If they made healers into pure healers, would you still play it?

[Saefinn]

snip.

During those old days of WHM doing the heavy lifting, I recall the complaints being "why don't you give us more utility?" instead of "why don't you take some of their utility away?" For a long time the request has been to bring White Mage up and not the others down, hence some of the "first time?" memes I've seen out of White Mage's.

But the important thing is, they were more fun to play this way, I agree an increase in healer focus is needed in encounter design because the downtime is too great for a lot of stuff, but I'd still want to see a better developed down time because downtime will happen and again you're talking a huge job retroactively adjusting the content.

And furthermore, solo play is a thing, solo FATEs, questing, solo instances and so on. With 1v1 being a thing in Bozja, imagine being the SCH getting it? You'd be spamming Broil/Ruin II.

I don't see how the old way was so bad or what the harm was, WHM was in need of love and this was the problem. But their solution made things a lot more dull.

Of course, it doesn't have to be just like the old days, there are other ways to break things up, in previous threads I have made suggestions to that effect, my idea for Scholar for example would keep the exact same skills but have ability to utilise them differently based on the situation, where you might trade off healing efficiency for utility, a principle that already existed with faerie choice.

But the short if that idea is that faerie choice mattered again, even to the point of how Fey Union, Seraph and Fey Blessing worked but also expand how Emergency Tactics and Deployment Tactics worked, to not just affect healing abilities, Eg. Emergency Tactics could make a Biolysis deal all its damage at once, kinda like a Thunder proc on BLM, or Deployment Tactics could be used as a Bane, or heck Emergency Tactics could turn any Aetherflow abilities into something else. Though they are all examples of the concept, rather than considered for how they should function exactly.

They were some design choices I thought about that could use the existing design without adding any new abilities, but would offer more complex options if I found myself in a situation where it was better for me to. Yet despite being more complex it would not affect the skill floor either. The added bonus, you are self nerfing, meaning your healing effectiveness is decreased the more you embrace utility.