Quote Originally Posted by AzureFlare View Post
Reddit doesn't represent the whole community.
White mage is not obsolete. Just don't be one of the derp WHM that never use their cooldowns.
Not a clue how buffing Nocturnal Sect or any spells using Nocturnal Field would 'shift the paradigm' when the offhealer's healing potencies isn't what is holding nocturnal back. It's the tip of the iceberg.

Just for a bit, look at what a SCH brings to the table that makes them so desired. 3 DoTs that can't miss, of which one stationary AoE. Being able to play mana-neutral on long fights while pumping out a lot of damage. The fairy still being able to heal while doing all that damage. 2 mitigation tools that don't require any healing to be done. One mitigation tool that, without critting, is already strong and on a crit can possibly make a mechanic trivial. Either an on-demand haste increase + AoE dispel or on-demand AoE healing increase + magic damage reduction. A buff on the fairy so she can do her job even better while the SCH continues dealing damage. And when it gets bad, SCH can still fulfill healing duties just fine by switching how they use their Aetherflow stacks and their GCDs. It can do so even better than a noct AST. If you want to get close to that as WHM + AST you'd essentially have to rotate DoTs, which WHM + SCH can do too anyway.

I'm honestly interested what would happen if Nocturnal Sect increased damage dealt by 5% and reduced mana cost of offensive spells by 50% on top of what it currently does. You'd still miss globals as N. AST to replace the fairy's throughput, no answer to E4E, Fey Covenant and Deployment, pretty much be required to stack accuracy so Malefic 2 would hit with a near 100% hit rate since AST is more filler-dependent than SCH and probably some other stuff. And that has to be made up with the cards, Time Dilation (which is bad on shields) and Celestial Opposition (which is bad on shields).
I agree scholars are in a good position right now and can see their offensive abilities being hit in the near future as well. Cleric stance should weaken the fairy the same as it does the scholar in healing when it is active.