Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[ForsakenRoe]

My answer to this, for a while, has been "We have 4 Healer Jobs, we should make them different so they appeal to different types of players."

Misshapen Chair did a video a few months back where his conclusion was basically "Leave WHM alone for people that like healing now, give SGE its SB kit back, give AST Nocturnal stance back and its SB cards back, and make SGE into a galaxy brain DPS rotation thing and see if people embrace it or not; and everyone can play the one they want and not demand to be 'rewarded' with more damage, as 'having fun and not being bored' is your reward, so shut up about a measly 2% DPS difference".

...he was a bit more vulgar, mind you, but I pretty much agree. Here's the video: https://youtu.be/sbWubxOTUWU?t=672
"Healing In FFXIV Is Not Fun"

Right around that timestamp. The whole video's worth a watch, too.

Since this came up, I'll reiterate a discussion/argument me and Ren had about this topic. It went through three different metaphors. Essentially, Ren's position (and Chair in the video, I guess) is that, suppose every healer is equivalent to the meat in a curry. WHM is Chicken Korma, SGE is Prawn Makhani, SCH is Lamb Bhuna, AST is Beef Vindaloo. So everyone has a spiciness they are comfortable with, right? But what if I really like Chicken, but I find Korma bland and boring because there's no spice? Why do I have to be told 'lmao idiot if you want spice go eat another kind of meat', I want chicken

On the flip side, my position was this: if every healer was meat in a curry, then the game should offer a range of spicyness levels of curry for each meat. SO WHM is Chicken, yes, but the curry house offers Korma, Tikka Masala, Madras,, Jalfrezi, Vindaloo. And then the same for the other meats. It'd be up to the player how much they want to optimize, same as how on a MNK for example, you can get by with the standard rotation. Or you can do Double Solar opener to optimize a bit. Or you can lock your framerate (???) to gain DPS (no idea how that works)

Then Ren gave up because the meat analogy was not working, and moved onto comparing the healers to FPS games. WHM is Halo, SGE is Titanfall, SCH is COD, AST is Battlefield, or such. Except again, WHM was 'Halo on easy mode', AST was 'Battlefield on (whatever the hardest mode is)', etc. Whereas I would prefer to see all the games have a variety of difficulty options, so that if someone LOVES Halo, but gets too good at it because it's easy mode, they can move up to Normal or Hard, rather than being told 'Oh you want a harder challenge, go play COD or Battlefield'. Maybe they don't like grounded FPS games or the war aesthetic of those games

Suffice to say, we did not come to an agreement. Me wanting WHM to have the potential to be a mild relaxed experience or a super spicy curry (depending on what the player is seeking from the class) was interpreted as 'then the casuals HAVE to make use of the full optimization suite', implying like every RPR in EX is doing double communio or every RDM is delaying melee combos into their manafication/embolden