Have we given up on SCH?

[Saefinn]

Snip

Historically SE have left any major changes to expansions rather than in the patch cycles. Meaning if we are looking at meaningful changes after "wiping the slate clean" then we'd expect to see them in 6.0. I don't mean to come off as rude when I say this, but people keep moving the goalpost on this one. At the media tour it was like "wait and see until you get to actually play it", we play it and then it's like "wait until you try it in Shadowbringers content", we play it in Shadowbringers content, "wait until end game, that's where the jobs are balanced", we play it at endgame, "it's a clean slate, wait for later patches". I've tried to enjoy Scholar, because it is my baby, but I've struggled.

But I don't think homogenisation is a clean slate, but a way of dumbing the roles down and making balance easier and also approachable to new players. Arguably they could still do this with a tiered system, it works for casters, RDM is easy (and still fun, it was my main DPS in SB and I am getting it to 80 at the moment), BLM has more to manage and less mobility and SMN has a more complicated rotation newbies might find harder to understand.

The thing is, they already have a great foundation for making healers fun and arguably don't need a clean slate or to homogenise them. One of the main issues here is that their main balance philosophy is to patch weaknesses instead of making strengths worthwhile over said weaknesses. It's why 2.0 SCH and WHM worked together. As soon as they patched SCH's weakness, SCH became OP and also made WHM's identity as "the healiest heal" redundant (an identity they've continued to give WHM since without giving them something else). To make it less OP, they've weakened what made it fun and strong, instead of giving it its weakness back. And then they based AST's design over this relationship and to be able to swap beween heal styles, which they inadvertently made redundant by patching SCH's weakness. So it put WHM in a bad place back then, but WHM, SCH and AST were still fun to play (though I didn't like being OP). Though understandably this was the first of issues where WHM seemingly started to be loved less by the devs.

If we need to look at SE's history, we only need to look at White Mage, who have had problems for a long time in terms of how the job plays and over-and-over they've not addressed the issues, we're talking over -years- and with over that time they've taken away more and more from WHM at first mostly, but all healers overall. And in that time, they've not really taken on people's feedback with WHM. Even now, we have silence and no acknowledgement that they consider the problems with healers as problems.

They've acknowledged problems with the DPS jobs and said they were going to do something and are delivering on them in 5.1. Historically MNK and MCH were DPS's that they ignored for ages, so fairdoes, they have addressed them in 5.0, but they also acknowledged issues with both prior to this.

I think if they went as far as to communicate that they're at least aware of the problem and are working on it, they'd have a bit more faith from people in the healer communities, something they've done with other roles. At the moment the extent of acknowledgement is that "no" they won't change AST's card and they'll update SCH's tooltips.
This was why my question for one of the "asks" was over better communication, I wasn't rude to them because I know overall the dev team does a fantastic job (and I expressed that), which is why it's even more frustrating healers feel so bad. I've changed jobs to enjoy the content.