Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

The problem with utility cards are that fights are designed to be possible with 0 tenacity, a tanks own cooldowns, base movement speed and your own mana pool. If your team are playing reasonably well, most utility cards are unnecessary. You have the fight mapped to beat it without them. They only feel useful. On the other hand, dps is always useful.

Having utility cooldowns on back-up incase of someone messing up is nice, but the game just doesn't support making a full rng based system out of it. Especially when some cards are better and compete with the situational unnecessary ones.

If cards are going to be utility, they should probably be something separate to the dps cards entirely, rather than instead of them.

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Originally Posted by Imora

So how the hell do you play AST now? The cards all do the same thing now?

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correct.
all cards are now a ~3-5% damage increase (depending on target), cannot be modified anymore tmk, and eating cards only serves to mildly increase this damage bonus. this all feeds into granting a sub-resource that allows you to grant another marginal damage increase beyond those, and the "complexity" now lies in assigning the right color card/lucky charm to the right class archetype to gain this resource.

The main issue with this is that SE homogenized some of the wrong things in both tanks and healers, though especially healers.

Everyone gets shields, mitigation, and regens.

While that can be fun and it's kinda fine for casuals, it's mostly only fine because casuals don't need to use most of that kit to get by. That's the entire point, but raiders get punished for that.

Despite SE's insistence of healers only heal, if you actually look at FFlogs, successful healers do half the damage of a full fledged DPS. It's only at the casual level that this isn't true, once you remove unsuccessful raid healers.

The entire design of healers had changed from ARR, where GCD heals were like 75% of healing, down to almost 0% now in ShB. Healers need to to stuff to not get bored, and if the boss mechanics don't force the healer to constantly do them since oGCD healing means that the healers essentially has 95%+ healer downtime, they're going to spend the whole time spamming a single button because SE didn't give healers anything else to do.

This isn't like the old Ultima/Everquest days where it was alright for a healer to go take a shower in between heal phases during a raid because they need to sit down and recover their MP before the next big heals. If the fight demands the healers' constant attention, they better have things to do the entire time.

To be honest, I don't know why healers don't get more utility skills in general. I mean, cards are great, and they take up a decent amount of the downtime ASTs get. It actually almost justifies having only two real damage buttons, as you can weave your cards in between. If only they had a noticeable effect and you did it more often. Like maybe you could draw a card every time you used Malefic, and when you got five, you could activate a buff on a target. The buff depends on the combination of cards, and you still got things like sleeve draw, shuffle, and other ways to manipulate the cards to change the buff.

At the same time SCH could get actually strategies that gave offensive buffs and mitigations. Put together three tactics from the aetherflow abilities to build a strategy, which gave the buff.

WHM could get...anything. They don't have a single utility skill for some reason, as if Afflatus Misery was supposed to make up for that. And if it was, then it's really telling how little SE is valuing the buffs that the other healers already have.

With how SE's been going on harder about the pure/shield healer divide since Sage was revealed, all the existing healers need a massive rework for those words not to be a flat out lie. It's not like the usual issues of going double shield healers is really that much of a problem in casual content anyways. Raiders should adjust their party comp so that they don't double up on anything in the first place.

I don't remember where I saw/heard it, but I feel like I recall the devs saying they wanted to remove a lot of the utility abilities from the game as they felt like it made people feel like certain classes were required. I.E. Utility always leads to meta, which they don't/didn't want to see. Despite the fact that it would just shift the meta from who supplies utility to who deals the most damage.

If they did make that statement I don't think we're going to see a return of utility abilities unless the design philosophy changes.

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Originally Posted by Shalan

I don't remember where I saw/heard it, but I feel like I recall the devs saying they wanted to remove a lot of the utility abilities from the game as they felt like it made people feel like certain classes were required. I.E. Utility always leads to meta, which they don't/didn't want to see. Despite the fact that it would just shift the meta from who supplies utility to who deals the most damage.

If they did make that statement I don't think we're going to see a return of utility abilities unless the design philosophy changes.

