Edited because I made a remark about Cleric Stance being cool, and... it really wasn't. It was janky. I'm glad the original ARR Cleric Stance is gone.
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I see so many people rebutting healer criticism with "healers heal, why do you want dps skills?" Or "well, I'm having fun.", or "I think dungeons are plenty challenging!" And that's great, there should absolutely be some set of classes in this game that play exactly like the healer design that's bringing you joy. What we have now should absolutely be an existing option in the game, I want you to have fun!
The problem is that Square decided you and I can't both have fun.
Scholar used to be my absolute favorite part of the game, finding opportunities to weave in damage because you've got healing taken care of. Finding room to use Selene instead of Eos because you've got this, you can safely sacrifice some heals for raid buffs. It felt like the tactician the Arcanist's Guild always wanted you to be.
Astrologian was something I never got the hang of, but that's okay. A number of people out there had a blast with it. It's design was intricate, and I loved the idea of tweaking various types of cards on the fly to manipulate your raid buffs into whatever combination you desired.
White Mage was what I played when I wanted to turn my brain off and just heal. It was a chill time, and while I still had to pay attention a bit, it was super nice having this option in the game.
The thing is... all of that is gone now. That's what I really want people to understand: the healer you love came at the cost of the healer I loved. They took away the scholar that I enjoyed to give you the scholar you enjoy. They took away the widely varied cards and almost D&D metamagic aspect of altering those cards, which I enjoyed, to give you the quick melee/ranged cards you enjoy.
None of us are out here telling you that you shouldn't be enjoying the game. We're not here telling you you love the wrong thing. We're telling Yoshi-P that we want you to have your own perfect class, instead of watching the devs destroy our perfect class and make a new one for you with the remaining pieces.
At the end of the day, I think you can agree that my fun shouldn't come at the cost of your fun, and neither should your fun come at the cost of mine. We should both get to have fun.
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Also "idk play Ultimates I guess" isn't the answer, Yoshi-P. Please, please hear what we're actually saying.
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02-19-2022, 05:03 PMGideonWilhelmIf you're having fun with healer, great! I want to have fun again, too.
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02-19-2022, 06:10 PMSpiralMask
(agreeing with OP)
downtime activities are optional.
adding an option of something to do when healing isnt required takes nothing away from the class.
adding an option doesn't mean that the more casual players can't also just continue to play as chill as they are currently and have the same level of fun doing so.
there is no reason an "i'm already having fun with healing" and a "i like mechanical depth/engagement in healing" can't both exist on the exact same job. -
02-19-2022, 07:02 PMDarnath
I'm down with what you're preaching.
As I said in the other thread, whenever I'm doing my roulettes as AST (most of the time outside MSQ roulette) most of the time I'm busy healing tanks or DPS that mess up.
But hey, if they can add extra DPS buttons to healers to at least allow the more skilled/lucky healers who are actually bored with the content, give it to them! -
02-19-2022, 10:52 PMLimonia
The problem is when they make some healers more fun again, but keep others super simple just because they want allow beginners to have an easy time to play healer without having to put in any effort, it'll become impossible to balance.
...
I really like WHMs aesthetics the most, and the base kit is nice as well. I would like the devs to make it more fun without adding something like a fairy or cards. I want to play a DPS/healer hybrid kind of class with buffs and other things to play around with. But I also want to cast earth, water, wind and light elemental spells with a staff. But because they decided CNJ/WHM is the only starter healer and thus must be kept braindead simple and clunky at the same time (and be still worse at healing than AST) I will never be able to play the class that brings me joy.
