Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

[KanameYuuki]

Handing out cards ever 30s + 3x each 3m with Sleeve Draw while Redrawing and Minor Arcana them doesn't feel intuitive at any point, especially playing on a controller.

Add to that the fact that you have to manually detonate Horoscope otherwise you will get no value from it.

More than ever I feel those "useless" cards, either form getting the same seal over and over or getting the wrong type of card with a party composition that has no such DPS.



What I like, the visual team did an outstanding job as always with the class, Celestial Intersection, Horoscope and Neutral Sect are great additions to the job, not only thematically but gameplay wise are quite unique and miss them whenever I'm doing low level content.

[Almostward]

Ast feels gutted, and the rework lazy. Stormblood was a good time for Ast, but balance needed adjustments. Same with Spire.

Scholar I play the least of, but there are things i hate. Some attacks are gone leaving 3 (not including energy drain). Then their faries were over simplified and are now the same....making having 2 usless.

White Mage is the better off of the 3. Lilly gauge is better now since it's over time. Heals feel good and strong. And...blood for the blood lilly.

[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.

[Punslinger]

Where do I even begin?

1. Healer oGCDs are WAY too powerful relative to the amount of incoming damage. When healers can solo-heal UCoB and UwU, and when GCD heals are a last resort instead of a bread-and-butter tool, that is a clear sign that something is wrong.

2. The healer DPS kit is boring, because it broils down to spamming one button, until expanse contracts, eon becomes instant, and you find yourself staring at a perpetually-brightened sky.

3. Support has been largely moved to ranged DPS. AST's Balance-Bot card system makes it a lesser DNC, while SCH's utility is a cooldown that they push once every two minutes. If healers are going to have significant downtime during fights, then why not add in more support? I don't think most healers would mind if half of the GCDs currently being spent on Stone spam were repurposed for buff/debuff gameplay.

4. Square, and far too many players, have bought into a false "regens vs. shields" dichotomy. SCH has Whispering Wind and auto-Embrace. WHM had traited Stoneskin back in ARR, and has Divine Benison today. It is silly, in a game where healers try to use their GCD healing kit as little as possible, for people to define the healing classes by what their least-used heals do.

Too many players say, "There's regens and shields, what more can be done?" I dunno, how about some or all of the following:

- A trait that turns half of your DPS into healing on the party member nearest the target?
- A cooldown that creates an object that players can interact with to get healed?
- A reactive heal that acts like a mini-Excog, jumping to a new party member whenever it goes off, up to five times?
- A trait that, when you die, makes you invincible and immoble for 15 seconds but allows you to continue healing with zero MP cost?
- A cooldown that throws out a healing boomerang, healing players it passes by as it flies away from and back to you?
- A cooldown that's like Wildfire, but for healing?

That's all stuff that WoW already has.

That's not even getting into other things that could be done, like delayed heals, or movement-speed buffs, or a healing spell that gives some of your HP to the target, or a cooldown that "rewinds" your target's current HP to the highest level it was over the past 5 seconds, or...

5. There is very little interaction between the various parts of a healer's kit. You use your oGCDs, you use your GCDs if necessary, and that's it. If you look at other MMOs, their healers tend to have a lot of "Heal A does X% more healing if target is under the effect of Heal B" stuff. Healers are meant to combo their abilities into each other to maximize healing. Think about GCD heals getting a boost on targets that already have a regen. Or shield breaks having a chance to proc a free Aetherflow. (Or AST using Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition to extend card buffs, regens, their own Lucid Dreaming...man, wouldn't that be a cool idea?)

[Ubbernaut]

Where do I even begin?

1. Healer oGCDs are WAY too powerful relative to the amount of incoming damage. When healers can solo-heal UCoB and UwU, and when GCD heals are a last resort instead of a bread-and-butter tool, that is a clear sign that something is wrong.

2. The healer DPS kit is boring, because it broils down to spamming one button, until expanse contracts, eon becomes instant, and you find yourself staring at a perpetually-brightened sky.

