SCH needs some nerfs

[Ghishlain]

I don't necessarily agree with the damage part. There's a lot of things you have to do to optimize damage as an AST. Lining up cards so that it doesn't decrease rDPS but let's you get potential lords under raid buffs like trick, litany, contagion etc takes a bit of thought as well as using sleeve draw optimally so you can potentially get 2/3 lords under raid buffs.

For example 3 Lord trick would be have a held lord and save it for trick > use it > draw > redraw and and minor arcana it (only if its a bad card) > Lord > Sleeve Draw > Lord. That's not even the maximum potential either since there's 4 Lord trick (generally only used prepull) since it takes a bit to pull off.

4 Lord trick: Have Lord held > Use redraw and hold it for 20+ seconds (bad card only) > Use Lord > GCD > MA draw card + Lord > GCD > Draw + Redraw > GCD > Lord + Sleeve > GCD > Lord.

And if you let your Sleeve Draw shift even a little bit you're losing quite a bit of damage so making sure delayed draws don't interfere with SDs CD is pretty crucial.

Where as White Mage is just hit Assize under TA if it doesn't save a heal and holding PoM for 30 seconds so it aligns with 3 minute burst but if you lose a use you just use it on CD. Not thinking too much about what you're doing.

There's also more you have to know and study up on as an AST vs WHM to maximize it's potential. If you draw an Arrow during a point of the fight who does it benefit the most? The NIN will get an extra Spinning Edge but the DRG will gain a Full Thrust but if you don't know that and give it to the NIN it's an easy loss of potency. It's also important to know how giving that Arrow during the point of the fight will affect their rotation at that point i.e giving the DRG an Arrow can make BoTD and oGCD usage a little funky. So you basically have to study everybodys own timings. If the Arrows value wouldn't exceed 230 potency (Broil II) then you're left at 2 options. Either give it to the SCH as they are almost guaranteed to get an extra GCD from that Arrow or gamble it to try and get 300 potency.

It's the same if you pull an extra Balance. You gotta know how much damage each person is doing relative to the timer on the fight. Giving it to the NIN during 2:00 intervals so it catches their full burst. Giving it to the BRD during it's Raging Strikes + Minuet window. Giving it to DRG when they are about to enter Nastrond. The problem with Balance is because it's 30-45 seconds even if it catches their burst it might not be worth it if the seconds after burst is bad i.e MCH where they have a pretty powerful 10 second window but drop afterwards.

That's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of AST optimization, there's a lot more minor stuff but those alone make AST harder to play than WHM. It's why I think AST is the hardest job to play as they have to optimize healing, optimize the raids DPS and optimize their personal DPS. As a SCH with a high end cohealer all I do is fill in the gaps where my ASTs heals dont reach.

It's also pretty interesting to note that AST does about 8-10 more CPM than WHMs do on average. Juggling a lot more actions than WHM has to even if it's because they have a 1.5s cast time.

I agree though that AST damage shouldn't be doing WHM levels of DPS (more after the Minor Arcana change). WHM pDPS should be 15% more damage than AST and SCH (if AST/SCH are doing 4k then WHM is doing 4.6k). That value changes in between patches as Balance and Chain get stronger per patch. I don't like to take Fey Wind into account because on XIVRDPS it's weighted way higher than it should be as it can't properly calculate the amount of extra GCDs you gain from it giving everyone a set value. Even if you don't gain a GCD from it Fey Wind will still have value on it.

I really like this post just because it gives a lot of insight for card decision making at a very high end level. It doesn't change my opinion that the reward for playing AST as a lower skill level feels far too good for the effort you have to put into it as you can ignore a lot of this optimization and still get good mileage for your buffs as long as you have a general idea of how kits operate and a running gauge of everyone's DPS - but it definitely puts into light the amount of effort one has to put on to the table to reach those top percentiles. And even if you remove the card system entirely from AST they would still do more rDPS than WHM due to their current levels of pDPS.

Give party buffs gain strength as the gear levels increase in an expansion, I almost wonder if the party buffs given by healers could use a minor nerf just to allow WHM to keep up with the power creep for the expansion. Just some food for thought to put on the table.

This this this. SE gave us more healing tools in Stormblood and REDUCED healing requirements in fights which is just baffling. Because of these new tools Ultimates are a lot easier to heal than they could have been. The only truly healing intensive part of UCoB was Teraflare phase (adds). Golden looked intimidating but there's only a spike of damage every like 40 seconds then no damage aside from auto attacks and tank busters. Same goes for UWU, Garuda and Aetherplasm phase were the only real healing intensive fights. My group got through UWU with 9 Succors during boss uptime. 3 Of those being in Garuda and 6 being after Aetheroplasm. And this was before the Passage and Collective change, I don't wanna think how much easier it is now.

3 Succors, 2 Indoms, 2 Excogs, 1 Soil in Garuda. 1 Adlo Deploy, 1 Indom, 1 Excog in Ifrit. 0 GCDs 1 Indom Titan. 6 Succors, 6 Indoms, 1 Excog. Total of 11 healer GCDs, 10 Indoms, and 4 Excogs over 15 minutes because AST can cover the majority of the damage with Earthly Star, Collective and proper Aspected Helios usage during downtime. And because there's so much time in between each set of damage Star and Collective are nearly up for every big AoE. As I said before this was before the Collective and Passage change so you can probably get rid of soils all together and probably 2 succors and a deploy.

I haven't had the chance to optimize UCoB like I did with UWU but I have a rough mapout of it and there's even less healing than UWU. The majority of healing will come from Add Phase. Even though it's super optimized it's still pretty pathetic that you can get away with doing that amount of heals just because ASTs kit meshes so well with the fight design.

I am actually curious. If you look at the percentile logs for UwU, WHM pretty much kills the rest of the competition at almost all percentiles. Is there a reason for that in UwU?

If healing requirements are so low, that would imply a AST/SCH team would be able to handle it easily imply the three healers would have the same DPS heirarchy as Savage yet WHM sits on the healer DPS throne for UwU. I've only seen up to Titan enrage, so I don't have the know how to dissect the fight fully, let alone how to optimize fully for the fight.

[edit] Just going to randomly add that I feel like due to the way the fight was structured, the buff alignments for WHM worked out well as I feel like I had PoM + CS up for every primal transition which coincided with TA applications which may have helped the DPS.