To YoshiP, here's what too stress-free: Healer edition

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

If you look at how various cutscenes depict a Sage Doing Their Thing(tm), their identity is clear: blocking incoming attacks via barriers. The implementation of the job simply doesn't embrace it fully.

(And as a related observation, Kardia gets essentially zero screen time. Alphinaud stops attacking to heal Allisaie in the opening trailer... Not to mention the comic absurdity that would be Sharlayan running its medical wards by sending doctors out into the local fields to laser wildlife to death.)

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It honestly just feels like they designed Kardia to be a tacked on mechanic for the player only. Alphinaud does not apply Kardia, and IIRC, neither does Fourchenault during the final role quest.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

It honestly just feels like they designed Kardia to be a tacked on mechanic for the player only. Alphinaud does not apply Kardia, and IIRC, neither does Fourchenault during the final role quest.

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Kardia is just Eos. Sage is the Dr. Mario of FFXIV. A character that is literally just heavier Mario, but with a lab coat, one different special move.

SGE doesn't get a cool theme song and a Tetris knockoff

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

DPS
Healers have far too few DPS abilities for how much time we spend DPSing in FFXIV. Healers do not need to have as many ways to attack as DPS jobs like Black Mage or Red Mage, but they should have a few more options that are unique to each healer. Look at the tanks for example; tanks are not DPS, yet they each have a larger variety of attacks that help make their offensive gameplay feel dynamic. Additionally, different tanks approach DPS with different levels of complexity, and the same can be done with healers. Much like how Warrior is a more simple tank, you can also have a more simple healer, but on the flip side, we should also have something like Gunbreaker, a more aggressive and fast-paced offensive healer. Before the release of Endwalker, you mentioned how during Sage's development, your team had looked at feedback of healers wanting more attack options and tried to explore those options with Sage, but the end result was far too timid of an approach. Why not be bold with Sage? Take a risk with a more aggressive healer design while approaching the other healers with more caution and see how it's received.

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Having picked up white mage recently, this is the most noticeable to me. For the majority of the fight I'm spamming Glare over and over again with the occasional Dia and Afflatus Misery. There's no need for me to heal that much either because most of the "midcore" content is just so easy. Not exactly the most riveting gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

Having picked up white mage recently, this is the most noticeable to me. For the majority of the fight I'm spamming Glare over and over again with the occasional Dia and Afflatus Misery. There's no need for me to heal that much either because most of the "midcore" content is just so easy. Not exactly the most riveting gameplay.

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That’s basically the collective problem the healer forum circles the drain on near daily because people continue to misunderstand our intentions

Whether you would prefer healers to be constantly healing to the point you can barely eek out 10 glares in entire encounter or lean more heavily into 14’s design as healers being accomplished casters in their own right the problem e it’s that the current design is equally terrible for both groups right now. People who want to heal are expected to contribute large amounts of damage and people who like the fantasy of healers being accomplished casters get to deal with the most boring rotation known to man

Square refuses to commit to either group even though it’s perfectly possible to actually make both groups happy if they would actually put in a shred of effort to designing healers then we just circle round and round as every 4-5 days like clockwork someone comes on here and goes “if you want to do DPS play a DPS”

Nothing ever goes anywhere

At this point I have no doubt that the “if you want to do DPS play a DPS” arguement is purely to stir the pot.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Nothing ever goes anywhere

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We have to accept that there's a segment of the player population that has only ever known ShB healers. Some of them are probably horrified at the prospect of keeping track of a timer that's lower than 30s, some are probably feeling stressed out that they're being told by their party to spam their 1 key and are terrified at the prospect of a party forcing them to do a MNK rotation while keeping them alive.

Both are of course pointless fears. Nobody expects a healer to have perfect DoT uptime, not even currently where you only have 1 that lasts 30s. And nobody wants an entire DPS job rotation transplanted onto a healer job, nobody has ever asked for that to my knowledge, the most that people asked for was for WHM to take inspiration from BLM, not to grab the entire BLM kit and slam it into WHM's kit.

