Your Opinion on the Current State of Job Identity/Balance in 6.4?

[Renathras]

If job A could do 10,000 dps by nodding birding one button or job B 10,000 dps by using a dozen or so different abilities in a structured rotation the latter will be more engaging but people will choose the former for consistency and ease and hate it. The “four healers” model as you put it is unworkable for the same reason new summoner is fundamentally incompatible with the game design.

That's their choice.

One of the world firsts had a BLM. His reason was "Because I like it." One of the world firsts had a DRK when DRK was considered the hardest Tank and somewhat sucked. "Because I like it" was his reason, too.

As long as Jobs output the same performance, PF generally isn't going to discriminate. And high end Ultimate players are so good, they kind of get to play what they like (world first races, I mean).

Moreover, that's still far better than the solution of either sticking with the Healer Jobs we have now - where half the people are upset - or changing them all to make those people happy, just alienating the other half - where half the people are upset now, too.

All things being equal - and equal DPS potential IS all things being equal - choice is better than no choice.

Or would you rather we just keep the Healers the same as they are now so you can pick any of the four and not be blacklisted because they're no different?

I feel the devs are hard focused on trying to increase tank numbers that everything else is secondary right now.

Doesn't look like it's working either.

I guess Tanks are like Healers - people feel a lack of identity and distinction in the Trinity role - but with even more "responsibility" (or the feeling/perception of it; tankxiety is real). So you end up with Blue DPS not being popular because the people who want to TANK don't feel like they're Tanking as a DPS, and if they're going to play a DPS, they're going to just play a DPS Job.

Same thing with Healers, just it's somehow (?) even worse with Tanks.

To be fair, Tanks are much closer to "Blue DPS" than Healers are to "Green DPS", complete with having DPS-lite rotations.

New summoner is way better than old summoner by far and actually fulfills the summoner fantasy.

Maybe, but I still contend it would be nice if they had split old SMN into (a) new SMN and (b) Green Mage DoT based Job.

Except, when DoTs...

I may need the Judge Judy "Help me with this one" meme. Ahem, okay, I'll try to keep this on point:

1) Old SCH was not NEARLY that dynamic. You used your DoTs on duration for refreshes, and Quickened Aetherflow was unreliable and often janky. You also spent the bulk of your casts on the same button. Yeah, you had LESS Broils than you do now, but still a pretty significant portion. What was REALLY different is you actually had to heal back then.

2) "all decently important" - yeah, but not highly distinct from what you have now. It won't keep you interested for months and years on end if the encounter designs are still "press one heal every 45 seconds or so". I dunno, maybe that's enough for you, but it isn't for many of us.

3) "While it could certainly have been be better in early game, you still had most of the gameplay available to any Trinity game." - not really, no. I played as the elemental mage class, since that was the CLOSEST thing to a healer (and one that had healer specs at high levels). There was no way for me to actually go dedicated healer early on. Best I could manage was a few aoe field healing effects which didn't matter since anyone who would group with me was self-healing and dodge rolling (because that's a thing in that game) mechanics anyway. People generally didn't party up when I was playing, and I played up to the mid-20s, going from what I guess was the Human starter area, to the zone to the south, and then I got bored and poked my nose into the zone to the east, another zone to the south and around a lake or something into a big capital city that was confusing as hell, I think was the hub to expansion areas and high end content/dungeons I couldn't do, and then across the water I remember a cave with jumping puzzles and...a ghost pirate or something, I think. (I didn't hate the game, I just couldn't get into it mechanically or thematically.) People largely just...didn't group at all, or only did so for the big FATE Boss things.

4) You can berate what other people like all you want - that doesn't change the fact other people like those things.

5) "How would the latter likely not be an 'action RPG'?" - because if you don't want the ARPG elements, you just play one of the classes that doesn't work that way.

6) "Moreover," - No, we haven't. Which MMO is that? GW2 isn't that. I don't think you can play any class as a FPS or fighting game, and their tab targeting caster doesn't really work as one. FFXIV doesn't work that way, for similar reasons with the exception BLM, to an extent RDM, and the Healers DO act as casters. I can't think of a single MMO that meets that description. Which are you thinking of?

