Another WHM chicken little sees the sky falling. The sky is an AST.

[Connor]

I’m gonna be brutally honest but I don’t understand how White Mage is supposed to compete at all after these buffs.

Don’t think I need to explain why it can’t compete with Scholar, it’s been overpowered for years.

All White Mage brings is more healing, in a game where healing requirements are so low that healers also have to double as damage dealers so they aren’t doing literally nothing.

Astrologian brings party dps increases in a game where the core objective of every encounter is to deal a certain amount of damage to an enemy within a specific timeframe (beat the dps check).

Considering it’s possible to scrape by a lot of content even with no healer (especially if you’re with jobs that can self-heal like Paladin, Red Mage etc), this alone kinda makes the choice obvious.

White Mage’s most often cited gimmick of having Holy for dungeon runs isn’t even anything special anymore. The most common Post-buff Lightspeed / Gravity might not be as strong as Holy with Presence of Mind, but that’s what card buffs are for. Off-gcd abilities like Tetragrammaton and Benediction might provide strong healing, but that doesn’t mean anything if nobody needs that healing in the first place. The same can be said for MP efficiency, it doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t running into situations where you run out of MP in the first place. Even with bad Ewer luck I’ve haven’t felt myself to be in a situation where I simply don’t have the tools to manage my MP. And even if I did, Celestial Opposition with Lucid Dreaming will restore enough MP to continue dealing damage.

Personally I didn’t even feel like the card system was clunky while dpsing, though that’s because I’m a filthy casual who likes to heal/support instead of dps (and typically tries to avoid them as a result). So I was never particularly bothered by gcd clipping while using cards. That’s not to say that I don’t think it’s something that shouldn’t be addressed, but I don’t have much to say for this topic.

Overall I personally don’t understand how White Mage can be considered ‘fine’ in a context where nothing to can do really matters. Maybe I’m just missing something. Regardless of whether there’s any truth in my opinions I know someone appear will tell me how wrong I am anyway.

[EaMett]

Overall I personally don’t understand how White Mage can be considered ‘fine’ in a context where nothing to can do really matters. Maybe I’m just missing something. Regardless of whether there’s any truth in my opinions I know someone appear will tell me how wrong I am anyway.

AST and SCH have a bigger learning curve and overall a higher APM than whm. They're also obtainable at later levels. This means that as game designers for a casual game like ff14 your starter healer (WHM) should be beginner friendly.
Beginner friendly means a few things. A straightforward reaction healing style; you don't have to think too hard about when to place what spell (like earth star, synastry, or shields). A small toolkit as to not overwhelm players. High potency to make up for the lack of skill/experience. Limited class synergies so you don't have to understand how other classes work. Hence the "pure healer" is born.

Because of all this WHM is probably just in the right spot in their eyes.

But low and behold. They decide to make non-casual content and everything falls appart. In ultimate the shear numbers of a whm in good hands becomes significant enough that the rng nature and lower potency of AST skills doesn't afford them a slot. They probably decided on AST buffs mostly for the next ultimate and it's screwing with the casual content balance.

SE's failure comes from them wanting all healers to be able to heal all content. Because of this they can't place healers in specific roles (sch heals party, whm heals tanks, vice versa, etc.). They finally managed to get a semblance of balance for all the current casual content. But now they're introducing hardcore stuff and their balance is no longer appropriate.

They're also struggling on coming up with new healer concepts because of this. SE either bites the bullet and changes their stance on "all healers can heal all content" or we wake up and see whm for what it is: a mix between a learning class and the rdm of healers.