Balance was balanced

I'm happy with these changes. They're not perfect, but they're a huge improvement in making all cards useful.

As a side note, hilariously I managed to draw Balance EIGHT TIMES in a row in my expert roulette today. RNG can be pretty wow sometimes.

Side effect of the change: I almost never use minor arcana anymore.

I love it, finally i can stop ignoring Spear. I'm fine with the Balance change, finally i can stop fishing for them.

Changes are good IMO
Just need to change my use of Lightspeed/Dignity a bit to make most of it

Balance is a slight nerf but the fact that we have now another great card (spear) totally makes up for it :)

I spent today grinding a bunch of content on AST. It's nice to have 3 generally useful spreads, and couple of situational windfall options. The only thing screwing me up right now is Sleeve Draw and Spire in the Spread, which is preemptively manageable.

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Originally Posted by Enla

I'd have to agree. Yes I'm still annoyed that Noct stance has a higher potency and usage than my Succor or Adlo, but with these new potency buffs it doesn't feel like I'm left out in the cold if I end up with an AST who absolutely refuses to change stances.

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Do people seriously do this? I've forgotten to change once with a SCH in the group, because my last 3 delta's had WHMs, but I started asking my group in discord to wipe it up because I forgot (that and we had a lot of deaths due to people not following mechanics). I actually prefer diurnal over Nocturnal. While I can work with the shields, they can be mana intense in encounters with a lot of aoe damage or high tank damage (AB costs as much as a Helios).

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

Think It this way. Remember every Spear and Arrow you tossed because you'd rather use Balance? Well now you can use them. Not only are you getting more buff uptime in general, but you're having fun with the card system again. Unless you found fishing for Balance fun....I guess?

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You mean every spear and arrow I did use? Like throwing spears on tanks when they stop and burn cooldowns to survive through the pull, throwing Arrows on Ninjas, Black Mages, and Samurai? Or royal roading them so that I could give a nice long Bole on that squishy Dark Knight.

I would also use spear on myself to setup for sleeve drawing more often.

But eh, people complained spear was useless (because it only worked on skills cast during its buff time) when it was a DPS burst buff of its own. Course now that is gone for a buff that can eh... maybe give its value? Maybe not give its value at all? On top of reducing the applicable targets and the amount of uses that could of been planned around it. So in my opinion the change to it being a crit buff is equal parts nerf and buff, but a balance or arrow would still be preferred just due to consistency.

Oh and, prior to it getting buffed a 5% AoE balance was not enough to give AST a place on raid groups.

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

Oh and, prior to it getting buffed a 5% AoE balance was not enough to give AST a place on raid groups.

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Most high-end raiders seem to believe that 3.3 was probably the most balanced patch (by far) for healers throughout all of Heavensward; it was mostly "Party Finder Heroes" with their heads clearly wedged back in 3.2 that were still excluding AST. Shifting Balance to 20% in 3.4 led to AST being completely broken in comparison to its competition and an obvious must-have in "optimal comps".

...And now that Balance has been shifted back to 10%, healer balance is probably the best of any role in this game right now, with people racing for world first with AST/SCH, AST/WHM, and WHM/SCH and having similar success with each. Funny how that works.

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Originally Posted by LazyTitan87

Do people seriously do this? I've forgotten to change once with a SCH in the group, because my last 3 delta's had WHMs, but I started asking my group in discord to wipe it up because I forgot (that and we had a lot of deaths due to people not following mechanics). I actually prefer diurnal over Nocturnal. While I can work with the shields, they can be mana intense in encounters with a lot of aoe damage or high tank damage (AB costs as much as a Helios).

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Yes they do.

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

Oh and, prior to it getting buffed a 5% AoE balance was not enough to give AST a place on raid groups.

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This wasn't the reason at all.

