It's okay to not reach the platonic ideal peak of perfection, what a revelation.
Or, perhaps, maybe being ultra clippy in the first place is evidence that a job's design doesn't flow very well and...*gasp* could be improved!
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Not a ding against this idea, but I'm finding myself amusingly drawn back to the olden days of ARR and Heavensward.
When the job balancing team decided that WHM having exclusive access to the magic defense half of protect or (heavens to betsy) a whole extra 8% shield on stoneskin would be "too powerful" and "might make WHM mandatory for raids"
*cackles in SCH getting Indom and being effectively mandatory the very same expansion*
*guffaws at The Blackest Night not only being HP percentage based, but far more useful, powerful, and kit integrated than Stoneskin ever was*
Where was I? Oh yeah, I didn't have a point to make. Just poking fun at healer design over the years. ;)
How is that ironic.
To clarify, I don't like how Chain Stratagem works, personally. I'd rather have to build up to it with a proper job gauge, than simply press a button. How Chain Stratagem works right now makes it bland and unsatisfying. But I still think SCH should be the unique healer to have to manage debuffs on enemies as its own identity.
Just like AST should be the unique healer to manage buffs on allies as its idenitity.
None of that means WHM should be the baby healer. None of that means WHM should be weakest or the simplest. I think WHM should have its own identity as a powerful nuker. Reliant on strong personal dps and a satisfying rotation that allows it to weave damage and healing together.
Managing 'buffs' is not an identity. Managing 'debuffs' is not an identity. There are what, 17 standard combat jobs? Let's not reserve mandatory raid spots for our favourites by cordoning off massive areas of design space.
Everyone wants those big numbers that they get from buffs/debuffs. Who cares who the highest damage dealing healer is, especially when pure damage dealers provide a progressively larger share of raid dps with each expansion? "I know you can clear on WHM, but would you mind swapping to make my numbers look better?"
I think the moment that you introduce offensive raid buffs/debuffs to a role, everyone in that role has to have it for there to be a level playing field. Alternatively, if they add a fourth healer next expansion, have SCH and AST's buff/debuff effects rewrite each other/share downtime such that you only ever want to take one of them at a time. I think the latter is less likely given that they opted not to go that way with tanks.
What exactly is an "identity" in your opinion? Managing buffs/debuffs seems pretty interesting as gameplay, and seems to come with a certain amount of unique choices. Of course it all comes down to how said activities are designed.
There seem to be two major ways to contribute to dps in FFXIV, either trough personal dps like SAM, BLM and MCH, or through giving others buffs and improving their dps, like DNC, RDM and NIN.
Healers also seem to fall under this binary in terms of design.
I agree giving jobs a sub-role might prevent a certain degree of design creativity, but I don't agree with the idea that having utility automatically makes sure that a job will be picked over another. I think pre 5.3 AST is a testament to that. AST was barely played compared to the other two even though it brought higher utility.
After what happened at the beginning of Shb, I think job homogenization is a bigger danger to job design than the "meta". Isn't homogenization one of the biggest sources of healer unhappiness after all?
AST and SCH hogging all of the utility and effectively being good at everything created the eternal unchanging healer meta, which was part of the larger utility job meta that the homogenization in 5.0 was aimed at breaking.
Job homogenization sucks. So do two jobs always and forever being the mandatory best because utility is king and no you can't have any, stay there at the bottom of the totem pole where you belong.
All of these arbitrary design restrictions on WHM make it the baby healer. Must be straightforward, can't alienate newbies. Must have zero utility, the other two have claimed nearly all of healer design space as their "identity". Must be the GCD healer because GCDs are more straightforward. Up until ShB (and even a few times after I've seen it) can't have a decent damage rotation because "doing damage is SCH's thing since they started from a DPS class". So with all these restrictions the devs and the community believe it has, what CAN WHM be good at?
Conversely, nobody has ever come to agree on what SCH's identity is. It's the DPS healer. It's the shield healer. It's the pet healer. It's the oGCD healer. It's the debuff healer.
It's because Scholar, eater of worlds, has devoured so much design space as its exclusive domain over the last three expansions that it became the good at everything healer. I think design space can also be healthier if we mix things around a bit. Not in a homogenizing way, but if you say, have twice as many debuffs as the next most debuff heavy healer, and those debuffs build differently and do different things, you've got a clear focus without staking exclusive claim.
Identities are unique gameplay experiences. While there's no point in creating multiple jobs if they all play the same, there's equally no point if everyone feels compelled to pick the same set of eight jobs, expansion after expansion. You need to have alternate methods of achieving the same end goals. There is a way to simultaneously achieve both "Identity" and "Balance" that is neither Stormblood nor Shadowbringers, respectively.
