Starter healer... WHM?

[Semirhage]

Also, AST is the worst healing class imo for levelling dungeons...So the fact that ast has cheaper heals and mobility in levelling dungeons is completely inconsequential.

Is it? AST doesn't need to stun mobs with Holy. It has a gazillion brokenly overpowered oGCD heals that have hilariously short cooldowns. They're available every single pull, even if you somehow need to dip into using all of them. And it has infinite free single-weaving space even on Gravity, so its damage doesn't get slowed down at all. Holy is the best damage reduction cooldown to be sure, but once its diminishing returns wear off you need to keep an eye on the tank and either clip the hell out of your damage to keep them up with your few oGCDs, or halt your GCD damage entirely to heal. AST is, just like in Stormblood, just a superior WHM in all but a few niche scenarios.

[Roeshel]

snip

A diurnal ast who is using only ogcds can't heal significantly more than you if you are using lilies which you need to use for movement before and after mechanics anyway. In three minutes time they can end up healing less if you utilize your tools.

You can use benison each time you reapply dia if you want so much to get that whopping 4500 shield potency. However, it will not change the fact that it is excessive and not needed outside tankbusters. Things that are not needed have no value. As you've stated yourself, strong gcd healing, the one thing whm excels at, has no value in savage because it is not needed.

Misaligning dia with assize is not that big of a deal, just improvise. Actually, there is no way you won't misalign dia with assize from the very beginning if you are resetting your dot at the last tick which occurs at the last 2 seconds.

Succor's shield is weak. 205 prevented damage is not huge. For me huge is something like 70-90% mitigation. Idk, we are thinking on different wavelengths.

The healer class with the strongest rDPS on e9s is whm. So it is possible to deal more damage than AST and SCH. Even if they are better equipped for the encounter.

A single good kill on whatever savage boss I hopped into means that I am good enough to be able to make a single good kill with good dps and an adequate amount of healing when I don't get murdered. Yes, it doesn't make me an expert and I never said it did, it was in your head.
Also, there is something I don't understand. How is seeing all mechanics of a boss a good thing? All of the bosses enrage after the last one. A good party will not get to that point. A bad party will.

[Roeshel]

Is it? AST doesn't need to stun mobs with Holy. It has a gazillion brokenly overpowered oGCD heals that have hilariously short cooldowns. They're available every single pull, even if you somehow need to dip into using all of them. And it has infinite free single-weaving space even on Gravity, so its damage doesn't get slowed down at all. Holy is the best damage reduction cooldown to be sure, but once its diminishing returns wear off you need to keep an eye on the tank and either clip the hell out of your damage to keep them up with your few oGCDs, or halt your GCD damage entirely to heal. AST is, just like in Stormblood, just a superior WHM in all but a few niche scenarios.

Putting regen and asylum is all you need for your tank to be sustained in a big pull. Even if the mobs are not dead by the time asylum and regen runs out you just reapply regen, use tetra and benison and continue with the spam, only 140 potency lost. You have 400 bonus dmg potency from assize so you still win against ast. WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content. And I just checked for ala mhigo from stromblood. White mages just deal more damage because they have good sustain.

[Semirhage]

Putting regen and asylum is all you need for your tank to be sustained in a big pull. Even if the mobs are not dead by the time asylum and regen runs out you just reapply regen, use tetra and benison and continue with the spam, only 140 potency lost. You have 400 bonus dmg potency from assize so you still win against ast. WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content. And I just checked for ala mhigo from stromblood. White mages just deal more damage because they have good sustain.

Does that make AST particularly bad at dungeons? They lose -zero- damage potency from their healing. I don't think that makes WHM so much better or more fluid than AST. At that point they're just approaching healing in different ways. Doesn't change the fact that AST isn't anywhere in the same galaxy as clunktastic as the immobile damage-lossy WHM gets when a tougher fight is going south.

Misaligning dia with assize is not that big of a deal, just improvise.

By improvise, do you mean clip? There isn't a way to do this without losing damage. AST doesn't have this problem at all. Because AST is designed in a way that gels with this game's combat system, and WHM isn't. Being incredibly mobile, never clipping anything, and never needing to slow your damage down to heal is a really unbeatable set of advantages in almost all situations.

Man, WHM has a bunch of really craptastic design facets when you actually try to optimize it. Being immobile is a huge disadvantage in a game that forces you to deal with nearly all mechanics by moving. Having so little damage-neutral weaving space forces you to clip your GCD, in a game where most of your output comes from maintaining your casts. It has zero party damage increases in a game that makes percentage buffs more and more effective as time goes on in an expansion. AST doesn't have any of these problems. It excels in not just one or two, but ALL of these areas, and all it pays for all of these quality of life advantages with slightly lower base potency on its damage spells.

