I'm just saying it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face trying to grit your teeth and play through a game where healing is fundamentally designed to DPS the majority of the time when other games exist. Someone mentioned Ragnarok Online where healers only heal because there's a lot of outgoing damage. Why not try that? It genuinely seems like that's what you're looking for. It's not a jab, but a serious question. I hate first-person view. I like MOBAs. I could play Overwatch and yell about how its not the kind of MOBA I like, or I could just go play a MOBA I like. Doesn't that sound like a healthier option for my own enjoyment?Quote:
Originally Posted by AFuzzyMu11in
What's different here is healers are designed for something that they currently are not built for. But they used to be better designed to compliment this system and had room to grow into it more now, but that was taken away to sterilize the role, but sterilization does not make it well designed. It's just trying to desperately feel as inoffensive as possible to push away the least amount of people, which is wishy-washy bad design. I just want to see the game embrace the path it's taken and design the healers for this game.
General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]
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10-27-2022, 12:41 AMty_taurus
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10-27-2022, 02:44 AMAFuzzyMu11inAnd then what happens to the players who can't handle the new raider style intensive high skill cap high skill floor healing style you want? "Git gud?"Quote:
Originally Posted by ty_taurus
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10-27-2022, 02:58 AMSemirhageWhy are players who can't handle content that requires more attention than breathing and picking their noses at the same time demanding that healing remain easy at all times, in all scenarios? Why are DPS allowed to have a skill ceiling while healers have flatlined, denied skill expression because it's the designated baby role for people who screech that Sastasha is too haaaaaaaaaaard?Quote:
Originally Posted by AFuzzyMu11in
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10-27-2022, 03:04 AMty_taurusFirst and foremost it's not "raider style intensive high skill cap high skill floor healing" It's literally asking what is asked of every other job in the game. If you take a look at any of the builds I proposed for example, none of them are asking for anything even remotely challenging. What changes about my WHM suggestion is basically that every 5 casts of literally any spell, you get a 1-2 utility combo where you cast Tempest, and combo that into either getting your MP back, gaining a lily, putting up Asylum, or activating mitigation based on whatever it is you need. That's not hard to do and no where near what most other jobs in the game ask, but it gives variation and options. It's forgiving, it's simple, but it's interactive, and it gives you choice.Quote:
Originally Posted by AFuzzyMu11in
Moreover, what dictates difficulty is not the job but the content. The vast majority of content barely requires a party to be breathing, let alone perform their rotation. When you do a dungeon roulette, if you decide you don't want to engage with any of those buttons, and just want to keep spamming Glare, you're still going to clear the content. You can clear the content now even when you don't Glare. This game is not asking anything of you in anything below EX. EX also has a lot of room for error. And Savage is meant to be a challenge anyway, not that the challenge is actually increasing much.
Please stop treating the idea of healers being able to optimize as a royal command that all healers must Parse 99% in every ounce of content or be tried for high treason. The bar on casual content is exceedingly low, so low an ant would lose in a game of limbo. -
10-27-2022, 03:10 AMSebazyThen they don't play at the new raider style intensive high skill cap. Not sure where you're getting the high skill floor thing from though?....Quote:
Originally Posted by AFuzzyMu11in
.... Oh wait yeah I do, it's because you're a troll and you've got to make up stuff to try and seem like you have a point when all you're doing is mindlessly stirring (EG quote necroing other peoples posts only to add absolutely nothing of value to it). -
10-27-2022, 03:45 AMAmiableApkalluNo one is really suggesting raising the skill floor for healing, though.Quote:
Originally Posted by AFuzzyMu11in
Healing in normal mode content is already quite forgiving and leaves plenty of time for dealing damage. A "squishy" DRK in a dungeon still gives me time to throw out a Holy and Stone. If I Swiftcase+Raise someone the moment they tank the floor after failing a mechanic, I still have time to throw stones while I wait for them to accept the Raise and become targetable for healing. It takes a party having a comically bad day before I have to spend every single GCD healing. -
10-27-2022, 03:56 AMFendred
So according to the census from February, there are slightly more whm and astros that are max level than sages and scholars. However, when accounting for ilvl in an October census, end game white mages and sages who have savage ilvl gear greatly outnumber astrologians and scholars with similar gear. Astrologian was actually kind of popular last tier.
February census: https://ffxivcensus.com/#class
Lucky Blancho's population by ilvl in october: https://i.imgur.com/t6eJLaj.png
Reddit for lucky blancho's post, which includes job disparity charts on top of the population chart from above: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus..._october_2022/
Astro was actually kind of popular last tier when the healing checks were easier, primarily because it added much needed stimulation for some players. That being said, when the difficulty in healing spiked, apparently its extraneous features became a hindrance rather than a source of amusement. If they can get the scholar and astrologian toolkits on the same page as the white mage and sage, we're basically golden. -
10-27-2022, 04:09 AMSemirhage
Hallelujah, once people who don't give a crap about healing can dip into an easy babymode job for sleeping through Savage content the healer role will finally be perfect.
Healers are designed for and by DPS mains, news to nobody. -
10-27-2022, 04:52 AMNizziI'm unsure of why you continue to build narratives and draw conclusions that aren't there solely to suit your own opinions. Astrologian was more popular last tier for a number of reasons:Quote:
Originally Posted by Fendred
WHM didn't get DPS neutral Lilies until 6.1, making WHM more punishing to heal on as its primary healing mechanic was a DPS loss
They hadn't announced the Astrologian rework, and also had not subsequently then announced that nothing would be reworked until 7.0 - currently leaving AST in a state where if you were unhappy with 6.0 changes you'll just wait until 7.0, and also leaving people who may be happy with it in a place where they see no reason to get invested in trying to learn the job when it is guaranteed to be heavily changed in a year-ish anyways.
