Healers, then and now:

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Far as I understand it, every element in FFXIV can appear in either the passive (umbral) or active (astral) form, some just trend more towards a certain polarity naturally. So while Fire is often found as it's astral form (explosive force), 'umbral fire' could theoretically exist too. In practice, that'd be the difference between a spell being packed with explosive power (our fire spells) versus something more akin to 'raise the internal temperature of a being until it cooks from the inside'. Similarly, umbral ice refers to the sheer cold of the ice spell, but astral ice would be like, idk, the rapid expansion of the ice as it freezes blasting apart whatever it's inside at the time? 'astral and umbral' in their pure unaspected forms refer to just the forces of stasis and entropy

Maybe that's just some fanmade BS I saw and internalised as 'actual lore' though, or maybe it was actual lore but got retconned idk, it'd be interesting to see it as a twist for a new job, where one might use elements in their astral form (BLM), this one instead uses them in their umbral form

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From Encyclopedia Eorzea: Volume I, page 9:

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In addition to the six elements, there also exist two poles - astral and umbral - which greatly influence the nature of the elements - an astral charge bringing more activity, while an umbral charge resulting in move passiveness. For example, when in an astral state, fire exhibits high volatility, whereas its umbra state is characterized by dryness.

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Cool we now know for sure that it's actual game lore and not just fan-theory, which means it can be used for things other than 'its a nice tidbit of background info'

We really don't need to look back. Healers were more fun because we had more options available to us. This has been stripped away in the name of the almighty homogeneity.

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Originally Posted by glamazon

We really don't need to look back. Healers were more fun because we had more options available to us. This has been stripped away in the name of the almighty homogeneity.

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That, and appealing to the lowest common denominator.

4.0 healing was probably my favorite healing experience in any game I've ever played on the SCH. They took away and destroyed so much since then though...it's really quite a shame. The healing role is a shadow of what it once was. FF14 healing changes make me actually relate to the Ascians.

7.0:
All healers no longer have healing abilities. All dps abilities passively generate healing to all party members. Cleric Stance removes the healing but gives a dps boost. That’s it, that’s the role lol.

Then in 7.5 they’ll be like ‘But we gave healers exactly what they asked for, what more can we do?!?! We had 6.0 Scholar done perfectly it was so good we couldn’t even thinking of anything new to add!’

If there’s one thing the developers excel at, it’s taking the completely wrong message from players and implementing it wholesale into the game.

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Originally Posted by Connor

7.0:
All healers no longer have healing abilities. All dps abilities passively generate healing to all party members. Cleric Stance removes the healing but gives a dps boost. That’s it, that’s the role lol.

Then in 7.5 they’ll be like ‘But we gave healers exactly what they asked for, what more can we do?!?! We had 6.0 Scholar done perfectly it was so good we couldn’t even thinking of anything new to add!’

If there’s one thing the developers excel at, it’s taking the completely wrong message from players and implementing it wholesale into the game.

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SCH is a good example. When we had miasma, 2 different dots, and a wide range of shield/heal abilities coupled with the ability to use 2 fairies with different function and the ability to actually AE spread our dots to various targets...THAT was the most fun I've ever had playing a job/class in any game. It was dynamic and from that point it's been downhill patch after patch. I don't know who's to blame, but someone really misunderstood what people playing healers enjoyed about their role. Spamming 1 dps button like we do today is just the worst.

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Originally Posted by Faidid

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I mean, I’m going to get absolutely fucking crucified for saying it, but I never found DoT Mage Scholar fun or interesting. Putting up and maintaining DoTs was something you had to do, not some big brain contextual tactic that only the smartest of the smart used. You kept all your DoTs at as close to 100% uptime as possible by pressing the exact same buttons at the exact same times lol. Miasma - Bio first, then Bio - Miasma to reapply. Bane was, again, an absolute necessity if there was any more than 2 enemies so there really wasn’t any actual thought involved in my opinion. You used your DoTs and you liked it or you were a waste of a party slot. Even with Miasma II, you had to literally have 0 piety on any piece of gear to ever run into Mp issues with it on normal content (and never used Shroud of Saints / Lucid Dreaming lol). Doubly so if it’s single target because Energy Drain.

