SCH changes are outrageous. Don't design classes around your trust system.

[EaMett]

Seriously SE let me recap these past events:

- No healer announced for the new expansion in order to "balance" healers (you painted yourself into a corner and HAD to deliver... now it's obvious you actually have no clue)
- Live letter where you just skim over healers like it's nothing. You had gameplay footage of all other roles but not healers... Shows you don't care much / don't know what to do.
- Changes are made public and there's hardly anything of what healers needed and SCH got gutted into the ground.

It's almost like it's on purpose. I don't understand what the endgame is (FFXIV classics in 10 years maybe?). Or perhaps there's no need to balance healers if all 3 are the same? (200iq move).

I know this is old news but the community has felt like the design team had very little high end experience with healers as a whole, and this just confirms it. Hell, the changes to SCH don't even make sense if you don't play the class at all.

I'm having a hard time deciding how to tackle this because it's so massively incoherent when it comes to SCH changes so let me start with what I do understand.

- SE wants to stick to balanced healer combos in 8 man content. They don't want to make some pairs stronger in some fights and other pairs stronger in others. Which would be viable and allow for a lot of healer diversity but alas not the choice they made. The result is that some homogenizing has to occur in order to introduce new healers.
- Trust system means they need to homogenize for the AI (Can't stress enough how bad a design that is but whatever)
- Healing requirements most likely won't change in the upcoming tiers. The current level of damage output from raids seems consistent with the level of play SE wants to provide for the more casual players. With that said I will (for argument's sake) assume that healing requirements for all content in 5.0 will be on par with ultimate raids (which lets be honest won't be a thing).


Ok so with all that in mind how do I approach this.

Lets talk about what makes a class flow nicely and what is fun.

Usually, the most painful thing for a healer in terms of enjoying gameplay is to instant cast and then have to wait for the gcd to end without any weaving options. This was a huge issue on WHM and something people have been wanting/expecting for a long time. Low and behold, they're still waiting. In the case of SCH, although fairy skills are now ogcd, the loss of shadowflare, energy drain (wtf were you thinking?), bane, quickened aetherflow we are most definitely ending up with more blocky gameplay.
SE made improvements for AST regarding this during SB, I thought that this was well understood but clearly that was either them getting lucky or one of them playing AST. This gameplay flow seems to be just as good for AST in 5.0.

Gameplay in dungeons. Just having the one aoe with the added healing abilities is going to be boring and suck away a lot of the enjoyment that was SCH. AST have a couple of options now as do WHM. SCH are stuck with just the one. Even early testers/"influencers" have noted that SCH feels lackluster in dungeons.

Lastly when it comes to enjoyment we need to talk about optimization and skill ceiling/cap. With many weaving options gone, almost no more pet management, embrace, down to the one dot to keep track of (from 3), etc.. the skill cap has dropped significantly. What once used to be a class you could highly optimize is only a shadow of it's former self.

There essentially isn't a SINGLE positive about this. Even the pet management being a qol improvement just sucks since we can no longer deploy off of her. Again biting into our optimization options.



Now lets talk about personal dps output:

Things seem relatively unchanged for WHM and AST in this department. But SCH..... Since we lost abilities that account for about 30% of our dps with nothing to show, that's essentially a net loss. Our fairy skills are also using up weaving opportunities (though that may no longer be an issue *cries*). I know potency calculations are different but there's nothing there to make up for that 30% loss. This is the real kicker. How can you just remove these but not see the issue? Our party utility has been nerfed along side this. The nerf in and of itself is ok given the direction the design team seem to want to take things, but both a personal dps nerf and a utility nerf?
There's nothing more to add here. Most healers were complaining that there was a lack of a more complex dps rotation. And although it didn't have to go as far as being a decent rotation, one dps skill and on dot is a kick in the nuts for our gameplay when 80-90% of our time is spent dpsing (even with ultimate levels of healing requirements).


Healing:

All healers get more options and overall more potencies etc... Again, as the community have been saying forever now. This is overkill. At ultimate levels, the added direct healing may be beneficial but what's the point if we turn around and only have 2 dps skills after we're done.
However for SCH a few things don't make sense. We lost our ability to critlo deploy, we lost energy drain, the new dissipation is nice but really lackluster in the face of the aforementioned changes. Sacred soil becoming the new CU is cool though, it was a bit of a lackluster skill for sch in the first place.