3. Support has been largely moved to ranged DPS. AST's Balance-Bot card system makes it a lesser DNC, while SCH's utility is a cooldown that they push once every two minutes. If healers are going to have significant downtime during fights, then why not add in more support? I don't think most healers would mind if half of the GCDs currently being spent on Stone spam were repurposed for buff/debuff gameplay.

4. Square, and far too many players, have bought into a false "regens vs. shields" dichotomy. SCH has Whispering Wind and auto-Embrace. WHM had traited Stoneskin back in ARR, and has Divine Benison today. It is silly, in a game where healers try to use their GCD healing kit as little as possible, for people to define the healing classes by what their least-used heals do.

5. There is very little interaction between the various parts of a healer's kit. You use your oGCDs, you use your GCDs if necessary, and that's it. If you look at other MMOs, their healers tend to have a lot of "Heal A does X% more healing if target is under the effect of Heal B" stuff. Healers are meant to combo their abilities into each other to maximize healing. Think about GCD heals getting a boost on targets that already have a regen. Or shield breaks having a chance to proc a free Aetherflow. (Or AST using Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition to extend card buffs, regens, their own Lucid Dreaming...man, wouldn't that be a cool idea?)

THESE were the issues the healer rework should've addressed and kept in mind, not gutting the DPS kits in a misguided attempt to 'FORCE' players to heal. (when point #1 shows the fundamental flaw of such a plan).

Albeit I fear the uproar (and prob so does SE) if after ALL the shit they've done to Healers this expansion, they also gut their potencies. Though its a step that needs to be taken OR they need to embrace the Green DPS situation.

[Sloprano]

Thanks for making this thread, Billy. With the lack of a Feedback forum and I'm not sure if the devs read these forums at all I'm hoping to understand better what other people enjoy about their healer jobs, both in previous and current iterations. It might not get our tools back, but it's fun to write about.

SCH

TL;DR: I can only speak for Scholar, as I haven't played Astrologian or White Mage enough to know how they feel, but I feel all Healer's problems stems from that SE seemed to design healers around a scenario that doesen't exisist unless everything goes very wrong. Sure in normal Trials and Alliance, enrage timer is very lenient to non-existing, but this all feel like it was made to accomodate Savage and Ultimate, where you can't afford a death most of the time. As Tanks, our role isn't DPS, but as Tanks we are expected to do a lot of it fighting in Solo Duties and Quests. Being assured that healer DPS wasn't factored into fight designs I don't think is the reassurance for giving us something more than one DPS button with the occasional other to press. If we could get a Cleric Stance variant that turned all our healing spells into being able to hurt mobs then I'd be on board for making a majority of our skillsets healing spells.

-------------------------------------------------

I'm pretty bad at analysis as I barely remember what potencies my skills have, such I cannot rightly say if we're doing more damage on Scholar now than we to in previous expansions. I've been more interested in how it feels to play. Barring the time and resources it would take to make something new and interesting for the healer jobs, I'm all for reimplementing all Arcanist skills and a Cleric Stance stance with healing penalty as Scholars way to fall back on if there's no healing required.

Having played this a long time there was one side of the game I've been seeking out recently: Fights where everywhere can go wrong very fast, like E4 or any 24-man. Where I'm constantly ressing healing and waiting on cooldowns to pull someones healthbar out of danger from the next raidwide. That or in higher floors of HoH and PotD where mobs hit like trucks, standing in aoe or cleaves means death and there is a random element of patrols and traps. These are moments where I often can't think of doing anything but healing and ressurecting. Unforunately, these are a small fraction of the entire content wherein I can use the skillset of a Scholar and in everything else I can calmly heal it up because I know it's coming. It also happens it is exactly this content the game wants me to run countless times in order to gain tomes, level up characters, progress Fates and if I want to help someone in lower levels. I would really like for them to find this fun first and foremost.

