A serious suggestion in lieu of punishing all healers.

[Reiryuu]

It's radical, I know... but here it is.

You want a healing job that heals and only heals? Low stress? Low demands? Can wear any healing gear that drops and can participate in most content? Look no further:

Conjurer.

It's simple. Take out the WHM job stone, remove any complex DPS systems that the WHM could have for new players. Give Conjurer only skills when WHM gets skills and replace those skills with the WHM skills when the stone is slotted in again.

Conjurer can already wear all healer gear. It may even be able to use WHM artifact weapons (I'm not logged in to check at the moment). Hell, give the lily system to the conjurer and make a different system for WHMs.

No needing to punish AST/SCH/WHM players for wanting DPS tools or utility/buff spells. No need to suffocate WHM with this idea of needing to have more heals. Make the advanced healing jobs cater to playstyles of the people who want more complex mechanics. Leave conjurer and support it with CONJ-only spells at higher levels for those who are afraid of these things and simply just want to heal. No longer do you need to worry about stressing healers out because now healers who are stressed out by dpsing and buffs have their one go-to job for all things healing.

Conjurer doesn't really have to be subject to the same balance as the other 3 jobs either. More demanding content like savage and that should require more demanding jobs. Hell, I am not stressed by healing, hate the 5.0 changes to just about all the healing jobs and I don't even DO savage content because I just don't like that sort of content and would never do it with people who aren't friends.

So there you go. Instead of neutering all jobs, support the base-class Conjurer to higher levels and use that as your "newbie friendly, low stress, healbot" healer.

[ADVSS]

I would like to be this cnj, but im going to need 3 fairies [all out at the same time] 10 different regens, 5 burst ogcd heals, and a new clericstance that makes my autoattacks become at a distance, like they were for thm in the beta, so I cant be bothered to touch a button to cast any attack magic ever, please?

[Reiryuu]

I would like to be this cnj, but im going to need 3 fairies [all out at the same time] 10 different regens, 5 burst ogcd heals, and a new clericstance that makes my autoattacks become at a distance, like they were for thm in the beta, so I cant be bothered to touch a button to cast any attack magic ever, please?

Lol. Sometimes I wonder if that's actually the kind of feedback SE is listening to.

[ADVSS]

Lol. Sometimes I wonder if that's actually the kind of feedback SE is listening to.

Seems that way to me as well

[Ilyrian]

Taking this to the extreme you could just remove WHM.
Balance nightmare over. Shields and HoTs for days. Give them both a fancy Wings cooldown - job done - ty ty.

[Yuyuka3]

Taking this to the extreme you could just remove WHM.
Balance nightmare over. Shields and HoTs for days. Give them both a fancy Wings cooldown - job done - ty ty.

AST is the copycat. If anything, it should go, plus WHM is one of the most iconic jobs in the franchise, they would be stupid to delete it. However, I think deleting any job at all won't do, they need to pull their heads out of their a**es and make them all unique, not just SCH and then WHM plus WHM with cards.

I actually like TCs idea quite a bit tbh.

[Cyrocco]

I would like to be this cnj, but im going to need 3 fairies [all out at the same time] 10 different regens, 5 burst ogcd heals, and a new clericstance that makes my autoattacks become at a distance, like they were for thm in the beta, so I cant be bothered to touch a button to cast any attack magic ever, please?

Now introducing: White Schologian

GCD: Curaja

Fairy GCD: AoE Reraise

oGCD: AoE Enchanced Balance - 15 sec cooldown

original idea do not steal

[Ilyrian]

they need to pull their heads out of their a**es and make them all unique

In seriousness that's the exact opposite of what they can do.
In a party that can have max 2 healers - two are always going to be favored over the other.
And there are only so many ways to heal - direct healing, HoTs and shields. Shields are always superior to reactionary healing. That's just indisputable.
So they either have to assume that players who heal and participate in high-end content are going to be playing all three jobs or they have to make encounters that assume that shields will be used.
So, they need to either make WHM essential to extreme high damage scenarios that the other two healers couldn't keep up with OR we just resign ourselves to the fact that WHM is the RDM of healing, reliable for progress - subpar on farm.

[Siccoroa]

Did I miss something? Each healer still has DPS skills, sch and ast still have utility skills.

[Cyrocco]

In seriousness that's the exact opposite of what they can do.
In a party that can have max 2 healers - two are always going to be favored over the other.
And there are only so many ways to heal - direct healing, HoTs and shields. Shields are always superior to reactionary healing. That's just indisputable.
So they either have to assume that players who heal and participate in high-end content are going to be playing all three jobs or they have to make encounters that assume that shields will be used.
So, they need to either make WHM essential to extreme high damage scenarios that the other two healers couldn't keep up with OR we just resign ourselves to the fact that WHM is the RDM of healing, reliable for progress - subpar on farm.

This reminds me of a good point that was brought up in one of my own forum posts a while back, and it really came to a consensus on how anything that is a unique way of recovering HP isn't an identity, and therefore, not relevant to the current balance issues.

It's much more important for each healer to have valuable tool kits for increasing party effectiveness in some unique way, rather than continue on with the Heal vs Shield vs HoT debate.

It would be much easier to balance the healers if they didn't have an extreme overlap in their healing power, and this is where I've agreed with Yuyuka in several threads at this point, Astrologian doesn't need shields, and the overlap here makes it much harder to make each role feel unique. White Mage only being a "pure" healer just means that everything in its kit can be found elsewhere, because everyone -needs- to be capable of healing through the content.

Give Scholar shields.

Give Astrologian rng buffs.

Give White Mage something.