Aero and Thunder honestly I don’t think are anything to do with Scholar and I don’t really get that argument that they were some integral part of its gameplay. Bards used to be able to cast Cure, Protect, Raise Thunder, but I don’t see anyone begging them to return that back to its toolkit lol. Just because a class could do something doesn’t mean it should always be capable of the exact same things.

Personally I’d rather see Scholar focus on buffing and debuffing the party. You know, ‘a role that provides support’, ‘using powerful restorative and enhancing magics’ whilst being set apart from other healers by the fairies. I don’t see ‘spreading plague and disease’ in that description of what a Scholar is lol. I highly doubt they wrote the dialogue thinking ‘let’s tell players this job is the polar opposite of what it really is just to spite them’ lol. Every other job in the game retains aspects that heavily influenced the job design, albeit in extremely simplified forms (i.e Bard’s songs have been reworked like 4 times, Astrologian’s cards got neutered instead of balancing them, Summoner still has Aetherflow/Fester/Painflare). Isn’t it strange that Scholar is the only job this doesn’t apply to? It had its 4000 DoTs removed and they never added them back, but surely if the entire point of Scholar’s existence in FFXIV is spreading DoTs and painful poisons, they never would have tried to remove them?

Do I think Scholar should never get any more dps or dot abilities? Obviously not. Do I think just slapping some basic DoTs and Bane on top of its toolkit is going to turn it into the most popular ultimate fun 1000% approval rating job? I do not lol. I want to see abilities that have actual interesting supportive effects like reducing damage taken/dealt, reducing enemy attack frequencies, counterplay skills like Eye for an Eye. There’s no reason why they can’t do damage over time as well though

Astrologians getting their cards simplified, losing spread and royal road. Ugh. Might as well rename the job to gambler for how much a coinflip their cards have been turned into. And its not like they don't know, especially with how the pvp version of astro has something resembling the old bole, arrow, and balance cards.

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Originally Posted by Chasingstars

Astrologians getting their cards simplified, losing spread and royal road. Ugh. Might as well rename the job to gambler for how much a coinflip their cards have been turned into. And its not like they don't know, especially with how the pvp version of astro has something resembling the old bole, arrow, and balance cards.

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I honestly can’t remember if I made it up but wasn’t there supposed to be an Astrologian rework sometime in 6.X that got moved to 7.0? I’ve always assumed that rework will end up looking more like the PvP version you describe. Basically the PvP version is like a prototype for their rework.
How much of it is actually kept for PvE though, I dare not hazard a guess lol.

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Originally Posted by Chasingstars

Astrologians getting their cards simplified, losing spread and royal road. Ugh. Might as well rename the job to gambler for how much a coinflip their cards have been turned into. And its not like they don't know, especially with how the pvp version of astro has something resembling the old bole, arrow, and balance cards.

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I'm shocked they destroyed Astrologians so completely. That mechanic was very cool and SE just deleted it!

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Originally Posted by Faidid

I'm shocked they destroyed Astrologians so completely. That mechanic was very cool and SE just deleted it!

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I don’t like new AST but in practice the old AST was a lot of effects for not much benefits, balance or bust was a real thing, balance was just objectively the best card by a country mile and every other card was “balance but worse” (spear) “an active hinderance on most classes (arrow) or really just useless (bole, spire and ewer), this just made the class a pain in raids and mildly inoffensive in casual content

Royal road and the time dilation effect of CU I 100% miss though

It’s not that they destroyed AST. The community pointing the finger at them because all they use is dmg buffs in SB. The devs give ppl what they actually wanted and now ppl don’t like it. Don’t freaking deny it lol.

I categorically deny it. Squeenix are the ones who made damage the only metric that matters. Of course the players fished for it more than anything else. They'd be stupid not to.

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Originally Posted by Osmond

It’s not that they destroyed AST. The community pointing the finger at them because all they use is dmg buffs in SB. The devs give ppl what they actually wanted and now ppl don’t like it. Don’t freaking deny it lol.

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Unfortunately this. All SE heard was ‘I don’t want to do these other support effects I just want to dps you can’t make me do those others things!!!!’. So they just made every card a dps card. Then there was the ‘oh but those pesky cards are getting in the way of my Malefics!’ so they removed all card interaction abilities and the standardised card effects meant you can throw those pointless buffs away wherever you want and focus solely on what you play Astrologian for…dps…?

