My take on the simplicity of healers and the healer problem

[Coatl]

People have been asking for a SCH revisit way before SGE. Of course you find SGE boring, its just SCH if they fixed some of its clunk.

[VerdeLuck]

I also forgot that you are neglecting to note that WHM doesn't exclusively have heals.

1. Regens. Regens are vastly useful and efficient heals. While technically healing, their fire and forget nature often makes them really ideal for the current structure of high-end fights. (Where you have periods of a LOT of damage, then a long recovery period.) - Pairing SGE/SCH with a WHM/AST dramatically makes the job of both jobs much easier as their abilities are complimentary. (And yes, SCH and SGE both have regens. But WHM and AST regens are notably better)
2. Asylum. While not a mit, the +healing on this works on basically all forms of recovery. It's also strictly better than Fae Illumination (which only impacts spells) and combos really well with tank heals like Shake it Off, Aurora, Heart of Corundum.
3. Divine Benson. While ST, it is a shield.
4. Temperance. AoE mit and healing up. Core for WHM play in savage content
5. Aquaveil. A single target mit. Comparable to both skills on SGE and AST.
6. Liturgy of the Bell. A beautiful combination of Panaheima AND earthly star. While it's not a shield, this ability basically means I as a Scholar do not need to do much of anything except pop soil during the entire duration. It's insanely good.

I just want to come back to this since this poster in his rush to justify why WHM should not get any buffs or help with becoming more viable, listed out 6 things he believes are utility WHM has other than heals, and half of them are either straight heals or a heal potency buff while active.
A single partywide mitigation, a single target mitigation, and then a single target shield. The rest is just healing, something that WHM has in spades for sure, but nothing really needs it due to SE's fight design and how people play, we want to avoid overhealing as much as possible.
Compare this to its direct competitor who has a partywide mitigation, a single target mitigation, a single target shield, and also has a heal amp that puts shields on its heals allowing it to do partywide or single target shields as it sees fit.
This competitor also does more damage, which is what really matters in these fights, and has enough healing potential to easily pass heal checks.

Why in this situation would you take WHM? It just straight up has less to offer, unless your group is bad and parses low, something no group wants to admit. This seems to be a bit of a problem that AST and SCH are overloaded in their kits and others struggle to keep up outside of early prog, which is why the AST+SCH combination seems to be so ubiqutous and dominant.

What I was trying to say with all of this is that WHM needs an identity, it needs a reason to pick it. AST is considered a must pick for certain strategies due to Macrocosmos and cards, SCH is considered the same for Expedient and Chain Strategem. What is the situation for WHM being a must pick on fights? Why do you pick it?
It either should be brought back up in parity with the abilities and damage of its direct competitor or given a unique reason to pick it, something that only it can do. Right now it's just raw healing output, but that is very much not something that gels with how the game is played at this point.

[Rilifane]

Not to mention that both SGE and SCH have more oGCD regens than WHM.
WHM only has Asylum. While WHM has a spammable regen with Medica II and Regen, both are on the GCD and avoided as much as possible. When it comes to oGCD regens, SGE wins by a mile.
Pairing a SGE or SCH with AST or WHM doesn't make their job "dramatically easier" - SGE/ SCH is an insanely strong comp both in terms of healing and combined healer DPS because both bring everything you need on their own but twice. Double mitigation that stacks trivializes a lot of mechanics.
You can 0 GCD heal (not counting downtime GCD heals obviously) all current savage fights right up to Dominion on part 2 on SGE/ SCH, the very last mechanic and the big "heal check" that still barely requires GCD healing and even the few could probably eliminated with a proper mapping. Without an AST or WHM making the job "dramatically easier".

AST and WHM both don't bring what's really important in terms of countering incoming damage.
AST is simply ahead and a meta choice because it brings raid buffs during an expansion where 2min burst is more important than ever. And because Papa Yoshi discouraged everyone from bringing double shields and people really like to take his word for gospel.

