The Healer Double Standard

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Yes. The battle team that designs the job is also the one that designs the encounters. That's the logic. It's sound logic to see the jobs in their new state in the content they were designed for.

And you know what? I've enjoyed White Mage so far. The other two I still need to work through but I only have so much time.

Now, I'm not trying to gloat. I'm actually on the same ship regarding card changes, I just disagree where it should head. Same bit as Scholar. I think resource conflict was a key part of Scholar. I don't care much for Energy Drain but something should replace it.

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Considering the fact that FFXIV has been rote and stuck in its ways for several years, whatever made you think that healing in 5.0 would be different appears to be lunacy. At least, to me. I cannot possibly pretend to understand your perception, but people were right. A lot of unnecessary (read: outside of savage/extreme fights) healing tools were added, and what made both Scholar and Astrologian fun got chopped as the cost. This isn't what anyone wanted.

White Mage should get aero 3 back if nothing else. SE needs to expand on the healer DPS toolkits, not contract them. Apparently, massive job changes are incoming in the savage patch, according to JP patch notes, but I will believe that when I see it happen.

To add onto the point about Astro: It was more butchered so that SE could try (and fail) to fight against the concept of 'The meta' and stringent party compositions which only applied in speed kills and world first bleeding edge racing.

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Originally Posted by Videra

Apparently, massive job changes are incoming in the savage patch, according to JP patch notes, but I will believe that when I see it happen.

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Knowing SE, I wouldn't be shocked if they did something stupid and DID have big changes, but that they made the situation even worse.

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Originally Posted by Videra

Considering the fact that FFXIV has been rote and stuck in its ways for several years, whatever made you think that healing in 5.0 would be different appears to be lunacy. At least, to me. I cannot possibly pretend to understand your perception, but people were right. A lot of unnecessary (read: outside of savage/extreme fights) healing tools were added, and what made both Scholar and Astrologian fun got chopped as the cost.

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My perception is that encounter design is limited by player toolkits.

And Astro and Scholar were -very- limited toolkits. Adding another facet of DPS to them doesn't change encounter design at all.

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Originally Posted by Billythepancake

Knowing SE, I wouldn't be shocked if they did something stupid and DID have big changes, but that they made the situation even worse.

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You mean like 4.2 Warrior?

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Originally Posted by Critical-Limit

Aim for balance but never perfect balance. Fighting games are full of interesting characters with different strengths skills and weakneses. However often there will be only like 12 tournament viable number of characters out of 24. That’s a healthy number. People who play at high end of the game have a decent number of characters to pick for winning high end games.

If you wanted perfect balance. Every character would need to be the exact same character, which is what is slowly happening to this game. I don’t think it’ll ever get that bad. But the closer we get to that the less interesting the game will become.

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Problem with that mentality when it comes to healers is there's only 3 to choose from and two are mandatory for content. So they need to be balanced, and right now, they're not.

This is AFTER we missed out on a new healer because "they wanted to balance what they had". SE has had 4 years to "balance" healers, and so far they haven't done a great job. They need some new blood or something because what has been going on for the past 4 years isn't working.

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Originally Posted by Videra

To add onto the point about Astro: It was more butchered so that SE could try (and fail) to fight against the concept of 'The meta' and stringent party compositions which only applied in speed kills and world first bleeding edge racing.

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This. SE needs to stop balancing around the top 1% of the player base and around the 90% and lower that the majority of plays like.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

This. SE needs to stop balancing around the top 1% of the player base and around the 90% and lower that the majority of plays like.

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Looking at it like that it makes sense with the restrictions of AF, limited fairy interactions and the cooldowns of things like Rescue and Chain Strat. It might just all work well in a well-planned fight like you find in Savage. But there is so much more content you play in than that. I'd wish they saw not only is a lot of time spent in lower-than-80 content for leveling, but also in the daily roulettes and the times to you try to fight something solo like in the MSQ. If they'd only first made sure that part is fun to play.

It might be the current rendition of not only healers but also rest of the jobs were only designed, tested and balanced for Extreme and upcoming Savage and now they're afraid of doing anything akin to 3.0 or earlier it might throw off a delicate number-crunched balance they achieved. If that is the case we might want for a seperate system like PvP and Eureka: You get a set of unbalanced and OP, but full and fun set of skills like with the old Primary, Secondary and Tertiary cross-class system to use everywhere else and then you have the current system we see today for Savage fights, where the developers can tweak and adjust so it fits in perfectly with the scripted fights.