There are some things that are an essential part of a role. You can't design a healer job whose identity consists of "actions which increase a party member's HP" to the exclusion of the others because that's fundamental to being a healer. You can't design a tank job whose identity gives them a monopoly on invulns.
Balancing out raid buffs is tricky enough on DPS jobs, even when you can pretty much reduce the performance of the role down to a single number. A number of longstanding raid buffs have been toned back such that they're a lot less dramatic than they used to be. And at the end of the day, even if you get everything mathematically balanced, the average DPS player doesn't really care who's on top of the healer damage charts when it's only ever going to be just a fraction of theirs. They just want you to press the magic button that makes their numbers bigger.
I think that if you want to achieve "identity" in a fair way, it has to be by either using alternate means to achieve a similar goal, or by providing two different benefits that are not directly comparable. For example, how does a proximity-based movement speed buff compare with an invisibility spell that makes a player less likely to be selected for a targeted mechanic? How does AoE knockback prevention compare against being able to set up a temporary teleporter between two points on the arena? It's alright to have unique situational abilities, so long as the game designers create situations for them to be used. Cover has historically seen some pretty interesting uses for this reason.
I don't think that raid buffs should be the focus of the discussion. Now that some healer jobs have them (read: everyone except for WHM), it should by rights be standardised across the board. Where you can make healers more interesting is by giving them tools to solve raid mechanics in a way that allows for greater dps efficiency. Movement and positioning is criminally underutilised in this game's design. Another place that you can differentiate them is by expanding on their respective resource management systems. MP can't be the new TP.
Disagree
Bard has many buffs so should machinist also have them? No. Should dancer? No. Because then why not just have one role and get rid of those others of everything is the same. We want diversity.
You don’t see scholars crying that they can’t buff. You don’t see ast crying that they can’t debuff. I personally could care less who does what as long as they are all different from Each other.
This is why the classes have gotten so bland and similar.
Dancer is packed to bursting with buffs.
I see Scholars and Astrologians bitching for a return to Stormblood/Heavensward design all the time. Fey Wind and Disable would presumably be part of that.
This is yet more AST/SCH "WHM should never ever have utility because Reasons". Great Healer Circular Argument strikes again.
Tbh most of those threads I've seen want to go back to Stormblood because both healers were less of a snoozefest or a clunky, buggy mess, their utility being completely irrelevant to the point. I've yet to see one that just blatantly states "I want Stormblood back because my cards/ fey wind were stronger than they are now" and nowhere in those do they demand WHM to go back to being a trainwreck.
Dancer just shows that SE doesn't actually know what they want.
"We want to get away from all this group utility" because the Nin, Drg, Brd, Sch, Ast meta and people who thought meta comps were the be-all-end-all of raiding were causing too many issues.
Then they remove all the utility from bard and several other jobs but create a new job whose core identity is group utility...:confused:
Yeah the problem with that is that dancer is the only one that isn’t bad as hell in comparison too brd and mch, and that’s only the case when you pair it up with a samurai. Like they did butcher physical range. Ofc you can clear content with it ,but they are bad jobs at the moment. The same with monk. Why play monk when samurai is more flexible and deals more dmg and can be made to fit into every burst phase in min max ( and it’s boring as hell).
I think MCH is in an okay spot dps wise. Their personal dps often beats dancer's rdps, it's just simply rather dull to play compared to it's carpal tunnel inducing nightmare version from Stormblood.
Bard on the other hand has been suffering from an identity crisis this whole expansion.
You don't need to read my post in its entirety to disagree with it. You do, however, need to at least attempt to read it if you want to formulate a relevant response.
Buffs and debuffs are potentially equivalent ways of achieving the same goal. An action that reduces boss damage by 10% is the same as giving everyone 10% DR. Why would anyone complain about the methodology of that? (Granted, there are situational advantages to each). But to cordon off AST as being the "buff healer" and SCH as being the "debuff healer" doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. There is no one "buff dps" job with complete exclusivity on the ability to use raid buffs or one "debuff dps" job with complete exclusivity on the ability to use raid debuffs. There isn't the design space for it.
This isn't about identity, it's about protecting your turf. If your concern was about job variety, then you'd be asking "how many unique ways could a healer job help boost raid damage against the boss?" There's more than just two. Even delineating raidwide damage boosts into "buffs" and "debuffs" is overly broad. How does a simple damage boost stack up against an ability that reduces the recasts on your cooldowns? How does a bigger single player boost match up against a smaller raidwide boost? If a key part of the healer role is support, then we need to find more ways to allow that to happen.
Nah, they just demand that WHM continue to have zero utility, that they remain stronger because they're "more complex", that WHM gets...ehh some work somewhere to make it good, but dear god nothing other than basic damage and healing otherwise it'll compromise AST/SCH "identity", and some prevarication about "making the numbers work".
