SCH needs help

[Brandedblade]

Game design ramble incoming.

This is true in theory, in a game design sense. Shielding is mechanically more powerful than direct heals or regens. What is meant by this is, take a straight heal. Keeping all other things the same (resource cost, cast time, targets, range, total potency, etc) and slap a shield on it. That heal is now more powerful than it was before. It's capable of salvaging more situations than it originally was. The opposite is true of a regen. Take a heal, parcel its potency out over time. It's now capable of salvaging fewer scenarios, because, again in a vacuum, its potency alone might get someone killed if it can't outpace the damage.

This is the root of why shielding spells are more resource-expensive than normal heals, and regens are cheaper. It's the price tag for mechanical advantage. Now, these can be priced in a way that makes the regens better outside the spherical cows world of the design vacuum, but it's why shielding is "better".

This also plays very heavily into why SE seems to scared to do things like allow the old crit-lo with Recitation and their reluctance to reduce the mp cost of Nocturnal Aspected Benefic.

They seem determined to avoid a scenario like in world of warcraft where the formerly shield-oriented disc priest, while sometimes extremely weak at the start of the expansion, would grow extremely powerful and nigh meta defining by the end due to how much damage it flat out negated throughout a raid. Because of the nature of mitigation, SE is forced to compensate by making it more costly and/or extremely capped in its potential. That was an element I always appreciated about sch and how its balanced. But they seem to not get it down right with Noct Ast.

[KDSilver]

This also plays very heavily into why SE seems to scared to do things like allow the old crit-lo with Recitation and their reluctance to reduce the mp cost of Nocturnal Aspected Benefic.

While I won't lie, I loved old critlo, it was too powerful really. When you had it, you knew you could completly ignore the next raid wide aoe damage.
This is something that Ast and WHM couldn't do, and was a part of why SCH was prefered so much over Noct Ast aswell (still rng outside of the pull fishing crit indeed, but when it happened, that was a huge and safe plus).
Introducing a forced crit on several abilities while also nerfing critlo was a good move on their part I think.

So not a question of being scared or anything I think.
But from a healer perspective as a whole, I'd say, it was more for the balance.