New healer: Sage. Barrier healer.

[elioaiko]

Sage looks fun so far but I will hold my expectations low as well since this is the first time they've added a job since HW and given their track record, it wouldn't shock me if Sage will either be OP or very weak like AST was in 3.0.

To me, having played all the ff tactics games, it's strange that they would call Sage as it wasn't really anything tech related in ff history.

Also I'm 50/50 on the weapon design, it looks cool and I think that they went for this simply because it looks more appealing to those outside the role. Ex. One of the dps members in my static really wanted to try it. It seems like SE designed it's aesthetic to appeal to other players as a "cool healer with a dps flair" rather than being a traditional healer like the ones we have now.

What I am worried about is the dictomy that they're going back to. 5.0 they wanted all healers to be viable so they homgenized their kits to have both shields and regens. But now with Sage they want a distinction between them. This could be good or bad.

1. Shielding is not that useful outside of prog and once you have said content on farm, GCD shielding is hardly ever needed. People get better gear and have more HP and less likely to get one-shotted. At this point, regens are infinitely better because they are MP-friendly and they passively heal everyone back to fill HP, which is why Diu. AST is generally the better of the two.

2. This could lead to AST being worse or better than WHM bringing us back to SB where WHM could be neglected by the community. This would heavily depend on what they do to AST and if they intend on changing WHM. The same thing will happen to Sage and SCH as well.

3. For better or for worse, healer balance is decent right now. All three healers are being used and no one job is neglected. Yes, SCH is in a bad place right now but it's not absolutely ignored and downright judged upon (SB WHM, early 3.0 AST). Going to a 1 shield/1 regen split might disturb this balance as people will find the best pair (inevitable) and push them in statics. Thus people will meme the worst two healers until SE buffs them into infinity.

4. A positive outlook of this is that they could feel more distinct as each healer can have a niche (though that will hurt balance im the long run).

Overall, I'm happy they finally are giving us a new healer. Though I am wary about the idea that they might delete Noct Stance (though it would be heathy for the future of AST).

Also please give us our time magic/elements back since you didn't add Geomancer or Time Mage!

[Absurdity]

1. Shielding is not that useful outside of prog and once you have said content on farm, GCD shielding is hardly ever needed. People get better gear and have more HP and less likely to get one-shotted. At this point, regens are infinitely better because they are MP-friendly and they passively heal everyone back to fill HP, which is why Diu. AST is generally the better of the two.

2. This could lead to AST being worse or better than WHM bringing us back to SB where WHM could be neglected by the community. This would heavily depend on what they do to AST and if they intend on changing WHM. The same thing will happen to Sage and SCH as well.

1. It currently isn't yes, that's why I'm hoping for changes that actually make shields matter throughout the entire raid's lifespan. Who knows, maybe mechanics that deal weak party damage but apply a nasty debuff if they aren't negated by shields.

2. I see it more as a potential positive because now you only have to balance healers within their specific niche. Before they needed AST to be on par with WHM and SCH, now it theoretically only needs to be on par with what WHM does. This does of course only work if barrier healers actually have their uses and aren't just relegated to bench warmers once prog is over.

If they plan on reigning back how versatile a kit has to be, that frees up action slots. What they spend it on is where it's going to matter.

We can only hope. As much as I would like this to be a thing, I remain sceptical until we get more information.

[Liam_Harper]

I'm suspecting they'll attempt to up the amount of damage we take again. Though if I were them, I'd make all raidwides and tank busters Max HP percentages. Large ones at that. Imagine if the raidwide always did 80% of the party's health unless mitigated. Suddenly, shielding is way more important. Imagine if that tank buster did 110% of the tank's Max HP. You'd need shields and mitigation on them, heavy doses, to keep them up. Things like that which suddenly turn shields from jokes to mandatory to survive. As a side effect, burst healing becomes needed more often.

