5.2 Liveletter

Nothing new for healers. No adjustments, no aknowledgement of issues- Just a bit of a show case of the next white frilly dress we get to wear.

So I guess everything is fine.

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Special Note
Regarding Job Balances and Adjustments.

YoshiP, in his previous Patch 5.1 Note Reading segment has confirmed that he will no longer detail the job balances and its adjustments in preliminary notes and maybe/likely during PLL as well because he does not want players to be overly concerned about how their job will end up getting nerfed or buffed just by looking at the paper, or the numbers itself. As pre-announcing it will just make people work up on details that shouldn't worry them until they play the actual job on release, they've decided to omit all job balance details until they patch day itself.

Therefore while we will put in as many details as we can from the PLL, don't be surprised if you see no job balance details (like what skill or ability will receive adjustments) more than maybe "this job and that job will be buffed" and et cetra.

TL;DR - If there is info, we'll post it for sure. Otherwise, don't be surprised because YoshiP decided to keep things a little bit private for the sake of the playerbase.

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But in all honesty, not knowing till the patch goes live makes me more worried and concerned, not less.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

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Not giving info would be fine, but they did announce buffs for RDM and nerfs to SMN so I guess they didn't follow their own rules.

I'd be surprised to see anything but minor potency adjustments (AST MP).

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

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Honestly comes off as cowardly to me. They've been called out several times about how bad things would be before it came out, and instead of listening they did it anyway, and guess what? It ended up bad. Remember energy drain? Remember how everyone said that was an awful idea to get rid of it when it was first announced and they did it anyways? Remember how, to nobody's surprise, other than SE, it was terrible? Comes off to me as they don't like being called out. Some times I swear the devs in this game want it to be Weenie Hut Jr.

Is it really too much to ask for some feedback from the devs?
Something like,
"We acknowledge that healers are in a bad spot, but we would rather spend the patches buffing DPS since we hate healers and wish we could replace them all with trusts."

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Originally Posted by althenawhm

Is it really too much to ask for some feedback from the devs?
Something like,
"We acknowledge that healers are in a bad spot, but we would rather spend the patches buffing DPS since we hate healers and wish we could replace them all with trusts."

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They have done so in the past. My likely guess is they see nothing wrong and so saw no need to comment on it.

I totally get Yoshi's decision to try and avoid details, especially specific ones about stats, because particularly when it comes to balance and how certain changes work in content, it doesn't always get an informed response and something people can get worked up over. What's the point getting forums of people worked up it, also as developers, I can also imagine it's disheartening to see people complaining about your work before anybody has a chance to actually try it.

I do understand that are also people who're more informed and can determine what certain changes will mean, as demonstrated over the ShB media tour where healers who complained then are still complaining about the same problems having played the game considerably since.

So I am kinda in the middle there, on the one hand, there is some merit to "wait and see" because there may be something you're not considering -- heck this was something I did during the media tour, where my problems were conditional on how the game played at the time, because we can only assume it'd continue the trend in encounter design...and it did.

But people can overreact and trying to curb overreactions is no bad thing, particularly as there's not usually a lot of difference in time between talking about the changes and releasing them. On the other hand, I don't think all feedback given is without merit prior to people "giving it it a go and seeing what it's like" and I think is good feedback if there were a slither of chance for tweaks even if small, before the release goes ahead. Especially if it's a bad decision they've made, which is something the 1.0 team did take heed of back when everybody was complaining during 1.0 beta. I was in the XI community when this happened and saw a lot over them over the forums and a lot of 'wait and see' to find that on release that it was not in a fit state, just like the beta. YoshiP has a better track record than that, so I am not going to be mean and say there's a direct comparison here, but obviously, sometimes feedback prior to release when there is still time is good as bad decisions can be made more apparent.

