Thread: Healer adjustment in 4.05

I'm really curious if these changes to SCH is going to push WHM to the bench yet again. I really don't feel WHM can stand up to a SCH if they get even more DPS, more use of their fairy skills and such. We'll see, but I have a bad feeling about this.

I'm being optimistic. WHM isn't weak by any means, and them tweaking Lilies and PI could just make WHM stronger.

WHM, imo, feels really good and packs a nice punch. I really don't feel that WHM can easily be completely outclassed at the moment. AST is strong but I don't see it as so cut and dry as 3.4, as Ghishlain had pointed out.

Please stop acting like Stoneskin was good. It wasn't. It was a garbage mitigation tool, and an over all terrible ability.

Originally Posted by VanilleFang

Please stop acting like Stoneskin was good. It wasn't. It was a garbage mitigation tool, and an over all terrible ability.

And Benison is better why, exactly? Just because of the 5% more mitigation? Guess what, they could have just buffed Stoneskin up to that value and be done with it, and everyone would have been happy. Instead they opted to create Benison, which is reliant on a mechanic half my other healing kit is reliant on, too, has a shit duration compared to Stoneskin, AND lies on a 30 second CD to boot when Stoneskin had 30 MINUTES. This means I can't just give a recently rezzed DPS a shield anymore to stop him from dying instantly again, I can't pre-shield the group anymore as I could before, and to add insult to injury, I only get Benison at level 66. That's right. I now have 65 levels without ANY shielding whatsoever. Stoneskin wasn't really good in HW anymore, granted, and I saw not much point in using it in raids anymore outside the aforementioned situations (it was great for tank busters in 2.x), but holy sh**, looking at the drawbacks of Benison makes Stoneskin look VERY desirable in my opinion.

No, Stoneskin also required a GCD.

DB has more flexibity in that since it is oGCD as long as you have a lily you can use DB whenever you need it. It also adds some mitigation to Cure II, which is a nice touch.

I'm not saying DB is good, but It's at least not a hindrance like SS was.

Also 65 levels without shielding... Lol. Did you rely on SS that much? I actually don't notice a difference at all.

I've read over the upcoming changes and I'm still...lost as to what SE even wants SCH to be.

Pet healer? They nerfed our pet's healing and took away our sustain. The skills given to one fairie (Selene) aren't even great, haven't seen a rework, and other skills such as dissipation work clunky as all hell with fairies and our mp management rn.

Mitigation healer? They made AST a more effective mitigation healer, with really only our crit adlo deployments topping them, but not by much I'd say. Noct AST just brings so much more in the way of DPS, utility, and overall healing and mitigation.

DPS healer? The only healer with no real AoE (lol bane), they nerfed our dots, and mp management is pretty bad to even sustain DPS.

Like I've said, I've seen the upcoming changes. Who knows if they'll change things for the better, but honestly, I feel they completely and utterly smeared any image SCH was supposed to have. We're not great healers, we're not great DPS, we're not great mitigation. Heck, even our image as a pet healer is clunky at best.

I wish they would rebalance/redo skills to fit the mitigation/pet healer job image instead of edging us more towards WHM style healing. It's nice to have those, and they are useful, but I'm not playing WHM for a reason. Fey Union doesn't really make me go 'wow' for a 70 skill. When I first saw it, I had hoped it'd be a -dmg taken tether or something along those lines. I know they said SCH wouldn't get much this go around just because they were so well thought out in HW, but this is honestly just a bit insulting.

Originally Posted by Ghishlain

The question then remains, for YOU, as the player - can you bring more DPS playing WHM, SCH, or AST? If the group DPS is lower than the pinnacle of skill level, then you might just get more overall output as a WHM than if you would play SCH or AST. This is up to each individual group to decide where their strengths and weaknesses lie and build accordingly.

All things wrong with this logic
1) idc how bad you are your basic combo plus a balance of any potency will be more damage then a whm.
2)yay now I have enough mp to rez people over and over and over and over till we meet enrage. On sch and ast I can rez maybe 3-4 times before I go into mana conservative mode and with that many deaths your prob going wipe anyway
3) after you perfected the fight there is no reason to be a whm cuz how your described whm is that it\\'s nothing more then a safety net

Originally Posted by simiii

All things wrong with this logic
1) idc how bad you are your basic combo plus a balance of any potency will be more damage then a whm.

Here's the best non-AST speedkill on Susano EX. Total DPS minus LB is 23,708.0. Let's also remove the WHM DPS for now (2,013) and include the DPS of the AST from the fastest kill on Susano EX (1,587) - changing our total to 23,282 total group DPS.

Assuming absolutely perfect RNG, this means you'd get an Expanded Balance every minute and Sleeve Draw also gives you Expanded Balance. With Celestial Opposition to extend one of those Expanded Balance another 10 seconds, this means you get a total of 100 seconds of 10% balance in a 120 second window - in other words you get an increase of 8.33333% DPS with this kind of uptime.

