I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex DPS rotations

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I'm not so sure about the job designers claim, though. I remember something from an interview back in Stormblood that has been paraphrased for many years, but I haven't seen anything recently about the number and distribution of designers. If you can point me to a source from this expansion, I'd be interested to see it.

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https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

I made a thread commenting on this back in 2019 as stated above, comparing SE's class design team to a few rivals of the time. Back in ARR this compact team was clearly absolutely fine. But now? I'm not so sure, the player base's knowledge and understanding of the game often outstrips the developers themselves at times. IMO they are just stretched too thin not only having to deal with double the number of jobs and a far more savvy player base since ARR, but also the additional load of PvP kits as well.

And to clarify, this is info taken from the credits and as such, is still accurate to this day.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I do think that more needs to be done to communicate job design philosophy with the playerbase directly. It'd be great if when it comes time to do the job showcases, that they break it down into a number of smaller reveals by role, and really take the time to discuss their design philosophy on each (especially since we're going up to 23 jobs next expansion). The Endwalker job reveal itself was several hours long, so they're bound to cut corners in discussing some jobs if they try to get through it all in a single sitting.

The SCH issue strikes me as relatively obvious, but you do have to read between the lines a bit. Historically, SCH has generally had a dedicated spot in raid comps. I've watched the dev team attempt to stealth nerf the job between expansions since Stormblood, and they're consistently forced to backpedal from the backlash. This time around they just turned it into its own subrole, to split the SCH fanbase up. It's an effective strategy, and they've done it before.

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IMO they've just had to eat humble pie more times than they'd care to admit over media previews and early patch notes with clear problematic issues that the developers and testers have somehow failed to spot. Hiding numbers until the patch drops is just a sad state of affairs.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I've seen that reference about job designers before, and it dates back to a Stormblood interview. The reason why I asked for a source is because I wanted to know what time period you were specifically referring to. I am genuinely interested in knowing how their job design process currently works, so if there's an up to date reference I would be definitely interested in seeing it. I tend to go to the source for most things, simply because I want to understand what's actually being said without alteration.

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If you want a quick way to get the credits without having to sit through a bunch of inn cutscenes you can use the following link:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/17679...playstation-5/

The staff you want to look for are the Battle System team which is specifically the job design team as has been confirmed by various mentions of Kei Sato over the years.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

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If the Battle System Team is involved in job design, then the 6.55 end credits list the following:

Kei Sato
Takashi Kawamoto
Hikaru Tamaki
Hironori Isami
Tomonari Kurokawa

That's interesting, but it doesn't really tell me how these designers are allocated, or whether this is by role. On what basis are we saying that there is no healer designer? Is there another interview that you're drawing this information from?

(I also note that the current credits have changed relative to your list and link - I can provide a screenshot if you want).

I don't know if there is anyone in charge of Healers... Since playing one feels mostly like an afterthought for most things. Doing MSQ as a healer is one of the worst things as the game entirely expects you to be doing damage in the instanced fights... But being a healer, you have the lowest damage in the game and your entire DPS kit is spamming one spell for about 25 seconds at a time between refreshing your DoT.

The one thing that to me really feels like healers don’t have a dedicated designer is the fact that if you forced me to come up with a justification for modern healer design it really feels like it was designed around asking a DPS main who’s never played a healer how they think healers should work in terms of how they work around DPS

The massive over abundance of heals that aren’t remotely needed, the “rotation” that can be cancelled anytime to heal, the “optimisation” that basically amounts to “hope the DPS presses feint at the correct time”

All of it just feels like someone started from the philosophy of “DPS are the main characters how can healers best facilitate that” rather than “healers are their own entity and their own classes that people who play want to enjoy”

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Originally Posted by Lyth

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Job nerfs (stealth nerfs) typically happen during these transition periods when nobody has a sense of what any of the potencies and stat values mean. This is typically where they go after perennially powerful and dominant jobs. These jobs tend to stay in power perpetually because there's a strong and vocal backing from the fanbase, which in turn fuels their popularity.

The problem with this approach is that people catch on to the nerfs, and then start demanding buffs, until they're back in the position that they originally started off in. Over the course of each expansion cycle, you see this pattern repeat itself. WAR and SCH are two of the longest running targets of this.

This time, they opted for a slightly different strategy. They turned SCH into its own subrole, and created a new flavor, SGE. Now, you no longer have a unified fanbase demanding revisions. The same would be true if they introduced in a lifestealing Hammer tank as a counterpoint to WAR (and I would not be surprised if that is next in the cards for 8.x). In the long term, these sorts of approaches are good for the state of the game because they ensure comp diversity.

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Thanks, and by the way Sebazy found exactly the thread I was thinking about - and clearly I have a faulty recall as it was more than 2 years ago!

