i'm sick and tired of the excuse for not having unique or varied jobs

[Reylah]

I could write a whole essay about it but I know it's like talking to a wall. All I'll say is if you can place over 80% of a job's entire kit in the same hotkeys/keybinds as another job *cough cough* healers *cough* then they're functionally the same, and aesthetics being practically the only thing keeping them separate.

Let me write that essay for you so some people can get a better picture.

Lets look at my hotbars for my healers WHM, AST and SGE (I haven't touched scholar):

1) cure/benefic/Dosis (all small heals and dosis because its sages small heal)
2) cure 2/benefic 2/diagnosis (all medium heals)
3) regen/aspected benefic/Eurasia (regen/setup for shield button)
4) benediction/essential dignity/tetragrammaton (all single target emergency heal)
5) medica/helios/prognosis (basic AoE heal)
6)esuna (not like its used much but this is where I have dispels on my bars in other games)
7)medica 2/aspected helios/- (AoE regen and some days I'm tempted to put a second prognosis here for eukrasian prognosis after hitting eukrasia just for habit's sake of "stronger AoE" on 7)
8)cure 3 (unique to white mage as a larger cast AoE heal but rarely used because the fights are designed so that the jobs without it can get by just fine)

shift-1)stone/maleific/dosis (single target damage)
shift-2)aero/combust/toxicon (Damage over time and toxikon because why not, though again I might just have a second dosis here for a smoother transition with eukrasia and eukrasian dosis)
shift-3)holy/gravity/Dyskrasia (AoE)

The other buttons are scattered wherever mostly because the packet of astrologian card buttons takes up most of my mouse buttons (M3-M5 + shift Ms) causing AST to unalign(ironically) from the other jobs.

What can we get from this? Well the vast majority of healer kits are the same with minor differences for flavor at best. Sage has the most differences in but those are all because Eukrasia just consolidates some of the buttons with no real change in functionality. This can be expanded to cover the major cooldowns/ogcds as well.

comparable major cooldowns:
aqua veil/exaltation/ tauochole (single target damage reduction)
asylum/collective unconscious/Physis 2 and kerachole(Instant AoE regen)
divine benison/celestial intersection/haima (single target shield, presumably for a tank buster)
planetary indulgence/ horoscope/pepis (group heal requiring setup)
liturgy of the Bell/earthly star/ phanhaima (massive group heal/shield)
temperance/-/krasis (healing buff)
Assize/celestial opposition/holos and ixochole (instant AoE heal)

Though there are a few more unique abilities and more instances of extra effects like mana, damage, or damage reduction for flavor here, there is still a ton of overlap in what is mechanically done by each healer. Obviously there are some unique job abilities like benediction, divination, toxikon, etc…

Lilies, cards, and addergall/sting are all job gauge things and so yeah they should be unique and job defining. That said they are also peripheral to playing the role. Sure it's not optimal to ignore them but with cards no longer tied to divination for AST ignoring them is a negligible dps loss in most content. 3-5% on 1/4, 1/8, or 1/24 people, depending on what content you are running, with 66% uptime is barely worth calling relevant even in prog. Clearly a simplification, but the point is they are just there for seals (also barely relevant) and the illusion of doing something. It's just more fun to use them than not. Lilities give you the equivalent of 3 more glares a minute to make up for the 3 glares you didn’t cast and addersgall is a shared charge system for some of your abilities while adderssting just lets you cast dosis equivalents while moving.

None of those affect how you fill the healing role in the party. No, that's not a call for “healers should only heal”, I just mean that when the game gives you a problem for healers to solve, your job gauge is rarely, if ever, a factor in how you solve it.

In fact your job is barely a factor in how you solve it. The difference between “shield healing” and “pure healing” is whether you want to finish your cast before the damage goes out or after. That's about the only difference I can see. For every shield that lets you cast and stop the damage there is a regen that lets you cast and go back to what you were doing while it fixes the damage.

The more I look at the overlaps between 3 of the 4 healers the more I become concerned that the devs are becoming… I hate using this word, especially for devs… lazy. Because you can look at these abilities and look at the fights and say “ok so this is where they want me to use X ability and this is where I should use Y” and it becomes excruciatingly clear that the fights are made so that you can clear them only using the core tools. When testing a fight it's no longer “can all healers clear this fight?” but instead “if one healer can clear this fight, the rest can.” They don’t have to ask themselves “Can this healer solve this problem?” just “Do all healers have a button for this? Then we can add this mechanic”.