Has anyone quit healing?

[Silver-Strider]

WHM started off lower than SCH in HW, but surpassed it going into SB, and has been ahead of it ever since. Almost like SCH’s SB kit was, comparatively/relatively (both numbers went up, but in the “by how much” comparison) less popular than WHM’s SB kit. Which is saying something, considering how bad WHM’s SB kit was. Healers seemed to have disliked SCH’s gameplay and kit more than WHM’s. Interestingly, AST was ahead of SCH from late SB (and yeah, broken as all hells) and into ShB and on to the present, though SGE is right there with SCH and neither is that far behind AST.

The SCH drop can be explained as a result of SE starting their lobotomy of healers in SB. While WHM lost a lot of abilities that either became role actions (Largesse, Cleric Stance, etc) or were just straight up replaced with something (Stoneskin -> Divine Benison), it didn't lose any attacks really and its long standing MP issue had finally been resolved with Thin Air's inclusion, leaving the only real problem with the job being the Lackluster RNG nature of Lilies and Confessions that could fully be ignored since their impact to WHM's gameplay was practically non-existent. AST maintained itself for the most part in SB in terms of functionality as well. Sure, Noct sect was meh but at least it worked well enough to hold itself up and got some new card gimmicks to maintain its identity. In comparison, SCH just flat out lost several of its previous tools such as Shadowflare, Bane, Energy Drain, and Miasma 2 while Bio 1+2 were merged into a single skill. Couple this with Succor/Addlo getting cost increases that made it next to impossible to sustain with, even in casual content, that of course it's going to drop like a stone in the Ruby Sea. It was an effort in futility to play SCH before SE "fixed" it in subsequent patches by returning Energy Drain and Miasma 2 but the damage was done at that point and no amount of making Dissipation playable was going to magically bring back all those players that dropped the job.

There's nothing really curious about that at all.