SCH needs some nerfs

[Jinzhu]

Indomitability is NOT the strongest heal in the game. The strongest heals in the game are actually the more situationalized ones. Whispering Dawn (again, the fairy is the most OP healer.) is the actual best heal in the game. 100% Free, and the Scholar does not even have to use an oGCD to use it

Actually it's a pretty common misconception but Whispering Dawn isn't the strongest heal in the game! A lot of people are fooled by the 840 potency it brings but don't realize that the fairy is actually weaker than the player. For example a cure potency of 120 is around 3.1K for a player but only 2.4k for the fairy. Theoretically an extended Collective by CO is the strongest heal in the game being 1200 potency for 36,000 healing (no crits) then followed by Asylum which is 900 potency for 28,000 healing (no crits). After those two Earthly Star is next being 720 potency for 22,000 Healing (36,000 crit). Whispering Dawn falls into #4 at 840 pet potency for 16K healing which isn't bad but doesn't compare to the abilities listed before. The main quirk as you said before is that it cost 0 oGCD spaces and 0 resources to use but so does Collective/Earthly Star due to ASTs 1.5s gcd. Asylum is a little more troublesome as it costs oGCD space which WHMs dont have much of but with proper play shouldn't be an issue.

I don't necessarily believe Whispering Dawn is too OP simply because Eos isn't used at all in the top end environments because Earthly Star does it's job. Back in HW Eos was meta because Earthly Star didn't exist and Whispering Dawn saved more DPS from healers than Fey Wind gave.

The problem with the fairy comes down to Embrace honestly. Having a passive regen (that's stronger than ASP Benefic/Regen) that lasts throughout the fight and costs 0 resources is laughable because single target damage is the main source of incoming damage in this game. You have AoEs but those are covered with the large abundant of AoE heals each healer has. Where the only free single target heals we have in the game are Embrace, Fey Union, Essential Dignity, Tetra and Benediction. Every skill in that list is limited aside from Embrace which heals constantly for 5k/8k crit or 8k/11k Crit under Rouse.

Embrace is the reason you can get through O9-O11 with 0 single target heals and only have to cast 3 ASP B in O12S. And either needs an obvious nerf or another job needs to have a similar effect like maybe DNC. In my opinion I think it would be good to tag some MP value on Embrace making it cost 100-200 per cast and taking the auto heal function off when on Obey. This would make it so that healers at a low skill level are still able to utilize her by leaving them on auto as they won't be DPSing much so they won't run into MP issues. But at the higher levels you would be picking and choosing where to heal as MP is a lot more limited.

[Ghishlain]

Yeah I agree that AST is is rewarded more for worse play in terms of damage. However I think that bad play is also punished more on AST because it makes your cohealer miserable. As an average AST will force you to heal more due to improper Star, CU, ED uses where as WHM there's not much that really punishes their cohealer (aside from the obvious of just not healing lmao). Can't tell you how many times i've been in a party with an AST who uses 2 Earthly Stars in a 10 minute fight and no CU or pops their Star when everyone is full HP. I would much rather have a WHM coheal than an AST coheal in PF for that one reason haha.

I've also been a huge advocate of nerfing Healer DPS in some way. In most groups our rDPS on healer beats most tanks which is ridiculous. I'm not sure how I feel about nerfing raid utility though because that's one of the things that keeps things interesting (looking at ARR where there was virtually no raid utility so there was no real coordination between players)

I can agree with the first bit. AST's power comes from a coordinated group taking full advantage of the power AST gives. As soon as you take things into a PuG setting when you can't guarntee the other 7 people will make use of the AST's tools, it certainly makes it less desirable in those scenarios. If even one person misses Star / CU, the AST will need to make up with that via Dignity and/or GCD heals. Though admittedly a lot of people talk about AST's strengths in the context of optimal play so..

I will disagree with the second bit unless they also give raid buffs to WHM as well. My reasoning is the fact that real DPS contribute a higher percentage of damage than healer DPS would. Even if gear scaling increases all player's DPS at the same magnitude, healers who contribute rDPS will get higher returns versus those who do not because the raw DPS increases will affect them more.

Here's an arbitrary example to visualize my thoughts:

ilvl 100
AST = 4,400 pDPS + 530 rDPS = 4,900 total DPS [Assume AST buffs contribute 1% more DPS for a group that does 53K total DPS]
WHM = 4,900 pDPS = 4,900 total DPS

ilvl 130 (assuming a +20% DPS increase)
AST = 5,280 pDPS + 636 rDPS = 5,916 total DPS [Assume AST buffs contribute 1% more DPS for a group that does 63.6K total DPS]
WHM = 5,880 pDPS = 5,880 total DPS

So with the above example, WHM and AST were equal on one tier but as soon as the next tier happens, WHM will start to fall behind. I feel this issue would be exasperated more if healer DPS was even further reduced and more emphasis was put on tank's and DPS' DPS.

Though again, if we give WHM some form of raid utility, that'll help bridge that potential gap and I'd be more inclined to agree with a healer DPS nerf.

One of the biggest reasons for that is because people aren't really optimizing Ultimate aside from a few groups because it's a huge time investment and because of that WHM exceeds as they don't really have to do too much optimization to hit high at the highest level compared to AST. (I also don't think the gap between WHM and AST is as big as Alphascape leaderboards are making it out to be. If you were to look at Sigmascape parses were a lot closer and it's not like that gap increases overnight. Hell the #1 Chaos for WHM is in a pug lol.)

