After this is all over, can we never claim "WHM is fine"?

[Lagomorph]

Bam.

Even right now, I think everyone can agree that whm isn't balanced, but the current healer model would pass under that chart you made. Dose ast offer anything that whm doesn't? No, it doesn't bring anything at all. And somehow this chart would suggest balance? Not sure why your chart is whm-centralized anyways, or do you think that whm/ast should always compete for the same spot in raid?

[Ceasaria]

WHM will never be fine as long as SCH has access to both many and strong heals and shields while WHM has only access to heal skills.
In fact, WHM will always struggle with AST for the last spot because SE doesn't know how to make Nocturnal interesting and competitive against SCH.

[Saefinn]

WHM will never be fine as long as SCH has access to both many and strong heals and shields while WHM has only access to heal skills.
In fact, WHM will always struggle with AST for the last spot because SE doesn't know how to make Nocturnal interesting and competitive against SCH.

As a SCH, I am happy with taking a nerf to pure heals. If I wanted to be really healy healer, I'd play WHM. If I wanted a mix of both I'd play AST. SCH was handicapped on pure heals in the beginning, its relationship with WHM was fantastic and was still able to holds it own. The balance concern really should have been "how do we make AST work in this already great healer relationship" and you can see how they attempted to do that in AST's design. Then they made it completely meaningless by buffing SCH's pure heals at the same time.

[ForteNightshade]

I think you missed his point.

He said that, in a game balanced around having 2 healer spots for the hardest content, 1 of the 3 will always be less interesting to take than the others. Perfect balance in a mmo (and any kind of online/competitive game) is just impossible, or else all your classes would have the same spells but with different colors. Look at WoW : so many years of terrible balance, be it for tanks/dps/healers. Look at GW2 (which I hate with a passion but still) : Chronomancer was king for a looong time, and that was the meta. So many games failed at balancing everything, do you think that it can be done by SE ? After years (I was not there, just informations I found) of imbalances ? Nah, it seems like it will be the same as always : some jobs on top, some at the bottom.

The only way for jobs to be balanced is by homogenizing them, but that's fucking boring and defeats the point of having multiple classes in the first place. If not, people will just take the 2 most interesting choices out of the 3 (or stack 2 of the strongest one).

Btw, I thought the main complains came from the fact that AST/SCH's gameplay was kinda butchered.

Except White Mage was not that bad in early Stormblood, Lilies notwithstanding. It still had a fairly large presence on the more casual to light midcore scene and was widely preferred for both prog and Ultimate despite Astro's utility. Some semblance of balance could have been achieved had they built upon what worked and addressed what was lacking. Had they simply given White Mage utility, it could finally answer Balance. Perhaps White Mage's version (we'll call it Bravery/Cheer) is a flat buff they main similar to Trick Attack or Brotherhood but it has a long CD and/or is weaker than Balance. Now both healers have something to suffer. One has a better buff but is subject to RNG whereas the other has flat damage. Conversely, they could have kept Astro exactly the same but reduced all the card effects to 15s. That puts a significant dent in its rDPS without gutting the job wholesale.

Instead, they fixed the clipping issues Astro had without realizing just how much that impacted its damage, indirectly buffed Collective and kept designing fights which encouraged movement—something that worked entirely against White Mage. In the end, the dev team's stubbornness sealed brought White Mage down.

[Seoulstar]

WHM has always had a really weak identity and kit. Nothing has changed in ShB, WHM looks great because the other healers are a bit undertuned atm.

A bit is more of an understatement. AST was quite literally gutted. With that being said, they have to figure out a way to make all three classes fun and viable. At this current moment at least in my own opinion, AST has had the fun sucked right out of it.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

It's funny how all of this could have been fixed by giving WHM utility, but for whatever reason they absolutely will not budge. They would rather gut every other job than give them utility. It's weird, I'm actually really curious what their reasoning is for this.

[Almostward]

I played Whm from ARR to Hws. When I unlocked Astro I fell in love. Loved how it played and everything.

Then in SB I did hate the lily gauge for Whm causs it felt usless, but I did content with it and had no issues (except when I accidentally used regen on a tank one time)

In SB astro felt great to me. The cards were good. Both sects were good, and we had a little more diversity. We had the buffs for situations and kicked butt.

Now I can only stomach Whm. Why? The lily gauge is good now I will say. The blood lily is a deadly foe, and heals are nice, but what the devs gave up was Astro.

My cards are small little balances and i hate the new mechanic. My shields are not worth it due to mp costs went up way to much. All together....it trash. I had enough to the point I discarded my Astro globe and quit. No buffs can fix this class cause everything is gone.

I've always loved Whm through the game, and now it's all I'm allowed to love now.

[kidalutz]

the problem with "interesting to play" is it's very subjective. And a lot of the suggestions on these forums since shb launch have been power increases where they probably aren't needed, so "interesting to play" and "balanced" do seem to be rather at odds with each other. If you can even get people to agree on what "interesting to play" means.

Yeah flat power increases are never fixes. However being able to keep busy while contributing that is something worth looking into

[Semirhage]

As a SCH, I am happy with taking a nerf to pure heals

This likely wouldn't work, as far as balancing things goes. All three healers being viable numbers-wise is an explicit design goal from Square. Fun, interesting gameplay, utility, et al aside, from a very basic standpoint, this has been true with few exceptions (viable in this instance meaning "can heal content with reasonable skill levels"). So if numbers are, in theory, always going to be fine, then nerfing Scholar's pure numbers would just lower the acceptability bar and create more overhealing for the other two.

I'm one of those mean WHMs who's always beaten the Nerf Scholar drum, and it's not because I want the job unfun. Scholar is (and has always been) OP because once potencies are at a baseline for clearing stuff, all of the variability comes in with things like efficiency, utility, personal damage, and time-saving. All things Scholar's kit has been incredibly good at, and the reason why Noct AST "sucks". Its shield potencies are higher, but it doesn't bring nearly enough of that list of features, so Scholar is always the obvious pick. Both healers benefit from the time-saving windows that things like constantly pulsing Embrace or highly available, beefy Indom or Excog create.

Tl;dr nerfing Scholar's potencies hasn't historically worked because the discrepancy between it and the other two isn't potency.

[TankHunter678]

WHM has always been fine and not bad, it always had the highest healing throughput and the highest pDPS of the healers which is why it remained popular even when it was not meta. The problems it had in the past were centered around a poorly designed job system, which has since been fixed, and a lack of utility, which still has not been fixed. Right now it is the top healer simply because its main competition has been crushed to the point of being a deficit in any healer combination. Which has made things very lopsided.

WHM should of been brought up to AST/SCHs level by giving it some utility. That would have given a third "knob" to twist for healer balancing. It is easier to balance classes that have utility against other classes that have utility then it is to balance a class without any utility against those that do.