This means the total DPS gain from including an AST (skewed slightly due to the AST's boosted value already from the fight) would be 1,940.2 DPS (AST total DPS contribution = 3,527.2)

Of course this would be a completely unrealistic expectation. A more conservative estimate might be getting two Expanded Balance which leads to 70s uptime out of 120s for 10% damage up - leading to an uptime of 5.83% or a DPS gain of 1,358.1 DPS (AST total DPS contribution = 2,945.1).

For the sake of argument - let's aim for a single Expanded Balance within that two minute period. 40s uptime out of 120s for 10% damage up which leads up to a 3.33% or a DPS gain of 776.1 DPS (AST total DPS contribution = 2,363.1). This uptime actually kinda matches up the average uptime of the fastest kills for Susano EX (#1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | #7 | #8 | #9 | #10)

Assuming the WHM in the non-AST kill listed above got the same Balance uptime as the example just above (3.33%), WHM's number would become 2,080. Then AST's contribution would be approximately 13% higher than WHM's.

Considering that I'm taking statistics from the pinnacle of the player base and that the average person slamming basic combo would basically be lower than the 50th percentile (and therefore basically do less than half the DPS these players do) - this is my excessively long winded way of saying "You're completely wrong".

Originally Posted by simiii

2)yay now I have enough mp to rez people over and over and over and over till we meet enrage. On sch and ast I can rez maybe 3-4 times before I go into mana conservative mode and with that many deaths your prob going wipe anyway
3) after you perfected the fight there is no reason to be a whm cuz how your described whm is that it\\'s nothing more then a safety net

Seeing enrage and thus seeing all the mechanics of a fight means people can learn how to do that fight sooner. Nothing wrong with that. Once you've perfected the fight on WHM, you could make the switch to AST but then your strategies would potentially have to change to suit the new composition. Is that something you'd like to have happen? That's up to each individual group to decide.

Originally Posted by Wilbow

The thing about SCH having the best healer DPS is actually more depressing if you look into it deeper. At 80 percentile, AST and WHM HPS are basically neck and neck at around 4k HPS, while SCH is sitting at 2.5k (I have no idea how it calculates shields into its calcs, so take it with a small grain of salt).

Coupled with the fact that WHM personal DPS on a dummy is higher than that of SCH, the best interpretation is that AST and WHM are doing the heavy lifting of healing because SCH isn't really as able to, leaving SCH to sit there spamming Broil II and thus accumulate a higher DPS in comparison than it otherwise would.

Healer balance is mainly down to the specifics of SCH/WHM changes on Tuesday, really.

As for the second point, when I say "easier", I don't really mean from a skill ceiling perspective. To be more specific, AST can set up Expanded Balance while healing with GCDs, while DPSing vs. healing with WHM is a mutually exclusive choice outside of things like Assize. This is largely in part because oGCDs, even at maximum clipping, only eat up around 1/3 - 1/5 of a GCD, while GCDs eat up 2.5 seconds. In addition, ASTs can barely clip, if at all, if they use a oGCD after the 2 second cast of Benefic or Benefic II, not just after Aspected Benefic.

Say you have a raid encounter where the incoming damage is low and you spend 80% of your GCDs DPSing and 20% of them healing; both healers won't really have much of an issue giving the raid DPS then, right? But if the incoming damage goes up (phase change, mechanic is failed, etc.) and now you're spending only 20% of your GCDs DPSing and 80% of them healing, WHM DPS is hurt way more than AST because AST can probably still find the time to put out Expanded Balance, but a WHM has no way to recover extra Stone IVs except *maybe* (s)he might find a way to spend 30% of their GCDs DPSing instead if they're wise with oGCDs. This is somewhat troubling for WHM in Savage because I can only presume that the healing requirements in the upcoming Savage will be higher than those of the Ex primals.

I agree with the first section fully. In terms of raid encounter I do agree too, though if people are dying there might not even be opportunities to use Expanded Balance since you may be in need of those Spires and Ewers at that point. I can see where you're going with mechanical fails leading to HP loss but Savage tends to be mechanical fails = death which is a whole other can of worms.

Originally Posted by Yuyuka3

Also, I love the theory of "if you are a good healer, you are much more desirable than a bad one on a better class!". It is, of course, true. But sadly... people don't know if you are that better healer, and if you are excluded from joining a party from the get-go due to your class, you can't proof them you are. And sadly, that happens a lot. That's the core of the problem, really. You are 100% right, but if I can't proof it to people because they won't let me, there is no chance in hell that knowing this helps me any.

Ideally, if you're running into people that block due to meta, you don't want to associate with them anyway. Easier said than done but the best thing I'd do is just take destiny into your own hands and starts making your own mini group. Getting at least one or two tanks and be the healer and you'll be able to build your own PFs with your own rules. As long as you have the tanks filled, the rest falls into place relatively easily afterwards.

Just keep calm, don't be angry, and try to look at things as objectively as possible. I agree that the AST kit is powerful right now but the WHM kit isn't a slouch either - just takes effort to make the wheels turn. Hopefully we'll see some good oil being poured into the WHM gears come 4.05.