But I think there are cases where actually it makes sense for them to communicate and healers I feel is one that needs communication and I believe MNK and possibly some other jobs might be in the same boat need it too. They said they're not make big changes in this patch, so if there are healer changes, I expect they're minor because they pointed out only 3 jobs that were in need of the changes they brought up. But I think people would have accepted a "we are aware of the complaints, we will look into them due course, but have not made any decisions on this, but we appreciate your patience".
And they are usually good at doing that sort of thing, which is why I suspect that healers aren't something they're paying attention to. Because even if they did not consider there to be issues, it's something they've historically communicated (as per MCH, then the job got an entire rework). But complaints must have been communicated to them by now, given in their Q&A sessions there's been an abundance of healer questions that have been upvoted more than some of the questions they addressed and we know the community team read the forums.

The live letter is a hype building marketing tool and talking about unpopular mechanical changes doesn't build hype. Makes sense they'd try to get away from that.

People are going to overact regardless of the time they release balance info (90% of the time these people have no clue how the thing they are whining about fully functions) the issue is this is another sign they can't take constructive criticism. We have multiple people in the community that crunch the numbers and perform sims better than the dev team ever could. With that said welcome to 3-12 months of waiting for them to "balance" your favorite job cause its here to stay.

It's a double edged sword for sure but it's not like they have ever acted on feedback before the content gets released as far as I can remember so they might as well just deal with it after it comes out instead of having months of people complaining regardles if they understand what they are complaining about or not.

It's an annoying decision for sure but I can see where it comes from.

I guess we're all Heavensward MCH and DRK now (it'll take years until our jobs get fixed)

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Originally Posted by Billythepancake

Honestly comes off as cowardly to me. They've been called out several times about how bad things would be before it came out, and instead of listening they did it anyway, and guess what? It ended up bad. Remember energy drain? Remember how everyone said that was an awful idea to get rid of it when it was first announced and they did it anyways? Remember how, to nobody's surprise, other than SE, it was terrible? Comes off to me as they don't like being called out. Some times I swear the devs in this game want it to be Weenie Hut Jr.

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4.0 Lilies
Red Mage and Samurai low damage
Tank Stance having a gauge cost
White Mage and Black Mage having no utility
Piercing debuff

And that's just to name a few times when the community called out their bad design decisions only to be proven right.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

But in all honesty, not knowing till the patch goes live makes me more worried and concerned, not less.

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This.
If the community had a habit of reading the changes wrong, consistently, then I would find this train of thought perfectly acceptable and logical. But the fact that we've all been able to predict how things would turn out accurately makes this sound like they don't want to deal with the backlash before the content goes out. (vs dealing with it once it's live)

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Originally Posted by EaMett

This.
If the community had a habit of reading the changes wrong, consistently, then I would find this train of thought perfectly acceptable and logical. But the fact that we've all been able to predict how things would turn out accurately makes this sound like they don't want to deal with the backlash before the content goes out. (vs dealing with it once it's live)

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Not releasing details is less about dealing with backlash (they know that's coming regardless), and more to do with the fact that everything in the upcoming patch has already been finalized and they're busy working on patch 5.25.

If they gave details too far prior to patch release, and the community rightly protested a change that was going to hit a job particularly badly, it would *look* like devs ignored the community and proceeded with the change anyway. Fact is, unless something was going to lead to hacks/abuse, they wouldn't be able to alter the change this close to patch time. That code is locked. So their best option is to wait for outcry at patch release, and work any adjustments into the patch coming after it.

What's wrong with healers?

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Originally Posted by EaMett

This.
If the community had a habit of reading the changes wrong, consistently, then I would find this train of thought perfectly acceptable and logical. But the fact that we've all been able to predict how things would turn out accurately makes this sound like they don't want to deal with the backlash before the content goes out. (vs dealing with it once it's live)

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And once a patch is live, SE considers it "locked in"... because they don't do job changes once prog starts. Not that the odds of getting a problem fixed before the lock were very great, but now SE won't touch it at all. Which they probably see as a good thing...

I just stopped having expectations entirely. Maybe the new relics will make me want to log in a little more but I just bounce around GNB, SCH, DNC and RDM (DPS usually in 24 mans).

