Selene

[LegoTechnic]

As someone who played since ARR, the slow and eventual death of Selene still irritates me. Originally she was a "buff" fairy, alternating between a spell speed and skill speed buff, each up alternatingly for half a minute. This was pretty powerful, but skewed more towards some classes than others (benefit to BLM greatly outweighed that to melee, who could even experience TP issues). Thus they reworked it to a haste that not only benefited everyone about the same, but worked for auto-attacks as well. The problem though was the dynamic with the new AST and the pure-heal WHM, because the third healer (AST) was the "buff" healer, which Selene's kit had always hinted at. In essence, Eos kept its identity as the "WHM fairy", and Selene was now the "AST fairy", but then the balance issue of trying to make it so that AST's buffs didn't inherently outweigh the benefit of the pure-healer WHM came about, and they proceeded to struggle to somehow even out the three healers while for some reason keeping WHM selfish. For whatever reason, despite AST having its sects and SCH its fairy options, they never gave WHM any kind of role switch option beyond the shared CNJ cleric stance, and kept it rigid and locked as a pure healer without party synergy buffs. Eventually after trying for years to someone balance party buffs to this playstyle, they just threw in the towel with ShB and said "whatever, buffing sucks!" and squashed the whole system. AST got flattened and Selene was killed in the spirit of making card party synergy somehow equate in value against the personal potential of WHM and the new heal-focused SCH. They want all healers to perform as similar as possible without having to change the initial WHM focus of "no party buffs", and I'll never understand why.

All they had to do was give WHM a mode-change that would change spells that applied regen effects into ones that applied haste or something (I choose haste as a lore staple spell), and then they could be free to let healers buff and try to balance those benefits against one another rather than try to balance party synergy benefits against a class without them. They had already completely removed SCH and AST's debuff utilities because they didn't want to give WHM mitigation debuffs for some reason (miss you Virus/Disable), and the classes just become more and more focused on their recover mechanics, so I begin to wonder if they feel having healers be responsible for more than that is too hard during progression. Certainly healing progression is often one of the hardest things you can do in this game, but unlike other classes the difficulty of healing scales drastically down as mechanics are learned and gear is obtained, which is why many progression groups still started with comfortable, high-heal WHMs and then switched to smaller-heal, buffing ASTs once they were good with the fights.

But you know what the devious mastermind in me thinks? I think they did this so they'll have more options to give to the 4th healer, because I suspect they honestly have no idea what to do for it, so they will make it a bag of things removed from the other healers.