To answer the original question instead of just sparring over whether AST or WHM is better, WHM has basically no nuance to it as long as you plan on just running expert roulette and you don't care about eking out every drop of efficiency out of your job. AST is harder to wrap your head around at first, but if you run both through expert you'll eventually someday find yourself wondering "Why the hell does this ridiculous AST job have a six-HUNDRED potency off-GCD heal on a THIRTY second cooldown, and why do I never have to stop blasting to use it? Why do I have to hard clip Holy to use Assize unless I want to dot one of the things in this group or blow a lily on the tank that's barely taking damage? Who designed this stupid WHM job and why does its kit feel like it wasn't created by someone who knows how this game's combat system flows?"

[Roeshel]

Does that make AST particularly bad at dungeons? They lose -zero- damage potency from their healing. I don't think that makes WHM so much better or more fluid than AST. At that point they're just approaching healing in different ways. Doesn't change the fact that AST isn't anywhere in the same galaxy as clunktastic as the immobile damage-lossy WHM gets when a tougher fight is going south.

By improvise, do you mean clip? There isn't a way to do this without losing damage. AST doesn't have this problem at all. Because AST is designed in a way that gels with this game's combat system, and WHM isn't. Being incredibly mobile, never clipping anything, and never needing to slow your damage down to heal is a really unbeatable set of advantages in almost all situations.

Man, WHM has a bunch of really craptastic design facets when you actually try to optimize it. Being immobile is a huge disadvantage in a game that forces you to deal with nearly all mechanics by moving. Having so little damage-neutral weaving space forces you to clip your GCD, in a game where most of your output comes from maintaining your casts. It has zero party damage increases in a game that makes percentage buffs more and more effective as time goes on in an expansion. AST doesn't have any of these problems. It excels in not just one or two, but ALL of these areas, and all it pays for all of these quality of life advantages with slightly lower base potency on its damage spells.

I know that ast is a better healer generally speaking. I just don't think that whm is the absolute garbage people make it out to be.

[Rilifane]

Usually, if you really want to move or weave more than one ogcd you can just reapply your dot.

Dps loss. A pretty chunky one at that. And you lose more than 180 potency at 3 dot ticks remaining as it costs you Glare casts over a fight.

Sch loses 90 potency every time they use Ruin II to weave their heals or move. You would have to use ED to make up for the lost potency which is going to result in you healing less. It's quite noticeable for your co-healer.

Even using every single AF for ED puts you above WHM in terms of dps neutral healing.
Which is one of the reasons why AST/ SCH is simply stronger and has the benefit of requiring less special adjustments for a healer

Ast is not an exception. They can lose rDPS when their party's dps is bad even if they played perfectly.

Which is completely besides the point because their healing is and remains dps neutral, no matter how bad that SAM over there screws up his rotation when you had just given him a card.

Whm has the strongest AoE damage from all healers and there is no point arguing about it. Misery + Assize = 675 +400 = 1075 AoE potency on every mob pack except the first one and that's aside from the Holy spam which stuns targets.

Whm also has the strongest ST healing spell in the game - bene. Aside from that, if you really want to heal someone you can dish out 1900 cure potency on a target in less than 2.5s.

Dps ST & aoe neutral healing, which is something like using Aszlum during a natural Dia refresh. Not aoe damage. Don't jump to conclusions.
It's not about "really wanting something", it's about how much you can do until you start suffering a dps loss. And that's where WHM falls behind, like it or not.
Of the 1900 cure potency, only 1200 is dps neutral if used during a Dia refresh. 1900 is already a dps loss.
This is not about how much you can do if you yolo your dps - it's about that WHM falls short when it comes to dps neutral healing, which is a direct result of the poor amount of free weaving slots and the lack of mobility compared to the other two healers.
And how much dps neutral healing a healer offers is escpecially important as long as you don't outgear content like crazy - going into fights with the party near/ full BiS doesn't make WHMs weaknesses disappear, they're just less obvious.

That's 4,290 without counting Asylum's regen. When you add it becomes 5,460 total for 24 secs and by using only 4 gcds. Obviously, in no part of the game is such fat heal needed. I just wanted to show that WHM is the straightforward healing powerhouse. The other two jobs can't achieve the same in the span of 24 seconds by using only 4 gcds to heal even if they use all of their ogcds.

