I think it's more so debating if there are other players who simply like the play style to be easy rather than it being hard for them. Don't get me wrong though. I would like to have more damage buttons too. I just don't know if we have a significant enough number of players who want to keep at least one easy with damage and maybe make the healing spells more complex. From the past, I do know we have had arguments over some players who just wanted to heal (the Sylphies as the derogative term?). So far, our surveys from Ty have an overwhelming majority to improve the DPS buttons, so we can only compare that to the total subs / accounts that are active now. I haven't gotten to filling in the survey yet too, but I would fill in for higher DPS buttons.
Renathras was suggesting another branching Druid healer from Conjurer since the lore would fit such an additional class anyhow with the elements Earth, Water and Air. I do know that White Mages in the past actually only used a Holy spell of sorts to do spell damage in said base kit. But depending on who you are talking about as a character, they had another unique thing with additional abilities. Like Garnet being a Summoner with the elements Fire, Ice, Thunder, non-elemental Bahamut and Shadow to name some. Eiko had 4 Summoner spells with Earth, Party Reflect, Phoenix and Light. Yuna also fit into the WHM / SMN trope too handling all of them. We also had mention that Rosa used Aim. Then we had Aerith using limit breaks that doubled down on using utilities like fully charging everyone else's limit breaks. Selphie was also an odd one who had "The End", but RPR kind of has that one as a LB3 now, right?
The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.
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04-28-2023, 10:47 PMTigore
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04-29-2023, 12:18 AMForsakenRoeWhile Selphie is not what I'd consider 'White Mage' by any standard, you raise a point with the names of skills. As such I think we should rework WHM's Rapture to work like FF8, where it instantly ends the fight.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tigore
(this is sarcasm)
The problem with 'just want to heal', for the millionth time, is that healing is binary. It is either 'enough' and you don't die, or 'not enough' and you wipe. WOW had to increase the amount of healing healers were doing by artificially boosting the HP of allies and damage of mobs by FORTY PERCENT going into DF, effectively neutering the healing strength of healers by 40%. It's only one patch later, and people have been getting so egregious with 'Mythic plus run 1 tank 4 dps' runs, completely throwing healers to the sidelines as there's not enough damage going on, that they're doing the same 'nerf healers' process, of increasing player HP and damage taken by another 25%. No doubt in my mind that once people get enough gear, they'll be doing 'zero healer' M+ runs again, and Blizz will have to do the same thing again. Why does this keep happening? Because unlike here where healer damage is 'actually quite a large percentage of a DPS player's output', something like 50%, healer damage in WOW is much lower, more like 20%. SO if you can swap one person out and that 'slot' of the party is now doing 5x as much (compared to here where it'd be 2x as much) of course they're going to.
And again, there's not exactly a lot of skill required to beat a HPS check as a WHM. 'press medica multiple times' is not the hallmark of 'skilled healer' some claim it to be. Dominion was boring as hell when I first did it on WHM. Temperance at 2nd, Lily at 3rd. I found it slightly more interesting doing it in my first reclear, which was on SGE. Even then, I fully winged it in terms of Mit plan for the entire fight. Stuff's just too forgiving, we can press anything in any order and it just works. That's fine for EX roulettes, maybe EX trials to an extent. But Savage? This was week 4 too, not exactly 'lmao you gearcrept the fight with full tome'
edit:
I got a potential solution: we bring back the AST sects, Diurnal for 'easy mode' DPSing and Nocturnal for 'more challenging with higher payoff' DPSing. Both are 'pure healer' designed instead of Noct being shielding, instead the difference is they're split based on damage rotation complexityQuote:
Originally Posted by FTP
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04-29-2023, 01:39 AMForteNightshadeI've always hated that line of logic. It's fine for some jobs to be easier than others but every job should have some degree of mastery to reward skill expression and experience. Players shouldn't feel their preferred job is somehow "lesser" because a subset of very casual players are too lazy to press more than one button. What's particularly irksome is the content those players partake it will never require that aforementioned skill expression. So let those of us who want that, have access to it in the high end content.Quote:
Originally Posted by FTP
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04-29-2023, 02:23 AMTigore
I was just exploring ideas of what skills were surrounded with other healers in other games. FF7 and FF8 had materia and Magic junctions to make everyone capable of using the WHM base kit. Only differences were the weapons and limit breaks at that point. Selphie usually gets Full Cure and Wall most of the time from her roulette as unique to her. It's probably 1% chance or lower for Rapture and The End to actually pop up. I wasn't really being serious with abilities that could potentially kill bosses flat out. Rapture was given to Selphie in a cellphone game "Dissidia FF Opera Omnia" to grant utility instead. It is very useful utility for how the game works.