I can’t wait for them to ‘rework’ the job in 7.X, because if the PvP version of card effects is anything to go by we’re going to get an absolutely hilarious situation where the forums are flooded with tears over Bole. ‘I went into a raid and all I got was damage reduction’. ‘why is this filthy effect in my game’ ‘plz delete and just give Balance’, ‘Bole doesn’t give DPS why have you done this Yoshi-P?!?!?!?!’

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I don’t like new AST but in practice the old AST was a lot of effects for not much benefits, balance or bust was a real thing, balance was just objectively the best card by a country mile and every other card was “balance but worse” (spear) “an active hinderance on most classes (arrow) or really just useless (bole, spire and ewer), this just made the class a pain in raids and mildly inoffensive in casual content

Royal road and the time dilation effect of CU I 100% miss though

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Since the most likely thing is to force The Balance, Heres a wild idea for Astrologian: Why not incorporate Eureka's elemental wheel and repurpose it to 'alignment' for one of six different cards?

Since Astrologian was originally a mix of Chemist, Time Mage, and Gambler.. why not lean into the gambler element more? Eventually having the equivalent of weighted dice? Like here is my idea for traits:

Elemental Wheel (Lv20): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is murky at best. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 20% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 16% chance.
Elemental Wheel II (Lv40): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is slowly becoming clearer. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 40% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 12% chance.
Elemental Wheel III (Lv60): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is greater. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 60% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 8% chance.
Elemental Wheel IV (Lv80): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is getting closer to its zenith. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 80% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 4% chance.
Elemental Wheel V (Lv100): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is with perfect clarity. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 100% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 0% chance.

For example The Balance is a celestial alignment and is naturally fire-aspected, so keeping the wheel aligned to fire means you have increased probability of getting a fire-aspected card. And The Balance is just a damage buff of 6% for the target.

Then you mix back in the old Royal Road and Spread abilities to allow for the astrologian to stack the deck in their favor more to compensate at lower levels. Obviously the durations and benefits of the old cards need to be tweaked, after all we are not working with TP anymore for example.

Again, Ewer and Spire were not 'useless'. Their own effects may have been middling at best, but they were one half of the 'aoe balance' combo that dominated SB, you can't 'AOE Balance' without burning a Ewer/Spire first. The one card that was 'not good' in all situations was Bole. It's also telling that people (including SE) think the only way to make the cards 'equally desireable' is to make them all identical, rather than actually balancing potencies between them. Or, since we have Crit Variance issues, DHit Variance on Misery, etc STILL causing rampant swings in damage, maybe people just need to open their damn eyes and realise that you cannot attain perfect balance, save one instance: Every class is completely identical. Which we're getting dangerously close to with healers.

A friend of mine showed me a log, his WHM wanted to optimize P1 of TOP, and was looking at one of the best WHMs in that phase. Both had 42 casts of Glare, 4 Dias, 3 Assizes, one Misery. 'Friend WHM' did 5434dps, 'Top WHM' did 6422dps. One thousand damage per second more, and it's entirely because their crit rate on Glare was double 'Friend WHM', and DHIT rate on Glare was FOUR TIMES AS HIGH. So with that ridiculous damage swing in mind, I would have to ask: Do we make Misery guaranteed Crit DHit because people bitched enough about 'feels bad when it doesnt crit'? Do we remove Chain Strat because of it's contribution to Crit Variance? Do we remove cards entirely, because AST always ends up ahead of WHM due to how raidbuff stacking works?

Or do we (and the devs) say 'enough is enough' and tell people to sit down, shut up, accept that some imbalance is a necessity for the game to actually feel alive rather than being as sterile as lab equipment? I for one am completely fine with WHM forever being 'a little bit worse than AST' if it means that WHM and AST are more fun to play. I can clear stuff as WHM, that's enough for me, I don't care about some dipshit who's hopelessly subservient to 'the funny colored number' on FFLogs, or their backwards priorities on class design. Its like they're tempered by the website, it's their 'primal'. And at this point, SE shouldn't pay attention to them either. SE's had four years of 'healers have really hollow design' to balance them, to satisfy these 'balance > fun' players and guess what: They haven't balanced them. They CANNOT balance them. As long as some of them have raidbuffs and others do not, it's going to be the same story.

