After this is all over, can we never claim "WHM is fine"?

The reality is that the 3 healers should be getting designed to be synergistic with each other rather than facing off as competition for 1 of the 2 seats.

2.0 demonstrated that SE's job design team are capable of doing this. I've assume the fall from grace is a case of them just not having the time or resources to keep up the standard of their earlier work.

I’d like for you guys to realize how we got here Sch/AST have been the preferred healers for way too long because of raid utility and their ability to solo heal content a WHM never could because they lacked shields. This is the price u pay for being the top healers for years. Let the WHM have their fun I’m sure the “balance” patch will make them feel inadequate again.

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Originally Posted by Hammerhorn

I’d like for you guys to realize how we got here Sch/AST have been the preferred healers for way too long because of raid utility and their ability to solo heal content a WHM never could because they lacked shields. This is the price u pay for being the top healers for years. Let the WHM have their fun I’m sure the “balance” patch will make them feel inadequate again.

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And this sort of mentality is one I absolutely abhor. “We suffered, so it’s only right that you suffer now, too.” That is a terrible mentality to have. All three healers should be balanced—they shouldn’t trade “who gets the crappy spot this expac” with one another. And players should stop with the above idea that, just because one healer had to suffer means the others get their turn as well. Honestly, it’s the same crap I see from DPS mains who are mad that some jobs were meta and think they deserve to be put out with the trash so that other jobs can shine. All jobs should try to find balance—half should not be great while the other half suck.

I don’t recall many ASTs or SCHs ever advocating to leave WHM in the dust. Not in any of the discussions I was present in for Stormblood, and I was in quite a few of them (and lurked in several more).


EDIT because posting limit... Guess it’s time for a 24-hour break from the forums again.

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Originally Posted by Hammerhorn

This balance your looking for doesn’t exist in this landscape if u have 3 classes and u can only field 2 one will always preform worse than others it’s the nature of the beast , it’s the predictable pattern, Trust me I’m a tank main PLD since launch I want the healers happy but this isnt new nor is it goin away. Look at PLD when Drk came out nobody wanted PLD , look at Nin now ppl are takin DNC instead, look at how War hasn’t been left out of raid group comp forever now, look at how AST/sch have dominated the past 2 yrs. There’s a pattern here I’m not condoning it but merely recognizing it. Square rotates whos time to shine it is. At the end of the day if your good enough with a gimped class it won’t matter much everything will be ok, but you can’t turn a blind eye to the fact balance is a illusion, there is no such thing as equal here.

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It is not right for you to justify AST’s current suffering with the suffering WHM endured. Especially when there were AST mains advocating on behalf of WHM when it was suffering. It’s poor on your part.

WAR/DRK/GNB shouldn’t advocate for PLD to suck, or vise versa. The melee shouldn’t advocate for NIN to suck, or vise versa (I don’t know why you’re comparing NIN to DNC—they aren’t in the same role and would never compete with one another for a spot—NIN competes with the melee, DNC with BRD/MCH). Likewise with the casters and physical ranged.

I think balance can be obtained. After all, the physical ranged are relatively well balanced now—DNC could maybe use slight potency buffs, but it is, at most 300~400 rDPS behind the selfish physical ranged MCH. BRD is 50~70 rDPS behind MCH. Taking any of them would not be a horrible hinderance to a party. Conversely, taking an AST over a WHM is denying ~900 rDPS. Taking a SMN over a BLM is denying ~600 rDPS. Tanks are also well balanced in terms of damage right now, based on the numbers and data I have seen on a Certain Site—WAR’s numbers seem to be lower in terms of uploads, but I think that’s due to job design. I don’t main tanks enough to know what their discussions are about its current design, but tanking a combination of any of the tanks would not be gimping your party.

Your post had very little to do with balance being unobtainable and everything to do with “it’s AST’s turn to warm the bench”.

This balance your looking for doesn’t exist in this landscape if u have 3 classes and u can only field 2 one will always preform worse than others it’s the nature of the beast , it’s the predictable pattern, Trust me I’m a tank main PLD since launch I want the healers happy but this isnt new nor is it goin away. Look at PLD when Drk came out nobody wanted PLD , look at Nin now ppl are takin DNC instead, look at how War hasn’t been left out of raid group comp forever now, look at how AST/sch have dominated the past 2 yrs. There’s a pattern here I’m not condoning it but merely recognizing it. Square rotates whos time to shine it is. At the end of the day if your good enough with a gimped class it won’t matter much everything will be ok, but you can’t turn a blind eye to the fact balance is a illusion, there is no such thing as equal here.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

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Adding onto that, it's not like most people only ever play one class. A lot of people here played one, two, or even all three healers. Many of us had a vested interest in seeing WHM do just as well as SCH/AST since we played the class as well, and were actively advocated buffs for it.

There's no need to drive a wedge between people by acting as though classes had a static playerbase that could never understand the plights of WHMs without their favored class of healing being put down as well.

