Once again, it is not because WHM has bad mitigation tools (it does but that is besides the point) or because N.AST is inferior to SCH in terms of defensive utility (it's not but it's arguably less versatile with its CDs), it is purely because you would be silly not to have an AST and a SCH for DPS reasons.
Even with a 18% AOE Stoneskin you wouldn't take WHM+AST over SCH+AST in the current set of raids. Defensive utility (including healing throughput) simply is irrelevant right now, and will forever be irrelevant when you start outgearing the content. That's a fact with these games. In WoW you would start removing healers after a point, thankfully in this game we can DPS a fair amount and raid structure is different so we're rarely phased out completely.
MNK does the most personal DPS, yet it is still considered sub-optimal because it doesn't bring rDPS and nobody needs mantra. It's the same situation with healers right now, leading to WHM sitting on the bench.
I didn't argue otherwise. But that doesn't make it any less of a problem going forward. AST's value in a raid isn't really tied to it's Sects at all, despite Noct still having one ot two issues Diurnal doesn't have that the expansion *could* fix (namely extend effects for shields being functionally useless vs extend effects for regen being quite useful). But I can't comment about that too much til we see what they get.
In a vacuum, WHM even has pretty good DPS (PoM in Cleric is a lot of dmg for a healer), but that doesn't matter in an actual raid because they will totally stop healing while doing so. AST provides Balance which doesn't interrupt healing *at all*, with the caveat of not being able to do Balance at all times and having the weakest personal DPS in the game.
SCH provides significant healing *and* CDs via fairy while DPSing at no real loss of effectiveness, which has mattered and is frankly too OP a niche to ignore in raiding. It's on par with WAR's dominance in the offtank position now, easy. And it's harder to "fix" without a serious change to how the class (all healers really) works.with Cleric Stance. This *is* possible since SE seems very interested in sweeping changes to cross class skills though.
They could either remove Cleric Stance and balance healers around it not being there (this would be a lot of work and may not necessarily fix the problem on it's own, but is probably the best long term solution), or penalize the SCH's healing further in Cleric stance so the other healers can provide similar raid DPS while healing (this would be tricky to do without affecting aspects of play outside raiding too, and probably has serious coding issues).I'm not sure what SE will go with, but it's likely to be one of those two with no new healer on the table (said healer might have been designed for an alternative to that dps while healing niche, but nah)
