Korean fan fest translation says ast changes balanced healers, do you agree?

[SaitoHikari]

I played another game that actually did near exactly what the FFXIV devs did between WHM and Astro.

It was known as Dragon Nest, which for years had one primary healer known as Saint that is highly comparable to WHM in this game, except they were capable of limited damage mitigation and provided some party attack buffs too. Then they released something called a Light Bringer, which is highly comparable to Astrologian now. It had greater mobility, DOUBLE the damage mitigation and damage buffing power that Saints had, and more convenient heals. The devs outright said that they released Light Bringer specifically to compete with Saint.

The only difference between the situations in both games is that Light Bringer was broken from the very beginning, rather than buffed later down the road like Astrologian was. And the Saint population outright DIED for an entire year, up until the buff/debuff stacking burst damage meta spiraled so wildly out of control and led to more than half of the population quitting the game in a year. An optimal 8-man raid composition that excluded even a single class could lead to as much as a 20-30% DPS loss for the entire party, in a game that had around 20 classes at the time. The devs tried to counter this by designing boss mechanics that spammed buff wipes among other things, but the end result was that it pushed the meta even harder towards burst phases to skip the mechanics in the first place. But again, the population died as everyone lost faith in the devs' ability to balance the classes properly, to the point where they basically had to overhaul every single skill and every fight in the game, to cut down on the amount of party buffs/debuffs along with removing certain boss mechanics in response to those. Though by that time it was too late - the only people left were those that embraced the meta, and they cried foul.

One of many things that happened was that it resulted in Light Bringer being hit with the nerf stick so hard (as in, their buffing power was brought down to Saint level) that everyone began to realize just how poorly designed the class was. It was only ever so popular because it was so broken in the first place, and now that it's been nerfed, the class had no real identity of its own. The population died as quickly as it soared upon release.

My fear is that I'm actually watching the same exact thing happening in FFXIV now, although at least Astrologian has more unique mechanics that would still retain their identity should Balance end up being nerfed. The Balance card can take a hit - it's Arrow and Spear that needed buffs in the first place, especially Spear. There's a reason why everyone sensible never ever imagined the devs would even buff Balance in the first place.

Basically, my argument is that if a party damage buff is the only argument for taking a healer to a raid, and people act like touching it at all is going to lead to the class being filed away as worthless, then it's a pretty clear sign that it's actually horrendously broken and everything else in the class' toolkit is grossly under-powered or poorly designed. Though many in this thread know the situation is a bit more complicated than that - WHM's fault is that it has no significant unique tools of its own that the other two healers can't copy in their own way.