SCH is no longer fun to play! Detailed review

[EaMett]

This is complete nonsense. WHM is still in a precarious spot.

Are we playing the same game lol? Whm pDPS outperforms sch total dps (including raid buff) by a safe margin all the while healing more. Whm is in a great spot and totally meta currently. And that’s great, let’s keep it that way. Like I said the buff I’m talking about would be on average 150pot per minute. Not much to write home about and would fix most of our issues + make up the slight disparity we currently see (while leaving whm well ahead of the game)

[Ftail]

This is complete nonsense. WHM is still in a precarious spot, and its position has been altered more as a result of AST nerfs than anything done to WHM. The challenge with SCH right now is that it remains overpowered, but now it's simply as boring to play as WHM is.

It's hard to take this post seriously when WHM's are parsing over 2k more than the other healers. They are even crushing the tanks DPS by comparison and basically becoming an extra DPS themselves. With the raid utility for both AST and SCH being nerfed this expansion, WHM is completely in the meta right now.

[Trunks]

Are we playing the same game lol? Whm pDPS outperforms sch total dps (including raid buff) by a safe margin all the while healing more. Whm is in a great spot and totally meta currently. And that’s great, let’s keep it that way. Like I said the buff I’m talking about would be on average 150pot per minute. Not much to write home about and would fix most of our issues + make up the slight disparity we currently see (while leaving whm well ahead of the game)

It's hard to take this post seriously when WHM's are parsing over 2k more than the other healers. They are even crushing the tanks DPS by comparison and basically becoming an extra DPS themselves. With the raid utility for both AST and SCH being nerfed this expansion, WHM is completely in the meta right now.

I assume the basis for this claim of WHMs parsing 2k more than the other healers is based on Titania EX. First, let me correct you: "more than AST". Second, let me laugh, because Titania EX is a joke. Yes, when WHM can go for several minutes without ever having to use a GCD on healing, it does great damage. If that's what we can expect from forthcoming Savage content, well, then any semblance of balance is out the window anyway.

Even just moving to the slightly more challenging Innocence, the disparity between WHM and AST drops to 1500; between WHM and SCH, it's half of that. To put that into perspective, raid DPS is just under 60k in the corresponding percentile. The gap between WHM and AST is therefore around 2.5% of rDPS, and 1.25% between WHM and SCH. Not so great a gulf after all, is it? So while 150 potency per minute sounds like a drop in the bucket, it's actually not, because WHM is just barely holding its own even in these fights that represent the best case scenario for its performance at endgame.

The moment that WHM has to start seriously healing, it will be screwed - just like in Stormblood (seriously, I swear we had these exact same arguments with Lakshmi EX). This goes to the fundamental flaw in WHM's design. It has a much lower maximum APM output because there's simply fewer buttons to press compared to AST and SCH*. Yet to be effective, it has to pack just as much power into this more condensed arsenal, meaning each of its GCDs is (relatively) more valuable. Consequently, it overperforms in undertuned or outdated content, where SCH and AST cannot bring the full weight of their oGCD toolkits to bear, and lags behind when things get hectic.

This is why the SCH and AST changes made absolutely no sense from a balance standpoint. They did nothing to rectify the actual source of the imbalance between the healers, which is WHM's egregious GCD bottlenecking relative to the other two. It's infuriating to see them wreck the other two healers' fun factors while piling even more on-global healing spells into WHM, and I really hope they correct some of it.

*Just consider that WHM has only 4 oGCD abilities with a CD of 60s or less, while SCH has 10 (AST is harder to quantify because of the way cards work and the charges on Redraw); meanwhile, WHM has 8 healing spells on the GCD, while SCH has 3 and AST has 5.

[Ftail]

I assume the basis for this claim of WHMs parsing 2k more than the other healers is based on Titania EX.

WHM is parsing insanely high on more then just Titania EX. They are pulling over 8k DPS on both ex primal fights.

Even just moving to the slightly more challenging Innocence, the disparity between WHM and AST drops to 1500; between WHM and SCH, it's half of that.

