Which healing job are they gonna gut for Sage?

[Raikai]

I love how people are claiming the AST death before even seeing how the kit will be reworked.

They can keep the 2 sects, and just make them do different things. Diurnal for HoTs, or Nocturnal for stronger direct heals (w/o hots) - changeable in combat but with a cooldown or something like that.

[Cidel]

Yeah, not too torn to see Noct go. The only things I will "miss" about it is a quick shield on the main tank between trash mob pulls (and promptly swap back to Diurnal) and the incredibly niche situations where I can stack Aspected Helios, Celestial Opposition and Collective Unconscious as a sort of super-shield... That's it. If anything, I'm more concerned about how cringe 2 ASTs in the same party are going to be since you already can't stack cards, and aspected effects of the same sect don't stack... I mean WHMs can stack Regens and Medica IIs... AST's equivalents don't. They should address that.

[Arkevorkhat]

I love how people are claiming the AST death before even seeing how the kit will be reworked.

They can keep the 2 sects, and just make them do different things. Diurnal for HoTs, or Nocturnal for stronger direct heals (w/o hots) - changeable in combat but with a cooldown or something like that.

That sounds significantly too reasonable and interesting for it to be the actual answer.
The devs rarely ever rework something and leave it at the same or higher complexity, every rework I've seen thus far has made the job being reworked simpler and easier to play.
MCH lost the whole loading system, and their procs got ripped out. AST lost the road, and all the cards got turned into the Balance. BRD lost cast times. MNK lost Greased Lightning. NIN lost a bunch of their kit, etc.

[Shougun]

OP: Which healer are they going to gut to make the new healer?
Forum: All of them.

Lawl. . XD

Hopefully all will be well :P. Might see some healers gain some more active combat options, while others, I assume at least WHM, will remain more straight forward and simple for the diversity of options.

[glitteringcosmos]

To be fair, I never liked Noct. If I was ever paired with a WHM I'd ask if I could swap to Scholar. Diurnal performs very well. It has good potency and the regens work with our lack of oGCD heals (in comparison to the others), but Noct has felt like Great Value Scholar for a very long time.

As an AST main, this image sums up my feelings perfectly.

Speak for yourself. Noct Sect AST has higher potency heals than SCH with Essential Dignity and faster CDs than Aetherflow for Lustrate. It's got the instant shield Collective Unconscious and the extra OGCD with Celestial Opposition. Plus the shield and regen duo under Neutral Sect and the emergency regen with a super-fast CD with Celestial Intersection. The shields aren't as beefy as SCH, sure, but I won't stand for this noct sect slander.

[Zfz]

Honestly I don't mind seeing one sect go, but I'm very concerned about healers repeating the mistake of early tanks.

Remember back when they started down the road where WAR would be the self-healing tank and PLD be the mitigation tank? WAR turned out to be so undesirable that double PLD was preferred when mitigation mattered. In some cases where tank swaps weren't forced (e.g. via stacking debuffs) a PLD could solo-tank what otherwise was designed to have two tanks, simply because the incoming damage had to be designed so that a WAR with much worse mitigation could survive the fight, meaning it became a walk in the park for the PLD.

Then they upped WAR mitigation while still insisting on self-healing being WAR's identity, and that made WAR the single best tank in the game. And several patches later with new tanking jobs added, they ended up homogenizing the tanks.

I fear might start with shield healers being so weak (and encounters needing to be designed for their lower healing throughput) that initially double regen healers will be preferred. Then they will adjust shield healer potencies so much that shield healers become the best healers everywhere. Then by 7.0 they'll come around and homogenise all healers again and the difference would no longer matter.

[LisSquid]

Speak for yourself. Noct Sect AST has higher potency heals than SCH with Essential Dignity and faster CDs than Aetherflow for Lustrate. It's got the instant shield Collective Unconscious and the extra OGCD with Celestial Opposition. Plus the shield and regen duo under Neutral Sect and the emergency regen with a super-fast CD with Celestial Intersection. The shields aren't as beefy as SCH, sure, but I won't stand for this noct sect slander.

That's fine. It's not SCH that's being deleted, tho :P

edit:

I fear might start with shield healers being so weak (and encounters needing to be designed for their lower healing throughput) that initially double regen healers will be preferred. Then they will adjust shield healer potencies so much that shield healers become the best healers everywhere. Then by 7.0 they'll come around and homogenise all healers again and the difference would no longer matter.

It's already kind of like that. We saw in early ShB double WHMs just because shields aren't nearly as useful as they could be. Mostly due to the majority of raid aoes being burst damage that is designed not to K.O. everyone, so unless you're doing a strat that makes you eat vuln snacks you're better off just popping regens or a oGCD heal and letting people top off.

The fact SCH isn't currently as desirable as Noct is because Noct AST still has regen ability and instant cast shields. They're not as potent, but they're instant when you need them. (I still prefer to play sch than noct, but that's just me.)

Without retuning fights to require shields or godmoding shield healers.. shields are just kinda meh.

[Brightamethyst]

Noct was always kind of an oddity, really. It was either too OP, or mostly useless. They've never really been able to balance (heh) AST and while killing Noct may not be the fun answer, it's probably the right answer.

[Infindox]

Hopefully they make AST the "third new job" like MCH was for ShB: completely rework it to the point it feels new but still the same job.

[MorionQ]

AST being gutted and rebuilt into a HoT healer has the potential of turning it (back?) into the buff support healer it was initially designed to be. I’m actually more excited about the possibilities for AST than the Sage!

On the other note, AST’s introduction was the first real hit towards SCH’s decline, and it feels like anyone still playing Scholar do so out of a love of the aesthetic (speaking from experience) and that’s something I expect to continue after the addition of Sage unless it’s grossly underpowered. I’m scared Scholar is going to lose any utility or niche in group content. White Mage is bursty with high damage. Astrologian has a party buffing system. But Sage walking in with shield heals without a clunky pet system?

Basically I suddenly understand why it took this long for a fourth healer to be added since everything about how they work in group content has to be worked on in a way that isn’t an issue with DPS or even tanks. :/