A summary of healer issues

[ForsakenRoe]

Okay to be fair, if we're gonna include "Healing increases" as counting towards buff variety, healers in FFXIV do get a bit more than flat DPS increases.

The point isn't just 'oh Holy Paladin has heal increase skill', these four effects are one talent called Blessing of Seasons, and they rotate through the four as you use them (so it's consistent and not RNG like AST was). There's other stuff Holy Paladin has that I did not list, the point was to illustrate that this one system (the Blessing of Seasons talent) has more variety in it's effects than the comparable system we have here (what the cards used to be for AST and what they are now). You're also listing four healers here vs the one example I gave. I could list every 'buff you can give to allies' for all seven of the WOW healers, but I'd be here for a long time. So I'll just do Holy Paladin:

- Aforementioned 4 Blessings of Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter
- Choice of passive aura between 3% DR, 20% movespeed while mounted, 'take more than 50% of your HP in a single hit and give out a damage buff to allies' Retribution Aura, 'reduce silence duration on allies' Aura (this one's more for PVP i think), swapping between them is GCD
- Aura Mastery increases the effectiveness of these passive auras, usually used on Devotion to increase it from 3% to 15% DR
- Blessing of Freedom removes anything that is CCing an ally and makes them immune to roots/stuns/slows for a bit
- Blessing of Protection makes target immune to physical damage for a while (makes them considered to have zero aggro for the duration too, so tanks will lose their mobs if you use it on them)
- Blessing of Sacrifice is Cover but actually useful
- Beacon of Light is Synastry but actually useful (considering all your healing is GCDs)
- A Stun, Interrupt, Taunt and Hallowed Ground (on a 5min CD, so theoretically you could purposely taunt a boss and invuln it's tankbuster. probably not worth the risk though). You can also use the invuln to soak a mech that a tank would otherwise have to eat, like those tank-specific meteors you occasionally see. These are not 'buffs you can give allies' per se, but being able to catch an interrupt that the DPS can't get, or soaking something so the tank can save their CDs for other stuff, is big utility to have in the back pocket
- A combat res. Not every class in WOW can resurrect in combat (and it's on a one-charge-per-5-mins system in a raid), so having someone that can CR is big

The only thing that we have left that gets any credit from me is Expedient, but I've always thought it'd be ridiculously good.

Flat out removing Selene's toolkit is the literal worst way you could realistically address this issue, and that's not hyperbole, but reworking her to actually feel like a balanced choice to Eos was something that was needed.

I also think removing Selene entirely was not great, but we have to consider, it was 'Selene vs Roused Whispering Dawn', the odds were so stacked against Selene's kit it'd have to be some real impactful stuff to compete with how good Eos was. And that'd just mean making SCH even more dominant than it already was