What is imbalanced about the healers. I keep seeing this said everywhere.

[Ahrijlaken]

WHM is poor.

1/ Shield can be more than usefull to survive savage content.
2/ Damage is what group want and it help doing content.
3/ End game healing is about oGCD managment between the 2 healer.


SCH and AST has been made for this game .... WHM not.

Everybody are blaming AST or SCH for being too strong but guys the problem is the WHM identity ( aka being the classic easy healer ). What is your solution ? Remove sch and Ast identity just because WHM is an empty shell ? And Yoshi want to make it even easier ? What a mistake ... WHM need a lot more spell and tool, WHM need to be a lot more complex.

[EaMett]

It was a particular design that literally every WHM player noticed right away but that the devs have been completely oblivious to since their inception.

This is so true and so sad. We didn't even get the skills yet, they had only announced them with skill descriptions and we could ALREADY tell it wouldn't work out at all (lilies and PI). I stood here in this forum with many others bringing this up. Really doesn't inspire confidence in SE's ability to balance/expand healer skills when us users can spot the flaw in seconds of reading descriptions and it takes them months of testing before release and months of player feedback after to finally get it (and clearly after 2 years we still have vanilla unworkable lilies).
I'm still immensely confused by how that hole thing happened in the first place.

[Ogulbuk]

It's a bit sad that Yoshi insists WHM should be healer only. Given they use elemental magic, they could very well use their spells also to buff or debuff. Slightly petrify an enemy so all damage against that target is increased for a few seconds. Or, borrow from FFXI's En-Element line of spells and give WHM Enholy, a spell they can cast on the entire party to grant them a holy damage proc.

There are many things they could do if they were willing to think beyond "WHM heals!"

[Yuyuka3]

This is so true and so sad. We didn't even get the skills yet, they had only announced them with skill descriptions and we could ALREADY tell it wouldn't work out at all (lilies and PI). I stood here in this forum with many others bringing this up. Really doesn't inspire confidence in SE's ability to balance/expand healer skills when us users can spot the flaw in seconds of reading descriptions and it takes them months of testing before release and months of player feedback after to finally get it (and clearly after 2 years we still have vanilla unworkable lilies).
I'm still immensely confused by how that hole thing happened in the first place.

That's why I said back then (I think it was in 3.0 already, even), and I stand to what I said, that we need better people in charge of job design. NO, this doesn't mean firing anyone, just swap them around to someone who actually knows what they are doing!

[dude1]

The healers are extremely balanced - well, maybe except for scholar, which is just all-round good and much better than shield ast. White mage has better heals and mana and is easy to play, while Astrologian has more damage output but might require more planning etc. There are tons of White Mages in this game. It is a very popular class, and is very useful in prog.

There are 15,031 White Mage parses for alphascape and 15,421 Astrologian parses right now. (21,636 Scholar) This is almost the same amount of WHM/AST. 92 AST vs. 163 WHM on ultimate coils.

This means they are balanced well. WHM might be less optimal for your average content, but it is more fun for people to play or something. And its not "that much worse" that people stop playing it.

Meanwhile you have 4,831 MCH parses vs 20,836 BRD parses, 18,575 DRG vs 6,160 MNK....... 21,344 WAR, 22,382 PLD vs 8,420 DRK. Those are actual unbalanced classes.

[Nathanial]

I havent seen this scholar domination as it is. Scholars have to crit for a shield to be any more powerful than a heal counter part. Adlo is 300 potency. Cure 2 is 600 potency. the difference is only that adlo applies the same amount of potency into a shield instead of a heal. this is only not the case in crits as a crit changes the shield potency from 300 to 600 but unless you stack crit for this effect, average scholars will only be casting a 600 potency spell and at extra cost to mp cause all scholar shield spells cost more mp then their pure healing counter parts. This math applies to all scholar spells which also are half as many as their counterparts. Also keep in mind, because people bring up fairies into the mix (which is fair) but fairies potency is 50% of that of scholar. by this i mean for every 1 point of potency in the fairy skill it only heals for 50% of the 1 point of potency of scholar. So My adlo is 300 potency, and my pet embrace is 250 potency. my adlo heals for 8000 and my pets embrase heals for 3000. Honestly they should just remove the potency from the pet skill description because why give us any info at all if it is false to begin with.

But honestly like people say. Scholar is still viable so its not just trash to be discarded. it just need some work around to make it a less clunky healer. the pet management is honestly become a handy cap as content is getting to a faster pace and timing heals with the pet is hard enough when your trying to heal that dragoon that stayed too long in the aoe and will die if you dont heal them up before the next raid wide attack that deals damage.

[Grimoire-M]

-snip-

UWU already proved that WHM can be viable with enough predictable damage being thrown around, but it was still paired with SCH far more often in that situation. It's not purely a raid design issue. It's purely a GCD efficiency issue. SCH gets more DPS out because it's more efficient at weaving in oGCD healing in tandem with its DPS. WHM gets more DPS out when its unique healing GCDs are beneficial to the encounter. When the damage is there they're better than AST. When it's not they're worse. Regardless SCH still remains king by design. You're not going to get the same results on AST/WHM without some serious overhauls and/or precise tuning from a job-to-job standpoint to compensate for it, which need to generally go in line with SCH nerfs to keep it where it is, better tools for AST and WHM, and WHM buffs. That's the direction things need to go in if they don't want to adapt their encounter design. And that to me seems more likely to stay as it is.

