Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Liam_Harper]

I'm fairly convinced the devs balanced healers based on popularity.

In their eyes WHM is great because people play it. Therefore they assume it must be fun. In reality, it's just that it's slightly more fun than juggling their poorly designed card or pet system, but still in an awful state.

AST and SCH are always less popular, but they have no clue how to design healers so they just receive endless reworks that make them worse or useless tweaks.

Now AST is more button bloated than ever and SCH's pet is still just oGCD's but clunkier that you snack on periodically, so we'll probably see even more full reworks for AST and nonsense SCH tweaks in upcoming patches while WHM remains completely ignored, before being nerfed again in 7.0 because it was the most popular healer all expansion so is clearly "too good".

[HyoMinPark]

I'm fairly convinced the devs balanced healers based on popularity.

In their eyes WHM is great because people play it. Therefore they assume it must be fun. In reality, it's just that it's slightly more fun than juggling their poorly designed card or pet system, but still in an awful state.

AST and SCH are always less popular, but they have no clue how to design healers so they just receive endless reworks that make them worse or useless tweaks.

Now AST is more button bloated than ever and SCH's pet is still just oGCD's but clunkier that you snack on periodically, so we'll probably see even more full reworks for AST and nonsense SCH tweaks in upcoming patches while WHM remains completely ignored, before being nerfed again in 7.0 because it was the most popular healer all expansion so is clearly "too good".

With regards to WHM, I’m not sure if the developers just ignore it because “well it’s WHM and people will play it anyways because Final Fantasy Staple/it’s Baby’s First Healer” or if they are just that caught up in their design philosophy of keeping it as the “pure, burst healer” that they won’t allow it to be anything else. It never fails every expansion to see it fall behind AST in terms of performance—even if it surpasses AST in popularity. But, then again, the dev team doesn’t have a designated “healer main” on it; and they also seem to neglect inviting actual healer mains to important events like expansion media tours to test out builds and provide feedback. I’m not really surprised anymore that WHM remains the same as ever—but I can’t tell how much of that is just me being jaded in general.

[RinaShinomiya]

or if they are just that caught up in their design philosophy of keeping it as the “pure, burst healer” that they won’t allow it to be anything else

i'd say its 100% their design philosophy getting in the way. A few years ago when asked why none of the complaints about Living Dead are being addressed YoshiP basically just said that it wouldn't with the job fantasy if the ability was any other way. Which is a different can of worms considering what they did to SCH and AST in 5.0 but whatever.

They definitely should've at least invited Momo to Mediatour though and I'm baffled he wasn't invited AGAIN.

[Liam_Harper]

Definitely their design philosophy too, but even then it wouldn't be impossible to design a Pure/Burst healer that worked, or a Living Dead that was less terrible. We have plenty of pure dps after all. There are lots of improvements WHM could get even if they were stubborn about no mitigation, raid shields or raid buffs.

I feel convinced the devs are like the forum Sylphies and look at things from the perspective of a GCD spamming overhealer. The fact Cure III is still a pitiful 6 yards, got the smallest potency increase with the new trait and Thin Air got nerfed makes me feel the devs legitimately thought "Old Thin Air + Plenary + Cure III = Healing God". I also feel they view Thin Air strictly as a cooldown for Raise and big GCD heals and are convinced we'll be using those frequently enough to justify it.

Things like no Assize charges, not even bumping Misery to 940 to show they notice it, Medica II having more potency on single target than Cure II, Holy causing clipping and so on make it seem like it's not just design philosophy, but more that they aren't even looking at WHM. All the focus went on Sage and misguidedly trying to fix AST's low player participation rate with buffs after wrecking its gameplay yet again.