Fixing Every Healer Job

[Silver-Strider]

Astro had 111111111 back in Stormblood. They also had a real active secondary system to manage on top of it, and I remember Astros still said they wouldn't wish their 1 button spam on anyone.

Why WHM is the prime candidate for spamming 1 button over and over again, when they've never had an active system to manage a distraction from said 1 button spam, is beyond me.

Shadowbringers and Endwalker just transferred the worst aspects of Stormblood AST onto WHM, tricked the community into thinking it "belongs" on WHM, and slapped on an overheal-encouraging passive job gauge for good measure. I'm in the minority here- I don't think WHM is "just a few tweaks away" from good design. I think its DPS kit is horrendously designed. I think its healing kit is barely interactive on an incredibly superficial level. The job gauge is both passive and doesn't encourage playing intelligently. Just blindly barreling forward and getting rewarded whether your resource usage was smart or not.

In short, I hate this whole milieu of "WHM is supposed to be stupid and horribly designed, that's *~variety~*! Getting dumber and less interactive downtime was a good direction for WHM! Finally, it sees the beginnings of good design!" when what actually happened was WHM had fewer brain cells to scramble with the great lobotomization of Shadowbringers.

It blows my mind how the healer forums wail endlessly about the jobs being A) boring and horribly designed, and B) homogenized (which implies that they're ALL boring and horribly designed), and then turn around and go "oh but this thing I just finished lambasting is just wonderful on WHM! Make them play like this pig slop I was bitching about two sentences ago. Being SImPuL is GoOD (for WHM!)"

I wholeheartedly agree with you. There definitely needs to be more to WHM than 1-1-1 spam because it doesn't have anything else to micromanage.
1-1-1 worked for AST because they had to micromanage their Card System but WHM doesn't have such a distraction to keep them engaged with. Keeping it that way just for the sake of keeping it simple just leaves WHM as a job with a Skill Floor and Ceiling practically touching and no job should have that. You can't say a system is bad and then keep that system anyways; it defeats your whole argument if you advocate to keep it.

I can compromise on keeping WHM simple but not 1-1-1 levels of simple.