Healer boycott in 5.0

[dezzmont]

Shadowflare wasn't just an AOE ability. It and energy drain pushed scholar to have significantly higher potency over a minute than white mage, which was problematic because scholar was good enough at healing to make the difference in healing output irrelevant. There was no way Sch was getting to another expansion with the DPS, utility, Nd healing it had. And because making a healer unable to keep up healing for some content is unacceptable, and scholar had a core identity of utility, the dps abilities had to go.

I actually wince when people say protect going away is dumbing down content. Protect only affects overworld content in any meaningful way, so it going away just means you no longer need to cast a spell once a run just to cast it. Like if you find the interaction of protect and rezzes seriously interesting that is... valid? But I don't think most people would want things to be designed to your tastes.

I don't think most people care about potency that much. That matters, but only if you are really petty about not being the best at everything or if the gap is huge. For most people who care about potency they will just change to the higher potency healer, nbd, and people who just are salty scholar isn't the king of healers should 100% be ignored. The bigger question is 'what will healers be doing in fights?' Scholar had a lot going on in addition to its rotation but unlike astro it didn't do most of its things all the time, but in reaction to events, so it having similar downtime to astro MIGHT be a problem. Astro got more complex in almost every way but people have an anchoring bias so it is understandable that cards that SEEM to have more diverse effects would be better than cards that all do the same thing. Trying to card match while also getting a card good for your best dps actually requires more thought than the old system because it can actually require mid fight judgement calls as you are now judging cards along two axises that are competing and risk losing an axis if you reroll for the other.

But a lot of the way healers play really comes down to fight design. The more I read arguments for healer panic, the less convinced I am, because I read the concerns and only have the conclusion of "why do you care?"

Is miasma+bio actually more interesting than a single spell? You tossed em both out together immediately every time anyway... you didn't lose a choice or something to think about, you lost a button... No one liked drawing spire or ewer, they were straight dps losses you mindlessly threw out or converted, a purely player negative rng. Ect. And a complex rotation would require a lot of oGcd things to make healing complex, meaning that old SCH rotation wasnt just oppressive for its dps but because it locks them out of making content with more intense healing requirements.

[althenawhm]

Shadowflare wasn't just an AOE ability. It and energy drain pushed scholar to have significantly higher potency over a minute than white mage, which was problematic because scholar was good enough at healing to make the difference in healing output irrelevant. There was no way Sch was getting to another expansion with the DPS, utility, Nd healing it had. And because making a healer unable to keep up healing for some content is unacceptable, and scholar had a core identity of utility, the dps abilities had to go.

How about instead of nerfing jobs to make them equal, why not BUFF jobs to make them equal?

[dezzmont]

How about instead of nerfing jobs to make them equal, why not BUFF jobs to make them equal?

Because that isn't how game design works like at all. You can't just buff things, nerfs are important too in order to keep things working in a sane manner.

Buffing WHM to have a reasonable amount of potency per minute, taking into account that it can't move and heal or dps as easily as scholar and isn't tossing out a 300 potency heal for free every 3 seconds, would require its potency to probably hit 11,000 or even 12,000 per minute, which is 3,000-4,000 potency over what it currently has per minute, which is a titanic jump that would impact healer balance in way more unpredictable ways than simply making it so scholar loses 1200 potency a minute in energy drain and shadowflare. You would be massively increasing the variance in DPS from burst windows, for example, which would unduly hit the lower DPS jobs if WHM in optimal conditions could get 4k more potency simply to account for the fact that at most times conditions aren't optimal and they are losing DPS to casting heals while Scholars do so less often. Due to the nature of the fairy, a simple potency buff to WHM (and probably Astro, because otherwise it would be left behind) would have to be extreme, while a potency nerf to Scholar keeps the healers at about the same level they are DPS wise and doesn't force content to assume healers are optimally DPSing, which allows content to be more rough on actual healing.

The scope of Scholar's superiority goes far beyond just the fact its raw DPS is higher, which it is. The fairy is in most ways an upgrade to regen (83 potency a second compared to 50 as long as you macro Eos right, AND you don't need to waste a cast on medica), scholars have more utility options, scholars have more oGCDs they can weave than white mage (Not counting aetherflow options as more than three oGCDs because they all effectively have 3 charges coming back every minute, which has obvious advantages), amazing mitigation, ect. You can't realistically make any healer good as long as scholar is good at so many things in ways that don't really have downsides besides difficulty of execution, which while more challenging than other healers isn't THAT challenging.

The idea Scholars are unduly mechanically gutted is transparently false, and the continued focus on that aspect of what happened to healers is what makes me frown more and more reading these threads when you consider what scholar is compared to Astro and especially White Mage. Downtime concerns, the fact that scholar was about oGCD offensive weaving and now it isn't, and the fact that healing complexity in most content may not rise to account for the fact that DPS abilities are slightly less interesting are pretty valid complaints, but I mostly see people saying "Scholars are worse MECHANICALLY now" and to that I say 'Good. Scholar deserved it, and it isn't reasonable to expect scholar to have all these strengths going forward.'

There is a difference between saying "I don't like how I lost the ability to tactically choose between healing and DPS with aetherflow, " and "My potency is lower despite deserving to be lower!"

[Ftail]

Shadowflare wasn't just an AOE ability. It and energy drain pushed scholar to have significantly higher potency over a minute than white mage...

Energy Drain and Shadowflare weren't the reason SCH had higher DPS. SCH being able to heal with oGCD abilities, and being more mobile caused them to have higher DPS than WHM. WHM literally has to stop DPS to heal, SCH can weave in their heals with their DPS. If you compare DPS between SCH and WHM on a target dummy WHM wins, it's because of the issues I mentioned that WHM lags behind on DPS. This isn't even taking into account the abhorrent lack of Utility WHM has.

Stop trying to justify the removal of SCH abilities.