SCH needs some nerfs

[Connor]

Idk personally I think the fact that most suggestions for balancing White Mage are to increase its DPS is just a sign of the problem lol. I mean, it’s a healer. Shouldn’t we be balancing it based on how well it can...heal? As we should for all healers lol.

The fact that all healers have to be balanced doubly as healer and DPS feels to me like we’re in the starting lanes for the wrong race. I think White Mage’s ‘lagging behind’ is the result of this, and unless they turn it into a full blown DPS with a slew of mechanics and basically make Lillies a DPS mechanic, it’s never going to fit into the current game design where healers are also damage dealers.

Basically I think that because healer balancing is so focused on DPS rather than healing, other healers will always have to play second fiddle to Scholar. I think it’s time they reassessed the design of ‘healing’ as a whole, because it’s never been truly balanced. Not when the role is judged on how well they can perform a different role lol

[Duskane]

it is more of a Issue of WHM not bringing anything
SCH might be very good but not necessarily means its broken
one healer is somewhat suffering but no need to bring the others down with it.

[MoroMurasaki]

Idk personally I think the fact that most suggestions for balancing White Mage are to increase its DPS is just a sign of the problem lol. I mean, it’s a healer. Shouldn’t we be balancing it based on how well it can...heal? As we should for all healers lol.

The fact that all healers have to be balanced doubly as healer and DPS feels to me like we’re in the starting lanes for the wrong race. I think White Mage’s ‘lagging behind’ is the result of this, and unless they turn it into a full blown DPS with a slew of mechanics and basically make Lillies a DPS mechanic, it’s never going to fit into the current game design where healers are also damage dealers.

Basically I think that because healer balancing is so focused on DPS rather than healing, other healers will always have to play second fiddle to Scholar. I think it’s time they reassessed the design of ‘healing’ as a whole, because it’s never been truly balanced. Not when the role is judged on how well they can perform a different role lol

The reason WHM is lagging behind in personal dps is because it is the least efficient healer of the 3.

For a large AoE heal WHM's options are all GCD-based in some respect, even plenary requires GCDs being sunk into it to get an effect. All of this translates into less Stone IV casts. Add to that that WHM is now the only healer that needs to clip their filler spell to use oGCDs and the problems start to become even clearer - Stone IV is not potent enough to make up for all the lost casts over the course of an encounter between the clipping and the GCDs wasted on healing, and that's before you consider movement where AST and SCH also win.

All in all WHM is the pre-buff BLM of healers - if it's catered to it can do damage almost as high as it's SMN/SCH competition but like... why stress your group unnecessarily? Especially when putting that same effort into catering to the alternative produces even better numbers.

it is more of a Issue of WHM not bringing anything
SCH might be very good but not necessarily means its broken
one healer is somewhat suffering but no need to bring the others down with it.

Look up clear rates for Alphascape and you'll see the disparity between SCH and AST is larger than the one between AST and WHM. No one is really bringing WHM especially for later floors but virtually everyone is taking a SCH. AST is the only properly balanced one of the three.

[Ghishlain]

Idk personally I think the fact that most suggestions for balancing White Mage are to increase its DPS is just a sign of the problem lol. I mean, it’s a healer. Shouldn’t we be balancing it based on how well it can...heal? As we should for all healers lol.

The fact that all healers have to be balanced doubly as healer and DPS feels to me like we’re in the starting lanes for the wrong race. I think White Mage’s ‘lagging behind’ is the result of this, and unless they turn it into a full blown DPS with a slew of mechanics and basically make Lillies a DPS mechanic, it’s never going to fit into the current game design where healers are also damage dealers.

Basically I think that because healer balancing is so focused on DPS rather than healing, other healers will always have to play second fiddle to Scholar. I think it’s time they reassessed the design of ‘healing’ as a whole, because it’s never been truly balanced. Not when the role is judged on how well they can perform a different role lol

Unfortunately, you can't balancing for healing (entirely) because there is only a finite number of HPS needed to get through each content. Once all three kits can achieve that theoretically HPS (either from skill, gear, or kit design), the next metric we have to balance around is DPS contribution.

This isn't to say HPS and DPS don't go hand in hand either. A kit with a better HPS kit can potentially allow for more overall healer DPS as the required GCDs to heal will be lessened.

Also, higher DPS can also lead to lower HPS requirements due to potential of skipped phases or mechanics.

I guess S-E could build some sort of scaling system that increases a monsters parameters based on the ilvl of the target but that would completely defeat the purpose of the vertical progression we have. In fact I believe it's one of the leading complaints of the new WoW expansion (IE, it's actually faster to kill monsters wearing less item level - you actually get "weaker" the more gear you get)

One could make the argument that you make WHM HPS so powerful your WHM can solo heal the content and your just bring a 5th DPS for optimized DPS - but I know there are more than a few people on these forums that are adamant against that. I don't like it either but it feels like the only way to make a "pure healer" thrive in the current environment if you remove DPS balance from the equation and focus entirely on HPS potential.

[Brightamethyst]

And why should people care about what happens in solo and 4-man content that can be easily cleared by smashing your head on the keyboard?

It really doesn't matter what the class can do solo and in dungeons honestly...

It doesn't matter? Why should people care?

You seem to be forgetting that people like us who post here are the minority. We like to get technical about the highest level content, but the fact is the vast majority of players never even set foot in a savage raid or EX primal, let alone clear them. You personally may not care, but most people don't give a damn about raiding and ONLY care about solo and light party play.