I don't know. You're seeing SCH as the target of some nerfs and buffs, hello, former AST main here? Would like to discuss major job reworks here? Not to mention, your theory regarding some previously unified fanbase now being split is interesting, and that may be the case with some players, however I honestly don't see that as having a major impact, that "new flavour" SGE? It really isn't that new, in comparison to SCH, for many healers - nor, in comparison to any healer in many respects- for that matter. Nor do I follow your reasoning that there is now some healer 'comp diversity' that didn't exist before - it's like saying - did the pure/barrier healer split really make sense from a healer/encounter design? You'd probably get a fair number of arguments that would point to "no, not really".

Sage is quite literally the Super Smash Bros Dr. Mario of FFXIV. Mario, but heavier, with some mildly different attack animations, and a different down special. Scholar, but more smoothbrain, with some different animations, and a burst heal instead of expedient.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

That's interesting, but it doesn't really tell me how these designers are allocated, or whether this is by role. On what basis are we saying that there is no healer designer? Is there another interview that you're drawing this information from?

(I also note that the current credits have changed relative to your list and link - I can provide a screenshot if you want).

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He must be a somewhat recent addition, that's good at least. Assuming there's no typo in the name, I can't find any history listed on them which honestly is probably a good thing. Fresh blood and ideas is the best thing this team needs IMO. It would be interesting to find out where they came from though!

As far as specific allocation goes, we're not fully privy to the whole process. Yoshida has talked a little about things but it's nothing concrete. It's mostly conjecture from the much more public processes we saw with World of Warcraft where you had several key designers that fought tooth and nail for their 'favourite' class (Eg Tigole/Kaplan and Rogues). The designer's favourite jobs are known from various fanfest boards where they've posted.

It's also very evident from some of the oversights and errors that have been made even recently with regards to healers and expansion updates that there isn't a whole heap of attention being paid or at best, the people sanity checking the numbers honestly don't play the job to any level beyond base competency. Eg anywhere from Misery potency not being scaled up with Endwalker's release or right the way back to SCH being 'updated' to have no spammable AoE button at any level. These are just a few examples that anyone with interest, experience and ability in the role should spot almost immediately with a bit of playtime in even basic content.

And of course, this is before we point to the simple and undeniable fact that current healer kits simply do not match up with mainstream content. There's a huge disconnect right there.

I'm not at all certain about it, but it feels to me that SGE didn't actually fracture the SCH community, it feels like it drew people out from the WHM community instead. Most SCH mains I know absolutely hate SGE because it strips out everything we find fun about SCH.

I feel like SGE pulled from a combo of noct AST mains and WHM mains, you have to truly be a masochist to still be a SCH main and if moving from 4.x SCH to 5.x SCH didn’t convince you to stop playing SCH I don’t think “smooth brained SCH” is going to change anything

This is further supported by the fact that the SCH parse numbers didn’t really change, WHM went down a bit when the class was in the toilet in 6.0 but it seems like most of the playerbase was pulled from the cratering AST playerbase, SCH has remained remarkably consistent

In my case, I support the healers getting more DPS button options because I know the devs have done it before. They have a certain tech to do it as well since it is already being used to update the single DoT spell according to what level trait we have on. Updating Cure to change to Cure 2 would be one step that would apply to all of the healers' equivalent to that. It might be possible to consider Afflatus Solace and Rapture taking the same slots as Cure 2 and Medica. Only reason not to would be if the lily spell version needs to be saved, but I haven't been able to find any instance where we actually use Cure 2 over Afflatus Solace as well as the AoE versions. The lily spells are pretty much the better version in almost every way with the only drawback being that it uses the blue lilies to discourage mindless spamming.

A few others mention the Heavensward and Stormblood Scholar. We actually did have Shadowflare and the Miasma DoT. AST is subjective which model would be the best, but the 6 cards started with unique buffs. It is probably the way it is due to the memes of "The Balance" continually getting fished for the card storing spell. I heard NINs usually told us to not give them "The Arrow" since the increased haste for their rotation could do more harm than good for them. Ninjutsus and Mudras are likely why and they already clipped their GCD with the 3 mudras without haste. It was more so the BLM card. We also lost the Royal Road spell to enhance the buff with either higher strength, AoE effects or extensions to the buff time. Royal Road allowed us to convert cards not good for the party into those buff extensions, but we might still get the card we don't want again 30s later. Redraw was a 60s cooldown back then if I recall right and it didn't have any way to prevent the same card from being drawn again at the time either. Definitely need some methods to fix the RNG it had in the past where a card could be godly in one party or a dud in another due to different DPS classes being present.

Another thing to say is that the WHM, SCH and AST had more DoTs to place up in the past. Bio 1 and 2 as well as Aero 1 and 2 were completely separate spells. Both the one and two versions were placed on enemies. WHM even had Aero 3 as the AoE DoT. Art of War used to be Miasma 2 as a burst hit and AoE DoT as well. This request will probably have some resistance to returning since I heard we have a 30 slot limit to the buff / debuff slots. There was a thread created to request increasing the slot limit if I remember right. Until such a thing happens, we probably won't see these multiple DoTs return yet. Players seem to only want SCH to have it with something different for the other 2 classes.