FF6 I couldn't say much since their special skills usually do other things. The Esper system also gave everyone the base WHM kit too. Desperation attacks only pop up at crisis HP at maybe 1/20 chance. I have never seen Riot Blade from Terra. The cast usually just off heal and focus on damage and utility. Terra and Celes I believe learn Cure by default. Sabin gets Mantra. Gau might have a monster copy for his Rage, but I would need to double check. Locke has his lore with Phoenix. Setzer healed the party a little bit if his Slots didn't get anything.
Anyways, the goal I was getting at was to examine what other damage and utility spells were present with other WHM-like healers. In a way, the sky is the limit with 6, 7 and 8 since anyone could have the base kit. Aerith and Selphie were mentioned more since their unique LBs are largely utility based like a healer. They were both capable of manipulating other LBs with Aerith's level 3 LBs and the base spell Aura. It's something different to look at. -
04-29-2023, 05:15 AMIDontPetLalasJust for sh*ts and giggles, take a look at https://aion.fandom.com/wiki/List:Cleric_skillsQuote:
Originally Posted by Tigore
That was a whm- like healer in another game. Look at the range of skills- incidentally, that isn't even the complete range of available skills - as 'stigma" skills allowed for the slotting of around approximately 10 (depending upon level) which could be either heal and/or DPS.
Mind you this isn't the current list, as the game started in 2009 and went through a number of changes - this was as a couple of years ago - but look at what the main healer could do there. also note that there are skills based upon water, earth and lightning. -
04-29-2023, 05:30 AMTigore
I think I heard from another Warcraft player he tried this Aion game. It was more PvP based from what I heard of. I can see from the list that it partially uses elemental resistances and weaknesses to define damage. Interesting. It probably won't happen here since one could just pop fire resist to make every enemy BLM hit like a wet noodle... Unless the BLM was given Ice and Thunder variants of course.
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04-29-2023, 09:32 AMIDontPetLalas
Aion did have a lot of PVP, however it did have PVE as well, everything for solo, party and alliance size PVE at various scales of of difficulty. While its PVE might not as been as challenging as some games, it was less failure tolerant because the number of entries per week were limited.
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04-29-2023, 12:45 PMRenathrasIt IS the most logical - no amount of insisting it's not changes that. Not to mention the time distinction in leveling from 1-30-90 vs 30-90 is relatively minor. It doesn't take long leveling to 30 in general unless it's your first ever character in your first ever MMO, in which case you most likely aren't going to be upset with it since those kinds of healer players tend to be, as someone once said, "WAY more focused on healing than you probably need to be."Quote:
Originally Posted by FTP
IF - for the sake of argument, IF - we were going to leave one alone and everyone accepted that: WHM would be the most logical choice. SCH doesn't make sense as it doesn't even start as a Healer (and its history has had more damage abilities in the past, which would mean making it the simple one would annoy longtime fans of the Job). AST doesn't make sense, since you can't even start with it, but it still has to level a ton to get to cap, and it's also arguably the most COMPLEX of the Healers right now. The amount you'd have to remove to make it "the simple one" would be far bigger in terms of change than WHM being simply left alone AND it wouldn't fit the Job or the expectation people have come to expect of it. And SGE doesn't make the most sense because a new player can't start with it and its lore suggests a more advanced thinker and spellcaster; notwithstanding this, SGE makes the SECOND most sense.
