Thoughts on why changes are here to stay!

While I think a lot of the suggestions on the forums are great and have potential I don't see them happening. Square treats DPS/Buffs/Debuffs like pie. Meaning if there are 3 pieces we each get one yay! But if you want more then that piece has to come from somebody else leaving them with 1/2 while you have 1 & 1/2. I think this was clearly shown when they came out with the dancer, Bard had a wholesale loss on buffs. Astro card % was nerfed overall. The one raid utility that Sch had lost 5%. Astro also lost potency across all damage abilities. Scholar gained potency but lost abilities. Whm gained potency and lost abilities as well. So looks like a ton of take and very little give.

All DPS & Tanks have had their dps potency increased. Their increases are not a ton of potency but more than make up for anything that was removed from healers. So back to pie, our little dps slices were divided up and handed to others. This way they don’t have to count our dps when tuning an encounter and we can focus on healing or a tv show maybe a book. I'm kinda shocked they left healers with any damage abilities at all.

So for us to get buffs and debuffs and keep balance they would remove them from somebody else or change the encounters. Seriously don't see that happening. It would be nice, but I don't see that fitting into the new healers should only be healing theory and it would take away from all the healing spell bloat they gave us.

The way I really see this playing out is Sch is in the middle so Ast will get a buff up in dps and heals. Whm will get a slight nerf to dps and possible heals. This example fits in perfectly with the homogenization concept they have gone with. I’m sure Whm will stay at the top of the dps step-stool but only enough to make up for the lackluster raid abilities the other two currently possess. Or whm will be brought to heel and be given a raid ability and the other two classes abilities will go down again to compensate. Then they will do some QOL changes to smooth out what some of the other complaints are. Either way this plays out I don’t see them changing a lot it would go against their holy grail.

well either way it's 7 more days until we know.

It's very possible that's what will happen. We'll find out when Savage hits in 7 days, but I do hope they at least buff AST potencies along with Savage release so they can heal better. Right now it feels like you're doing more for the same.

Then they genuinely need to make the healing itself more interesting. I wouldn't mind their idea of pure healing, if I actually had to use my healing kit the majority, or even half, of the time. We're begging for changes because we don't feel engaged right now, and simple potency changes(while desperately needed for AST) won't fix that.

I’m not all the way through the story yet(so I haven’t done any raids or anything) but I do feel like all three healers would benefit from getting a few QOL changes. And it isn’t much. It would definitely be a start but slight tweaks and honestly I think we would be good to go. But like I said I’m not all the way to 80 yet so these are just initial feelings :)

Yes, more healing mechanics. Bosses that leave healing absorb rebuffs, mechanics that must be cleaned, but not too soon, to control damage. Rebuffs that if you overgeal, you take damage

I really don't feel that's really the case. Especially within the same role, it makes little sense to just go "Ok, we'll just take all the DPS from this class and give it to another one." Add onto that, they actually didn't really nerf our DPS that much, and in some cases it even went up.

What happened, and what people are complaining about, was that it was simplified and made more boring to do. It's not a matter of how much damage we do, it's a matter of how engaged we are when we've got everyone healed up. And let's face it, as both we and the rest of the party gear up, the amount of time spent healing a duty will shrink and shrink, so simply saying "Just make encounters deal more damage" is simply moving the goalposts a little.

Can you elaborate on why you think that for a class to buffed other classes have to get nerfed? I'm not seeing the relationship nor the necessity; this assumption seems pretty fallacious to me. Also if healers are they way that they are because of their "healing only" philosophy, then they have failed pretty miserably.

So to make the whole system more balance... so that we have to struggle more. Healer dps shifted to DPS, and healer buff given to support oriented job... i now see glimpse of the light

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Originally Posted by Billythepancake

Then they genuinely need to make the healing itself more interesting. I wouldn't mind their idea of pure healing, if I actually had to use my healing kit the majority, or even half, of the time. We're begging for changes because we don't feel engaged right now, and simple potency changes(while desperately needed for AST) won't fix that.

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You hit the nail on the head, healers up until Shadowbringers swapped to damage when they were not healing. That's what we did during downtime. Either they need to modify the role to decrease downtime, or give us something to do other than dps during the downtime. Such as have a role in providing buffs to the party ala bard/mch/dancer. Or more involved damage prevention in anticipation of incoming attacks. Sadly both of those changes seem a little... ambitious and I doubt we will get such a significant change outside an expansion release. Personally I think they need to reverse the changes temporarily and give us back our damage abilities until we get a replacement.

Because we haven't been given a replacement. We still do damage during our downtime. But it's just been simplified and so feels awful, like a rework halfway complete.

