The Problem With Healers as a Role Withing FFXIV

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

I never did. Reduction in complexity has happened across the board, that's without dispute. The healer role just happens to contain the one job in the entire game for which complexity is (seemingly) expressly verboten- White Mage. Some of that's an impression from live letters. Some of it's borne out through design decisions. Some of it is from the community here. The day White Mage gets more than an ankle-depth kit is the day hell freezes over.

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WHM does seem to have been designed by intention to be less complex than the other healing jobs. Perhaps SE feels that it's important to have one accessible healing job that a large number of players can feel comfortable playing in casual content, lest duty finder queue times get too long.

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Originally Posted by BungleBear

WHM does seem to have been designed by intention to be less complex than the other healing jobs. Perhaps SE feels that it's important to have one accessible healing job that a large number of players can feel comfortable playing in casual content, lest duty finder queue times get too long.

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While I understand their approach of making at least one job of the understaffed roles very accessible, I don't think it has to mean that skill floor and skill ceiling need to be brought down.
A low skill floor is enough to make a job accessible because anything that aims at reaching the skill ceiling isn't of any interest to people playing it every once in a while in casual content. They want to feel safe and secure in fulfilling their primary role.
Oversimplifying a job as a whole brings down the skill ceiling aswell; a job can be easy to play but hard to master. To be accessible it needs to be easy to play, not without any complexity on higher skill levels to the point of being braindead.
And I think that's what angers to many veteran WHMs: they feel like too much was taken away or never given in the first place, all for people who don't even care about it one bit while they never got anything in return.

To this day it boggles my mind that SE have this glorious job system coupled with itemisation that is mostly role rather than job centric. Yet they don't embrace or abuse this in the slightest.

A badly handled balance patch in WoW could sideline thousands of hours of effort put into gear, reputation and even clout within the opposing faction.

In FFXIV, this simply means that you might want to give your favoured job a pass for a bit in Savage and Ultimate.

Now that they are at least claiming to be switching to a dynamic of 2 pure + 2 barrier healers, there has never been a better time to go full yolo with a healer from each side of the coin and try to experiment. Take some chances and see what sticks. The initial period when it's just dungeons, quests and a couple of EX primals is the most forgiving period of an expansion and they would have to truly scupper a job for it to be unviable in trivial content like this. We don't even need a DPS rotation in all honesty (although something as simple as an auto combo would help at least give the illusion of something more interesting, as well as rewarding consecutive GCD usage). Let us dump our GCDs into buffs. Give us back our debuffs. Give us anything to do that isn't smashing that single glare key endlessly at almost all stages of content.

Unfortunately this would require some effort to actually be put into healers so uh, NM =/

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Now that they are at least claiming to be switching to a dynamic of 2 pure + 2 barrier healers, there has never been a better time to go full yolo with a healer from each side of the coin and try to experiment. Take some chances and see what sticks. The initial period when it's just dungeons, quests and a couple of EX primals is the most forgiving period of an expansion and they would have to truly scupper a job for it to be unviable in trivial content like this. We don't even need a DPS rotation in all honesty (although something as simple as an auto combo would help at least give the illusion of something more interesting, as well as rewarding consecutive GCD usage). Let us dump our GCDs into buffs. Give us back our debuffs. Give us anything to do that isn't smashing that single glare key endlessly at almost all stages of content.

Unfortunately this would require some effort to actually be put into healers so uh, NM =/

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To be honest, I don't see why SE doesn't gamble on the jobs more often.

Frankly speaking, while I'm a relatively hardcore SCH main, I wouldn't mind it so much if they made SCH and WHM easy to access jobs, while the went ham on AST and SGE, being that they are both jobs you can't get until reaching at least level 50.

Of course I'd head straight into one of those jobs if that happened, I wouldn't even mind if they were underperformers as long as they were sufficiently fun to play.

SE does have a problem with risking alienating existing players with their decisions, but pretty much every decision will alienate a portion of the player base. They currently are alienating most of the healer boards with their ShB healer decisions as it is.

But FFXIV is a game that it's easy to switch jobs or even roles, and while there's a lot of players who only play one job, I don't see the downside of alienating a portion of those players who liked a particular job for its style or feel if the changes served to help the greater game.

SE already made GNB the DPS style tank, and a large number of veteran tanks migrated that way. They should do the same with SGE, since it's the perfect opportunity.

As someone who plays WHM on the side, the job being easy isn't really an issue for me. It's more that the vast majority of damage can be either shrugged off with heals, or instantly drops the affected player there and then, in which case the Res Mage'll usually have them up quicker than I will.

If you want to differentiate between healers, and you want to make healing interesting, then it needs to be through resource management. If you have too many resources at your disposal relative to what the content requires, healing becomes trivial.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

If you want to differentiate between healers, and you want to make healing interesting, then it needs to be through resource management. If you have too many resources at your disposal relative to what the content requires, healing becomes trivial.

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you also need to differentiate between what they do when they don't need to heal, which is hte majority of a healer's gameplay in ff14

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Originally Posted by BungleBear

WHM does seem to have been designed by intention to be less complex than the other healing jobs. Perhaps SE feels that it's important to have one accessible healing job that a large number of players can feel comfortable playing in casual content, lest duty finder queue times get too long.

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The gap between skilled and unskilled players in this game is gargantuan. I'm not even saying it to be snobbish, nor am I claiming to be a world first master of my job. I've met fellow players who think the 5.3 trial is too difficult to include in the MSQ. The QTE wasn't even their only concern. Having to remember which element imbued Coruscant Blade for the what, 15 seconds between the imbue and the cast was too hard for a story trial. Not SoS extreme, mind you. Story. The one where the element is a binary choice between fire and ice. A level of object permanence you normally test for in toddlers.

There will never be a skill floor too low for the FFXIV community. I really wish the design team would stop chasing it.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

The one where the element is a binary choice between fire and ice. A level of object permanence you normally test for in toddlers.

There will never be a skill floor too low for the FFXIV community. I really wish the design team would stop chasing it.

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This made me giggle cause I get this duty a lot in the Trials roulette and for some groups I had to make loud chat macros to get people to survive. It literally tells you the element in the chat box too just in case you forgot. It's amazing how low we have to set the bar for level capped content.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

There will never be a skill floor too low for the FFXIV community. I really wish the design team would stop chasing it.

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I have to keep saying the same thing, designing your content for the lowest common denominator is an exercise in futility.

These people often don't even put the absolute bare minimum effort into actually playing the game, so if you make the content easier to appeal to said people they will simply do even less, creating an endless spiral of the devs nerfing the game and certain players consequently becoming even worse at it, repeat ad infinitum.