[Lastelli]

We like to get technical about the highest level content, but the fact is the vast majority of players never even set foot in a savage raid or EX primal, let alone clear them.

And why would all those casual healers be concerned about a potency buff to stone 3/aero, exactly?

[NobleWinter]

WHM has the smallest and most straightforward skill kit to use of the 3 healers and it has amazing MP economy. At level 70 with an AST you need to be able to preplan where to place Earthly Star 10 seconds in advance of the mechanic that demands it and be careful of you MP usage to be effective. For SCH you have to manage Aetherflow Stacks between 3 Healing Abilities, 1 Defense Cool Down and a single DPS tool that doubles as a HP/MP generator. This is in addition to micro managing a fairy and having poor MP economy across the bulk of your spells. If we look at the payout of efficiency at top skill levels the skill ceiling for each Healer matches how efficiently they can be played. It is hardest to master a SCH and it would seem you get rewarded with the most efficient gameplay and highest DPS for doing so. WHM has the lowest efficiency and the lowest skill ceiling as well meaning the Healer balance could possibly be perfect from a perspective of skill versus reward. The outcry seems to be that the easiest Healer to learn should be equally effective as it's harder counterparts and personally I don't think it's fair for that to ever happen. RDM should be the weakest DPS and WHM the weakest Healer. They are too simple to be rewarded otherwise.

[Metsonm]

The problem with balancing around difficulty is that it basically leaves some classes as the 'training wheels' job that you graduate out of, which is terrible for class variation.

There's also the fact that difficulty is entirely subjective. Some people like the strict rigidity of dragoons and can't keep track of bard critprocs. Some people prefer "See button light up, press button." How do you balance subjectivity?

[MoroMurasaki]

WHM has the smallest and most straightforward skill kit to use of the 3 healers and it has amazing MP economy. At level 70 with an AST you need to be able to preplan where to place Earthly Star 10 seconds in advance of the mechanic that demands it and be careful of you MP usage to be effective. For SCH you have to manage Aetherflow Stacks between 3 Healing Abilities, 1 Defense Cool Down and a single DPS tool that doubles as a HP/MP generator. This is in addition to micro managing a fairy and having poor MP economy across the bulk of your spells. If we look at the payout of efficiency at top skill levels the skill ceiling for each Healer matches how efficiently they can be played. It is hardest to master a SCH and it would seem you get rewarded with the most efficient gameplay and highest DPS for doing so. WHM has the lowest efficiency and the lowest skill ceiling as well meaning the Healer balance could possibly be perfect from a perspective of skill versus reward. The outcry seems to be that the easiest Healer to learn should be equally effective as it's harder counterparts and personally I don't think it's fair for that to ever happen. RDM should be the weakest DPS and WHM the weakest Healer. They are too simple to be rewarded otherwise.

What a silly way to balance in a game that's supposed to make every job viable in all content.

I hear from SCH's and SMNs a lot about how their class is so hard and all it makes me think is that they need to spend more time on their class. This isn't a dig at you, I'm not one of those idiots who will look up someone's logs and determine the validity if their argument by them because (as proven by posters in this thread) you can have great logs and some very weak arguments.

All I mean to say is when you're proclaiming your class the most difficult in a given category (or another class the easiest) I would expect you to be able to demonstrate a high level of play in all classes involved or what is your opinion really based on? It's all opinion and without a bunch of documented experience with all variables it isn't even a very educated one.

I would also say that the only potentially objective measure of a classes difficulty is the gap between it's potential damage and effective damage in a given piece of content. Basically how much of a job's potential is being accessed by the playerbase right now? SCH is very near it's skill ceiling, there is that o9s video linked in another thread on the healer forums that a SCH used something like 13 GCDs on healing over the course of a 6:30 Chaos clear.

Comparatively speaking I think the best WHM clear is something like 27 GCDs on healing plus a fair bit of clipping for oGCDs heals with the WHM also doing comparatively less of a % of the HPS there and burdening their cohealer with it. WHM's potential dps certainly isn't very far behind SCH - Stove IV potency makes sure of that - but squeezing every bit of pDPS out of a WHM is significantly harder than doing the same with a SCH or even an AST.

I'm not crazy, WHM's MP economy and powerful heals mean it can sometimes brute force it's way through things that the other healers can't. I've healed the Lunacy stack marker on Tsukuyomi with only 4 people in it because of Cure III, Plenary and Assize... but balancing around that is like balancing RDM dps around Verraise. Can it maybe fix a bad spot? Sure, but it's better to not find yourself in that bad spot to begin with. Once you do that the extra defensive utility is useless.

[Raminax]

In addition, using Genaux's numbers posted earlier, the argument that Scholars and Astrologians are harder to play can't really be supported. If that was the case, they would be providing lower numbers as a result of a quirky and complicated toolkit, but that simply isn't showing outside of (Final) Omega, where White Mages beat Astrologians by a tiny margin up to 50th percentile but lose out to Scholars in the end. As such, we can only assume that all healers are easy to play at a basic or reasonably good level - or that Astrologian and Scholar numbers are busted despite being advertised as more difficult classes to play. Hard to master, I can swallow, but hard to play? No.

Of course, one could also argue that the ability to clear Savage content already makes you fairly good, unlike what the omglolwtf grey parse xDDDD people would like you to believe. So the data reflects the upper echolon of the average FFXIV player anyway - and thus fairly skilled healers of all Jobs. The higher percentile players are simply even better than the ones below.