So, what's your opinion on current healer jobs

[Awha]

Yeah I agree cleric stance was clunky at times, I wish they fleshed it out more instead of removing the stance dance concept altogether. I get giving players an option is not really giving them an option because whatever does the most damage would be considered the only viable way of playing.

Still I wish we had the option to use old cleric stance. I have no problems with the heal tool kit itself, I do miss the old card system mostly for the lolz.

I just wish we had more to do, and cleric stance did provide that level of something to do. Sure it was clunky, stressful and imperfect. I did enjoy it a lot though.

[Ayesafaile]

This basically. The potential issue regarding Healers is that the devs want any healer composition to function. It's not the same as balancing the other roles from what I can understand, and the main reason why duplicates don't synergise well together. A lot of it boils down to the fact that the devs have sectioned healing into either "pure healing" or "shield healing". If they introduce a fourth healer designated as a "shield healer" and force Ast into a permanent Diurnal Sect, then you'll never be able to run with a Whm/Ast comp because it wouldn't be feasible. Similarly, making all four healers have their own niche can possibly end up with similar results.

In the majority of content (i.e. any full party Duty Finder activity, maps, hunts, etc.), it wouldn't matter, just like how things are currently with WHM/WHM or SCH/SCH. It's much easier to balance two jobs per role, and give them unique job identities and mechanics, than it is to balance four. I'd much rather have 4 healer jobs that play differently than 4 jobs that by necessity must possess the same functionality such that all possible combinations are viable. There just isn't enough development time put into job design to create a perfect world where all healers are unique yet equally capable and flexible. Look at all the job identity that's been lost over the last two expansions in the name of raid balance - SCH doesn't even remotely resemble Arcanist anymore, and it's a huge shame. SE have failed to expand upon the unique and interesting facets of jobs, for example the buff extension capabilities of old AST, and instead completely axed them in order to throw Stormblood WHM abilities into the AST kit (Celestial Intersection/Divine Benison, Horoscope/Plenary Indulgence) for the sake of job balance.

The homogenization required for complete raid balance and healer interchangeability results in jobs being neither fun nor interesting, and nothing has made that more clear than Shadowbringers.

[EaMett]

They need to do what they've done with tanks (where any tank can MT or OT) and basically have all healers have a certain capacity for pure healing, regen and shields. And this seems to be what they're going for with the latest job forms.

I have to disagree here. That would be homogenizing the healers even more, in fact that's exactly what SE gunned for this expansion and -exactly- what everyone is complaining about. If anything the exact opposite needs to happen.

The reality of the matter is that healers, in the holy trinity occupy a very unique role. One that can't be measured by the performance of a single class but as a combination of factors. How healer skills synergies, how tank skills synergies with the healers, what the damage spread in the content is, how dps mitigation can be leveraged, etc.. Unlike other roles, you can't look at a single healer in a vacuum and decide how the skill set should work, equally (and this is directly tied to your suggestion) you can't look at healers in a vacuum unless you plan on essentially making them the same.

What the healer roles in MMOs require are a specialized set of tools that estimate mobility, positioning, downtime, damage, etc. based on party comp and encounter design. With this, it makes it possible to offer a lot of diversity (be it in skill type, uptime, positioning, mobility, HPS, DPS) while keeping practical balance. "Practical" is the keyword here. It's ok to have unbalanced (lets say weaker) healer comps for some content as long as other healer comps are weaker in other content. When you achieve overall balance over multiple types of content you have a balanced game.
It seems, very strongly, that this is not something SE finds worth investing in, and here we are as per usual, eternally unhappy healers.

[Liam_Harper]

But it was also a time when a good healer could out DPS a bad DPS (which can't really happen now even if the DPS is dead for a minute+).

I'm all for that.

If a skilled healer utilizing an engaging dps toolkit can out dps a bad dps while simultaneously healing the group, then that's great. Good job. That dps was simply outperformed by a far better player. If the bad dps doesn't like it, then maybe they should play their class properly. I never understood giving tanks/healers terrible damage to try to protect the ego of players putting in no effort.

[Awha]

Likewise this new shield healer + SCH would be prohibitive.

They need to do what they've done with tanks (where any tank can MT or OT) and basically have all healers have a certain capacity for pure healing, regen and shields. And this seems to be what they're going for with the latest job forms.
AST now has two skills that do the opposite of their current sect, and WHM has a proper single target shield skill.
Of course SCH still has it's Tactics skills that turn shields into pure heals, and the fairy which is basically an elaborate regen, so SCH was kinda already there.
They just need to be able to differentiate them enough via job mechanics and dps skills.

