About Endwalkers AST changes

[ty_taurus]

Then call it better like afflatus = celestial or essential = benediction?

It doesn´t change the possibilities you´ve in your kit. Just because 1 cd is a full heal and the other heals more the less HP your target has, or that you need a lily or just have a bunch of cd´s on it, doesn´t really change their use. You´ve x aoes, x bubbles, x gcds, x ogcds and they´re tweaks with "heals more / heals less / can be used up to x times / different cooldowns based on the impact".
It´s like saying that "but WHM bubble gives 10% more life while SCH bubble grants 10% less damage". Yes they work slightly different, but the use and end-effect is the same. In kind of healing AST and WHM will become finally the same class. Their difference is RDPS in form of cards vs ADPS with a selfbuff and lily-attacks, while one might be still a bit more movement friendly. But this is something we don´t know yet with all the movement and casting time changes which will arrive with 6.0.

It doesn´t make sense. If you can play one, you can play the other. But if you can play WHM or AST, you´re not able to perform well on SCH immediately, unless you just spam heal and ignore all the tools. It´s a gameplay difference AST and WHM won´t have anymore.

You keep moving farther and farther away from an adequate comparison for Afflatus Solace/Rapture. I have no idea whether you're talking about Solace or Rapture, and I have no idea if you're referencing Celestial Opposition or Celestial Intersection which just adds to the confusion on what kind of comparison you're trying to make, but regardless of which you mean, those actions are almost nothing alike other than they heal to some degree.

Afflatus Solace and Rapture are MP-free GCD actions that currently are used as weaving tools most prominently and fuel a partial DPS forgiveness system--something that is entirely unique to WHM's gameplay and doesn't really have a fair comparison. There are lots of similarities between the healers as a whole and we could stand to maintain more individuality, but this is one of the examples of something that isn't homogenized. Regardless of whether you're referring to Celestial Opposition or Intersection, neither of them are anything like the Afflatus spells. Your closest comparison would be Aspected Benefic since it's also an instant cast, single target heal, but that's really the only similarity.

As for Essential Dignity, it's also not really comparable to Benediction which just raises anyone's HP to max. It would be more accurate to compare it to Tetragrammaton, but at the end of the day, I'm really not super concerned with similarities between basic healing tools and am more interested about how healers differ beyond the core necessities, and while those actions are functionally quite similar, they do at least have some nuance differences, like Essential Dignity being on a faster CD and having charges over Tetragrammaton making AST a more flexible healer regarding OGCDs (for other reasons too).

If anything, I'm more disappointed in the homogenization of healer DPS actions being reduced in cast times to match AST's 1.5 seconds. The mobility is absolutely a good thing, but I was really hoping that SCH would get an update to Ruin II that kept it on par with Broil and WHM would receive something perhaps inspired by BLM moreso to assist in its mobility issues rather than just conforming to AST's cast times.