Healing is now a state of permanent hatred.

[Saefinn]

I'm sorry that you are frustrated and I'm sorry if what I said came off the wrong way but I simply can not grasp why people are so upset.

Lets look at what changed and maybe then you or someone else can point me in the direction I need to face because I must be missing something.

AST: Got the card system reworked. Lost cleric stance. Lost time dilation.

Only thing I see people complain about on AST are some QoL changes for some skills. Also some people dont like the new cards. Others have a problem with the opener on controller.

WHM: Lilies got reworked (?). Lost Cleric stance. (This is the healer I am least familiar with because I find it extremely boring with little to no challenge but with big reward with its blood lilies)

and then there is ... SCH: Prob took the most hits from the move from SB to ShB. Lost like 3 dps skills and cleric stance.

Now if you are speaking from a SCH perspective, I can sympathize with you. You lost skills but it was to streamline you with the other healers. So from what I've listed I don't see much that has changed (dps related) for healers in the move from SB to ShB.. Hell, AST dps skills are the same since SB. And WHM got a new dps skill..

Soo what is making healers so unfun for you all? Was it losing cleric stance or something? Or not getting enough dps skills?

I'd say, the problem is probably more HW->ShB, but SB was still enjoyable. I've healed since 2.0 and one trend I've noticed is that are our healing kits get more comprehensive the content does not match it. What we end up getting is an increased downtime. In making the healing kits more comprehensive, what we do in our downtime is made less comprehensive.

For losses, WHM has actually lost a lot. But their losses were gradual. SCH's, however, was sudden. WHM has had a history of nerfs, and there were improvements this time around, like Planery Indulgence was better and Lilies are less dumb, but not necessarily the improvements needed because more was taken away. Add that some of their abilities ended up being made into cross class without really getting anything back for them, as well as losing some too or the effectiveness of them.

The loss of Cleric Stance was twofold, one in that what it did was changed and then what it was changed to was removed, but its original version offered a dynamic of risk/reward we used to have as healers we don't have anymore, it was clunky but it could have been improved rather than removed. Scholar used to have additional status effects on their DPS abilities too, which was a part of their damage mitigation schtick, which as a nice added touch. AST could stun, SCH could silence and offer other types of CC through debuffs in their DPS skills, WHM could (and fortunately still can) stun - these all had their place.


AST on paper looks the least affected by the changes, but those changes remove some of the core parts people found interesting about the cards, there was the argument over balance fishing and the answer to that seemed to be...make every card the balance, no real RNG, no variety, no Royal Road dynamic, sure some argued there were times the cards they got were useless, but there's better ways of fixing that. No Time Dilation or the old Celestial Opposition (in the old way it worked) and these are all dynamics that added to what AST's could manage in their down time and how it felt to play. Heck, I loved Royal Road, because it reminded me of FFXI SCH with stratagems but with a little RNG, it was a nice depth of choice/utility to the card system, which has been replaced with 1 ability & effect. Sure 'balance' fishing is gone when every card is the balance, but now I have seal fishing, so this hasn't solved that problem. Just that every card is now useful. They could have just use the old card system and the new Lord/Lady system and no card would ever be useless. Can't use it? Minor Arcana and get a base use. Can use it? Sweet, may it work. For me, AST is in the best place of all 3 in terms of fun, because it has a higher APM and Nocturnal Sect is the weakest version of healing ATM so i have more to engage with as a result, hence I'll AST when I end up doing stuff as a healer, despite being a former SCH main. And it still feels like it's a shadow of its former self.

In effect, the feeling is that the healer jobs overall have been stripped. Sure there's more dynamics on their healing side than before, but the issue is that the content and potencies don't match them. So in effect, particularly with experienced healers (though not exclusively), we're in a position where healer downtime has increased over the years (and I feel it is the highest in Shadowbringers) but what we can do in that downtime has been stripped and thus we find it boring. This process wasn't just the changes from SB -> ShB, but some of the most drastic were made in this expansion.

I think if there was a push in content design to put more dynamic use of our healing toolkit, I don't think we'd be so bored. But in most case scenarios, light healing is only required and you can half-arse it.

And I think we'd be okay with the 'half-arse it' approach as long as there was more to do during this increased downtime. Because there'd be content that is hard where we can heal harder and moments where we might get a bigger use of that toolkit, such as a struggling party or an intense fight.

And the content where we're half-arsing it, a newbie healer, somebody learning or less confident might not be. They might benefit from that extra space. Because if the content and potencies were tweaked more to make full use of our healing skills, then it'd be a tougher learning curve. If we embraced that downtime IS a thing and filled it, the skill floor stays low, whilst raising the skill ceiling.