AST was a pretty weak healer with more or less mediocre utility at release, which gave the job a bad rep. The lack of an oGCD AoE heal to supplement their burst healing was actually the biggest issue AST had in Gordias progression, and this is what led to the mentality that AST was simply shit. However, if you talk to speedrunners from that time, you'll find that a lot of them will say speed runs ended up coming down to who had more Balance uptime.

After extensive buffs to the card system's management, they finally found a good place for the cards and AST's healing potencies, and Midas was a pretty good era for healer balance. The gross overbuffing of Balance in 3.4 was a horrible mistake. It's good that they fixed it.

The fact that AST isn't absolutely necessary anymore is a great thing, as is the fact that SCH isn't absolutely necessary either. Healers are actually the most balanced role in the game right now, with tanks more or less coming in close second.

The DPS roles tho... #prayforSMN

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

You mean every spear and arrow I did use? Like throwing spears on tanks when they stop and burn cooldowns to survive through the pull, throwing Arrows on Ninjas, Black Mages, and Samurai? Or royal roading them so that I could give a nice long Bole on that squishy Dark Knight.

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In situations where cooldowns actually matter, most tanks will figure out a specific rotation and stick to that like glue, I'd wager if I quietly speared my tanks in 3.4, there's a pretty solid shot they wouldn't even notice, and if they did, I couldn't guarantee that spear so they wouldn't be able to build a rotation around it. Bole has been very decent since 3.4. Not really news there.

Arrow seems quite a bit better now that TP isn't such a burning issue. But it's still not quite on par with balance (or crit spear) for most jobs. As for spearing yourself for sleeve draw? I'm not really convinced sorry =(

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

But eh, people complained spear was useless (because it only worked on skills cast during its buff time) when it was a DPS burst buff of its own.

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DPS tend to have even more disdain for it than tanks as it'll put their cooldown rotations out of alignment. There might be a little merit in it for dungeons if you're with someone who hasn't built up a gameplan for the place yet, but in a 10 minute encounter you'll likely cause a DPS loss using it on a DPS especially if they're not expecting it.

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

Oh and, prior to it getting buffed a 5% AoE balance was not enough to give AST a place on raid groups.

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Say what?

AST (5-10%) didn't get a spot on raid groups for Gordias because it was horribly untuned and didn't have the HPS throughput to catch up after a mistake. Every team on Ragnarok that ran AST/SCH either gave up or switched at A3S during the initial progression race.

AST (still 5-10%) had a decent even split with WHM for Midas. Noct sect was still subpar vs a SCH at this point, but Diu could keep up with the heat now as long as the group adjusted a little for it.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

You'd think not a single person in this thread play AST or something. For them to call a 5% AOE 30/40s damage buff "useless"....Holy shit.

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Oh god I'm agreeing with you again ;)

I think it's a shame that SE forced this situation to come to a head by giving us that ludicrous 20% balance in the first place, but this puts cards in a much better situation now. There's legitimate variety rather than the 'balance or bust' that we had in 3.4. All that's left for SE to address is the button bloat the card system has now. Not sure how they are going to achieve that but eh. GL Yoshi!

I say balance decreasing back to 10% should have happened during the release of SB. When that buff originally came out you would see Astrologians throwing other cards away for balance. Balance was not very balanced imo. For the Raiding astros out there the card mechanics turned into a mini-game of "Find the balance!" Though with the buffs to other cards implementing afterwards Astro's started to have some fun picking and choosing cards again. But Balance itself was still leagues stronger than the others. I do believe tho SPEAR has finally found it's mark. Unlike Balance, Spear was a weak card that you would always eat. Now you have a card Bards and Monks will kill you for!

Sounds like Astrologian and Magic the Gathering had a lot in common.

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Originally Posted by Eyvhokan

Sounds like Astrologian and Magic the Gathering had a lot in common.

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Except Astrologian's can't win on turn 1.

(Yes, i'm still salty)

So what are the new card priorities then?

Is Spear more powerful than Balance?

Should you redraw Balance now and try to fish for Spears or are they of equal value DPS wise?

