Healer role design change?

[Renathras]

Again... do we really need to strip the melee-ranged-based complexities from Melee, the casting-based complexities from Casters, etc.?

Again, not my argument.

My position is that encounter design has changed since ARR/HW/even SB, and not for the better, and that encounter design needs to shift back. FFXIV is not an ARPG, it needs to stop having fights designed as if it were one.

Imagine, for a moment, SCH without Aetherflow. It wouldn't make the cut, either. And why would it?

What are you talking about? SCH current meta is devoting as many AF as possible to pathetic 100 potency Energy Drains. Without AF, SCH would still work just fine. It still has an abundance of healing tools that can clear every encounter in the game right now. Again, the current design meta for SCH is "use no AF on heals". The only question would be if its slightly lower potency would make it unable to deal enough damage to clear content...and the answer would be yes, since ED is a pretty pathetic amount of increased potency on the whole that only makes the difference in cases of massive DPS player messups that bring Enrage that close to the wire.

Imagine, for a moment, any other healer with 2400 (or 1200n) less mobile curative ppm and 930 less offensive ppm.

That's oddly specific and not at all comparable to "remove this one set of mechanics from the Job and watch it be entirely non-viable".

None of them would survive that. I'm not sure why we're treating this as something WHM-specific.

As noted: Because it is WHM specific. WHM is a Job that seems designed for a different game, because it was. So was SCH, but it was originally designed as a more mobile support healer with oGCD focus to aid the main healer (WHM) while chiefly focusing on dealing damage. As this is more or less what FFXIV's combat system has become, SCH slots into it pretty well other than a little jank related to pet AI and snapshotting stuff.

FFXIV encounter design in general doesn't match the Healer design, but in the case of the other Healers, this is muted because they don't have as much raw healing (that becomes even more useless overhealing), they have more mitigation and mobility (what FFXIV encounters actually care about now), and their kits are focused on oGCD healing to augment fairly mobile damage dealing. They also aren't perfect with FFXIV's encounter design, but WHM is the outlier and the biggest sore showing the disconnect between the two.