But WHM is still by far the most logical choice. It's always been the simple one in this game. Its EW kit (as shown in that other thread going right now) is about equal in number of damage buttons to its ARR damage kit. It even largely plays the same (in terms of damage) to its SB era, where SB was using even LESS planned non-Stone casts per minute than ShB/EW WHM does (5.288 vs 6, I believe the numbers were: See the "Healers, Then and Now" thread here for more info on that). It makes the most sense in this category of any of the Healers by far in terms of the logical pick for this.
We...have more than one DPS button. You get your second one at level 4 in the game as it is today...?Quote:
Originally Posted by FTP
No one's "pretending" it's "too hard". I've said many players DON'T LIKE/WANT more complicated DPS rotations on Healers. While it is true that on these forums people tend to say the opposite, you still get people from time to time say "I wouldn't mind just one DPS button" (which is far more extreme than my own position; current WHM has 5; 6/7 if you count Solace and Rapture as separate, but if you don't - I don't - then 5 + Presence of Mind, I suppose) and/or "If I wanted a DPS rotation, I'd play one of the many DPS Jobs in this game" or the like. Even if it WAS a minority, 1 Job out of 4 is also a minority, so it fits.
To be fair, there's a rather famous reason for that: Twintania.Quote:
Originally Posted by FTP
The arena isn't flat for that fight (Bahamut's palm), which led to a lot of weirdness in the mechanics and at least one (probably more than one) exploit. Even now, you can use the "out and in" of that dip on the one side to bait Divebombs that then don't hit the party at all.
I'm not saying they still need to do this or that there's no other solution, mind you. But that's the reason for WHY most arenas are flat, even as they try to vary the stage arrangement like Susaku or P7.
This.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tigore
And if we go by a pure numbers, with around 2-3 million players, at least 20% of those Healers (and many people maining multiple Jobs and/or multiple roles) making for a conservative estimate of around 500,000 Healer players (ballparking it), if only 125,000 simply liked the playstyle of having a slimmed down healing kit, that would be 25%. Note that 1 Healer Job out of 4 would also be 25%. Ty's poll did have some problems.
For example, in the first iteration (he changed it at some point), you HAD to pick a "more something" action, even if you didn't want to. A lot of people may have defaulted to "more attacking", we don't know.
Additionally, "more attacking actions" doesn't always mean what you might initially think. If you read the long answer (for those who filled that in), a lot of people asking for "more attacking actions", when going into detail, are talking about swapping around when you gain abilities in the leveling process, with many saying WHM should get Misery much earlier. That's not MORE attacking actions, it's EXISTING attacking actions granted earlier.
Moreover, just looking at WHM, the number of people who DID NOT list "more attacking actions" was 26 in a poll of 159. That's 16% (and some change; 16.35...%). That means even among this community which is MORE LIKELY to be in favor of more attacking actions, 1/6th of WHM responses were NOT for more attacking actions.
I'd ask Ty if he'd make another pie chart for them breaking down (as a percentage of 159) who answered which of each of the answers, and ideally one with the different combinations (e.g. someone saying "more attacking" only would be distinct from "more attacking + more movement abilities"). But...I suspect he's angry at me for calling him out and then his doubling down on it, so he probably won't want to do any favors for me for a while.
Regardless, if even in this selection sample bias opposed to NOT having more attacking actions, fully 1/6th of people held that position of no more attacking actions, it should be reasonable for us to assume that a substantial percentage of the Healer community doesn't want more attacking actions. Definitely enough to justify at least one Job out of four not being forced into it. This is honestly even more noticeable if we look at the AST numbers. 55 out of 162 or 33.95...%. That's more than 1/3rd of ASTs that do NOT want more attacking actions (including some responses like "no stop adding things", lol; I hear you, friend!)
I definitely think it's clear that there's enough people who do not want more attack actions across the Jobs to justify at least one not doing so.