And which classes benefit the most from each card now.

Balance is still your best card by far, but I'd hazard it's no longer worth shuffling or discarding Spear and Arrow to fish for it. In my O1S/O2S runs last night I found I used a lot of my cards as I drew them, even Bole, since Balance is no longer the busted mess it was. (I tell the MT to feel free to drop tank stance with Bole up if the situation allows, so in some ways it's a DPS gain even there!)

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Originally Posted by Maxilor

Is Spear more powerful than Balance?

Should you redraw Balance now and try to fish for Spears or are they of equal value DPS wise?

And which classes benefit the most from each card now.

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Monks and Bards benefits the most from Spear due to their mechanics. Spear is atm around 30% the dmg of Balance, and towards the end of the expansion when people start meldingc crit (3000+) it wil be 41-42% of balance. Balance is still BY FAR the best, and Arrow is better than Spear.

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Originally Posted by Born_Free

It's not a problem. If you're an AST. Your shields cost less mana, shield higher, and are instant, of course you don't see where the problem is.

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They don't see where the problem is because you don't evaluate a class based upon one single ability. You evaluate it by its entire toolkit.

The aspected benefic that people love to whine about so much is actually a sub-par method of healing for ASTs as it's far less mana efficient than the HoTs.

AST being able to create larger shields in one of its two stances (that cannot be changed in combat) than SCH doesn't make it superior to SCH. SCH still has more overall shielding ability and better emergency buttons than AST does and likely ever will.

No one's arguing that SCH needs/needed some buffs, but acting like the SCH class was invalidated because of ONE shield comparison is ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by RichardButte

SCH still has more overall shielding ability

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Um, sch has aldo, weaker than asp. benefic, and succor, weaker than asp. helios. How do they have more shielding than ast?

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Originally Posted by Yorumi

Um, sch has aldo, weaker than asp. benefic, and succor, weaker than asp. helios. How do they have more shielding than ast?

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Because of deployed adlo and crit potential.

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Originally Posted by SnugglesD

Because of deployed adlo and crit potential.

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The ONLY works on a crit, a deployed non-crit adlo is weaker than asp. heilos. I stand by my point.

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Originally Posted by SnugglesD

Because of deployed adlo and crit potential.

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If you Crit* and DT is on a relatively long CD so often for aoe shielding you find yourself falling back on (the expensive) Succor and praying for a crit, as you have no follow up other than the recently buffed indom if we don't include eos hots.

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Originally Posted by BloodRubyXII

If you Crit*

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That's what the word potential means...

When you're balancing jobs, you don't just measure one ability versus another. You have to keep the entire kit in mind over the course of a whole fight. So no, you don't just get to discount deployment tactics because the cool down is longer and you don't get to discount crit!lo or crit succor just because it's RNG. Especially when you're comparing it to ast, which is the king of RNG. Balancing is all about the big picture, not pointing out tiny specific details.

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Originally Posted by SnugglesD

That's what the word potential means...

When you're balancing jobs, you don't just measure one ability versus another. You have to keep the entire kit in mind over the course of a whole fight. So no, you don't just get to discount deployment tactics because the cool down is longer and you don't get to discount crit!lo or crit succor just because it's RNG. Especially when you're comparing it to ast, which is the king of RNG. Balancing is all about the big picture, not pointing out tiny specific details.

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Physick = benefic before sect bonus so weaker than benefic.
helios, no sch equivellent.
Essential Dignity -> Lustrate.
Benefic II, no sch equivellent
Asp. Benefic, bigger shield than adlo, less mp, almost as big as a crit adlo.
Asp. Helios -> succor, much more powerful than succor, shield is bigger than a deployed adlo
CU -> Sacred soil, CU wins by a mile
Earthly Star -> Indom, bigger heal if not set up, almost double indom's heal if allowed to set up, also does aoe damage.
Lady card, no sch equivellent

Yeah look at the full kit, AST are so hurting for heals what ever will they do.