Macrocosmos completely invalidating the P3S heal check, "Death's Toll" with a press of 1 button, instead of relying on both healers to press multiple buttons to heal the party to full.
The amount of effort and strain required to play Astrologian optimally versus every other healer compared to the reward put into it. Astrologian's 6.0 changes satisfied very few and made the job significantly clunkier than it was in Shadowbringers.
Also: Scholar and Astrologian have always been played less than White Mage. Simplying their job mechanics by changing cards and removal of SCH's DPS kit has done nothing to appeal to the players who play White Mage. It's almost as if people who play White Mage will not go to Scholar or Astrologian no matter how much you make the jobs "WHM but fairy" and "WHM but card".
"We're golden" by making Scholar and Astrologian worse? Scholar is the most played healer in DSR due to how great it's healing kit is; just because you don't like something doesn't mean it needs to change - just play White Mage or Sage.Quote:
If they can get the scholar and astrologian toolkits on the same page as the white mage and sage, we're basically golden.
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10-27-2022, 05:37 AMty_taurus
How about if you want a baby mode healer because the game is too hard, you just play CNJ instead and allow WHM to grow into a real job. Just put all the "hard" stuff on WHM and let CNJ be the class for players that want to be vegetables. Problem solved. We're basically golden.
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10-27-2022, 07:45 AMFendredWhen I said they were more popular, I just meant that from my anecdotal experience of seeing more astrologians during the first tier of raiding. What the numbers say is that when healers do savage, the white mage handedly defeats astrologian, with sage/scholar being tied depending on region. We can say this because the February census show that people are leveling all the healers pretty uniformly. It's only when these jobs get stress tested via savage content that players lean heavily towards white mage over astrologian. The October census chart suggests sage is preferred over scholar, but the regional healer differences between Japan and the US indicate it may be a cultural difference.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nizzi
There is an overall healer shortage, so pretty much the whole healer role is problematic. However, high complexity is clearly not the answer given the astrologian's position in these charts. Working within the current system, a focus on functionality would be a more immediate solution. That's all I really mean. -
10-27-2022, 07:54 AMty_taurus
Listen, I get irritable about this kind of stuff sometimes. I get it. It's not a great way to respond to people, but at the same time, game design is something I am deeply passionate about generally. I studied game design. I work in game design. I love healer and support roles and love how much better these roles have become over the years in many games, so it really frustrates me to see my favorite role in one of my favorite games suffer from bad design choices in the name of playing it as safe as possible. I see such a wellspring of potential being stifled and suffocated in the name of not scaring away this very specific, delicate community of healers who are deathly afraid of have anything more to press during their copious amount of healing downtime than 1 or 2 buttons even if the vast majority of content, and likely the only type of content this specific group largely experiences, doesn't ask you to master any additional skill in order to complete.
Whether intentional or not, I find the consistent opposition to discussing FFXIV's healers and what the problems are to be really disrespectful to the job design of healer and support roles in gaming. I shouldn't feel that way, but I do, and that makes it really grating on me over time. What we have is not good design. It's infuriating design. And while there's nothing wrong with not caring about it, not feeling the same passion that I or any others feel, not being bothered by the severe lack of gameplay by the role or the apparent distain for healer complaints the developers seem to feel, the constant opposition is nails-on-a-chalkboard aggravating to deal with, especially when a large chunk of it comes across as disingenuous and in poor taste.
But I also feel bad for being snappy about it also, and I don't like feeling like I've attacked anyone either. So its tough some days. -
10-27-2022, 08:15 AMASkellingtonHigh complexity is not the reason why AST is lower.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fendred
AST isn't complex. Its perceived as complex but there is nothing complex about the job if you choose to main it, same as any other healer.
AST is needlessly busy.
The cards, mean nothing because of the Seals system. The Seals system is garbage because for all the work you put into it underneath the Divination window it amounts to BARELY ANYTHING. And on top of that AST feels clunky switching off and on targets thanks to SE not wanting to work with a better tab targeting system. (oh and Draw/Play still aren't one button)
And that's not even taking into account that people left the job previously because of the way AST is currently (old cards vs seals system + removal of Nocturnal Sect)
Reinstating the older cards in some what would actually reduce the bloat, because you aren't trying to "wait 30s so you have 3 draws of seals, Lightspeed, Divination, Play/Draw, Play/Draw, Play/Astrodyne with Malefics squeezed in" provided Divination stays as RR Balance and the cards are extra buffs. -
10-27-2022, 09:34 AMSebazyOr maybe it was popular because Macrocosmos almost entirely sidestepped a huge heal check in P3S whereas comps with WHM routinely ended up using LB3 for it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fendred
Again, I really can't stress it enough here. AST isn't a problem when it comes to healing. for ~1 minute and 50 seconds out of every 2 minutes it's APM is barely higher than the other healers. It's healing capability is absolutely fine. If you take the 2 minute burst window out of the equation, it's absolutely not a hinderance.
AST's biggest issue lays in that burst window period. Repeatedly doing a complex movement heavy mechanic such as P4S PT1 Pinax through the 2 minute burst window for hours on end during prog was a pretty rough experience at least for me. Reprogging and helping other groups on DNC and WHM was utter bliss by comparison.
And of course, another important detail is that if you miss your burst window on AST, that's a sizeable chunk of contribution gone right there and of course it leaves you the delicious choice of skipping your next window or continuing to go late for the rest of the fight. Yummy :rolleyes: -
10-27-2022, 09:38 AMSargeTheSeagull
I do wonder what other MMO’s (or other games with healers) are big in Japan and how healers work in those. It would at least give some insight as to what the devs have to compare 14 to and vice versa.
