The State of Homogenization: A New (Healer) Player's Perspective

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Originally Posted by CrimsonGunner

regen and aspected benefic.
medica 2 and aspected helios.
glare and dia are identical to combust and malefic the only thing different is potencies.

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Sage gets Lustrate and Indom that are not deeps loss too. Exact same potencies and use case for these skills between Sage and Scholar.

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Originally Posted by Elesh

An upfront heal + heal over time is identical to JUST a heal over time?

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Nope! One is just better in every way which poses whooole different problem..

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Originally Posted by CrimsonGunner

i think you are trying to ignore the similarities here my friend not me reaching.

also what cast time... both regen and aspected benefic are instant cast

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The cast time was in reference to Aspected Helios, which I'd forgotten is simply significantly faster and not instant. A factual error that I later remembered was incorrect so edited.

But no. there are similarities. But... similar is not identical. And a regen healer having a basic building block of:
AoE Heal
AoE Regen
Single Heal
Big Heal
Nuke
DoT

Doesn't seem like an unreasonable level of similarity when you add on all the other stuff that ISN'T identical.

But... saying '70% of their spells are identical' when it's really just... 7 out of about ~24 class specific skills... is just factually wrong. And needlessly reductive.

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Originally Posted by Elesh

The cast time was in reference to Aspected Helios, which I'd forgotten is simply significantly faster and not instant. A factual error that I later remembered was incorrect so edited.

But no. there are similarities. But... similar is not identical. And a regen healer having a basic building block of:
AoE Heal
AoE Regen
Single Heal
Big Heal
Nuke
DoT

Doesn't seem like an unreasonable level of similarity when you add on all the other stuff that ISN'T identical.

But... saying '70% of their spells are identical' when it's really just... 7 out of about ~24 class specific skills... is just factually wrong. And needlessly reductive.

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lightning speed and presence of mind.
temperence and neutral sect.
exaltation and aquaveil.

you can play semantics all you want but when skills are identical almost to a T both play,use and have identical effects with only 1 small thing added to one job to make it different sorry that is not similar that is identical.

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Originally Posted by Elesh

So let's compare WhM/Astro, which are the two who share the most in terms of role.
Cure 1, Cure 2, and Medica have identical counterparts. Glare and Dia have nearly identical abilities.

That's... it, actually(aside from role actions). Essential Dignity is fairly similar to Tetragrammaton, but not identical.Celestial Intersection is fairly similar to Divine Benison, but again not identical.

So no, it's not a copy paste.

There are abiltiies that serve the same role in different ways - ex. Earthly Star and Assize serve similar roles, so could be put on the same bar, but aren't identical. Medica 2 vs Aspected Helios, again. Similar, but not identical. But you have to be REALLY reductive to say 'these abilities are identical'.

Oh and raise. But... that's basically a role action.

Please provide me any abilities I didn't mention above that White Mage has that any other healer has word for word identical. I can't think of any.

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Talk about splitting hairs. The differences between WHM and AST are superficial at best and it's clear that you're just arguing for argument's sake.

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Originally Posted by CrimsonGunner

lightning speed and presence of mind.
temperence and neutral sect.
exaltation and aquaveil.

you can play semantics all you want but when skills are identical almost to a T both play,use and have identical effects with only 1 small thing added to one job to make it different sorry that is not similar that is identical.

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This is my core problem with homogenization arguments. They're so incredibly freaking reductive. Yep, if you go simple enough everything's the same. FFXIV is the same as tetris. I push buttons and things happen on screen. A beautiful sonnet by a professional singer is the same as a two year old throwing a temper tantrum - they both involve sound and impact your emotions in some way.

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Originally Posted by Elesh

The cast time was in reference to Aspected Helios, which I'd forgotten is simply significantly faster and not instant. A factual error that I later remembered was incorrect so edited.

But no. there are similarities. But... similar is not identical. And a regen healer having a basic building block of:
AoE Heal
AoE Regen
Single Heal
Big Heal
Nuke
DoT

Doesn't seem like an unreasonable level of similarity when you add on all the other stuff that ISN'T identical.

But... saying '70% of their spells are identical' when it's really just... 7 out of about ~24 class specific skills... is just factually wrong. And needlessly reductive.