And I still don't understand why they even removed dps buttons from healers. They don't want to overwhelm casual players...? Those players who don't care about better play anyway. They wouldn't have touched those 'optional' buttons anyway. Honestly, why can't the healers have more interesting gameplay mechanics while keeping the core healing spells a bit on the easy side? But whatever, I have long given up about healers, and I don't think the devs will ever give them an overhaul. I only do story content anymore and while WHM feels so suboptimal to play it still gets the job done. I just feel sorry for those who still have hope and are still fighting for more fun healing classes. -
02-19-2022, 11:32 PMAnxin
Throughout what I watched of the LL, accessibility kept coming up in responses. I suspect this is why we have dance-dance fights and patch-up, one-button healers. I don't touch extremes, savages, ultimates, and similar content. I can't dance well enough for them. I don't find memorization and aoe-dodging fun anyway, so I won't follow the "play ultimates to heal" advice. My fun comes from when everything goes wrong--random chaos, which rarely happens. Perhaps I'm an outlier, but I find the trash mobs more entertaining (wall-to-wall pulls anyway) than the boss fights.
All said, despite my love for healers, I've considered changing my main from AST to Dancer. I can still get my healer jollies sometimes and feel more impactful the majority of the time on Dancer. Perhaps if the majority of healers get tired enough to stop healing, change will happen. Of course, the rewards for healers on the roulettes would prevent a mass exodus, so I doubt this will happen. -
02-20-2022, 03:49 AMpinkbubblegumAw I think you should give Ex trials a try though! In my data center a lot of people still queue for the old ARR trials and a number of the people doing them are sprouts so there's a lot of people doing them who don't know mechs and get hit by avoidable stuff xDQuote:
Originally Posted by Anxin
Very chaotic, but I'm also in the camp that finds healing through stuff like that really fun. I'm a big fan of joining fresh prog or A2C PFs. The unpredictability of player error is part of the fun in these fights if you're starting to find the fights too scripted haha. -
02-20-2022, 04:29 AMQooEr
i havent touched scholar since shadowbringers, and it was pretty much my secondary class for all content back in HW and Stormblood. why do we need 4 healers that almost play the same? theres enough jobs to let both kinds of players. and no, sage doesnt have an "involed" downtime activity. its literally dosis spam with phlegma thrown in every 45 seconds
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02-20-2022, 07:35 AMGrimGaleInterestingly "random chaos" and ultimates are not compatible. If you have random chaos, people dying to mechanics and such in ultimates its a wipe. No amount of healing will fix it. You either complete mechanics perfectly or we all die- That goes for unavoidable damage too, that's why its understood that Ultimates offer more challenge in terms of healing, but really it's not the case. There is no "chaos" in ultimates. You either run through the hoops or its reset and back to the start.Quote:
Originally Posted by Anxin
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02-20-2022, 09:53 AMAnxinThat was what I was told by some FC mates. It doesn't sound fun to me. I've tasted Ex before I took a break and found they weren't for me. If I can't heal through aoe hits (I have bad reflexes for dodging and latency on my connection), I can't do them. I miss the games that didn't rely on dodging things and instead on, admittedly simple, AI that tried to kill people. I do enough hoop running in real life :D.Quote:
Originally Posted by GrimGale
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02-23-2022, 06:14 AMMapleine
A large, commonly overlooked issue and the reason healing likely works the way it does: Controller users can heal perfectly fine on current design: spot heals, OGCD weaving and DPS but if you alter things to be about single target, hard targeting and places where mouse-over macros rule the domain that parity is gone. It isn't a fun answer, and it puts some heat on console players, but it's def a part of why things are the way they are.
A solution is probably to take the current path to the point of hybrid design, making responsibility roles more of a toggle and accepting DPS as the games core (which it already is). That iis what I figured the end goal of current combat revamping was was until Yoshi P also told healers they shouldn't have to DPS and showed heavy reluctance to offer more DPS options.
So, now I don't have even a faint guess on what he wants anymore, which is worrying. Healers don't have to heal, healers don't have to DPS so what do we do? I really don't want to sit and just push one button for the entirty of combat. I was farming Zodiark yesterday and all I could think of was "Gee, this reminds me of Frost Mage in Molten Core back in the day, ten minutes of pressing the 1 key.