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10-27-2022, 11:59 AMSemirhageDon't worry, you have me for that. I don't feel bad about it. Because I feel like at this point I've seen every single angle on the Sylphie attack vector. I'm beyond over it and uninterested in a "good faith discussion" about it. Because there really isn't common ground. You see, every discussion in this vein starts seemingly neutral. I want X, they want Y, there's a vague attempt to describe a world where X and Y have their time in the sun. But push them on it even a little bit and they start stamping their feet and revealing what they actually want: not X. They don't want Y. They want -not X-. Suggest a skill ceiling and the wailing and gnashing of teeth begins.Quote:
Originally Posted by ty_taurus
These people don't want low skill floors. They want nonexistent skill ceilings. They don't want accessible content, not really. What they want is healing to be an easy path to free stuff. Paying attention to your job's resources is bad. Even the existence of a suboptimal-but-still-present GlareMedica2 rotation that could satisfy the zero interactivity isn't enough. They want the lazy no-thought gameplay to be the optimal gameplay. They don't want to climb the mountain before them. They want to bulldoze it down, walk into the rubble, and declare they're at the peak now. They want an easy job that they can be told they're masters of by dint of unlocking the job stone.
Prod literally any Sylphie who claims they sympathize with the desire for more complex gameplay and that's the tantrum you're going to get. Every single time. -
10-27-2022, 12:14 PMForsakenRoeYou probably shouldn't use 'my anecdotal experience' and then try to back it up with evidence, that's the wrong way round. You should be looking at the evidence for a pattern, and if your anecdotal experience matches it, that helps prove the theory but it's not 100% set in stone. The logic you pose (AST played less than WHM, therefore we should make AST as simple as WHM) is wrong imo for several reasons, firstly that the constant 'we have to make it as simple as WHM' is how we got all the healers losing their DOTs, secondly, it is ignoring all the reasons people may have played AST in the last tier and why they wouldn't now (for example, say, the last boss is overtuned and relying on other players via raidbuffs is less 'safe' for meeting the DPS check vs going personal-DPS with WHM?)Quote:
Originally Posted by Fendred
Third, (this one gets its own paragraph) a LOT of the players who have logs as healer are not AST players, or WHM players, they're 'healer players'. That is, they swap about based on what is the best for the team. I am a dyed-in-the-wool WHM, but recently I've been seeing PFs missing Barrier Healers when I go for the P8S reclear, so I play Sage more. Does this swap me to being a Sage main? I learned all of phase 1 of P4S as AST, despite not liking AST much in it's EW incarnation, why? Because WHM was BAD on MP economy at the time and I didn't feel like stacking 600 piety just to make up for SE's cockup. I also did P3S reclears on AST every time, because Macrocosmos completely removed the heal check in Life's Agonies, not just for me, but for my cohealer too. Does this mean I was an AST main for that tier? My Allstar ranking seems to think so, but I actually got pretty even parses across all four healers. The only reason I can see why it's thinking I was an 'AST main' is because I didn't get a single parse of P3S as WHM. But my best for 1 is SCH, 2 is WHM, 3 is tied between AST and SGE, 4-1 is AST and 4-2 is WHM. I'd hazard a guess that a fair few healers are like me, swapping about either because of fight design or just to try to find SOME variety in the role
Fourth, correlation does not equal causation, as you will know. But if the logic of 'AST less logs than WHM, must be cos hard', surely we'd have to apply that to all the other classes, at which point the theory falls apart? WAR isn't harder than GNB in almost anyone's books, but it's got less parses (because it had lower damage in a very tightly tuned/overtuned tier). DNC has more parses than BRD and MCH combined, does this mean we should look at making them like Dancer? Remove BRD's DOTs, restore the RNG on the 123 combo for MCH? BLM has around half the parses of SMN, I guess we should remove the complexity of BLM so more people try it out? This is all rhetorical of course, we shouldn't change the design of a class completely based just on 'how many people play in savag' because every one of those players will have different reasons WHY they play that class in savage. Yeh, AST's harder to work with than WHM, it's got more moving parts to keep on top of. But some people play for the aesthetic, some play because they didn't level the alternative classes in the role, some people play specifically because it's 'harder', and they enjoy the extra challenge.
Heck, one of my two claims to fame in this game is that back in SB I was top allstars ranking for my server for DRK. This wasn't because I was good, believe me, I was dog-doo bad compared to the worldwide top players. It was because nobody else on my server played it. Despite all the naysaying, the 'its bad play WAR', the people who played DRK back then made it work, for whatever reason. Me, it was because I had mained WAR in 4.1 (then SE made it idiotproof with 'haha 5 fellcleaves IR'), then PLD in 4.2/4.3, and when they did the big DRK changelist of 4.3 I started dabbling more and more, until deciding I'd main it in 4.4, come hell or high water. I played it partially cos I liked the speed at the time, partially because DarkMind+TBN was hilarious for removing tankbusters from the fight (WARs not knowing what to do without cover on O12S always made me laugh), and partially because I'm a salty Brit who would 100% main something that everyone claims is 'bad' just to prove they're bloody idiots who should stop parroting what they hear on Youtube tier list videos. Now look where we are, DRK a shadow (lmao) of itself too, made into WAR 2 with the SHB rework because people said 'dont like dark arts pls fix' instead of playing a different job. Starting to feel like I'm cursed, every time I main a class, it gets made boring/poopy/not-fun so y'all better watch out before I start maining yours and make that suck too. Maybe I should be a BLM main and watch the universe implode
Also, as someone else mentioned, 'AST is too complex' isn't exactly true, considering me of all people was able to pick it up and get to the P4S doorboss enrage, week 1. Didn't clear though, many 50% enrages due to lack of damage. Sure would be nice if I could see who's pumping, and therefore who to card, SE! -
10-27-2022, 01:59 PMNizziApologies for the following wall of text:Quote:
Originally Posted by Fendred
The thing is that this has always been the case across expansions. Back during Shadowbringers when AST was in a better spot with its cards and WHM was arguably in the worst spot due to being a turret mage and having no way to heal without losing DPS. This has always been the case between the White Mage and Astrologian dichotomy. White Mage is just more popular, even though AST has always enjoyed the luxurious spot of being a better healer in practically every regard to WHM, even down to AST's GCDs being better despite being copies of White Mages.
