Can we please continue removing GCD heals to the point where we have none?

It is a good thing that Sage has only 2 GCD heals on their hotbar. It is fantastic when compared to White mage who has 8 in total. Now that not clipping gameplay has been enabled, can we move forward and remove any GCD spell that is not damage-related? Together with the removal of Fluid Aura & Afflatus Misery, White mage will have 10 free slots for a brand-new rework and a new job gauge to get creative with. We can go as far as removing Thin Air, Temperance and Plenary and with that WHM will have 13 free slots for a complete overhaul. I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume that PoM was been reworked into being that new buff that WHM has to maintain and not include it in the abilities to be deleted.

I don't think it should take another decade to reach a better style of gameplay. We should not be held back by lore and 8 years old job quests.

We are already seeing X-times come Ruin, which might be even more prevalent in EW. Healing on demand has already been removed from the game content and so should our GCD heals which are heals on demand. The changes are lagging behind.

SE, even if you don't plan on reworking WHM, make sure that whatever you do, you make lilies oGCDs or DPS neutral by the time EW has been released unless you want more tanks to be Glared to death.

Now, come on. They're trying something different and new with Sage. let's see how it goes...and see how many tanks die to the playstyle in dungeons.

Seeing as I don't even have Fluid Aura on my bar? the removal made me go "...that's still around?".

Look, we go through this EVERY expansion. They did it with AST (and nothing against ASTs) they bring it it overtooled, then they change things patch by patch. the WHM will survive, the WHM will still be relevant and if you think that we're going to have another 3.5 Great Kickening, i don't think we're going to see that this time around for 8/24 man stuff. The WHM will persevere and those of us skilled on it will come through, staring blankly as we see what needs changed, what's overdone, what's underdone and sipping our Tea and Coffee to keep our Salt levels down while we wait.

By the way...have some tea or coffee. it's too early to be this salty, wait until Early Access Weekend then go full Salt Mage.

Rather than deleting GCD heals, I’d rather see them giving cooldown to those spells, particularly speaking the AoEs. So rather than trying to top everybody up to 100% with excessive Medica/Medica II/Cure III/Succor/Helios spams, with cooldowns people will have to think ‘a bit’ before using each spell.

Single target GCD spell can probably stay without cooldown or if any, a short one.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Rather than deleting GCD heals, I’d rather see them giving cooldown to those spells, particularly speaking the AoEs. So rather than trying to top everybody up to 100% with excessive Medica/Medica II/Cure III/Succor/Helios spams, with cooldowns people will have to think ‘a bit’ before using each spell.

Single target GCD spell can probably stay without cooldown or if any, a short one.

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That's the whole point of oGCD. Proposing GCD to get their own count time is worse than having thm on oGCD because of DPS loss.

With Cardia, Sage already has ST regen ticking that is slightly stronger than the normal GCD regen whm and AST have but it only gets stronger as you gain more spell speed. Healings spells should not obstruct DPSing, they should encourage it. Sage has been designed following this idea.

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Originally Posted by Saraphin

By the way...have some tea or coffee. it's too early to be this salty, wait until Early Access Weekend then go full Salt Mage.

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I will not be playing White mage unless it deals more damage than Sage which is very unlikely.

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Originally Posted by Saraphin

Now, come on. They're trying something different and new with Sage. let's see how it goes...and see how many tanks die to the playstyle in dungeons.

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They are not trying anything new. They are switching from enabling comfy GCD overhealing to offensive GCD on which the player is dependant in order to fulfill their job's responsibility and they've been doing that since SHB by first introducing a plethora of oGCD heals whose sole existence suggests that the devs are encouraging healers to DPS.