With this in mind, I think the next healer should be based around a mechanic that allows them to use either regens or shields at will.

Please no. Tanking use to be one my favorite roles because every class played overall differently and had varying strengths and weaknesses which was cool. Now they are more or less the same, sure they look different but they are simoly inter changeable. Play one played them all.

[KageTokage]

I feel like AST/SCH need tools to make them more appealing to play in dungeons because it's pretty hard to beat the AoE stuns and additional AoE damage that WHM has when it comes to those.

[Lilseph]

SE have failed to expand upon the unique and interesting facets of jobs, for example the buff extension capabilities of old AST, and instead completely axed them in order to throw Stormblood WHM abilities into the AST kit (Celestial Intersection/Divine Benison, Horoscope/Plenary Indulgence) for the sake of job balance.

As much as anyone would like to admit, the buff extension for Ast was not as extensive as you'd think. Ast had MP issues in previous expansions too, and Opposition was exclusively saved for Lucid because of it. Dilation wasn't super interesting either since you can't use it on yourself—and places where you would get value out of it were few and far between. I personally really liked the idea for buff extending as a concept, but it was pretty redundant in practice honestly.

I have to disagree here. That would be homogenizing the healers even more, in fact that's exactly what SE gunned for this expansion and -exactly- what everyone is complaining about. If anything the exact opposite needs to happen.

They really can't if the devs want to keep the philosophy of "you can clear with any reasonable party configuration". It's the main factor for the split between "pure healing" and "shield healing" in the design, and is similar to the "Main/Off Tank" concept.

The moment they distance Ast specifically from either design concept is the moment it can't compete with the other two healers anymore. Both design concepts are heavily integral to a lot of the current encounter design, so making that kind of change would require a rework on a massive scale to implement. Sure it'll be cool for a while to have all three (and potentially a fourth) healers having their own niche, but designing encounters around four different unique kits is extremely restricting.

[Recon1o6]

As much as anyone would like to admit, the buff extension for Ast was not as extensive as you'd think

Actually, yes, it was. Not so much in savage for those dps numbers everybody craves too much (though I strongly suspect were roll dps the thing back in hw and sb, it would shine better), but in alliance and dungeons it was amazing. Stacking your buffs on the mt followed by a CO and TD meant you go entire pulls with barely a heal if you really tried.

Ast had mp issues in previous expansions

Ast's were only slightly mp negative in diurnal and more so in nocturnal on account of it being objectively inferior in being unable to stack its shields unlike diurnal's regens which do. Slight mp negative is a good thing, as mp management is both fun when balanced right and integral part of healer balance.
Whm has practifcally infinite mp. It will run dry, but only if you aren't using your kit to even a basic level, which no player should be doing at 70 nevermind 80

Astro's ewer was excellent mana regen and boostable at that, at the cost of it being unreliable. But that's what made it fun, you had redraw to adjust your cards to as of when you needed htem, failing tha tin sb minor arcana could grant a free heal.
Luminerferous aether was the mp restorative in HW. It did the equivalent of 1/5 to 1/4 of your mp depending on a few factors

[Loki]

Compared to AST and SCH, WHM is a bit more fun to play and seems more "complete" imo.

Aoe + stun effect, aoe dmg + heal effect + regen mp, some rng free mp cures, several single/aoe regen, a shield, an aoe dmg with gauge, a free mp skill, a cast boost skill.....seriously, the other healers feel weak compared to this. But even with its kit, whm feels borring in certain content and you spamm your 1 dps spell like a robot like the other healer jobs....

The community has created dozens of subjects in english, french, german, japanese concerning how the 5.0 healer jobs were broken and not fun anymore but it doesn't seems SE cares about it so...maybe we should just all boycott healers jobs idk.

[Lilseph]

Stacking your buffs on the mt followed by a CO and TD meant you go entire pulls with barely a heal if you really tried.

It was nice to have and and satisfying to pull off (no amount of effort can overwrite bad luck), but again, where would you use it outside of that one specific instance? What if you never get the exact card combination for the entire dungeon? Are you going to just hold onto both abilities indefinitely till you get it? Genuinely curious.

Ast's were only slightly mp negative in diurnal and more so in nocturnal on account of it being objectively inferior in being unable to stack its shields unlike diurnal's regens which do.

Eh, it's about the same as it is right now. The reason why its so noticeable in ShB is that they removed both Ewer and the ability to extend Lucid while not giving any other external source of MP recovery to compensate. Adding on to buff extenders, there were posts like this regarding MP issues such as always pairing Opposition with Lucid.