Macrocosmos completely invalidating the P3S heal check is stupid

[Semirhage]

I'm too cynical for that. I mained WHM from ARR through Stormblood. I've seen competition from two busted overpowered healer jobs claiming that being extremely good at everything is just "good design". I healed through 20% Balance and Scholar doing as much damage as Ninja, while being told those things were "just good design", "WHM just needs to be brought up a little to compete". I've also been around when WHM dares to have a patch where they do more damage than the other healers and the screaming that entails. The thing is, WHM is never, ever going to be a well-designed job so long a Square keeps hammering this awful "pure simple straightforward no frills" fake identity onto it, and the good-at-everything overpowered healers are going to say "there there, I hope they fix you someday" until the heat death of the universe. Square has already demonstrated they'd rather topple the entire design they set forth for both AST and SCH than EVER give WHM anything interesting or fun to do.

I had a point in there somewhere, but it got lost in my being angry about how terribly Square has treated WHM since 3.2. I get what you're saying, but I still think that being good at everything isn't "good design". It's overpowered design that creates role imbalance because it warps the whole role around itself. Everyone else has to be just as overpowered, or be left in the dust.

[ty_taurus]

I'm too cynical for that. I mained WHM from ARR through Stormblood. I've seen competition from two busted overpowered healer jobs claiming that being extremely good at everything is just "good design". I healed through 20% Balance and Scholar doing as much damage as Ninja, while being told those things were "just good design", "WHM just needs to be brought up a little to compete". I've also been around when WHM dares to have a patch where they do more damage than the other healers and the screaming that entails. The thing is, WHM is never, ever going to be a well-designed job so long a Square keeps hammering this awful "pure simple straightforward no frills" fake identity onto it, and the good-at-everything overpowered healers are going to say "there there, I hope they fix you someday" until the heat death of the universe. Square has already demonstrated they'd rather topple the entire design they set forth for both AST and SCH than EVER give WHM anything interesting or fun to do.

I had a point in there somewhere, but it got lost in my being angry about how terribly Square has treated WHM since 3.2. I get what you're saying, but I still think that being good at everything isn't "good design". It's overpowered design that creates role imbalance because it warps the whole role around itself. Everyone else has to be just as overpowered, or be left in the dust.

WHM's design made a lot more sense during ARR where it and SCH traded strengths and weaknesses and complimented each other very well. WHM had a significantly easier time healing the party where SCH just couldn't. Your only way to recover from heavy raid-wide damage as 2 SCHs was to Succor spam, which was just not very effective. It also had Enmity control in Shroud of Saints where I can't actually remember whether or not SCH had any way of lowering their aggro, which was actually a big deal back then. In exchange, SCH's had more mitigation, damage, and better MP management. The reason why these trade offs made sense was because you only had 2 healers, but once we threw in a third wheel into the ring, suddenly that changes.

WHM's identity of being the one that can comfortably heal big damage now can't be exclusively true otherwise it becomes mandatory. This became more apparent over the course of HW, because as AST's utility got buffed, suddenly WHM's ability to do better something the others could comfortably do anyway was no longer a legitimate strength, and rather than adapting to this revelation, they just dug their heels in the sand in SB stating that it would be sacrilegious to WHM's job fantasy from the rest of the series--a statement that I will never understand for a number of reasons. First, because WHM has offered offensive support many times in the series previously in the form of spells like Might/Bravery, Faith, and Haste. Second, because the design team seems to pick and choose when a job's fantasy from the series is worth defending so much so to the point of turning an entire job into a gimmicky minigame in Blue Mage, but they're also perfectly fine trampling over others like Bard who is absolutely nothing like any Final Fantasy Bard ever in the series anywhere.