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https://i.imgur.com/Hnx7E4N.png

They are not the same thing? You are correct in some respects but whm has a unfair disadvantage for regen cure and cure 2. There are differences sure but they are in essence exactly the same thing serving the same exact function similar to Aetherflow on scholar and Addersgall for Sage you can even throw Lillies from whm except the unfairness of it being on the global.

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Originally Posted by Faafetai

Stuffs!

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Shall save you the time of awaiting their reply.

"Reductive. Reductive! Buzzword buzzword buzzword. Soooo reductive."

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Originally Posted by Faafetai

https://i.imgur.com/Hnx7E4N.png

They are not the same thing? You are correct in some respects but whm has a unfair disadvantage for regen cure and cure 2. There are differences sure but they are in essence exactly the same thing serving the same exact function similar to Aetherflow on scholar and Addersgall for Sage you can even throw Lillies from whm except the unfairness of it being on the global.

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I said that those specific spells were the only things thaty WERE the same.(although I don't consider regen and aspected benefic to be the same) - the basic building blocks are the same. But while Assize and Earthly Star both serve the same function of 'damage + healing', and while Tetra and ED both serve the same function of 'emergency heal'... they aren't identical. Down the board. Outside of the BASIC building blocks... every tool past that serves a similar PURPOSE but in a different way. Liturgy vs Macro. Opposition vs Afflatus Rapture. Temperance vs Neutral Sect. They serve similar purposes... but play differently. Neutral sect gives shields while temperance reduces damage taken. Similar effect, but not the same. Rapture is on the gcd and requires a lily while also enabling the blood lily. Opposition is ogcd but has a large cooldown and provides a regen. Both give aoe healing, but don't feel the same to have.

Like down the line... the healers have toolkits that serve the same purpose, but they don't do it in the same way. It's important they have these tools. You can't have a healer that can't aoe heal because they'd be useless. So you NEED tools that serve the same purpose. But the important part is that they function in different methods - different resources used, casting methods, secondary effects, cooldowns, etc.

Only the base toolkit of like cure 1, cure 2, medica, raise, glare, dia, medica 2 are 'identical'.

When I started playing FFXIV during ShB 5.05 patch, I was excited to play SCH the most. Little did I know I'd be broiling 99% of my time as healer. I had hoped for more dps variety, but who needs that, amirite.

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Originally Posted by Elesh

snip

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okay good because I literally thought I was going insane, or missing some important information about the classes.

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Originally Posted by Faafetai

okay good because I literally thought I was going insane, or missing some important information about the classes.

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Ya no, if you just read that one post you quoted I can absolutely see where you misunderstood what I was saying. My apologies for the poor wording in that post.

Those abilities ARE identical. It's the stuff after those that aren't. And really... aside from glare and dia, you barely cast most of the 'identical' abilities so like... you're not using much of the 'basic building block' toolkit at high levels at all.

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Originally Posted by Broken_Wind

My thought on Wildstar is they wanted to capture the segment of players that liked big time sinks or coordination efforts like guild attunement. they wanted the people who sunk 8-10 hour days into EQ and WoW, and liked the challenging of herding cats into a 54 man, or bigger, raid where the challenges were much more organizational/tactical then "skill". This is a niche market for sure, but certainly existed during Wildstar's launch time

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That's more or less accurate.

Don't get me wrong, I was demonstrably very fond of the game; I still get asked periodically "are you the same Packetdancer from WildStar?" I nearly took a job at Carbine. I still am friends with some of the devs. It's the only game made after I left the game development industry as my day job where I'm in the credits. But I think they made two really big mistakes.

First... I don't actually think the action-based combat system was the wrong choice, but I do think the way they scaled it up over the level range was; the game didn't have a skill curve so much as a skill cliff. The early levels were relatively easy and accessible, but after a certain point it ramped up so abruptly that a lot of people slammed into a wall like Wile E. Coyote trying to chase the Roadrunner through a painted tunnel. ("Meep meep! Pthb." *WHAM*) As it also didn't provide a ton of things to help folks get past that sudden dramatic increase, many folks got frustrated and left. A smoother ramping up might have led to less frustration and more player retention. (Whether or not it would've been a significant amount more retention, I don't know. But I don't think a smoother difficulty curve would have made player retention worse.)

