Quote Originally Posted by Dearche View Post
For you two cases, how would you feel if WHM was more set up so that the difficulty came from pulling out maximum healing while doing mechanics? The end result would vary wildly admittedly, but if, like now but on a better designed skill set, the difficulty doesn't come from spamming attack spells on a striking dummy, but the loss of uptime from movement, with limited ways to gain free movement (like swiftcast and stuff)? The base job would be easy to do well in, but the moment you started to do any remotely difficult content, you'd quickly start dropping damage until you learned to get better at it?
I'd hesitate to make "movement" an explicit weakness. It's how basically every single mechanic in XIV works. You have to move somewhere to dodge a thing. Movement being an explicit WHM weakness is one of the myriad things that's made it such a chore to play in the past. When you have two classes, and one of them has a fake "weakness" that the game never bothers to touch on, and the other has a crippling weakness that the game picks at all the time, then you've wrenched the disparity between those classes pretty wide. WHM has historically had weaknesses that actually come up all the time in this game. AST and SCH haven't, not since early Heavensward for AST. Now, that's not necessarily a problem if you compensate for that disparity elsewhere, but from what I've seen of how Squeenix designs things, they tend to treat weaknesses as if they were all equivalent, wash their hands and call it a day. Even Black Mage, the iconic immobile turret of mages, has received a truckload of movement tools because it's such a bullsh*t thing to do to a class in this game of heavy movement requirements.

I don't like to say that WHM should be simple and boring for the sake of ease of play, but if it means that we can have nice, complex, dynamic, and engaging healer jobs, then it's a trade I'd be more than willing to do. Though admitedly, I've never liked WHM so I'm pretty biased there, but WHM is the only healer you get before level 30, sadly enough.
Of course you're willing, you're a Scholar main. I've seen AST and SCH mains perfectly happy to sacrifice WHM on the complexity altar if it allows them to be OP again. Nevermind the fact that the DPS casters don't suffer from this problem, which shows we don't actually need to have an ankle-height skill ceiling baby class in order to keep the role healthy. I'll counter with this admittedly facetious question: How would you feel if the simplistic entry-level job was Scholar, and the three other healers got to enjoy complexity as a consequence of that? Make the fairy heals 200 real potency, delete most of the kit, whittle it down to Succor, Adlo, Lustrate, Bio, and Broil. Design finished. Beginner healers would be too intimidated by things as complicated as Excog after all.