Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
I think what makes it a pure healer's "niche" is the percentage of heals that come from HoTs. And this percentage tends to go up along with the healing requirements of any given encounter. Pure healers also use the GCD as a resource for some of their HoT abilities. It is more compartmentalized now in EW.


Healers are pretty homogenized TBH. There are variations to some of their skills, and there are some situations where one healer will have an advantage over another, but it is only slightly so, and nothing that any of the other healers can't handle, just less efficient. The exception to this is AST. Their card mech makes AST the only true niche healer because it requires consistent interaction from the player. It also ramps up their APM.
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The job gauges of the other three healers are pretty much entirely passive, requiring little to no interaction from the healer. I can't speak for all healers, and especially more experienced AST, but I have to abandon the cards in healing intense scenarios. It takes my focus off where it needs to be, and the benefits from astrodyne don't warrant that focus either. Due to this, I have no doubt that giving any other healer an interactive job gauge would cause the exact same issue. While I don't claim to be the best healer, I can still confidently state that if I have that problem, I know other casual healers will also.

The disconnect between players and devs that I see is actually due to lack of transparency from the dev team. I have absolutely no doubt that a decision like removing Divination from the card mechanic and replacing it with a lackluster Astrodyne was made exactly for the reason in the above statement. I think the dev team even stated that they did not want group DPS to suffer as a result of bad RNG from played cards. I think they're just sugarcoating that many AST lose focus on even executing Divination at all in its previous state. And now, if an AST isn't consistently using Astrodyne, it really isn't that big of a deal, especially in casual content.

With that in mind in regards to WHM, players will pick it up under the impression that it is the most straight forward healer, and the easiest to play. But healing in general is pretty straight forward; and it is easy until it isn't. That is what a player learns over time.
Though the strongest healer on a HOT basis is SGE so it’s not even really a pure healer niche, they just happen to have it on their GCD