Korean fan fest translation says ast changes balanced healers, do you agree?

[ToasterMan]

Yet another WHM crying thread ?

Healers are balanced now, all the pairs can be used to do Savage content, things that were not possible a few months ago.
It litterally around 18months to balance AST make it worth it.

As i already said months ago, WHM is still as good as it was, it's the same for PLD that people tend to push out.
Those two jobs are doing their job correctly and perfectly fine.

Plus we've always seen jobs more powerfull than others as patches goes on.

Hey I'm honest about wanting balance to be removed from the game. The least you could do for us here is being honest about wanting WHM removed.

[Watachy]

I tried to take this post seriously. Then I saw your sig.

And my sig is here since 3.0, you know when the AST wasn't a thing, just a mutant.
I like to actually support my party members by different buffs and think AST has a more dynamic gameplay compared to WHM.

Hey I'm honest about wanting balance to be removed from the game. The least you could do for us here is being honest about wanting WHM removed.

Guess what ? I don't want WHM to be removed. It's a good healer.
Were AST so noisy back in 3.0 when we were so bad at healing and we waited for 3.2 to be decent in diurnal and 3.4 to be decent in nocturnal, yes probably but since it was not a core job from the FF series no one was listening to us.

Accept the fact your job is doing well just a bit less than AST.
As i said, while patches goes on, buff and debuff goes too.

There is no reason to prefer AST over WHM for casual and sacage content, except for speed kills.

This is getting ridiculous, you know how we felt during 18 months and our wasn't as good as yours.

[Tiva]

Yet another WHM crying thread ?

Actually I main sch, so this isn't a "whm crying thread". Cus I am not a whm. =P

Actually if anything I want to buff your class ( I do want to bring balance back down though that buff was too much sorry.) =P I want to make noct competitive with sch combined with small nerfs to sch (eliminate some of the free healing from the fairy) so noct can push sch out of meta. At least for like a tier or two. I think it's scholar's turn to sit on the bench for a while. If nothing else just out of fairness. I feel the same with tanks. War is the god tank. Time to let it sit out for a while. It's pld/drk comp time now. That's only fair.

[ToasterMan]

Were AST so noisy back in 3.0 when we were so bad at healing and we waited for 3.2 to be decent in diurnal and 3.4 to be decent in nocturnal, yes probably but since it was not a core job from the FF series no one was listening to us.

Honestly that's irrelevant. That was then, and this now. I wasn't really active on here back then but if it makes you feel better I would've been right there with you with the complaints.

Accept the fact your job is doing well just a bit less than AST.
As i said, while patches goes on, buff and debuff goes too.

Well no I don't have to accept the fact that it's a bit less than AST since one, that isn't a fact that's an opinion, and two, you haven't actually provided evidence on why it isn't a big gap.

There is no reason to prefer AST over WHM for casual and savage content, except for speed kills.

You really don't know what you're talking about do you?

I think it's scholar's turn to sit on the bench for a while

Nobody should be "Sitting the bench". All jobs should be balanced to the point where all raid teams are comfortable bringing all jobs into a raid and won't pressure or force anyone to switch because the other job is clearly superior.

[Connor]

To be frank, I don't think the fact that Astrologian was weaker at the beginning of the expansion justifies making it overpowered at any stage of the game. Not that it would be considered overpowered currently, of course, but there is a bit of a distance between Astrologian and White Mage.

I think I understand what they mean in that Astrologian changes made every healer combination viable. This is, in a sense, 'balance'. But of course, as we know now, Astrologian / Scholar tends to be more optimal than other combinations because Astrologians can output healing that's not too far off what White Mage can do. And then of course we have the raid design itself for A9S - A12S, which from what I've heard (I don't do Savage so take this with a grain of salt), don't really play to White Mage's strengths at all (no need for extremely high healing or powerful AoE heals like Cure III when Aspected Helios / Helios will suffice).

Going forward, I think it's likely that they'll give White Mage more tools to close the small gap between it and Astrologian, rather than nerfing Astrologian and undoing everything they've worked on during the 3.X series

[FeliAiko]

As I mentioned in another thread, saying all 3 healers are viable is not synonymous with saying they are balanced.

Pre 3.4, only Diurnal AST was considered viable for Savage (and even then, most people took WHM for prog first, then switched once it was on farm). Now you can roll either Sect and get through Creator fine (ofc, WHM-AST is still a sub-optimal comp, but it's not as bad as it was in the past now). So in that sense, yes, all 3 healers are currently viable. The Balance change just put a spotlight on the Job to lure more people into taking it for progression, since the stigma with AST up to that point was you only took it after you knew the whole fight.