All healers now have 1.5 cast times which seems like a small change but for that change to happen a lot of balancing needs to be done especially for Scholar with their strong oGCD healing. They locked the utilization of the full healing kit behind DPS loss in raids and nerfed the fairy because the numbers are really off if the pet doesn't get nerfed. The only reason AST ended up stronger than WHM was not because they have neutral DPS healing, but because of severe scaling issues caused by the card's buffs that were taken into consideration upon release but due to lack of popularity AST ultimately got buffs in 5.1. Astroligians with 45 potency on DoT and 1600 AoE neutral healing can only dream of out-dpsing & out-healing WHM & SCH despite their DPS losses for healing. AST had no strengths anywhere in the game. Playing the job instead of WHM was basically doing more work for weaker results. AST was not WHM+ as people like to refer to it, it was WHM- in every way imaginable. Playing the job probably felt like trading usefulness for fancy cards.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Rather than deleting GCD heals, I’d rather see them giving cooldown to those spells, particularly speaking the AoEs. So rather than trying to top everybody up to 100% with excessive Medica/Medica II/Cure III/Succor/Helios spams, with cooldowns people will have to think ‘a bit’ before using each spell.

Single target GCD spell can probably stay without cooldown or if any, a short one.

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That might worth a try making heal more interesting, rather than dumb down healing even further.

We might fainlly look more like healer and less green DPS

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

All healers now have 1.5 cast times which seems like a small change but for that change to happen a lot of balancing needs to be done especially for Scholar with their strong oGCD healing. They locked the utilization of the full healing kit behind DPS loss in raids and nerfed the fairy because the numbers are really off if the pet doesn't get nerfed. The only reason AST ended up stronger than WHM was not because they have neutral DPS healing, but because of severe scaling issues caused by the card's buffs that were taken into consideration upon release but due to lack of popularity AST ultimately got buffs in 5.1. Astroligians with 45 potency on DoT and 1600 AoE neutral healing can only dream of out-dpsing & out-healing WHM & SCH despite their DPS losses for healing. AST had no strengths anywhere in the game. Playing the job instead of WHM was basically doing more work for weaker results. AST was not WHM+ as people like to refer to it, it was WHM- in every way imaginable. Playing the job probably felt like trading usefulness for fancy cards.

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You don't recall when it first came out, AST was out doing WHM at healing and DPS. I remember that in 3.5. I remember being kicked from 24 man raids because I was running WHM. I remember trying to get clears on EXs and joining a party, then getting kicked with an "Oh, we forgot, we don't want WHMs".

AST is just as powerful as WHM, i've healed right along side ASTs that can keep up with WHMs in ALL aspects. So...if you are saying AST is "WHM-" you need to rethink how you're playing it.

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Originally Posted by Saraphin

You don't recall when it first came out, AST was out doing WHM at healing and DPS. I remember that in 3.5. I remember being kicked from 24 man raids because I was running WHM. I remember trying to get clears on EXs and joining a party, then getting kicked with an "Oh, we forgot, we don't want WHMs".

AST is just as powerful as WHM, i've healed right along side ASTs that can keep up with WHMs in ALL aspects. So...if you are saying AST is "WHM-" you need to rethink how you're playing it.

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The WHM- thing was only 5.0 in Shb. I didn't read all of the patch notes of Heavensward or those for Stormblood.

Currently at 5.5, the only thing AST is better than WHM at is the Single Target boss encounter in a party of 8. I don't think AST is WHM-, they are just another healer for me.

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Originally Posted by Saraphin

You don't recall when it first came out, AST was out doing WHM at healing and DPS. I remember that in 3.5. I remember being kicked from 24 man raids because I was running WHM. I remember trying to get clears on EXs and joining a party, then getting kicked with an "Oh, we forgot, we don't want WHMs".

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And people were arguing with me that Fun > Balance

Heavensward was a very very dark time for WHM, to be truthful.

they're still tuning the healers...and we know they will. Sage is going to be overtuned, the other healers undertuned and by 6.4 the potencies and other things will be changed. it will be more "equalized" but...while we can look at what they've released, until we can get our hands on it? we won't be able to give feed back that they'll really listen to.

we looked at everything for HW, saw the changes, tried to point out..."this ain't gonna work" and got told "Try it out". Lo and Behold, people were right and...they spent the time retuning it so that things were closer. I'm not saying that the status of healers are perfect. far, far from, but...i think they probably should have made Sage a DPS instead of a healer and continued to work on balancing out the three we have now.

