Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
This is also an issue of intra-role imbalance. You can have tradeoffs, or no tradeoffs. Why do AST and SGE just have a crapload of completely free heals that cost them zero DPS? In a game where the DPS race is the point of basically every encounter, your potential DPS is a huge boon. Why bring a SnoozeMage with few oGCDs and a bunch of lossy GCD heals when you have another option that can heal for free and lose no DPS? Would you like a $5 piece of cake, or a $0 piece of cake?

Yeah I know the way this discussion normally ends is "lol bro who cares it's just five bucks it doesn't matter in the end why do you care so much" Because proportionally, 5 is infinitely more than zero.

One of the big things that has kept WHM an unattractive pick from a numbers standpoint is that, for the longest time, Square decided that WHM's "niche" was healing throughput. This might be a workable identity. In a different game. Because Square Enix has also made it abundantly clear: they want all party comps to be viable, and by viable, they mean comfortably so- not clearing by the skin of your teeth at the absolute skill ceiling, but clearable in a midcore, relatively chill party. One of the knock-on effects from this design consideration is that healers must all have healing throughput that comfortably clears everything. So if everyone has a massive amount of healing throughput as a baseline, what's the point of having -even more-? Making a class that's easier for someone really bad at healing to clear something I guess? It's not an advantage that makes WHM attractive to a skilled player. It's a safety net that makes them less attractive the more skilled you get.
That last part is basically the entirety of what’s always been wrong with WHM, you can’t balance content explicitly for savage in a game which is overwhelmingly biased to casual content, then put in a class that’s designed as the “newbie friendly” alternative without it messing up its sub-role balance generally to the detriment of the others.

Tanks get around this problem with WAR, it’s the newbie friendly tank but it also has its own powerful niche that is also specifically designed to attract newer people to tanking (massive self heal), WHM needs something like that or otherwise it just needs to have its balance disconnected from the others so that they aren’t dragged down endlessly by WHM.

Also please make another healer accessible at level 1, having so many threads where people ask for “what’s the best starting healing” and as an experienced healers you know WHM is the worst to start with because it teaches all the wrong habits but having to level something else up to get another healer when they can just pick CNJ massively biases WHM for no other reason than outdated game design