[Feyona]

Actually I main sch, so this isn't a "whm crying thread". Cus I am not a whm. =P

Actually if anything I want to buff your class ( I do want to bring balance back down though that buff was too much sorry.) =P I want to make noct competitive with sch combined with small nerfs to sch (eliminate some of the free healing from the fairy)

I dont really think sch is any better than the other healers if just healing with really or that would make ast better than wmg and scholar as well. Sch just has the added benefit of preventin more damage at times, where ast can buff as well, I think the ability to dps alone makes it a better choice to go with di ast or wmg. Nerf scholar at all would make it hard to clear dungs. Just done wall and needed every healing ability durin damage phases. Im wondering now if cleric is removed,or made to scale with mind if that alone will push sch out of meta anyway and then there will be more balance the rest would be up to content, and which healer is better for what

[Exiled_Tonberry]

There is no reason to prefer AST over WHM for casual and sacage content, except for speed kills.

Why do people still think a plethora of added utility, mitigation, extra damage, near infinite MP for rasing without risk on going OOM and excellent synergy with SCHs mitigation skills is "just for speedruns"?

Do you realize how utterly ridiculous that sounds?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

There is no reason to prefer AST over WHM for casual and sacage content, except for speed kills.

Yes, there is. Astro is simply a superior job in every facet excluding Cure III. Your stance is the equivalent of arguing why bother melding once you reach the accuracy cap. You don't need that extra Crit/Det. People want it to push phases. Making each job viable doesn't mean people will take them. White Mage clears dropped a staggering 50% after the buffs to Astro were released. That is going to become worse if Stormblood fails to address these imbalances. While the jobs cannot ever be 100% balanced against each other, they can be close enough to not impact the raid. Plenty of people still bring Summoner, Black Mage and even Monk because you can make them all work without too significant a loss to raid DPS and/or utility. White Mage, on the other hand, is basically an inferior Astro.

You see, the problem with SE' way of thinking is, they're not looking at healers for the amount of damage or support they can do. They look at how well they can heal.

This was made obvious back before 3.0 raids, where Yoshi told us how everything was Balanced to not require healer DPS at all.

If you look at healing alone, WHM is indeed viable. As long as it can fulfill it's role of keeping people alive, it's good enough to SE. It's a really faulty way to look at balance if you ask me.

That... is a rather intriguing point, and one I find myself agreeing with. I've long suspected their solution to White Mage will slapping even more raw healing onto it despite that being precisely why it got booted from the meta. Hopefully, we all are proven wrong and they surprise us.

[SaitoHikari]

I played another game that actually did near exactly what the FFXIV devs did between WHM and Astro.

It was known as Dragon Nest, which for years had one primary healer known as Saint that is highly comparable to WHM in this game, except they were capable of limited damage mitigation and provided some party attack buffs too. Then they released something called a Light Bringer, which is highly comparable to Astrologian now. It had greater mobility, DOUBLE the damage mitigation and damage buffing power that Saints had, and more convenient heals. The devs outright said that they released Light Bringer specifically to compete with Saint.

The only difference between the situations in both games is that Light Bringer was broken from the very beginning, rather than buffed later down the road like Astrologian was. And the Saint population outright DIED for an entire year, up until the buff/debuff stacking burst damage meta spiraled so wildly out of control and led to more than half of the population quitting the game in a year. An optimal 8-man raid composition that excluded even a single class could lead to as much as a 20-30% DPS loss for the entire party, in a game that had around 20 classes at the time. The devs tried to counter this by designing boss mechanics that spammed buff wipes among other things, but the end result was that it pushed the meta even harder towards burst phases to skip the mechanics in the first place. But again, the population died as everyone lost faith in the devs' ability to balance the classes properly, to the point where they basically had to overhaul every single skill and every fight in the game, to cut down on the amount of party buffs/debuffs along with removing certain boss mechanics in response to those. Though by that time it was too late - the only people left were those that embraced the meta, and they cried foul.

One of many things that happened was that it resulted in Light Bringer being hit with the nerf stick so hard (as in, their buffing power was brought down to Saint level) that everyone began to realize just how poorly designed the class was. It was only ever so popular because it was so broken in the first place, and now that it's been nerfed, the class had no real identity of its own. The population died as quickly as it soared upon release.

My fear is that I'm actually watching the same exact thing happening in FFXIV now, although at least Astrologian has more unique mechanics that would still retain their identity should Balance end up being nerfed. The Balance card can take a hit - it's Arrow and Spear that needed buffs in the first place, especially Spear. There's a reason why everyone sensible never ever imagined the devs would even buff Balance in the first place.

Basically, my argument is that if a party damage buff is the only argument for taking a healer to a raid, and people act like touching it at all is going to lead to the class being filed away as worthless, then it's a pretty clear sign that it's actually horrendously broken and everything else in the class' toolkit is grossly under-powered or poorly designed. Though many in this thread know the situation is a bit more complicated than that - WHM's fault is that it has no significant unique tools of its own that the other two healers can't copy in their own way.