So, what's your opinion on current healer jobs

[Lilseph]

I am not happy with healers because even though the devs said that there would be more healing to do or "shift to more healing" prior to 5.0, it feels the same but they gutted their DPS kits so healing is even more boring.

I wanna interject here for a sec. The devs never said they were going to have more healing to do, only that they wanted to shift to more healing. What "shifting to more healing" could mean is left up to interpretation. The actual source of the "there's more healing to do" came from the Shadowbringers Media Tour where, if I recall correctly, none of the people that were invited actually mained Healer so perspectives were skewed.

[Payotz]

WHM fairs the best, but it isn't good, either. Lilies are arguably more useless than before; Clones of Cure II and Medica without a cast time are extremely unnecessary for anyone that knows how to precast properly, and having both of these Afflatus Skills still adhere to the GCD makes for an extremely awkward flow when they are used.

I'd argue that Lilies are extremely useful for weaving and movement. An instacast Medica or Cure 2 is better for movement and leaves a lot of room for double weaving if necessary. Plus it's more of a dps gain compared to regen, and hardcasting heals because of the Blood Lily, even though it's technically still a dps loss compared to spamming Glare.

Old SB WHM iirc had to either hard clip their Stone 4s, overwrite a regen or overwrite their dots in order to weave. New lilies solve that problem a bit by giving more weaving opportunities.

[althenawhm]

I'd argue that Lilies are extremely useful for weaving and movement. An instacast Medica or Cure 2 is better for movement and leaves a lot of room for double weaving if necessary. Plus it's more of a dps gain compared to regen, and hardcasting heals because of the Blood Lily, even though it's technically still a dps loss compared to spamming Glare.

Old SB WHM iirc had to either hard clip their Stone 4s, overwrite a regen or overwrite their dots in order to weave. New lilies solve that problem a bit by giving more weaving opportunities.

Yeah, I'd say the lilies are great now, the only problem being they should have been great in Stormblood and the job should have moved forward this expansion.

[Payotz]

Yeah, I'd say the lilies are great now, the only problem being they should have been great in Stormblood and the job should have moved forward this expansion.

Yeah, I agree, and not only that, the other two healers should not be dragged down to WHM's level so WHM can compete.
Healers and Tanks should have their kit be improved, not gutted.
SE imo should start looking into adding complexity, not dumbing down roles.

[EaMett]

They wanted to make healers more accessible, they wanted to give more healing tools so that some healers weren't covering for others (ironically they thought sch was leaching off of whm when sch was the main healer all along... Goes to show the disconnect). They wanted to homogenize healers so that it was easier -for them- to balance (aka not needing to make specialized tools). In the end all the healers are a pale copy of each other. the added healing makes the healing requirements even lower and the gutted dps rotations (on sch) don't give the healers anything to do during downtime.
End result is that a few players that found healing a little too angst inducing now enjoy the jobs, and all the healers that were already complaining about how easy it was and how they needed more to do, have either quit or hate their lives.

[Tranquilmelody7]

I refuse to accept Astrologian in it's current state.
I think while functional the new card is terribly unpleasant and devoid of creativity.

While flawed the old cards were quite a spectacle, I loved working with what I drew - made me feel like I was playing Yugioh in a Final Fantasy world.

I'm indifferent to the other two healers personally but I am empathetic to Scholar players.

Overall I think Healer and Tank(DRK and WAR in particular) design in Shadowbringers is embarrassing and I feel the devs lack of response to players feedback is flatout shameful.

This whole fiasco could have been avoided if Square Enix was more transparent with Job design development, but they seem to be doubling down on their mistakes by withholding class change info until patch launches.

It have personally never felt worse to sub to this game due to overall job(MNK is even worse than any Tank or Healer!) and encounter design(Hades EX was NOT similar to Shinyru EX at all) severely lacking in quality this expansion despite the great initial reception of Shadow bringers.

[PondHollow]

Healing is only an engaging experience in an alliance raid when no one knows what to do and the other healer in your group is dead.

Healing a routine run of current savage content or a dungeon is a dismal and boring experience that mostly consists of pressing one button.

It's just terrible, and the developers haven't seemed to care since before Shadowbringers was released.

I regret having my subscription paid many months in advance. It's incredibly boring.

