Sorry, this ain't true. In no edition of DnD was it wise to healbot or single ability spam as a cleric.Quote:
Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi
1st Ed: Clerics had a slightly restricted spell list compared to MUs, but had melee capabilities close to fighters. Turn Undead was a big feature. They also didn't rely on a spell book. Most of thier classic spells (Bless, Protection fom X, Command, Sanctuary) mitigated damage directly, detection, or were crowd control. Healing was a last resort, because in 1e if you hit 0hp...you died. That's it. Avoiding damage was the name if the game.
2nd Ed ADnD - Once again clerics were heavy armor spellcasting frontliners with HP and AC to match. Thier spell list was based on the Sphere of Domain for thier god, but again they focused heavily on Buffs and control. 2nd ed is also where summoning really started, and quite a few clerics were proficient at doing it.
3e: Clerics had a 3/4th attack progression, full casting, a plethora of offensive spells (Flame Stike, Inflict Wounds, Harm) plus all thier old buffs and detection. Frankly they were (still are) all around better than other magic classes except arguably Druid. Offensively an A-team (made of A-men from various Dieties of different domains) were not only a viable squad, but actually exceptional. Summoning magic was super prevalent in 3e as it was insanely potent to not need to fight something yourself.
4e: Clerics were a 'leader' class in 4th ed, and probably the most MMO styled healer in all versions. Even so they were *still* hravy armor frontliners capable of smiting the heck out of infidels, while maybe holding back a healing word or two for emergencies. Once again control spells were the name of the game. Killing a target is the best CC, and making them unable to act normally saves more health than any heal you can cast.
5th Edition: Clerics are near the top of DPR charts after two rounds of combat. Spirit guardians is insane damage around you, Spiritual Weapon is autonomous and doesn't require concentration, you can easily get heavy armor and and a shield if you want to frontline, and spells like Banishment are massive gane changers. If you cast any healing at all in combat, someone git focused OR you are misplaying. Plus to pick up an ally you need all of....one bonus action. Nuts I know!
FFXIV healers are nothing like DnD clerics. If they were the class would be both beloved and likely called massively OP, since healers would easily be out damaging tanks (and probably many dos players to boot!)
What are the games that make healer interesting?
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06-27-2024, 03:49 AMJamini
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06-27-2024, 04:16 AMMisterNubletPandæmonium: Abyssos had tanks and dps blaming healers for "lack of healing" because the dps and tanks didn't know how to push their mitigations.Quote:
Originally Posted by Keldion
I'd take WoW's sweaty toxicity over FFXIV's. -
06-27-2024, 04:52 AMKisaiTenshiThe concept of a "healbot" is a strictly PvE MMORPG thing. The first three versions of DnD came out before CRPG's were much of a thing, but essentially every version of the the Cleric or White Mage in Final Fantasy, Wizardry, and every Japanese RPG is based on this DnD version. Cantrips and spells you use once and then have to purchase or learn again. The very concept of "MP" replaces the logic of having levels to magic, separate from character progression levels. Can't cast level 9 armageddeon-end-all-life-on-the-planet when it requires 9999 MP when you are at level 1, even if you can buy it (this is a reference to Ultima, in which you can quite literately acquire the ends-all-life-in-britannia spell and it literately does kill everyone except you and LB.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Jamini
Anyway, you can see this in Wizardy Online. The wiki's for the MMO still exist online despite the game being dead for years. For the sake of not taking screenshots to explain things, here's the wiki page: https://wizardryonline.fandom.com/wiki/Priest
The 4 base classes are exactly the same as FF1, because, again, common ancestor being the 1975 version of DnD.
Note exactly how many offensive skills there are relative to the amount of buff and healing. It's skill tree is literately "Heal" and "Shield (Tank)"
There is one Melee strike at level 4 that causes a stun, Holy magic at level 11, elemental attack at 20, and everything else is a shield. So 3 of 39 skills are "DPS"
Meanwhile the Fighter's skill tree is split between "DPS" and "Guard(Tank)", of which there is a single self-heal under the Guard skill set out of 34 skills.
Wizardry and FF1 also uses what was later called Prestige classes that came out later with ADnD 3rd edition.