It's really hard to look at this and think, at any point, that the changes are nice. Even someone who doesn't play healer would figure this out.
The ONLY reason I can think of for these changes is that SCH needed to be put back in line with other 1/2/3 type skills for the trust system to work. A real shame as the class has essentially been gutted of everything that made it fun to optimize and unique to play.

Conclusion:

Unless we see very serious damage output increases from raids all the new shinies will be pointless and our dps and gameplay loss will be a net loss. If healing requirements aren't increased I can easily see healers solo healing content and that becoming meta (will need to wait and see fully how potencies and HP work). I expect a lot of healer pair mechanics in savage to force parties into dual healer. I personally would love to see solo healing become meta, if only to make a statement.

I can't express my disappointment enough. There are so many skilled players out there who would love to have an opportunity to sit down and help SE sort healer out for free I don't understand why they can't get someone experienced on their team to tell them that this just isn't viable.

Edit: More food for thought, coutesy of the wonderful Sebazy:

[...] healers simply don't have enough facets to fill their time with. ASTs are halfway there with cards (And I made a huge suggestion years back recommending that cards get taken off cooldown and put on the GCD). WHM have pretty much nothing to do outside of healing or dps whilst SCH are about to join the WHM camp thanks to the decision to remove most of the fairy micromanagement.

Other successful MMOs have healers setting up combos in advance of mechanics or events, placing and maintaining buffs or even putting as big an emphasis on their positioning as their GCD efficiency. SE just aren't interested in investing the time and effort into implementing involving and rewarding healer gameplay which leaves us in the position we are.

[Sebazy]

Hear hear.

Short end of the stick? Healer mains got a little pile of ash out of this expansion. I really do hope that the raids are well designed and enjoyable as from a purely role restricted viewpoint. Healers have got somewhere between very little and nothing to look forward to in the coming months.

That's a great start to a new expansion.

[EaMett]

I really do hope that the raids are well designed and enjoyable as from a purely role restricted viewpoint.

Fingers crossed. Looking at the glass a quarter full.

[Truen]

+1 to the OP. I agree with everything, on all counts. My interest in the expansion has been vastly diminished after the revealing of the new class system. At this rate I'm sure the expansion will be riddled with fetch quests sending us on errand after errand.

[Anoin]

I want to clarify that I don't really mind the changes to DPS as much as other people, although I agree that leveling/ dungeons/ fates/ beast tribe quests and more content will be a lot more boring with the changes to DPS actions.

I mostly play casual content and I main SCH, occasionally doing extreme but not savage. SCH already had a few problems that were very specific and most people didn't care about them and treated them as not important since they mostly happened in casual content.

-For example, if you are doing a raid and your party has 2 SCH, and the boss does a bunch of raid-wide damage back to back, the Scholars will struggle to heal it since the shields of their Succor's don't stack. Other healers don't have this problem. WHM has Medica and Cure 3, AST has Helios but SCH doesn't have a no gimmick GCD AOE heal. SCH's aoe heals either waste half their potency on a shield, consume a non-mp resource, or have a cooldown. In other words we have an equivalent of Aspected Helios and Medica 2, but we don't have a Medica or Helios. In situations where you aren't on voice chat with your co-healer and they are a SCH too, this can be very annoying.

-Even if you can speak to your co-healer, your co-healer can't know what the fairy AI is thinking and who it's going to use Embrace on next, this is very annoying. And now they are making it so that the Fairy casts Embrace, but the SCH has absolutely no control over who the heal goes to. From what I saw, Seraph also has a 200 potency single target heal/shield that the player can just not target at all. The only way to make the fairy do what you want is to use a resource, or the use a cooldown.

These things may not sound like too important, especially if you don't play SCH, but if this wasn't the case, the job would be so much more fun to play.

They have to make dungeons and other casual content enjoyable by healers as well, but it doesn't seem like they are doing that. I think they are going in a very wrong direction with SCH this expansion. Even some of the action icons look lazy, like the fairy from aetherpact icon was cropped and pasted on all fairy actions.

If it was up to me I would keep Bane and Shadowflare and remove maybe remove Emergency Tactics and replace it with a normal aoe heal. I would rework Fey Union as well. I think it is really silly that the only reliable method of getting your fairy to heal a specific party member uses up a resource that you only get 3 of every 45 seconds.

