Quote Originally Posted by EaMett View Post
Thanks everyone for clearing that up.

I'm a little confused though because the healing toolkit is pretty irrelevant in and of itself. There's barely any healing required and there are actually quite a few speed runners that run noct AST with SCH (AST does almost all the shielding). I believe there's even a post in this forum about such a comp on chaos.
Adding new classes won't change this much unless SE really bumps up healing requirements.

Of course healing toolkit has an impact on pDPS but more about that bellow.

When it comes to defining meta the only thing that counts is rDPS. And that's not even on a lower tier of skill, meta is defined by the higher tiers where class potential is properly expressed.
As it stands AST and SCH are pretty balanced and performing miles better than WHM (historically SCH has always been the rdps master up until very recently, hence it's presence). That's why WHM is left out. I'm not sure how nerfing SCH helps in all of this.
The simple answer is SCH has the strongest pDPS, most consistent rDPS and by leaps and bounds the easiest time healing without losing GCDs.

AST is more of a happy medium than a comparable class to SCH. Its definitely in a much better place than WHM and WHM would need a buff to catch up to it especially after the Malefic cast time reduction and CU becoming instant.

I think WHM and SCH should be brought in line with AST rather than AST and WHM being brought up to SCH if for the sake of retaining the difficulty of the current tier than anything else. This means SCH losing some damage and WHM gaining it.