Healers, then and now:

[Renathras]

Seems a strange choice to pick SB for such an in-depth dive as this TBH? Stormblood set the tone even if they did have to walk it back a bit. ShB and EW followed the same trend.

No, SB is the most logical point. I'll read through some of the rest of these later, but here's the reasoning:

1) The most available data is for SB. It's when the game started hitting it big but before the "dumbing down" of ShB.

2) SB is the cementing of the modern era of the game's design. HW had things like Cleric and encounters with things like the Gorilla to push the bombs, things that no longer exist in the modern encounter design. PARTICULARLY for Healers because it's the point where Cleric no longer existed, which ushered in the modern concept of playing a Healer in FFXIV.

3) Modern raid/encounter cadence, gearing systems, materia systems (for the most part), etc were all cemented in SB. HW still had Elemental Resist and level-up stat point allocation.

4) The modern damage profiles date to SB (HW Tanks did less damage than Healers, not more)

5) The modern Job mechanics/gauges started for most Jobs in SB.

6) Most Jobs that exist or had major additions date to SB (or later). The HW trio have all had redesigns since then, some several times, for example, while SAM/RDM and on have stayed MOSTLY the same.

7) SB was lauded (during ShB) as the height of Job and encounter design, that ShB was seen as having fallen from.

8) SB was when the game really opened up to where a majority of players were likely challenging harder content like Extremes, the 24 mans were also more challenging (launch TG Cid, anyone?), and Savage was done by at least a quarter of the playerbase, something not true by most accounts in HW.

9) Most Jobs resemble their SB forms even now, and even after reworks (excepting the most extensive like MCH and SMN); HW still had things like damage-less gap closers, bow mages, type damage buffs/debuffs (e.g. blunt damage resist down on bosses) and so on.

10) Finally, because people on this forum like to talk about how great SCH and AST were in SB (and WHM when I'm not there to remind them how much it did not), so it seemed worth it to take off the rose tinted goggles and look at that point with clear vision. On some points, they are very clearly right (SCH in particular), so it seemed the most logical point of reference for this reason as well.

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In short, SB is the most logical place to use as the baseline. If you really go back and look through the old skills (Mr Happy's doing a series on just taht), MOST Jobs had some pretty different mechanics in ARR and HW, to the point SB+ can almost be considered "A Realm Reborn, Reborn".