The thing is I really like a lot of of the newer job design, it focuses on fun, flash and the actual fight difficulty rather than frustration but Healers are too far in the wrong direction. We don't have cool primals and melee combos and finishers. We get to Broil IV 180 times in one fight. -
02-23-2022, 06:58 AMGaethan_TessulaI will dispute controller being any real impediment to more taxing healer-checks in fights. I was playing on console during 3.1, and was just fine handling the dragoon jumps during Thordan EX add phase, which involved spot healing several targeted DPS while also keeping the tanks up. The 2.5 second GCD is a bigger concession to controller, and it does not take that long to smash the d-pad a maximum of four times up or down to target a given party member.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mapleine
If people can play combo-heavy fighting games at a professional level on pad, and they do, then people can handle spot-healing in FF14. Or, for an even more extreme example, look at Devil May Cry players - a lot of the major content creators for DMC play on pad, and the APM required for their combos puts most MMOs to shame. I've had personal experience doing both (top 16 in a Blazblue CP major; beat DMC 5 on Dante Must Die with S rankings for all stages with all characters).
I won't deny that keyboard and mouse (or stick, for fighting games) grants some real advantages for certain gaming genres, e.g. holding down multiple buttons (negative edging). However, FF14 is nowhere close to the threshold where controller becomes a major handicap. -
02-23-2022, 07:23 AMRika007Literally are ultimate level raiders playing AST on controller and doing incredible at it. This is just not a valid excuse anymore. We as a player base learned controllers were not an impediment to high level play somewhere around Heavensward.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaethan_Tessula
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02-24-2022, 12:50 AMSacred-Oblivion
As a tank I want my healers to be happy and enjoying their role *hugs*
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02-24-2022, 01:01 AMForteNightshadeBecause the dev team has a mistaken belief that all those DPS abilities were what led casual players to feel Healers were too difficult or overwhelming when that was never the case. We see that now as those same players who didn't want to manage Aero III still aren't pressing Glare III constantly but rather spamming useless heals just like they did two expansions ago. It also didn't really attract new players to healers in any sizable large like they assumed. What they need to understand is tanks and healers attract certain types of players and nothing you do will convince others to pick them up if they weren't interested to begin with. A lot of people simply prefer doing damage and that's it. Yoshida even acknowledged this, and gave it as a reason they'll always add at least one new DPS per expansion.Quote:
Originally Posted by Limonia
It largely boils down to accessibility above all else. They don't want the skill ceiling to be more than a few feet above the floor, if even that high. Hence why jobs are so simplified nowadays. -
02-24-2022, 01:59 AMQooErthe most ironic thing is they never actually made healing easier. they keep the terrible pitfall of freecure which makes worse players worse while any half decent player knows to avoid it like the plague. they nerfed the fairy heals so scholar actually has to know how to heal. if they wanted to truly lower the skill floor theyd get rid of the awful base heals that bad players resort to instead of cutting on dps options that they dont touch in the first place. or they would stop giving overpowered ogcd heals to ast when bad players dont even touch them to begin with.Quote:
Originally Posted by ForteNightshade
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02-24-2022, 02:38 AMForteNightshadeTheir whole design philosophy really is at odds with itself, isn't it? They keep emphasising how they want to encourage healers to heal more yet continuously slap in more overpowered oGCDs that do the precise opposite. I feel the fairy nerf was largely them thinking Scholars would heal more because they still think we prioritize GCD healing. Hence White Mage's stubborn design. Speaking of, I've never been able to find the interview but on the discussion reddit, it was brought up Yoshida saying they kept Cure I for healers that wanted to focus more on healing. Is it bad I can actually believe that just on face value even if Cure I is absolutely garbage "healing" above 50?Quote:
Originally Posted by QooEr
I'd love to actually see the dev team complete a Savage tier just to see how they actually play. I wanna bet they GCD a lot, especially as nobody on the dev team mains healer. -
02-25-2022, 11:31 AMGrimGaleI play with controller on PC and I am pretty fast at targeting. It takes only a few taps on your pad (at most 4 up or 4 down) to select any party member on the party list. I play Astro on controller too and I manage to weave my cards in. You can change target immediately after you start casting and 1.5s is more than enough to target anybody on the party and fling a card.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mapleine
The issue isn't Controller I'd say, its more server ticks and how the game processes information. Now that certain effects apply before the end of the cast this has been alleviated but I can't count the amount of times I've Lustrated a corpse or my Benediction went on CD yet the target died. -
02-27-2022, 05:42 AMXceptOne
I'm still fairly fresh to the game I say, only got to EW but a few hours ago and been healing most of my journey since, even more so now I've unlocked SGE and gods damn healing is fun, always on your toes and that's good for me!