I like having FUN in 14, but when one class is overtuned more than another, similar sort of class...you're going to have people going "no, we do not want this in our group". even in non-ex, non-savage content. so it'll be back to like...5 people queuing for things together so that classes aren't booted...which will increase queue time for single queued people.....

...it's a vicious cycle, it really is, but...it'll get sorted out, may take a bit, but i've hope things will be made closer to an equilibrium. However: "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst".

Chasing perfect balance is an impossible goal, but Square has come as close as just about any company can hope to. I agree that fun is more important than perfect numerical balance- with a caveat that is relevant to the healer role. If you're going to tip something out of balance, you'd better at least make it uniquely useful somewhere, and failing that give it something fun and impactful to manage or work with. Their utter refusal to do anything of the sort with White Mage is why I've personally found healer imbalance especially egregious; when I'm playing Red Mage, I couldn't care less that my explosions are less powerful than Black Mage's. It's not like they're pulling orders of magnitude higher numbers than I am, and I'm enjoying the flow that the class has and the neat little things I can do to squeeze more out of what I'm doing. When I'm playing White Mage (especially in the Heavensward/Stormblood era)? I was playing a job that was A) weaker than its competition B) had less to do than its competition C) had a lower skill ceiling than its competition, and D) to make up for all that, had a boring downtime rotation with nothing to manage or work toward. And the Endwalker job trailer let me know that it's still going to spam one boring spell over and over again, with likely no unique utility, nothing to manage, and if past expansions are anything to go by it'll be wimpier than AST's output within a patch cycle. Sounds like garbage to me!

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Originally Posted by Misutoraru

That might worth a try making heal more interesting, rather than dumb down healing even further.

We might fainlly look more like healer and less green DPS

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I'm usually one to lean on the side of optimism, but I said this same thing when Shadowbringers dropped. Outside very specific encounters, this did not hold true. Perhaps if the raw power of healing didn't get hotfixed for the first Savage patch, this might have held true, but it didn't.

I think all GCD heals should be removed, except maybe regens. Healing should feel like a special event.

no, the GCD Heals is the core of WHM. that's been their "kit" forever. by doing that, you'd take away the "Core Essence" of WHM.

Wouldn't really even be that weird. We'd basically be similar to tanks.

Tanks basically have DPS rotations and tank stuff oGCD. Healers would have caster dps rotations and healing stuff oGCD. SCH already has basically their entire healing kit oGCD already anyways.

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Originally Posted by Saraphin

no, the GCD Heals is the core of WHM. that's been their "kit" forever. by doing that, you'd take away the "Core Essence" of WHM.

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I am pretty sure the elemental magic is WHM's Core Essence which was taken away in Shb. Glare replaced Stone. The wind magic was also removed and got replaced by a light-based one. The cast animation for Aero III actually looked good, better than Misery in my opinion. The white fluff initially came from the Lily system which looks completely random IMHO. You don't even have a job quest linked to a spell that interacts with the gauge. The job gauge needs a rework from the ground up, the whole concept about the lily system is bad and out of place. Holy is the only light-based spell that WHM originally had which again, doesn't interact with the gauge or at least hasn't been interacting with it for the past 8 years.

Whenever I recall Y'shtola's role play duty I keep thinking about what Whm could have been. When I was doing the MSQ for the first time, I did it with WHM and when I completed that quest I kept trying to find that spell somewhere. It wasn't the Temperance, it wasn't Misery, so thought it was hidden behind some quest or stuff but I was mistaken. The reason why I was so certain that we had a spell-like that was that Yugiri used Bunshin somewhere in Stormblood and then I checked if Ninja has that Bunshin ability and they do. They received it in Shb if I am not mistaken. I think maybe, in some far distant future we might also get an ultimate spell like that one when WHM gets a decent rework.

Yeah, having no gcd heals really wouldn't change much in high level play; everything is planned out as is after all.

It'd just make dungeons take forever as people wait for healing cooldowns to reset before pulling bosses. It'd also make casuals just not want to play anymore, since mistakes are much more punishing for healers and non healers alike.

