SCH needs some nerfs

[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.