Can we delete Seraph, Dissipation, Excog and Sacred Soil? Some ideas on top of it...

[Semirhage]

WHM: Replace Aero/Dia with something like Ruin 2 for a movement tool, remove the DoT entirely.

Oh yay, another suggestion that all other healers get something interesting while WHM sucks on purpose.

[ThorneDynasty]

Oh yay, another suggestion that all other healers get something interesting while WHM sucks on purpose.

Square is just never going to budge from babying the worst DF healers forever, and they all play WHM because learning another healer after level 50 is just too darn complicated.

Trading WHM for saving the entire role is just the best possible deal we fathom getting from the devs, thank you for your sacrifice.

[Bonkleberry]

Sacred Soil came first, and was - legitimately - the reason I leveled SCH in ARR

Sorry to derail, but what SCH during ARR or Heavensward ever used Sacred Soil? Sacred Soil and Shadowflare were mutually exclusive, so using Sacred Soil meant losing DPS :-p

[QooEr]

Sorry to derail, but what SCH during ARR or Heavensward ever used Sacred Soil? Sacred Soil and Shadowflare were mutually exclusive, so using Sacred Soil meant losing DPS :-p

do you understand why mitigation is a necessity to survive otherwise lethal damage or...

[Semirhage]

Square is just never going to budge from babying the worst DF healers forever, and they all play WHM because learning another healer after level 50 is just too darn complicated.

Trading WHM for saving the entire role is just the best possible deal we fathom getting from the devs, thank you for your sacrifice.

Excellent! I can't wait for the cycle of complaining to return the rest of the healers back to horribly designed again. Every time I hear "I don't care if your favorite healer is designed terribly as long as mine is designed well", I can't help but think...right back at 'cha.

The healer role entered this mess in the first place because WHM was designed like garbage and the other two at least had something going for them. The devs want numeric balance, but care less about engagement balance. If the dumdum healer is just as good as the complex ones, the complex ones complain that they deserve more output for their complexity. If it's not, the complex healers are satisfied, but the devs look for ways to bring their numbers closer together. Lobotomizing AST and SCH was their decision at the end of Stormblood.

If you get your complexity back, you're putting the role back in the relative position it was in Stormblood. Who's to say they won't make the same decision again? Healers are all dimwits as you know. At least, that seems to be the balancing team's opinion on it.

[Renathras]

Oh yay, another suggestion that all other healers get something interesting while WHM sucks on purpose.

Square is just never going to budge from babying the worst DF healers forever, and they all play WHM because learning another healer after level 50 is just too darn complicated.

Trading WHM for saving the entire role is just the best possible deal we fathom getting from the devs, thank you for your sacrifice.

Basically, yeah.

There is no world where Square isn't going to have at least one simple and straightforward healer, and WHM makes the most sense to be that one.

Lore-wise, it is a powerful mage focused towards highly potent healing. Thematically, White Mages in Final Fantasy games tend to be simple and direct healers with a few support spells and often only one damage spell (usually Holy, sometimes Dia). Mechanically, it's basically already there just staying as it is now. Historically, in FFXIV, the most complex WHM ever was was SB, where it had Aero (instant cast DoT), Aero 2 (DoT with a bit of front-loaded damage), and Stonespam, or for AOE, Aero 3 then Holyspam; and its healing kit was less complex (slightly) than today as it had no Solace/Rapture (nor Misery) and had a few less spells overall. And in terms of the community, WHM is already "baby's first healer". Using it, many people get into healing in the game (begin as a level 1 CNJ) make their start and learn healing on WHM. And for those who like it simple, they stick with it as their main. It's also the only healer you don't have to go out of your way to get (leveling ARC to 30, leveling up from 30 like AST, or picking up after having leveled something else to 70 like SGE), and most healers have spent at least some time on CNJ/WHM before moving onto the other healers anyway. So it being simple makes sense there as well.

[EDIT2: Yes, I know, it could technically cross-class one more DoT or something from ARC, but the main point still stands: WHM was the simplest damage kit healer vs SCH and dAST/nAST.]

EDIT:

As far as a transition from what we have now to this new proposed system, this also makes sense, as players that like the simple gameplay style probably already have WHM at least somewhat leveled and so can easily move to it or stick with it vs if some other healer was made "the simple one" since almost ALL of us healers either have WHM at 90 or have at least a good 60-80 levels into it. This would make for the smoothest transition. SGE being complex at 70 makes sense, as anyone picking up SGE will have been playing the game for at least a few weeks if not months/years, and so should understand the warnings of "This is a complicated healer, are you sure you want to main it?", something that can't be said for day one players picking CNJ as their starting class. Making, say, WHM the complicated one and SGE the easy one would be ridiculously counterintuitive, and neither SCH nor AST make sense as "the simple one".

Compromise is a two-way street. It isn't you getting everything you want. As Thorne points out, trading WHM for the role as a whole being made more interesting (with the alternative being everything stays the way it is today) should be seen as an acceptable loss.

It's not "WHM sucks on purpose". Being simple is not the same as "sucking". To many people, being complex/having tons of work to do to achieve the same result is "sucking", yet that is the very thing you want.