Reason for the thrill seeking above is that I enjoyed that too back in 3.0, but then it was another side of the Healer playstyle for me. I could easily and quickly swap between modes. If I ran Sohm Al for the 30th time I had gotten a feeling of how tanks used to pull, so I would follow close, see how they settled in, make precautions and then activate Cleric Stance and see how much of DPS abilities I could get off before the tank's or DPS's HP got low. This was all the while I had Eos doing her part with Rouse, Whipsering Dawn, Fey Illumination and Fey Covenant inbetween my GCDs. The suite of damage and debuff abilities along with Eos was huge so it was a great fun game of seeing how much or what I could squeeze in before that mob was dead or someone needed healing. I wanted to be responsible, so always tried to gauge how fast the tanks HP was going down before turning on CS and saved at least one Aetherflow until AF was off cooldown again.

This wasn't exclusive to level 60 dungeons either, thanks to Arcanist getting a lot of it's skills before level 30 and Cleric Stance was a level 8 CNJ skill meant I could stay busy even in trivial content like Halatali while Eos could even take care of most of the healing. Did it make Scholar overpowered compared to the other healer jobs? Most probably as we could shoulder almost all healing on Eos. What I really think they should've done is bring the other healers up to where Scholar was: access to a dps class' multitude of skills at lower levels and give them something much earlier to deal with healing in leveling dungeons. Like Regen could be unlocked at level 15 for Conjurer. If classes are problem, then I can see them just letting Jobs absorb classes and have them start at level 1 as all new jobs do.

Thing was, at any time I could drop the DPS act (Cleric Stance notwithstanding) and turn into Triage mode after Alliance B suddenly got wiped out. I enjoyed DPS and Healer aspect both of the job. After the Small Sundering in 4.0 and the Great Sundering in 5.0 the DPS part is not longer enjoyable as a couple Broil III delivers seems to do what a lot of keyboard dancing took back then. It was not about the amount of damage, it was feeling of making use of everything I had, sometimes for a marginal improvement. After 5.0 I tried dedicated DPS jobs, the thrill of having many buttons to press is there, but it gets dull fast with nothing to heal. Scholar is now fun when I'm so busy can't think about doing damage, but gets dull there is nothing left to think about than doing damage. Which I'm afraid happens a lot of the time these days.

That they now are looking to condensate the 2.X Quests gives me hope they haven't forgotten there are Duties under level 71 that people still run and they could turn them into a bowl catharsis where you eagerly await all the ways you can mess up a pack of mobs with cornerstone abilities unlocked very early for not just healers, but all jobs.

[Lethros]

I think perhaps the rate of damage taken and HPS is not meaningful enough. Healing is quick, and damage taken can also be quick. DPS jobs do their thing stretched out over time. Healers do their thing in moments. They don't really have a combination of things to go through in a surge of tank or party damage. As the game is if there were more healing it would just be more spamming the same thing, except in a more stressful way. I don't think healers should have to be casting heals all the time, but that the actions they use have a longer relevance/meaning. Maybe a bit less reactionary and more balancing of HPS/incoming-DPS with defensive and restorative actions over time.

With the amount HPS in this game the gap between 10% HP and 100% HP is quite small, relative to the amount of damage taken. This drifts away from the way the game is, but if that gap was effectively much larger, and HPS and general incoming damage compared to smaller/varying portions of HP, with all our healing actions adjusted/changed/redesigned for such gameplay, maybe it would be more interesting and meaningful (not with our healing actions as they are). To be able to see and experience the management of HP levels with the actions you use.

As it is HP levels change very quickly and don't have much life/movement beyond their quick restoration and chunks of damage. Basically I think maybe healing tasks and effects are too instant, and are not much perceivable.

Addition: With the smaller portions part I mean some large amounts of damage staggered/spread out over some time, rather than just instantly. And not that quick massive damage couldn't also exist as it does now

[Lethros]

I originally played as Conjurer/White Mage to level 60 mid/later Heavensward. I really enjoyed the healing role and comparatively found other roles boring and uninteresting. And I actually particularly liked lower level healing (20-30), and also the Cleric Stance play. When I leveled Scholar as a second job I enjoyed it so much that it was my most played and favoured job until the early access of 5.0. I find healing jobs to be the most low stress and relaxed feeling jobs to play as, even with the party responsibility.