A heal powerhouse is not definied by "if everything aligns perfectly, you stack everything you get, lock yourself out of dps completely, have 10s of glory nobody will ever need and then be completely drained of resources" in FFXIV.
The true healing powerhouse is AST because they have by far the highest dps neutral healing and very strong GCD healing via Synastry and Neutral, something you exclusively use for GCDs heals and is thus always ready in case you are forced to stop dpsing. Unlike e.g. Asylum which gets regulary used throughout a fight. Followed by SCH, which has immense oGCD healing potency, although a lot of it is tied to a dps loss. So 2nd place for the fairy friends.
This discussions are best done in reality, not on paper. It's about as useful as saying that WHM slaps a dummy harder than SCH or AST.

The healer class with the strongest rDPS on e9s is whm. So it is possible to deal more damage than AST and SCH. Even if they are better equipped for the encounter.

It's not.
WHM gets out-dpsed at all percentiles by both other healers on all bosses.
But the metric you really want to look at is "Healer Combined Damage" because healers don't function in a vacuum. They have a pool of resources that get used by two different players. If WHM was ahead at e9s (which it's not), AST/ SCH is still the better comp in terms of rDPS which is what really counts at the end of the day.
And the differences were far more extreme early tier when not everyone and their cat farmed Promise in near/ full BiS. Right now you have the luxury of overgeared people that have done the content for months. That sugarcoats the weaknesses it has but content wasn't balanced around outgearing it.

This is not about insulting your chosen healer class, it's about bringing weaknesses to the attention of the players and devs that the other two healers don't have or only have to a much lesser extend.
The statistics say that a lot of people play WHM. So everything is fine, right? And if you encounter a problem the other two don't encounter or only to a much lesser extend, you can just do this suboptimal thing the others don't have to do in order to achieve the same, so no problems at all, right? After all you have options.
"WHM is fine, l2p" isn't going to help here.

WHM is crazy good in level 80 dungeons with a half-decent tank because you can dump lilies between pulls and just fire away. It still needs to clip oGCDs while aoeing if Misery is not available and is very immobile during aoeing. Does it make a big difference? No, because the content is faceroll.
But it means that WHM still has these issues even in the easiest and perhaps most tailored-to-WHM content that exists in the entire game.

WHM is not garbage but is has issues that absolutely need to get adressed. Sugarcoating them won't help anyone.

I'm guilty of this because I've tried adlo spam and it doesn't help when the tanks getting trucked. I just can't keep up. Lustrate seems to hit like a wet noodle too.

Need to make up my damn mind.

But thanks for the tips. I usually saved WD for aoe damage ><

But to stay on topic:
Physick heals with a higher potency but Adlo has a shield attached to it. So even if the HP doesn't go up as far, it barely goes down at the same time which makes Adlo spam overall better.
It's generally best to use WD early into the pull when damage on tank his highest, slap the ground and Lustrate until the tank starts dropping, use Fey Illumination if available and then Adlo as much as neccessary while squeezing more ground slaps in until everything is dead.
Front loading the pull with regens and dps makes it much easier to handle because you signifcantly extend the time until you need to GCD heal at lower levels. By the time you're forced to Adlo, some mobs should already be dead.
None of the skills have crazy high healing on it's own, it's about cycling through everything and combining it for maximum benefit.

Very fair and true and the third paragraph is my fav part. May I ask about something? A friend of mine does old exs such as arr for fun no echo ilvl mini and i guess the bis for that. he state ifrit is very intense with heals but the comp is whm/ sch. I ask why not ast/sch this was probably before we got the nice mp rework and draw now gives mp back. Cause I think it was one of those reasons but or something about ast kit not good for it. am thinking cards and div is there aspected helios is there and ed and what not and medic 2 is too expensive and whm themself suffer mp issue under heavens ward things. Would a Di ast not be more viable now even in old exes like arr ones than whm?

Better late than never:
I believe the main issue is that WHM got stripped of several things with each expansion. You once had more dots for more mobility, Largesse was a huge heal buff that is now part of Temperance, BRD had refresh. I haven't played any old ex recently, so this is all theory.
The basic toolkit of both AST and WHM is the same, but AST has less MP issues from Draw and lower MP costs, more mobility and two GCDs to complement it, ED and Synastry. WHM could have higher rDPS as the diffence between their fillers is bigger at lower levels and AST can't use Div during opener for the lack of Sleeve Draw. But AST has an easier time keeping dps up and doesn't suffer from the same MP issues as WHM does pre-HW.
So I think AST should be better here aswell but I'd have to try it myself.

