SCH needs some nerfs

[Ghishlain]

Even then, in the example they listed, fudging up that decision-making is literally no more potency loss than blowing a SCH stack on something that isn't Energy Drain (10 pp loss per second when you do the math on it). And that's on a pretty hypothetical/niche situation to boot (drawing Arrow, not having Shuffle up, not having Royal Road for an AOE effect), and it ALSO assumes equal skill level/skill input on behalf of the players involved (aka, the DRG and NIN are pressing buttons at the same speed and are optimizing buffs exactly as they should), and also that they have the same gear/are doing the same damage output, which is not a given until we're talking absolute BiS. Even then, an RNG crit will still completely put the wash on any calculations you'd made about this one extra GCD you'd get from a raw Arrow card, so...why should this situation even be on the radar for balance discussion? There are too many variables to make it a meaningful bout of decision-making, IMO. Meanwhile, every other AST on the planet just uses their abilities to fish out AOE Spears, Balances, and Arrows and gets insane value out of very little planning, decision-making, or forethought.

Their point about CPM is also pretty moot frankly, because AST toolkit is bloated with a bunch of stuff to try to get favorable situations out of crap RNG. It's easy to do 8-10 more CPM than your co-healer when you have a 1.5 second cast speed on your basic damage nuke, you have two Draw actions every minute, and very likely two Shuffles every minute, a Spread, as well as possibly one Royal Road and/or one Minor Arcana every minute. IIRC Drawing a card and using a card also count as "casts", inflating AST CPM even more (aka Draw Balance, counts as a cast, put it in Spread, counts as a cast, use it from Spread counts as a cast). It's hardly worth discussing. Yes, it's a ton of APM, but so is mashing an Embrace macro on SCH, except that Embrace doesn't get counted as a "SCH ability" so it doesn't get to inflate their CPM because it's the pet move.

Oh, I don't disagree about your point regarding the ease of the AST kit and the power you can get out of it and how it should be discussed as a balancing point.

My post was more about how I appreciate the thought that the top tier players have to go through in order to eck out that additional 0.0000001% damage (value exaggerated, I honestly dunno how much it actually changes). I could never play to that level of thought but I like reading about it as I've tried my hand at theorycrafting card selection based on tool kits.

I think it says a lot that, even if you were to never touch your cards, AST (and by extension SCH and Chain / Fey Wind) would still be able to out DPS WHM and thus add more rDPS than the "pure healer" job in the game.

[loreleidiangelo]

Oh, I don't disagree about your point regarding the ease of the AST kit and the power you can get out of it and how it should be discussed as a balancing point.

My post was more about how I appreciate the thought that the top tier players have to go through in order to eck out that additional 0.0000001% damage (value exaggerated, I honestly dunno how much it actually changes). I could never play to that level of thought but I like reading about it as I've tried my hand at theorycrafting card selection based on tool kits.

I think it says a lot that, even if you were to never touch your cards, AST (and by extension SCH and Chain / Fey Wind) would still be able to out DPS WHM and thus add more rDPS than the "pure healer" job in the game.

I did make an edit to my original post, because I realize that I sounded a bit like a tool who didn't appreciate Jinhzu's breakdown of truly optimal card use vs "good enough for the other 99.9% of the game" card use. While I still maintain that the job is too easy for the 99.9%, that still doesn't make their points about the top .1% factually wrong, especially when talking about the job's skill ceiling rather than floor.