If it is DESIGNED to be simple and straightforward, that isn't "sucking". That's "you not liking it". You not liking a thing is not the definition of whether or not a thing sucks.

Sorry to derail, but what SCH during ARR or Heavensward ever used Sacred Soil? Sacred Soil and Shadowflare were mutually exclusive, so using Sacred Soil meant losing DPS :-p

Not everyone ran parsers then (or does now), and tons of people playing healers back then did so to heal, not to top the DPS charts. Sacred Soil scratched a "defending the party" itch for a lot of people, and was a useful spell at the time, and correct me if I'm wrong, but Shadowflare had a 30 or 60 sec CD, so you could alternate using the two anyway, right? They didn't share CD, just couldn't be up at the same time...?

[Renathras]

The healer role entered this mess in the first place because WHM was designed like garbage and the other two at least had something going for them. The devs want numeric balance, but care less about engagement balance. If the dumdum healer is just as good as the complex ones, the complex ones complain that they deserve more output for their complexity. If it's not, the complex healers are satisfied, but the devs look for ways to bring their numbers closer together. Lobotomizing AST and SCH was their decision at the end of Stormblood.

If you get your complexity back, you're putting the role back in the relative position it was in Stormblood. Who's to say they won't make the same decision again? Healers are all dimwits as you know. At least, that seems to be the balancing team's opinion on it.

No, the problem was that the "more complex" healers didn't enjoy the complexity enough that it was a reward in itself.

That is, all of you saying "I don't want to be bored" are lying - what you REALLY MEAN is "I want to be a DPS and do more damage".

The problem in SB is that AST and SCH had more involved kits - so in theory weren't bored - but they complained that their "more work" should mean "more damage", even though the Devs said over and over that healer damage was balanced and they weren't going to buff it. But the "I don't want to be bored" players kept complaining. How DARE people that aren't like them enjoy healing and have comparable performance! So the Devs gutted all the healing kits in a "corrupt-a-wish" sort of way: "Now you don't do more work than WHMs! Happy now?!"

The question comes down to: Is it that you really just want more buttons to push to not be bored...or do you really want to play a damage dealer and just do more damage?

I think this is the crux of all of these discussion and people don't want to address it because they probably see themselves in this picture and don't like it.

If it really IS just you being bored and wanting more buttons to push, then it shouldn't matter that there's a healer Job out there that does the same damage with less button presses and that players who DON'T want to be a "dps-lite" can enjoy it and perform comparably to you on it. After all, your goal was to not be bored, not to outpace less skilled/dedicated players, right? Especially when you factor in that WHM has the least overall utility of all the healers.

[Icecylee]

"you just want to deal more damage" is a pretty disingenuous take away from you personally not being to understand why people are bored, and why former WHM mains in particular might not be thrilled with the idea of everything *but* WHM getting some kind of theoretical fix but being left to rot. Like, even in ARR WHM was dozens of times more complex than it is now. Every without going into cross class actions, you had two dots, your filler spell... but on top of that regen uptime actually mattered, you had put a tiny bit of foresight into the buttons you wanted to push and in what order due to cleric stance, stoneskin was still a thing, and you didn't have basically any oGCD healing except for benediction which was on a massive cooldown, so what you were doing from moment to moment was still pretty varied even if your party didn't suck and get hit by avoidable damage constantly.

Sure it wasn't perfect, but it was a bit more involved and certainly a lot more engaging. I used to love WHM back then and mained it all throughout turns 1-13, but I can't stand playing it (or any other healer) these days since it's such a shallow husk of what it used to be. It's not strange that someone might want the bare minimum levels of engagement we used to have back, rather than being stuck with the brain dead button masher we have now. It's not like the requirements for the role have done anything but get easier for the last few expansions in a row.

[RyuDragnier]

SCH can easily be fixed, in terms of how it flows (and the jankiness of moves). Remove Aetherflow, have the Fairy Gauge used for all AF moves instead, give them all various costs (such as Lustrate being 10 gauge, Excog being 25, Sacred Soil being 30, etc etc). Make it so the gauge only goes up when the fairy heals (5 gauge per heal) or you use a new move (Fey Gift for 50 gauge), with Fey Blessing, Fey Illumination, and Whispering Dawn all filling the gauge in larger doses. Make Seraph a permanent upgrade to the fairy, and Consolation not give any gauge (in return for it giving those lovely AoE shields). Make Dissipation sacrifice a chunk of the gauge for higher healing output from all SCH heals (GCD or oGCD). Make Fey Union force the fairy to focus target a single individual for X amount of seconds with Embrace at increased healing potency.

With all that, SCH's kit no longer fights itself, and the fairy is much more integral to our healing since we need her just so we can use our oGCDs. If they want to add a cherry on top, give us PvP's Deployment Tactics, with 2 charges and the ability to spread Biolysis and Chain Strategem to multiple enemies by using it. Because then we'll TECHNICALLY have Bane back.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not sure I'd want more Aetherflow DPS abilities, I'd rather there be more reasons to use Aetherflow on healing rather than almost always on Energy Drain.

Given that you'd lose 195 potency on each Energy Drain whose use would cause you to need a GCD heal, there's plenty of reason to use Aetherflow on healing... so long as there's damage actually being taken. The problem there isn't ED, but the content.