Poll: Are You Happy with the Healer Kit Reveal for Endwalker?

Thread Title: https://strawpoll.vote/polls/2e6mxhnx/vote

Let’s hit it with numbers. Those speak louder than words.

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

Thread Title: https://strawpoll.vote/polls/2e6mxhnx/vote

Let’s hit it with numbers. Those speak louder than words.

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All 3 of those options pretty much suck. You can like one aspect but not the others.

Yeah, it's a bit more complex than that IMHO

Am I happy with the healer kit they showed? Yeah, SCH seems rough, it could be argued that WHM and AST are getting further blurred together but outside of those nitpicks, I'm looking forward to it.

The elephant in the room is that I'm still firmly of the opinion that healing in this game needs a fundamental rethink which this doesn't appear to be.

The stat squish could be an opportunity to retune things so there's some hope there.

I’m inclined to agree with those sentiments. Polling sites weren’t behaving for me unless I did that limit of three. The waiting option is expectedly over represented as a result.

I always give healers a pass when it comes to their abilities showcase. Healers can't really shine unless the shizz has hit the fan. What I look at instead is how healing is being addressed overall.

That being said, the new abilities and updates are cool, but it ends there. Even with Sage, everything shown is of novelty value. Once it wears off Sage will be in the same place as the other three healers because the healing role and its place in the encounter design has not been addressed.

Job trailers are not meant to show case rotations, or nuances, or anything associated with high level play. They're meant to showcase animation updates, glimpses into potential kit interactions, and the 'Job Feel'.

While there's quite a few high winners here, and a few low points, lets cut to the chase.

The Scholar's job Trailer is an abject failure. While there were a few easy hits for all the healers that were missed, none of them faceplanted as hard into the ground than Scholar. 75% of the segment was nothing new, and what was new was the usual 'No context ally targeted ability' and a greenlit walk up to the enemy. There were actually legitimate improvements in how they trailered healers this time - The usual "No context ally targeting abilities" were given much more visual clarity, and the post-video live letter segments gave much needed context to them. (Heart of Water is a single target buff for example and not just Benison 2). Despite this, there is effectively no argument to who lost. Scholar did.

Contrasting that, the good points from Scholar can be attributed to extrapolation from Pet AI improvements and general QOL improvement across the board. I have no doubt that 6.0 scholar is going to be significantly better on the gamefeel even if the solution was a GCD cast reduction (Which people asked for). Improved Pet AI hopefully means less ghosting and more snappy responses, but infinite weave windows will make this mostly moot. Scholar / Ast will still likely be the speed killing combination given they still bring the most party buffs, and every other job being put into the 60/120 window only strengthens that.

If you liked 5.0 Scholar, 6.0 is probably just going to be more of what you liked but better. The same for White Mage.

Astrologian is a wait and see case. The self enhancement and what that entails will determine much of how the job should be received - Could potentially be good, could potentially be bad. There are too many unknowns here, but the direction isn't unwelcome. It's 'new stuff' and new stuff is always welcome. If you liked 5.0 Astrologian, this is going to be hit or miss - But the good news is that 5.0 Astrologian is basically New Whm or New Sch.

Sage definitely had the most pizazz, and while it might not seem as such, you can see a fair amount of player centered feedback into this design. On demand spell enhancement for higher mobility windows and on demand double weaves, a stock DPS option to dump into burst phases, "More than 1 DPS button", and "Not DoTs" (Okay that might just be me). Tying healing into damage dealing means you don't necessarily use everything on CD and you don't necessarily only dump in burst windows. Separate healing resources that in turn may/may not feed into DPS resources (This part is a little unclear).

Without more details though, it's all up for speculation, but I would label it as thus.

1. White Mage is just White Mage, but better gamefeel due to general QOL.
2. Scholar taking the big L, but if you like 5.0 Sch it's likely just going to feel better due to general QOL. Probably still the speedkill shielder.
3. Ast has too many unknowns. It will likely swing lower and higher on damage compared to White mage. Probably still the speedkill regener.
4. Sage has much of the player feedback implemented into its design. Those of you tired with 4.0-5.0 should give this a try.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

The elephant in the room is that I'm still firmly of the opinion that healing in this game needs a fundamental rethink which this doesn't appear to be.

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This was kind of one of the most curious things to me. There's a lot of complaints but SE seems to be largely happy with the status quo and doesn't really want to change things up much. I mean, yeah OK, Noct stance removal is a big change for AST, but there's no big paradigm shifts for the role as a whole.

I'm a bit surprised SE didn't at least give SCH 2 dots and bane back. Seems like it'd be an easy way to at least give some DPS satisfaction back to the job and the potencies could easily be balanced to offer the same throughput as "now"/whatever the standard will be for Endwalker.

But on the flipside, without an overhaul, there's not really much to show. All the healers have very strong kits so it does kind of make sense that this expac things are much more incremental rather than new big splash abilities.

But honestly, I prefer that over gutting earlier-level abilities and reselling them in a new, flashier package at higher levels. Which is what's happened in the past a bit.

No. If they want this game to be dps centric then give healers a dps centric rotation. Give us full on rotations. Give scholar back it's dots, bane and shadow flare.

That would be enough to please scholars. At least better than the current crap

Remember when some people claimed they tore down healers in 5.0 to balance them, just to build them up in 6.0?
I laughed at them then, and I still laugh at them now.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Job trailers are not meant to show case rotations, or nuances, or anything associated with high level play. They\\'re meant to showcase animation updates, glimpses into potential kit interactions, and the \\'Job Feel\\'.