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That was said during the job actions video for shadowbringers. Yoshi said he wanted to kill the meta because some jobs were left out of savage and he wanted every job to be viable so that’s why they stripped bard, Astro and scholar of their utility because they were meta for years. I don’t agree with it but it is what it is. I hope they learned their lesson. All this expansion there have been complaints about sch, Astro and bard. We will see if endwalker fixes what shadowbringers destroyed

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Originally Posted by SweetPete

That was said during the job actions video for shadowbringers. Yoshi said he wanted to kill the meta because some jobs were left out of savage and he wanted every job to be viable so that’s why they stripped bard, Astro and scholar of their utility because they were meta for years. I don’t agree with it but it is what it is. I hope they learned their lesson. All this expansion there have been complaints about sch, Astro and bard. We will see if endwalker fixes what shadowbringers destroyed

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As a former WHM main, the only welcome change that Shadowbringers brought to the healing role was that AST and SCH were no longer just strictly superior to WHM in basically every way. Whatever fixes they make to the role in general, I really hope it's not "well these two have powerful utility and you don't. Also they have heals and damage that are roughly as strong as yours. So they're just better. Have fun feeling like you're gimping your party with jobs that are straight up inferior!"

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Originally Posted by SweetPete

That was said during the job actions video for shadowbringers. Yoshi said he wanted to kill the meta because some jobs were left out of savage and he wanted every job to be viable so that’s why they stripped bard, Astro and scholar of their utility because they were meta for years. I don’t agree with it but it is what it is. I hope they learned their lesson. All this expansion there have been complaints about sch, Astro and bard. We will see if endwalker fixes what shadowbringers destroyed

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I don't get why they decided it was better to simply strip the utility rather than give utility to the jobs that didn't have it. WHM should've simply gotten some sort of party buff to make up for the difference rather than strip AST and SCH so badly.

You can't even make the "it's for the newbies" argument when it's not like newer players would even use the utility until they're comfortable with the base mechanics anyways. At least aside from AST, but you went for AST specifically for the cards anyways.

And for the DPS, I mean, utility is amazing and all, but it doesn't work without some selfish DPSs to maximize its use in the first place. Though that would depend on the balance of output, I don't see how it's that bad as long as the dev team has some baseline rules when it comes to designing the jobs vs the content.

One has to wonder... How can DPS have zero party damage buff jobs but healers struggled with it until the others were nerfed to the baseline? I'm sure it would have been possible to buff WHM without giving it party damage buffs or nerfing SCH or AST.

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Originally Posted by Shalan

I don't remember where I saw/heard it, but I feel like I recall the devs saying they wanted to remove a lot of the utility abilities from the game as they felt like it made people feel like certain classes were required. I.E. Utility always leads to meta, which they don't/didn't want to see. Despite the fact that it would just shift the meta from who supplies utility to who deals the most damage.

If they did make that statement I don't think we're going to see a return of utility abilities unless the design philosophy changes.

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What's wrong with having a meta? Just design fights in a way that makes all roles useful. Make them unique and make their uniqueness required in certain encounters or more like have the boss do different mechanics when different jobs are in the party. Basically, have the boss adjust to the jobs instead of having the player base adjust by bringing the best jobs.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

What's wrong with having a meta? Just design fights in a way that makes all roles useful. Make them unique and make their uniqueness required in certain encounters or more like have the boss do different mechanics when different jobs are in the party. Basically, have the boss adjust to the jobs instead of having the player base adjust by bringing the best jobs.

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While I agree with the direction you're aiming for there, that requires more work while not actually much reducing the impact of a meta, as one composition-based version of the boss will end up easier than others.

Tbf, the metas aren't particularly impactful even now. You can do Ultimate on whatever jobs you wish, given appropriate role counts and few enough (or no) duplicates. And giving us more impactful/tailored mechanics or boss designs would at least give us something to look for beyond merely sustained rDPS, which I feel would be healthier for the game. But, it'd ultimately change very little in regards to a given meta existing, except to make it a bit more chaotic (proficient players wanting Comp A for speedruns and less skilled players wanting Comp B for its leniency unless there's a one-trick who requires a swap to Comp C, etc.)... assuming, even, that everything goes right and it's not the same comp or two that always gets the quickest and easiest cake for the majority of fights.