A summary of healer issues

[Irenia]

It's just chaos that you are trying to make sense of.

Actually, I wonder if that is what people enjoyed back then. I've been pondering what the essence of MMO healing is, and one of the answers I've come to is "Managing Chaos".

[Grimoire-M]

The point just soars right over your and Roeshel's head doesn't it?

You’re the one with literal rose tinted glasses in your avatar, not me.

I’m just tired of people hand waving my go-to healer’s (I started playing it in Heavensward, embrace management and all) former traits away as good gameplay instead of as the same jank we have now but with way more button mashing, because that was my experience of the class back then. It has legs to stand on without having to deal with carpal tunnel. The parts I love about it on the healing side didn’t go away entirely. If anything, they’re improved from prior iterations for the things that were added. It’s the DPS kit that we agree on. But pretending that the fun factor and ‘fluidity’ (which personally was never true for me prior to Shadowbringers) of old fairies and the power it carried weren’t inherently linked is also flat out incorrect. AST’s half casts are an example of the same thing from the other direction. Adding lossless weaving made their card management not garbage but also shot their DPS up by similar margins. The only reason I think Scholar’s was justified is because it brought all three healers to equal parity regarding their oGCDs. Unlike Roeshel, I do -not- think it should have cost their DPS rotation along with it. I play both sides of Arcanist equally and I get why you miss Bane. Losing Shadowflare was worth getting Soil back for me.

[FoxCh40s]

You said SCH can't be nerfed any more than it already is and it's objectively the worst healer. What you actually meant was that SCH is the job you have the strongest emotional reaction to. Those aren't anywhere near the same thing.

Did SCH get gutted harder than any other job in ShB? Yes. But even if you took SCH's current kit and removed all of the Faerie abilities, put all Aetherflow abilities on the GCD, and deleted Ruin II and Energy Drain, it would still have more going on than WHM's kit. The fact that SCH and AST got their kneecaps sawn off and still landed above WHM anyway just goes to show how huge the gap was to begin with. It was absolutely wrong for them to try to drag everyone to WHM's level rather than giving WHM a kit that's more complex than a level 30 Dragoon. But even after the mass gutting of the other two healers, they're like level 60 Dragoons at least.

It's just weird to suggest that SCH is in the worst shape out of the healers when you could remove half of its remaining kit and still give WHM a run for its money. It sort of just comes across as a selfish exclamation. Scholar is the worst one because I play Scholar, so Scholar being bad is worse than other healers being bad, because I don't play the other ones. Or maybe it's just a foregone conclusion at this point that WHM is completely non-competitive with other healers so they're not even part of the equation.

Which is true, because they are never going to significantly change White Mage, ever. It's why I stopped maining the job, for that very reason. Expecting them to significantly change Whitr Mage is like asking water to not be wet. It's impossible.

[Sebazy]

Which is true, because they are never going to significantly change White Mage

And IMHO this is fine as long as it's still viable. SE really should embrace the job system's flexibility and push for diversity within the roles. Switching healers for different turns and content helped keep things fresh and I wonder if that's a big part of why so many look back fondly on HW when it was particularly common around 3.2 to 3.3.

In WoW, if my Shaman was obsolete for some piece of content I was probably going to be sitting out for it, in FFXIV, I just click a button and switch to the job that is more suited. Gearing just isn't an issue in the grand scheme of things. FFXI did well with this concept but FFXIV seems terrified of it.

[Semirhage]

And IMHO this is fine as long as it's still viable. SE really should embrace the job system's flexibility and push for diversity within the roles. Switching healers for different turns and content helped keep things fresh and I wonder if that's a big part of why so many look back fondly on HW when it was particularly common around 3.2 to 3.3.

In WoW, if my Shaman was obsolete for some piece of content I was probably going to be sitting out for it, in FFXIV, I just click a button and switch to the job that is more suited. Gearing just isn't an issue in the grand scheme of things. FFXI did well with this concept but FFXIV seems terrified of it.

Thunderous agreement in theory.

Something just rubs me the wrong way that, from my perspective, healer design "diversity" nearly always means WHM has less-smooth healing, zero utility, lower rDPS, clunkier weaving...when I come to the healer bazaar, I'd like to see what I see in the DPS caster section: several items each suited to their own special purposes for different reasons. In the metaphorical healer section, I've seen two items that look like Kitchenaids with a dozen attachments for doing anything you want, alongside a potato masher that has the dual weakness of doing nothing the other two don't already do (and often better), but it also doesn't bring anything to the table that they don't.

This is going to be the albatross around the healer role's neck forever, mark my words. So long as WHM is cursed to never bring anything unique, healer design is still going to be stumped that for some ~weird~ reason, the community thinks the healer with no unique contribution sucks compared to the others.

[Sebazy]

In the metaphorical healer section, I've seen two items that look like Kitchenaids with a dozen attachments for doing anything you want, alongside a potato masher that has the dual weakness of doing nothing the other two don't already do (and often better), but it also doesn't bring anything to the table that they don't.

This is the best content I've read on the forums for a while++

[Truen]

SE really should embrace the job system's flexibility and push for diversity within the roles.

That will never happen; this dev team is obsessed with homogenization sadly.

[Boizinho]

Which is true, because they are never going to significantly change White Mage, ever. It's why I stopped maining the job, for that very reason. Expecting them to significantly change Whitr Mage is like asking water to not be wet. It's impossible.

True enough. Though water may end up not being wet if they nerf Fluid Aura again in Endwalker.

[QooEr]

So long as WHM is cursed to never bring anything unique, healer design is still going to be stumped that for some ~weird~ reason, the community thinks the healer with no unique contribution sucks compared to the others.

Players fixation with whm being the simplest healer adds to this, but whm couldve been simple And strong. they simply never build on the supposed strengths of whm. if it was supposed to be the "big heal healer", how come its healing potential is always lower than ast's, and its heal opportunity cost is always the highest? if its supposed to be the gcd healer then why is its only notable gcd heal cure iii? whm doing the comparative damage it does now was overdue since 3.4

[FoxCh40s]

Players fixation with whm being the simplest healer adds to this, but whm couldve been simple And strong. they simply never build on the supposed strengths of whm. if it was supposed to be the "big heal healer", how come its healing potential is always lower than ast's, and its heal opportunity cost is always the highest? if its supposed to be the gcd healer then why is its only notable gcd heal cure iii? whm doing the comparative damage it does now was overdue since 3.4

I've never understood why White Mage wasn't the buff healer? Like, where was Faith? Bravery? Their absolute insistence on all the healers being able to do everything means no one is good at anything. There are no strengths and weaknesses, meaning the one that can do both becomes the strongest.

It has absolutely perplexed me, as I started out as a White Mage for a reason. I wanted Iconic Elemental Power combined with Unsurpassed Party Interaction.