Sylphie is used as an insult by people who don't read quest text.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tigore
I did a VERY long deep dive into it (as in, I went through the quest cutscenes line by line as well as the summary description [the text summarizing the quest you can read in your journal later]) and proved that the issue with Sylphie was not "I just wanna heal and not deal damage", it was "I'm using my life force to heal people and about to cast Raise, which will kill me by consuming all my life force". The point is made so clear, it's impossible to miss, yet people want to use it as an insult because they didn't read the quest text/dialogue and/or didn't understand what they read and/or wanted it to mean something else. In any case, it's an insult, but it more insults the people using it since it exposes them for not having read OR not having understood OR injecting their own bias into the quest text.
More I was saying how Ty's idea would have to be implemented to actually work.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tigore
Honestly, I'd prefer WHM stay as it is today. A possible solution could be to make Druid/Geomancer split from Conjurer and be what people who want "WHM with more attack actions" and leave WHM alone. This would probably work better with the lore as well as the player base, since many people who want WHM to have "more attack actions" tend to say they don't like the Glare/Dia aesthetic and would rather Flood/Tornado/Quake...which would make more sense for a Geomancer/Druid to have anyway. It also would be less work for the Devs to just make DRU/GEO as a new Job splitting from CNJ with those abilities rather than make DRU/GEO, copying all the WHM abilities over (including the Holy ones, which make no sense for DRU/GEO), and THEN remaking WHM into the "new" version. Not to mention that would be stealing WHM from the people who have it, play it, and enjoy it now (granted, we'd also be doing this with the other Healer Jobs, but in this case, it would make even less sense). Overall, the better option would be to leave WHM alone while adding DRU/GEO as the nature themed attacky one.
Funny you say this, I had a very similar idea:Quote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...is-but-what-if...
It got 1 like, so that's...something, I guess? /shrug
Good news!Quote:
Originally Posted by ForteNightshade
No Job in this game has only 1 DPS button! \o/
Sarcasm aside, there actually IS a good deal of nuance to WHM. It's not gigabrain stuff, but it's a depth of more than 0. Off the top of my head:
1) When Holy is a DPS gain over Glare (easy, but still a thing): Technically 3 targets, but it's close enough most people swap to it at 2.
2) When Holy is a DPS gain over Dia (not as many people know this one): 5 targets (4.4). Up to 4 targets, you should Dia them all, Holy until Dia needs refreshing, refresh Dia, then continue Holy. At 5 targets, Holy does a total of 750 damage per GCD used, which is higher than Dia's 660 total.
3) When Glare is a DPS gain over Dia: If the target has less than 15 seconds to live, Dia will only do 60 + [ (time/3) * 60 ] damage. 60 for less than 3 seconds, 120 for 3-5, 180 for 6-8, 240 for 9-11, 300 for 12-14 vs Glare III's 310.
4) When Misery is a gain/putting Misery into damage buffs.
5a) When holding Assize can be a DPS gain, and up to how long it can be held (also depends on fight knowledge and buff window timings/delays during the fight).
5b) There's a similar case with Presence of Mind, though it's more strict. In BOTH cases, the deciding issue is "will delay lose you one use of the ability over the fight or not" and "will delay cause you to drift out of buff windows unacceptably".
6) That Dia is a DPS gain for long movement if Swiftcast cannot be used and you don't have a Lily/Misery up (Dia, unlike Biolysis, Combust, and Eukrasia Diagnosis has a 60 Potency damage tick up front - this obviously isn't huge, but it's > 0 and thus a DPS gain to optimize if you have fights that don't let you stand still at all for even slide casts).
7) Proper placement of Holy in add phases (when they exist) to hit multiple adds (when you can).
While not gigabrain DPS stuff...WHM isn't a DPS Job. Those issues are still points of optimization and all sum up to make WHM a Job that does more than "press one DPS button".
