What makes WHM special? Nothing anymore.

[mp-please]

The "identity problem" looks more like people being
A) Bored with the class,
B) Don't and haven't enjoyed the playstyle or
C) Are just selfish and upset that AST got a buff and WHM didn't.

Now this is the kind of stuff that annoys me, astrologian needed a buff, badly.
I was sick and tired of having to heal for a healer and half everytime i found one on alexander BUT not a buff like this, they straight out copied most of WHM skills and gave to astrologian. Maybe it was a quick fix so they could enter on groups asap but it's just unfair how skills were straight up copied.

Since 3.0 WHM lost

> Proshell

> Granite skin (Ok 18% SS with the current HP bloat would be a bit OP but it's still a class trait lost)
>> Thanks to this loss and astrologian lightspeed, it's actually easier (and less costy) to spam SS during combat on a AST than on WHM making the quick stoneskin trait quite insignificant. And to be honest, 0.5s is hardly noticeable when most of the attacks on this game are telegraphed in a way or another.

> Accuracy on gear which is indispensable for a WHM as every single dps skill requires it
>> DPS was buffed to the best of all 3 healers, but nothing was done to allow us to dps because "Healers don't need to dps, mr yoshi-p says"

> Most powerful single target healing spells since benefic and benefic II are exact copies of Cure I and Cure II
>> Said copies cost LESS MP than the original skills at the exact same potency

> HoT speciality
>>The difference between Diurnal Aspected benefic/helios potencies and regen/medica II is almost insignificant

On another matter since i keep seeing this mentioned on this thread.

Cure III
Mind you, i love this skill. I'd marry it if i could. (i'd probably marry holy faster though) However like i said before the usefulness of cure III is negatively proportional to overgear and this game has history of throwing unnecessary gear levels to people to the point FCOB was being solo healed a month after it's release. We'll eventually get again to the point where a single medica II does the job and currently astrologian can do that with negligible losses. To add up they even gave scholars the ability to burst aoe heal with indomitability.

Synastry vs Divine seal
Divine seal straight up buffs every single healing spell power by 30% (except a few chosen), that's as straightfoward as it is. So a cure II that has 650 potency gets turned into 845.
Synastry is hard to calculate the potency since not everyone will get second hand heals for that long but benefic II gets turned into a 780 and then the 2nd target receives half of that, that's 20 seconds of 1170 heal potency right there. The main concern about synastry is it's higher cooldown (reduceable with the spear) and that that once the secondary target is fully healed, the second hand healing is completely wasted. Either way i wouldn't call the skills equal, but they're on equal ground.

Medica II range
Honestly, nobody cares. Everyone should be near the boss, no exceptions. Positionals are a mechanic everyone has in a way or another.

To cut short this already big wall of text, and on a personal note. I'm worried about the long term usefulness of the job i love and main for more than a year now.
Once again overgear is a huge concern of mine as nobody cares about healing numbers as long healing is done and in a few months nobody will care if white mage heals for more than everyone else because that heal bonus will only result on overheal. All people will care will be "can the healer dps while it doesn't need to heal?"
SCH does their job as the summoner lite that they're, AST has no issues in maintaining the DoTs and buff everyone with their cards that has absolutely no mp cost and then we have WHM with the best single target dps that has to spend millions on melds just to hit stuff with their "best" dps which result on a huge mnd, pie and det loss compared to full i210 accessories.

To conclude, i don't defend ast being nerfed or whm being buffed. But hell, both classes need to be tweaked so they're different from each other with WHM actually being viable on farmable-out of accuracy reach content.

A) play another class for a while

Reminder WEEKLY LOOT IS CLASS SPECIFIC NOW. Changing classes just because SE can't into job balance this late in the marathon is just BS.