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03-01-2022, 04:32 AMBrokentoothMarchNot to invalidate your excitement but... What? On your toes? I've played since release of HW and endured the butchering of AST in SB, only to finally quit healing in late ShB and continue tanking into EW. In essence: I feel like I might be a veteran and my veterans opinion is that I unironically, legitimately, actually have fallen asleep healing.Quote:
Originally Posted by XceptOne
The experience is painful and boring. A job that feels meant for people who want to clear content without putting in any actual effort. To say nothing of all the tools tanks have to stay alive devoid of a healer. If your tank isn't a DRK, a healer is hardly even necessary as anything other than a mediocre DPS.
If, as a healer, you're kept on your toes? I weep for you. That speaks more about your parties than anything else. -
03-01-2022, 05:42 AMForteNightshadeTo be fair, a new healer isn't going to necessarily how overpowered oGCDs truly are and just how little healing you can comfortably get away with. Plus being new means the monotony of spamming the same nuke hasn't quite set in yet. Of course, it wouldn't be entirely fair to dismiss the notion some people do actually enjoy the current healer design even if many of us fundamentally disagree.Quote:
Originally Posted by BrokentoothMarch
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03-01-2022, 06:33 AMGrimoire-M
The only thing that even gives me a spark of joy in the role anymore is figuring out how to keep a bad tank alive on a trash pull without cutting into my energy drain usage.
It’s not even fun in harder content. It’s just spreadsheet nonsense. No triage or contingency planning, just stricter timing and punishment the harder things get. Never mind that an interesting DPS rotation to optimize fits equally well in both cases. -
03-01-2022, 08:01 AMMapleineThey could deal with a lot of these issues with new players by enforcing a tutorial. Make a tutorial dungeon, make a role tutor, make a checklist that lets you know it's going well.Quote:
Originally Posted by ForteNightshade
The game never tries to teach you a single thing for 90 levels, just expects you to absorb tooltips, sometimes monolithic and have MMO knowledge through genre osmosis. Really tired of excuses related to Yoshi P's inability to shore up his old systems. -
03-01-2022, 08:35 AMGrimoire-MIt’s not even the systems. It’s the explanation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mapleine
Summoner’s a good example of this on the DPS side of things. A myriad of tooltip bloat that’ll put off players who see older guides/comments/posts talking about how complicated it was in the past and will assume it’s difficult when it’s automated down to a pair of buttons that you could pre-plan macros for nowadays.
Healers suffer this the most but it’s not like those problems aren’t leaking out elsewhere. -
03-02-2022, 12:36 AMLiam_HarperHonestly I feel it's GCD heals that are just too good in this game. They allow bad players to play badly and get away with it. Medica II for example is a massive 1000 potency and Regen is 1500, no cooldown, always available. MP is hardly a limiting factor when the bad player tends to bring a few thousand Piety and keep poor cast uptime. Blindly throwing out GCD heals works as long as the dps make up your lower damage.Quote:
Originally Posted by ForteNightshade
At least oGCD's are limited by a cooldown and blindly spamming them for scratches means you have none available when actual damage happens. GCD heals are just mindless.