Quote Originally Posted by Lyrica_Ashtine View Post
For the record, Scholars will be getting:
Indomitability - AOE Heal (Aetherflow required to cast)
Deployment Tactics - Gives Adloquium and Eye for an Eye to party members near the person they are casted on.
Emergency Tactics - Changes Adloquium from a shield to a pure heal
Dissipation - Consumes Eos or Selene for 50% extra healing potency (Currently overpowered, will be adjusted before release)
Unnamed Spell - Non Elemental Magic attack
Well... let's look at a practical scenario here.

For the sake of simplicity, consider phase 2 of t13 (although final phase would work too). Assuming megaflare gets handled perfectly and no lustrates are needed to emergency heal someone... you have a short window to heal up the whole party.

So blow two atherflow stacks on that. Rage of bahamut takes their health right back down again, followed up by a flare breath and an auto attack (that might crit) on the main tank. Where do you spend that last aetherflow stack? Maybe you're using Eos instead of Selene (good bye DPS buffs), so you could lustrate the tank and Whispering Dawn the part.

But wherever you spent it, you no longer have it for 1. FB/Flatten/FB or 2. That mini death sentence thing the adds do. (And you better hope DPS never need an emergency heal from you.)

Ok, so use emergency tactics and you've got your single target HP/S back (at a cost of 400 MP a pop...). Only, now... while you can get the tanks HP back up, you can't shield for Flatten.

Do I think it will be possible to run without a WHM? Yes...
AST will be able to cover/supplement some of the weaknesses above.

Is WHM without its own advantages and reasons to bring it along for fights like that?

I really don't see why it would be. It will still have the strongest HP/S throughput in the game (pretty much nullifying megaflare/rage in 2 or 3 GCDs), and let the SCH get by with using Selene, help him/her conserve aetherflow stacks, etc.

For a phase 4 alternative, just fill in with megaflare/gigaflare/ES (again, hope the DPS are perfect if you're using aetherflow on AoE heals)/Tornado+flare breath combo, and finally Ahk Morn.

TL;DR job with the most powerful raw heals is unlikely to be obsolete.

It's also possible the new fights will be soft on healing, but at that point, just bring whatever, it doesn't matter.

Quote Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo View Post
With a SMN to supply Supervirus...which was kind of the point of this thread.

While I won't "doom n gloom" or claim innate superiority of any one healing job over another, just going off the information we have now, it seems like stacking SCH's mitigation and fairy DPS buffs with AST's regen sect and card DPS buffs will be the preferred healer raid composition for those on the bleeding edge of content. I say this as someone who is swapping to Astrologian, and raid healing with a WHM co-healer. We're not "server first" raiders in my group by any means though, so we'll progress at a slower rate with adequate gear buffers such that that level of mitigation and DPS boost provided by a SCH/AST comp won't be needed.

We won't know any of this for certain though until complete skill lists, CDs, and potencies are revealed.
Re: SMN. Does it really matter? As long as someone has the mitigation. And SMNs should be more popular come the expac (Though IMO, they're not really gimp right now, just underappreciated). WARs and MNKs help with mitigation too. More to the point, WHM had the raw healing power to do it pre echo.

ASTs have to deal with RNG though. You can't guarantee that you'll buff a party's or party member's DPS at any given moment. In fact, you might just make them or the whole party take a vulnerability up debuff.