Healer design is still terrible and I'm tired of apologizing for it.

[OtakuSempai]

I personally haven't played since ARR but i did dip into healers back in Stormblood and i really liked AST and SCH back then. 5.0 rework sucked for these two imo. I still haven't gotten over how much the 5.0 made me hate Scholar. WHM was the only healer who got better with it, purely because WHM was rubbish in Stormblood (pretty glam tho) but even WHM lost Aero 3 for no reason at all. I will probably never understand what was wrong with each healer having a second AoE DoT. It's not great DPS gameplay but it gave us at least something more to do than just manage 1 dot every 30s and spam a nuke. OG Healer Stance might've been flawed but imagine if they refined it into a proper healer gameplay featuring a job gauge and everything.

I do not believe that having a Diet Coke Black mage gameplay system for WHM, with Astral and Umbral stances increasing / reducing MP costs, would be a bad idea. OGCD heals never cost MP + WHM could still keep the lillies for more free heals. Lucid dreaming feels like a crutch for "we don't wanna think of a proper MP system" rather than a actual part of our toolkit.

It kills me being reminded of what happened to SCH and AST in Shb. I remember leveling AST in the upper 30's back at the end of Stb and I was more engaged with the game doing low level content on that job than I have been in the last 3 years.

[Melorie]

It kills me being reminded of what happened to SCH and AST in Shb. I remember leveling AST in the upper 30's back at the end of Stb and I was more engaged with the game doing low level content on that job than I have been in the last 3 years.

Yeah. Like I don't mean to be nostalgic and act like the class design was perfect - it had issues, and the healing kit of said classes still were a bit disconnected, but 5.0 really managed to kill my enjoyment in ways that I did not find possible. Despite everything, I'm a casual player that didn't really care for optimization because I was able to have fun with it, now everything is so bare to the point that it's hard to not think of optimizing - you get to that stage really quickly and there's nothing there for you. It doesn't help that all the sacrifices that were made in 5.0 and all the changes were pretty much for nothing - nothing was really added to these classes that actually makes you feel they're going towards a certain direction that makes sense or is well-thought/designed. I wouldn't even mind losing all the things we lost back then if I actually felt that there was a direction they were going forward instead oh "here's a flashy new heal skill that hardly engages with the rest of your kit in any meaningful way".

And while I do wish that they would actually work on the healing side of things, it seems to me that just embracing the fact that this game content is always based on dps above all else and there's really low decision-making involved in most of the combat would at least give them something to work it, given that they're unable to actually have a solution for the healing side.