ASTs heals dont reach.

It's also pretty interesting to note that AST does about 8-10 more CPM than WHMs do on average. Juggling a lot more actions than WHM has to even if it's because they have a 1.5s cast time.

I agree though that AST damage shouldn't be doing WHM levels of DPS (more after the Minor Arcana change). WHM pDPS should be 15% more damage than AST and SCH (if AST/SCH are doing 4k then WHM is doing 4.6k). That value changes in between patches as Balance and Chain get stronger per patch. I don't like to take Fey Wind into account because on XIVRDPS it's weighted way higher than it should be as it can't properly calculate the amount of extra GCDs you gain from it giving everyone a set value. Even if you don't gain a GCD from it Fey Wind will still have value on it.

I really like this post just because it gives a lot of insight for card decision making at a very high end level. It doesn't change my opinion that the reward for playing AST as a lower skill level feels far too good for the effort you have to put into it as you can ignore a lot of this optimization and still get good mileage for your buffs as long as you have a general idea of how kits operate and a running gauge of everyone's DPS - but it definitely puts into light the amount of effort one has to put on to the table to reach those top percentiles. And even if you remove the card system entirely from AST they would still do more rDPS than WHM due to their current levels of pDPS.

Give party buffs gain strength as the gear levels increase in an expansion, I almost wonder if the party buffs given by healers could use a minor nerf just to allow WHM to keep up with the power creep for the expansion. Just some food for thought to put on the table.

This this this. SE gave us more healing tools in Stormblood and REDUCED healing requirements in fights which is just baffling. Because of these new tools Ultimates are a lot easier to heal than they could have been. The only truly healing intensive part of UCoB was Teraflare phase (adds). Golden looked intimidating but there's only a spike of damage every like 40 seconds then no damage aside from auto attacks and tank busters. Same goes for UWU, Garuda and Aetherplasm phase were the only real healing intensive fights. My group got through UWU with 9 Succors during boss uptime. 3 Of those being in Garuda and 6 being after Aetheroplasm. And this was before the Passage and Collective change, I don't wanna think how much easier it is now.

3 Succors, 2 Indoms, 2 Excogs, 1 Soil in Garuda. 1 Adlo Deploy, 1 Indom, 1 Excog in Ifrit. 0 GCDs 1 Indom Titan. 6 Succors, 6 Indoms, 1 Excog. Total of 11 healer GCDs, 10 Indoms, and 4 Excogs over 15 minutes because AST can cover the majority of the damage with Earthly Star, Collective and proper Aspected Helios usage during downtime. And because there's so much time in between each set of damage Star and Collective are nearly up for every big AoE. As I said before this was before the Collective and Passage change so you can probably get rid of soils all together and probably 2 succors and a deploy.

I haven't had the chance to optimize UCoB like I did with UWU but I have a rough mapout of it and there's even less healing than UWU. The majority of healing will come from Add Phase. Even though it's super optimized it's still pretty pathetic that you can get away with doing that amount of heals just because ASTs kit meshes so well with the fight design.

I am actually curious. If you look at the percentile logs for UwU, WHM pretty much kills the rest of the competition at almost all percentiles. Is there a reason for that in UwU?

If healing requirements are so low, that would imply a AST/SCH team would be able to handle it easily imply the three healers would have the same DPS heirarchy as Savage yet WHM sits on the healer DPS throne for UwU. I've only seen up to Titan enrage, so I don't have the know how to dissect the fight fully, let alone how to optimize fully for the fight.

[edit] Just going to randomly add that I feel like due to the way the fight was structured, the buff alignments for WHM worked out well as I feel like I had PoM + CS up for every primal transition which coincided with TA applications which may have helped the DPS.

[loreleidiangelo]

I really like this post just because it gives a lot of insight for card decision making at a very high end level. It doesn't change my opinion that the reward for playing AST as a lower skill level feels far too good for the effort you have to put into it as you can ignore a lot of this optimization and still get good mileage for your buffs as long as you have a general idea of how kits operate and a running gauge of everyone's DPS - but it definitely puts into light the amount of effort one has to put on to the table to reach those top percentiles. And even if you remove the card system entirely from AST they would still do more rDPS than WHM due to their current levels of pDPS.

Even then, in the example they listed, fudging up that decision-making is literally no more potency loss than blowing a SCH stack on something that isn't Energy Drain (10 pp loss per second when you do the math on it). And that's on a pretty hypothetical/niche situation to boot (drawing Arrow, not having Shuffle up, not having Royal Road for an AOE effect), and it ALSO assumes equal skill level/skill input on behalf of the players involved (aka, the DRG and NIN are pressing buttons at the same speed and are optimizing buffs exactly as they should), and also that they have the same gear/are doing the same damage output, which is not a given until we're talking absolute BiS. Even then, an RNG crit will still completely put the wash on any calculations you'd made about this one extra GCD you'd get from a raw Arrow card, so...why should this situation even be on the radar for balance discussion? There are too many variables to make it a meaningful bout of decision-making, IMO. Meanwhile, every other AST on the planet just uses their abilities to fish out AOE Spears, Balances, and Arrows and gets insane value out of very little planning, decision-making, or forethought.