They don't ask for WHM to be a trainwreck, they just paint a picture that leaves an outline around a trainwreck-shaped hole in the artwork and then spend an expansion Surprised Pikachu-ing over the trainwreck Squeenix fills in there.
Why do I want WHM to not have damage abilities with variable potencies proportional to party performance (aka raid "utility")?
It's because I find the concept of a healer whose dps is wholly "selfish" to be a compelling one. I don't want this scrapped, I want to make it work. And so far, no one has convinced me that a selfish dps healer is impossible, just that SE has failed at it so far.
That said, if we get a new healer in 6.0 that's selfish, and WHM gets raid damage boosters, then that's cool too.
It's not impossible to balance. But all things being equal, if you asked a dps or tank to choose between a healer who does high damage and a healer who hands out the equivalent amount in raid buffs, it's a complete non-contest. It's asking someone else to choose between you making yourself look better or you making them look better. And you can always choose to play support abilities selfishly, if that's your job fantasy. Why not give that big single target buff to yourself?
There's also an effort discrepancy. You can create a nice spreadsheet with all the healer oGCDs and your tanks' cooldowns mapped out against their timestamps, such that you can spend as much uptime angrily Glaring at your opponents as possible. And then your co-healer presses a button once every two minutes and gets high praise for it. Unless they have to expend an equivalent amount of uptime to get to that button press, it's not going to be an even trade-off.
I don't think that there's a problem with having variations in the amount of "support" vs. "healing/damage throughput" each job can provide. But if it's as binary as "this job brings a buff, this one doesn't", it's a complete no-brainer for your teammates. The smart solution is to give everyone varying degrees of buffs/debuffs, especially those that cannot be easily compared with each other numerically.
Interesting.
Then I would like to challenge the idea that the healer exists only for the party's sake and the role's design must focus on enhancing the enjoyment of the party. It is a class fantasy, yes, but I argue that there is design space for healers that are selfish with their dps.
EDIT: sorry, I was distracted. But as for self-buffing, that is a thing I would absolutely expect for a selfish healer. SAM has Kaiten, for example, and they are the definition of selfish DPS.
Healers don't exist only for the party's sake, but other players will evaluate you based on how you benefit them. In some cases, that benefit might be because you dish out a lot of damage (relatively, mind you, as non-dps players occupy a progressively shrinking slice of the pie) while keeping everyone alive, and that's great. But progression aside, there comes a time when everyone has done the fight more than enough, and people start looking at pushing their personal performance higher. And then they look at buffs. And then comes the question: "We know you play WHM very well, but do you think you could try swapping to..." I've seen this conversation happen for five years. It will continue to happen unless you have at least something to put on the table buff-wise.
A single target buff can just as easily be applied to yourself as it can to another player. What if Bravery was an all around single target buff (i.e. Ana Nano)? Restore a set amount of HP, boost damage resistance, offensive power and skill/spell speed. Maybe you use it to save the tank who is about to die. Maybe you decide not to. You are the WHM, after all. Maybe you use it on the irritating DPS player who keeps failing an individual dps check mechanic and wiping the group. Or maybe you use it on yourself, because you're worth it. The 'job fantasy' concept doesn't need to close doors. It should open them.
Try telling SE and non healer mains that, if the healer existed outside the party they wouldn't have taken away so much and reduced all 3 healers to 1,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,1 etc for downtime especially for solo duties.
The game is too slow, too scripted for that to be an acceptable downtime for 80%+ for fights (100% for solo duties), healers are the only role that stagnates for so long, the 1st solo duty in ARR is handled the same way as the 5.3 solo duty, just different aesthetics, this is unacceptable imo.
All roles should be evolving their kit as they level but healers don't for half their kit, the half that does is used less and less each expansion to the point that it is a fact we as a community have even more downtime than ever before and it is happening at a lower skill level.
Whms want utility because without it they need potency buffs anytime the other 2 healers utility is even touched upon because otherwise HW and SB will repeat again, and I'm sure every Whm player would not want that for a 3rd expansion.
Whm entire gimmick of lillies can be ignored when doing solo stuff or in a competent party(I've had runs of dungeons where I pop afflatus skills when there is nothing going on between pulls, I highly doubt this is intended dev design to use instant cast heals on full hp players when nothing is happening) and unlike Sch's fairy these are all gcds so you are incentivised by the community to ignore until you have to either move for mechanics or out of cds or dead air.
Lillies system is an expansion behind where it should be, this system should've been the SB one and ShB should've improved upon it in some way.
If they want to keep whm selfish give a Lily buff for having them or give an ability for 1 Lily cost to improve Whm healing and damage at same time I.e. Faith.
