SCH vs AST?

[GideonHighmourn]

If your defence is really just HPS you are at a lost. If you want to talk about HPS talk too about how much of that HPS is on overhealing. IF is more than 50% you are doing something wrong on my eyes.

I don't think HPS matters as much as people make it seem; however, the ability to increase your actual throughput on demand or respond to spike damage is far more important, which is something AST terribly lacks. They give up too much for their mediocre card buffs. Meanwhile, WHM and SCH have emergency heals in spades.

I'm interested in seeing how Lightspeed gets adjusted, as that could easily give AST some of the most versatile burst healing capacity.

[Dalvy]

SCH main with a lv 55 AST and 50 WHM currently.

I really miss having e4e and more than one emergency heal for snap decisions you need to make. The instant cast heal is quite underwhelming, and you never know when you'll get the card buff you need. It would be nice to have a healing potency cooldown like WHM and SCH do, and to do away with Lightspeed for healing altogether.

[Tashim]

The tools that a WHM and SCH gets are versatile, presence of mind, can be used in many different ways, as can Aetherflow Stacks. I feel that SCH is the most versatile healer, and probably still has the best single-target burst healing potential, as long as their aetherflow holds out, but WHM has the highest group healing throughput potential, abit inefficiently (although their single-target burst is still quite good too)

The problem, is that AST has the lowest burst healing potential in any situation. AST burst healing consists of:
1. Essential Dignity
2. pray for an arrow card, to give to yourself
3. use the bole card you drew instead, and hope its enough

[RichardButte]

Level 60 AST/SCH here.

AST can heal fine in any content before raids, so long as the group is competent and doesn't get hit by too much avoidable damage. If the group is taking more damage then they should be, AST goes OOM VERY quickly and lacks the emergency buttons to save multiple party members if a situation turns sour.

In exchange for this inherent weakness, AST has random card buffs which generally do very little to help the party overall. Even the hallowed expanded RR + Balance combo is only 5% more damage for 15 seconds, and that's garbage, considering the difficulty and randomness of setting it up in the first place.

I think they should just improve the AST's emergency options, because a hybrid healer just isn't going to work in a game with a duty finder where the healer is going to have to heal people who make mistakes a lot or wind up getting kicked (as some ASTs have already complained about).

[Muahbec]

...

YES!!! YEEEESS you just said everything i feel. THANK YOU!