The Pure/Barrier Split and my inane ramblings about it

[Rithy255]

I wanna say firstly, I'm not a healer main, nor do I find any appeal of bringing a healer into savage, I will say I've leveled all healers to 90, I also would be more interested in playing healers if they were actually more fun for me, I generally enjoy "support" jobs in a game, but I also do enjoy if im expected to do "damage", I should at least have some buttons that engage me dps wise, which lets face it job design even on the hardest content healers are meant to deal damage a lot of the time, just from the DPS checks in harder fights alone, but I have general reasons why I'm pretty "meh" on healers as a whole.

I really dislike sage, Not that it isn't particularly fun, but it ruins how old astro used to function, now I think sage is generally just "fresh scholar" I really don't think sage is different enough from scholar to be justified, in it's current state at least, sure scholar "gives out buffs" but it's also not anything like astro, you just give out one raid buff every 2 minutes it's really not unique enough for me to care (I do actually find Scholar alright? likely my second most liked healer..), again The problem really comes from 1. Removing something from astro 2. sage "design" was to copy a lot of scholars homework, where you somehow replace a healer stance with something that is less inspired then that stance...

Old Astro with being able to "choose" between two stances or effects outside of combat was really interesting and worked pretty well, I feel like barrier Astro played way differently from both SCH/Sage, So it being removed for sage really annoys me... I generally prefer barriers to pure healing but I also really like astros playstyle, I don't know what they expect to do when they introduce a "5th" healer, My guess is give back astro sects? I don't know but they really didn't *have* to remove it for sage... Sure I guess you'd have 3Bhealers vs 2pure healers, but is that really a big deal...? I am genuinely just am really disappointed with the idea that we had to remove it outright.

I'll also mention I'm glad theirs a small distinction in game between "barrier" and "pure" healers, I wouldn't want every healer to play the same even from a healing standpoint, I don't mind them classing the healers separately, just not at the expense of jobs like Astro.