Is there any hope for next expansion?

[NobleWinter]

Are healers going to be part of the major overhaul to reintroduce job identity? Have the Dev's said that they would like to try anything new with Healers? As far as I know it's been radio silence for any plans concerning change. Dawntrail adding only the most superficial abilities to every class after three expansions of lackluster healer gameplay has not left me very hopeful. I do appreciate getting new healing classes like Warrior and Paladin but they seem to take away more fun from actual healers in exchange.

[Carighan]

They have plenty job identity, actually. Just nothing to heal, so you never notice their identity, either.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]I do appreciate getting new healing classes like Warrior and Paladin[...]

I cackled hard reading this part.

Humors aside, probably no. As cynical as that sounded, that's what they've been doing for as long as I've been playing personally. They've done absolutely nothing to convince me the otherwise. Not just on healer gameplay, mind you. Long ago, I thought healers are the red hooded step child, which may be true if this is still Shadowbringer. But after Endwalker and everything else that rolls by the following years, they're probably extending the same treatment everywhere else. As if trying to see how low they can cut corner until too many player breaks away.

[Laerune]

It's a coin toss for now. Yoshi did say at first that we would see something in 7.0, then pushed it to 8.0.

We will know more late this year, when fanfest starts.

[PercibelTheren]

They have plenty job identity, actually. Just nothing to heal, so you never notice their identity, either.

Do they? AST is "better WHM with more sparkles" and SGE is "better SCH". All the healers play the same. Which is why I no longer main the role.

[PercibelTheren]

I no longer believe anything they say, to be honest. They either make promises they never deliver on, or deliver a lot less/something vastly different than what it sounds like. If their idea of "reworks" is what they did to AST and BLM in Dawntrail, I'd rather they just don't touch jobs at all.

[Supersnow845]

Do they? AST is "better WHM with more sparkles" and SGE is "better SCH". All the healers play the same. Which is why I no longer main the role.

SGE is just far worse SCH honestly

The SGE/SCH imbalance is arguably the most egregious in the game

[Carighan]

Do they? AST is "better WHM with more sparkles" and SGE is "better SCH". All the healers play the same. Which is why I no longer main the role.

White Mage is the "raw output" healer. In fact, you can place the four healers on a matrix, where one axis is "output vs utility" and the other is "shield vs heals". WHM is healing and output focused. Astro by comparison is healing and utility focused.

White Mage emphasizes this in their movement mechanic being free instant cast heals (the Afflati spells), in Cure III which is a highly unique spell for maximum output only situations, their biggest CD being based on raw healing and getting mana-free casts of their biggest spells to further emphasize the ability to just go ham on everyone's health bars. Even an area that increasing healing taken, no matter from which source.

Contrast this with Astro, which shows a way more nuanced and utility focused approach. Their cards and Divinition to enhance the damage ouput of their groups and reduce tank damage taken. Their ability to intermittently provide shielding beyond a single ability. The fact that three of their abilities focus on (ideally) pre-planning for when damage will be taken to automatically re-heal it (which plays into the whole "divining the future"-angle of the job, too). Essential Dignity scaling with health missing. Their biggest CD including a damage GCD and scales with damage taken.

Then you get to the shield healers, Sage is very much what White Mage is for raw health, but for shields. Lots of ability to provide raw output, even while nuking. Instant cast shields, spammable. Damage reductions galore and stackable. Throws cola cans if actual healing is needed. Can supercharge shielding on a tank. And their primary resource for movement depends on shields since they need to be used up to provide it. Also a strong identity due to their manaregen being tied to the skills that further just push more output and more DR onto the group. To keep going, you gotta keep spamming!

And in contrast to that, again, Scholar is more utility centric (also utterly wasted as a concept, this is the one job that doesn't even show slight signs of design or identity, but on a gameplay level it works out). Damage taken debuff, runspeed, extremely varied modes of healing and shielding to cover every situation. In return it can't just spam shields while moving all day, but hey, it can actually spam (a weaker) nuke while moving!

If you actually had to use your whole kit, and your GCD heals/shields, constantly, the jobs would feel quite distinct despite so many similarities. They could be worlds better (and Scholar needs to be scrapped entirely and re-done from the ground up, it's a hodgepodge of all those years of ill-fitting design ideas), but they do work out. Or would, if there was stuff to be healed in this game.

[Supersnow845]

Just making the healers heal more wouldn’t fix them because they don’t have any means of ability to scale or diversify. SGE but having to heal 10 times as much as you do now is still just boring old SGE because you have a limited pool of MP that even performing each action perfectly can’t increase and none of your heals interact with each other. Like toxicon is not a remotely interesting feedback loop for spamming shields (neither is misery but toxicon is worse). SGE has no design depth (note I’m using SGE as an example but this applies to almost every one except maybe SCH) because it can’t be any more than the sum of its very basic parts because nothing it does makes any other part of its kit any more interesting. No matter how many times toxicon partially refunds e prog it doesn’t change how boring and uninteractive the addersgall system is as an example. Nothing leads to anything else your “interaction” for spamming e PROG is toxicon and that’s it, once that’s happened the kit resets to its base space again. This is to say nothing of the fact that SGE’s kit is such a strong ripoff of SCH’s ShB Kit anyway that even if it refunds for continuing to use things you are still using the same toolkit that SCH has been using for 10 years with minor differences

This is arguably what SCH’s hodgepodge kit gets right. SCH’s job identity has been ripped apart by it being the original healer that’s actually a DPS in disguise before SGE was even a twinkle in the eyes of the developers but it’s Swiss Army knife kit actually benefits it because it can actually do more than the base parts of its kit suggests

A class like SGE flowing like butter is meaningless when said butter is actually just yellow filler with no taste

[Qyoon]

I am willing to say it cannot be worse as it is right now. But i guess it can always be with enought imagination from SQE.
Devs seems to be happy with the fact healers gameplay in normal content is limited to spam one ability for 50% of the fight.
They said nothing, gave no hint about the direction they wants healer to go.
I just hope the whole job identity thingy won't only be a comsmetic overhaul.
I mean we have... things that already does that way better than SE ever did.