I'm just playing the waiting game until 6.0. The alternative is art of war spam with occasional oGCD.

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Originally Posted by xxvaynxx

What's wrong with healers?

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We spend most of our runs spamming the damaging spell and healing very little. Savage parsers, heck even regular dungeon runs parsers show the average healer spends at least 50 to 60 percent of their time casting the very boring damage spells. (And that is being generous, most of the time its around 70-80%). This means there is very little to heal and healers find themselves idly standing by if they don't dps.

This upsets both the people that would like to heal more and the people that would like more interesting things to do during healing downtime.

This situation was predicted as far as the first skill reveals of shadowbringers where healers saw their dps spells dramatically reduced in number and their rotations simplified without any apparent increase in encounter healing demand.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

We spend most of our runs spamming the damaging spell and healing very little. Savage parsers, heck even regular dungeon runs parsers show the average healer spends at least 50 to 60 percent of their time casting the very boring damage spells. (And that is being generous, most of the time its around 70-80%). This means there is very little to heal and healers find themselves idly standing by if they don't dps.

This upsets both the people that would like to heal more and the people that would like more interesting things to do during healing downtime.

This situation was predicted as far as the first skill reveals of shadowbringers where healers saw their dps spells dramatically reduced in number and their rotations simplified without any apparent increase in encounter healing demand.

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To be fair the "DPSing majority of the time" is kinda the draw to healers in this game. Could DPSing as a healer be more interesting? Sure, but I don't think healers really need to be forced to spam GCD heals as that's just as boring as spamming GCD damage spells.

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Originally Posted by Rai_Takara

To be fair the "DPSing majority of the time" is kinda the draw to healers in this game.

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Not necessarily. In every general MMO community I've seen when FFXIV comes up, people warn prospective healers that, if they try FFXIV, healers in "that game" are really a hybrid DPS class and will spend the majority of their time DPSing; it's not necessarily a draw to those outside of the current community, especially if they were looking for a, well, healing play experience.

It's simply what the current/established FF14 healer playerbase likes.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

Not necessarily. In every general MMO community I've seen when FFXIV comes up, people warn prospective healers that, if they try FFXIV, healers in "that game" are really a hybrid DPS class and will spend the majority of their time DPSing; it's not necessarily a draw to those outside of the current community, especially if they were looking for a, well, healing play experience.

It's simply what the current/established FF14 healer playerbase likes.

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That's what I mean, the established healers, especially at the higher end. This style is great for the kind of game it is and how the game engine works in conjunction with content design.

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Originally Posted by xxvaynxx

What's wrong with healers?

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1. We heal too well for the content we are given
2. Healing too well gives us a lot of downtime
3. That downtime would not be considered terrible, as in fairness, we have it in Stormblood too, but in Stormblood we had more to do in said downtime (though I prefer HW and ARR as an example of when healing was fun)
4. By stripping us of our DPS skills that down time can get incredibly boring
5. AST would be the one with a saving grace here in having their cards still but the changes to cards for many feel as though the system is now less impactful and mediocre


Those would be the core of the issues, there are other issues but the above is what has people's knickers in a twist.

On paper it looks like the design philosophy is that they wanted to move healers away from DPS and to focus more on healing. But by making healing pretty OP, they've made DPS a bigger focus and by stripping our DPS abilities our focus is dull as Heck.
It boils down to one of the following to be done:
1. nerf healing to push healers more (the Blue Mage solution, their healing is less significant, but is more engaging as a healer)
2. Adjust the content to make full use of our healing toolkit and reduce our downtime significantly
3. Fill our downtime with non-healer stuff to do like DPS


The 3rd option is the most popular as it doest raise the skill floor for less experienced healers, respects current playstyles, is the simplest for the devs to implement and is how things worked before. And at least it means when healers have to do solo content, it won't be dull. And the bonus, if they want us to heal more on certain content, they can just by making that content take advantage of our healing abilities. That's because the content and healing skills are what determines a healing or DPS focus, rather than the DPS skills you have.

