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

[Semirhage]

As others players have mentioned it, the best would be to have WHM (ShB), SCH (HW) and AST (SB).
If SE don't want to do that, then rework them all completely (which will take too much time, so it would be stupid compared to the previous solution).

ShB WHM would be immediately trashcanned if offered alongside HW SCH and SB AST design. The only reason healers are currently balanced (and the only reason current WHM looks "good") is the unholy nerf beating AST and SCH got. Compared to WHM's insulting Baby's First Healer design, old school AST and SCH were over. powered. They were overpowered. They had a crapload of utility and didn't pay for it anywhere else in their kits. They had great damage, free healing out the wazoo, mobility, everything you could ask for in a job with no downsides. WHM design from any era cannot compete with that. You CANNOT revert the other two without reworking WHM.

[glamazon]

They weren’t overpowered. Thinking like this is why they got nerfed. Whm should have been buffed. How you frame the discussion can either help or hinder what you want to accomplish.

There is one core aspect all healers need: to be able to heal each encounter for their group.

Now how they do this is where class identity comes in. Healers also need a mini dps rotation for solo and downtime during healing. Our three dps spells could work if they also gave us three buffs or debuffs or dps to wave with them.

[AmurT]

I don't think non-damage utility is useless necessarily. But if it has resource competition with damage, that's never going to fly in XIV.

This was the main issue of AST cards, I quite enjoyed Bole and Ewer, but they were completely inferior to Balance. Instead of making just everything Balance, a better route would have been to provide incentive to use non-damage alternatives.

They were somewhat close to hitting the mark with Seals and Divination, if Solar Seals provided damage, Celestial Seals mitigation and Lunar Seals MP regen or something. This sort of system would discourage Balance fishing since you want different Seals, while retaining card flavour and still providing the all important consistent/reliable damage buff in the form of Divination. Minor Arcana would work as it currently does for after the player is done collecting Seals, or to give a choice of whether MAing for someone's burst window was worth potentially losing a Seal.

[Ceasaria]

ShB WHM would be immediately trashcanned if offered alongside HW SCH and SB AST design. The only reason healers are currently balanced (and the only reason current WHM looks "good") is the unholy nerf beating AST and SCH got. Compared to WHM's insulting Baby's First Healer design, old school AST and SCH were over. powered. They were overpowered. They had a crapload of utility and didn't pay for it anywhere else in their kits. They had great damage, free healing out the wazoo, mobility, everything you could ask for in a job with no downsides. WHM design from any era cannot compete with that. You CANNOT revert the other two without reworking WHM.

Yes I understand.
I wasn't completely thinking to a definitive version, but like a foundation to develop.
Sure WHM will need more work than the others if we do that.

Btw with that, the next expansion needs to give back importance to shields again (maybe a little less than Stormblood).

[Lyth]

The biggest problem with healing is fight design. That means fights that are actually difficult to heal. That means fights that you don't clear if you don't have a good healer on your team.

If people pick a role to feel needed, you should probably make them be needed. Your survival, your ability to get a clear, should hinge on your tanks and healers. That's how you get balanced numbers.

[Semirhage]

They weren’t overpowered.

I disagree. AST and SCH could do basically everything really well and had effectively no weaknesses.

They had a crapload of utility and didn't pay for it anywhere else in their kits. They had great damage, free healing out the wazoo, mobility, everything you could ask for in a job with no downsides.

to continue, the ability to use their overpowered oGCD-packed healing kits to deal damage and heal simultaneously with no uptime lost, SCH's freebie five extra abilities that came on the pets that as a bonus operated even more efficiently than an off-GCD/didn't take any weave slots, AST's lack of caster tax, the fact that Essential Dignity is just superior Tetragrammaton in every single way (cooldown, potency, level obtained, you name it) on the healer that, in theory, isn't the "pure raw healer", I could go on and on and on.

Much as I disagree with the heavy-handedness of the AST and SCH nerfs in ShB, those two were very overpowered.

[Veis_Alveare]

I disagree. AST and SCH could do basically everything really well and had effectively no weaknesses. to continue, the ability to use their overpowered oGCD-packed healing kits to deal damage and heal simultaneously with no uptime lost, SCH's freebie five extra abilities that came on the pets that as a bonus operated even more efficiently than an off-GCD/didn't take any weave slots, AST's lack of caster tax, the fact that Essential Dignity is just superior Tetragrammaton in every single way (cooldown, potency, level obtained, you name it) on the healer that, in theory, isn't the "pure raw healer", I could go on and on and on.

Much as I disagree with the heavy-handedness of the AST and SCH nerfs in ShB, those two were very overpowered.

