Which healing job are they gonna gut for Sage?

[Shougun]

They legitimately have no idea what they're doing.

Not suggesting that all is perfect, but I still strongly believe all of this happened in response to players (not saying all, but there were indeed some) asking for healer to focus on healing over damage dealing. In response you've far more healing options, few and relatively 'very easy' to manage damage spells. Which also aligns with Energy drain change.

When they first start expansions it's alright, mostly, because people don't massively over gear stuff and so things hurt. One of the problems healers have, as discussed before, is that as other people get strong their role gets less valuable and far more so than say a tank might be and tank being part of that group getting stronger. Higher defense higher hp, less important to need to heal urgently and often can be managed purely by oGCD (outside of very serious content). I know they mentioned coding errors being one of the reasons they're doing a gear squish, but given that they said unsync wont be as powerful in the end I've to wonder if perhaps they're going to try and address that a bit too. Although as an aside I hope they find some way to ensure solo unsync is still quite powerful, it's a feature I really appreciate (if they want to send it all to BLU that's fine, but then I hope they make pretty the 1-50 spells and generally smooth acquisition of key interesting abilities).

If in the end it becomes significantly more difficult to let people live on scraps till your oGCDs come bout, and healing is a more pressing matter, it'll be interesting to see those who liked "DD healer" over "healer first, maybe some DD". Although I would hope they do make one or more healers feel more technical, in different ways (like AST gets cards to dink around with), maybe another is more technical with their cures, while another has a more engaged damage kit, and then one more simple for those who like that. WHM, imo, currently being that more straight forward simple healer. Similar to how some DD in this game are far easier than others, depending on your skills and preference to keyboard dancing.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Sorry for the necro, but this seems worth revisiting.

The problem with the WAR-PLD distinction wasn't that one was the self-healing tank and the other the mitigation tank, but rather that they had wildly different

1. eHP,
2. combined throughput (healer offensive throughput allowed for via mitigation or self-healing + personal damage throughput), and
3. scaling (Warrior's combined throughput scaled far more with gear than did Paladin's).

Had Paladin added to their mitigation niche an Attack-Power-based component, rather than retaining only mitigating a percentage of incoming damage, and thus scaled as well as Warrior did, while Warrior had sufficient eHP to compete with Paladin's active mitigation (rather than only to at best --or, at 5 stacks of Wrath-- nearly make up for the lack of Shield Oath) and its damage, self-healing, and healing-taken-bonuses were strong enough (or, in regard to healing-taken-bonuses, applying broadly enough, as to include ability-based healing) to compete with Paladin's combined throughput, the distinction would have been fully tenable.

But instead they blamed a blatant imbalance in power on tangential elements (how each job reached its power) and thereby homogenized the two.

Sadly, that's not a mistake unique to the time, either, as we've increasingly seen.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

I hope White Mage goes untouched.
I love where Wht is at RN.
AST definitly needs some help, its fun but isnt very strong.

I do hope Sage is as fun as it looks though

[Anhra]

I hope White Mage goes untouched.
I love where Wht is at RN.
AST definitly needs some help, its fun but isnt very strong.

I do hope Sage is as fun as it looks though

Healing power by itself, is already strong enough on any healing job, it wouldnt even suprise me if it could cover everything endwalker has to offer as long as your gear is sufficient.

It would be alot better if Healers would get the amount of healing abilities (14 in number on average) at least cut down in half, get some potency adjustments for the remaining ones and with all the empty space they would have then, they could finally get the extra dps skills/utility/job mechanic related skills/spells they truly deserve.

[LisSquid]

I hope the one thing the "Maximize dps" and "Dps when I can" healers can agree on is that late expac healing experience would be greatly improved by giving us more damage buttons.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

All of them, obviously.

[Krokov]

Players will find a way too work with it regardless of the changes.

[GrizzlyTank]

But instead they blamed a blatant imbalance in power on tangential elements (how each job reached its power) and thereby homogenized the two.

Sadly, that's not a mistake unique to the time, either, as we've increasingly seen.

Classes in this game is honestly way to homogenized. If DPS were to be mapped across an axis of proc vs fixed rotation, nearly every job ends up far on the fixed side.
And for healers it's this... either regen or shield...

It feels like the devs are afraid to branch out and try more niches.

[Yeol]

My guess is they're going to re-work & re-balance all 4 healers.

AST/WHM re-balanced for the regen healer role
Sage/SCH re-balanced for the shield healer role.

They'll probably rework a lot of their tool kits to make them homogenized (Like tanks balance in Shadowbringers). They will keep key elements to differentiate them apart. Like AST being a buffer healer (with cards) in the regen category & SCH being the buffer healer (Chain strat & maybe some utility with their fairy) in the shield category. While WHM & Sage are pure at doing their role in their category.

If they do something similar to this, a lot of groups will either take 1 buffer and one non-buffer for stronger heals/shields, or they'll take the two healers that bring buffs to the group.

What I'm really wondering is if they are going to change how shields and regen stack. At the moment you can stack regens but can't stack shields (At least not all of them).

[Shurrikhan]

Classes in this game is honestly way to homogenized. If DPS were to be mapped across an axis of proc vs fixed rotation, nearly every job ends up far on the fixed side.
And for healers it's this... either regen or shield...

It feels like the devs are afraid to branch out and try more niches.

I agree, but that's not going to change so long as the community overwhelmingly just murmurs briefly, nods, and goes on their way when the devs put out utterly disingenuous excuses for a given change, or is generally plenty happy for the combat playflow to be just a visuals-buoyed topping on an otherwise just storytelling/grind experience.

There is then just no incentive to put out actual quality or serious effort beyond the newest visual flair or extra button.

"Oh, but there wasn't yet a single-target option of that skill? Well, here's an extra button, otherwise exactly identical, devoted solely to whether you can count the number of enemies within the line or radius of your action as one... or more than one. Brilliant, yes?"