There's a threshold on speed affecting your damage in UWU as well because of kill time. Depending on how fast you kill the primals the more your CDs can get misaligned. I think at about 7:25? If you kill Titan any earlier than that you lose a set of 3 minutes as they won't be back up for Ultima. To compare our fastest kill time is 14:23 (14:20 if someone lbed at the end xd) and we kill Titan at 7:00 and lost a use of Litany/Voice where as a groups with a kill time of 14:50+ got that use. You can also gain an extra use of Potions if you pop them during Ifrit dashes but again if you kill too fast they won't be back up in time for the opener so you're knocked down a use there as well.

Another problem with killing Ultima itself fast is that it's one of those fights where the longer it lives the more DPS you will do. There's two reasons 1. You have more time to bring your DPS up after the massive amount of downtime and healing and 2. Killing faster can mess with your reopener. In my best we killed it mid burst and thats starting as soon as it starts gathering aether. If the fight would have lasted 30 seconds longer my PB could have been around 100 DPS higher.

I'm not saying that's the reason that WHM is higher because the amount of groups actually killing it that fast is small but just comparing the top healer combined between SCH+AST and SCH+WHM and the WHM did 20 more healer GCDs than my AST. And ours isnt even completely optimized. Our current map out for heals is based around Selene where as the SCH+WHM one isn't. So that's 20+ healer GCDs less with Selene. Whispering Dawn is all fluff healing in with out current setup because Earthly Star covers all of the damage Whispering would. Sucks that we weren't able to get a kill with it because of Alphascape releasing. Anyways the only reason Selene is possible is because Earthly Star basically covers for WD and I can't imagine a WHM being able to do that without too much of a loss.

The pDPS discrepancy between WHM and AST is definitely over exaggerated though. It just comes down to the point I made before and that there are no truly great groups running with WHMs compared to their AST counterpart. Sure you can optimize on WHM but that's only a piece of the puzzle. The other halves being kill time, buff alignment and coordination and just looking at the top parses in Alphascape for WHM they are very mediocre in those aspects. Like I said earlier it's not like the DPS gap between WHM and other healers can just magically grow overnight. The best WHM in O9 was in a pug and is currently ranked #5 across all healers for that fight.

Thanks for the insight~

Just looking at FFlogs, the DPS discrepancy between WHM and AST is about 1000 on average. That's just not normal no matter how you look at it.

I'd like to add that AST is also almost equal to SCH in pDPS contribution across the board as well. For a healer job that is suppose to have the least potential DPS based on SSS, that's also something that we shouldn't consider normal.

The problem with the fairy comes down to Embrace honestly. Having a passive regen (that's stronger than ASP Benefic/Regen) that lasts throughout the fight and costs 0 resources is laughable because single target damage is the main source of incoming damage in this game. You have AoEs but those are covered with the large abundant of AoE heals each healer has. Where the only free single target heals we have in the game are Embrace, Fey Union, Essential Dignity, Tetra and Benediction. Every skill in that list is limited aside from Embrace which heals constantly for 5k/8k crit or 8k/11k Crit under Rouse.

Funny enough, Aspected Benefic is actually more potency per 3 seconds than either Regen or Embrace when you combine both the initial heal and the the HoT component of it.

Regen = 150 potency / 3s
Embrace = (250 potency*0.66) = 165 potency / 3s
D.Aspected Benefic = {[200 + (140*6)]*1.1} / 6 = 190 potency / 3s

With that being said, given the GCD commodity game we play now for optimized play, I'd also be inclined to nerf Embrace. Both Regen and D.Aspected Benefic cost a GCD and AB also costs an arm and a leg to cast where as Embrace is both GCD and MP free.

It's amusing - I wouldn't of remotely thought of agreeing with this suggestion back in the second / final Coil days but times have changed a lot since then.

[LiddyGhu]

Actually it's a pretty common misconception but Whispering Dawn isn't the strongest heal in the game! A lot of people are fooled by the 840 potency it brings but don't realize that the fairy is actually weaker than the player. For example a cure potency of 120 is around 3.1K for a player but only 2.4k for the fairy. Theoretically an extended Collective by CO is the strongest heal in the game being 1200 potency for 36,000 healing (no crits) then followed by Asylum which is 900 potency for 28,000 healing (no crits). After those two Earthly Star is next being 720 potency for 22,000 Healing (36,000 crit). Whispering Dawn falls into #4 at 840 pet potency for 16K healing which isn't bad but doesn't compare to the abilities listed before. The main quirk as you said before is that it cost 0 oGCD spaces and 0 resources to use but so does Collective/Earthly Star due to ASTs 1.5s gcd. Asylum is a little more troublesome as it costs oGCD space which WHMs dont have much of but with proper play shouldn't be an issue.

The raw potency was not the reason why I labeled it as the "strongest." Sorry about the wording, but what I meant was "best."
The range, being completely cost-free, and only being 60s on cooldown (the most key point), as well as not requiring the scholar to stop casting for even a moment to use it are what makes it the best. My apologies.
Another noteworthy aspect would be that the fairy can often stand in places the healers themselves cannot, making it the only option available to hit all players in some scenarios.