Whm also has abilities that need improvement after so much nerfing, Fluid aura deserves better, repose deserved better than being taken and forced for a healer role action (I can tell you practically no one who played Sch or Ast in SB wanted repose, they had their own answers for what they needed, repose was a very lazy decision.)
Healers(especially Whms) have for a long time felt like they didn't matter to the devs, ShB only made it way more upfront and apparent. Whm is only as good now because the other two were beaten with a sledgehammer, if sch was as good as SB version, Whm would still be suffering like it had been since SB, Whm is better by proxy not by its own merit and it is the devs who are at fault, they created everything through their own ineptitude at actually understanding their own game and community.
My group is kind of lower skilled, so I don't really run into that issue, but I've read that since FFLogs shifted the default DPS calculation mode, instead of the damage dealers asking for group support, the supporty classes have been asking for dps with strong personal numbers.
As for the ability to pad numbers, sure, as long as in an optimal situation the buff should be placed of the healer in question themselves for max rDPS. It'd have to basically be multiple mode skill, and placing on an ally would have to have an effect outside of damage boosting, and now I'm rambling...
There seems to be a misunderstanding about how rDPS works. If you are a selfish DPS with no group utility then you're more likely to lose dps depending on whether or not you hold your burst for buff windows. If you are a support however then whatever extra damage you provide to your DPS through buffs is counting towards your own rDPS.
So yes, you are correct that as a supporter you want jobs with high personal dps but they also need to put that personal dps inside your buff windows, whereas as a selfish dps you're better off just ignoring the buffs altogether and just cramming as many burst cooldowns into a fight as possible. As a support healer you do not want to put the dps buffs on yourself since it is never gonna give you more rDPS than putting it on an actual DPS job.
This could lead to weird situations where a big buff window is coming up in like 10 seconds but you want to use your burst right away because holding it for 10 sec means you're gonna lose a use of that cooldown throughout the fight. You're essentially doing less dps overall but your rDPS is gonna be higher.
This sounds like a bigger issue than it actually is, most jobs have their burst every 60, 120, 180 seconds which naturally lines up with buff windows...some however do not.
For speedkills on the other hand it's a completely different story, your rDPS doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is how fast you can kill the boss.
I wish that FFlogs had a option to easily view player performance in three parts
1) Personal dps: damage from your damaging skills, which may or may not be augmented by any buffs you cast on yourself or debuffs you cast on an enemy.
2) Outgoing Boost: extra damage gained from your buffs and debuffs affecting party members other than yourself.
3) Incoming Boost: extra damage gained from allies' buffs and debuffs affecting your own damaging skills.
Then again, I view clear time as the 'One True Metric' and looking at your own dps is a mere estimation of your contribution that pepe seem to take too seriously.
They made it worse....
So what has SEs response been? Does watch role have a dev? Each class? For a game that generates so much revenue the service seems to be lacking and the quantity not the quality of content as well.
Pretty certain one of them mains pld given how OP it is but forgot to save the final change that stopped it needing to drop a gcd every so often
One of them probably mains DRG, but didn't get to work on DRG this time as they were training the intern to ignore the healers :P hence why DRG got a cut and paste of ARR job actions (Stardiver-dragonfire dive, Coertahn torment- doomspike, high jump-jump, blood of the dragon is still just power surge, raiden thrust is the only really new thing there)
One of them definately mains blm and has to report directly to Yoshi-p as its yoshi-ps job.
I'm reading all you guys post in the text to speak voice from reddit tales on youtube. haha.
So in a recent interview they are mentioned this from the reddit discord
"They are aware on the feedback about "AST is so much easier to use but SCH, though....."
It's vague in its wording but it does make one think with all of the past changes that they have done to healers this expansion and how they might proceed now. Also the fact they were willing to go into what would changed about SAM and DRG in the same sentence but not so much with the SCH.
To be fair, they probably view Astro being "so much easier to use" as a positive when many believe it's once again the best healer, and far too easy. That's been a primary issue with healer design, and really, job design in general. The devs tend to focus on making everything easier to play but don't consider player expression beyond the initial learning curve.
It could be referring to SCH mana costs compared to AST, since all of AST’s GCDs are stronger & cheaper than SCH’s.
Or how they said they were going to make WHM easier between StB and ShB and that consisted of giving it more opportunities to weave (as well as the only healer change people liked lmao).
Plus SCH MP management is still heavily reliant on your party.
If you need to spend a lot of AF on healing, you're not just missing out on dps but on 500-1500 MP from ED per minute from AF alone aswell. In good parties low Piety and ressing is fine, in bad parties that MP loss quickly adds up to the point where you are forced to do book slaps.
They cut MP management from mobility for AST, I wouldn't be surprised if they take a look into SCHs MP management via ED aswell. Escpecially with the more expensive GCD heals.