Quote Originally Posted by Verlyn View Post
You are the correct that the current design is much more engaging when you are actually under pressure. That said, you are vastly overstating the differences between each of the different buttons. When it comes down to it, Emergency Tactics > Succor, Indom, Seraph, Fey Blessing all exist for one express purpose: To be backup buttons for each other. Is one on cooldown? You use another. Is one lacking resources? You still good, you have a backup. Their differences begin to matter less when I need to throw them out in response to the same stimuli, for the same reasons.

They had healer design working at one point; It was in ARR. Scholar was an extremely tight design where every skill served a purpose and there were limitations that demanded I respond to mechanics differently than White Mage. It mattered that I was limited to Aetherflow stacks because if I mismanaged them I didn't have four different oGCD heals as backup. Likewise, Adlo and Succor were prohibitively expensive so I wanted to use them smartly and sparingly (and mostly predictively), rather than as my main GCD heals. And then when I needed to dps, I had a pretty neat DoT-based rotation to play with (and later, Shadowflare).

Currently, there's a fundamental misunderstand that simply having a lot of heals means healing will be more engaging. I'm of the opinion that limitations breeds creativity-- when every situation is a puzzle of how to use your limited moveset to approach a problem, healing becomes engaging. As it is, I have few limitations.
I think this is fair comment. 2.0 healer design was my favourite and for the reasons you've listed. And I never felt the 2.0 healing was inaccessible to new players, after all I started out as a SCH (it's one argument I keep on seeing for more simplicity is being accessible for new players) and I also coached some new SCH's too, and if anything I praised the game for how it eases you in. Rather than the job being accessible through simplicity, but more about how the game teaches you.

That's why stuff like Sastasha, TamTara and friends are good dungeons for the start of the game (heck guildhests were like dungeon training, but I suspect nobody does them anymore). They game eases you in, there's lots of room to make mistakes on any role and the difficulty gets gradual with the odd dungeon or fight acted as a check for your abilities. By the time you get to endgame, you've learned to play the job and role. And to add, if you wanted something more straight forward, you had WHM and if you wanted something where you're planning more, you had SCH.


I think healer design now (and maybe after potency tweaks) still has the potential to fulfill that niche, but it'd require designing encounters around it. But that'd be a considerable amount of work, arguably. This was my argument back in the media tour, the changes to healers would make healing boring unless they change encounter design...and they haven't.