Isn't playing WHM optimally going completely against what SE wants healers to be?

[Exiled_Tonberry]

To play a WHM on a savage raiding level and not be a complete handicap to your party, you need to DPS like crazy. WHM has the highest DPS potential of all healers, and it's their answer to not having utility or synergy of any kind with other roles.

Yet SE says multiple times that healers aren't meant to DPS all that much and content isn't designed with healer DPS being considered. Heck we can even go further and talk about the fact that WHM is supposed to fill the role as a pure healer, which should mean its heals are it's strongest assets.

Yet it turns out in order to be a good WHM, you have to DPS for the entire fight in order to mimic the utility from other healers. It just seems like backwards design to put into players heads that healer DPS isn't needed, and then Balance WHM around their personal DPS.

I say this coming off of healing with ASTs, who can get away with putting up cards and their DoT and get praised to heck and back while WHM needs to bust ass dpsing, nearly killing the tank a few times, just to maybe get the same recognition. It's so odd for them to talk down on DPS healers, only to design what is essentially a DPS healer.

[Jxnibbles]

SE also wants us to spam Cure I, and Cure II for lillies but optimally we want to use as little as possible, and use Regen as much as possible.
Same goes with Scholar. I don't think anyone on the Dev team even plays a Healer.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Same goes with some of Scholars kit. I don't think anyone on the Dev team plays any of the Healers.

It could be as simple as this really. There's been so many weird decisions in regard to healers and healer balance in the past couple years, you can only assume they have no idea how the jobs actually play in content.
And the first chance they had to make a new healer, they just went ahead and made a WHM/SCH combo that is proving impossible to balance instead.
It's really disheartening to be a healer main in this game right now. It just feels like they're lost with healers.

[magnanimousCynic]

It almost reminds me of FFXI when SAM and NIN were added. SE designed SAM with tanking in mind and NIN with DPS in mind.

The community thought otherwise though, making SAM a DPS and NIN a tank. They were so dead-set on those ideas that SE eventually gave in and added things to help them do their roles based on what the community made of them.

[Jxnibbles]

I want to see a member of the Dev team play a Healer without god mode on stream. I don't think they have any idea on how to play this Role effectively.
Also I don't think we should get a Healer for 5.0. They are obviously clueless if they literally couldn't make Astro unique without copy/pasting Abilities I don't think they are remotely ready for a 4th Healer.

[Penthea]

Also as a bonus note for this Role I don't think we should get a Healer for 5.0. They are obviously clueless if they literally couldn't make Astro unique without copy/pasting Abilities I don't think they are remotely ready for a 4th Healer.

I honestly think one of the biggest problems with healing is that ast isn't a unique healer in its own right. Take away the card mechanic and what you got left is a very two dimensional healer that has a boring version of whm and sch healing kits. Yes the card mechanic is supposed to make up for that but frankly the rng of it is often very punishing. Ast need a prominent healing mechanic unique to them instead of just having the pseudo whm and sch stances.

[Riyshn]

SCH in HW was pretty much the same, too. Still is, to some extent. Correctly playing SCH in most circumstances pretty much means using the fairy and Aetherflow for as much of the healing as possible, and spending as few GCDs on it as you can.

[loreleidiangelo]

Is it honestly possible for you to make a controlled, objective thread without bashing Astrologians in some way? We're not praised "to heck and back" for keeping our DoT up; we're expected to DPS just as much as either of the other two healers, our output is just less in respect to the utility our cards bring.

Removing your AST dig from the equation though, there's a lot of merit to your point about how the devs keep saying one thing about healer DPS and adjusting the jobs in a way that encourages otherwise. I tend to agree that for the most part, healer design and balance is easily one of the most ill-designed roles in this game.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Also I don't think we should get a Healer for 5.0. They are obviously clueless if they literally couldn't make Astro unique without copy/pasting Abilities I don't think they are remotely ready for a 4th Healer.

Completely agree, and I've said this same thing many times when discussion of new jobs come up. It's really a shame, because we shouldn't hope that healer doesn't get a new job added to it's role, but the balance and identity between current healers is so skewed it just wouldn't make sense to add a new job into the mess right now.

We really need a full redesign for AST. It shouldn't be a hybrid of the two current healers, this is always going to hold the role back. Once that's accomplished, I think we can start moving forward again, but right now we're just stuck not knowing exactly what they want healers to be.

Is it honestly possible for you to make a controlled, objective thread without bashing Astrologians in some way? We're not praised "to heck and back" for keeping our DoT up; we're expected to DPS just as much as either of the other two healers

Another exaggeration on my end, which I really need to work on stop doing. It just comes off as me ranting, which is not the case. I actually want to discuss this.

What I meant was, AST doesn't have to go against it's identity, which is card utility, to help the group. While WHM must actively DPS, something that is looked down on even by SE, to be as helpful as an AST would be.

I wouldn't actually mind this, especially if they gave us even more tools to help us deal damage, but it just feels like we're not playing the job as it was intended. We have all these new job systems, like lilies and confessions, that 100% encourage healing. Yet all of our raid usefulness lies in our DPS, which our new systems doesn't support at all...

[Mimilu]

Also I don't think we should get a Healer for 5.0. They are obviously clueless if they literally couldn't make Astro unique without copy/pasting Abilities I don't think they are remotely ready for a 4th Healer.

I think they desperately need a new healer in 5.0 so they can decide if AST should focus on mitigation or HoTs and balance it around that (and cards). The new healer could pick up what AST lost (hopefully in a new way), that way we can have two healers that shield/mitigate before damage and two that can do big heals afterwards. :B