Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

[Hatstand]

Hi Billy. Really glad to be consolidating things like this.

As a general note on damage abilities: here I advocate for many more offensive abilities for healers. That doesn't mean I want them to do more damage. It means I want them to do damage in a more interesting manner. If any of my suggestions went into effect I'd want SE to modify the potencies of all relevant abilities to keep damage contribution stable.

SCH:

The fairy:

Back in 2.0, the SCH fairy both lowered the skill floor (on sic it would take care of some of your healing for you while you worked out how your own buttons worked) and raised the skill ceiling (being able to effectively micromanage embraces and use the cooldowns effectively took some skill, as well as keeping it alive while also keeping it in range of as much of the party as possible. Additionally, starting to use Selene instead of Eos felt like a graduation: you feel comfortable enough in your own healing that you're happy to give up some healing tools in exchange for more utility.

By contrast, the current fairy feels like it lowers the skill floor without providing anything engaging. Embrace can no longer be manually controlled, so it's always just a free heal. Because of the delays on casting for the other skills, they can't be reliably used to mitigate specific mechanics, so instead I find myself weaving them in alternately whenever I have room to weave something extra. This is better than nothing, but not particularly engaging.

Another side effect of the fairy being immortal and not on the party list is that it can be hard to keep track of her, especially when playing in synced content without the fairy gauge. I find that when I manually place her I often forget that she won't follow me and leave her behind. This is more of an annoyance than anything else, but it feels like insult to injury after the other changes.

My suggested fix:

I understand the argument that being able to use fairy skills completely independent of your regular gcd is overpowered, even if it's only for 2 skills. I would like to have the fairy back on its own gcd, but I'd settle for regaining manual control of embrace independent of the gcd. I want this independent of the gcd because if it wasn't then it wouldn't be worth using, and I don't think that this is OP since the fairy is always casting embrace anyway, so you're only gaining some control, not any additional healing. The fairy healing abilities also need to be actually instant. Let them interrupt embrace. It would be nice if an interrupted embrace simply finished early and gave a much smaller heal, but I could deal with it being wasted if it means my fairy commands happen on time.

Also, give Selene distinct abilities again. I don't mind whether they're her old ones or a new set, but I'd like to see something that can be used for utility and something that can be used offensively.

Finally, if they made it so that your fairy would automatically go back to following you if you went out of range to control her that would be a significant QoL upgrade.

Downtime:

As you get better at a fight, or more geared for it, you end up spending more and more time spamming the same 1 or two buttons. This is especially pronounced in old content, where it's possible to heal a dungeon with only 1-2 healing abilities used per minute.

The only solution I can see is to give SCH's more offensive abilities. I'd like some of these to be dps abilities, for use in solo content, but I'd also be happy with offensive debuffs, or buffs, or whatever, so long as whatever system is put in place is reasonably interesting and can fill an indefinite amount of downtime where there is no healing required. Back in 2.0, almost half of SCH's abilities could be used offensively. I'd like to get closer to that ratio. Perhaps not to 50/50 but at least to 1/3 of abilities being capable of being used offensively. (Abilities that can be used offensively include abilities like WHM's Presence of Mind, since this can be used to spam Glare's and do a lot of damage very quickly, not just abilities that are dedicated only to damage).

Increasing the amount of healing required, or reducing the power of our heals could also help here, but I think it's important for us to get more offensive skills either way because there will always be content which we have mastered/outgeared to the point that we have downtime. Downtime tools we have but don't need can be ignored. Downtime tools we need but don't have are a problem.

This factors into SCH at lower levels:

Considering how many SCH abilities have been gutted from lower levels, playing SCH at those lower levels feels excruciating. Upon equipping the SCH job stone, SCH loses Miasma, Energy Drain, Fester, Bane and a second, unique summon. In return it gains adlo. This means that at level 30, a SCH has only 1 DoT, 1 nuke, Physick, Adlo, Whispering Dawn, and Rez (along with role abilities repose (useless), esuna, swiftcast, and lucid dreaming.) SMN, by contrast, has Bio, Miasma, Ruin, Energy Drain, Fester, Bane, Physick, Egi Assault (which I will count for 3 abilities considering that it changes depending on summon and summoners can switch pets pretty much for free), rez, bane, and energy siphon (along with role abilities addle, swiftcast, and lucid dreaming). This simple comparison shows how threadbare early SCH is, and how bad it feels to equip the SCH job stone.