Cards are garbage, regardless if it was for balance, they're complete utter mess. I highly doubt they'll do anything for AST this coming patch, the less people playing it the more they can ignore it and do other things. Must we wait an entire year for such a huge outcry concerning it? Time to go on Strike.

nothing for ast as expected,guess i'm definitely ready for maining dancer in 5.2 and further now
well played devs for forcing me to move on from my main job i used for years... w/e i'm just gonna hold my salt this time and deal with it (by not playing it),it's pointless to rage

They said that they won't talk about job changes in the live letters anymore so is reasonable that they didn't talk about it, I find it quite a coward policy but understandable.

But lets be honest here, I doubt any of us expect the devs to recognize our problems until 6.0 if we are lucky

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Originally Posted by WaxSw

They said that they won't talk about job changes in the live letters anymore so is reasonable that they didn't talk about it, I find it quite a coward policy but understandable.

But lets be honest here, I doubt any of us expect the devs to recognize our problems until 6.0 if we are lucky

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From now on? They did talk about incomming nerfs to SMN and buffs to RDM in this Liveletter.

From my understanding of the translation, Yoshi said the team won't discuss job adjustments in the prelim patch notes. The LLs was a maybe and even then they'd only avoid talking about potencies and just detail what they plan to change. Case in point, they mentioned job changes for a few jobs in the recent LL but did not disclose the potencies or by exactly how much.

So I don't expect any changes besides for SMN, RDM, and SAM. If there are others, it was so minor and nothing noteworthy to mention to their players.

WAR
- There will be adjustments for the job. Details unspecified.

But if anything, it's just gonna be be broad generalization and probably nothing too specific unless it is a major issue.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

But in all honesty, not knowing till the patch goes live makes me more worried and concerned, not less.

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100%. SE has decided to NOT have a closed beta so experienced people can give proper feedback on future changes.

We already have a bad time getting healer attention now it's going to be worse.

This is overall a bad stance for SE to take.

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

1. We heal too well for the content we are given
2. Healing too well gives us a lot of downtime
3. That downtime would not be considered terrible, as in fairness, we have it in Stormblood too, but in Stormblood we had more to do in said downtime (though I prefer HW and ARR as an example of when healing was fun)
4. By stripping us of our DPS skills that down time can get incredibly boring
5. AST would be the one with a saving grace here in having their cards still but the changes to cards for many feel as though the system is now less impactful and mediocre


Those would be the core of the issues, there are other issues but the above is what has people's knickers in a twist.

On paper it looks like the design philosophy is that they wanted to move healers away from DPS and to focus more on healing. But by making healing pretty OP, they've made DPS a bigger focus and by stripping our DPS abilities our focus is dull as Heck.
It boils down to one of the following to be done:
1. nerf healing to push healers more (the Blue Mage solution, their healing is less significant, but is more engaging as a healer)
2. Adjust the content to make full use of our healing toolkit and reduce our downtime significantly
3. Fill our downtime with non-healer stuff to do like DPS


The 3rd option is the most popular as it doest raise the skill floor for less experienced healers, respects current playstyles, is the simplest for the devs to implement and is how things worked before. And at least it means when healers have to do solo content, it won't be dull. And the bonus, if they want us to heal more on certain content, they can just by making that content take advantage of our healing abilities. That's because the content and healing skills are what determines a healing or DPS focus, rather than the DPS skills you have.

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I kept saying a good solution would be to implement the third point. It's almost there in fact.

We all agree Healers should have different identities when it comes to their gameplay, but require a similar basic set of abilites to manintain balance.

Now we have that but the often neglected part of healer identity is how they deal with healing downtime.

Ast fills it with cards, great! Now focus on making the card and buff system interesting again.

Whm fills it with dps, good! Now focus on making the dps interesting! Weave options, proper dps rotation, damage and healing effects tied together.

Sch should fill it with a debuff system that mirrors Ast buffs. Rather than enhancing allies, SCH would weaken enemies! AoE stratagems, Data gathering, weakness exploits, tactical advantages and so on.