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Originally Posted by Yorumi

Physick = benefic before sect bonus so weaker than benefic.
helios, no sch equivellent.
Essential Dignity -> Lustrate.
Benefic II, no sch equivellent
Asp. Benefic, bigger shield than adlo, less mp, almost as big as a crit adlo.
Asp. Helios -> succor, much more powerful than succor, shield is bigger than a deployed adlo
CU -> Sacred soil, CU wins by a mile
Earthly Star -> Indom, bigger heal if not set up, almost double indom's heal if allowed to set up, also does aoe damage.
Lady card, no sch equivellent

Yeah look at the full kit, AST are so hurting for heals what ever will they do.

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1. That's not either jobs full kit.

2. Be pedantic all you want, but no one is saying ast is hurting for heals. I'm saying sch isn't hurting as much as people are crying about and the balance between shields has way more to consider than just comparing non-crit potential of just 2 abilities in a vacuum.

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Originally Posted by SnugglesD

1. That's not either jobs full kit.

2. Be pedantic all you want, but no one is saying ast is hurting for heals. I'm saying sch isn't hurting as much as people are crying about and the balance between shields has way more to consider than just comparing non-crit potential of just 2 abilities in a vacuum.

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No I'm not being pedantic in the least, I just went through the heals of each class and showed how other than lustrate sch comes up short in every single comparison you can imagine. I am sick of all the AST on this board pretending like there is no legitimate complaint against a massively OP class that is taking identities of the other healers with it. A class that no one would ever dream of dropping from a raid party, and the other two healers only get spots out of pity from devs who had to force them into parties. It's as though people are required to put on a blindfold to play AST. If anyone is not looking at the full picture it is the AST.

It is YOU who needs to look at the full picture. You're right that's not the AST's full kit, I didn't include the freaken card buffs. AST wins without their card buffs, and they have those just to add insult to injury on the other healers.

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Originally Posted by Yorumi

No I'm not being pedantic in the least, I just went through the heals of each class and showed how other than lustrate sch comes up short in every single comparison you can imagine. I am sick of all the AST on this board pretending...


. A class that no one would ever dream of dropping from a aid party rs.

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one of the top world prog raiding FC doesn't even use an AST for neo exdeath.

and they have a MCH and was able to get past the INTENSE first phase DPS check.

what are you talking about?

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Originally Posted by paoweeotter

one of the top world prog raiding FC doesn't even use an AST for neo exdeath.

and they have a MCH and was able to get past the INTENSE first phase DPS check.

what are you talking about?

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One of the best raiding teams switched Scholar out with Astro as well. Your argument is bad and you should feel bad. What world first prog use does not reflect in any shape or form the state of the healers in a detailed sense. What does it even mean that MCH in a composition allowed it to get past an intense DPS check? Does it somehow change that BRD still does more damage and more utility? Like Jesus Christ, don't you people THINK before you argue?

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Originally Posted by Starflake

One of the best raiding teams switched Scholar out with Astro as well. Your argument is bad and you should feel bad. What world first prog use does not reflect in any shape or form the state of the healers in a detailed sense. What does it even mean that MCH in a composition allowed it to get past an intense DPS check? Does it somehow change that BRD still does more damage and more utility? Like Jesus Christ, don't you people THINK before you argue?

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It says that three of the top groups in the world are comfortable entering the world first race with all 3 possible healer combinations, which implies that there really isn't such a huge gap between them anymore. Each serves a different purpose.

And while BRD currently has higher overall DPS than MCH, MCH does burst higher, between Wildfire and the overheat mechanic, which is usually what you want for mechanics that are a DPS check.

Note: This is more of a ramble than anything. Unlike my previous thread on the Spear, I wrote this quickly and just wrote my thoughts out in a jumble instead of taking the 8-ish hours it took to organize and edit it into a truly structured and understandable post. Maybe you can get something from it though.