AST is parsing around 5.5k DPS on innocence and WHM is clocked in at 8k for that fight. While SCH is clocked in at 6.4k DPS. I'm getting my information from FFlogs, I don't know where you got your numbers from.

*Just consider that WHM has only 4 oGCD abilities with a CD of 60s or less, while SCH has 10 (AST is harder to quantify because of the way cards work and the charges on Redraw); meanwhile, WHM has 8 healing spells on the GCD, while SCH has 3 and AST has 5.

Many of SCH's oGCDs are locked behind aetherflow usage, and that's not even taking into account WHM has higher healing potencies. You're also acting like fights are forcing you to GCD heal because the outgoing damage is high, it's not, and if it was you'd have a point.

WHM is literally in the best position right now, out of all 3 healers. Which I say, good for them.

[EaMett]

Even just moving to the slightly more challenging Innocence, the disparity between WHM and AST drops to 1500; between WHM and SCH, it's half of that. To put that into perspective, raid DPS is just under 60k in the corresponding percentile. The gap between WHM and AST is therefore around 2.5% of rDPS, and 1.25% between WHM and SCH. Not so great a gulf after all, is it? So while 150 potency per minute sounds like a drop in the bucket, it's actually not, because WHM is just barely holding its own even in these fights that represent the best case scenario for its performance at endgame.

Not exactly sure how you're going about doing these calculations. I'm basing this not off of the 2k difference from higher tier logs but a more generalized 1k difference.
For SCH CS accounts for roughly a 10% uptime at 10% extra crit (or 1% uptime at 100% crit < not entirely correct since 100% crit is not guarantied but lets go with that anyways). It's a crit buff btw not a flat increase to damage output. If your raid DPS is 70k that would be about 350 extra rdps for sch (if you account crit hits to increase damage by 50% which it's usually lower). Again it's less because 70k is already high and already accounts for CS but whatever lets use that 350 figure anyways.

This means WHM is still ahead by 650 dps. If you go into higher tiers of play you're looking at 1250-1650 dps difference. So considering SCH dps is around the 4.5-5.5k range we're looking at WHM doing anywhere between 14% to 30% more dps.

Yes you are absolutely correct in that WHM will see diminishing returns with higher healing requirements. But with the way healing works that return will only diminish after all 12-14 ogcds have been used. SE has significantly increased ogcd options/power for healer pairs (esp in the case of sch) and some GCD healing increases. Which means it's going to take a faire amount before that hits WHM hard.
For reference this represented about a 8% dps decrease for WHM during SB between savage and ex trials. Also worth noting that all healers saw a decrease in their pdps output roughly equivalent to that. But again lets ignore that for now and imagine a world where neither AST nor SCH suffer any dps loss due to all their ogcds.

That means that WHM is still a projected 6%-22% ahead in dps. Again I can't stress enough that I'm fine with this. WHM won't be pulling this much in prog anyways as groups are more likely to heavily rely on their healing. So things will be pretty equivalent for a while. Their MP management means they'll be better for raising as well. And that's amazing. WHM around eorzea have spend the last 4 years in limbo, they deserve their current standing.

But back to the initial suggestion. 150pot per minute is perfectly fine. If I round it up we're talking about a ~2% dps increase for sch, 5% if you manage to use all 3 stacks (which is very unlikely). Nothing that would even remotely dethrone WHM. It might bring SCH up on par with WHM in a lesser optimized setting but WHM will still be miles ahead of the other healers and their rdps in optimized play.

So yeah... Is there room for error in the above? Sure maybe whm will see an decrease in dps higher than 8% but given how all the sch numbers I used were toned down a ton (ignored their dps decrease for savage, used 70k raid dps as a basis, used 50% damage increase from crit, used 100% uptime as a basis which is the best case scenario, etc..) I think it's safe to view it as accurate enough.

tldr; Give us an ED equivalent back. Of course knowing SE what is more likely to happen is SCH get nothing and WHM get a nerf.

[Ringabell]

WHM damage is SIGNIFICANTLY higher than SCH in addition to having stronger heals and infinite mana.

Please stop gaslighting.