I mean, 1 spammable spell and 1 dot every 30 seconds, for 86 levels, is bad game design no matter how much people want to twist it to make it justifyable. "You're a healer, your job is to heal not dps" then give us something to heal. People mostly only want more dps buttons because the option to increase healing requirements so we actually heal more has already been shot down (ironic huh?), so right now you can only either spam that 1111111 or stand there doing nothing (or spam heals when the tank is at 97% HP to make believe you're being useful when even you yourself know all that is just wasted healing)

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Originally Posted by Allegor

I mean, 1 spammable spell and 1 dot every 30 seconds, for 86 levels, is bad game design no matter how much people want to twist it to make it justifyable. "You're a healer, your job is to heal not dps" then give us something to heal. People mostly only want more dps buttons because the option to increase healing requirements so we actually heal more has already been shot down (ironic huh?), so right now you can only either spam that 1111111 or stand there doing nothing (or spam heals when the tank is at 97% HP to make believe you're being useful when even you yourself know all that is just wasted healing)

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Let's be fairer here, both options were shot down by Yoshi P himself. But time moves on, maybe he had a change of heart. They did attempt a healing requirement increase in Abyssos, they went about it in a bad way, but I digress, they did try. Perhaps they'll try giving us more damage options in Dawntrail, one can dream.

At this point, I'd straight up rip the bandage off and tell people that healers are designed to make duty finder queue pops faster. Don't worry about actual healings, people love playing WAR/PLD and will 100% do your job for you. You can look pretty, /gpose, /beesknees while your party deal with the dangers out there for you!

A plus design from a small indie company. I'm so grateful /s

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Originally Posted by Allegor

I mean, 1 spammable spell and 1 dot every 30 seconds, for 86 levels, is bad game design no matter how much people want to twist it to make it justifyable. "You're a healer, your job is to heal not dps" then give us something to heal. People mostly only want more dps buttons because the option to increase healing requirements so we actually heal more has already been shot down (ironic huh?), so right now you can only either spam that 1111111 or stand there doing nothing (or spam heals when the tank is at 97% HP to make believe you're being useful when even you yourself know all that is just wasted healing)

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The option to give us more reasons to heal, particularly at a volume high enough to justify only having 1 standard DPS action, 1 DOT, and 1 Cooldown isn't realistic because the game has never been designed to support that type of damage profile. Asking for more healing opportunities is fine and possible to a point, but that will still require adjustments to the DPS side of healer kits, or the end result will not be anywhere near sufficient to address the problem. Asking for more healing such that no new DPS buttons need to ever get added is literally asking for a different game at this point. That is not FFXIV. That has never been FFXIV. That never will be FFXIV unless we do another A Realm Reborn.

Either you change the damage profile for all fights moving forward, in which case how in the hell do you design healers to function in the content we have now as well as this new punishingly brutal healing requirement content at the same time? You can't. So the alternative is that you rework every single fight that has ever been made over the last 10 years in order to support this new brutal healing requirements content model so that your healers can actually function in all forms of content. There is no planet in our universe where that is a realistic solution for a game this old. You think the amount of time we spent on creating the Duty Support system was long? And you'd have to roll out all those changes at the same time. You can't roll them out gradually.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

At this point, I'd straight up rip the bandage off and tell people that healers are designed to make duty finder queue pops faster. Don't worry about actual healings, people love playing WAR/PLD and will 100% do your job for you. You can look pretty, /gpose, /beesknees while your party deal with the dangers out there for you!

A plus design from a small indie company. I'm so grateful /s

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More like healers are designed to slow down queue pops by being so anti-fun that barely anyone can actually enjoy the role.

Might as well give us the option to add an actual healbot into the party to get queues going quicker, especially since they've been designing content specifically so healbots can clear.

I guess it comes down to what square enix considers the best balance for the classes vs the queues

Going back to long abandoned discussions with our old friend renrathas while we could prove that job satisfaction for AST and SCH crashed after ShB changed them we really have little to no evidence outside of our own personal anecdotes as to whether queues and the proportion of the healer population across the game has gotten better or worse as a collective (outliers like abyssos notwithstanding). We can be pretty sure as a collective that square enix is biased to tanks over healers but we also see specific incentives for tank queues such the titles and the mounts with a noticeable lack of equivalents on healers as well as the AIN system which is commonly believed to inherently bias tanks

If even with all these incentives, the bias of AIN and the fact that tanks have become functionally immortal to avoid “tankxiety” tanks are still actually the rarest role over healers then square may honestly believe that’s the subpar healing design doesn’t piss of “enough people” to overcome the fact that it assists tanks and DPS to fill their queues

If instead as healer is the rarest role again square may just consider it “good enough” to not actually feel like they need to care compared to the greater value of improving the more played classes

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I guess it comes down to what square enix considers the best balance for the classes vs the queues

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I think it's really hard to say definitively one way or another. We all have our own circles and we generally know how the change affected our own circles, but it's quite impossible to tell for sure how it affected the larger playerbase.