Scaling raidwides is problematic because it ignores gear. So if your healer is near the min ilv and half the team are BiS, the 80% of a health bar they'd be taking would be comparatively larger and far harder to heal. It also acts as a sort of punishment for reaching BiS in general because you take more damage. They tried this on e1s and it wasn't very popular.
Making shields vital sounds good in theory but only giving half the healers shields just forces comps. What happened to playing the class you prefer or enjoy? Can you imagine if they suddenly made it so only GNB and PLD brought any raidwide mitigation and DRK/WAR had more damage, so bringing a GNB+PLD or a DRK+WAR was a big downgrade or possibly not even viable. That's what's happening.

2. I see it more as a potential positive because now you only have to balance healers within their specific niche. Before they needed AST to be on par with WHM and SCH, now it theoretically only needs to be on par with what WHM does. This does of course only work if barrier healers actually have their uses and aren't just relegated to bench warmers once prog is over.

I'm skeptical they'll manage it, but very interested in the case of WHM and AST.

Diurnal AST is by far superior to WHM in almost every way. It's not even close. Free weaves, full mobility, abundant oGCD's, raid buffs, stronger versions of many abilities. To balance AST and WHM where WHM is actually a decent pick for the pure heal slot, they'd need to either:
a). Absolutely butcher AST's mobility, weave and toolkit.
b). Redesign WHM's identity and give it significant buffs in at least weaving, mobility and maybe damage.
They've been very stubborn that WHM must have some clipping and no mobility, so there's a good chance they'll either butcher AST, or WHM will yet again become the rejected healer of the expansion.

Sage vs SCH will also be interesting. If they do not fix SCH's ghosting issues, Sage is likely to be the superior shield healer because it's a simple case of a class with smooth oGCD's vs a class with half their oGCD's tied to a clunky ghosting pet that vanishes for 30 sec windows.
Hopefully they also won't pull a Bard/Dancer and give Sage the smoother gameplay and better toolkit to make the new class more appealing. Bard is among the the least popular classes in the game now.

[Laphicet]

For better or for worse, healer balance is decent right now. All three healers are being used and no one job is neglected.

WHM is used more than the other two healers combined and easily more than twice as much as AST, if not three times as much. I would not say their usage is balanced by a long shot. And such can be traced back to their awful 5.0 changes that gutted the lore-based gameplay of AST and made SCH a frustrating mess with most of its unique dps kit stripped away.

The healers were actually used much more evenly in stormblood. each one seeing 30% usage at least.

[Rilifane]

WHM is used more than the other two healers combined and easily more than twice as much as AST, if not three times as much. I would not say their usage is balanced by a long shot. And such can be traced back to their awful 5.0 changes that gutted the lore-based gameplay of AST and made SCH a frustrating mess with most of its unique dps kit stripped away.

The healers were actually used much more evenly in stormblood. each one seeing 30% usage at least.

WhM has a long history of being the healer people flock to whenever they have to go for the green icon.
It's the first healer you can unlock, it's simple and straightforward; you push button, HP bar goes up. The reason why SB had a more even distribution was mostly because WhM was just outright bad compared to the other two... but with the huge amount of people naturally gravitating towards WhM, it made for an even distribution rather than WhM being barely played.
By usual standards, WhM saw a hefty decline in players though.

AST has a reputation of being the high APM healer with lots of stuff to manage, SCH as the tactical healer with a pet that requires more planning. Wether that's true or not is debatable but that alone keeps many people from playing them. WhM is as accessible as it can get. And that means people who dabble in savage on healer will more likely go for WhM first before they try themselves at the "more difficult" healers.

They are decently balanced right now in terms of output although AST is ahead of both of them. AST was even further ahead pre 5.3, the strongest healer by a clear margin yet was least played. Not only because AST veterans left out of frustration but also because it has a reputation of not being as accessible as WhM.
People will always gravitate more towards certain classes even if they objectively worse than others.
Like BLM has been the least played caster for the whole expansion because many people can't/ don't want to deal with the turret gameplay although it has the highest dps potential in all fights and is extremely well-designed. RDM on the other hand is simple and straightforward, very comfy in most settings and has nice utility, so after the first buff it saw a huge increase in players.