Honestly, my WHM feels like a WoL - impressive casting animations. It's just that there aren't enough attacks to really feel like someone who would dominate a battlefield.
Counterpoint: why are they all flocking to SMN which is essentially the same boring gameplay? Why the most played healer by far has always consistently been WhM, the most boring of them all? Why every time something gets dumbed down to oblivion, the playing rates dramatically increase?
( the questions are rhetorical )
It’s obvious the modern healer job gear designer designs almost exclusively around the shorter non lala female races (so hyur, miqote and au ra)
The robes hug them relatively well and pieces are designed to complement each other
On males the robes that hug the females sit in baggy waves and any sort of short skirt or shorts designed to accentuate the boots are replaced with baggy pants
I’m generally of the opinion that no non lala specific gear looks good on lala’s but long flowing robes and gowns certainly looks the worse
Not necessarily. I have experienced many many man smn that only ever spammed ruin and ignored all dots and everything else between ARR and ShB. Talking with a few ruin smns usually their thought process was since they didn't read or couldn't comprehend the tool tips and they couldn't see dot damage as readily as ruin, that dots didn't really do enough damage so they were pointless to use as were anything associated with them. Other moves like Shadow Flare were "too hard" to place so that was out. Basically they just didn't take the time to learn the class and made a lot of assumptions and then complained about the class being too simple or boring. Kinda like ice mages, songless/dotless bards, cure1 only whms or rdm who don't use their physical rotation.
Honestly, I preferred healing on WHM, because it scratched that Final Fantasy / generic fantasy aesthetic so, so much better than the other classes. Mechanical complexity didn't have much to do with it, and SCH never felt like it had enough extra complexity over WHM to use it instead. When the fights mean that you're mostly blasting your 1 key, it's sort of moot.
Because once a healer gives up on healing they can pick SMN and it's like playing healing but without worrying about the health bars. Similar situation when a melee player gives up on crit savage and just chooses a phys range so they can autopilot and brain off.
Also WHM is not the most played healer by far, its barely above the rest in TOP, 2nd in DSR, 3rd on Savage raids, and equal to Sage in easier stuff like Zeromus.
I refuse to believe that the SMN bloated numbers of players is due to ex healers picking a new job... But who knows.
I mean you can see the same pattern on every job rework. PLD has higher numbers than before the rework. It's not that huge but it's there. MCH has more numbers than before SHB. DNC has never been as popular as well. MNK doesn't, because it hasn't been dumbed down. It's not just because healers decide to pick up easy DPS jobs.
Occam's Razor would probably be more about 2 main reasons:
- Path of least resistance, especially in raiding (I don't have casual numbers anyway, unless we look at alliance raid charts maybe).
- The majority of people don't give a crap about job intricacies, which incidentally tends to make SE right with the current direction they give to the game...