WHM DPS needs to stay this high.

[EaMett]

Only for upper tier players though. I mean let’s face it the average player doesn’t play optimally as is and a good many people struggle with just the base lvl 8man content. When looking at what is going on we have to pay attention to the average not the bleeding edge. FFXIV takes great pains to make sure the classes and general content is completable/playable by even the lowest skill level. If you are an upper skill level player aside from maybe some savage fights and the ultimate fights you will always find the content pretty easy and as an extension the classes.

They could fix this by adding more tiers of content, but their metrics seems to show that the majority of people never see savage levels, so is it worthwhile in that regard? I would say yes, but development costs compare to player time spent in said content seems to say otherwise. I’d argue that the same is said for class design. Hence the healers being made “easier”. Still holding out hope that the healing reqs will increase a bit across the board.

Yes this is absolutely correct and our complaint is that there are plenty of ways of allowing for a higher skill ceiling without raising access difficulty for these jobs. Not only that but sch already had some of these in place that we’re removed. ED is a perfect example, players could just ignore it and keep stacks for healing if they needed it. Then spend them proportionally to their comfort. Dissipation was somewhat the same, it played twofold depending on if you used it as an “oh shit” or optimized around it for the extra ED.
There are a few other example for sch alone.

Not only that but diversity is key to good game design and if sch wasn’t for you you still had options like whm that played simpler. Now you’re kinda stuck.

They obviously balanced (yet to see the balance) through homogenization which is already contrary to theory. We’re here making a case for the skill ceiling

[Feidam]

Yes this is absolutely correct and our complaint is that there are plenty of ways of allowing for a higher skill ceiling without raising access difficulty for these jobs. Not only that but sch already had some of these in place that we’re removed. ED is a perfect example, players could just ignore it and keep stacks for healing if they needed it. Then spend them proportionally to their comfort. Dissipation was somewhat the same, it played twofold depending on if you used it as an “oh shit” or optimized around it for the extra ED.
There are a few other example for sch alone.

Not only that but diversity is key to good game design and if sch wasn’t for you you still had options like whm that played simpler. Now you’re kinda stuck.

They obviously balanced (yet to see the balance) through homogenization which is already contrary to theory. We’re here making a case for the skill ceiling

You are only stuck though if you are looking for diversity among dps skills. Currently the healers healing kits and styles are different. The only thing that was homogenized were the dps skills. However, I’m not sure that we can call that collectively bad. There are those that rather like the changes to the healers and if the conversations in game indicate anything it’s a larger portion of the player base than reading the forums would indicate.

I play the scholar as my healer of choice(since 2.0). I miss ED, my second dot, shadowflare,bane and miasma2. However, I still find the class enjoyable. There a some issues to be sure, but scholars are wanting stuff back that I think is long gone. I feel like this was the first step in separating the scholar from the Arcanist like they wanted to do. Take energy drain. It is the now the summoners Aetherflow. It’s not coming back to Scholar. However, they could give a dps Aetherflow dump in a different form. IMO that lack is the only thing making the scholar feel clunky as you burn stacks on overhealing to keep fairy gauge growth and mp flowing which just feels wrong.

P.S. I do hope they can give us a dot based healer back. I do get tired of m dot classes moving away from dot’s all he time.

[LegoTechnic]

You are only stuck though if you are looking for diversity among dps skills. Currently the healers healing kits and styles are different. The only thing that was homogenized were the dps skills. However, I’m not sure that we can call that collectively bad. There are those that rather like the changes to the healers and if the conversations in game indicate anything it’s a larger portion of the player base than reading the forums would indicate.

I play the scholar as my healer of choice(since 2.0). I miss ED, my second dot, shadowflare,bane and miasma2. However, I still find the class enjoyable. There a some issues to be sure, but scholars are wanting stuff back that I think is long gone. I feel like this was the first step in separating the scholar from the Arcanist like they wanted to do. Take energy drain. It is the now the summoners Aetherflow. It’s not coming back to Scholar. However, they could give a dps Aetherflow dump in a different form. IMO that lack is the only thing making the scholar feel clunky as you burn stacks on overhealing to keep fairy gauge growth and mp flowing which just feels wrong.

P.S. I do hope they can give us a dot based healer back. I do get tired of m dot classes moving away from dot’s all he time.

I do find it odd how everyone seems to oversimplify things into just a "DPS issue".

