New healer: Sage. Barrier healer.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

yeah but when u have no aether flow and whm or ast die and savage boss dies bog aoe damage 2x then what?

Did they choose the right ability to heal? Did they burn all their aetherflows prematurely for 'MuH dIpShIt EnErGy DrAiN' leaving them without options when they needed an effective and efficient heal? Did they even put any thought whenever they decide to use a certain ability and wonder if it will work effectively on the situation on hand? They still have [Dissipation] for more aetherflow reserve and [Emergency Tactic] to proceed on using GCD to heal.

Heck, when faced with these 'out of oGCD' situation as a WHM and AST, they too have to resort in GCD heals. Doesn't matter what class is your co-healer, if players faced with that specific situation especially in savage, then the group really need to discuss what actually went wrong and HOW to prevent it as a team, instead of being 'OmG yOu'rE uSiNg WeAk HeAl ClAsS HaHaHaHa GaRbAgE.' (or basically blaming a specific class for the situation on hand. Ik, a hyperbolic quotation but it happens)

Don't plan -for- emergency. Work around to prevent it, and all 3 healers can do this just fine as long as their group complies.

(Anyway I'll stop here because it's straying further from OP's topic)

[Gemina]

The entire pure healer vs shield healer concept is broken. You barely need shields to start with.

I can say the exact same thing about regens. Both are situational skills, and I shouldn't have to point this out to any experienced healer. When either of these GCDs are more worthwhile than the DPS skill you trade it for, then you use it.

As for "pure healer", good lord, who cares? I'm actually quite sick of the term being scrutinized and causing further polarization of the healer community. I paint the healers with a very broad brush.

[BlueMageQuina]

Back to the topic at hand:

We’re getting a new healer and I think it’s first time to celebrate. We’ve been begging and pleading for years, and to our consensus, more often than the other roles our concerns go disregarded unless our job is unable to function. Finally, we get a fourth healer; something we’ve wanted. Let’s commend that.

With that said, to those of you that are confused and argumentative about the poor reactions: the healer role and jobs have been screwed one way or another each expansion and by this time people have lost trust. If you don’t understand or underestimate the loss of trust, you cannot begin to understand the poor reaction to the thing we’ve been asking for in the first place. Healer mains who are voicing their concerns about how the explanation of changes on paper seem as if it will kill their job, or damage the healing role, is something to be expected and to be considered by all of us, not something to roll your eyes at.

The divide where we will have a shield healer and regen healer subrole, with two healers in each subrole, does in fact bring into question if there will be an even stricter meta that keeps some jobs out of party finder in a way that hasn’t been seen before. For example: if both AST and WHM are regen healers, why bring WHM ever is AST does the same thing and still has raid utility with cards? Similarly, if SGE potentially does so much more damage than SCH, what will be SCH’s place in content?

This is the issue which we had already determined in so many threads is the problem with relegating healing to a shield-or-regen dichotomy and not thinking outside the box for the newer job.

My thought is that it’s too early to speculate so heavily on anything, but that we should not at all be so surprised about the reaction so far. Let’s wait for more info, or until the fall, and find out if our reservations were founded or unfounded on release.

[Reksanden]

I wonder if they'll have Sage's shielding be basically how Divine Benison functions, or apply vastly more shield than what it heals for. Both of these would make it different than Scholar, at least a bit more than a skin deep difference, I feel.

I also want to see both/either gaining something to put on a target that rewards you if it meets a condition - like TBN (resource return) and Chelonian Gate (damage).

[Karshan]

Last tier our SCH casted exactly 1 prepull adlo and 0 succor on some of our kills.

I agree. Since any comp is supposed to be manageable, Square can't risk that a content is undoable without a shielding healer, hence there is always a way to do it without shields (albeit really top end gameplay is involved).

Imagine having to walk out of an instance cause you can't do it without a scholar. Not really "meta isn't a thing" compliant, wouldn't you agree ?

But maybe that's about to change, I saw on another topic they were differencing the two subroles in healers even in DF, is it true ?

[Absurdity]

But maybe that's about to change, I saw on another topic they were differencing the two subroles in healers even in DF, is it true ?

Not really. They are splitting the healers into regen focused (whm/ast) & barrier focused (sch/sage), this does however not mean that they will change anything about their encounter design, be it normal dungeons/raids or savage.

[Ultimatecalibur]

The divide where we will have a shield healer and regen healer subrole, with two healers in each subrole, does in fact bring into question if there will be an even stricter meta that keeps some jobs out of party finder in a way that hasn’t been seen before. For example: if both AST and WHM are regen healers, why bring WHM ever is AST does the same thing and still has raid utility with cards? Similarly, if SGE potentially does so much more damage than SCH, what will be SCH’s place in content?

I suspect that won't be a problem. For the most part, after a few hiccups during the X.0 and X.1 patches the devs have actually been pretty effective at balancing 2 job pairs. It is when they are trying to balance 3 jobs that the trouble occurs. Both Healers and tanks ended up unbalanced when HW introduced DRK and AST. When GNB was added in 5.0 the 4 tanks more or less achieved a workable equilibrium where all 4 tanks were viable for content.

[SiriusSaltstice]

Dont get blinding by the fancy sparkly effects, Sage only matters if it actually plays different.
It only matters if healer gameplay improves.

The true take from this.

[Semirhage]

Based on past performance, concerns over viability and/or content clearing are mostly unfounded. Concern about one healer being head and shoulders better than another in a "why would you ever take job A when job B is the exact same thing with higher potencies, shorter cooldowns, and actual raid utility" way, now that's actually happened a few times and I'd say it's more likely.

Where concern should be: as your job's ever-expanding glut of downtime grows with skill and item level, will your job continue to spam one spell a billion times until you want to gouge your eyes out, or will Square have actually designed something entertaining to occupy your attention?

[MsTanya]

The most important question of all hasn't been discussed yet, will it be the first magic user to have ranged autos or will we have to be in melee just to have the weapon swipe at the target in a completely comical/nonsensical fashion...lol