[Liam_Harper]

Also, there is something I don't understand. How is seeing all mechanics of a boss a good thing? All of the bosses enrage after the last one. A good party will not get to that point. A bad party will.

Basically skipping high movement/heal mechanics like Pitch Bog II and having a well coordinated group that makes no mistakes and lines up mitigation well is going to result in far better dps. Obviously, getting orange still means you're decent but if you're claiming Dia misalignment is fine (it's rough) and Benison doesn't matter there's more to learn. If WHM had infinite weave we'd use Benison on cd, it's free and may save other resources. But we don't so we dump it on the AST who can CI and ED constantly and use it only whenever a window opens that needs nothing else. Which is why AST is so valuable.

The top e9s rdps kill for WHM has high crit Assize/Misery padding on adds.

Succor in itself is bad, but a 205 shield is good when you pair it with other heals. In the same way 300 potency for a Rapture is "weak", but paired with mitigation and your co-heals oGCD's, it equals enough healing to avoid GCD hardcasts being necessary. It adds up. In a group that doesn't bother with all those 10%'s, you start to notice your resources being stretched or your normal heal plan didn't cut it and you're unsure why.

Curious on your source for a Diurnal AST with all oGCD's healing less than a WHM using all their lilies. Most top kills have AST significantly ahead.

WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content.

Definitely, WHM's are damage machines in lv80 dungeons, no doubt. But dungeons are so ridiculously easy having that as a strength doesn't really mean much.

The issue isn't that WHM isn't good enough for any of the content in the game. It's "fine". It's just that none of it's strengths, like dungeons or overheal Cure III combos matter. Everything that does matter other healers can do better except WHM comes with multiple weaknesses the other healers don't have.

Would a Di ast not be more viable now even in old exes like arr ones than whm?

Definitely. Diurnal AST is miles easier on mana at lv50, having the 8% mp from cards and similar but cheaper GCD heals, while WHM doesn't get Solace or Thin Air until later. ED is generally more useful than Bene too, due to a shorter cooldown meaning you have it on demand more often. It's also far more mobile, WHM doesn't even have lilies to move while AST has full access to Lightspeed and 1.5 sec Malefic.

[Semirhage]

I know that ast is a better healer generally speaking. I just don't think that whm is the absolute garbage people make it out to be.

It's playable, but it's got a lot of clunky weaknesses in its design that are compounded by the fact that those weaknesses relate to core competencies with the combat system. And on top of *that*, the other two healers don't have these weaknesses. We're ironically in the same design space as we were in Stormblood, except AST and SCH had their gameplay and skill ceilings pancaked down. The reason we're still here is that the ceilings weren't the problem; AST and SCH are better than WHM because they're fundamentally designed in ways that complement how the combat system works. Because their "weaknesses" are fake news because encounter design never puts any pressure on those weaknesses.

I don't know why my brain is going to generic RPG mechanics instead of just FFXIV, but imagine a single player RPG with classes laid out in front of you. AST and SCH are classes that have "downsides" like "This class takes a hefty 50% penalty to all gold drops! But as an upside, all shop items are free". or "This class is hobbled and can only move at 1/4 speed. But as an upside, they can short range teleport at will". or "this class suffers from a -5 to social rolls. Also there is only one single difficult social check in the game that matters to a sidequest". Meanwhile WHM's are more like "You have a 20% penalty to strength, but a 10% walking speed bonus out of combat".

[Imora]

I don't make headway with Adlo.

Hm. Just got to 50 today. I want to get AST to 50 too. Really fighting to play it but the struggle bus keeps picking me up.

[Roeshel]

Curious on your source for a Diurnal AST with all oGCD's healing less than a WHM using all their lilies. Most top kills have AST significantly ahead.

Theoretically speaking, every three minutes whm gains 6 lilies = 1800 aoe heal. You have plenary on 1 min cd, so what you can do is use two lilies each time you use plenary so that's extra 400 per minute, 1200 for 3 mins. You can cast assize 4 times in 3 mins so that's 1600 aoe heal and you get to use Asylum twice, it has 900 base potency but I guess the hp recovery buff also applies to it as well. In any case, 1800 from asylum. In three minutes, whm's cure potential is 6400 without any medicas and hp recovery buffs.

Diurnal ast has 700 from CO, 500 from CU, 720 from star and 200 from Horoscope. That's 2120 every minute. 6360 in three minutes. The difference is that they can heal that amount for free. WHM loses on potency every time they use a lily. So most whms just opt out to heal significantly less in order to avoid losing dps.