We had an expansion about 'the encroaching sterility of blank perfection' and fighting back against it's advance. Can we do the same 'fight back', with the sterility of the class design please

I will never be okay with the healer role balance that states WHM must always, always, always be worse than AST because buff stacking necessitates it. It paints job design into a box that gets just as stale as the one we're in now, and I'm -very- tired of "healer design will be great once we decide to make WHM's being weaker an explicit design consideration rather than just a natural consequence of overlapping secondary considerations"

"Just make WHM weaker" is not a design I will ever agree with. Why not make AST weaker? Oh that would be unfair? Wonder why that is. Oh right, it's only unfair if anyone other than WHM gets thrown under the bus.

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Originally Posted by Osmond

The devs give ppl what they actually wanted and now ppl don’t like it. Don’t freaking deny it lol.

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This Is what i HATE the most. I am a player (and former main AST) and i DID NOT wanted It ti change. You cant generalize all ppls.

Dont care if i am a filthy casual or what.. they, as usual, could have done something to make the class work without destroing it's divining identity (with time mage aspects), and instead decidere to take the lazy route

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Originally Posted by Garten

This Is what i HATE the most. I am a player (and former main AST) and i DID NOT wanted It ti change. You cant generalize all ppls.

Dont care if i am a filthy casual or what.. they, as usual, could have done something to make the class work without destroing it's divining identity (with time mage aspects), and instead decidere to take the lazy route

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I feel like the ‘time aspect’ removal from Astrologian’s identity is another symptom of the devs desperate attempt to maintain absolute balance (which cannot be maintained without standardising literally everything lol). Extra 15s on a party member’s buff? Unbalanced.
Extra 5 sec on all nearby party member buffs? Unbalanced.
Astrologians having fun? You guessed it, Unbalanced lol.
So instead of balancing, or just accepting that disparity is sometimes inevitable (and in my opinion acceptable as long as it’s minimal because it’s practically impossible for there not to be slight disparity), they just…straight deleted it. Which frankly has been the developer’s MO for quite a few expansions now, so it shouldn’t even surprise me at this point lol

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Originally Posted by Connor

I feel like the ‘time aspect’ removal from Astrologian’s identity is another symptom of the devs desperate attempt to maintain absolute balance (which cannot be maintained without standardising literally everything lol). Extra 15s on a party member’s buff? Unbalanced.
Extra 5 sec on all nearby party member buffs? Unbalanced.

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They were somewhat unbalanced to be fair. Celestial Opposition didn't just extend normal damage buffs by 10 seconds, it extended Lucid Dreaming, your potion, Lightspeed, HoTs, Shields, your Earthly Star and probably something else that I forgot about. It didn't just make Ast an rDPS powerhouse but allowed it to run almost no piety and pump out healing so powerful it made Whitemages cry in a corner.


But as overpowered as it was, both Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation involved actual decision making, something severely lacking nowadays.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

They were somewhat unbalanced to be fair. Celestial Opposition didn't just extend normal damage buffs by 10 seconds, it extended Lucid Dreaming, your potion, Lightspeed, HoTs, Shields, your Earthly Star and probably something else that I forgot about. It didn't just make Ast an rDPS powerhouse but allowed it to run almost no piety and pump out healing so powerful it made Whitemages cry in a corner.


But as overpowered as it was, both Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation involved actual decision making, something severely lacking nowadays.

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I mean, that’s fair to say; that it genuinely was unbalanced lol, especially when compared to other healers. At the same time though, they could’ve at least tried to adjust them before throwing them out the window, even if it was something like making it only affect cards buffs, or just increasing the cool-down. Or giving White Mage something to actually contribute outside of some dps lol (but that’s a whole other topic lol).

Not to mention it required some thinking to even set it up to extend so many useful things with one button in the first place. It's not something the average player was able to do properly. Instead of rebelancing it so it would be a bit less broken, they deleted the skill ceiling with it. Although, honestly... if someone is able to pull something off that requires good thinking and planning, they deserve a reward. Maybe not a reward that invalidates all other healers but if you excell at something, take your reward.

