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.

[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.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

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.

I really don't think this is the only case. Sure there's less good WHMs playing but even the best WHM parses are significantly below what an AST can do.
I really do feel like they overbuffed AST accidentally through the faster Malefic III casts. Unless you're a Bard or MCH, the game attempts to control caster damage throughput by forcing you to stop casting and move. I would think that every healers potential DPS is decided with this in mind, but now that AST is not playing by the rules and is able to cast non stop it's throwing things off.

Just looking at FFlogs, the DPS discrepancy between WHM and AST is about 1000 on average. That's just not normal no matter how you look at it.

[Jinzhu]

I really don't think this is the only case. Sure there's less good WHMs playing but even the best WHM parses are significantly below what an AST can do.
I really do feel like they overbuffed AST accidentally through the faster Malefic III casts. Unless you're a Bard or MCH, the game attempts to control caster damage throughput by forcing you to stop casting and move. I would think that every healers potential DPS is decided with this in mind, but now that AST is not playing by the rules and is able to cast non stop it's throwing things off.

Just looking at FFlogs, the DPS discrepancy between WHM and AST is about 1000 on average. That's just not normal no matter how you look at it.

Yeah they definitely overtuned AST. I made a breakdown about this before but AST gained about 4400-6600 potency from the change. How that bypassed SE is beyond me.

Anyways my point before was back in Sigma WHM was in a lot better spot for the first half of it and there were a lot of exceptional players and groups playing it. WHM actually had the highest parse unpadded out of all the healers in O5 and Clown Kefka and beat AST in every fight. One or two SCHs beat them in every other fight but they were really close.

That's comparing all the parses all the way to the end of Sigmascape right before Alphascape which means the AST changes are taken into consideration. What i'm saying is this discrepancy doesn't just increase to the extent people like to say it does or looks like. It's really just a player skill/group situation.

[KDSilver]

I made a breakdown about this before but AST gained about 4400-6600 potency from the change. How that bypassed SE is beyond me.

My guess is that they don't bother looking at it cause from their point of view (like they said several times), healers damages aren't taken into account, even if the clipping issue with AST was asked majorly by dpsing healer.
Not saying they shouldn't look at it, of course they should, but in their mind, since it's not required, it looks okay, until there's an uproar because healers damages are unbalanced and that's still raid contribution.

[LiddyGhu]

I don't disagree that Scholar is by far and away more powerful than the other two healers. But I want to tell you that the reasons you've mentioned on why scholar is unbalanced are all the wrong reasons. It's really all about the fairy.

Indomitability *does* come at a steep opportunity cost. It costs an aetherflow stack. You only get three of these every 45 seconds, and it has to compete with other tools in Scholar's own kit for usage. If you use Indomitability, you do not get one of :
Energy Drain
Sacred Soil
Excogitation
Lustrate

Perhaps the LARGEST opportunity cost here is the Energy Drain, because it does damage and restores the scholar's MP.
Indomitability is NOT the strongest heal in the game. The strongest heals in the game are actually the more situationalized ones. Whispering Dawn (again, the fairy is the most OP healer.) is the actual best heal in the game. 100% Free, and the Scholar does not even have to use an oGCD to use it. Given the nature of the game, this HoT will usually be able to do any job without any raw healing numbers required. Assize, while not as strong, also comes with the power of *doing* damage instead of taking damage away. If it can cover something, it is the best for the job hands-down. Earthly star is a little harder to use than Assize, but the same thing to be said here. Because it ALSO does damage, it has no opportunity cost.
When I am making a healing map with my co-healer, this is the priority for when all cooldowns are available and all cooldowns can do the job, in order:

Earthly Star
Assize
Asylum
Whispering Dawn
Collective Unconscious
Indomitability

As you can see, indomitability is more of the "Fall-back" option when nothing else is available to do the job. Yes, it's versatile. Yes, it's good. But it's not OP by any stretch of the imagination. It is actually the worst tool of them all, but gets used the most because it's the easiest to use, and is the most often available to use.

