Whew, OK. But the problem is that FFXIV actually takes that homogenization to the extreme.
The healer classes in that game are painfully boring until hard content, but then you missed the second problem. In hard content they all play the same.
Besides extraneous things that don’t fully matter to your actual healing kit, you’re going to plan your globals out the exact same way. A Sage player can just swap to scholar and they’ll still have the exact same plan for the fight. The only differences start at like level 90 buttons, and you’re only gonna hit those buttons like once a minute/3 minutes.
Balance for the world first groups also STILL DOES have this problem because of party buffs, which are one of the only unique things these classes bring. The only difference is that the classes are SO similar otherwise that you’re really only getting maybe a very slight change in performance.
But again, if FFXIV had an M+ equivalent, you WOULD see these differences play out. Half the reason that you don’t see the “meta” in FFXIV is that the content is easy right up to ultimates, and even at ultimate range these things get cleared in a couple days by WF groups. Savage has extremely generous windows to a point where I’ve hit enrages like twice in pug groups. Battle rezes are infinite with only a DPS loss, etc, etc.
If the content was actually hard enough that you had to consider that Scholar gives you a speed boost and Sage doesn’t and that was enough to maybe pass/fail, you WOULD take scholar every time. And this is in a game where these classes have carbon copy buttons.
But that kind of doesn’t matter, because it totally misses the point. I don’t think anyone considers priests getting interrupts as a huge ‘homogenization’ point. Healers ARE homogenized in this respect, but priests are an odd one out.
Most people support priest getting an interrupt and some better form of mobility.
I hate complaining from a front of “let’s just make things up!!! Then maybe we’ll look bad enough to buff!!” Which is how half of these threads turn out.
We’ll say things like “Man this class is awful it can’t even heal a +8 boss!” or “Man this class is awful it literally sucks in all content and can’t succeed” or “Man priest HPS is so BAD”
When what is REALLY happening is that the class has a good amount of HPS. Disc itself is a wild outlier spec that’s doing an insane amount of HPS in small group content and is about to become meta because of prot pally/ele and enh shaman rise in M+. It totally lacks utility and that sucks - but its DR is making up for that. Holy lacks the utility to compete AND doesn’t have any DR to speak of so it just can’t compete in the top 1% of keys (but it’s still a solid spec till 10keys if all you care about is portals).
Like people should complain, but they should complain about what actually sucks about priest, which is its utility kit - it has no good stops, it has no interrupt, its mobility is bad, its group utility is basically only PI/fort because Mass Dispel isn’t ever relevant anymore.
Half these threads are still about DPS and HPS. Meanwhile Disc has so much HPS it’s totally ignoring its utility weakness and is still the highest DPS healer in dungeons.
