Quote Originally Posted by Eloah View Post
Not exactly. spf1200 is right though, it boils down to HoTs and Shields. If you were to remove those two forms of healing from each healer, and look at what they have left, you'd see that that is basically all WHM had going for it. AST still offers a tone of other things, and while they'd be hit hard SCH still has utility. The main issue is WHM is supposed to be like the healer version of BLM. But where big damage numbers are good, big heals are not, relatively speaking. You are right about the utility, but it's because of the HoTs and Shields that it's more noticeable.
The issue isn't really HoTs and Shields. Since, it's not like AST is preferred over WHM because of its shields, it really only uses its HoTs stance because its shields are trash.

HoTs and Shields is only what makes SCH so dominant and again, it's only because SCH's shields are REALLY good, since again, AST doesn't want to use its shields because they're bad.

AST is preferred over WHM because it is the exact same HoT healer. But with cards providing utility.

It's astounding that Yoshi mentions that they've been having balance issues with healers since adding AST and hasn't made the connection that simply releasing AST as "WHM... But with Cards" might be the problem that devalues WHM.

If anything, removing HoTs and Shields would actually make WHM the king, since they have more oGCD's to use to allow them to keep DPSing instead of hard casting Cure/Benefic/Physick.

Quote Originally Posted by Eloah View Post
Since when you get down to it how many different ways can you dress up a heal, or damage, or a shield...?
Plenty of ways. Like, damage we literally have 9 DPS jobs (Soon 10) with the only limiting factor to adding new ones being them wanting to release jobs for other roles too.

Healing and shielding also has plenty of design space:

Direct Healing
Healing Over Time
Reactive Healing
Shields
Channelled Healing
Healing from dealing Damage

It would just require the games healing to not revolve around the situation where using a GCD on a healing skill is a sin.

Since that's the main thing that limits healer design, is that they all have to work around using DPS GCD's like 90% of the time and rely on massively jacked HoTs, Shields and oGCD's that allow them to do this.

There's only so many things you can do, when you're specifically restricted to things that are oGCD or GCD's that can cover healing requirements for long periods of time.