Quote Originally Posted by Laphael View Post
Fun is subjectiv and you can´t determine the "preference en mass" from forum posts.

I liked the old healers and i like the new healers, because they didn´t change as much as some ppl want me to believe, and yes, i play them all myself.

Of course they should cater to different tastes, but lets be honest here. As much fun as a class might be, if its underpowered it wont be played, so yes, balance probably is first priority with fun being a close second.
Not much point in saying it again for myself when it's been said very eloquently before:

Quote Originally Posted by Billythepancake View Post
There is more to a game than just numbers and parses. wanna talk numbers? Let's look at MCH. In terms of dps and viability, it was great in SB, it could compete just fine against BRD, but despite that nobody played it. Why? Because it felt like trash to play, it was a nightmare trying to play that class well, despite how good of numbers it could produce. Same thing with AST, even if for optimization it is better in terms of sheer numbers, it feels like garbage to play it, and that's 1000x worse than having bad numbers. That's why you dont see very many ASTs now, not because it isnt viable to take one, but because it's too much of a headache to get the opener, and then after opener its boring as hell.
And if you think forums are a bad metric for what people find fun (and I assume you also don't consider the poll reliable) please tell me what metric the devs should be using to tell whether people are having fun playing a class. Usage? Because AST seems to be falling down there, too.