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Agreed, however, the lack of resources getting moved around in the SCH/WHM trailers leads me to believe both are just extra cooldowns. Maybe flower Eos and Tactician’s Sprint are overtuned and useful. Most likely they’re just window dressing.

Sage while legitimately interesting reaks of the same clone++ problems AST still has with WHM. I’m fairly comfortable spitballing that the ‘DPS mark’ will not be good enough or accessible enough to matter, the healing mark with be slightly overtuned assuming we’re not DPSing as often as we actually do, and while brief stance dancing and infuriate spells are something, they’re not much.

And we know that’s going to be a problem because they’ve already admitted they’re not willing to push the healing checks on Savage further.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

The Scholar\\'s job Trailer is an abject failure. While there were a few easy hits for all the healers that were missed, none of them faceplanted as hard into the ground than Scholar.

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I mostly agree with this, though personally I’m more offended by WHM than SCH as it’s still an expansion behind as far as I’m concerned. Two at this point, most likely. It needs depth and they didn’t sell that anywhere.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Contrasting that, the good points from Scholar can be attributed to extrapolation from Pet AI improvements and general QOL improvement across the board. I have no doubt that 6.0 scholar is going to be significantly better on the gamefeel even if the solution was a GCD cast reduction (Which people asked for). Improved Pet AI hopefully means less ghosting and more snappy responses, but infinite weave windows will make this mostly moot. Scholar / Ast will still likely be the speed killing combination given they still bring the most party buffs, and every other job being put into the 60/120 window only strengthens that.

If you liked 5.0 Scholar, 6.0 is probably just going to be more of what you liked but better. The same for White Mage.

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I significantly doubt that. The speeds of the pet actions we already know looked very similar to what they are now and no new ones were added for token reasons. Carby/Egi lost their autos on the Summoner side and if Embrace is gone then that’s the coffin for SCH’s one edge.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Astrologian is a wait and see case.

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It’s…okay. My guess on seals is they’re just Royal Road for minor arcana. Is that good? Probably enough to not hate it. Not looking forward to it at any rate. It feels like an afterthought despite being necessary.

It's definitely more complex than those 3 choices on the healer kit reveals. I'm happy with what I saw for WHM, AST, and Sage. But SCH I'm heavily disappointed with, more so because they outright admitted they didn't know what to do with it. The only hope I have with that admission is that it means that they're going to rework SCH in the future into a form they can manage easier. Until then, SCH is looking like it could be a much weaker healer than Sage at first glance. But of course, changes to the tool kit, number changes, the stat squish, a number of things will play into how SCH will look at level 90.

For me :

SGE = AST > WHM >>>>> SCH

... "Healer Kit Reveal?"
Did they reveal their kits and I somehow missed it?
The Live Letter I watched had vague talk about (according to the slide) "examples" of some changes.

With the way things stand we spend the VAST majority of our GCDs on damage. SE needs to sit down and decide if they want that to continue if they do then they need to have fun and engaging gameplay for it. Spending 90% of your time spamming one spell is Vanilla WoW levels of boring. Tanks are primarily flooded with DPS buttons and have a bunch of oGCDs to tank... healers could be similar and probably everyone would enjoy that more. OR they could make an actual need to cast GCD heals once in awhile to mix things up.

I'd say I'm interested to see the AST specifics a bit more. Also the reduced cast time is good for other healers but I think AST loses some uniqueness because of it.

My major issue with the healer kit reveals - and knowing what happened in Shadowbringers at launch - is that to avoid a 'healer drought' like we had before, its apparent they're only trying to push out one semi-competently designed healer class. It'll get flocked to as a result of it being the one decent one, healer queues and numbers will be fine, and they'll deny there's any problem with healers as a result. Maybe on some wild chance they'll actually look and see that SCH (or even WHM/AST balance, depending on how either of those two work out) numbers will have hit rock-bottom and decide to do something about it, though I'm certainly not holding out hope.

People have said it many times already here and everywhere else, but engagement is the problem - and making one healer function in a way that people have been asking for (if it even will) doesn't solve it, it just shows they know what to do but are refusing to apply that to the other three classes, which is much more insulting. Don't bore a player that does genuinely want to do more to death, give them options or give them less downtime. You've already made the players that want to do less or would rather sleepwalk everything plenty happy as it is.

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Originally Posted by BraveMustaine

My major issue with the healer kit reveals - and knowing what happened in Shadowbringers at launch - is that to avoid a 'healer drought' like we had before, its apparent they're only trying to push out one semi-competently designed healer class. It'll get flocked to as a result of it being the one decent one, healer queues and numbers will be fine, and they'll deny there's any problem with healers as a result. Maybe on some wild chance they'll actually look and see that SCH (or even WHM/AST balance, depending on how either of those two work out) numbers will have hit rock-bottom and decide to do something about it, though I'm certainly not holding out hope.

People have said it many times already here and everywhere else, but engagement is the problem - and making one healer function in a way that people have been asking for (if it even will) doesn't solve it, it just shows they know what to do but are refusing to apply that to the other three classes, which is much more insulting. Don't bore a player that does genuinely want to do more to death, give them options or give them less downtime. You've already made the players that want to do less or would rather sleepwalk everything plenty happy as it is.

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I’m glad the initial split on no/Waiting has settled into a comfortable lead for no, though I do agree with the initial sentiments in this thread. That said, this the overall point. Engagement. Though I also want SE to commit to some form of nuance. The fact that it takes inconsistent pugs, day 1 prog, and min item level to become a role worth playing is the problem. Scaling hurts this as much as fight design and kits. I have little doubt they’ll deliver on fights given they’ve said they can’t tune healing difficulty up more. Stat squishes only do so much too. If they intend to deliver, they need to step up.