My suggested fix: In early dungeons, the healing tools we have are more than sufficient. The dungeons were designed with those healing tools in mind, and so any extra heals would just create more downtime. SCH needs more front-loaded offensive abilities. They don't have to be the same abilities as SMN, but give us a new ability for each ability that we lose upon equipping the job stone (adlo doesn't count because we get it instead of summon III AND energy siphon). I'd like this to include some sort of AoE, which Bane used to be for SCH.

The Fairy Gauge:

We got energy drain back because we needed an aetherflow dump, but this is just kind of moving the problem. If we don't need any aetherflow heals, we presumably don't need more fairy gauge heals. This is once again a problem of too many healing tools for not enough healing required.

My suggested solution: add offensive options to the fairy gauge. Maybe it's a buff. Maybe it's as simple as empowering whichever fairy is out, which could be used offensively if Selene is reworked to have offensive abilities (probably in the form of buffs/debuffs). However, I don't want fairy gauge to become just another aetherflow. There's no point in having two gauges if we don't use them differently. For this reason, I'd like one of the two to be more effective for offensive utility and the other to be more useful for healing and defence. This is once again leaning into getting closer to 50/50 offence/defence. That way if there is no healing required you can use both gauges offensively, and if you're struggling to keep your group alive you can use both defensively, but optimal play (in non-trivial content) will come from using both gauges for their preferred purpose as much as possible.

WHM:

I have not played WHM to cap, but I will comment on WHM at the levels I have played it at. Ofc, my comments about the low number of moves at low levels, the offensive to defensive ratio, and the general downtime problem also apply to WHM, although I chose to express them in terms of SCH as that is the kit I'm most familiar with.

WHM at low levels:

Feels clunky. A lot of the weaving tools WHM later gets like assize don't become available until later, leaving low level WHM with very little weaving to do.

Solution: Add more moves or allow some more moves to be learned at an earlier level. One thing I'd love for WHM is an instant dps ability (like perhaps fluid aura) to weave with their instant heals.

Lilies:

Might work great at cap, but in lower level content, before you get misery, there's not much benefit to using them over regular heals unless you're strapped for mana or forced to move. Having an instant damage ability to weave would help, but I also think WHM needs an offensive lily dump. Not necessarily direct damage, so as not to just mimic aetherflow, but perhaps a buff. This offensive lily option should nourish the blood lily less than a healing lily ability, so that misery remains the primary offensive use of lilies, but this would mean that lilies have some offensive capacity before learning misery, and after misery is learned it becomes a choice between a small dps gain now or a greater overall gain from misery.

AST:

As a disclaimer, the last time I played AST seriously was back in 3.0. I never played it in 4.0 not because I didn't like it but because I unsubscribed pretty much as soon as I saw what they did to cleric stance. I kept pressing F (my old cleric stance key) and setting off the buff when it wasn't optimal or having nothing happen because it was on cooldown and that plus the loss of miasma 2 (hadn't been given back yet) was enough to turn me away. When I came back my focus was on SCH, which was my main, and I didn't get around to WHM and AST until after the expansion released.

Also, those who have been reading my posts will probably have seen these ideas before.

Cards:

As has been mentioned earlier in this thread, the current AST cards feel more like a dps rotation than a healer rotation. There's a correct way to use them that involves pressing a certain set of buttons in a certain order without much concern for context (except perhaps lining divination up with a certain mechanic or stack of buffs). Healing feels good to me when it's responsive. This doesn't mean that you should be waiting for health bars to drop and then topping them up, but rather that the optimal thing to do in a given situation will depend on changing factors: usually the mistakes made by your group and how well geared each party member is. The AST I remember leaned into that style of healing because you had an additional situation to adjust to: the cards that you draw. As such, I would like the cards to have different effects and some rng involved in which cards you get.

Useless cards:

Spire was pretty much useless, and Ewer and Bole could be useless under certain circumstances. However, given the old royal road system, along with the minor arcana system, you could get some use out of pretty much any card. That said, those runs where you draw 5 spires and only 1 spear were pretty painful.

