Quote Originally Posted by Sidra View Post
It is an issue. You play this game, not the game you wish it was. And in this game the off healer does far more dpsing than it does anything else, and often for extended durations as the main healer heals everything. If SE changes the meta, than perhaps it would be less important. But right now, it is. AST's mana issue while dpsing is a massive barrier to use it is anything other than the main healer.
Thordan offers a big break after phase 1, when everyone has to spread to break chains and deal with towers. After the two knights, there's an even longer break that allows your MP to refresh even without Mage's Ballad/MP turret. All three healers can DPS for the entire first phase without any fear of running out of MP for the healing check that the fight requires in the other phases, so the MP management SCH has becomes irrelevant and numbers for both AST and WHM become higher; anyone with little knowledge of math can see that the combined potencies of the SCH's' DPS spells and skills is lower than AST's and WHM's - in fact, WHM has the highest burst and is only lower in numbers due to accuracy requirements for their whole toolkit. AST is lower than SCH because of MP management and the fact that SCH has three DoTs that bypass accuracy. In Thordan, however, Shadow Flare loses value because the boss moves around a lot. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that it's perfectly possible for a good AST to pass SCH in DPS if they're both allowed to DPS for the same amount of time - and that fight makes it possible. If some people in here can't do it, too bad; there are some who can. And I didn't even mentioned the cards, because that's not the topic discussed at the moment.