An Integration of Former and Current Ideas for WHM

[ty_taurus]

Ahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha. I wish. That's a good one.

Shadowbringers showed us that the devs' vision for WHM is "the boring simple healer that clips a lot with no utility". And they'd rather destroy AST and SCH to balance them numerically with that vision. They haven't changed their minds since Stormblood, when we proved them conclusively wrong there. Let's just say there's a looooot of inertia against digging WHM out of the boring grave, but I also think it's the best option for rescuing SCH and AST from it too. If WHM's horrible design dragged the other two down, it stands to reason that designing it well can be the road to restoring them.

I don't hate most of these ideas, but good luck getting the healer design team to think of WHM as anything beyond "but it has Cure and Stone right? Perfect. Design finished."

And that's really the thing in general, isn't it? They vehemently demand that healing should play in a very specific way without really thinking about whether or not that actually fits into the way content is designed in this game (spoiler alert, it doesn't), and they continue to fight our way of playing healer in every conceivable manner without actually touching the reason why we play that way. I can't help but feel that someone somewhere in the design team is always shouting "We keep taking away their DPS, why are they still using it!?"

[Dearche]

I can't help but feel that someone somewhere in the design team is always shouting "We keep taking away their DPS, why are they still using it!?"

To be honest, I can't help but feel that this might actually be the real sentiment within the ones in charge of designing jobs. Either that, or that they believe that the best way to make people play a role that's less popular is to make it as easy as possible to get into, which means making them as braindead as possible. Not realizing that making gameplay overly simplistic is how the entire genre of JRPGs almost got wiped out until less than a decade ago. At least in the west.

It's ridiculous that the rest of the FF franchise is going the other way by making things like gameplay mastery an important aspect of the series, yet XIV is trying to do the opposite for every role except DPS.

That aside though, while I don't actually expect these changes to be implemented, or even seen by the dev team (since I doubt they look at any thread here that doesn't have like 10k views or something), the idea behind these changes was to create a WHM that had as low of a skill floor as possible, while not being boring for veteran players to play. In fact, I think with stripping out so many oGCD skills, it's actually simpler than the current WHM, yet loses none of the flexibility.

Also, I don't think the idea of raid utility is a forgone conclusion. WHile AST would entirely lose its identity without cards, SCH still has chain stratagem and has never lost it. So unless if SE cares so little for healers that they had intended to strip all raid utility from healers aside from the AST cards, and simply forgot that chain stratagem even existed (I don't say that this isn't a possibility), the skill does suggest that SE does think that raid utility should be a part of the healer kit, even if it is on a very basic level.

Though, at the same time, it's possible that SE does actually account for healer damage in job design as WHM's attack potency is the highest of the three healers in place of having any raid utility.

Then again, it could just be an oversight, as SCH had its potency for broil 2 raised just so they could nerf energy drain and get people to stop doing the ruin 2+energy drain combo in place of using aetherflow for healing. Seriously, if that's not a malicious nerf on player expression, I don't know what is.

[Semirhage]

Also, I don't think the idea of raid utility is a forgone conclusion. WHile AST would entirely lose its identity without cards, SCH still has chain stratagem and has never lost it. So unless if SE cares so little for healers that they had intended to strip all raid utility from healers aside from the AST cards, and simply forgot that chain stratagem even existed (I don't say that this isn't a possibility), the skill does suggest that SE does think that raid utility should be a part of the healer kit, even if it is on a very basic level.

Though, at the same time, it's possible that SE does actually account for healer damage in job design as WHM's attack potency is the highest of the three healers in place of having any raid utility.

Oh, my chortling about WHM and raid utility isn't because I don't think Square wants healers in general to have utility. It's because WHMs have been begging Square to give them something to do during downtime for years. Some form of raid utility would have killed two birds with one stone: given WHM something to manage, while also bringing them up to AST and SCH's level. Back in Stormblood it felt like garbage playing WHM compared to the other two. You did less damage, your heals weren't really any stronger than theirs, you had nothing to do in downtime except refresh your dots and spam Stone, and if your party needed you to do anything other than heal them up or stare at them while spamming Stone, you were SOL. Lethal AOE damage going out? Can't help you, I have no AOE shields and no damage reduction. And no debuffs to reduce boss outgoing damage. Party's struggling with a tight DPS check? Oh well, I don't have anything to help you with that. Need to Esuna multiple people quickly? Don't look at me, I'm not Selene. As a WHM, there was no scenario you were uniquely useful in outside spamming Cure 3. Conversely, there were TONS of scenarios where the other two healers were invaluable, but you had no equivalent ability to help. Offensive utility was just the tip of the iceberg there; WHM just had effectively nothing unique going for it.

Shadowbringers healer design by all appearances is the healer design dev saying "yeah we see WHMs have been begging for utility for literal years now, I'm gonna go with no. But we have to balance this out with two really strong, flexible healers. What to do....oh I know! Let's blow up their flexibility instead."