Delete rescue from the game.

[Renathras]

...

My personal position would probably be to give one of them a 1-2-3 (and possibly -4) combo system. "But they're casters, not melee"; MCH is close enough (and once was) a caster and has a 1-2-3. SGE having a 1-2-3 of lasers would work fine. Though I have a different Job in mind for the 1-2-3. For SGE, we can go two ways with it. One way is to make it like RDM or BLM where it has kind of a balance/back and forth rotation (simplified, of course; no melee phase of RDM/no extra stuff of BLM, just the core rotation). So if you think of BLM with just Fire 1, Fire 3, Blizzard 3, Fire 2, Freeze, maybe, or if you think of RDM having only Jolt/Stone/Fire/Aero/Thunder and their AOE Impact/Aero2/Thunder2. Either one of those might work for a A-B-C-D-A-B-C-D kind of a thing. The nice thing about SGE is its healing with Kardia. In my mind, its healing kit should be focused around that. Kardia, a second Kardia with a short duration (think AST's Synastry just for Kardia heals), an AOE Kardia with a short duration (for party healing), and a Soteria (for bigger Kardia healing). This gives you your base Kardia but also 3 offshoots for second target (off-tank), AOE (party), and boosted (Soteria) healing. I feel like those should be up frequently (short CD) and SGE's oGCD kit should probably overall be balanced to be a bit weaker so it's AUGMENTING Kardia, not REPLACING Kardia. Once that's done, the DPS rotation here is what's generating the lion's share of your healing, ideally, using those Kardia modifiers intelligently with some mitigation to smooth damage.

Alternatively, we could do a complex CD dance, but in practice, I'm not sure which would be better/worse...

SCH as a DoT mage seems to be what everyone wants. I'd just quit playing it, but as I've said before, I'm fine with the Healer Jobs all being different so that everyone can have one they enjoy; a corollary to that is that some of them would be such that some players wouldn't enjoy them. But that's true now - I don't enjoy AST now, I just also wouldn't enjoy SCH. That just means I'd stop playing them, but other people would be (presumably) playing them, so everyone wins. Yeah, I'd hate it, but I'm fine with that as long as there is at least one Healer that I don't hate.

I feel like this may be a case of you being relatively new here (not a dig, just an observation), but we've actually had a lot of these conversations here. My position has consistently been to change some of the Healers and make all four differentiated so that individual players can gravitate to the ones they like. If there's only one that I like, that's fine with me, as long as there's at least one that I like. I figure we need to leave one Healer alone (either SGE or WHM seem the best candidates) with their current DPS kits for the players that enjoy the way Healers are played now. People that like current healing would shift to those Jobs, and people that don't would have three other options to use instead.

I call this the "Four Healers"/"4 Healers" model, in contrast to many here who kind of want to make all the Healers more complex, but then we have the problem that they're mostly the same again, just more complex, which, as I say, just makes a different set of people mad.

I feel like AST needs more GCD damage buttons. People play AST because they like complexity, they play WHM because they don't. So giving WHM the more complex rotation and AST the less makes little sense to me. "But it has tons of button bloat", yeah, but it's a WHM clone, not the other way around. In a case of "We're both wearing the same outfit, ONE of us has to change", the clone/one that came after should be the one to change, imo. Not to mention it makes no sense for AST to be "the simple healer" since that would require gutting and simplifying its oGCD tools to be like WHM already is, at which point why do it instead of WHM? I've thought before AST would be a good candidate to remove the DoT and make it a 1-2-3 rotation Job. This way, it is just doing a 1-2-3 while weaving its various oGCDs between them. Since the 1-2-3 is a steady cadence that can be muscle-memoried, this should take little brainpower away from the oGCD game that AST plays.

WHM is the leading candidate for the Job I wouldn't touch. IF FOR SOME REASON we leave SGE alone instead and decide to change WHM (a bad idea since WHM is the introductory Healer, the baseline, and has long appealed to people that want a simple and straightforward kit), I'd probably make the changes minor. Aero 3 for AOE DoT which upgrades to Banish, Water at level 15 for an AOE Holy (that upgrades to Holy at 45). Some big ability they build up to where they case Flood, Quake, and Tornado (maybe something akin to PLD's Requiescat, perhaps retooling Presence of Mind into this, and that would be your "Swords Combo"), and make the Water/Holy have a use in single target. Maybe something like every Glare gives you a stacking buff "Increases the damage of the next Holy by 25%, stacks to 4", so every 4th Glare you'd want to weave in a Holy. Granted, for this we'd want to do the thing I said in another thread - make Holy work like Cure 3 where you can cast it on a target OR, if you're not targeting an enemy, it will use it on your location - but if we did that, it would make Water/Holy have a single target use, and give us the three CNJ core elements at all levels of gameplay; Stone, Aero, Water at low levels, Glare, Dia, Holy at higher levels, and adding Quake, Tornado, and Flood for the big hit burst combo at high levels. Also make Assize a GCD like Plegma that stacks to 2. Because...I dunno, why not?

.

Despite people insisting otherwise, I DO have a mind for adding damage abilities, I just don't like my Healers so heavily inclined to DPS rotations and want one of them - WHM, SGE, or SCH; I hate AST now and if it's the only one untouched, I'd just quit healing at that point and be pissed - left as it is now. If that's WHM or SGE, I don't mind either way.