Easiest Healer to play?

[Grimoire-M]

Personally I think SCH is the easiest and best of the three healers to play, because it teaches you how to heal efficiently while still being flexible. WHM and AST both have a habit of encouraging heal spam if you don’t learn how to use all of their respective tools, but SCH’s weaker GCDs force you to learn how to utilize its whole toolkit as you level to compensate.

As a bonus, you also can unlock SMN at the same time, the best DPS class currently, and one I’d say is the most faithful to the classic fantasy of a SMN when translated into a trinity-MMO. It’s got a lot of fiddly parts to micromanage, but this iteration is the easiest the job has ever been honestly.

Whether both come off as hard or easy mostly boils down to how you handle organizing their buttons.

[ClickOnce]

WHM for easiest.

[Absurdity]

I will keep that in mind.

I guess I should clarify this a bit more. The SCH pet has always been a bit of an issue. In it's earlier days it had an insane delay in it's reactions, so you would end up pressing a fairy skill and it could take anywhere between 2-8 seconds before the fairy reacts...if it does at all. Then they managed to pretty much fix it in Stormblood, it's reaction time was significantly increased, you could command your fairy to do something while you yourself were in the middle of a cast and it would often use the action before your cast was even finished.



In Shadowbringers however they not only removed their fixes for the fairy but managed to make it worse. Nowadays your fairy just "exists", meaning that it spams a low potency heal on targets that have <100% hp, with no control over who it heals (something you could control before), you also can't activate it's abilities while casting anymore because it will just wait until you finish your cast, put you in a short animation lock and then use it. This essentially means that all fairy actions are now oGCDs for you, because not using them like oGCDs causes you to clip. On top of these two issues they managed to introduce ability ghosting to both SCH and SMN, this means that if you press your pet's abilities too quickly in succession then they will sometimes go on cooldown but the fairy won't actually use it, wasting the ability.


This is what I meant with "don't play it for the pet" because instead of adding to the job the pet is one of the most frustrating aspects.

[Almagnus1]

CNJ/WHM is probably the easiest (as WHM starts off as a level 1 CNJ and becomes WHM at 30). AST starts out at 30, while SCH (which is probably the most complex between it and AST) starts out life as a DPS (the Arcanist) and becomes a healer at 30 when Arcanist forks into SMN and SCH (as both share the same XP bar as they are derived from the same class - so you get a 2fer =D

[glamazon]

Why did they revert the changes to fairy if it was fixed?

[Absurdity]

Why did they revert the changes to fairy if it was fixed?

That is something I assume SCH mains are asking themselves to this day. I heard "quality of life change" thrown around but whether or not they actually used that as a reason I don't know and considering that it would be a nonsensical explanation for those changes I avoid putting words in the dev teams mouths. Whatever reason they had for changing the fairy it is inferior to it's Stormblood version and that doesn't even include the fact that they basically turned Selene into a glorified glamour.

[glamazon]

So do they take away all these abilities from healers just to give them back in the next expansion?

[Veis_Alveare]

So do they take away all these abilities from healers just to give them back in the next expansion?

We can hope.

[Sylvain]

At *high* level they all have their optimisation niche and I'm not sure you can say there's an easiest healer. For instance I'm a terrible WHM and find it incredibly hard to optimise while I have 0 issue dealing with cards and 'oticing who's bursting when.

However, as many have stated, whm is considered to easiest because of his very straight forward kit and I also would definitely recommend WHM to anyone who wants to start healing (unless they have strong understand of the game mechanic already)

[Raikai]

Easiest? I'd say WHM because of the sheer number of insta-casts and ogcd heals.