5.05 Healer Changes

[Lagomorph]

Um, so? Making it meta again was never the point. It was to balance them with the other healers.
You shouldn't want any job buffed into meta.
Healers are, as of right now, pretty nicely balanced.

I thought the point was to make all three healers meta, right? Isn't that what balanced means? Also if you think that ast will be on an even playing field with sch and whm right now, you're mistaken. Healing potencies was not what they needed most. The only actual buff they got to their raid contribution is divination being on a shorter cooldown. And let's be real, divination being a 6% buff for 15s on a 2 minute cd is still pretty pathetic.

[Risvertasashi]

And let's be real, divination being a 6% buff for 15s on a 2 minute cd is still pretty pathetic.

Except you're acting like AST isn't tossing out other buffs in the meantime. AST still does the most raid buffing of all the healers by a wide margin. And if trick attack can be so high impact lasting only 10s, I'm sure AST's buff spamming can make an impact too.

And if it's still too low, SE will buff it again. But can we please stop acting like raid buffs are meaningless? They've been defining the meta for years, across several expacs (or all expacs, if you count jobs other than AST)

[Lagomorph]

AST still does the most raid buffing of all the healers by a wide margin.

Irrelevant when it doesn't even come close to making up for their terrible personal dps.

[Zolvolt]

Irrelevant when it doesn't even come close to making up for their terrible personal dps.

It actually puts them on par with scholars pretty consistently. You can check the new RDPS metric for that data. Ast damage + buffs is in a good place rn compared to sch damage.

[Risvertasashi]

Irrelevant when it doesn't even come close to making up for their terrible personal dps.

On the contrary. AST has been meta when its personal DPS has been low before (See Stormblood yet again). But then when AST's personal DPS gets buffed up, then it just goes completely off the charts and makes the others (well, WHM) irrelevant.

If you want to play a healer with excellent personal DPS, play WHM.

If you want to play a healer with excellent buffing, play AST.

Even if specific numbers need slight tweaks - This is balance and this is the way it should be. I hope AST is never the best at everything again. Because no healer should be.

[Lagomorph]

On the contrary. AST has been meta when its personal DPS has been low before (See Stormblood yet again). But then when AST's personal DPS gets buffed up, then it just goes completely off the charts and makes the others (well, WHM) irrelevant.

If you want to play a healer with excellent personal DPS, play WHM.

If you want to play a healer with excellent buffing, play AST.

Even if specific numbers need slight tweaks - This is balance and this is the way it should be. I hope AST is never the best at everything again. Because no healer should be.

Ast never was the best at everything. I'm not sure how you and a few others have deluded yourselves into thinking that. It's fine if ast is the "buffs" healer. But their buffs are not strong enough to make up for how weak malefic/combust are. Also realistically there are two metrics that matter: healing output and raid dps contribution. Whm was the best in both of these areas. I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say that no healer should be the best at everything?

What do you mean irrelevant? The very reason why AST personal DPS is so low is because their raid utility is so high. You can't have it both ways.

It is not having it both ways. Ast needs their personal dps combined with their contributions with buffs to be at least close to the other healers. It can be a little behind, that's fine. I'm saying that it will still be far behind. If you disagree with this, then just way a few days and see for yourself.

[Risvertasashi]

I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say that no healer should be the best at everything?

Late stormblood AST did more personal DPS than WHM, did more raid buffing than WHM, and was the only healer to solo heal ultimate content while also having much greater mobility than WHM.

Now technically you can say 'But holy spam was better for dungeons!' or 'AST shields weren't the best!' and yeah that's true, but in all major areas AST was outperforming. And it was meta before the 4.3 AST buffs let it do all of that at once.

If AST's raid buffs are far behind in total contribution, they'll get buffed again.

[Conna]

trick attack atm is not doing enough to make ninja worth taking for one, and two thats when you use all the buffs at once. The value of the card buff outside of actual cd windows is pretty low.

[Silver-Strider]

I thought the point was to make all three healers meta, right? Isn't that what balanced means? Also if you think that ast will be on an even playing field with sch and whm right now, you're mistaken. Healing potencies was not what they needed most. The only actual buff they got to their raid contribution is divination being on a shorter cooldown. And let's be real, divination being a 6% buff for 15s on a 2 minute cd is still pretty pathetic.

Even so, it does put AST on a much sturdier base than it was before and while the Divination change will need to be fully tested before we can make any actual arguments about AST's spot in terms of the meta, it's still a good improvement overall.