SCH is no longer fun to play! Detailed review

[Trunks]

Are we playing the same game lol? Whm pDPS outperforms sch total dps (including raid buff) by a safe margin all the while healing more. Whm is in a great spot and totally meta currently. And that’s great, let’s keep it that way. Like I said the buff I’m talking about would be on average 150pot per minute. Not much to write home about and would fix most of our issues + make up the slight disparity we currently see (while leaving whm well ahead of the game)

It's hard to take this post seriously when WHM's are parsing over 2k more than the other healers. They are even crushing the tanks DPS by comparison and basically becoming an extra DPS themselves. With the raid utility for both AST and SCH being nerfed this expansion, WHM is completely in the meta right now.

I assume the basis for this claim of WHMs parsing 2k more than the other healers is based on Titania EX. First, let me correct you: "more than AST". Second, let me laugh, because Titania EX is a joke. Yes, when WHM can go for several minutes without ever having to use a GCD on healing, it does great damage. If that's what we can expect from forthcoming Savage content, well, then any semblance of balance is out the window anyway.

Even just moving to the slightly more challenging Innocence, the disparity between WHM and AST drops to 1500; between WHM and SCH, it's half of that. To put that into perspective, raid DPS is just under 60k in the corresponding percentile. The gap between WHM and AST is therefore around 2.5% of rDPS, and 1.25% between WHM and SCH. Not so great a gulf after all, is it? So while 150 potency per minute sounds like a drop in the bucket, it's actually not, because WHM is just barely holding its own even in these fights that represent the best case scenario for its performance at endgame.

The moment that WHM has to start seriously healing, it will be screwed - just like in Stormblood (seriously, I swear we had these exact same arguments with Lakshmi EX). This goes to the fundamental flaw in WHM's design. It has a much lower maximum APM output because there's simply fewer buttons to press compared to AST and SCH*. Yet to be effective, it has to pack just as much power into this more condensed arsenal, meaning each of its GCDs is (relatively) more valuable. Consequently, it overperforms in undertuned or outdated content, where SCH and AST cannot bring the full weight of their oGCD toolkits to bear, and lags behind when things get hectic.

This is why the SCH and AST changes made absolutely no sense from a balance standpoint. They did nothing to rectify the actual source of the imbalance between the healers, which is WHM's egregious GCD bottlenecking relative to the other two. It's infuriating to see them wreck the other two healers' fun factors while piling even more on-global healing spells into WHM, and I really hope they correct some of it.

*Just consider that WHM has only 4 oGCD abilities with a CD of 60s or less, while SCH has 10 (AST is harder to quantify because of the way cards work and the charges on Redraw); meanwhile, WHM has 8 healing spells on the GCD, while SCH has 3 and AST has 5.