In one of these threads, I went through every WHM incarnation in the mainline (numbered games) history of Final Fantasy + Final Fantasy Tactics and the "sequel" games (X-2, and maybe the XIII-2/3 games, but I don't remember...)Quote:
Originally Posted by Tigore
Basically, there are two kinds of WHM in the franchise's history: Pure WHMs and WHM/X hybrids (often Summoner). The WHM/SMN hybrids can probably be thought of a lot as what SCH is. Indeed, a Summon monster seen in the series is Slyph/Faerie:
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Sylph
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Faerie
Though the WHM/SMN hybrids in the mainline games tend to have a mix of offensive and healing/defensive summons (Eiko was probably the least offensive, with 4 versions of Carby to buff the party in various ways, and Phoenix to raise the party with; her other two were an Earth or Wind Fenrir and a Holy element Madeen, with her Trance being Double White magic vs Garnet's high summon one). Many of these cases also aren't referred to as White Mages. For example, Yuna is very clearly described in all lore and story interactions as a Summoner, not a White Mage. Garnet AND Eiko are Summoners, from "the Village of Summoners". There is no "Village of White Mages" in FF9 - though there IS a Village of Black Mages. And Yuna? Well...
https://youtu.be/8G-6rd2c-_A?t=38
Excluding those and looking at the pure WHMs, you get cases like Rosa who had Aim (which wasn't a damage thing, it increased her accuracy; it'd be like if WHM had an ability that increased Direct Hit rate or something, and WHM arguably has something akin to this with Presence of Mind), the sister pair of Porom/Palom, who has white magic and Twincast, or the Job system versions (FF1, FF3, FFTactics), which weren't swimming in damage abilities compared to current FFXIV WHM, typically being limited to Holy and either some Aero magic or Dia/light elemental magic. This is also true of FFXI's WHM, not counting Sub-Job skills - it has a much more expansive kit than FFT's version, but a lot of the other stuff are things like "Bar<element>" spells to reduce various elemental damages and various "Bar<status effect>" or "<status effect healing>" (like Stona or Poisona and their AOE versions) abilities, not damage actions, of which it also has very few.
Aerith also isn't described as a White Mage (despite people often seeing her as one) where Rosa and Porom actually are. Porom and Palom are from a village of mages (Black and White), and I think Rosa may be introduced as a White Mage.
So as far as the comparison goes, FFXIV WHM is a pretty good fit for the White Mages in the franchise's history overall. -
04-29-2023, 01:42 PMShurrikhanI can agree with that, but the premise itself is still beyond flawed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renathras
There is no requirement nor benefit to having a job a purposely low skill ceiling, no matter which way you cut it.
If you reward with performance optimal to the Xth degree only as due for the time required by an 'average player' to optimize the job to that Xth degree... that job obviously then can't compete at the highest levels of content except insofar as others can compete despite making considerably more mistakes (e.g., when there's more than enough lenience). Even if we were to ignore any and all who want to enjoy themselves when playing a given job they've been attracted to for its aesthetics, that's not going to fly. (Though, admittedly, it'd probably be less disruptive to the game overall for the only 'baby's first healer', if we were saddled with one, to be only for 'baby' to at most midcore content.)
On the other hand, if you make it so they're as simple as possible short of going comatose and yet have the performance of any other job, the best result you can achieve is to create a situation where a group of less confident players feel pigeonholed into one job despite less than optimal performance on others still being sufficient, on the simple basis that they can compete with far more skilled players so long as they don't dare step beyond their protected space of that single job. Ultimately, such hurts those players.
More likely though, you create a situation where the easier job is also superior for most fights when handled by the vast majority of players --not just your least confident population-- because a simpler job is inherently going to have fewer levers to pull to bring about tight functional balance.
That's not to say you can't have jobs whose path to mastery deals less with what a typical person would call "complexity" than they would "nuance," but that's not a skill ceiling, and is often preferable regardless and certainly wouldn't reduce a job to being actually "simple" or require that it be left in a state of "technically having 'more than 0' complexity" as per current WHM.
This whole idea that we MUST have an infant(ilized) job option seems to spawn from a very twisted sense of protectionism -- the idea that a player must be allowed to do little without noticing how little that actually is or that they could do more. It's an effort solely in --depending on how that infant job gets balanced-- double-standards and/or obfuscation.
