So...Can a SCH tell me how SCH's are right now relative to WHM and AST?

[loreleidiangelo]

SCH is fine, but I enjoy it less than I used to. Its playstyle is increasingly mirroring that of the other healers, and the two aspects of the Job that I enjoy most (barriers and pet management) have been consistently de-emphasized since the end of 2.x.

Putting aside for the moment questions of what was or wasn't OP, the fact remains that the faerie makes less of an impact and AST barriers are measurably superior.

TL;DR: SCH is fine, but it isn't the same. Your mileage may vary. Some people may even like it better now. *shrug*

This is definitely a concern, as an old old OLD SCH main who dropped the job with both AST's release (I love buffing people) and 3.0's SCH design. Someone else said they thought that 3.x and 4.x were better for healers than 2.x because in 2.x the two healers were more niche, but I think that was a great design philosophy and when SCH got a bunch of reactive AOE heals in HW it just pushed the healers even closer to homogenization in the name of "balance". Now we get endless threads about "WHM needs utility because the other healers have it" or "ASTs need to have stronger shields because SCH has the fairy" or whatever. Everyone basically wants healers to have an answer to every problem in their kit, but then question why there's so much bickering over things like "utility" and the "healer DPS meta" - newsflash, when throughput is designed to be pretty much more than adequate for both single-target AND AOE situations across the board, there's not much else to separate them but those two metrics.

I still feel like SCH's Heavensward additions were a knee-jerk reaction to people who couldn't handle trials in the DF going tits-up without a WHM's AOE healing to brute force them through. I still remember the crying over dual SCHs in Titan HM, when the primary sales group on my server was solo-healing it with one. I also feel like AST's entire bastardized lazy "hybrid" design was absolutely done out of fear of one of the healers having a bad "niche" for upcoming raids and thus left out...hilariously, AST backfired so much that there was basically ALWAYS "one healer left behind" from 3.0 to 4.05.

I feel like future healers are going to be just as predictable and limited in their design sadly so long as damage dispensation and lack of clear, definable healing niches remains the same. (Let's be real, is there anything in a raid other than single-target or AOE spike damage in predictable intervals ATM? I can easily take Esuna off my bar for raids because there's nothing meaningful to cleanse and never will be; RIP Selene's unique utility in that area. There's no meaningful room for an efficient sustain healer to shine either, as everything is just brute forcing HP bars then brute forcing the boss's HP bar DOWN for a few globals after that.)

[Dregenfox]

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Def agree with everything you said - unfortunately all mmo's eventually gravitate towards class homogenization because diversity/uniqueness = imbalance and imbalance = unhappy players who complain on forums. It's not necessarily a bad thing though - this ensures all players have viable classes to play while still feeling somewhat unique.

[Yuyuka3]

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Omg, I agree with you 100%. I always got a thick neck when some idiot went "WHM got Cure III, we need something like it because we need everything WHM has!". No. No, you don't. You need your own separate skills. Yes, I was among the people wanting utility for WHM. I still think that WHM needs utility, because if two other healers can heal just as well as the third, but also bring utility the third cannot, why bring the third if there's no advantage in doing that? Jury is still out for me if that situation won't return later on in the patches (my guess is it will, tbh).

In the beginning, you had WHM as a direct healer and SCH as the mitigation healer; now, all healers shifted closer towards each other, and that is NOT a good development. Also, that lazy hybrid healer design of AST sucks. They should have introduced it as its own thing instead of a hard to balance copy cat of the other two healers...