Startibg Sage?

[Absurdity]

SGE is very intuitive for people that have been playing FFXIV healers for a while, particularly for SCH mains, but it's not very intuitive for new healers that have not and are thinking in terms of "Where's my Cure 2?" or that haven't learned how powerful, cheap, and high uptime abilities like Physis 2 can be, or things like Soteria or Krasis.

Which is partially the fault of the leveling experience. Since Conjurer is the only healer starting job a lot of people will have started with that and learned to rely on Cure/Cure 2 during their leveling process, because the job has barely anything else for 49 levels.
But that reliance creates bad habits. You see it again and again, healers that just spam GCD heals and completely ignore their oGCDs since that's simply what their gameplay has been for the entirety of ARR.

Now put those healers on a job that relies on using oGCDs and you have a disaster in the making.

[Supersnow845]

Which is partially the fault of the leveling experience. Since Conjurer is the only healer starting job a lot of people will have started with that and learned to rely on Cure/Cure 2 during their leveling process, because the job has barely anything else for 49 levels.
But that reliance creates bad habits. You see it again and again, healers that just spam GCD heals and completely ignore their oGCDs since that's simply what their gameplay has been for the entirety of ARR.

Now put those healers on a job that relies on using oGCDs and you have a disaster in the making.

Another reason why WHM is actually the worst starting healer and is actually a massive new person trap

Starting with a shield healer that encourages passive regen which is super powerful at level 1 is the best way to learn the right habits on healer day 1

[Absurdity]

Another reason why WHM is actually the worst starting healer and is actually a massive new person trap

Starting with a shield healer that encourages passive regen which is super powerful at level 1 is the best way to learn the right habits on healer day 1

Even just making Scholar a starting option would already be a massive improvement, the other would be giving both Whitemage and Scholar their oGCDs (or a weaker version of them) during the 1-50 leveling process to get people used to them early on and prevent those bad habits from forming.

Just take AST as an example, it has Essential Dignity at level 15 so even in Sastasha it has access to an incredibly powerful oGCD heal on a relatively short cooldown.

[IceBlueNinja]

Sage does have prognosis at lvl 10 which is a medica 1 equivalent so it dont fall off too short in even low lvls but god do I wish we have an option to get certain lvl duty finders, nothing turns me off when I get some low lvl dungeon , healers dont get anything fun till at least 40+ or least in terms of sch/sage they at least get their gc shields while ast/whm is ugh. I also wonder why cant we just have our aoes at lvl 10 even if it means making it only do very mere damage.

[Renathras]

Which is partially the fault of the leveling experience. Since Conjurer is the only healer starting job a lot of people will have started with that and learned to rely on Cure/Cure 2 during their leveling process, because the job has barely anything else for 49 levels.
But that reliance creates bad habits. You see it again and again, healers that just spam GCD heals and completely ignore their oGCDs since that's simply what their gameplay has been for the entirety of ARR.

Now put those healers on a job that relies on using oGCDs and you have a disaster in the making.

Another reason why WHM is actually the worst starting healer and is actually a massive new person trap

Starting with a shield healer that encourages passive regen which is super powerful at level 1 is the best way to learn the right habits on healer day 1

(At the risk of derailing the thread...):

What you have to remember is ARR was off the heels of 1.X, and launched around the time of, what, Mists of Pandaria/Warlords of Draenor in WoW? Recall that Yoshi P had his team play those games to consider changes from 1.X to 2.0.

In ARR, all healing (just about) was GCD healing. SCH had 3 Lustrates per minute if it wasn't using any other AF abilities such as Energy Drain (this tug-of-war was still a thing back then) or Soil. This was still LARGELY true in HW for WHM and debatably true of AST. In that era, oGCD heals were much more limited, so when WHM level 1-50 was designed, and even when the level cap was raised to 60, it actually WAS a good introduction and training on healing in FFXIV. This was debatably still true in SB, but much less so for SCH and AST.

The game was originally designed around the idea of GCD healing, not oGCD healing.

Moreover, it's not TERRIBLE to heal that way on WHM - just shift to using Solace/Rapture once you get them.

Honestly, I'm not sure which healer Job would be the best to learn on (from level 1) at this point.

.

I DO agree that lower level oGCDs earlier in the leveling process is a good idea, though.