Do you want healers to be reworked from the ground up?

[ADVSS]

For the love of Hydalaen NO.

You know yuu want it back lol

Alright Alright. How about all of your DPS skills are unlocked by hitting a button called Deliri- er -Angel something something, and for the next 10 Seconds you're allowed to Glare. Then for every 6-7 heal spells, you arent allowed to Glare untill the combo is completed. Twice. Deal?
Then every 40-60 seconds you get to spam Glare again, for 4 or 5 times depending on your spell speed, again.

[Semirhage]

It's the only healer that doesn't need one, rather it just needs tuning with the other ones.

I totally disagree with this opinion, but I know it's rather common. I don't think it's possible to balance barebones WHM with the other two as long as the kit capability gap is so absolutely gigantic. I've played since ARR. I've seen this design paradigm of "ehhhh just balance two overpowered and ultra flexible kits capable of doing everything really well against the healbot that's barely allowed more than Cure and Stone spamming" before, and shockingly AST was just a superior WHM in basically every metric with buffs on top.

White. Mage. Is. Not. Conjurer. It's not a class that caps at level 30. I promise having buffs/debuffs isn't too bigbrained for stoopid white mages to handle. How about WHM sees actual growth in its kit instead of having their ARR kit shuffled around and sold back next expansion? Monks hate it too, and they're getting a rework.

[Almagnus1]

You know yuu want it back lol

Alright Alright. How about all of your DPS skills are unlocked by hitting a button called Deliri- er -Angel something something, and for the next 10 Seconds you're allowed to Glare. Then for every 6-7 heal spells, you arent allowed to Glare untill the combo is completed. Twice. Deal?
Then every 40-60 seconds you get to spam Glare again, for 4 or 5 times depending on your spell speed, again.

You're just desperate to not get healed in the next encounter, aren't you?

I totally disagree with this opinion, but I know it's rather common. I don't think it's possible to balance barebones WHM with the other two as long as the kit capability gap is so absolutely gigantic. I've played since ARR. I've seen this design paradigm of "ehhhh just balance two overpowered and ultra flexible kits capable of doing everything really well against the healbot that's barely allowed more than Cure and Stone spamming" before, and shockingly AST was just a superior WHM in basically every metric with buffs on top.

White. Mage. Is. Not. Conjurer. It's not a class that caps at level 30. I promise having buffs/debuffs isn't too bigbrained for stoopid white mages to handle. How about WHM sees actual growth in its kit instead of having their ARR kit shuffled around and sold back next expansion? Monks hate it too, and they're getting a rework.

That's kinda the problem with buffs, either you homogenize all the healers so they have the same buff and DPS side of things, or you figure out how their RDPS contribution works and balance their personal and buffing ability around it as you've got to figure out how to do different flavors of DNC and MCH, and then hope you don't end up with a broken BRD in the process.

Having a "selfish" DPS healer, in this regard, makes a lot of sense as we've seen it work with the DPS classes, so why not apply the same thing to the healers?

[glamazon]

I thought the point was to make all healers Carole of healing but distinct in how they do it and with what else they bring to the table?

Heal with direct heals (chemist)
Heal with regens ( whm)
Heal with shields (sch)
Heal with mix of shields/regens (ast)

Also each could take one of the following to focus on

Personal dps
Buffs
Debuffs
Group dps

[IDontPetLalas]

So having read some of the thread, here's how I would rework the healers and add in a fourth one:



As far as Raid DPS goes, all three should be balanced where their personal and raid DPS contributions are roughly equal when played optimally. This will let the WHM be really good at progression because it's designed to be the simplest class, while the AST first in an all around niche. The SCH should find it's home in an instance farm state because knowing the fight inside and out will allow the SCH to be played optimally making it the strongest of the three classes as far as healing and DPS goes, but needs to have the optimal play to hit that point or it suffers greatly.

I agree with a lot of your post, except where you want to see SCH as the most complex. To me, that's not very logical given AST- I main SCH and see it as falling naturally in complexity between WHM and AST.

I also don't see any sense in have one class targeted more for progression over another, or making an argument for one class being more for "instance farming" you really had me scratching my head at that -- seriously who would want to have "optimal play or you suffer greatly"- really?? and why not the other healers? Really, all three healers should have their unique playstyle but none of them should be faceroll easy to the point that they don't need to know a fight and how to optimize their class to a certain extent.

[Semirhage]

That's kinda the problem with buffs, either you homogenize all the healers so they have the same buff and DPS side of things, or you figure out how their RDPS contribution works and balance their personal and buffing ability around it as you've got to figure out how to do different flavors of DNC and MCH, and then hope you don't end up with a broken BRD in the process.

Having a "selfish" DPS healer, in this regard, makes a lot of sense as we've seen it work with the DPS classes, so why not apply the same thing to the healers?

Ahhhhh, you'd think that. Me too for a while, but that idea has proven to be a trap twice now. There are two issues with it. 1) the reason it works with DPS jobs is because damage contribution isn't a metric that becomes worthless after you hit a cap like healing does, and all combinations must be able to comfortably clear everything, which means that being the "healiest" healer is a non-identity. That leads to 2) so why not make their damage contributions mimic the way, say caster DPS do it? Let's take that hypothetical, setting aside fiddly balancing issues with Summoner being OP. So you've got selfish on top, then progressively trade out damage contribution for utility as you add more Batman tools to a healer's kit. Maybe that could work, seems to be a reasonably settled argument with the casters.