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Originally Posted by Neela

RIP AST? xD

...maybe she should change the game by her understanding of buff vs. nerfs... in general the majority is just locking for raw pots... on healers side like on dds side - potency is not the only thing what matters why can't people understand that by now... q.q

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Old post on this thread, since I have been too busy. But I'd agree with the general point (I have no idea of the context this was said in).

I feel like SQEX is very poor at developing in-depth classes that feel genuinely interesting to play. Regardless of whether I think the changes were good or bad for the functionality of the class (in case anyone was curious, my answer is that the changes are bad), SQEX is constantly focusing on direct DPS/HPS buffs. This is generally done with potency changes, or adding new skills that directly affect damage or healing output (like the new Spear's % increase). There's nothing inherently wrong with focusing on the direct changes. And such changes are usually quite popular because the masses can more easily see how much of an effect it actually had. The effect is also global, rather than being shoehorned into various niche situations. The Spear, for example, was a very potent and useful tool. However, since it was only exceptionally useful in a certain niche corner of the game, did players never bothered to consider whether it was useful in any situation or not.

Having a job mechanic that is only useful in very specific circumstances is not particularly good game design either. Despite being a Spear-lover, I can admit that. However, what Spear did was it resisted the one-dimensional gameplay that we currently have. It was very situational, but in a good way. It had a huge impact in the few situations where it mattered, and a player that knew to use it in that way had an advantage in those situations. Now, any fight that literally requires that one of AST's cooldowns be used just to survive, but also has that mechanic appear more often than that skill's base cooldowns allowed just became impossible to complete. Other fights simply became far more dangerous, demanding a higher level of player perfection. In case you're wondering, no regular content has these sorts of strict lines between 'possible' and 'impossible' that can be changed by a single patch, because regular content is designed to be completed. It's the special challenge runs that can run into this issue, like synced or unsynced undersized runs, or doing certain fights with no tank, etc.

This was in exchange for... more DPS. While more DPS makes people happy, it doesn't actually enable anything outside of a faster clear time; if you remove DPS potential, you lose out on clear speed and can't skip whole sections of boss fights, but the fight doesn't suddenly become impossible to complete. The bottom line is, DPS doesn't make the game interesting, it just makes it fast. I believe that what makes a job 'fun' to play is divided into:

• Whether the class feels impactful, and for the real DPS-lovers: how well the class performs, mathematically.
• Whether the class feels unique.

I think that FF14 is quite poor at both of these points, but especially the second point, which I think is most important. The reason I think this is that SQEX doesn't like to introduce new mechanics that actually do something new very often. Each class may have its own supposedly "unique" gameplay element, like the DRG's Blood of the Dragon, AST's cards, and WHM's Lilies and Confessions. But all of the mechanics are just variations on the same basic ideas that effectively amount to the same thing: "How well does this class perform, mathematically. Does this mechanic work out to have effective DPS numbers, or HPS numbers, or DRPS numbers? If yes, then it's considered "good" and people like it. If not, it's considered "bad" and people dislike it.

What gets left by the wayside, though, are situational abilities. These are abilities that have a huge effect, but only if used in the right way or in the right situation. FF14 does have a few of these abilities. One of them is Rescue, for instance. It does next to nothing unless a player is not going to get out of an AoE in time, but if the healer notices a player in danger, they can save a life. Other healer abilities may have some potential to do this, but people tend to look at them from the perspective of "How do I use this to maximize DPS?" For example, Largesse lets you heal faster and with less MP so you can DPS more; lightspeed reduces MP cost by 25% so you can DPS more; etc. Rescue essentially does nothing except in that situation.