I will also argue that Scholar DOES have to clip and weaving opportunities are NOT unlimited. Bio II is once every 30s, Miasma II costs a TON of MP, and Ruin II is TOO WEAK to weave with. Ruin II is weak enough that even if you were to clip your GCD twice for Off-GCDs, it was better to clip than ruin II. Because Broil II is that much stronger.

Regarding Scholar's personal DPS... well. Because of the aforementioned opportunity cost of Indomitability, Scholar actually ends up doing less damage than both of the other healers when playing optimally. The damage calculations you are probably looking at are attacks on Striking Dummy, where Scholar can use all of their Aetherflow on Energy Drain. Along with the lack of Energy Drain, they lose Miasma II weaving opportunities. When they can't do this, their DPS takes a nosedive. In-content is much different for Scholar.

[LiddyGhu]

As for where Scholar should be hit, well. That's absolutely in the fairy. Rather than nerfing the fairy directly, they should buff Scholar's counterpart job.
Give Nocturnal Astrologian a heal-pulse equivalent to Lily's "Embrace"; constantly healing players who are missing health for free at no cost of MP,GCD, or Recast. (Perhaps Synastry could be remade into this function?)
Make Nocturnal Astrologian's "Collective Unconscious" ability the same cooldown as Whispering Dawn (60 seconds instead of 90) and larger - Sacred Soil's size would suffice.
Remove Astrologian's ability to extend the healing effect of "Wheel of Fortune."

The reason why I would instead buff Nocturnal Astrologian is because when they tried nerfing scholar at the beginning of Stormblood, many casual players had issues getting through dungeons, and some Scholars were even kicked from parties because they were believed to be unable to keep up with healing. While it wasn't true at the time, you must think of how the casual player-base would receive nerfs to a class that is initially difficult to execute well like Scholar.

[Jinzhu]

Indomitability is NOT the strongest heal in the game. The strongest heals in the game are actually the more situationalized ones. Whispering Dawn (again, the fairy is the most OP healer.) is the actual best heal in the game. 100% Free, and the Scholar does not even have to use an oGCD to use it

Actually it's a pretty common misconception but Whispering Dawn isn't the strongest heal in the game! A lot of people are fooled by the 840 potency it brings but don't realize that the fairy is actually weaker than the player. For example a cure potency of 120 is around 3.1K for a player but only 2.4k for the fairy. Theoretically an extended Collective by CO is the strongest heal in the game being 1200 potency for 36,000 healing (no crits) then followed by Asylum which is 900 potency for 28,000 healing (no crits). After those two Earthly Star is next being 720 potency for 22,000 Healing (36,000 crit). Whispering Dawn falls into #4 at 840 pet potency for 16K healing which isn't bad but doesn't compare to the abilities listed before. The main quirk as you said before is that it cost 0 oGCD spaces and 0 resources to use but so does Collective/Earthly Star due to ASTs 1.5s gcd. Asylum is a little more troublesome as it costs oGCD space which WHMs dont have much of but with proper play shouldn't be an issue.

I don't necessarily believe Whispering Dawn is too OP simply because Eos isn't used at all in the top end environments because Earthly Star does it's job. Back in HW Eos was meta because Earthly Star didn't exist and Whispering Dawn saved more DPS from healers than Fey Wind gave.

The problem with the fairy comes down to Embrace honestly. Having a passive regen (that's stronger than ASP Benefic/Regen) that lasts throughout the fight and costs 0 resources is laughable because single target damage is the main source of incoming damage in this game. You have AoEs but those are covered with the large abundant of AoE heals each healer has. Where the only free single target heals we have in the game are Embrace, Fey Union, Essential Dignity, Tetra and Benediction. Every skill in that list is limited aside from Embrace which heals constantly for 5k/8k crit or 8k/11k Crit under Rouse.

Embrace is the reason you can get through O9-O11 with 0 single target heals and only have to cast 3 ASP B in O12S. And either needs an obvious nerf or another job needs to have a similar effect like maybe DNC. In my opinion I think it would be good to tag some MP value on Embrace making it cost 100-200 per cast and taking the auto heal function off when on Obey. This would make it so that healers at a low skill level are still able to utilize her by leaving them on auto as they won't be DPSing much so they won't run into MP issues. But at the higher levels you would be picking and choosing where to heal as MP is a lot more limited.