[kidalutz]

+1 to the OP. I agree with everything, on all counts. My interest in the expansion has been vastly diminished after the revealing of the new class system. At this rate I'm sure the expansion will be riddled with fetch quests sending us on errand after errand.

Dont assume changes to classes is going to change regular gameplay and story that's Asinine

[Yomiko_Nonaka]

-For example, if you are doing a raid and your party has 2 SCH, and the boss does a bunch of raid-wide damage back to back, the Scholars will struggle to heal it since the shields of their Succor's don't stack. Other healers don't have this problem. WHM has Medica and Cure 3, AST has Helios but SCH doesn't have a no gimmick GCD AOE heal. SCH's aoe heals either waste half their potency on a shield, consume a non-mp resource, or have a cooldown. In other words we have an equivalent of Aspected Helios and Medica 2, but we don't have a Medica or Helios. In situations where you aren't on voice chat with your co-healer and they are a SCH too, this can be very annoying.

Emergency Tactics. Indom.

Please, i have no problem topping my party quickly with my co-healer being another SCH

[Yuyuka3]

Fingers crossed. Looking at the glass a quarter full.

Don't worry. SCH will be buffed up to being top dog again pretty quickly, with AST receiving it's buff to push them ahead WHM again (if they aren't ahead from the beginning anyway, which I expect) soon after. The only one left in the dust will be WHM, so hoorray to another two years of WHM scorn and another expansion without new healer in 6.0, because they will still be unsuccessfully trying to figure out healer balance by then, and still getting to the same, old, horrifically wrong conclusions! Please look forward to it, guys.

[Lemuel81]

Hm so I guess I will not be healing this expansion. Not sure how they thought all these healer changes were good gameplay. At least the healers who didn't want to weave dps in healing got what they wanted...grats

Prepare for a drought on healers.

[Yulja]

Your post is really amazing thank you for that!
I personally don't play any healer but my brother plays all 3.

First of all the AST card changes are just a joke, I don't understand the SE trend with just DPS buffs on everything(devotion for SMN or pruning utilities like Palisade). From a job which is unique to a job which lacks just any kind of uniqueness from the other healers(though for the "meta" AST is going to be just insane).
WHM players were mad about some things, with for example the Lily system(which is now just waiting(not really engaging)) and not being able to be part of the "meta", now get nothing for the "meta".

Now we go to SCH.
These changes now are totally insane in a personal and watcher perspective. They do not help WHM problems because Chainstrategam is still being there.
Oh and WHM is also losing Aero 3 just like SCH is losing Miasma. SE could have kept the castable DoT to provide more skill and management for the player.
Another point is the Fairy. You cannot really manage her, Selene and Eos are just the same and even though they have another heal now, there would be more time to manage the DoTs but instead they cut them.
Energy Drain and Shadowflare is also huge. Not being able to do anything with the Aetherflow Stacks and just waiting is just not engaging.
I use the word engaging because SE is always talking about engaging gameplay but the Healers lack engaging gameplay. Even the Lily system is not engaging because you just wait. The Aetherflow system is not engaging anymore because you just wait for the group to get damage and use for example Lustrate. AST cards are not engaging because you just use them on a Melee DPS or Ranged DPS.
The whole engaging and unique playstyle is gone from the Healers. Even if they got new heals, the gameplay will not be engaging as before.

The presentation from the Live Letter about the Healers was really disrespectful towards healers. They don't bring a new Healer, they almost speed-talk the Healer changes in the Live Letter and do not show any footage. They even almost cut the talk about the Healer-DPS but later on said just 1 sentence about it which said like nothing.

Also it is pretty easy to balance the "meta" for all healer be viable. Because the main problem of the "meta" is utility buff like Chainstrategam or Cards. Therefore they can just give WHM a utility as well.
But personally I really don't understand why they only try to balance on the Savage Raid "meta" style. Where is the unique Modern-MMORPG Style of FFXIV where they focus on Story, job identity, progress of the character, nuanced gameplay? I am really sad that the go the action/arcade way instead of the nuanced unique story way. Why does SE want to balance something where they forbid these programs which provide DMG metres or w/e?
I really do not understand them, not even 1% of the community plays "meta". They seem to not understand the community and healer playerbase at all I guess.