New summoner is all flash and no substance, a caster in name only, and the shining example of what a rework looks like at the hands of these devs.

Perfect for players that don't have a single synapse firing off in their brains.

If you have to insult people to make a point, you don't have a point worth making.

New SMN is fun to play. It's a Caster, though as you level, you hardcast increasingly less (though there's also a BLM rotation that is all instant casts, even if it is absurd, no one calls BLM a non-Caster because of it). New SMN has a lot of things going for it:

1) It is what it says on the tin.
2) You DON'T have to use extensive out of game resources to understand how to play it correctly.
3) It more or less lines up properly with the way the game is currently designed to play (2 min cycles).
4) It doesn't have mechanics that require you to spend as much or more time glaring at your hotbars or Job gauge as you do on the boss encounter.
4b) It can be played by feel as a result, which is really nice (that is, fingers on buttons and rolling through your known cycles).
5) It's also not static, or only as static as you want it, as you can move various pieces of your rotation around.

SMN is the Job that actually fits the "just read your tooltips" paradigm; as it's one you CAN "just read your tooltips" and play optimally. It also just works, something a lot of Jobs don't do, or don't do without massaging. And it doesn't require one to do hours of theorycrafting or try to wade through the toxic cesspool that is The Balance discord to figure out how to play properly.

I DO think (as I said above and have said before) that what old SMN was should have been retained in some form (Green Mage/GRM being my go-to for that), but new SMN itself is not only fine, it's a really good design. It's not a design EVERYTHING SHOULD BE - as I say in my 4 Healers Model, the problems come when things are identical, not when they are distinct - and it's nice to me that the Caster subrole has three Jobs that all feel distinct from each other. Say what you will, but no sane person is going to say that BLM, RDM, and SMN play alike. Caster is arguably the most diverse - in terms of playstyle and "feel" of play - of any of the Roles/Subroles in the game right now. And that's a good thing.

Would it be better if GRM was there alongside them? Oh absolutely.

BLM is probably the worst example you could've chosen because...

Irrelevant.

If the argument was - and it was - that fights are too movement oriented to use GCD heals, then they'd also be too movement oriented to use GCD damage casts. And while BLM has insane movement if prepped for it and rolling through their various movement tools, it's not INFINITE. BLM isn't SMN. Meaning if BLM can get away with it in current content, so can Healers.

Hell, WHM already has this. Swiftcast, natural Dia refreshes, and up to 3 Lilies (4 if we include Misery) is a ton of free movement when you need it. Bonus points, Dia can be used as a movement tool for (minor) DPS gain since it has that initial damage. And 1.5 sec Glare casts means extensive slidecasting. SCH can go to Ruin 2spam if it really really needs to move a long way. SGE can Icarus and has up to 3 Toxicons, up to 2 Icaruses, and can even use Eukrasian shields for a 50% damage refund (a DPS gain over "doing literally nothing") if needs to go a super far distance.

BLM is also not the best designed toolkit, it just happens to have been well adapted; something you could easily do for Healers without much difficulty.

Also: You realize shifting Healers to their SB kits would be a rework, right?

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This got a chuckle out of me.

It's true, though.

Not to mention the Shadows of Mhach and Ivalice raid series were BOTH legendary for their difficulty at release. Orbonne had to be nerfed. A LOT. Like...it wouldn't surprise me at all if the nerf total was more than half a dozen, or possibly even a dozen. TG Cid, in particular, is legendary for wiping parties, and Orbonne was the only non-Extreme/Savage instance I can recall ever timing out on, and it wasn't just the one time.

"Tales of Duty Finders" are mostly anecdotes, and many are probably made up entirely. It's a thread where anyone can post whatever they want with no evidence.

We have as much evidence people playing healers enjoy it as we have that people do not - anecdotal stories and individuals posting that they like or dislike it.