I understand where this is coming from but I think perhaps the term overpowered is not the right one to use to describe this.

Specifically in terms of AST, it's not that it contributed a crazy amount more rDPS than the other healers or anything but rather it's just always felt better to play than WHM. The QoL for AST has been huge from the Malefic cast time reduction to the instant CU application. By comparison WHM feels clunky and awkward, choosing between horrendous clipping/dropped casts to move and not efficiently using all your oGCD potential.

[Anhra]

I think a good way to fix healers would be first to remove a significant amount of their healing spells which they currently have and limit those which stay (high potency spells such as adloquium, WHM's afflatus heals and earthly star from AST for example) with charges. This would give quite some room for utility skills that can and should compliment the remaining spells while giving more room for more attack spells.

previous Final Fantasy games, especially the earlier ones had a good amount of skills that could be inplimented into the game without going completely overboard, here are some ideas for each healer job i thought would be interesting:

White Mage:
-Pray: in old titles it used to allow spells to be cast with no MP cost (eventually with a fail chance), i think aside from the mentioned effect, it could also have a random chance of upgrading a healing spell, like turning cure 1 into cure 2 or even 3 for example.
-Dia spells: while WHM already has it in the form of a rather generic spell, i think it would be great to give it the bonus damage aganist any kind of undead enemy.
-more Wind and Water based Abilities which could serve with the wind spells giving the WHM some DoT options while Water gives the WHM some AoE attacks
-Fear: do i really need to explain this one?
-Enwater/-aero: name's just a placeholder, but WHM used to be able to grant additional bonus element damage, it could give some additional bonus damage for a limited amount of attacks which could in a similar way like bushin works for ninja.

Astrologian:
-Countdown: I know the original does a entirely different thing but hear me out on this. It could serve as a buff for AST which allows the next spell to be cast automatically after a certain delay (like casting for example earthly star on a certain position with a delay of 10 seconds for example)
-Balance: This spell could be the AST version of WHM's Afflatus Misery, It could deal damage depending on how much max HP the attacked enemy has, it would deal the most damage while the enemy has max HP while it gradually becomes weaker along with the enemies HP bar dropping down.
-Veil/Invisible: increases a Allies evasion aganist either a set amount of (auto)attacks or a set amount of time.
-Extend: increases the duration of positive effects of buffs.
-Reverse: allows the next spell from AST to gain the opposite effect, like a healing spell being able to deal damage or a damage skill to be used as a heal.

part 1/2 (sorry for the flooding but i had to divide this post into two halves due to the character limit)

[Anhra]

(part 2/2)

Scholar:
-Eos/Selene: Should be able to completely use abilities on its own. while it does cast a discount price heal all time time on its own, i think it would be great if the fairy had some limited access to Spirit Magic (FF:tactics). It shouldnt yeet the spells constantly as soon as its ready, and rather use one or two of them from a table of say, 10 abilities in total,along with the constant basic heals during combat (cooldown of the additional attack spells should have a long cooldown like 30 minutes for every, say, 2 spells which are picked randomly)
-Berserk: gives one Party member a haste buff that increases movement speed and shortens GCD to 1 second for a limited time (10 seconds?) but disables most abilities (except for something like a basic attack rotation or spells)
-increased Item effects: Scholars had in Final Fantasy 3 the ability to use items with double their efficiency. i think this holds great potential of making certain consumeables finally worth having again. I am aware that this would come at the cost of inventory space but that's in my perspective a small prize to pay for efficiency, only a well prepared adventurer is a successful adventurer after all.
-Access to low and medium black magic: instead of copypasting the spells from BLM, scholar should have a big focus on dealing indirect damage with a fair amount of DoTs, rather than having direct attack spells. the old kit with shadowflare and miasma was already decent and should be build upon more. Dark based abilities could also fit in well in this Job.
-Analyze: while the crit buff is already decent, i think scholars true strengh should be build upon this. I think it would have a better feel gameplaywise it it were a skill that's being channeled over a large amount of time. during that timeframe (say 30 seconds for example) the scholar has to stay completely still AND within range of the desired target(s). during the channeling, it debuffs the enemy with a invul. up debuff (or something similar) that becomes stronger the longer the skill is being channeled. if it is cast for the complete duration, it could maybe even follow with a potential nuke spell that could be dmgwise similar to WHM's afflatus misery or the earlier mentioned Balance from AST.

Before anyone says "wouldnt that make healers way too overpowered to be let loose upon Eorzea?" well, maybe a bit but i am quite confident that such balance changes can be applied with skilled potency changes.

sorry again for the very long post and thanks for actually reading this if you did.

[HeulGDarian]

Lovely job design dear but unfortunately it wont work on a game structure such as the one we have in ff14