Can Healer Balance Survive a 4th Healer?

[Recon1o6]

healer balance is good atm too good. To the point where a 4th healer would make it better by varying it up a bit and hopefully forcing an end to the current mess that is "pure healers"

why?
A 4th healer can have one of two roles without pissing off astros by removing a sect: either it has both shields and heals, or it has neither and relies on big numbers

SE really needs to make it so that shields can stack.
Balancing the healers for their healing is a pointless exercise given how fight design works in this game. Namely been a limited amount with periodic spikes.

So we should instead look to how they would function on their downtime portion of the kit. This here we can have balance, but we should always remember fun>balance. Potencies can be adjusted later to make up for balanxe adjustments

We could have two dps and two rdps based playstyles

WHM and SCH being the dps based. Sch having its dots, bane, fester and shadowflare, WHM getting its elements back and doing high potencies or combos- a more upfront style to contrast sch's grinder style
AST and *new healer* would be rdps based. Give Astro its cards back while keeping current minor arcana to make everyone happy. New healer can then fill the gap of a debuffer for rdps

[Deceptus]

What exactly is wrong with healer balance currently that a 4th job would potentially address though? It's not like any of them are incapable of doing content even at the highest levels

AST is entirely the problem with balance since they've been implemented.

Either they are a jack of all trades and a master of none who aren't as strong as SCH/WHM but their cards were supposed to be their utility

or

They're as strong as WHM/SCH and their cards still bring utility and either WHM or SCH are redundant at that point.

Hell, there was a time Noct Sect shields were stronger than a SCH's, used less MP, and were instant (still are instant). They were literally better at shielding than the job dedicated to shielding and they also brought card buffs.

Point is, AST's dual nature has made them virtually impossible to balance.

[EaMett]

The state of healers can't exactly get that much worse. And if it does it won't be from the introduction of another healer. I'm not too worried about that. I'm just worried we're going to get yet again another carbon copy of what we already have, with different fx.

[EaMett]

Point is, AST's dual nature has made them virtually impossible to balance.

This isn't correct. At least not entirely. You need to make many conscious game design choices to push yourself into a corner with dual healers like AST. Sadly SE has done just that.
AST can absolutely be a regular healer, master of all trades but still not more desirable than another healer if the content is designed properly. Mobility, stats, resources, potencies all come into play. For example, AST could have better healing than WHM, better shielding than SCH, better DPS than both, but horrible mobility. Encounter designs could be such that some fights suit low mobility classes and others don't. Making AST amazing in some cases, and subpar in others (high mobility fights in this case).
Designing content that inherently changes the meta guarantees game balance at the expense of single encounter balance. This is how you can create diverse gameplays and still retain game balance.

The issue is that SE is blind to this. It requires some effort on their part because they need tools that allow them to keep an overview of encounter designs vs class performance, and they don't seem to be willing to put that effort in. So instead, we're stuck with healers that all have the same reskinned skills.

[QooEr]

AST is entirely the problem with balance since they've been implemented.

Either they are a jack of all trades and a master of none who aren't as strong as SCH/WHM but their cards were supposed to be their utility

or

They're as strong as WHM/SCH and their cards still bring utility and either WHM or SCH are redundant at that point.

Hell, there was a time Noct Sect shields were stronger than a SCH's, used less MP, and were instant (still are instant). They were literally better at shielding than the job dedicated to shielding and they also brought card buffs.

Point is, AST's dual nature has made them virtually impossible to balance.

the devs kinda set themselves for failure when they made ast's aspected spells. When implemented, diurnal sect's healing kit was almost 1:1 comparable to white mage's kit, minus assize. Noct ast i think was different enough from scholar to be able to be its own thing (i mean yeah, at one point noct shields were stronger than sch shields, but sch had sacred soil, fey illumination, supervirus, and deployment tactics if they needed big shields anyway so that did not negate schs existence).

I wish that they had expanded more on what made astro different (time magic, earthly star) rather than similar (intersection is p much just benison or a discount fairy regen) to the other healers.

At this point in the game i dont feel like regens arent that relevant when healing, so they could make the fourth healer have no regens or shields. They should however give it a mitigation tool to be able to clear mitigation checks even if its not strictly a shield. I think that rather than focusing on what healers do, they should focus on how they do it.

[Bsrking5]

Depends. For best in raids, no. Any small (no matter how tiny) advantage is gonna be heavily favored. General uses, ya sure. No one cares that much for anything besides hardest content. And thats basically it when people talk about balance what they actually mean.

[MPNZ]

AST is entirely the problem with balance since they've been implemented.

Either they are a jack of all trades and a master of none who aren't as strong as SCH/WHM but their cards were supposed to be their utility

or

They're as strong as WHM/SCH and their cards still bring utility and either WHM or SCH are redundant at that point.

Hell, there was a time Noct Sect shields were stronger than a SCH's, used less MP, and were instant (still are instant). They were literally better at shielding than the job dedicated to shielding and they also brought card buffs.

Point is, AST's dual nature has made them virtually impossible to balance.

It's actually less of its dual nature than just partly being its design philosophy as an in-between class with its rigid and locked stances as opposed to making it fluid and flexible. Bard and Dark have suffered because of similar a or b design philosophies, and the dichotomy designs like shields and HoTs which is not as much of a problem with only two classes. And that's not even touching issues with status effects being very weak or neutered when they are accidentally useful. Or, when it's the nature of support classes that seems to make the dev team afraid of the meta comps, or having machinist comparable to other dps classes, or Higher skill-level single-player play options, et cetera. W/O the ability to like make use of both of it's sects in encounters it just loses a major part of it's ability to compensate for being weaker, and the devs remain totally stagnant on the design of wHM and SCH. There is a lot of issues that need to be fixed, IMO

[ItMe]

Bard and Dark have suffered because of similar a or b design philosophies

Maybe I'm just too new to know what this is referring to, but what are these A or B designs they suffered from?

[Gemina]

What exactly is wrong with healer balance currently that a 4th job would potentially address though? It's not like any of them are incapable of doing content even at the highest levels

The healers are currently homogenized, not balanced. Balance is obtained when both strengths and weaknesses are present, and the weakness of one job is compensated for by the strength of another. This way neither job is inferior/superior to the other, but instead they work together to accomplish a task with far better efficiency than if they worked alone or with another job of the same type. The closest we had to that was back in 2.x when WHM and SCH were the only healers.

If a 4th healer is introduced, it would have to be homogenized like the current healers to not disturb the "balance" with healing that currently exists. Otherwise it will be 3.x AST all over again. With the difficulty the devs have had dealing with the healing role, I really don't know how they can bring in a 4th healer at this point. But the devs are engineers, whereas I am not. I can code, sure. But innovation is not my forte. We will have to rely on them to either do the unthinkable, or the predictable.

[MPNZ]

Maybe I'm just too new to know what this is referring to, but what are these A or B designs they suffered from?

Bard is currently designed as an in-between MCH (dps focused) and DNC (support focused). Dark was originally designed as an in-between PLD (def, mitigation) and WAR (dps, regen) with magic def cooldowns instead of Physical Def. And, the only thing like different from now is that everything currently plays almost exactly the same as the other jobs for tanks and healers whereas RNGDPS ended up changing entirely after 3.0 and mostly MCH after 4.0. And, AST is an in-between of WHM (HoT) and SCH (sheild). To totally reiterate, the main issue with doing this is that the in-between jobs just end up becoming way too powerful, or super weak, which is basically AST whole existence every expansion.