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Originally Posted by Garten

This Is what i HATE the most. I am a player (and former main AST) and i DID NOT wanted It ti change. You cant generalize all ppls.

Dont care if i am a filthy casual or what.. they, as usual, could have done something to make the class work without destroing it's divining identity (with time mage aspects), and instead decidere to take the lazy route

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The devs just looking at the overall data from savage, the extremes, ultimate….I think? Back in SB, that’s all they saw. Ppl barely use Bole, it was trash, numbers didn’t go up. Dmg reduction for tanks? What’s that? The Arrow was good..but overtime jobs don’t need them anymore as the game progressed. Was screwing up rotations and such…except BLM. The Spear, really good crit rate card especially when stacked. Yet, the devs probably saw it as it was going to make fights too easy overtime. The Ewer & Spire…hmm. Situational, but barely used. Now that MP/TP isn’t much of an issue…pointless. Balance….numbers go up, majority happy.

It’s not that you’re a casual or anything, the devs going by the overall result. Dmg cards was more used than any other card….while spear is 2nd. The job was really bloated. Way too much responsibility. Tried to do too much for its own good.

Also yes, I’m going to generalize all people. Being too nice helps no one. In fact it make it worse for everyone. Go outside, how’s it going so far? It’s getting better or worse? I’ll let you ask yourself that.

What if we consider then, the reason Bole wasn't used as much might not have just been 'no damage'? If you had a Ewer/Spire burned with RR (next card is AOE), you would purposely re-burn Ewer/Spire (cos it just refreshes the buff, nothing lost nothing gained), play Arrow Spear Balance (unless you wanted to gamble on getting a Balance reroll, but there's every chance of getting screwed too), and completely discard Bole. So if there were a way to 'Play' the card currently held, without using the stored Royal Road effect, people would have used Bole, because it'd shift from 'using Bole now wastes my RR' to 'well, Bole's not what I need, but I might as well play it because the alternative is 'literal nothing'. Instead of 'play without RRing it' we have Undraw taking the same hotbar real estate.

Alternatively, putting 'reflect damage with a potency of X' on Bole would have solved part of the issue. Think about it. We only wanted AOE RRs, and only wanted Balance (or Spear as 'i guess itll do' tier). This means not just the usual 'everything except balance was bad' for the actual effects, but the OTHER side of the cards, the RR effect, the only one we wanted was AOE. So if we instead had Bole able to cause a Vengeance style effect, then maybe the 'duration increase' effect of Arrow and Spear's RR would have seen more use. A full 60s of the boss hurting itself because of it's autoattacks would be a good strong source of damage, maybe not as amazingly busted as AOE Balance, but if there is a system in a game, there will always be something that is 'better' than the others. The RNG is what made it 'balanced'. You didn't always get Ewer, Balance, Ewer, Balance, Ewer, Balance, etc. Far from it, most of the time you got screwed and made do with what you had. But entitled logheads saw 'the best AST runs' on FFlogs and complained that 'its not fair that I don't get Balance every 2nd draw', rather than putting in the hours like those top ASTs did to beat the RNG and get that godly run.

It's just like when they changed WAR in 4.2, because people complained that 'it doesn't feel good to do your opener and get no crits'. Like, what the hell did they think every other class is going through with THEIR opener? Did they think PLDs enjoyed having their Confiteor not crit in SHB (now the issue is 4x as much!), do they think GNBs love it when they Double Down and get Double Screwed-Over by their DHit/Crit stats? So to finish, let's go back to AST for a second. I want to show everyone this, and remind them of the event that set everything in motion:

https://i.gyazo.com/f4ff571d7420dda8...47965771f4.png

See, some people here might not be as old as others, they might not have played at this point. But once upon a time, AST was dog. It was considered griefing to bring to Gordias, as much as PLD to some. It received buffs in 3.2 to make it competitive for Midas (I've heard World Second ran AST SCH, but can't find any evidence so take with salt), but the stigma persisted that it was 'bad' and 'not good'. So SE did the above changes in 3.4, to essentially 'shock' people into trying it. Only, people are weird. Rather than just trying AST and going 'oh this is actually viable', the shoe just swapped feet, and now they said 'lmao WHM griefing', despite it having received zero changes from Midas (where it was considered 'not griefing') to Creator (where it was). How was any other card, let alone CLASS, meant to compete with the power of 10% AOE damage increase? So yeh, I blame SE for not bothering to even try and balance the cards. Many people in here have had many ideas on how to reduce Balance's stranglehold on the meta in the years since SB, and hindsight is 20/20. But SE just, giving up and making all the cards 'Balance, but worse, and you can't AOE them' is pretty lazy IMO.

