New healer: Sage. Barrier healer.

[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.