[EaMett]

I refuse to accept Astrologian in it's current state.
I think while functional the new card is terribly unpleasant and devoid of creativity.

While flawed the old cards were quite a spectacle, I loved working with what I drew - made me feel like I was playing Yugioh in a Final Fantasy world.

I'm indifferent to the other two healers personally but I am empathetic to Scholar players.

Overall I think Healer and Tank(DRK and WAR in particular) design in Shadowbringers is embarrassing and I feel the devs lack of response to players feedback is flatout shameful.

This whole fiasco could have been avoided if Square Enix was more transparent with Job design development, but they seem to be doubling down on their mistakes by withholding class change info until patch launches.

It have personally never felt worse to sub to this game due to overall job(MNK is even worse than any Tank or Healer!) and encounter design(Hades EX was NOT similar to Shinyru EX at all) severely lacking in quality this expansion despite the great initial reception of Shadow bringers.

In regards to AST. I understand that the new card system is more consistent. I understand that speed runners and 99%+ parsers welcome that consistency. But what it cost us to please this population (which btw runs the content enough to overcome RNG) was definitely NOT worth it. Cards lost all their flavor, players lost all their options (even if we didn't use them much, that one time we did successfully was great), the class lost all of it's lore, and we're still fetching for cards just as much.
I understand why they did it, but why oh why wouldn't they run these changes past the healer community first. The whole "we aren't listening to you guys before you get to play the class" thing is old and honestly outright wrong. We've proven already, over 3 expansions now, that our predictions coming from tooltips were correct. We've provided so much good feedback over the years and almost none of it seems to have hit the dev team in any form. The results have been classes just broken for ENTIRE expansions. That's just appalling considering the reputation SE has of listening to it's player base. How would anyone feel if their class of choice was just a hot pile of clunky, clippy, ineffective mess for 2 FULL YEARS. Seriously

I wanna interject here for a sec. The devs never said they were going to have more healing to do, only that they wanted to shift to more healing. What "shifting to more healing" could mean is left up to interpretation. The actual source of the "there's more healing to do" came from the Shadowbringers Media Tour where, if I recall correctly, none of the people that were invited actually mained Healer so perspectives were skewed.

I believe it stemmed from two things. One of the expansion powerpoint slides stating a shift towards "pure healing" (whatever that means) and then a semi confirmation from YoshiP during an interview with Mr Happy regarding the healing requirements in the single dungeon they could test (where YoshiP played koi and just went along with what Mr Happy was saying while being as vague as humanly possible).

[Lilseph]

I believe it stemmed from two things. One of the expansion powerpoint slides stating a shift towards "pure healing" (whatever that means) and then a semi confirmation from YoshiP during an interview with Mr Happy regarding the healing requirements in the single dungeon they could test (where YoshiP played koi and just went along with what Mr Happy was saying while being as vague as humanly possible).

Mhm. That's where misinterpretations pretty much happened. Just as a side note for anyone wondering.. whenever the devs ever mention "pure healing", it's always used as a counterpart to "shield healing". Whether it be a mistranslation or poor choice of words, whenever that phrase is used by the devs, it's actually being used to refer to "raw healing", as in, there's no extra component to the healing itself. It's just a straight up heal.

[Esmoire]

Something I feel is topical is IMO MP fails as a resource. For most play experiences, while there are exceptions (like prog or a disastrous alliance raid), the MP cost of spells doesn't feel like it is creating interesting choices or meaning. It feels like, if you ran out of MP, you made a mechanical error in not hitting Lucid Dreaming early enough and... is this really what we want it to come down to? Hitting Lucid Dreaming every minute?

When I look at DRK, a tank job, I see a much more interesting take on the resource. PvP likewise actually IMO does MP more interesting than PvE does. In PvP, your basic attack spell and healing spell are free to use, however, your powerful healing spell is expensive. If they keep adding oGCD or other forms of free healing every expansion, it becomes harder and harder to make just casting heal spells more meaningful, and that in turn makes the resource (and Piety) less sexy.

If they plan to keep Cure 1/Physick/Benefic next expansion, maybe consider making those and the healer attack spells free to cast, and giving some of the oGCD heals an expensive MP cost. MP seems like an underutilized way of creating more interesting design. It's already enough of an eyesore being stuck on your HUD despite not being used by half of the jobs.