Quote Originally Posted by Dearche View Post
the only actually green pasture I see nowadays is all marked with red icons.
This is correct, and why I've swapped to DPS this expansion. You not only feel like you have a real impact on your party's performance, but your job is actually fun to play. And perhaps even more importantly, becomes more fun to play the better you get at playing it.

Reiterating here what I've said elsewhere. To oversimplify the reason I think healers are as boring as they are in this expansion: Two of the axioms job design operates by are "WHM has to suck" and "All comps have to be viable". If both must be true, then in order to make Suck competitive with non-Suck, you have to make the non-Suck jobs suck. That's the direction we were always headed since Stormblood. There's a weird world WHM operates in where it's got all these seemingly holy writ stupid rules that shackle its job design. It can't have utility. It can't be complex. It has to be newbie-friendly. It has to be so easy to understand that a level 30 Monk could figure out its 80 kit. It can't shield too much, that's not its identity. It can't buff, that's not its identity. It can't do too much personal damage, that'd scare the DPS. It can't have Proshell exclusivity, that might make it "maaaaaaandatory". It can't have Graniteskin, that would be "tooooooooo poooooowerful". It can't have decision making, that's too frustrating for new players.

I've always been of the mind, why don't we just...not do those things? Perhaps it could have an identity that isn't pinned down by all of these things that it's not. Maybe it could be designed in a way that's fun and interesting, where you could technically spam Medica in easy content but you could juggle some buff systems, make some decisions, figure out cool ways to level up my understanding of the class like using Swiftcast to fish for procs on Red Mage that don't actually hurt me if I don't know about them, but can drastically improve my output if I do? Squeeze a bit of frigging fun out of the role. No more of these entirely (or in Scholar's case, almost entirely) passive job gauges. Get a job designer who understands how this game's combat system works and actually likes playing healers. No more of this job design from people who clearly main DPS and design healers like a DPS main who doesn't really care about healing past "keeps me alive".