My suggested fix: Make Spire into something else. Direct hit would work, or a buff that transforms damage dealt into healing. Balance could also have done with a nerf so that it wasn't so much better than the other offensive options. I would also liked to have seen bag randomisation, as was suggested in another thread, since a promise of getting balance once and exactly once every 3 minutes would be a lot less frustrating than the possibility of not drawing it once. I would combine this with a shuffle button which comes with a 2 minute cooldown. This button would reset the bag randomisation, so if you only have spire and bole left (for example) and know that there's not much damage coming up you can reset your chances and hopefully get something you need. Having this as a 2 minute cooldown means that you still have to interact with approximately 2/3rds of your cards at least per cycle (only approximately because of the next section's suggestion).

I'd support this with a small extra job gauge which displays the 6 card symbols. The symbols for cards still in the bag (can be randomly drawn) would be lit up, and the symbols for used cards would be colourless. This way you could easily tell what you might have to work with, and when you want to shuffle.

I'm not sure how I'd have the bag randomisation interact with redraws. I'd probably have them go back into the bag, but only AFTER you play another card, so that you can't redraw a card you rejected. Redraw just wouldn't work if there were no other cards in the bag you hadn't used, but you should never come up against a circumstance where there are no more cards to redraw and shuffle is on cooldown.

As an aside, I realise that SE might not want to put Ewer back in the game as it was, since mana management is now an individual responsibility. As such, I think they could change Ewer so that it works differently depending on who it's played on. On oneself it's a mana regen. On others it's a HoT, which would also have the effect of letting the AST conserve some mana by not healing for a beat or two. When used in AoE, Ewer would still have the mana regen effect for the user and the HoT for everyone else in the radius.

Lack of reliability on defensive buffs:

This is something I can also see as a valid problem, and while I always managed it by putting aside a bole or ewer for later (if I thought I'd need one), that does lock you out of that part of your kit, and only works for one emergency.

My suggested fix: Force the Fates. I've mentioned this a few times before, but this would be a cooldown which could be used instead of play (using it would also put play on cooldown). Upon activating Force the Fates your basic moves would change to be the icons of the cards, much like the basic dancer moves change into steps, and you could choose which card to play. The card that you select would be removed from the current bag, so you wouldn't be able to randomly draw that card until all the other cards had been drawn (since last reset) or shuffle is used, but you would be able to choose a card that had been previously drawn since the last bag reset, so drawing a card randomly doesn't mean that you won't be able to access it when you need it. I'd be happy putting this on as short as a 1 minute cooldown, so that you could choose every other card you draw. This would mean that ASTs could have reliable access to mana regen and damage mitigation while also maintaining the "make the most out of what you draw" aspect of the class with every other draw. Also, if you didn't need any extra defence, this could be burned for balance after balance. As a QoL thing, I'd probably have the Force the Fates button itself turn into the balance icon, since this will probably be the most common usage, and it will make things easier. I'd have to test that out, though, and make sure people weren't accidentally double pressing and getting an unwanted balance. Also, interacting with the shuffle cooldown from before, this would mean that theoretically, if you draw regularly before you force the fates and draw the card you then choose both times you might end up only using 2 cards before you shuffle, whereas if you force the fates first you have to use at least 3.

Positives

SCH:

Healing kit still feels good, apart from the unresponsive fairy, even if it feels a bit bloated with more heals than I need.

I genuinely like Art of War (as opposed to Holy or Gravity) because dancing out of AoEs while trying to keep everything in range is fun, and allows for weaving heals well (due to being able to keep target on the tank and its instant nature). I actually wouldn't mind this being our primary AoE instead of Miasma II, but would like Miasma II to return as a pure DoT, whether AoE or single target to be spread with Bane. The Art of War animation could be better, but I'm less fussed about animations than about functionality. They can fix this after literally everything else.

WHM:

Presence of Mind. Honestly my favourite button in the whole game. I love that it can be used offensively (spam a bunch of glares); defensively, if you've fallen behind in healing (thin air, presence of mind, and spam cure 2/3 like your life depends on it); or for a combination of offence and defence, depending on your read of the situation.

The stun on holy is very nice. I got great satisfaction in Palace of the Dead saving my party from mobs by knowing their moves and starting my holy early enough to interrupt them. I would quite like WHM to have an instant interrupt (on a cooldown) as well. It would be a nice little niche for them to have, as something they can bring that the other healers can't.

AST:

It's pretty. I'm sure there are other positives, too, but I haven't found the motivation to play new AST enough to find them.

This may get an edit or two if I think of anything else, but that's it for now. Thank you to anyone who got this far for reading my essay.