Just let all jobs have a decently high ceiling through different mechanics, let players gravitate towards either/both of whatever, by idiosyncracy of habit and former experience, most clicks with them (such that its difficulty to optimize to whatever degree they care to learn up to feels less to them than is typically reported by others) or most appeals to them aesthetically, with whatever learning required taken in stride.
There is no need to truncate any of these jobs, or leave any starved of reworks, rejuvenation, or metaphorical oxygen, etc., just to "provide an option" for less interested players; simply playing less optimally already provides that option for not having to take play so seriously, and it would not be to broader game's benefit to allow half-assing on one job to equal a far greater practiced effort on another (or any other complete denial of balance). Someone who can't be bothered to play well enough for Extremes shouldn't be able to then do Ultimate by swapping to baby's first healer/tank/DPS/what-have-you. -
04-29-2023, 02:11 PMRenathras
For the record, Ty's survey, as of this writing - Healers in each category that did NOT want more attack actions for a given Job:
WHM: 26 / 159 (>16%) [16.35...%]
SCH: 29 / 172 (>16%) [16.86...%] *
AST: 55 / 162 (>33%) [33.95...%]
SGE: 17 / 132 (>12%) [12.8787...%]
TOTAL 1: 20.32%
TOTAL 2: 15.68%**
**[EDIT: As per the later discussion, 7 SCHs actually directly answered they want LESS healing actions, meaning Total 2's minimum value is actually 16.8%, not 15.68%. So even at the minimum estimate, it is at least 1/6th of overall survey responses that are not in favor of more attack actions per their answers.]
* SCH is weird since some people didn't say more attack actions, but kind of indicated in their posts they wanted some, but others said they didn't, and either didn't put in a long form answer, or indicated in their long form they didn't want more. A LOT wanted Energy Drain decoupled from Aetherflow (or outright removed) [even some people who DID want more attack actions]. One even said make SCH like SB and that it was perfect (while NOT selecting add more actions), while another said DON'T make SCH a clone of SB. So the answers are kind of all over the place, so I'm including it as a lower and upper bound.
Total 1 is including ALL the SCH answers, Total 2 is including NONE of them (but still using +172 in the denominator; in other words, pretending all the SCH players DID, in fact, want more damage actions - which is highly unlikely)
[EDIT: To be clear, this was true across the Jobs, but PARTICULARLY prevalent with SCH. Few SGEs held the position in the first place, with most seeming to want more damage abilities and not being a SCH clone, while ASTs seemed to want more buffs all around, and across all the Healers there seemed to be a lot of desire for buffing and movement options overall. The non-SCHs I'm not as worried about here, though, since you also had people say "more attack actions" which their long form then clarified as they meant "earlier access to Misery" as opposed to more actions, so I think we can say those probably even out except in the peculiar case of SCH itself, hence Total 1 and Total 2 above.
Also note that the number who don't want more attack actions MAY be higher than this, given the weirdness of the early time the poll was up (some even said "I don't want to pick more, but I have to pick something, so..." or the like), and that some clarified "more attack" meant "early access to existing attack buttons". And, of course, that this community is more in favor of adding attack actions than not with some selection bias there. But while it may be higher than Total 1, it should not be LOWER than Total 2.]
The total is between 1/6th and 1/5th of Healers do not want more DPS actions. SPECIFICALLY in the case of AST, 1/3rd do not want more DPS actions - even a lot of people asking for more damage actions were complaining about button bloat.
And again, note that this is from a community that is very much in favor of more damage actions. I think there's more than enough there to justify that at least one Healer Job should NOT be made more DPS focused overall. This is assuming they WERE going to change them to be more DPS focused in the first place (which the Devs have given no indication of). Even in the worst case scenario, 1/6 is still a sizeable minority of the population, and using the more realistic 1/5 would suggest that if there were 5 Healer Jobs (or 4 Healer Jobs but one had two STANCES - like AST, for example...), at least one of those not being DPS focused would be fully justified.