- I miss Miasma and Shadowflare, but I'll live without them.
- Energy Drain as a move itself wasn't special, but I sorely, deeply miss the simple ability to use it to consume unneeded stacks, which has long been a core mechanic of the class.
- I rage at not being able to use Aetherflow outside of combat, especially when a fight ends just as aetherflow's cooldown comes up.
- I mourn the passing of Selene and the versatility decision she offered, especially since I remember her in her glory years, back before her skills were continually reduced into irrelevance (though the AoE esuna was neat).
- I regret that we can no longer trigger pet abilities during the casting of other actions because now they're forced player skills.
- I regret that Dissipation is now incredibly niche due to the removal of aether stack options combined with ability cooldowns, relegating it to a 20% adlo boost since it doesn't affect any of the aetherflow abilities, all while locking out the fairy for 30 seconds.
- I miss being able to Bane multiple DoTs onto a crowd, an aspect that helped set SCH apart from the other two healers.
- I still marvel at how god-awful weak Fey Illumination is now, especially when it wasn't all that powerful to begin with (seriously, is 5% magic mitigation even going to be noticable? 10% stronger adlos are at least usable).
- I'm annoyed that the fairy "eats" commands, sometimes putting it on cooldown without actually using the ability if you time it wrong.
- I'm sad that the fairy no longer has its own aggro, meaning I can't use it for sacrificial distraction shenanigans during mob spawns with Whispering Dawn aggro (since all aggro now applies to the SCH, and I really loved doing stuff like that, especially in places like a2 savage with the snipers!).
- I wish I could still target Embrace via a macro, especially with Seraph's powerful adlo-variant.
- I'm seriously irked that they decided to have crit adlo's Galvanize shield expire before the Catalyze shield, meaning that possibility of being able to Recitation-shield the tank while it was taking auto attacks and still deploy a shield is gone.
- I can't stand not being able to see the fairy in the party list, especially with its propensity to despawn when a tank runs out of fey union tether range and it locks up, refusing to heel, or is outranged due to wonky pathing in the Praetorium (or when you just forget to tell it to heel after a boss fight and it despawns where you placed it).
- Lastly, I miss the aetherflow cooldown trait from Stormsblood, which encouraged you to actively use your aetherflow stacks and honestly just added a cool level of fun to the resouce mechanic (I still hold that the trait was a canny level of design genius, and am sorry to see it go).

Hmm... That may have been kind of rambling, but I really do miss quite a lot. I'm still not all that sold on Fey Blessing (it's a free AoE heal, but it's kind of weak), but I want to like Seraph, who is at least pretty interesting, even if summoning her too fast can cancel a previous fairy order while still putting it on cooldown.

[EaMett]

You are only stuck though if you are looking for diversity among dps skills. Currently the healers healing kits and styles are different.

Not really accurate. The spread is different among healers but they've also homogenized the healing. I don't want to go on a three page rant about game design and homogenizing classes for balance but essentially the healers "think" the same in the sense that you have almost 1:1 equivalency between healer skills. Switching classes is pretty much akin to using the equivalent heal on that class for that moment in the fight (moreso than in SB might I add). The only thing that changes is the healing spread.

You also can't look at diversity from a healing or DPS perspective in a vacuum. It's a whole. It used to be that the APM and time spent healing or dpsing, or handling downtime mechanics(cards) in a fight, etc.. would vary a lot based on the healer you were playing, introducing genuine diversity among healers. Currently it charts the same regardless of who you play. They even aligned low dps cost healing among healers (aka, ogcd healing skills or gcd healing skills that keep dps uptime > afflatus). The AST card system is a bit of an outlier but their (SE) desire to make it the same is the reason why they dumbed it down to a glorified and more tedious CS.

I mean SE haven't even been shy about it. They outright said they wanted the healers to be as much the same as possible with only slight variations for identity.

Putting aside the fact that this disregards basic game design theory for a sticky game like an MMO, they should at the very least make healer gameplay less clunky (aka: less gcd clipping, better weaving tools) and increase the skill spread a bit (just a bit) to give career healers some options. We've been asking for the former for at least 2 years at this point on WHM and instead they gave the same issues to SCH (while slightly correcting the issue for WHM with afflatus, sadly Ruin II remains underwhelming). A stack dump and potentially a ruin II buff would work wonders for SCH as far as clunkiness is concerned. And here we are asking for just that.