Scholar could manage healing with patient ways of healing, and big immediate ways of healing. I think key parts of the Scholar experience were quite particularly Lustrate, Indomitability, all the fearie actions, and several options to help mitigate incoming damage or sustain HP. I enjoyed stacking Adloquium and Stoneskin, especially in advance when in a dungeon, jumping into into Cleric Stance to use damage spells for a bit, then drop Cleric Stance to replenish the tank again (/repeat). In a boss battle it was fun to feel in control of HP, with Whispering Dawn and Embrace restoring a large amount of HP in a patient but sure way, or in another/clutch moment I could use Indomitability with an at-request explosion of more HP. (I got excited writing and thinking about these things)

With the changes and additions in 5.0 I feel like the Scholar job feel has shifted into something much different. A lot more oGCDs clash with GCDs, and I have felt like the Broil III was a large change of character, with it's look and sound, giving a strong and different character to the job. It immediately sat unwell with my character and experience of the job. Although weeks later when I tried playing again I resolved to be kind of okay with playing with it, I ultimately caved in again with the play experience change in faerie ability execution and jamming lots of oGCDs between GCDs.

From the beginning of the early access of Shadowbringers I have started and stuck with White Mage. I was quite interested in the new Afflatus actions and how they interact with how I play, and the experience of the job with less oGCD clash as it is a more GCD focused job. The new Lily system was kind of familiar after playing Scholar previously. Similar to Aetherflow it supplies instant cast single target and AOE heals, through Afflatus Solace and Afflatus Rapture, like Lustrate and Indomitability. I found the new spells very pleasant to use, and especially gentle and low stress in feeling. Afflatus Misery is such a big hit yet I really like how it feels so gentle to use.

As it is I much rather playing White Mage than Scholar, but I couldn't compare how much immense fun I've had with Scholar in the past. It was a different time at a different level of experience. However, the amount of 5.0 expert roulettes I've done is the most I've done since the final Heavensward expert roulette (Sohm Al (Hard) and Baelsar's Wall).

[Larius]

WHM:
1) Nothing to do but spam Glare all day long. Healing is reactive, the whole role is designed about being reactive. It's horrible, we need something proactive to do other than spamming one button. There are many ways that reactive healing could be more engaging, like simply having heals way weaker so that it's actually a struggle to keep the tank alive, but ultimately as both tank and healer gear up the need for healing will always go down. That's when we need something proactive to do, no more one button 'dps rotations'.

2) People telling me WHM is fine because it has the best numbers out of all healers. Couldn't care less about numbers, those can be hotfixed in a small patch. What WHM, and actually all healers, is lacking is fun gameplay.

3) Healing sets that look good on male characters. Can we have some?

[Punslinger]

Thinking on it some more, most of what's wrong with healers ultimately comes back to the oGCDs. Healers have gotten more of them with each expansion, yet fights have not increased their damage output (relative to player HP) to compensate. As a result, healing has gotten easier and easier with each expansion.

Using WHM as an example, back in ARR, it had one oGCD direct heal: Benediction. Its other oGCDs were Divine Seal, which was a precursor to Largesse, and Presence of Mind. Both of which interacted with GCD heals to make them better. Shroud of Saints was a proto-Lucid for MP recovery. And that's it. That's the sum total of WHM's 2.0 oGCD toolkit.

Now, in 5.0, WHM has the following direct heals in its oGCD toolkit:

- Benediction
- Asylum
- Assize
- Tetragrammaton
- Divine Benison

That's five oGCD tools ready and available to deal with scripted tankbusters and raidwides. That's not even counting further healing-boosting oGCDs like Temperance or Plenary Indulgence or Largesse.

If you stop and think about it, actually, almost all of the new healing abilities added since 2.0 have been oGCDs. The Afflatus spells are on the GCD, but that's it. SCH and AST didn't get any new healing GCDs to play with. It shouldn't have been hard to add a couple extra healing GCD spells that interact with the existing kit in some way, yet it never happened.