This is the problem with changing kits based on numbers, or trying to change jobs to appeal to people who don't have any interest in playing them. Aesthetics can carry a job a long way, and that holds true even into Savage where people typically take jobs they are more comfortable on rather than playing meta picks, especially when healers are so tightly balanced (relative to DPS or tank jobs, at least) which can further compound the effort to play Astrologian optimally feeling like a waste of time when you can play White Mage and perform similarly numerically with less effort.
Aesthetics carrying White Mage as the most popular job in the game has always been true for White Mage, especially after the huge changes to AST and SCH in Shadowbringers - White Mage players are not swapping to AST or SCH despite them being better numerically and on HPS, or in ShB AST's case vs ShB WHM, able to move& heal freely without losing DPS. I think Square Enix should try to come up with an answer for this question - if White Mage is the most popular job in the game; how is it that despite what they've done to healer complexity and DPS in ShB onward to make them "simple" like White Mage, healer is the least played role across all content in the game and is only getting worse?
I don't think:
is necessarily fair assessment because when we look at the actual HEALING throughput of these jobs, WHM has the lowest HPS of all four healers across Abyssos. So are players picking WHM because it performs better under stress despite it numerically being worse than AST, SCH and SGE in terms of healing? (Overheal aside) Probably not. Rather, it's a multitude of factors that I don't think anyone will ever be able to understand fully. Rather, I think SE should go back to making this role as diverse as possible to appeal to people that they've lost with healer changes, and also appeal to new people who don't like healers as they are now. SE trying to funnel some of the WHM player base into Astrologian and Scholar hasn't worked in the past, so I'm really uncertain why they keep trying to do it.Quote:
It's only when these jobs get stress tested via savage content that players lean heavily towards white mage over astrologian
ASkellington's post pretty much sums my feelings about AST proper - it's hard to say the job is complex; rather it is needlessly busy for very little reward compared to WHM, especially after Misery no longer being a DPS loss in 6.1. A good example of a job with complexity in Endwalker is Black Mage; it is very simple on a base level and intuitive, but if you're curious, take a look at The Balance's optimization guides and see all the cool complexities that BLM has with nonstandard lines, transpose optimization, etc. This is what every healer should strive for - obviously in varying levels and less than a DPS, but I believe they should all be simple to pick up with more meat on the bones in terms of complexity than they currently have.
I agree with this, and this is why I feel like SE's decision to not rework DRG and AST following the SAM outcry over Kaiten was a huge double edged sword and really, really bad for healers. Dragoons definitely won there, but Astrologian lost. Astrologian definitely needs a rework; the job is in an awful state and essentially gets to remain in it's bloated, RSI inducing state until early 2024. In fact, this entire design philosophy shift is bad for healers because it essentially means there's nothing that SE will do to fix the healer drought this expansion outside of just making Savage easier - which does nothing for the casual content where healers are also consistently in need and instant queues. Astrologian is in a very bad state, and the healer role in general is; I just don't further "WHM-ification" is what will appeal to people who have left the role or have no interest in it due to the lack of engagement within it.Quote:
Working within the current system, a focus on functionality would be a more immediate solution. That's all I really mean.
As a minor note, if you go to the site that shall not be named and look at "deaths" it gives a total list of all logs uploaded, and you can sort by that to see what healers are being played in Savage rather than just using Lucky Bancho's "if they have a 615 or higher weapon" statistics (which I think are valuable themselves) and interestingly, Scholar is the second most played healer this tier, and for DSR, even Astrologian is played more than Sage. -
10-28-2022, 02:48 PMAFuzzyMu11inTruth time. This is how I feel. I guess I am a slyphie...Quote:
Originally Posted by Semirhage
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10-30-2022, 08:46 AMMintnHoneyAcceptance is the first step to recovery.Quote:
Originally Posted by AFuzzyMu11in
Jokes aside, it's okay to want to play a simple game, and it's okay to want to play a game in a simple way.
Let's use the theme park mmo moniker for a moment: you, as someone who goes to the theme park, may enjoy simply wandering the park. You might enjoy stopping to sit at a bench to people watch with some candy or food, and you may enjoy going on the merry-go-round, the ferris wheel, or would enjoy a slow ride that's meant to give you a certain vantage on the park (e.g. the Yoshi's Island ride at Nintendo Land), but avoid roller coasters and water-related rides, or virtual reality, bumper cars, etc.. No one's going to tell you that you're wrong for enjoying yourself the way you want and, on the off-chance that they do (and that you're not doing something actually illegal or indecent), they would be the assholes. But on the flipside, other people do enjoy roller coasters, water rides, virtual reality, and/or bumper cars, so those people will go on those rides. If you were to try to stop other people from going on those rides just because you don't like them, then you would be the asshole.
Even if you go with friends to a theme park, there will be times where said friends will want to go on a ride and you don't want to; if they do go, and you don't go, that's not the end of the world. They enjoy the ride, you can do something in the meantime, or just wait and watch, and then you meet back up, tease the friend who threw up, continue through the park, and life goes on.
It's the same idea here: you can go do whatever you want, yes, but if you want to play in certain kinds of content because you want to play a certain way, then you simply don't go to the content that demands you play in the way you don't like to. The opportunity cost is that you don't go to that portion of content. Curiosity can lead you to trying the content, but, if it's not to your taste and you really don't enjoy playing that way, then it's not for you and that's okay.
You just have to remember that there are people out there who like the same game, but like to play the other content and play in such a way that the game was designed but not necessarily to your taste, and that's okay also.
