Is it fun?

[ItMe]

It could be nostalgia or some other bias but I really feel that older MMOs were much more focused on world building and immersion of the player than making sure all classes could play within a few hundred DPS of each other. There was also much more attention spent on detail and play style of classes, they all felt different and did very different things.

Ha ha yeah... I remember when the issue swung the other way. Back when balance wasn't a concern and flavor justified most decisions.
Those time had plenty of their own issues and I honestly don't wanna to back to that.

[Semirhage]

I've been one of those perennial voices calling for job balance, but that's mostly because I'm a WHM enthusiast. It's hard to tease out the nuance when someone's complaining, but there's definitely a difference between "everyone needs to have the same output or the game is unplayable" and "hey, why is it that two out of the three jobs in this role are jacks of all trades that have hilarious fake tradeoffs like 'very slightly lower personal damage' for their grand piano keyboards of utility, while the third has almost none of that for no reason other than this weird healer-role-only belief that one of the jobs has to be basic?"

I mean, FFS, we're two years into those aforementioned jobs getting ganked into the same relative job design position that third one is, and I'm STILL hearing "we should barely touch WHM and then also restore AST and SCH back to their old levels of complexity" like they learned literally nothing about WHM's former position as the role's bad design sinkhole from how boring their jobs currently are. A reasonable compromise between job balance and job lore are possible...but this "WHM has to suck because we said so" needs to go the way of the dodo, both in the community's and the job designer's collective consciousness. I maintain it's the biggest dam upstream from nearly all other issues with the healing role.

[Brandedblade]

"Is it fun?" Will always be a matter of subjective opinion. I find it fun despite the fact I do agree and miss some of the older complexity, I'm still fundamentally filling the same role I've always had, and despite how much they've neutered sch's dps rotation, to me the healing aspect of it is relatively the same, the only difference being having to weave the fairy skills, and that's enough for me. WHM for me is boring and I only play it when i want to zerg old content with Holy spam, and AST, ast is alright, i don't hate playing it but SCH has been my comfort pick and very likely will continue to do so even with SGE ( i won't even be touching it until i get SCH to cap)

[Teno]

"Is it fun?" Will always be a matter of subjective opinion. I find it fun despite the fact I do agree and miss some of the older complexity, I'm still fundamentally filling the same role I've always had, and despite how much they've neutered sch's dps rotation, to me the healing aspect of it is relatively the same, the only difference being having to weave the fairy skills, and that's enough for me. WHM for me is boring and I only play it when i want to zerg old content with Holy spam, and AST, ast is alright, i don't hate playing it but SCH has been my comfort pick and very likely will continue to do so even with SGE ( i won't even be touching it until i get SCH to cap)

I find even the healing aspect boring. Ghosting being such a pain in the ass, but also the sheer amount of ogcd makes the use of gcd heals kind of irrelevant, as ogcd are enough most of the time.

Gcd heals used to have some weight before. In essence you put your dots on, let them running, and then you had to choose between gcd dps or gcd heal.

[Mimilu]

My problem with answering this question is that what I view as fun as a healer doesn't seem to jive with the dev teams idea of what a healer is/should be: I enjoy spending most of the GCD on DPSing and weaving oGCD heals between them. I would go as far to classify myself as more of a Green DPS then a Healer and I'm more then fine with that.

An example of when I had fun as a healer would be my run of Paglth'an yesterday; The tank pulled wall-to-wall whenever a gate opened and used their cooldowns competently, while the DPS avoided most telegraphed AoEs while using their party buffs on cooldown and focusing on AoEing large groups. This allowed me to focus more on DPS and cards, use Celestial Intersection's shield on cooldown, and heal by either manually detonating upgraded Earthly Stars or Essential Dignity (with random Celestial Opposition or Aspected Benefic HoTs thrown in and Horoscope for boss AoEs).

[CupOfIcedCoffee]

See, I find healing fun when me and my friend run a tank/healer combo, and we're seeing just how many mobs we can pull before I can't keep up anymore because 3/4ths of his health is gone every second. Other than that, healing is alright. Maybe not as fun as playing DPS classes, but still enjoyable at times. If I want to consistently have fun though I play a class like BLM or MCH. Less brain, more button pushing.

[SpiralMask]

@OP: since two of the three were pretty openly kneecapped, not really all that fun for them compared to the fun they were having even last expansion. for the third? it's been a problem since ARR that they aren't fun to play (now they just do Bigger Number but still suffer from the same lack what, eight years at this point?).

[Semirhage]

It's why I advocate for balancing overall DPS contribution and differentiating flavor basically everywhere else. DPS is the god metric. If that number is the ONE point of homogenization, you can play around with a lot of flavor outside that.