We can't know how many people quit the healer role entirely vs how many people entered the role because it became so impossible to fail. We also can't know how many ex-healer mains still occasionally go back to healing, we also can't know if the removal of every failure point in the healer role managed to drag a tank/DPS main into becoming a healer main.

That's why this kind of discussion is hard to have. Healer queues would also depend on your DC and time of day you play, so it's very hard to get any accurate data outside of directly polling the playerbase.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

The option to give us more reasons to heal, particularly at a volume high enough to justify only having 1 standard DPS action, 1 DOT, and 1 Cooldown isn't realistic because the game has never been designed to support that type of damage profile. Asking for more healing opportunities is fine and possible to a point, but that will still require adjustments to the DPS side of healer kits, or the end result will not be anywhere near sufficient to address the problem. Asking for more healing such that no new DPS buttons need to ever get added is literally asking for a different game at this point. That is not FFXIV. That has never been FFXIV. That never will be FFXIV unless we do another A Realm Reborn.

Either you change the damage profile for all fights moving forward, in which case how in the hell do you design healers to function in the content we have now as well as this new punishingly brutal healing requirement content at the same time? You can't. So the alternative is that you rework every single fight that has ever been made over the last 10 years in order to support this new brutal healing requirements content model so that your healers can actually function in all forms of content. There is no planet in our universe where that is a realistic solution for a game this old. You think the amount of time we spent on creating the Duty Support system was long? And you'd have to roll out all those changes at the same time. You can't roll them out gradually.

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To be fair, they literally are remaking every single (MSQ) fight in the game, at least so that even a bot can do it, so making the fights require some more healing isn't really far fetched. That said, my point wasn't really to make us healbots either, just a response to the notion that we shouldn't dps at all since we're healers, but there's so little to heal in the first place so like, what are we supposed to do other than dps? To have a reason to heal more than once every unavoidable party/raidwide or when someone screws up a mechanic is the bare minimum "increased healing" that could be done imo, and I'm not speaking of EX or Savage fights but normal mode trials, dungeons and alliance raids too (tho the lack of proper 'midcore' content is its own can of worms)

I love playing a healer. But I have reached the point where I bring out my beloved AST less and less. I default to MCH for quest content and BLM for instances. It is miserable to go into a dungeon and spam 1 button the entire time. I spend the time wishing that my heals were shields. Then, there would at least be a reason to cast them!

Heals are not needed when party members are either at +90% health or dead from one-shot mechanics.

After having played FF7 Rebirth, something that's danced around my head for a while was once again trying to take inspiration from Aerith for how white mage could be, since both FFXIV's white mage and Aerith are white mages associated with nature, and it gave me some interesting questions that I'd like some opinions on. What are your thoughts on a mechanic like this as white mage's standard attack spell instead of Glare?

Dia - When pressed, deals single target damage with a potency of 220. When held for 2 seconds, becomes Tempest. If the hold is canceled, Dia is cast when the hold is released.

Tempest - Deals AOE damage around your target four times with a potency of 40 per hit, then deals single target damage to your target with a potency of 100.

It's sort of like an optional cast time. If you complete the cast, you get the slightly stronger spell and AOE damage out of it. Dia would also have a new, more simple animation of firing a small magic bolt at your opponent. This also merges your standard single target attack with your standard AOE attack. Holy III then remains as an AOE with a stun, but also grants you a Fleeting Familiar, which adds an extra 20 potency attack on the nearest enemy to all your spell casts and lasts 30 seconds.

I have other ideas based on this concept as well, such as how Stone, Aero, and Water play into this, but what are your thoughts on an action like this, where you can hold down the button rather than press it to cast something different, but casts the "on press" spell if you release prematurely, either to move or by accident.