In the case of these threads of complaints and requests to add more to the role, it's not as if you're not being considered. There are snide comments sometimes, yes, but ultimately, requests have evolved over time to acknowledge that players who play on the simpler side do, in fact, exist for many reasons and the forum threads have also evolved as a result, to try and incorporate ways to leave you with the gameplay that you have enjoyed so far while still allowing them access to the gameplay that they crave and have been denied. The hard part is finding a way to convey this to the development team in such a way that they (1) understand it, (2) care about it, (3) believe it, and then (4) implement it with enough care so that they don't accidentally leave out one side of the fence for the other (as they traditionally have done for the role).
But that's just my thoughts and observations on the matter. -
10-30-2022, 11:08 AMelioaiko
The healer status quo has always been the same. Heal predictable choreographed damage go right back to one button spam.
This has never really changed despite what people might think with every healer rework every expansion. In fact, I do feel like every healer job has gotten worse over the years.
SCH was really fun, rewarding, individual fairies and had dots to compensate for Broil spam.
AST while becoming a monster in healing, has had its gimmick (cards) hacked away into this mess we have now. It's healing is more than fine and rewards good planning like SCH. It's just that the job is really busy for the wrong reasons. Cards are literally just singe target buffs and seals only matter for you and even then they don't because dps card choice is better.
Nearly everything on AST has a massive disconnect and doesn't flow properly. Divination is just it's own thing not rewarded for rolling seals. Astrodyne is really underwhelming and makes no sense. A selfish buff for a healer that's the least selfish of the healers? ShB wasn't perfect but at least there was a system. Draw, cast, seal alignment, Divination, repeat with filler cards being Lord or Lady. AST is just a giant timer at this point.
WHM is the only job that changed for the better. Because it had nowhere but up to go. Aero 3 removal is still painful.
They will inevitable screw up SGE and then the other healers some more. The dev team has shown time and time again, that they desperately need a seperate team to balance jobs. It's clear they are out of creative power which has lead to some horrible and dumb choices. Kaiten removal, NIN rework, all of MNK. -
10-31-2022, 05:17 AMAllegor
I can't believe I'm saying it cuz normally I loathe that game mode....but they should seriously consider copy pasting the PvP templates into PvE, because those are far more engaging without making each job's niche feel convoluted. Or, at the very least, bring over the good aspects like aoe cards, or SGE actually being a damage-to-heal healer as it was promoted to be.
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10-31-2022, 10:57 AMForsakenRoeWhile I can be very sarcastic at times, my ideas for how to change up healers have very much tried to include this fact, be it from making 'Glarespam' still possible via potency balancing, keeping the amount of extra buttons (and therefore extra spinning plates) in check, adhering to the lore as much as possible, considering how the engine works and limitations it'd create, etc. I'm sure other 'idea creators' have also had these considerations in mind when coming up with their versions. We might sound like we're mad about the players who enjoy current design healer, or 'just want to heal', but for me at least, maybe others too, a process occurs:Quote:
Originally Posted by MintnHoney
Me: "Hey here is my idea for how to make healers more interesting, by adding more damage stuff"
'Healer who only wants to heal': "I don't want to do more damage, I like how healers are now, I like it being simple and easy to understand like this"
Me: "I have changed the idea up, now it respects how simple WHM currently is, it can be played like current WHM and you'll do 98% of the current WHM's potential damage, it has strong thematic ties to the lore with new cool visuals, and everything feeds back in a loop to allow the damage skills to give you a really cool and powerful feeling healing tool. Also it has Stoneskin back, for those times where you get a greedy SCH who refuses to use shields at all, so you can pump your HPS even more if you want"
HWOWTH: "Stop trying to change the thing I like its perfect the way it is"
'Perfect' is subjective, and while us 'idea creators' have tried to keep the ideas under control to respect the wishes of as much of the healer playerbase as possible, some people just can't be pleased, because as someone else said in a different thread, they claim they don't want X, they want Y. But when you offer an idea that could provide X AND Y together, you realize: they don't want Y, if they get Y that's not a factor to them. They want 'Not X', that's the important part. As long as 'Not X' occurs, all else is secondary. In this case, Y is 'more to heal' and X is 'an actual damage rotation' I guess. It's kinda depressing to see such a desire to stamp out creativity or ideas, in this fervent rush to make sure that, apparently, 'healers only heal'. Still don't know where that idea came from, so I'm still guessing 'overtuned Cata Heroics'. And when we have 'more to heal', proven a bit by this tier's required healing, and also anecdotally I've seen a few times in dungeons with a 'curebot' healer, if you give some of these 'healers only heal' kind of players something to actually heal, they fall apart because they've never been pushed to actually heal, rotate CDs, manage MP vs Job gauge resource, etc. So maybe it's more accurate to say 'they say they don't want X (damage rotation), they want Y (more to heal). But what they actually want is 'Not X', and 'Not Y', instead they want Z (less to heal, so they can have the easy ride of pressing Cure 1 over and over while watching Netflix)' -
11-03-2022, 08:03 AMty_taurus
Outside of just healing, I've seen others describing EW thus far as feeling a bit tired--feeling those pre-expansion blues and we're only in 6.28 due to the content coming out feeling very short lived. I feel this a bit too, but I also just feel really anxious to see if 7.0 will do anything to address the healers. Not saying I have much hope that it will offer something I want, but I've grown really tired of not being allowed to play the role I want to play for over 3 years now and I feel this internal pressure to want to hit the fast forward button and see when healers become at least tolerable again. SB AST and SCH weren't perfect, but I was content with them even if I wanted more from them. With all the heat coming onto job design philosophy overall, SE really has to decide where they want to go from here on the game as a whole as a lot of prominent names in the FFXIV circle are feeling tired of EW's stagnancy.