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Originally Posted by Naychan

I'm kinda shocked they left healers with any damage abilities at all.

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Healers have to be able to complete the MSQ somehow. . .

The troubling with these changes is how people seem to be at each others throats with the impressions of reading this subforum daily: Many AST and SCH players seem to be clamoring for a return to their older playstyle while WHM players fear this will nerf or make the job less fun if this happens. This is especially disheartning after WHMs seem to finally have gotten something they asked for in years while AST and SCHs saw their orginal playstyle considerably changed for the worse.

If anything we should all be mad at SE for going through with these changes and barely talking to the players about it. It's been almost a month since 5.0. released and I can't seem to find anything beyond the Media Tour questions or the couple slides from the last Live Letter discussing this. I wanted to hear if anyone have heard anything if the developers are ok with this state or is looking to shake things up again, be it interviews or community manager posts in any of the other languages.

I think that this post misses the point. We aren't upset because they removed our damage numbers. We're upset because they removed our damage options. If they just nerfed the skills we had I doubt there would have been nearly so much of a fuss. They can put that right without either increasing the damage being put out by parties as a whole or decreasing the damage of others.

And then there's the mess that is AST... if they don't do something about that... I don't know. It will make me lose a lot of faith in SE

Some classes don't feel all that great right now.
SAM is underwhelming on the whole with barely noticeable numbers over its melee counterparts. MNK is a mess with a constantly conflicting toolkit. NIN suffers from Trick Attack syndrome. BRD lost a lot of its gimmick as an actual musician. SCH lost Selene and several DPS options it used to have in place of the same 1,2 rotation that AST has been cursed with since inception. AST is just absolute trash with nerfed rDPS, lackluster heal potency and it just feels awful to play.

I don't expect any of these to be fully fixed in any patch this expansion.
Sure, some of the problems can be solved fairly easily with some potency adjustments, such as with SAM's DPS numbers or AST's healing numbers but other problems are more deeper rooted than just potency issue. This is how the game will most likely play for the better part of ShB with a handful of tweaks thrown in periodically to placate us for awhile.

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Originally Posted by Hatstand

I think that this post misses the point. We aren't upset because they removed our damage numbers. We're upset because they removed our damage options. If they just nerfed the skills we had I doubt there would have been nearly so much of a fuss. They can put that right without either increasing the damage being put out by parties as a whole or decreasing the damage of others.

And then there's the mess that is AST... if they don't do something about that... I don't know. It will make me lose a lot of faith in SE

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This. I don't mind where SCH is right now from a DPS numbers stand point and from a pure HPS standpoint I'd say the class is in fairly good shape. What I mind is that they took the most complex healing job in the game and gutted it. For the first time ever since I switched to SCH as my main I'm /bored/ to death in content. Even just trying to weave in my dots was more engaging, to say nothing of faerie management which has become almost mindless thanks to Eos/Selene becoming invincible. I just plop her in the middle of the area and that's the last time I actually consider my faerie placement these days in fights. Where as before proper placement always had a risk/reward system that just plain felt nice to pull off correctly.

I can't comment on AST as I'm refusing to touch the class till Savage drops and we get some answers, but right now I /dread/ getting ASTs as co-healers in any group content and a look at where the class is right now only confirms the reason why.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Healers have to be able to complete the MSQ somehow. . .

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Sorry that was pure sarcasm I should have elaborated.

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Originally Posted by Hatstand

I think that this post misses the point. We aren't upset because they removed our damage numbers. We're upset because they removed our damage options. If they just nerfed the skills we had I doubt there would have been nearly so much of a fuss. They can put that right without either increasing the damage being put out by parties as a whole or decreasing the damage of others.

And then there's the mess that is AST... if they don't do something about that... I don't know. It will make me lose a lot of faith in SE

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Actually I get the points. And I’ve been ranting about them all over the forums. This post was 100% not about the changes but a theory on how they look at things. When they said class balance I had such high hopes that whm were getting raid utility, Astro would be elevated. I expected potencies on sch to drop a bit. But not the rework we got.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Healers have to be able to complete the MSQ somehow. . .

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8.0 Patch Notes preview:

• Scholar and Astrologian have been removed from the game
• White Mages are now a DPS Job
• Conjurer is now the only Healer Role Job
• All damaging actions have been removed from Conjurer
• Players who unlock Conjurer are given a special free Story Skip and Level Skip that unlocks Expert Roulettes and the Normal Mode Raid and brings them to cap
• We have finally achieved Healer Balance
• Healers should just Heal
• It was either this or replacing you with Trusts
• Should've stopped complaining
• Our 48 DPS Jobs' (with our new 12th sub-sub category) queue times matter!
• Please look forward to it!