Left the game at 5.0 because of the job changes, temporarily taking another look because of EW hype, sad to see that nothing much has changed from the healer implementation then. Good summary, for what it's worth hope someone over there is paying attention.

Surprised at the stated reasons for this mess, though - SE seem to have convinced themselves (and a lot of players) that the healer homogenization was for the benefit of making them "more accessible for casuals" when the only real benefit is flattening raid numbers. The chaotic unpredictability in casual content was exactly where old AST (and SCH, from what friends tell me) shined, and frankly I was hoping "healer rebalance" meant "add some more non-healing stuff to WHM rather than making everything gimp WHM and further gimping WHM. "Healing" as in "making the HP bars go up" is not a full-time job in this game and the easier the content the more apparent that is; sure it's fun to salvage a run gone wrong but you shouldn't be hoping for a disaster party just to get some excitement. When things are going well tanks and DPS still have their complex rotations, while healers are stuck with 2111112.

I'm a complete casual and was never interested in healers until I tried (SB) AST; had tried WHM as a newbie and didn't like it, ended up playing AST as much as my main job cause I loved the card system, which made up for the anemic DPS options (which I would not have wanted to inflict on any other job, much less all of them). Now the cards are pointless busywork that can just as well be distilled into a single button AND the DPS still sucks. If the stated goal was "get more casuals to play healers" I'm sorry to say it had the opposite effect on me; you can't pay me to play a healer the way they are right now, I don't care what the AIN says. And no matter how sparkly that new Sage job is if it's more of the same then why bother?