Also, I feel that there is a serious lack of depth to FF14. Classes tend to be set up quite simplistically so that everyone knows how to play them. But getting the most out of the class is not actually all that complicated. The reason for this is because, no matter how complicated it may seem, people are always able to reduce everything to numbers. I think game developers should strive to create gameplay that cannot be reduced to numbers. This makes classes genuinely interesting - when a class' potential is reliant on the player's unique decisions, and not on how well the players follow a relatively simple set of instructions derived from the raw numbers. One game I feel has been very successful in this regard is League of Legends, actually. The game has... over 150 playable classes now, I think (I haven't played in awhile)? Yet each and every one of those classes not only feels unique, but they can't be reduced to mere numbers. People still do the math, but the game is so situational that the math's predictions are always being broken. Perhaps the champion Shaco might have poor numbers according to math, but if the player uses him effectively he can be very potent, making the math meaningless, to some extent (even at the highest levels of play). I suppose this is largely because LoL is a MOBA and a fully PvP game, which makes it less scripted by nature. However, despite FF14 being highly scripted, the healer role still has the potential for LoL-levels of player impact on the job's potential, because for a healer, the boss isn't the enemy target; their allies are the boss (healers don't fight the boss, they fight to keep their allies alive). And their allies are human. This is probably why I find the removal of Spear and the lack of creative impact of WHM's Lilies, among other things, so frustrating. In the case of Spear, they took one of the few skills that can have a huge effect based on player judgment and turned it into a mindless DPS increase. Meanwhile for WHM, they added a really cool system with a ton of player-judgment potential and made it completely pointless. The same can be said for Confessions. Both mechanics have so little control on the player's end that the player can't really make an impact with their own judgment calls.

I don't know if it's been said, but I suspect they did feel balance was balanced, but balance + new/improved spear wouldn't be.

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Originally Posted by Alistaire

I don't know if it's been said, but I suspect they did feel balance was balanced, but balance + new/improved spear wouldn't be.

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From an fflog perspective it is. By wounding balance you made the classes that were being fed balances 24/7 by 5 to 10% do less damage, thus shrinking the upper extreme. Spear cant be stacked with the balance, so you can't get the benefits together.

Whether ast can provide, on average higher dps boost uptime to average out to be better than balance is probably impossible. Every old balance was worth 2 new balances. Current spear is worth less than a balance unless its for healing.

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Originally Posted by Rawrz

From an fflog perspective it is. By wounding balance you made the classes that were being fed balances 24/7 by 5 to 10%, thus shrinking the upper extreme. Spear cant be stacked with the balance, so you can't get the benefits together.

Whether ast can provide, on average higher dps boost uptime to average out to be better than balance is probably impossible. Every old balance was worth 2 new balances. Current spear is worth less than a balance unless its for healing.

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I mean stacked in general. Not both on the same person same time, but when both abilities now always boost dps, the potential became too great. So you'd end up having fflogs with pure dps, pure dps - balance categories, but then how would they even do "dps - spear" since that's more hit or miss as to whether it contributed or not?

Basically over the course of a whole fight AST's dps boost got pushed up, so balance got pushed back down to compensate.

And spear wasn't exactly bad, it just required more coordination to make it effective.

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Originally Posted by Miste

Please stop acting like groups are fully ostracizing any healer who isn't an AST please. It is plainly not true. Primal DC seems to be totally accepting of all 3 healers.

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Thanks for posting those screenshots.

People just overexagerate and blow things out of proportion. I don't understand all the still existant complaints after the adjustments. Hyperboling stuff like SE never having the intention to balance healers? Then what were the adjustments we just got for? Hyperboling AST being so OP that it makes whm/sch irrelevant. Please. Just say you want your cake and eat it too. Ast just got adjusted and they still have the nerve to keep nit picking. The more they complain, the more the cake thing is getting too obvious. :/

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Originally Posted by Tyla_Esmeraude

Snip

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Astrologians hands down had a broken card. for the sole reason it was better than all the other cards. Astrologians were originally designed to have provide an array of Good/Great cards, not shuffling to find the god card. I'm with you with the definition of "Adjustment". Astrologian's Balance card was not "nerfed" it was adjusted to be realistic. 10% is already a huge buff for one player, for the whole party!? Now that's just Kaiba level cheating.