If you want me to accept that 'we have to make the cards have the same effect for balance reasons', you're going to also have to fully accept that we should remove every other source of RNG from the game that could 'ruin someone's parse'. Crits, DHits, natural damage variance (that + or - 5% that happens on every attack), DNC/RDM procs, BRD DOT ticks and Repertoire procs, etc. Because if we're on about 'balance' at all costs, well, what if I and another GNB do the exact same rotation, the exact same GCDs, but I get zero Crits on my Double Down and they crit all of them? It's 'not fair' that I played with the same skill, and got a worse parse because of RNG right? God I hate this parse obsession it is a plague, yes I'm mad

The other problem with Bole was that it simply served no purpose. You could never include it in your mitigation planning because it was entirely up to RNG whether or not you would have Bole for a certain mechanic.

So you planned your mitigation under the assumption that you wouldn't have a Bole, which meant when you actually drew one it was entirely superfluous.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

God I hate this parse obsession it is a plague, yes I'm mad

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When every end-game boss is hitting a dummy while doing a little dance perfectly or reset, the only metric that naturally matters is how quick you can reduce that health bar before someone trips over themselves and takes the whole party with them. You can't stop the boss from attacking you. The only "utility" that matters (until your healthpool is enough to make it irrelevant) is mitigation/shielding. There is no CC, there is no interrupts, there is barely no dispelling debuffs. No adds that need to be controlled, no line of sight and no battlefield manipulation, like changing the shape of the terrain.

All of that would fall under "utility" and would require gameplay elements that are not present in the game.

Point is, FFXIV seems to have no space for interesting utility, and what they had before has been removed. Which is one of the reasons healers seem to have been designed into 1 button peashooter spam.

Meanwhile, Bole on the warrior for the last A12S adds allowed them to merrily drop stance and do pretty considerable extra damage with a little coordination.

Niche for sure, but saying that Bole served no purpose at all isn't really fair. IMHO the haste card (Arrow?) was more annoying as you could genuinely throw some jobs out of alignment with it.

It's good that the time extension stuff has actually got brought up though, those abilities were great and you could get huge value from them really giving AST an impressive level of depth that's far beyond anything healers have now.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

They were somewhat unbalanced to be fair. Celestial Opposition didn't just extend normal damage buffs by 10 seconds, it extended Lucid Dreaming, your potion, Lightspeed, HoTs, Shields, your Earthly Star and probably something else that I forgot about. It didn't just make Ast an rDPS powerhouse but allowed it to run almost no piety and pump out healing so powerful it made Whitemages cry in a corner.


But as overpowered as it was, both Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation involved actual decision making, something severely lacking nowadays.

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Sprint + Strider boots from Anemos + CO was really nice in cities.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Meanwhile, Bole on the warrior for the last A12S adds allowed them to merrily drop stance and do pretty considerable extra damage with a little coordination.

Niche for sure, but saying that Bole served no purpose at all isn't really fair. IMHO the haste card (Arrow?) was more annoying as you could genuinely throw some jobs out of alignment with it.

It's good that the time extension stuff has actually got brought up though, those abilities were great and you could get huge value from them really giving AST an impressive level of depth that's far beyond anything healers have now.

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With the removal of TP haste would actually be a decent card to throw to a lot of jobs.