Without getting into specifics, THAT is what the cross-classing was intended to be in FFXIV V1.0 and ARR. In 1.20 they decided to make the classic FF1 jobs the prestige class rather than the "Wizard" or "Sage" of the FF1. That leads us to where all this lackluster healing skills started. If it would have been possible to prestige the conjurer to a white mage or a black mage, that would have made a heck of a lot more sense, and you could have picked which DPS skills you wanted to keep. Or you could prestige Thaumaturge to black mage or maybe summoner and take the various Debuff casts like Slow and Gravity. Conjurer would have Air, Thunder, Ice, Water, Earth, Fire, and prestige to White Mage would have added Holy. To get all the DPS skills from Conjurer and Thaumaturge, you'd have to level both, and then the DPS spells from both could be added to your black mage, but not Holy. What we actually got in 2.0 was a further culling of this.
Instead of having a pile of skills that you could pick and choose based on ability points, and resulting in everyone playing the same meta, we have a focus on choreography (avoiding taking damage in the first place) which is half of what healers toolbox is for. This comes from how people originally played these games. You didn't "move to avoid AOE" you just had to roll to see if you were going to be hit or not, characters would move within attack range before actually trying to attack. The idea that you could just scoot over an inch to avoid being killed was not a thing.
Fixing "healers" in FFXIV is a unique problem that you can't just look at another game and go "oh they did it better", because every game has to balance around it's core mechanic. As I said with Wizardy Online, most players just forgo trying to be the healer and take consumables. Magic is just too expensive to use, better to take fighters into the dungeon, or try to cheese things with the thief by laying dozens of traps on the floor and just kiting the enemies over them while avoiding tripping your own traps. But the important detail missing here is that the enemies don't self-heal either. If you die, someone has to haul your body back to the shrine, and you have to sacrifice some loot to be revived. Avoiding death was VERY important because it was permadeath if you didn't have enough loot to avoid the RNG deciding against reviving you.
With Yoshi-P casually dropping the idea of ability points, it brings back these nightmare skill trees and awful meta's that make party play next to impossible, because you can't rely on anyone to have the skills needed to complete the content "quickly", since we're not dealing with 3 hour dungeons, but 20 minute ones. There is one thing that I would like to see in XIV, and that would be the "3 hour exploration dungeon", and I don't mean literately 3 hours, but a dungeon that persists your progress like in Wizardry, but also carries the puzzle solving (Unfortunately Wizardy was more like a quiz so it didn't gate keep anyone who watched a video)
At any rate, Cleric in "DnD" was about destroying undead, because their "healing" magic destroys undead. Final Fantasy actually retains this in FF1-10, where using cure or life on undead damages or one-shot kills them. If FFXIV had retained it's "elemental" attributes, then the healer would be the ONLY ONE who could instant-kill undead mobs, everyone else would have to slow-burn them. Outside if this very specific, but also very-common dungeon trope, the cleric would be more buffs than straight healing. But you also have to realize that the encounter design in all but XIV (I don't know about XI since I didn't play XI) has a very logical progressions where you could either Melee DPS the target from the front row, Ranged from the back row, Cast from the back row, and heal from the back row. This concept of "front row" and "back row" is where positioning in other RPG's happens. Contrast with Chrono Trigger and, oh, Super Mario RPG. CT had no positioning but did use party-combos, the only other game I've seen "party combos" from that era in is a Sailor Moon SFC RPG game. Once you figure out what is the best combo to use on a boss, you don't use anything else and spam consumables to keep the DPS up.
But even when I play CT, I would usually have one character do the actual healing (Marle) rather than try to use consumables. My entire play style is "I'm cheap and won't buy consumables" so I will leverage as much healing I can get from the characters who have healing abilities. In every game. Super Mario RPG is one of those cases where Peach is pretty obviously the intended healer since she has the only party heal. So I would always leave Peach in the party once I had the chance to. Staying at the inn to recover magic was generally cheaper than buying consumables.
Which back to the OP, I can't think of another MMORPG where there was a specific healer class that is anything like XIV's that even floating the idea of being similar. Other MMORPG's tend to be way too mechanic light and don't really require "dedicated healing" since consumables are readily available. Having the ability to do content gated behind peoples willingness to sell healing pots seems like a good way to make the game P2W rather than accessible. All the current generations of Gacha mobile RPG games do this. Want a specific character? Pay money for a chance to win them. And then pay a lot more money to prestige them by winning them in the gacha 100 more times. If a specific dungeon requires a "thunder" character to do any damage, and you don't have one, you are gatekept until you spend money. Now imagine if there was no healing character in the game because the game is designed around having it's hands on your wallet. No consumables, no self-healing, HP and MP doesn't automatically recover except at inns and campfires (which means you sit around and do nothing for an hour.) I weep for what kind of content is being passed off as "RPG" in the mobile space.