There's a part of me that feels like something will have to give on healer design as well if they are capable of addressing these concerns and I just wanna be done with EW's gameplay model and move onto the next thing. I've not felt this way before about past expansions as a whole, and it really makes me sad that I feel this way. I've taken breaks before and have no problem with that of course, it's just even then I'd think "I'll come back in a couple months and see the new content" whereas now it's more like "Damn, it's still well over a year before 7.0 comes in and maybe/hopefully fixes some of this." -
11-03-2022, 05:57 PMForsakenRoeI'm only raidlogging at this point too, the real problem is that for the most part, when SE does something as an 'experiment', that experiment doesn't ever seem to be written off as a 'failure' it's just re-run until it sort of works. Which can be fine for some things, look how many times they redid Diadem before it became 'kinda ok I guess' tier. But the idea of 'Pure healer VS Barrier healer' is a failure in my view, and it should have been obvious it would be from the moment it was announced, as they tried thinking the same thing with tanks and rolled it back before it even got past the design pitch phase. The big problem here (and I really do mean big, with zero hyperbole or exaggeration) is that if they carry on with the 'failed experiment' path and double down on trying to enforce Pure vs Barrier, it'll just get so so much harder to undo all of that when they finally realize how non-functional the idea is. Of course, there's a chance they actually manage to pull it off in a satisfying way, but so far I've seen zero evidence they can manage something like that. SCH SGE still is a crazy strong combo, and WHM AST is a literal meme.Quote:
Originally Posted by ty_taurus
At this point, I'm checking out 'the other MMO', and having a very good time levelling healers there. Healers with completely different feelings to one another for their gameplay, they got melee healer, HOT healer, plain jane 'i press heal hp go up' healer, daamge-to-heal healer, new expansion's bringing a new one that has a load of time related skills like 'the next 3 spells you cast are stored. press this button again to replay them instantly, ignoring their CDs and resource costs', 'macrocosmos but you dont have to press it in advance of the damage', or 'the next damage instance the target takes is split. 50% is dealt instantly, 50% as a 10sec DOT'. IDK how much of the design limitations for SE is 'engine cant do that' and how much is 'we need to try and make the healers as similar as possible so it's easier to balance them' but their direct competitor is a game with an engine held together by spit and prayers at this point, and they've got so many more functionalities they can play with for their class designs.
Maybe a tiny bit of hyperbole, I feel like we're starting to see a shift. Originally it was FF as the underdog, who started their road to redemption by listening to the fans and working hard to win back trust. Now it almost feels like, with the mass exodus of streamers to FF, and the lawsuit stuff, it's like the shoe is on the other foot: it's the 'other MMO' that is down in the dirt, and is now starting to climb back to its feet (while the theme music plays in the background for hype). My question is, if FFXIV is known for being 'the MMO where the devs listen', how do people at media tour interviews like MrHappy keep raising the point over and over that healers have bland DPS rotations but are expected to use them by the enrage timer? How does it keep coming up at Live Letter Q+As? How many times do these people have to ask the question 'healers are in a bad spot, how are you going to fix them' before we hear an answer beyond 'hmm well...uhhh... let us collect some more data please'? -
11-03-2022, 07:44 PMSemirhage
I do like popularity data, but I find it equal parts useful, depressing, and not-always-relevant. It's useful, clearly, because it gives us a view on what the current landscape looks like. It's depressing because White Mage could swap aesthetic to flinging piles of rotting garbage at enemies and belching on allies while underperforming the entire rest of the role by a good 30% and it'd come up BeST Job eVaR on any survey. It's dubiously relevant for a whole lot of reasons. Sometimes the data collected isn't reflective of what the surveyor wants to show (does a sweep of the Lodestone for the second coil savage titles tell us anything important about the content's popularity? Or does it show us a lot of people who solo unsynced it with a level 90 job?). Most of the time data is collected without any why attached to it (why is WHM the most popular healer? Any Sylphie will tell you it's due to the AMAZING job design. I *hope* that's not the case, but any reasoning I come up with is nothing more than speculation either). And at the end of the day, popularity is a metric that, charitably, exists in pseudo-overlapping magisteria with "good". Does being popular make something "good"? Does being unpopular make it "bad"? Welcome to a conversation the human species has had since at least the invention of writing. I don't like arguments that WHM's current job representation makes it "good" (because lord knows this boring crapass pathetic excuse for "job design" didn't even pass my smell test). So I'm also hesitant to use the current role unpopularity to argue that it's inarguable proof they're "bad". Personally, I like to stick with: I want my main job to be a superb multitasking support/healing/damaging hybrid that feels rewarding, has an aesthetic I enjoy, fun to play, engaging to juggle responsibilities, an asset to the party, and allows a satisfying level of skill expression.
WHM in particular for me, but all four healers in general, do NONE of these. Fix 'em. -
11-04-2022, 04:14 AMSargeTheSeagull
I'm also really starting to sense that EW hasn't been great and a lot of people are feeling the same way. 7.0 has a lot weighing on it and though the graphics update is gonna be great, that won't do it for a lot of people. My biggest hope for the game overall in 7.0 is that the devs break the formula and do something just different. Even if it's something like giving each dungeon a criterion difficulty, reworking most jobs back to roughly how they were in stormblood (but more refined of course), instead of a dungeon at lv99 give us a 24 man raid, anything. I know it's not super likely but a guy can hope. 14's patch consistency is great because it makes it easy to tell when the thing you're interested in is coming out but it has become really boring. The fact that we know exactly what's coming in 6.5 despite the fact that its around a year away says a lot.
