Encounter healing, ShB vs EW

[Renathras]

WHM being regarded as the 'red headed stepchild' of the day and being significantly improved (aside from losing A3) going into SHB does not undo all the losses the others faced. There is zero reason we couldn't have gained the SHB lily fix, AND kept Aero 3, for example. Trying to say that one replaced the other 'so nothing changed really' is like what SE tries to convince us with, with things like 'yeh you lost Stoneskin but here's Stoneskin with a new coat of paint (benison)', or the removal and readdition of the healing% increase CD called Divine Seal>Largesse>Temperance

Well, it's not the topic at hand, but this IS kind of a point I've made before. And why I've specifically advocated for Aero3/Banish since otherwise WHM is pretty much undisputedly better now than it was in SB. Most of the other things about SB WHM really sucked, and while people keep saying "SB was better", when pinned down on WHM, there's a lot of dithering passed Aero 3. It's also a reason for the advocation that WHM stay mostly the same since there's not really anything from that era aside from Aero 3 that people really miss when pressed on the question. And yet, people didn't complain about it being braindead back then, so apparently, having only Aero 3 that we don't know (and possibly a few less oGCDs...but with WHM, that doesn't really make a lot of sense...) was sufficient for people at the time to find WHM intensely engaging and fun to play.

Stoneskin and Benison aren't the same (one was a GCD, spamable and there was sometimes reason to do so, though by SB most people had stopped using it as much; the other is an oGCD with a CD that you weave between Nukespam casts), likewise, Divine Seal should honestly still be in the game and simply upgrade to Temperance (Largesse wasn't a separate action, it was Divine Seal converted to a Role Action).

But that's more for this thread, so I guess I'll cross-post it here.

[ForsakenRoe]

crosspost

The SB WHM issue stems more from, at least from how I saw it then (and with hindsight my view of it is only doubled down on), simply this: WHM did not evolve enough going from HW into SB. AST and SCH both got new cool things to get excited over, new Card system stuff for AST like Minor Arcana and Sleeve Draw, and Earthly Star as an actual OGCD healing tool (since it had none up til then). SCH got a rework to Shadowflare that very few people asked for, but it also got Miasma2 as an actual AOE to spam (and the niche optimization for movement that it brought), Chain Strat as a raidbuff to help the team with (which everyone still loves to this day), and some new fairy stuff to play with (Fey Union, while memed on now, helped immensely with keeping the MT alive for extended periods without resorting to Adlos)

WHM, had it received the SHB Lily changes just 2 years earlier at the start of SB, instead of SHB, would not have been remotely as dunked on. It'd still have caught some flak because AST's cards were just so good, but they didn't even really try to balance WHM to have better damage output to make it compete with AST. They could have then had, based on that, 4 years of building WHM into a healer who's theme is using GCD heals to both heal and build a resource, then blowing all of that built-up resource in raidbuffs to compile massive burst damage. Instead, like SMN and to an extent MCH, it's going to be playing catchup to the others for a while

Back then, they had their vision of the 'pure healer', the one who can 'focus on doing good heal work' or whatever they were on about back then, and the experiment was a failure. That should have been the end of it. Instead, it was only the beginning.