SCH needs some nerfs

[Ghishlain]

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.

I feel the comments towards SCH nerfs is in part driven by an aggravation and frustration of a favoritism S-E seems to show for the SCH job.

With that being said, there's been a lot of comments made in these threads the last couple weeks that have made me think and reflect a lot about the current healer balance. Given the high skilled AST can keep up with the equally skilled SCH in terms of pDPS, my largest complaint about the current balance is just how powerful AST given the ease of their kit. AST doesn't have to make many optimization decisions regarding clipping since the Malefic change, there are minimal healing oGCDs to optimize for a fight, and optimizing 2 of those 3 oGCDs is more about group coordination than individual skill. The 700+ potency of Earthly Star and Collective Unconsciousness is just icing on that cake. This isn't to undermine the achievements of the highest tiers of ASTs, but I certainly feel a lot more effort is required to eck out every inch of DPS on WHM or SCH whom have significantly harder clipping decisions to make during the course of a fight.

I'll lead this on to your next post:

What's your take on the difficulty to play each class? WHM/AST/SCH. How do you think they scale with skill comparatively to each other?

I feel the skill level difficulty would be AST > WHM > SCH, but I feel AST's power level is a lot higher than the other two when you correlate skill versus power.

With that being said, content design can help reduce the gap. You can see that with the Ultima logs where WHM leads both DPS and HPS categories at almost all percentiles. If SCH and AST aren't allowed to play with zero weakness, it certainly shows.

And as a final point to the whole thing, I'd like to see the pDPS spectrum to be AST > SCH > WHM given the turret nature of WHM.

It is not. healer balance is the worst it's been all expac.

Here's a nice starting point but you're right in that it's been discussed to death.

Going to agree. Healer balance was definitely a lot better pre-Malefic changes to AST.

[EaMett]

[...] I feel the skill level difficulty would be AST > WHM > SCH [...]

That's interesting. So even considering the fact WHM doesn't have many skills to juggle you still think it's harder to play than AST? Do you attribute the difficulty to it's turret nature?

[MoroMurasaki]

That's interesting. So even considering the fact WHM doesn't have many skills to juggle you still think it's harder to play than AST? Do you attribute the difficulty to it's turret nature?

Not my response but I'll bite because I feel the same.

I think the main thing that makes AST easier is the cast time reduction on Malefic and the maneuverability in general. You can get a lot more cheeky on AST with dodging than you can with WHM and you almost never have to plan your oGCD uses because they fit behind your most used spell. Add to that the same or better healing potencies and I think AST is the friendlier class at this point.