Their point about CPM is also pretty moot frankly, because AST toolkit is bloated with a bunch of stuff to try to get favorable situations out of crap RNG. It's easy to do 8-10 more CPM than your co-healer when you have a 1.5 second cast speed on your basic damage nuke, you have two Draw actions every minute, and very likely two Shuffles every minute, a Spread, as well as possibly one Royal Road and/or one Minor Arcana every minute. IIRC Drawing a card and using a card also count as "casts", inflating AST CPM even more (aka Draw Balance, counts as a cast, put it in Spread, counts as a cast, use it from Spread counts as a cast). It's hardly worth discussing. Yes, it's a ton of APM, but so is mashing an Embrace macro on SCH, except that Embrace doesn't get counted as a "SCH ability" so it doesn't get to inflate their CPM because it's the pet move.

EDIT: Since I'm aware I sound a bit like a heel here, I guess the easiest way to state my position is that I think it's better to look at how low the AST skill floor is rather than talk about its skill ceiling, at least when it comes to the measure of their cards. When the difference in "optimal" vs "average" card use is like, 300 potency over 30 seconds in an extremely fringe situation unlikely to crop up with any frequency in the average raid or a 10% DPS increase on a sustained damage dealer vs one about to use their burst vs 5% increased damage for the entire raid or whatever I just don't feel like it's relevant. Most of the time using AOE damage increase cards or a single-target card on your highest damage dealer is going to be more than enough contribution for an AST to shove way beyond the contribution of WHM (and possibly SCH tbh), and that's the point I think SE should address. Ironically, if AST card buffs were STRONGER using one sub-optimally would have pretty devastating results, but I don't think any of us who main healers in this game want AST cards to actually be more valuable than they are now lol.

[Ghishlain]

Even then, in the example they listed, fudging up that decision-making is literally no more potency loss than blowing a SCH stack on something that isn't Energy Drain (10 pp loss per second when you do the math on it). And that's on a pretty hypothetical/niche situation to boot (drawing Arrow, not having Shuffle up, not having Royal Road for an AOE effect), and it ALSO assumes equal skill level/skill input on behalf of the players involved (aka, the DRG and NIN are pressing buttons at the same speed and are optimizing buffs exactly as they should), and also that they have the same gear/are doing the same damage output, which is not a given until we're talking absolute BiS. Even then, an RNG crit will still completely put the wash on any calculations you'd made about this one extra GCD you'd get from a raw Arrow card, so...why should this situation even be on the radar for balance discussion? There are too many variables to make it a meaningful bout of decision-making, IMO. Meanwhile, every other AST on the planet just uses their abilities to fish out AOE Spears, Balances, and Arrows and gets insane value out of very little planning, decision-making, or forethought.

Their point about CPM is also pretty moot frankly, because AST toolkit is bloated with a bunch of stuff to try to get favorable situations out of crap RNG. It's easy to do 8-10 more CPM than your co-healer when you have a 1.5 second cast speed on your basic damage nuke, you have two Draw actions every minute, and very likely two Shuffles every minute, a Spread, as well as possibly one Royal Road and/or one Minor Arcana every minute. IIRC Drawing a card and using a card also count as "casts", inflating AST CPM even more (aka Draw Balance, counts as a cast, put it in Spread, counts as a cast, use it from Spread counts as a cast). It's hardly worth discussing. Yes, it's a ton of APM, but so is mashing an Embrace macro on SCH, except that Embrace doesn't get counted as a "SCH ability" so it doesn't get to inflate their CPM because it's the pet move.

Oh, I don't disagree about your point regarding the ease of the AST kit and the power you can get out of it and how it should be discussed as a balancing point.

My post was more about how I appreciate the thought that the top tier players have to go through in order to eck out that additional 0.0000001% damage (value exaggerated, I honestly dunno how much it actually changes). I could never play to that level of thought but I like reading about it as I've tried my hand at theorycrafting card selection based on tool kits.

I think it says a lot that, even if you were to never touch your cards, AST (and by extension SCH and Chain / Fey Wind) would still be able to out DPS WHM and thus add more rDPS than the "pure healer" job in the game.

[loreleidiangelo]

Oh, I don't disagree about your point regarding the ease of the AST kit and the power you can get out of it and how it should be discussed as a balancing point.

My post was more about how I appreciate the thought that the top tier players have to go through in order to eck out that additional 0.0000001% damage (value exaggerated, I honestly dunno how much it actually changes). I could never play to that level of thought but I like reading about it as I've tried my hand at theorycrafting card selection based on tool kits.

I think it says a lot that, even if you were to never touch your cards, AST (and by extension SCH and Chain / Fey Wind) would still be able to out DPS WHM and thus add more rDPS than the "pure healer" job in the game.

I did make an edit to my original post, because I realize that I sounded a bit like a tool who didn't appreciate Jinhzu's breakdown of truly optimal card use vs "good enough for the other 99.9% of the game" card use. While I still maintain that the job is too easy for the 99.9%, that still doesn't make their points about the top .1% factually wrong, especially when talking about the job's skill ceiling rather than floor.

