Are...
Are you seriously suggesting that what you got from all that is that to have fun as a healer you should be bad at healing?
Did you really read the whole thing? Context matters...
A comment from the skill floor.
Dps complexity or simplicity does not impact the absolute skill floor. The required minumum healing skill is to be able to heal the first 10 perhaps 15 seconds of roulette trash megapulls, when dps has zero priority anyway. After that, it's stable, and healing the rest including bosses is cake in comparison. The challenge on bosses are mechanics, not healing. Even the mechanics required for the msq, makes a mockery of a claim that more than dps single button spam is too hard even for the higher tier players. Seriously.
I don't know the state of healing above the floor, but I would expect higher level difficulty content to require more job skill. Otherwise, why do it?
See, I'm of the opinion that to unlock the new jobs, you should have levelled one of their category to the starting rank and perform a basic solo duty to make sure you can do that role. So for gnb you needed to get a tank to 60 and fight as a drk, pld or war. Sage likewise should be to 70 and you got to do it as a whm, ast or sch.
Ensuring basic competence is not the same as gatekeeping
Back in the ARR and hw days, if you didn't know the basics of your job by the time you reached level 30, aiatar would give you a kicking over in brayflox's longstop. Likewise you had to do dps in order to stop madison from shooting everyone dead in sastacha hard or Titan from punting everybody back to the start.
You learned to do dps when healing regardless of stance dancing or not.
The msq too, forces you to dps while healing. You cant heal the trash to death when saving the beggar in uldah. You cant heal your way past raubahn in 3.2
The msq duties do not give you the echo healing as a healer. You got to heal yourself and do dps to beat the encounter.
Healing while dpsing is like pc requirents
The skill floor in duties is healing everyone enough to clear the content. That's the absolute minimum specs
But you want the reccommended specs which is always be casting- healing everyone enough to clear the content and do something productive with your gcd. This means damage.
You should be past the skill floor once you reach the end of ARR's story.
Yeah, this is huge. Levelling is straight up scuffed for a lot of Jobs. Every time the devs think "we need to remove skills to keep the Job from getting bloated" they end up removing skills from early levels. After all, the later levels need to be exciting, so people are sitting there going "I just hit Stormblood and got a bunch of new tools!" or whatever. Except now the ARR portion is largely garbage barring the few Jobs that have sane levelling kits. RDM is fine, SAM is pretty decent, but then there's BRD as you mentioned, DRK which is the poster boy for a completely jacked levelling experience, multiple Melee DPS that don't get AoEs until horribly late because obviously DRG loves getting Doom Spike at level 40. SE needs to actually sit down and do a full revamp of the 1 to 90 experience, but that would probably require so much damn work to make sure content doesn't snap in half that they'd probably run out of time to design Jobs for the next expac.
Do we really need new jobs for the next expansion? I'd say we've hit a pretty solid amount of Jobs at the moment.
We got the healer and the heavy armor DPS we needed to make things more or less rounded. (Though I guess we'd still need another ranged and a second Dexterity melee job, that is if you consider Blue Mage the 4th caster.)
Given how many of the supposed new buttons are actually old ones under a different name, there's really no reason why a lot of them can't be restored to lower levels since SE already admitted they don't do much balancing for them (look at the ED nerf) just like how healer dps actions being restored would be beneficial to the levelling process by giving new healers options to do in combat during the long levelling process instead of yet another heal they won't press.
Plus, judging from the preview, monk is getting howling fist and steel peak being returned at lower levels. Why not other jobs? Energy drain should be back at the level it was taught to be used in the acn quest for example. Get the core mechanics taught early.
And tbh, if all the flashy new holy, aow and gravity is just a 10 potency increase, just scrap the current form and make that a trait and make the holy/gravity/aow 2 do something NEW
I'd be perfectly fine with SE skipping out on new Jobs to re-do the levelling kit for the Jobs we have, but I bet SE heavily banks on showing off new Jobs to generate hype. "We fixed the trash levelling system and made ARR combat less boring!" doesn't have the same appeal as "SUMMON A DEMON FROM THE VOID TO BECOME THE ULTIMATE EDGELORD". Plus there are still some fan favourite Jobs that people are asking for, such as Beastmaster, Time Mage, and Chemist, and going an expac with zero Jobs would just being "delaying" those Jobs (even if SE has zero intention of ever making them).
As a WHM player who levelled the Job to max level back in Stormblood (also first Job I levelled to max) and will be dropping it in favor of AST, the Job needs something to make it a more enjoyable Job to play. The Job is simply too boring for me now, and after seeing the media tour for the Job, I believe it's time to hang my cane up.
However, I still want the Job to succeed. Believe it or not, WHM doesn't need a lot to make it fun. Aside from a few nitpicks, the WHM healing toolkit is fine in my eyes. Really good even. And I do agree with the nerfs to Thin Air. I believe that in order to fix WHM, the devs can add one or two DPS skills and that's it (maybe three but that's pushing it). Healing isn't hard. It's not. And adding one or two DPS skills won't raise the skill ceiling all that much. Maybe I'll make a new thread about WHM in the future. It's just sad to see the Job that I loved and levelled to max level first isn't being shown any love at all.