Second, the devs were predominantly veterans of the original WoW team or the Everquest and Everquest 2 teams, and when they heard a lot of raiders talk about missing the old days and wanting meaty content that required huge parties and a lot of organization... I feel like they took that very, very seriously, and tried to recapture the feel of those early days of MMO raiding. But as a result, that was basically the only endgame that existed at launch. Which meant folks more interested in other endgame activities wandered off... and it turned out that no matter how loud a lot of old-school raiders were about missing the old days, many had little things like "jobs" and "families" and "social lives" now, and did not actually want to put in the massive amount of effort required to tackle those types of endgame content any longer.

And I suspect that's part of the reason that Square-Enix tries to simplify/streamline the primary content. Because no matter how vocal folks are here on the forums, I strongly suspect we're a fairly small portion of the playerbase. And much as I really wish I had a more interesting DPS rotation (or, y'know, enough DPS button variety for something to count as a "rotation" in the first place) as a healer, I also strongly suspect that making the combat more complex would alienate many players. And no matter how it sounds here in the forums, I genuinely wonder if the vocal few here would be enough to keep the game going indefinitely were they to reverse course... or whether it'd be a situation where, a few years from now, players were reminiscing about their much-lamented MMO's demise and holding an impromptu wake on Twitter.

(As is happening for WildStar right now.)

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

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And I suspect that's part of the reason that Square-Enix tries to simplify/streamline the primary content. Because no matter how vocal folks are here on the forums, I strongly suspect we're a fairly small portion of the playerbase. And much as I really wish I had a more interesting DPS rotation (or, y'know, enough DPS button variety for something to count as a "rotation" in the first place) as a healer, I also strongly suspect that making the combat more complex would alienate many players. And no matter how it sounds here in the forums, I genuinely wonder if the vocal few here would be enough to keep the game going indefinitely were they to reverse course... or whether it'd be a situation where, a few years from now, players were reminiscing about their much-lamented MMO's demise and holding an impromptu wake on Twitter.

(As is happening for WildStar right now.)

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Agreed. And while I do think there's a bit of a middle ground they could make to add a tiny bit of skill expression, I also appreciate what we have and want it to keep going so... lol

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Originally Posted by Elesh

Agreed. And while I do think there's a bit of a middle ground they could make to add a tiny bit of skill expression, I also appreciate what we have and want it to keep going so... lol

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Yeah. As a player, I tend to feel like there's got to be a middle ground.

On the other hand, as a former professional game dev, I also know that balancing things is a freakin' nightmare at the best of times; even if it all works out on paper, people will always try to find creative ways to eke just that little bit more DPS out... and you have to just pray those ways are ones you already foresaw and took into account when balancing.

And it takes less of those unexpected ways to use the system to destabilize it than you might think. Because—at least in my own personal experience—game balance is often a house of cards built on top of a table made out of dominos. And the playerbase are half a dozen cats laying on the floor with one paw out towards the first domino of that chain, staring thoughtfully as though wondering, "I wonder what happens if I bat at this domino here..."

(...I'm tired, my ability to analogy may be breaking down.)

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Originally Posted by Elesh

Like down the line... the healers have toolkits that serve the same purpose, but they don't do it in the same way. It's important they have these tools. You can't have a healer that can't aoe heal because they'd be useless. So you NEED tools that serve the same purpose. But the important part is that they function in different methods - different resources used, casting methods, secondary effects, cooldowns, etc.

Only the base toolkit of like cure 1, cure 2, medica, raise, glare, dia, medica 2 are 'identical'.

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AST's tools aren't identical to WHM's, that's true. AST's tools are, for the most part, what you'd do if you took a suspiciously similar ability from WHM's kit, and then made it superior in basically every single way, then called it "balanced".

Interestingly enough SGE is a better SCH and AST a better WHM but at end all hit their attack skill more often then a tank autattacks in full savage fight >.< It is pattern but a weird one. So atleast we have only boredom and can clear all content, it is a very low bar but hey ^^