Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
I can't help but feel that someone somewhere in the design team is always shouting "We keep taking away their DPS, why are they still using it!?"
To be honest, I can't help but feel that this might actually be the real sentiment within the ones in charge of designing jobs. Either that, or that they believe that the best way to make people play a role that's less popular is to make it as easy as possible to get into, which means making them as braindead as possible. Not realizing that making gameplay overly simplistic is how the entire genre of JRPGs almost got wiped out until less than a decade ago. At least in the west.

It's ridiculous that the rest of the FF franchise is going the other way by making things like gameplay mastery an important aspect of the series, yet XIV is trying to do the opposite for every role except DPS.

That aside though, while I don't actually expect these changes to be implemented, or even seen by the dev team (since I doubt they look at any thread here that doesn't have like 10k views or something), the idea behind these changes was to create a WHM that had as low of a skill floor as possible, while not being boring for veteran players to play. In fact, I think with stripping out so many oGCD skills, it's actually simpler than the current WHM, yet loses none of the flexibility.

Also, I don't think the idea of raid utility is a forgone conclusion. WHile AST would entirely lose its identity without cards, SCH still has chain stratagem and has never lost it. So unless if SE cares so little for healers that they had intended to strip all raid utility from healers aside from the AST cards, and simply forgot that chain stratagem even existed (I don't say that this isn't a possibility), the skill does suggest that SE does think that raid utility should be a part of the healer kit, even if it is on a very basic level.

Though, at the same time, it's possible that SE does actually account for healer damage in job design as WHM's attack potency is the highest of the three healers in place of having any raid utility.

Then again, it could just be an oversight, as SCH had its potency for broil 2 raised just so they could nerf energy drain and get people to stop doing the ruin 2+energy drain combo in place of using aetherflow for healing. Seriously, if that's not a malicious nerf on player expression, I don't know what is.