[ty_taurus]

In order to create a healthy balance between jobs within any given role, we need to acknowledge these key factors:

Damage
Damage comes in two major forms:
1. Selfish DPS
2. Offensive Buffs
Whether your damage comes from your own DPS or buffs doesn't really matter. Buffs add a few extra steps to calculating your total damage dealt, but what matters is that total. BLM is still considered the strongest DPS caster despite not having raid buffs even though RDM and SMN do because its selfish DPS is much higher. Damage also isn't just a specific variable. You can also take into consideration aspects like job difficulty and uptime which can create more flexibility in job balance as its not always about which job can be the strongest, but about the player.

Utility
Utility comprises all of the non-damaging tools a job can have. While these tools don't contribute to damage directly, they improve a party's margin for error. Most groups are not speed clearers, parsing parties, or world first groups. Most players make mistakes, even when reclearing. There is value in jobs that have less damage, but bring some form of utility, but not all utility is inherently valuable. Rescue, for example, as clever as it is, almost never applies to Savage scenarios. Forms of currently meaningful utility we have:
- Instant Raise/Free Raise (Instant being vastly more useful)
- Mitigation (in some parts mandatory, but additional mitigation is beneficial as well)
- Sustain (on non-healers--tools that aid the healers for back-to-back damage mechanics)
- Mobility (Mainly expedient)
I'd also consider Macrocosmos to be a fringe example of utility as while it is primarily a healing tool, we did have a mechanic that Macrocosmos was able to skip during P3S. I'd consider that beyond normal healing requirements. I'd say that tools that allow the party to skip mechanics count as utility rather than straight healing.
There are other aspects that could count as Utility as well, such as MP restoration and debuff removal, but these are not tools that have applicable value right now. They could be made to be useful, but don't actually matter right now.

SCH remains at the top of the healer list because it has both the best damage and the best utility--great mitigation and expedient. Below SCH, AST has better damage thanks to raid buffs than SGE, and SGE has better utility with all of its extra mitigation. The two aren't exactly even, but they're not that far apart either. WHM has the worst damage and only offers free Raising for utility, which has negligible value as MP is not a major concern this expansion, and also has almost no party mitigation in a meta that demands it.

The balance that I'd like to see in the future would look something like:

SGE: Highest damage a few notches above the others; selfish damage only that is more challenging to optimize. Moderate mitigation; no utility beyond that.
WHM: Second highest damage; mostly selfish with a modest raid buff (like determination). Moderate mitigation; new utility (I proposed Float previously--buff that negates floor damage and puddle damage).
SCH: Second lowest damage; more DoT focused with Chain Stratagem. High mitigation; expedient as utility.
AST: Lowest damage; selfish DPS disguised as support with raid buffs. High mitigation; add instant raise utility.

I would like to see 7.0 shift away from the 2 minute meta of course, but buffs can still exist if we go back to having different cooldowns on things. This would just be the overall field with all that considered.

A visual representation of where I picture these damage values falling with PLD as the control--the lowest DPS tank:

EDIT: I found a website where I could make an actual graph to better articulate the values I imagine. I used a vaguely similar metric to where the tanks currently stand as a reference point, and the healers are adjusted to what I'm describing. I know our community generally holds damage on a higher pedestal than everything else, but in practice, there are many times where I can say that my own group would've not wiped had we a RDM instead of a BLM. No shade to my group's BLM of course. It was never his fault because he couldn't raise or anything, but the value he brought in having extra damage did not matter when having a raise would. There are also times where his extra damage helped us skip And all I mean by that is, adding margin for error, while not as easily measurable, is a worthwhile exchange for DPS for most groups.

[IDontPetLalas]

I don't understand why you would list macrocosmos as utility for AST, and not list Chain Strategem for SCH, if anything I would say CS is > macrocosmos (not that maco isn't a good skill, it is). Looking at the highest to lowest healer, there's a fairly wide DPS gap, unless I am reading it completely incorrectly than would increase the gap from the current state - which not be an improvement- and would add a utility skill (instant raise) that would be situational - if anything I would say make it a role skill, but don't subtract from AST because of it.