But I've never seen anything like a call for that around here or in game. AST and SCH must not only have the most utility, but they also must have the highest output because they require just so much skill to play you see. And that's why reason 2 exists, because the community has a collective stroke if AST and SCH aren't the best at everything. Nobody will say that outright of course, but you get a feel around the edges. "WHM should be the simplest and therefore have the lowest skill cap" they say. "It wouldn't be fair for a higher skill healer to have less output for more work". "WHM should be good at prog and fall off during farm, it's only fair" "WHM has a stun that makes them good at dungeons, that's so unfair!" screams the healer with like 10 buffs/debuffs that WHM doesn't have access to. And so on.

Unless this community is willing to eat WHM being both straightforward AND top dog DPS like BLM is, it needs a rework. Because if it stays as-is and isn't on top, then why bring one? It doesn't bring anything else to the table.

Edit: As an additional argument for a rework, both BLM and RDM have a relatively straightforward, easy to grasp gameplay loop without complicated utility weaving beyond using things more or less as they come off cooldown. They're both pretty fun to play too. I'd imagine the BLMs and RDMs would explode the DPS subforum if that gameplay loop were dia 11111clip111111 dia 11111111111 dia 111111clip1clip1111 dia 11111111111 dia 11clip111111111 dia 11111111111 dia 11111clipclip111111.......

[GrimGale]

You know yuu want it back lol

Alright Alright. How about all of your DPS skills are unlocked by hitting a button called Deliri- er -Angel something something, and for the next 10 Seconds you're allowed to Glare. Then for every 6-7 heal spells, you arent allowed to Glare untill the combo is completed. Twice. Deal?
Then every 40-60 seconds you get to spam Glare again, for 4 or 5 times depending on your spell speed, again.

Imagine a WHM Enochian, as a parallel to BLM. You press the Enochian button and your Stone IV turns into Glare, Aero III into Dia and your Fluid Aura into Flood of Light.
WHM Enochian is maintained by using Flood of light or Lily-Based spells.

[Maltothoris]

This will let the WHM be really good at progression because it's designed to be the simplest class,

There's just one flaw with this assumption. This is what happened with Heavensward and Stormblood. Whm was the simple healer with one of the more dumber gimmicks and look what happened to it. Heavily ostracized to the point to where it was one of the three classes that got a temporary buff in 4.5 before shadowbringers. Since it offered nothing and all healers need to be able to heal the content, whatever over-healing advantages the whm brought were basically moot. In Heavensward, it certainly was only a safety net for things like nidhogg's akh morn which wasn't often. In Stormblood, they were the most mp-efficient but even that fell wayward because the 4.3 buffs to Astro and and that lead to the aforementioned 4.5 buffs which usually never happens.

And for the selfish healer to work, it's some of sort of buff to maintain its damage much like how SAM and BLM have their respective buffs in Jinpu/Shifu and Astral Fire so that it can keep with the cards of the astro and the chain strat of the scholar. Which at that point, you're almost turning it into a full fledged dps at that point.

[Lyth]

Differentiating between jobs because they are simple vs. "complex" is always going to be controversial. Performance should be player skill gated, not job gated.

Likewise, differentiating between jobs on the basis of personal dps vs. raid dps contributions doesn't work very well for healers. First, healers (and tanks) are doing contributing progressively less to total raid dps with each expansion. Second, there's less of a time trade-off involved when you just toss a buff on someone and focus on healing than there is when you split your time between healing and doing damage. Lastly, most players care less about good your dps output is than they do about how good you make their dps output look. Even if you're a walking afk dps buff, people will want you for the ego boost alone.

The sensible thing to do is to have all healers do comparable personal dps, comparable raid damage buffs, and then differentiate between them on the basis of utility. Actions that increase uptime without directly buffing damage are very difficult to compare. For example, what's the dps benefit associated with increasing movement speed? It depends on the fight, but a good melee player could certainly translate that into a buff to their personal dps. What if you could set up a teleporter between two points on the arena? A good caster could exploit that to minimize their movement. What if you could prevent someone from being targeted by single target abilities/mechanics for the next X seconds? What if add spawns were a genuine threat and healers could help CC them until the tanks corral them up?

If you can't make a direct comparison between two abilities, there's no trade-offs. Just opportunities for skilled players to take advantage. It's okay for certain jobs to have a situational advantage in certain fights. That rewards really versatile healers who understand how to play to the strengths of a variety of jobs. When you can mathematically compare them on the basis of raid damage output, then you run into the present problem. Flat raid buffs on healers are a terrible idea. Trading off personal vs. raid dps on healers is also a terrible idea.

Give healers utility, and let them support your team. Damage buffs for the sake of existing are boring.

[HeulGDarian]

For me whm needs only one tool. just one tool that they've shown it exists but never really put that "promised" effect in. Reverse from ff12, the white statue boss if you havent played it. All healing spells are now dmg spells there done.
A distinct phase, only whm can do playing to whm's exessiveness . And no i dont mean old cleric stance.
I simply hope they revert the changes to Sch, it just doesnt feel good to play. From being a different flavour of summoner to a one button fest, I honestly cant play healer this tier just cause i get so bored i literally sleep on the wheel.