Benchmark trailer

[Dearche]

Even Black Mage, the iconic immobile turret of mages, has received a truckload of movement tools because it's such a bullsh*t thing to do to a class in this game of heavy movement requirements.

I suppose this is really the evidence of the disparity when it comes to attention and concessions that SE is willing to put into the DPS vs Healers. Agreed that movement's always been an issue for WHM and the game works to make WHM suffer almost deliberately because of it. Unfortunately, I'm just not able to come up with things to differentiate WHM without gutting what's little that's left of its job identity.

Of course you're willing, you're a Scholar main. I've seen AST and SCH mains perfectly happy to sacrifice WHM on the complexity altar if it allows them to be OP again. Nevermind the fact that the DPS casters don't suffer from this problem, which shows we don't actually need to have an ankle-height skill ceiling baby class in order to keep the role healthy. I'll counter with this admittedly facetious question: How would you feel if the simplistic entry-level job was Scholar, and the three other healers got to enjoy complexity as a consequence of that? Make the fairy heals 200 real potency, delete most of the kit, whittle it down to Succor, Adlo, Lustrate, Bio, and Broil. Design finished. Beginner healers would be too intimidated by things as complicated as Excog after all.

I already admitted that I am biased in regards to that opinion, but I do think that there should be at least one healer that is accessible to starting players that is easy to play even in the endgame, even if it's no longer true in extreme and savage.

As much as I would hate it, I would accept SCH being turned into the one button boring healer if SE did two things at the same time. The first is make SCH into it's own class that can be picked at character creation (maybe reverse ACN so that it's a healer instead of DPS if not straight out just create a new starting class for SCH). Second would be to make both AST and SGE into complex, fun, and interesting jobs to play with unique healing styles, not just a single gimmick to separate them like WAR and DRK.

If we could get those two things, while I'd cringe pretty badly, losing SCH's old complexity and interesting gameplay forever would be a sacrifice I'd be willing to make.

As much as I love SCH, I'm not that adverse to leaving it behind for greener pastures. The problem is that the only actually green pasture I see nowadays is all marked with red icons. I used to like WAR and DRK on the side, but now both of them have been gutted just like the healers, and GNB hasn't been doing it for me for some reason.