[Erakir]

I havent seen this scholar domination as it is.

So, I'm not particularly great with FFlogs, but I got a way to find data I was looking for in a roundabout way that probably isn't the easiest method. I did this by going to rankings, looking at healer combined damage, selecting the various healer compositions and literally just paging through 10 pages at a time till I found the end of the list.

Regardless, I went and looked for Final Omega parses of all healer compositions. Including double WHM, double SCH, double AST (of which there were like 4 double AST and 2 double SCH or something). If you want to see scholar domination, this is where you see it.

I found:
917 WHM+AST parses
10964 AST+SCH parses
8894 WHM+SCH parses.

That is 20775 parses. Scholar is part of 19858 of them. With three healers in the game, scholar is found in over 95% of the clears of this fight. Scholar's strengths and reasons it has maintained a deathgrip on a 'all-but-mandatory' slot go beyond a short and dry potency list, and really healer optimization goes heavily into oGCD use so you won't be seeing many of those Adlos to begin with. I won't go into it all here right now, but it's a culmination of what many of their CDs and mobility options allow them to do on top of benefits from the fairy and no super huge MP concerns despite WHM having quite a lot of MP sustain (It's not really needed especially if you have Refresh or people are dying like D-day). It's a significant discussion and it has to be compared to its "competition" of Noct AST's abysmal standing because that too is part of the reason SCH is so well represented; Noct AST just blows in comparison for what raids require.

But a > 95% representation in Final Omega should show what people mean when they mention scholar domination.

[Josco]

Yeah, my static had WHM/AST for a long time, but the very first time we went into savage on SCH/AST, the whole group was in awe of how much their damage improved. We had 3 people hit PBs on that run alone. I wasn't even good on SCH. That, my friend, is imbalance at its finest.

[Reiryuu]

Perhaps this reddit post will help the OP understand the healer meta situation. It's really well done.

level 7 Healer Lyritha Score hidden

< snipped irrelevent reply to this discussion >

Long-winded history of healer meta below:

Original WHM/SCH pair worked well because 1) it was the only possible pair, which 2) made it easy to design encounters around it. You could have damage heavy enough that SCH's shields were necessary for survival, and you could have enough damage going out that WHM's heals were necessary for survival.

Enter Astrologian - in trying to preserve the heals vs shields dichotomy, they made AST capable of both, but not good enough at either (on release) that it could truly replace WHM or SCH. To add to the problem, Gordias was incredibly difficult and had very tight DPS and heal checks. AST also shipped with very bad MP management issues. This means AST was mostly shunned on release because its weaker heals (or shields) couldn't keep up. Midas was released and Diurnal AST gained some popularity, but it was still a difficult tier with punishing mechanics and very punishing heal/mitigation checks (A8S, for instance, wasn't cleared until people had enough HP through gear to survive mechanics) and WHM/SCH still had the edge. This means Nocturnal AST was largely ignored because you needed really solid, beefy mitigation to survive.

So... AST gradually got buffed throughout Heavensward so it could keep up with WHM and SCH and be a proper replacement for either. Enter Creator - the fights' difficulty was drastically reduced, along with several other QoL changes that made prog faster. AST also got buffed even further, and the buff was too heavy-handed (Balance's effectiveness was doubled, and shields were further buffed to the point they are today - the only SCH shield that is stronger than an AST shield is a crit Adloquium). This pushed WHM out of the meta because SCH still had plenty of free healing/mitigation and could offer more than WHM could, and AST's party buffing ability was off the charts ridiculous. Also, the existence of Indomitability covered for AST's lack of burst heals at the time. As a pair, AST/SCH could heal as much as a WHM could, while protecting and buffing the entire party (gentle reminder that Disable and traited Virus were on AST and SCH respectively) and spending fewer GCDs to do it.

This happened before any of the cross-role skill shuffle. AST/SCH was already meta then. This is when the meta truly shifted to what it is today - do the bulk of healing through oGCDs and have as much party utility as possible.

Stormblood came around everyone got access to Shroud of Saints (now Lucid) and a slightly watered down version of Divine Seal (Largesse). The devs made the (baffling) decision to reinforce WHM's identity as a "healy healer" (despite the meta having shifted away from GCD heals), and though they got Benison (which was hot garbage on release), it straight up can't compete with AST and SCH's mitigation. Adding insult to injury, SCH got a party buff (Stratagem) and AST got the incredibly ridiculous Earthly Star, closing the gap between WHM and AST for good - AST doesn't even need to rely on Indomitability anymore, as Earthly is straight up more powerful. Balance being nerfed back to its original state changed little.

The fights never got any harder, so GCD heals became less and less important, and party mitigation/buffs became more and more important. WHM got literally no new oGCD heals and almost every new thing it got relied on GCD heals. (Edit: Plenary is technically oGCD, but relies on GCDs to proc.)

And then AST got more buffs in Stormblood - Collective Unconscious applies instantly now, turning it into a simple oGCD you can weave, and Malefic's cast time was shortened by a second, making AST the only healer with zero weaving issues. The buffs WHM got (Lilies are slightly less garbage, Benison no longer needs lilies, Plenary Indulgence is more useful, Assize had a potency increase) never addressed the core issues, and other healers just kept getting better and better at what became the preferred healer playstyle.

And that is the story of how we reached the point where other healers can do everything WHM can that is actually necessary to clear content, while also being able to do things that WHM can't.

Edit 2: I just remembered Largesse was originally called Divine Seal so I edited the post to reflect that.