Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
I'm not sure why cast time is seen as a class identity rather than a basic function tbh. It's sort of like claiming melees or phys ranged are clones of each other because they all have instant abilities. Shorter cast time (or significantly more free weave) opens the potential to design all sorts of abilities to combo and weave, dps, utility and heal because now you can make them flow and work properly.
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I'd just like healers to flow, feel good to play and reward me when I play well.
You can fix WHM and SCH without giving them the AST treatment though. What you said may be true, but at the same time it's also true that cast times do define how some jobs play and contribute to differentiating jobs in the same role. Also we shouldn't forget that AST has a quicker cast time because it has a significantly higher APM count when compared to the other healers. An easy way to help WHM whould be something like giving them a dps neutral instant dot with a 15 seconds duration, that would be more than enough considering how little weaving they have to do. As for SCH, they could just slightly buff ruin ii and/or get a little more creative with AF damage interactions. Think of something like the following: every time an AF stack is used for an healing oGCD, a stack of "disaster" is gained. At 3 stacks, ruin ii is changed to "catastrophe", a new instant cast offensive spell that places an aetherial mine below your target that explodes a few times, dealing damage to all enemies in its vicinity. This would make for a little more interesting gameplay flow for SCH: you'd still want to minimize ruin ii usage, but you'd gain 1 more instant spell for every AF use and you'd be rewarded for using AF stacks for healing instead of feeling bad because you had to "waste" them on healing skills instead of energy drains. ED would remain an emergency measure to deal with mana issues and in an optimized scenario should be avoided.

Anyway, the point is that giving SCH and WHM a quicker casting time would just be a bad move. Both of them are already terribly boring and trying to maximize uptime is their only form of optimization. Take that away and there would be absolutely nothing interesting about them. AST at the very least has cards management. That might not seem like a lot, but optimizing cards distribution based on the burst windows of your dps is at least something to think about and may be occasionally challenging, especially when cards distrubition happens during non-trivial mechanics.