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Originally Posted by Corbeau

The live letter is a hype building marketing tool and talking about unpopular mechanical changes doesn't build hype. Makes sense they'd try to get away from that.

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Hit the nail on the head with a tinkering hammer. And I would actually say that what usually takes place after the prelims outright kills that hype. I see no reason to make that happen even sooner.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Hit the nail on the head with a tinkering hammer. And I would actually say that what usually takes place after the prelims outright kills that hype. I see no reason to make that happen even sooner.

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It's a good point. I just wish I could get hyped to play healers again.

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Originally Posted by Rai_Takara

That's what I mean, the established healers, especially at the higher end. This style is great for the kind of game it is and how the game engine works in conjunction with content design.

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If that were the case, why have so many healers quit either the role or the game itself? From all skill levels you have people bemoaning how boring healers have become or how little focus is on actually healing. I agree, swapping Glare casts with Cure II wouldn't make the role more interesting. But neither does making it a gimped DPS hybrid with two buttons.

Considering the devs outright said they wanted healers to focus more on healing in Shadowbringers, it tells us they aren't intending for healers to spam Glare 80% of the time. They simply have no idea what to do since they stubbornly refuse to increase the outgoing damage, which is yet another reason why there have been so many more complaints this expansion. What use are abilities like Temperance and Seraph to a more casual player when they're comically overpowered for everything outside Savage? Content is so laughably easy to heal, you don't need two healers. This means, for non-raiders, you're essentially a gimped DPS and little else. Even Savage has suffered this tier—E3S being the worst offender.

What they should be striving for is a balanced gameplay model between DPS and Healing. Not one that heavily favors spamming one nuke over and over and over again.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

If that were the case, why have so many healers quit either the role or the game itself? From all skill levels you have people bemoaning how boring healers have become or how little focus is on actually healing. I agree, swapping Glare casts with Cure II wouldn't make the role more interesting. But neither does making it a gimped DPS hybrid with two buttons.

Considering the devs outright said they wanted healers to focus more on healing in Shadowbringers, it tells us they aren't intending for healers to spam Glare 80% of the time. They simply have no idea what to do since they stubbornly refuse to increase the outgoing damage, which is yet another reason why there have been so many more complaints this expansion. What use are abilities like Temperance and Seraph to a more casual player when they're comically overpowered for everything outside Savage? Content is so laughably easy to heal, you don't need two healers. This means, for non-raiders, you're essentially a gimped DPS and little else. Even Savage has suffered this tier—E3S being the worst offender.

What they should be striving for is a balanced gameplay model between DPS and Healing. Not one that heavily favors spamming one nuke over and over and over again.

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Can I get a quote on that devs wanting healers to heal more? Because my understanding was healers were made to heal more as in they have less shielding capabilities and such had to compensate with more raw heals.

As far as non-savage and under content, that's by design. The devs want people to not be challenged in content that isn't the recent raid tier + ultimates. You start making healers needing to heal to get through dungeons and then you'll find yourselves more healers quitting because they can't handle savage or extremes, let alone ultimates.

What would be interesting is if healers had more ways to do damage since they do spend most of their time doing damage. How SE goes about it, not sure, but that sounds more fun than being forced to spam same old GCD heals.

From the savage team interview. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...4_battle_devs/

Kawamoto: As a member of the battle system team, i wanted healers to be conscious. We actually held down/nerfed healers' healing capibilities across the board in shadowbringers, so having a percentage based attack that hit hard was on purpose.

This is probably the closest insight we have to the current design at the moment. It was only one question though and nothing else was really discussed.

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Originally Posted by Maltothoris

From the savage team interview. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...4_battle_devs/

Kawamoto: As a member of the battle system team, i wanted healers to be conscious. We actually held down/nerfed healers' healing capibilities across the board in shadowbringers, so having a percentage based attack that hit hard was on purpose.

This is probably the closest insight we have to the current design at the moment. It was only one question though and nothing else was really discussed.