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Originally Posted by Sloprano

Looking at it like that it makes sense with the restrictions of AF, limited fairy interactions and the cooldowns of things like Rescue and Chain Strat. It might just all work well in a well-planned fight like you find in Savage. But there is so much more content you play in than that. I'd wish they saw not only is a lot of time spent in lower-than-80 content for leveling, but also in the daily roulettes and the times to you try to fight something solo like in the MSQ. If they'd only first made sure that part is fun to play.

It might be the current rendition of not only healers but also rest of the jobs were only designed, tested and balanced for Extreme and upcoming Savage and now they're afraid of doing anything akin to 3.0 or earlier it might throw off a delicate number-crunched balance they achieved. If that is the case we might want for a seperate system like PvP and Eureka: You get a set of unbalanced and OP, but full and fun set of skills like with the old Primary, Secondary and Tertiary cross-class system to use everywhere else and then you have the current system we see today for Savage fights, where the developers can tweak and adjust so it fits in perfectly with the scripted fights.

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I feel like for everything outside Savage we’re starting to see balancing be towards the absolute bottom than the absolute top. Healing requirements are the perfect example of this; devs want healers to heal which is fine, but then design all healing content around the idea that players are desperately struggling to meet healing requirements, which is almost never the case outside of savage in my experience.
It’s the same with DPS toolkits for healers. Developers aren’t simplifying it to address any kind of healer savage balance, it’s just because they don’t want healers to be too ‘complicated’. The same could even be argued for things like buffs/debuffs on healers. They aren’t trying to adjust healer strength in savage with removal do things like Virus and Disable, they just wanted to make healing easier for everyone outside of that content.
The real question is how they expect players to ever learn things like maintaining buffs or debuffs or DPS as a healer when they design content so that everything outside of savage doesn’t need those. And that ultimately leads to healers being incredibly bored because healing is far too easy but we don’t have anything to fill the huge amounts of downtime (which I assume will be much less in savage)

This is one thing I can definitely say I just don’t get. They balance the healing kit for savage, then balance everything outside of savage as low as they possibly can, so healers end up with an insanely powerful tool but barely anything to use it on. They don’t want healers to be overburdened, then give them a toolkit that assumes the player is overburdened

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Originally Posted by Doozer

Funny that people are raving now that SCH is getting this when AST has had it literally the entire time. 1 DPS button, 1 DoT button, and one AoE. Were you crying at the beginning of HW because of that too, or only now because it affects your main job?

Also you're literally not arguing against anything I said. I said tanks benefit from the aggro generated from DPS, hence why it makes sense for them to still have it.

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Except the flaw in your argument is that SCH isn't AST.

Nobody plays SCH because they want to spam 2 buttons, that's why you choose to main WHM or AST. By your logic should we also not get mad if we give black mage no casting penalty for movement? I mean MCHs and BRDs have been mobile literally the entire time.

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Originally Posted by Dogempire

Except the flaw in your argument is that SCH isn't AST.

Nobody plays SCH because they want to spam 2 buttons, that's why you choose to main WHM or AST. By your logic should we also not get mad if we give black mage no casting penalty for movement? I mean MCHs and BRDs have been mobile literally the entire time.

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Also, AST had the cards to play with.

Also, I really wish (although I understand it's never happen) that the deva would tie dps into healing. Like by having the lily vague fillbased on a combination of time passed and damage dealt, so dpsing would also help you heal better directly. (It already helps indirectly because the quicker something dies the less damage it does). That way we could stop this stupid argument of "past design choices mean healers should be more boring".

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Originally Posted by Dogempire

Except the flaw in your argument is that SCH isn't AST.

Nobody plays SCH because they want to spam 2 buttons, that's why you choose to main WHM or AST. By your logic should we also not get mad if we give black mage no casting penalty for movement? I mean MCHs and BRDs have been mobile literally the entire time.

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SCH and AST are both healers, BLM and BRD are different roles.

Furthermore, no one picks up AST or WHM because they want to spam 2 DPS buttons, they pick them up cause you know...they wanna heal.

People play SCH when they like shields, AST when they like buffs, and WHM when they like the big heals.

SCH was only special because of the 30 levels where people had to play Arcanist, so I mean, if Thaumaturge is going to level up into Bard, then yeah, the way the Job is built should probably change to match the others.