Pre-4.0 Concern

[LegoTechnic]

SE promised tanks and healers both that the reason we weren't getting any new jobs to play in Stormblood was because they were spending the time and focusing on balancing the jobs. WHMs have been kinda peeved since 3.0 that a lot of our utility has just been whored out to the other 2 healers and we really haven't had much in return.

When I see this sentiment I almost invariably disregard the rest of the post because it's kind of ridiculous, but I wanted to address it before getting to the rest. The design focus of HW was to normalize healer utility and WHM definitely benefited from that. SCH gained the ability to turn adlo and succor into cure II and medica respectively once every 30 seconds with Emergency Tactics as a method of shoring up their poor AoE utility, as well as an AoE variant of lustrate with the same 30 second cooldown to help fill in that issue, and gained a weird and costly spin on divine seal that actually required sacrificing the fairy. In return WHM gained a stronger version of Lustrate gated by a 60 second cooldown in Tetragrammaton, as well as their own spin on both Aetherize and Indomitability in Assize which returns half the mana of Aetherize but also deals damage and AoE heals like indom, albeit with with a 90 second cooldown rather than Aetherize's 60s. They also received their own bubble mechanic in Asylum which was both unique and different from sacred soil. In this way the two classes moved closer to each other in effectiveness, borrowing ideas from one another while still maintaining a healthy design focus that made the abilities unique and interesting to the class.

The problem is, and I think has always been, that AST is a WHM clone with cards. All of its base abilities are only slightly tweaked variants of the WHM class, with Benefic II being Cure II, Luminous Aether as Shroud, Gravity as Holy, Collective Unconsciousness is Asylum, Essential Diginity is Tetragrammaton, and so on. While some moves like Synastry (divine seal) and Lightspeed (presence of mind) manage to take WHM abilities in a unique direction, an AST still plays largely identical to a WHM, and this is rather hard to avoid. Even in Noct stance all you're doing is giving shields to a WHM as it doesn't have any analog to the SCH playstyle otherwise outside of Disable (which will no longer be a case come 4.0). And this I think is the issue, because AST doesn't have its own core identity. It very much plays like a WHM with card mechanics instead of Assize, and that's just lazy design.

And now in SB we see a heavier normalization, where much of what made the SCH playstyle unique is being reduced and the WHM class is being stripped to "homogenize" the classes further. Aetherize is being reduced to 10% mana regen and Assize's cooldown reduced to 60 seconds giving them identical mana return, and shroud is being given to SCHs as a mana regen even though no one ever asked for it, and certainly not at the expense of Aetherize's efficiency. This is horrendous from my perspective not only because it makes SCH and WHM mana regen identical outside of Energy Drain (which costs stacks), but because SCH abilities have had their mana costs increased across the board for little to no reason; just looking at a single example that all three classes have, Stone IV (260 pot) and Malefic II (210 pot) are both 720 MP, but Broil II (230 pot) is 960 MP . Why?! And this trend actually continues for most SCH abilities in comparison, especially compared to AST like Succor and Adlo against their aspected alternatives.

As far as role abilities go, every class lost something. All classes lost Esuna, which is just annoying. SCH and AST both lost Virus/Disable, though unique to this they lost it completely to DPS roles. WHM and AST both lost Shroud of Saints/Luminous Aether and Divine Seal/Synastry. SCH lost Eye for an Eye. WHM lost Protect and Cleric Stance. AST lost Stella (no one cares, though), though WHM and SCH lost their passive heavy effects on Cure I and Miasma. And all of this was taken without giving anything back. While most of these can be regained, it still leaves a bit of a hole in one's perceptions because of it.

And compounding on all of that, it looks like for some reason the Stormsblood design decision is that WHM needed their own unique spin on Aetherize stacks using RNG procs as a base, and this isn't what the players wanted. Because let's be clear, that's what the Lilies and confessions are. They're charges you get that can be used as a resource for powerful moves with gated cost and cooldown, the unique difference being rather than coming from a purposeful action like Aetherize they come from RNG procs, and no healer likes RNG. It honestly feels like they were wanting to inject a WHM variant of part of the SCH playstyle, but dropped the ball trying to keep it with a unique flavor, and the results are fairly unexciting. And to make matters worse, if it was the playstyle in general that attracted WHMs, this leaves AST as the class closest to HW WHM come Stormsblood since their core precepts were largely left alone, and this might be a large annoyance to those with a WHM who never leveled an AST.

It's ok to experiment, S-E, but what made WHM/SCH so much fun in ARR was their unique complimentary identities where playing each role felt like a separate class with the same goal. You did fine with the two in HW in compensating for both classes' weaknesses while still keeping the class design focus intact and I applaud that, but you're taking the homogenization too far; you've gutted SCH DPS and largely ignored the WHM playstyle of the past two years in order to introduce a new mechanic that is both unintuitive and lackluster, and you have still largely failed to give AST its own unique identity beyond "WHM clone with cards". Earthly Star is very neat and a step in the right direction, especially with its time-delay mechanic, so we know you can do it if you try.... Or rather, we hope you can. Our enjoyment with the classes depends on it.