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11-04-2022, 04:37 AMty_taurusWell here's the silver lining: Leading up to EW, FFXIV has never been under such scrutiny by the community as it currently is. There has always been an underlying discourse about certain elements, some warranted, others not, but it's always been subverted by the otherwise overwhelmingly positive feedback otherwise. And that positive feedback was very largely earned, I'd argue, but lately a lot of these topics have been brought up even by FFXIV streamers and content creators--ones that have otherwise been firm supporters of the game. Our community as healers has been jaded from several expansions of neglect, but this is the first time a wider, louder audience is feeling displeased with aspects of the game, and we don't know how SE will respond to this.Quote:
Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull
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11-04-2022, 09:51 AMSieyaM
For me I believe the problem I have with healer design right now is that it doesn't feel like we are working towards anything with our downtime. DPS and even tanks have some kind of burst phase that they are building resources or waiting for the countdown for in the case of SMN at least. You kind of do with WHM working to generate the blood lily but that feels kind of lackluster and after the fact when it's just making up for DPS lost to using a GCD on a lily ability. The Faerie Gauge on SCH might as well be nonexistent, it works with only one ability which could just as easily be put on a cool down and giving a fixed duration, and SGEs is just a ticking clock that builds over time. AST works for a very minimal return which for me is unnoticeable, maybe in savage and ultimate you can feel the difference between two and three seals but for what I do there just seems to be no reward. They need to find something for healers to be building towards.
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11-04-2022, 10:17 AMASkellingtonThere is 0 difference between having that 6% damage or not. Same as there was barely a difference between 5% vs 6% Divination last expansion unless you were using a parser. The only upside to last expac's Seals BS is that Lord/Lady came from a card you didn't want.Quote:
Originally Posted by SieyaM
Astrodyne and Seals-Divination were, are, and ever will be failures. They were better off making the Seals do the old card effects based on seal combination instead of this crap they gave us. But then that would take giving the healing role some thought now wouldn't it? -
11-04-2022, 10:29 AMASkellingtonThis was me last expac going into EW. You have more hope than I do. That said, 7.0 is likely going to break whether or not I decide to stay subbed, even if I do like the RP community I found. FFXIV being story focused is fine to a point, but it is still an MMORPG and part of the MMORPG experience is whether or not your battle design is decent to great. Healers in this game aren't even decent at best.Quote:
Originally Posted by ty_taurus
Especially if YoshiP wants to bring in single players to the game. That works for DPS and it kinda works for tanks. But for healer? 86 levels of mostly 2 dps buttons when this game has solo encounters is ubsurd and on this alone I can't fathom why anyone thinks Healers are "ok".
And no "go level another job" is no excuse for the dev team to be lazy, neglectful or that oversightful of that single metric. -
11-04-2022, 10:48 AMSieyaMI would love for them to trash all this business and go back to the old system of StB anyway. Choosing to use a card or burn it for the added effect of royal road required thought and knowledge of the current party make up, even in regular 4 man roulettes. With the added effect of Lord and Lady of crowns giving you even more options to maximize your cards usefulness it meant that there was actually something engaging and thought provoking about the system, so much so that the minimal DPS options were almost necessary given the amount of time spent working the cards.Quote:
Originally Posted by ASkellington
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11-04-2022, 12:33 PMty_taurusYeah, Stormblood may not have been perfect, but it was lightyears ahead of the trash Shadowbringers/Endwalker healers we're stuck withQuote:
Originally Posted by SieyaM
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11-04-2022, 07:06 PMForsakenRoe
At this point if the devs told us 'yeh ok so we can make the healers fun and interesting but there's gonna be clear winners and losers, like we will not be able to balance them', I'll go 'yep dont care ship it', what seems to be an obsession with making things 'easier to balance' is just sterilizing the fun out of the game. Who gives a damn if class X is stronger than class Y, if both can clear the content? People with tools they're not meant to have. If we didn't have those tools telling us exact numbers, we'd never even know if SAM was ahead of or behind of MNK. It's within crit variance as it is. If AST ends up being ahead of WHM because it's got the old SB cards? I got news for you, it's already ahead of WHM. The joys of having a raidbuff, it would seem. Make the healer role fun, give it some uniqueness to each class again, sod the 'well the damage balance might be screwy' who cares? We keep getting told by some players that healers shouldn't DO damage, they should heal, so if AST is 5% ahead of WHM on damage, it's not even meant to DO damage according to some players, so who gives a rat's backside? Classes are the lens we view the game through, and the healer lens desperately needs cleaning off. Get a microfiber cloth and give it a good clean, I beg.
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11-04-2022, 07:45 PMSemirhageI'd agree, with a small caveat. As a former WHM main, what I didn't enjoy about this state of affairs was always being behind SCH and AST. And by always, I mean any patch ahead of either one was an anomaly the devs pretty swiftly corrected. I'd love great, fun design. I'd just like it applied to ALL of the healers, please. Not the superfriends who get all of the engagement, all of the tools, all of the utility, and are always and forever solidly meta because of their busted OP toolkits, while chopped liver sits in the corner because being the worst at everything and having zero engagement is "its identity".Quote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
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11-04-2022, 10:03 PMForsakenRoe
Yeh WHM wouldn't be an exception here, it'd be as crazy cool and fun as the other healers in this hypothetical. It might get left out of speedrun meta cos it doesn't have a raidbuff, but that's not exactly new for the class. And if idiots want to go 'sorry we dont want WHM for this weekly reclear/prog/not specifically going for 99s', then well, they're idiots and I don't feel particularly bad about calling them that. If crazy fun WHM can clear but it's 5% behind crazy fun AST because oops AST got it's old cards back, I wouldn't care, noone should care, because WHM is fun and AST is fun, and they can clear the content. The 5% dps difference between two healers is not gonna make or break an enrage timer. I checked healer stuff on the forbidden site earlier, and at 95% on P6S (pretty training dummy in terms of mechanics/movement), WHM was at 6.2k. 5% of that is 310. 310 damage per second, or over a 10min fight, 186k damage. On a boss with several million HP, that's like, 0.1% enrage. So yeh, if you have a 0.1% wipe, maybe it's the WHM's fault for not being on AST. Or, maybe it's actually within crit variance, and throwing a whole load of personal-DPS out to play AST and have the party be even more reliant on the raidbuff window going well, is actually not the greatest idea, especially if the WHM isn't as good at AST as they are at WHM.
