Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

I mean, the first thing I posted...

I'll kind of ignore the first part because I answered why.

Fight pacing has changed a lot, but so have toolkits. An ARR fight with today's toolkits would be laughably easy because of all the oGCD healing we have today (Lilies for WHM). But those things didn't exist at the time, so they wouldn't have been the design intent. And it wasn't players trying to force their notions from other games on FFXIV's Devs' bold new design that was supposed to be different and groundbreaking. Remember ARR was an attempt to save Square-Enix as a company. They were actually trying to play it safe at the time, not go in some bold new direction. And the Devs of that time were also players of other MMOs - Yoshi P actually directed his team to play other MMOs, including WoW, and try to emulate them, not to go in some risky bold new direction apart from them. It wasn't fresh-faced players trying to impose an incompatible paradigm on the game.

The thing is, what you find "fun" isn't what everyone finds fun. I hate AST because of how busy it is. I like WHM because of how straightforward and low APM it is. I like WAR and SMN for the same reason. We like different things. Wouldn't it be great if there were classes that played like you like and classes that play like I like so we can both be happy and both have fun in this shared space we call an MMO?

I've already said I think there should be 4 different gameplay styles. In short, direct healing and simple damage, buffing, plate spinning support/damage, and rotational complexity support/damage; WHM (ShB/EW, or ARR with a lot of boosts and tweaks), AST (SB with less RNG), SCH (SB), and SGE (with an actual damage rotation and Kardia interplay)

I think that's the answer, and I've yet to see a good reason from you guys why it's not other than "you want to neuter WHM!!" or "you want carries!" (Thankfully, we've moved on from the latter...) or "But...WHM is my favorite healer so all of them MUST be changed so I won't be put out!"

EDIT:

I don't know for sure what the answer is, but I know that without one, the status quo will prevail (making all of you and those like you unhappy), but changing all the healers will make a lot of other people unhappy as well. There are ways to thread that needle.

EDIT2:

One very curious thing, though...

...looking through P8S-2 on the Abacus, it's frankly surprising to me how many Pure/Barrier comps there are. Like there aren't SCH/SGE everywhere. But also interesting, there aren't AST/SCH everywhere. There are some, no doubt, but there are also some WHM/SGE, WHM/SCH, and AST/SGE as well as AST/SCH. I still think the Pure/Barrier thing hasn't worked out, but interestingly...it seems to be prevalent on the top end. And not only in the meta incarnation of AST/SCH. Interesting.