Quote Originally Posted by Ixon View Post
You are confusing "not engaging/simple" with "not fun". For instance, WAR is very, very simples, and not all that engaging when compared to DRK and GNB right? However it's still FUN. At no point at all, did I say WHM had to be unfun or awful. You misconstrued what I am saying and fabricate what you want to hear. All I said was WHM will forever be designed to be simple. You won't win that fight as it's core to it's identity even historically throughout Final Fantasy titles. The dream in general on a design basis is to have jobs whose PLAYSTYLE appeals to a fraction of the playerbase. Some people enjoy the simpler, slower paced jobs compared to the higher paced, more engaging jobs. It is a terrible design choice to make every job as engaging as every other job, and better to have some resemblance of identity and playstyle that differentiates itself from another job. I'll say it again cause you miss it a lot, WHM needs work, WHM has room to improve, but it won't ever become more than what it was always designed to be. It doesn't matter if it's your favorite or not. I like AST or MCH the most aesthetically, but because I never enjoyed it's playstyle, I don't play it.
I argue against WHM's "yay crayola" job design for a bunch of reasons, engagement chief among them, but it's not the only consideration I have there. I'm sure we both know that HURRR 1111111111111 is wretched, horrible game design. And I won't stop complaining until it gets a LOT less babymode than that.

The other chief reason I argue against it is role balance. Healer role meta, barring a single minor patch or two, has pretty much been "lol not WHM" for years and years and years. And this isn't an accident. The reason it's "lol not WHM" is because WHM is the worst at everything. If not that, it's at least a strong contender in the categories it doesn't get an F in. The DPS role has this idea the right way around: you get utility, or you get personal output. Tinker upward and downward as you please. In many ways, that utility makes up for personal output- in most patches, you don't feel like you're actively gimping your party when you play a RDM, because the extra stuff you can do on the side like the occasional pull-squeaking Vercure, or spamming Verraise, or your party buff is useful enough that you don't feel like a crappy Roseart drawing of a BLM.

The healer role says screw that; WHM gets no utility, garbage damage output compared to its peers, and nothing engaging to manage in its downtime. It's a shell of a job. It has nothing going for it. SOMETHING has to give here. Why the hell have the job exist at all if it's just "worse fill in the blank" at everything? It excels at nothing. It's even been a worse healer than Astro for years, and raw HPS output is a garbage fake "advantage" that it's been touted to have for a long time.

WHM needs to be nuked from orbit. Being "the crappy one" isn't an identity. Its oversimplicity is one of the many contributing factors to this. I'm tired of enjoying the aesthetic of WHM only to be told by the dev team that LOL 11111111111111 is an "identity". Because if the healer role ever gets out of this rut it's in, the Cassandra in me sees the other three healers getting deluxe makeovers, and WHM remains boring and stupid because "it's supposed to be" or "because people like SiMpL". And I'd rather it not happen that way.