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11-04-2022, 10:18 PMSemirhage
I'd say WHM either gets a raidbuff or is stronger than AST in that scenario. If it's always weaker, why bring it? Unless WHM is redesigned to provide utility, it only brings damage if its damage is worse, what's the point of WHM? The buff healers need to take an L here. *Something* has to give. You can't have all the utility, all the flexibility, and be the best at everything, even if that best is whittled down to a few measly percentage points. With no material advantages, what you're down to is what AST has always been: Better WHM.
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11-04-2022, 10:43 PMForsakenRoeWhy play anything other than SAM if you're a melee? (edit, apparently it's DRG now?) Why play WAR when GNB does more damage? Why play WHM when AST provides more, both in the hypothetical and also right now? Many reasons. You enjoy the class more than the 'better one', you prefer it's aesthetics, you prefer it's gameplay, you prefer not smashing your hands into a bloody pulp doing that accursed 2min burst window over and over again in prog? If we simplify it down to 'why bring X when Y better' every time, you might as well just delete every class that isn't Y, because Y is better.Quote:
Originally Posted by Semirhage
Raidbuff classes are supposedly in a delicate state. If the selfish classes do more, and have no reliance on any outside buff to be the strongest, then the raidbuff classes are 'extra busywork, but the payoff doesnt even match the selfish'. If the raidbuff classes do more RDPS via the party playing incredibly well and exploiting the raidbuff correctly (as the design intends, btw) then the raidbuff classes are better, and the selfish classes complain that 'theyre meant to be the top dps why am i being beaten by a DRG'. AST is better than WHM right now, you can go see the stats yourself. But people still play WHM, and WHM doesn't get kicked from parties. Why do people play WHM? They prefer it's aesthetics, or gameplay, or dont want to smash their hands into a bloody pulp because it was dog first and now they have to do cards DURING MANIFOLD AAAAAAA
Also, side note, we can't ever have a new healer, and Sage needs to be deleted too. It's just going to be 'SCH but worse', or if the balancing ends up the other way, 'SCH but better' and we can delete SCH. See how silly this can get if we look at 'which is better' as the only quantifier? Yeh it can suck to be 'the underdog' all the time, but if it's fun to play and you still clear, who gives a damn? PLD took L's the whole way through HW but some people kept playing it despite this. AST was so limp on healing power on release it struggled to clear The Vault, people still played it. WHM was super crusty in SB, still got world first in both ultimates. DRK got laughed at for all of SB, I still decided to main it from 4.3 onwards and had a great time with it, laughing at those warrior mains who needed Cover for TBs in O12S. -
11-04-2022, 11:26 PMKabzyAgreed, I've played both in savage and while no healer is particularly complex, I don't think it would make sense for the most braindead one (WHM) with the easiest recovery tools to be higher in DPS than a job that requires coordination and at least some thought. The difference isn't even that grand either.Quote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
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11-05-2022, 08:07 PMSemirhageQuote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
I understand all of these arguments, and have heard all of them before. The only issue with them is what you're left with: the overlap between them consigns WHM to be the Memechinist of the role. Woohoo! So to recap, WHM's design principles are:- It's easy
- It has no utility
- It has no buffs
- It MUST be weaker than the utility jobs because it's easy
Where is the room for growth in that? All these design principles leave room for is the Stormblood healing paradigm. All these arguments boil down to is "let's go back to Stormblood, except this time instead of choosing the crap that is Shadowbringers design we acknowledge that WHM sucks and it belongs there and proceed to do nothing about it."
Why not make WHM the ACTUAL BLM of the role? Give it a skill ceiling that's really tough to optimize so it "deserves" to output more damage? Why MUST it remain the weakest, easiest, least-engaging healer? It's a design armpit Machinists have occupied for a while now, and I've been bored of AST and SCH mains arguing that their hogging of all the utility, all the buffs, all the interesting gameplay loops, all of the identities, and having eternally cemented meta positions is correct, just, and good. It's circular arguments all the way down. Give. WHM. A. Niche. You joke that no new healer should ever be introduced, and in a way I agree: why the hell would you design a new healer if you know that AST and SCH's "identities" are "being better than everyone else by fiat, no you can't encroach on my identity of being more complex than you and eternally meta and superior in every way"?
To hell with going back to Stormblood if it means we learned nothing from it other than "AST and SCH being overpowered was a good thing actually". I realize most of the Healer subforum disagrees with me here, but I'll say it anyway: Stormblood was not good game design. Having two classes that are direct upgrades to the third in every single way is not healthy game balance. Just as "the easy one" isn't an identity, neither is "the best at everything". You do that, and mark my words we'll end up right back at Shadowbringers design. I am personally not okay with how Stormblood played out, and it blows my mind that this forum cannot understand that maybe, just maybe, one of the myriad reasons why WHM sucked so badly in Stormblood was that it wasn't allowed to improve because it had nowhere to go in the design space where its competition is defined as "you, but better". Why is magic DPS the only subrole that seems to understand that classes should actually pay for more flexibility with lower output, instead of just getting all of the flexibility with none of the downsides?
I agree! So why is this argument ONLY applicable to WHM? AST and SCH mains, it sucks being weaker but if you're having fun who cares? Oh wait, we only care about "balance" insofar as it means AST and SCH are always better, and once they're there then it goes back to not mattering again.Quote:
Yeh it can suck to be 'the underdog' all the time, but if it's fun to play and you still clear, who gives a damn?