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Originally Posted by Hammerhorn

This balance your looking for doesn’t exist in this landscape if u have 3 classes and u can only field 2 one will always preform worse than others it’s the nature of the beast , it’s the predictable pattern. Square rotates whos time to shine it is. At the end of the day if your good enough with a gimped class it won’t matter much everything will be ok, but you can’t turn a blind eye to the fact balance is a illusion, there is no such thing as equal here.

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That indicate's a failure on Square's part, and is not something that we should simply roll over and accept because it's not "our time to shine."
SE could have simply touched up on WHM without taking the bat to SCH/AST as hard as they did.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

The reality is that the 3 healers should be getting designed to be synergistic with each other rather than facing off as competition for 1 of the 2 seats.

2.0 demonstrated that SE's job design team are capable of doing this. I've assume the fall from grace is a case of them just not having the time or resources to keep up the standard of their earlier work.

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This. I've long felt that AST lazily being given a regen-mode/shield-mode toggle is much of the root cause of X healer being straight up better than another, along with encounter design not pushing healers hard enough to make a "pure healer" with higher HPS desirable. Sadly, SE job and encounter design has doubled down on homogenization and the removal of synergy as a method of balancing.

The problem with balance by homogenization is that if you have ANY differences remaining between jobs/characters/etc. it's more likely one of those things will be outright superior to another. If you don't have any differences remaining, why do you even have separate jobs? At least with heterogeneous balance a given job can be better in some encounters and worse in others.

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Originally Posted by Shalan

That indicate's a failure on Square's part, and is not something that we should simply roll over and accept because it's not "our time to shine."
SE could have simply touched up on WHM without taking the bat to SCH/AST as hard as they did.

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I think you missed his point.

He said that, in a game balanced around having 2 healer spots for the hardest content, 1 of the 3 will always be less interesting to take than the others. Perfect balance in a mmo (and any kind of online/competitive game) is just impossible, or else all your classes would have the same spells but with different colors. Look at WoW : so many years of terrible balance, be it for tanks/dps/healers. Look at GW2 (which I hate with a passion but still) : Chronomancer was king for a looong time, and that was the meta. So many games failed at balancing everything, do you think that it can be done by SE ? After years (I was not there, just informations I found) of imbalances ? Nah, it seems like it will be the same as always : some jobs on top, some at the bottom.

The only way for jobs to be balanced is by homogenizing them, but that's fucking boring and defeats the point of having multiple classes in the first place. If not, people will just take the 2 most interesting choices out of the 3 (or stack 2 of the strongest one).

Btw, I thought the main complains came from the fact that AST/SCH's gameplay was kinda butchered.

Perfect balance is probably not achievable, and I think we all can agree on that. There's always going to be some kind of job that narrowly cuts out the others. But you can get pretty close. (See the numbers HyoMin posted about rDPS)

Ever since Astrologian was added the balance has been pretty comically bad. They can do better.

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Originally Posted by ColaSama

I think you missed his point.

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I quite understood what he said, it was easy and simple to understand. And I perfectly understand how having three healers can create some form of dilemma, and how idiotic it would be to pine for perfect balance. I just don't agree with his justifications.

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This is the price u pay for being the top healers for years.

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and

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Square rotates whos time to shine it is. At the end of the day if your good enough with a gimped class it won’t matter much everything will be ok

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Feel like trashy cop out excuses to the current situation, and makes it sound as though we should find the current state of healing acceptable because it's WHM's "time to shine."

If that's the balancing attitude we want to take we'll be forever in a cycle of classes being shat upon for the benefit of the others. That's not something I want to see happen, and I feel as though we should be requesting and expecting more if we ever want to see some form of progress.

Sorry, I'd write something more eloquent and longer to address more points but I'm on lunch break atm, lol. I'll come back later to see if there's anything else to add.

(Also, there are more issues with AST at least than gameplay issues - there's some potency, lacking pDPS/rDPS contributions, and to a lesser extent MP issues - here's hoping Tuesday gives them a little love)

SE seems to have this dogma that, for healers, "easier to play" necessarily means "pushing fewer buttons". I'm not convinced that there can ever be balance between the healers so long as WHM has a fundamentally different, less-efficient design than the other two.

We need to realize, collectively, that if any one of us is disadvantaged, then nobody is "fine". ShB should've made that abundantly clear to non-WHMs. You can draw a straight line of causality between the lack of visible and vocal urgency for fixing White Mage and the devastation which was wrought on Scholar.

The imbalances led them to approach healer changes from the perspective of broad design goals, to the exclusion of gameplay considerations. They'll tweak some potencies on AST and things will be much as they were in SB, just with healers using a few extra GCDs on healing now and then. Tah-dah, everyone's a "more pure healer" and still everyone's "viable"; but somebody's still not "desirable" and nobody's having fun.

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Originally Posted by Hammerhorn

This balance your looking for doesn’t exist in this landscape if u have 3 classes and u can only field 2 one will always preform worse than others it’s the nature of the beast

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This is nonsense. The problem isn't the number of Jobs in the meta, it's that one of the Jobs is fundamentally different in a way that makes balancing their capabilities across a diverse set of content nearly impossible.