[Jinzhu]

I really like this post just because it gives a lot of insight for card decision making at a very high end level. It doesn't change my opinion that the reward for playing AST as a lower skill level feels far too good for the effort you have to put into it as you can ignore a lot of this optimization and still get good mileage for your buffs as long as you have a general idea of how kits operate and a running gauge of everyone's DPS - but it definitely puts into light the amount of effort one has to put on to the table to reach those top percentiles. And even if you remove the card system entirely from AST they would still do more rDPS than WHM due to their current levels of pDPS.

Give party buffs gain strength as the gear levels increase in an expansion, I almost wonder if the party buffs given by healers could use a minor nerf just to allow WHM to keep up with the power creep for the expansion. Just some food for thought to put on the table.

Yeah I agree that AST is is rewarded more for worse play in terms of damage. However I think that bad play is also punished more on AST because it makes your cohealer miserable. As an average AST will force you to heal more due to improper Star, CU, ED uses where as WHM there's not much that really punishes their cohealer (aside from the obvious of just not healing lmao). Can't tell you how many times i've been in a party with an AST who uses 2 Earthly Stars in a 10 minute fight and no CU or pops their Star when everyone is full HP. I would much rather have a WHM coheal than an AST coheal in PF for that one reason haha.

I've also been a huge advocate of nerfing Healer DPS in some way. In most groups our rDPS on healer beats most tanks which is ridiculous. I'm not sure how I feel about nerfing raid utility though because that's one of the things that keeps things interesting (looking at ARR where there was virtually no raid utility so there was no real coordination between players)

I am actually curious. If you look at the percentile logs for UwU, WHM pretty much kills the rest of the competition at almost all percentiles. Is there a reason for that in UwU?

If healing requirements are so low, that would imply a AST/SCH team would be able to handle it easily imply the three healers would have the same DPS heirarchy as Savage yet WHM sits on the healer DPS throne for UwU. I've only seen up to Titan enrage, so I don't have the know how to dissect the fight fully, let alone how to optimize fully for the fight.

[edit] Just going to randomly add that I feel like due to the way the fight was structured, the buff alignments for WHM worked out well as I feel like I had PoM + CS up for every primal transition which coincided with TA applications which may have helped the DPS.

One of the biggest reasons for that is because people aren't really optimizing Ultimate aside from a few groups because it's a huge time investment and because of that WHM exceeds as they don't really have to do too much optimization to hit high at the highest level compared to AST. (I also don't think the gap between WHM and AST is as big as Alphascape leaderboards are making it out to be. If you were to look at Sigmascape parses were a lot closer and it's not like that gap increases overnight. Hell the #1 Chaos for WHM is in a pug lol.)

There's a threshold on speed affecting your damage in UWU as well because of kill time. Depending on how fast you kill the primals the more your CDs can get misaligned. I think at about 7:25? If you kill Titan any earlier than that you lose a set of 3 minutes as they won't be back up for Ultima. To compare our fastest kill time is 14:23 (14:20 if someone lbed at the end xd) and we kill Titan at 7:00 and lost a use of Litany/Voice where as a groups with a kill time of 14:50+ got that use. You can also gain an extra use of Potions if you pop them during Ifrit dashes but again if you kill too fast they won't be back up in time for the opener so you're knocked down a use there as well.

Another problem with killing Ultima itself fast is that it's one of those fights where the longer it lives the more DPS you will do. There's two reasons 1. You have more time to bring your DPS up after the massive amount of downtime and healing and 2. Killing faster can mess with your reopener. In my best we killed it mid burst and thats starting as soon as it starts gathering aether. If the fight would have lasted 30 seconds longer my PB could have been around 100 DPS higher.

I'm not saying that's the reason that WHM is higher because the amount of groups actually killing it that fast is small but just comparing the top healer combined between SCH+AST and SCH+WHM and the WHM did 20 more healer GCDs than my AST. And ours isnt even completely optimized. Our current map out for heals is based around Selene where as the SCH+WHM one isn't. So that's 20+ healer GCDs less with Selene. Whispering Dawn is all fluff healing in with out current setup because Earthly Star covers all of the damage Whispering would. Sucks that we weren't able to get a kill with it because of Alphascape releasing. Anyways the only reason Selene is possible is because Earthly Star basically covers for WD and I can't imagine a WHM being able to do that without too much of a loss.

The pDPS discrepancy between WHM and AST is definitely over exaggerated though. It just comes down to the point I made before and that there are no truly great groups running with WHMs compared to their AST counterpart. Sure you can optimize on WHM but that's only a piece of the puzzle. The other halves being kill time, buff alignment and coordination and just looking at the top parses in Alphascape for WHM they are very mediocre in those aspects. Like I said earlier it's not like the DPS gap between WHM and other healers can just magically grow overnight. The best WHM in O9 was in a pug and is currently ranked #5 across all healers for that fight.