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Hmm, all that says is healers needing to just be awake and pay attention though.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

I kept saying a good solution would be to implement the third point. It's almost there in fact.

We all agree Healers should have different identities when it comes to their gameplay, but require a similar basic set of abilites to manintain balance.

Now we have that but the often neglected part of healer identity is how they deal with healing downtime.

Ast fills it with cards, great! Now focus on making the card and buff system interesting again.

Whm fills it with dps, good! Now focus on making the dps interesting! Weave options, proper dps rotation, damage and healing effects tied together.

Sch should fill it with a debuff system that mirrors Ast buffs. Rather than enhancing allies, SCH would weaken enemies! AoE stratagems, Data gathering, weakness exploits, tactical advantages and so on.

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Very much this. And as a SCH I feel they've missed a trick with this. 2.0 SCH had debuffs tied in with the DPS skills. I feel like they should have evolved from that point to make SCH better at it rather than remove the debuffs entirely. One thing I've already argued is that I think Blue Mage in dungeons has demonstrated how debuffs can be useful in a dungeon without being game breaking. One of the problems from 2.0 SCH's debuffs is they weren't always noticeable for the effect they're supposed to give and of course got resisted by bosses. But I think it'd still be accepted if bosses didn't resist them but instead it affected their autoattacks but not scripted mechanics.

The suggestion I had was to reutilise Selene as a utility faerie, but focus on her having debuffs or a new system of debuffs. But your talk of exploiting weakness makes me think SCH could have 'libra'. Thinking on my feet, perhaps when Selene is summoned "Libra" replaces "Summon Seraph" and we have access to additional and stronger debuffs themed around gathering data about weaknesses and exploiting them.

I think it would work, because if this is designed to be what we do in our downtime, then SCH isn't really needing to utilise these extra healing abilities and instead could be replaced with something more useful with the added bonus of not needing to add anything new to your hot/crossbar (except maybe 1 skill if you've removed one of your faeries)

And when you need that healing efficiency, back to Eos. New/less experienced/less skilled players could rely more on Eos as to not raise the skill floor.

And I agree with a proper rotation for WHM, WHM's advantage of providing DPS could be interesting. I feel it's appropriate for WHM given I feel it is the Black Mage of healers, powerful heals, powerful attacks to match the might of Amdapori in the war of the Magi. Dia and Glare should be separate skills as part of a rotation and not as upgrades of Stone/Aero. Maybe give WHM a proper water spell at last.

After this live letter, I completely believe the devs think all jobs (not just healer role)'s designs are fine. This is my final straw and I give up. My interest in playing healer dropped to the ground. They just refuse to take in any feedback anymore. They won't give details on job balance prior to patch anymore. What are the chance of they fixing afterwards? One fix per major patch aka 3-4 months is not acceptable. At this point I expect to see almost no adjustments on healers, tanks, and some minimal potency changes to create illusion for balance. Hopefully SMN won't be ruined.

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Originally Posted by Miziliti

After this live letter, I completely believe the devs think all jobs (not just healer role)'s designs are fine. This is my final straw and I give up. My interest in playing healer dropped to the ground. They just refuse to take in any feedback anymore. They won't give details on job balance prior to patch anymore. What are the chance of they fixing afterwards? One fix per major patch aka 3-4 months is not acceptable. At this point I expect to see almost no adjustments on healers, tanks, and some minimal potency changes to create illusion for balance. Hopefully SMN won't be ruined.

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I think they are taking back feedback but the OF isn't the only source. Consequently, it would be interesting to see feedback from the JP side as well. But at the same time they're under no obligation to take action given the feedback, especially if they don't agree without issues. I'll have to see what these patch notes look like, but if there only thing missing from the patch notes is potency adjustments for RDM and SMN, then we didn't really lose anything as Yoshi already said those jobs were getting adjustments.

Currently, all jobs are balanced besides RDM, SMN, and I'd argue BRD (being underpowered), and perhaps WAR (it also is a little on the soft side). Whether their playstyles are fun are not is another matter, but that doesn't equate to balance.