It's just one of the many quirks of healer design in FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

I am pretty sure the elemental magic is WHM's Core Essence which was taken away in Shb. Glare replaced Stone. The wind magic was also removed and got replaced by a light-based one. The cast animation for Aero III actually looked good, better than Misery in my opinion. The white fluff initially came from the Lily system which looks completely random IMHO. You don't even have a job quest linked to a spell that interacts with the gauge. The job gauge needs a rework from the ground up, the whole concept about the lily system is bad and out of place. Holy is the only light-based spell that WHM originally had which again, doesn't interact with the gauge or at least hasn't been interacting with it for the past 8 years.

Whenever I recall Y'shtola's role play duty I keep thinking about what Whm could have been. When I was doing the MSQ for the first time, I did it with WHM and when I completed that quest I kept trying to find that spell somewhere. It wasn't the Temperance, it wasn't Misery, so thought it was hidden behind some quest or stuff but I was mistaken. The reason why I was so certain that we had a spell-like that was that Yugiri used Bunshin somewhere in Stormblood and then I checked if Ninja has that Bunshin ability and they do. They received it in Shb if I am not mistaken. I think maybe, in some far distant future we might also get an ultimate spell like that one when WHM gets a decent rework.

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well, we've been trying to get Lily's redone since...they were introduced. Unfortunately, i think we're stuck with it. Yes, I also think that the moving from Elements to Light Based was probably a bad choice.

Ah, yeah, I remember that Action, i stared and went "is that an upgraded Fluid Aura?" because an AOE Fluid Aura would have been nice, but yeah, we never get the cool stuff the NPCs get...

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Originally Posted by Saraphin

You don't recall when it first came out, AST was out doing WHM at healing and DPS. I remember that in 3.5.

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You are right though, WHM was definitely starting to be neglected ever since AST was buffed in 3.4, plus at the time both of AST primary dots ignored accuracy checks due to them not applying initial damage upon cast, so they could always provide that minimum damage and deal with healing consistently. Since late Heavenwsward an AST could provide 20% single target and 10% raidwide damage buffs for around 30~55s, very desirable during that 'skip-soar' era with 6dps 1tank 1 healer (or 5dps, 2healers). Stormblood was really bad for WHM, the lillies were implemented quite poorly with RNG on lillies and majority of patches in Stormblood did very little to no adjustments for WHM, meanwhile SCH had Chain Stratagem at this point and AST had Sleeve draw, and then also receiving QoL buffs like the one to malefic's cast time giving them extremely strong weaving space from that moment onward, Stormblood also had that whole issue of raid composition locking due to the piercing/striking debuffs which I'm glad they have done away with.

WHM lilie skills, although technically GCD, shouldn't really be considered like GCD actions. Their cost to heal ratio is in line with ogcds. Just saying.

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Originally Posted by Saraphin

You don't recall when it first came out, AST was out doing WHM at healing and DPS. I remember that in 3.5. I remember being kicked from 24 man raids because I was running WHM. I remember trying to get clears on EXs and joining a party, then getting kicked with an "Oh, we forgot, we don't want WHMs".

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Apologies for going off topic, but but just to clarify here. AST most certainly wasn't out performing WHM at it's release, quite the opposite in fact. AST was actually drastically undertuned for 3.0. Whilst it could manage in dungeons and primals, it's weaknesses were horridly exposed once Gordias Savage landed. Even in A1S, a 3.0 AST would need to be absolutely on point with their healing and APM as they just didn't have the burst healing to recover from just about any set back. On Ragnarok at least, pretty much all but one of the competitive prog teams had their ASTs switching to WHM. The one team that did stick with AST/SCH never made it past Living Liquid despite having a pretty solid lineup. In the end the numbers make for pretty grim reading. SCH has 1541 logged clears of A3S, WHM has 1430, AST has 262.... For A4S AST was 'out cleared' at a ratio approaching 10 to 1.

Naturally this led to several hot fixes and updates that gave AST a divine seal equivalent and a bunch more potency so it could actually contribute. IMHO 3.2 AST was actually pretty close to being on parity with WHM for Savage with many healers including myself switching between the two on a turn by turn basis. But despite this AST still seemed to be haunted by how badly it failed in early Gordias prog and it still saw significantly less use vs WHM/SCH at a ratio of around 6 to 1.