If we really want to talk about useless cards, remember when Spear was a cool-down reduction that only affected cool-downs already used lol, so it would only work if you like, just so happened to use it on someone who’d used a cool-down lol. That effect didn’t last very at all before they replaced it

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Originally Posted by Connor

If we really want to talk about useless cards, remember when Spear was a cool-down reduction that only affected cool-downs already used lol, so it would only work if you like, just so happened to use it on someone who’d used a cool-down lol. That effect didn’t last very at all before they replaced it

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Actually it was the other way around. It only reduced the cooldown of OGCDs used during the duration of Spear, which could actually be incredibly powerful if timed correctly. I don't recall exactly, but I believe you could reduce the cooldown of Hallowed Ground by an entire minute with Spear. But that came with several problems: it desychs rotations aggressively when used effectively, and also requires a lot of team communication to use properly, which the longer you held onto Spear, the longer it'd take to get Draw's cooldown ticking again. It would actually have been way smoother if it also reduced the cooldowns of used OGCDs like you suggest as it wouldn't require highly specific situation knowledge and knowledge of every other job's kits to actually know when and what it affects to best utilize it. Imagine trying to decipher which of our 18 jobs most benefits from a card during your 30 second windows, 1 minute windows, 90 second windows, 2 minute windows, and 3 minute windows back during late SB and ShB.

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Originally Posted by Connor

If we really want to talk about useless cards, remember when Spear was a cool-down reduction that only affected cool-downs already used lol, so it would only work if you like, just so happened to use it on someone who’d used a cool-down lol. That effect didn’t last very at all before they replaced it

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That's the card I was thinking of!

I pretty much got threatened with literal violence if I used it on some of my DPS lol =(

It had theoretical potential but for the most part, it just throw rotations and cooldown alignments out of the window causing things to pop when they didn't expect them.

I guess I’m mixing up what Spear used to be, and what it should’ve been (at the time lol) I do remember it having some synergy with Hallowed Ground, but mostly I just remember using it for Royal Road (assuming aoe wasn’t already up) to save myself the trouble lol

People can say what they want. Yet i miss when my cards were not just Balance + and Balance O o. o like Astro cards did things. Its funny how that system exist but only in pvp would love for it to come back to open world but be more fleshed out. Now im stuck doing RNG against Melee dps vs Range DPS XD when back then cards could be more fun even if RNG was involved.

Thought about bringing back the old card system…somewhat. It wouldn’t make sense to bring that back now other than PvP. What they can do is add a new hot bar where you can spread your card for AoE dmg buff at a reduced % for….every 90 secs.

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Originally Posted by Connor

I guess I’m mixing up what Spear used to be, and what it should’ve been (at the time lol) I do remember it having some synergy with Hallowed Ground, but mostly I just remember using it for Royal Road (assuming aoe wasn’t already up) to save myself the trouble lol

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Sadly, if the game wasn't so fixated on burst windows and choreographed timing, the original Spear would have been a beautiful card to have in later expansion. So many good abilities to reduce the cooldowns for, so many possibilities.
Then again, if the game wasn't so fixated on burst windows and choreographed timing, we probably wouldn't be having any of these conversations, as we'd probably have more to work with than what we've been left with after what basically amounts to multiple expansions of cut aways and shakedowns.

Have to stop you there. You can blame the devs for focusing on burst windows, but I wonder. How did burst windows came to be? Hmmmmmmmmmmm, oh I know! I was back in ARR with all these bloated buff abilities, poison pots, SMN’s contagion before pull on the boss. Was it the community that created burst windows? Yes, the community did. HW’s AST with multiple extensions of their cards before/during boss fights? All community there. The community made it a norm so devs said, “let’s do that!” Now we’re upset. Can’t have nice things……

Here's the thing... the gaming community has changed significantly over the last 20 years. In 2003, skill and knowledge regarding a game was something you developed largely by yourself, with the help of a strategy guide produced by the developer, or by a tight nit community if real-life friends or online fiends in multiplayer games. Now, information is vastly accessible. Most people don't go into a fight and try and find the solution, we look up a guide on YouTube. Not sure what the proper use of Reprise is on RDM? Google it. Even in the last few years, The Balance discord didn't exist. And this isn't a FFXIV thing, it's a gamer thing in general. We are a different breed of people who, by in large, are always looking to be better--to improve our skills, and over time, the incredibly accessible methods of communication and development of gaming content allows the most optimal--the shortest and easiest paths to success--become public knowledge.