[DivineP]

In order to create a healthy balance between jobs within any given role, we need to acknowledge these key factors:

Damage
Damage comes in two major forms:
1. Selfish DPS
2. Offensive Buffs
Whether your damage comes from your own DPS or buffs doesn\\'t really matter. Buffs add a few extra steps to calculating your total damage dealt, but what matters is that total. BLM is still considered the strongest DPS caster despite not having raid buffs even though RDM and SMN do because its selfish DPS is much higher. Damage also isn\\'t just a specific variable. You can also take into consideration aspects like job difficulty and uptime which can create more flexibility in job balance as its not always about which job can be

Is your charts, actual SE tho? Or your calculations through an add-on?

[ty_taurus]

Is your charts, actual SE tho? Or your calculations through an add-on?

It's google sheets lol. It's not calculated, it's just me coloring in cells to represent where I think each healer would fall. Note that because it's google sheets, it's blockly. It looks more exaggerated than it is.

I don't understand why you would list macrocosmos as utility for AST, and not list Chain Strategem for SCH, if anything I would say CS is > macrocosmos (not that maco isn't a good skill, it is). Looking at the highest to lowest healer, there's a fairly wide DPS gap, unless I am reading it completely incorrectly than would increase the gap from the current state - which not be an improvement- and would add a utility skill (instant raise) that would be situational - if anything I would say make it a role skill, but don't subtract from AST because of it.

Chain Stratagem would fall under damage. I don't consider damage buffs utility because utility is traditionally non-damaging methods of influencing combat. Things like crowd control, mobility buffs, debuff removal, resource management, cooldown reductions, etc. Chain Stratagem just increases damage dealt to the target (via critical hits). Macrocosmos is only fringe utility in my mind if its negating a mechanic. Otherwise it's just healing.

[Floortank]

Healing is just adding a value to an HP number. There isn't a lot you can do with that. That is the only way healing is expressed. You can overheal (shield), which is just a temporary extension of the HP number. You can reduce the subtraction of HP through temporary damage reduction.

Since you can't expand this to any further variety the solutions people put forward are always geared toward changing boss encounters in ways that only benefit healers while screwing over everyone else. On top of that, the benefit to healers are dubious.

For example, if you put vuln stacks instead of damage down (as OP suggested) all that means is the healer simply will not be able to heal someone if they take vuln. It makes you less good at healing, because you won't be able to mathematically prevent them from hitting 0 HP no matter what you do. It would entail your damage reduction mitigation becoming stronger or boss damage mechanics becoming weaker, because in Savage they can already kill you easily on your first mistake, if you aren't topped off or if your gear isn't the best yet.

All by itself, vuln over damage down doesn't actually help healers and entails a lot of other changes to mechanics and abilities just on the back of this one idea.

Every "healer" system change suggested is like this--it entails a bunch of things changing about the way the game is played and penalizes every other role in favor of rebuilding the whole game around healing.

Your job is just to put numbers back on the HP bar. If you don't like that, healing isn't for you.

[Nihility]

The problem is the rigid game design more than anything.
Probably sound like a broken record but as long as every healer needs particular types of heals on set intervals. They're all going to be very samey with the only difference being the margins.

Same deal with tanks. The actual damage soaking capacity needs to basically be the same on all so best tank is simply the most dps one.

[IDontPetLalas]

It's google sheets lol. It's not calculated, it's just me coloring in cells to represent where I think each healer would fall. Note that because it's google sheets, it's blockly. It looks more exaggerated than it is.



Chain Stratagem would fall under damage. I don't consider damage buffs utility because utility is traditionally non-damaging methods of influencing combat. Things like crowd control, mobility buffs, debuff removal, resource management, cooldown reductions, etc. Chain Stratagem just increases damage dealt to the target (via critical hits). Macrocosmos is only fringe utility in my mind if its negating a mechanic. Otherwise it's just healing.

Thanks, also the graphics are much appreciated , i just saw the one comparing tanks to healers, which is closer to what I was visualizing.