Quote Originally Posted by Fevelle View Post
No one wants to understand this. They seem only to care about how "competitive" a healer is. The matter for me is the feeling of the class. I never demanded potency increase or any broken thing. To be honest, the only thing I demanded here was an added effect to Stone II, to not be completely useless spell after lv. 54 and a change to Enhanced Medica.
But... literally nothing changed for WHMs in 3.07. There was no nerf. They weren't decreased in any way. AST was given a buff because they not only felt weaker than WHM and SCH, the numbers supported the feeling. I guarantee you, SE wouldn't have made those changes if they hadn't pored over terabytes of combat metrics. So, if you couple "ASTs feel underpowered" with "the data supports their feeling", they're going to make that change.

I think a problem I see is where WHMs feel that Proshell was "taken" from them. It wasn't. It was rolled into the baseline Protect ability. Stoneskin's mitigation buff was, in fact, taken away in 3.0, but they got a cast time buff on it. I could see getting up in arms if Galvanize was given a 30 minute duration, or Stoneskin's duration was reduced to 30 seconds, but neither of those things should happen if the designers are doing the right thing. Those two changes were made so that a WHM in the party wasn't mandatory. Before, a two-SCH party was passable and fine for DF content, but you'd be insane not to have a WHM/SCH combo in your group because of the way the two complement each other. If anything, an AST could now more easily replace a SCH.

Adding that effect to Stone II and giving Enhanced Medica a buff? Sure, why not, that sounds fine. It'd be nice for Stone II not to be completely useless post-54, I'll totally agree with you there.

Going back to a question I had earlier though... what do you think would be good to make a WHM feel unique, if "stronger heals" wasn't part of the picture. In other words, assume that the number one requirement is "healing power parity" between all three jobs, because their job should be "heals the party". What kind of interesting fluff should WHM have that would set them apart? What would make them "feel" different?