This led to patch 3.4 where it was mindlessly overbuffed to a huge extent, that coupled with WHM's MP/Enmity struggles as well as Creator's emphasis on pushing DPS to skip phases caused WHM to become pretty undesirable in raid statics. Zurvan and the whole skip soar rubbish pretty much did the same in the PF scene come 3.5.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

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I'm of the opinion that SE should take a closer look at early BnS support specced Summoner and Warhammer Online's Warrior Priest gameplay.

Both were fairly simple low committal DPS classes, in Summoner's case, they had fairly potent splash style heals with limited but rapidly regenerating resources. Warrior priest on the other hand was functionally a basic melee DPS that generated resources for an AoE centric healing toolkit that allowed them to splash out healing around them whilst focusing on their melee and positioning.

These two classes would be far more suited to casual content in FFXIV than the overly heal focused jobs that we have and frankly, it boggles my mind that SE didn't consider using these as a basis for Red Mage in particular.

The big problem here of course is how to make something like these work going forward whilst also not forcing them to have to retune old redundant content =(

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

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I'm speaking specifically of 3.5 here. after all the adjustments, AST did get over tuned. it was slow and at the same time WHM did get nerfs to their things as well, if I recall. I'm not discussing them in Savage content, but in general for things like 8/24 mans.

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Originally Posted by Saraphin

I'm speaking specifically of 3.5 here. after all the adjustments, AST did get over tuned. it was slow and at the same time WHM did get nerfs to their things as well, if I recall. I'm not discussing them in Savage content, but in general for things like 8/24 mans.

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That's fair yeah. In reality, WHM was perfectly fine for 8/24 man content. The comically desperate need for people to skip soar on Zurvan shone a light on the issue and rather than put the blame where deserved on underperforming DPS players, WHM pretty much got used as a hard scapegoat for some reason. It was pretty sad to see PFs flat out blocking WHMs for this and even easier content.

People always forget these days when they are calling the prog raid scene elitist :rolleyes:

So, ogcd heals aren't 'healing on demand' but... Gcd ones are? :D

Weird!

I'd rather spam another medica than another broil!

Might just be me tho :D

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

That's fair yeah. In reality, WHM was perfectly fine for 8/24 man content. The comically desperate need for people to skip soar on Zurvan shone a light on the issue and rather than put the blame where deserved on underperforming DPS players, WHM pretty much got used as a hard scapegoat for some reason. It was pretty sad to see PFs flat out blocking WHMs for this and even easier content.

People always forget these days when they are calling the prog raid scene elitist :rolleyes:

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That reminds about the video xenos did about not skipping soar with a group of 8 tanks and casual and hardcore raider both did feel attacked at the same time making it even more funny. Like heavensward had the worst raiding scene in pf and casual content ever (like you said elitism).

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Originally Posted by IckeDerTyp

So, ogcd heals aren't 'healing on demand' but... Gcd ones are? :D

Weird!

I'd rather spam another medica than another broil!

Might just be me tho :D

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oGCDs are easier to use on reaction than GCD heals are. GCD heals are always available, but are stuck with terrible cast times and eat at your DPS spell spam. That’s what justifies their lack of use. They’re the final fallback option once your other resources are strained.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

That's fair yeah. In reality, WHM was perfectly fine for 8/24 man content. The comically desperate need for people to skip soar on Zurvan shone a light on the issue and rather than put the blame where deserved on underperforming DPS players, WHM pretty much got used as a hard scapegoat for some reason. It was pretty sad to see PFs flat out blocking WHMs for this and even easier content.

People always forget these days when they are calling the prog raid scene elitist :rolleyes:

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They were and while i'm not forgetting that dark time, i've forgiven it all...call me a bit on the worried side that it MAY happen again, but at this point...if it does we're looking at a double possible lockout (WHM and SCH maybe? who knows what combo?) and i think that'd be really sad. I also think new players would get very upset if it happened to them come EW 8/24mans..while those of us that went through 3.5? we're just gonna grab 4 other friends...and queue together, increasing queue time for solo people and not being sorry.