Are you someone who will sit down and spent 17 hours breaking down each GCD you can use in a 2 minute window and number crunch every job to figure out how to squeeze out the most damage, or create a program that runs those numbers for you? No? Me neither, but someone out there will do that and post that on reddit, and now everyone knows the best way to organize your tools. And this creates a dilemma for game designers, because how do you create a game that doesn't demand that level of obsessive perfection, yet also provides a challenge to the people that pursue that?

This pursuit of mastery is unavoidable, because gaming by its nature is an act of self-improvement in a sense. Games present challenges, and people who play them are always looking to overcome those challenges, and once they do, they want a new challenge to overcome, but it has to be harder than the last one or its no longer a challenge.

My point ultimately is that I don't think it's healthy to play the blame game on the community for wanting optimization, because that's the natural progression for this type of environment. What I think is the bigger issue is this desire for absolute balance--for everything to be meta and equal. There's nothing wrong with having a meta so long as every job is at least viable, and with the exception of a few hiccups that were resolved fairly quickly over the years, FFXIV has a very solid track record of ensuring everything is playable.

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Originally Posted by Osmond

Have to stop you there. You can blame the devs for focusing on burst windows, but I wonder. How did burst windows came to be? Hmmmmmmmmmmm, oh I know! I was back in ARR with all these bloated buff abilities, poison pots, SMN’s contagion before pull on the boss. Was it the community that created burst windows? Yes, the community did. HW’s AST with multiple extensions of their cards before/during boss fights? All community there. The community made it a norm so devs said, “let’s do that!” Now we’re upset. Can’t have nice things……

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I'm gonna stop you right there. The community came up with the burst windows, the devs came up with the idea to cater to that.

No AST asked for all the cards to be Balance. You can stop blaming the community there.

The problem with Old AST cards were that too many of them were too niche or too random to make good use of.

Bole for example is a fantastic card, but as mentioned earlier comes up too infrequent to use when you want to use it. Balance was good A L W A Y S because its always good to have more damage.

There were a good number of ways they could have fixed this without making all the cards Balance. The devs chose to make all the cards Balance because it was easier. Dare I say, the lazy way.

• They could have split the Damage and Support cards where Lord/Lady could have become Lord/Lady/Knave for instance and have the effects of Bole/Ewer/and a tweaked Spire.
• They could have made the cards move on a cycle where when you pressed play it would stop on which ever of the 6 you wanted and draw that card, making it so that if a mechanic was up that you wanted to use Bole on, you could time it and use it then.
• They even could have used their idea of the Seals system and instead of making it more damage could have given them different effects depending on the combination of which seals you had.

The devs chose the easy way out. Plain and simple. That's on them not on us. We give them the pain points, they come up with the solutions. The blame shouldn't be on the community for them making up garbage solutions. Especially when all through out Shb we gave them solutions to fix their screw up for Endwalker and they did NONE OF IT.

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Originally Posted by ASkellington

I'm gonna stop you right there. The community came up with the burst windows, the devs came up with the idea to cater to that.

No AST asked for all the cards to be Balance. You can stop blaming the community there.

The problem with Old AST cards were that too many of them were too niche or too random to make good use of.

Bole for example is a fantastic card, but as mentioned earlier comes up too infrequent to use when you want to use it. Balance was good A L W A Y S because its always good to have more damage.

There were a good number of ways they could have fixed this without making all the cards Balance. The devs chose to make all the cards Balance because it was easier. Dare I say, the lazy way.

• They could have split the Damage and Support cards where Lord/Lady could have become Lord/Lady/Knave for instance and have the effects of Bole/Ewer/and a tweaked Spire.
• They could have made the cards move on a cycle where when you pressed play it would stop on which ever of the 6 you wanted and draw that card, making it so that if a mechanic was up that you wanted to use Bole on, you could time it and use it then.
• They even could have used their idea of the Seals system and instead of making it more damage could have given them different effects depending on the combination of which seals you had.

The devs chose the easy way out. Plain and simple. That's on them not on us. We give them the pain points, they come up with the solutions. The blame shouldn't be on the community for them making up garbage solutions. Especially when all through out Shb we gave them solutions to fix their screw up for Endwalker and they did NONE OF IT.

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…………….man. I wonder all the complaints the community has made, the devs changed it, the community complained, the devs changed it, the community complains, the devs………..screw it. We’re doing it this way. Either you like it or you don’t.