Korean Live Letter and Job changes (Translated)

[Zojha]

[...] rather than doing my job in most content because it's so utterly, utterly redundant.

Quite the opposite! If you ever played a dungeon without a tank and healer, you'd know that neither of them are anything close to "redundant", especially in higher levels - they are mandatory, there's just too much damage going out that you cannot possibly avoid taking.
But healers in particular are so extremely powerful that they meet these demands with ease. Heck, A11S boasts regular mechanics in which multiple people are reduced to 1 HP or take up to 90% of one's health and they're sometimes coming back to back - If you're asking me, that this kind of fight is even possible to heal is quite perverse and only goes to show just how powerful healers actually are. And despite this, healers can STILL add considerable damage in that fight.

As such, "making fights more healer intensive" is easily said, but, uh... when they're as powerful as they are, you kinda need to resort to terrible, terrible things to facilitate that. You need damage that can kill people in a couple seconds - damage that can kill TANKS in a couple seconds. And since we're talking PvE, scripted, unavoidable damage that can kill tanks in a couple seconds. I hope I'm not the only one whose alarm is ringing at that.
If increased healing intensity really is desired, I certainly hope it'll go over nerfing healers. It's not fun to be insta-gibbed because you accidentally left blood for blood on just so that healers don't get bored.

[Serilda]

that this kind of fight is even possible to heal is quite perverse and only goes to show just how powerful healers actually are. And despite this, healers can STILL add considerable damage in that fight.

I think that is a fair viewpoint. If it wasn't possible to just ignore healing most of the time and leave it to passive abilities, it wouldn't be so underwhelming, so being overpowered is definitely a big factor. Making healing twitchier so more people risk dying and having less fun isn't really the answer (and it's also a bit hard to balance; spells like Benediction require moderate levels of clairvoyance already due to its lag and not all healers are made equal in terms of preventing certain types of accidental death). Requiring more coordination between both healers would be lovely though; as things are there seldom seems to be much need to pay more than superficial attention to what the other is doing after picking your job/sect since your course of action is generally the same either way.

So I'm not moaning 100%, I do feel satisfied when I arrange encounters to challenge myself, like massively undersizing fights in Coil with mediocre gear and really pushing my friends (and myself) to the limit. And I'm sure people pushing the Savage content to its limit get that same feeling before they're all geared up too, but I want everything to be at least moderately exciting for healers right the way down to regular dungeons, without having to artificially modify the difficulty by asking your friends to take off their clothes and making mistakes on purpose.

I would also like to have more to do in fights to help the group without resorting to direct damage. I know it's taboo to mention it (and I don't think it handled it perfectly in any case - button bloat galore) but FFXI gave healers a lot of support abilities which made the role feel less pigeonholed without being DPS-with-a-few-overpowered-heals. I feel slightly less bored on AST because I have cards to play with. More support options for all healers which aren't reduced down to 'do more DPS so things die faster so people take no damage' would be a nice compromise.

[Zojha]

Requiring more coordination between both healers would be lovely though; as things are there seldom seems to be much need to pay more than superficial attention to what the other is doing after picking your job/sect since your course of action is generally the same either way.

Indeed - And that's not something restricted to healers either. As DPS, I only ever truly "interact" with people when there are tether, meteor or spread mechanics and usually in those cases there's a strategy set up beforehand so you don't really need to interact, but just act according to strategy (for example, set positions for mechanics that demand interaction). None of my support skills nor rotational abilities really "depend" on another person either, the biggest interaction is probably leaving Dancing Edge out so as to not needlessly overwrite the WARs debuff.

And yes, I totally agree it would be a huge boon to every "career healer" that wants to focus more on healing to get support abilities like AST cards. Seriously, I'd like to give you a cookie for noticing that, because in all the controversial healer DPS threads, the main argument in favor of healer DPS is to please do something useful in downtime, so if healers had those support abilities to use in downtime and those abilities would compare to DPS in usefulness, that would allow both parties to get what they want. It's great!

[Pireco]

Why this became another healer dps thread....why im even surprised
You all seem to ignore the main problem, perma enochian? Are you kidding me?
Doing this blm will become more dull than it is and extreme unbalanced, well my only hope is botd, dreadwyrm will also be perma, i mean , if making balance by making all overpowered and easy to play thats the way.
If they take my cleric stance we will have problems.

[Serilda]

You all seem to ignore the main problem, perma enochian? Are you kidding me?
Doing this blm will become more dull than it is and extreme unbalanced

I literally mentioned that in the post which kicked off the healer DPS discussion. The current Enochian is boring for everyday casual BLMing outside of group content. If they get this right, the rebalanced version could easily mean more fun for everyone without affecting the challenge of trying to maintain your full damage output (they could even take the opportunity to make it harder with different 'stances', who knows?)

[Pireco]

I literally mentioned that in the post which kicked off the healer DPS discussion. The current Enochian is boring for everyday casual BLMing outside of group content. If they get this right, the rebalanced version could easily mean more fun for everyone without affecting the challenge of trying to maintain your full damage output (they could even take the opportunity to make it harder with different 'stances', who knows?)

I agree with we don't know what they are doing with the rest, but i find very unlikely the job will be more than easy, stances? We have umbral/astral , probably not new ones.
Enochian is the only little challenge blm has, and after some practice it become so easy u forget u can lose, except in move intensive content.
If fun means its easier, for me its not what makes a job fun in this game.
But i wont get too upset about it until they reveal more.

[Airget]

It's the punishment that's an issue. When you lose 40 potency and your dmg boost that is a huge dmg loss compared to just losing one or the other. The enochain change comes off more like they want BLM to still have access to Fire IV even if they don't have the 5% dmg boost. But see by doing that you do close in the ceiling, the better BLMs will be able to shine and showcase the potency of that 5% boos but the ones that don't won't hurt as much for screwing up an enochain.

[Ultimatecalibur]

As the only possible benefit to combining Rampart and Shadowskin is that your Gladiator gets his Rampart-Shadowskin one level earlier (level 1 instead of level 2) IF and only IF you already started a Dark Knight, I don't see how this change was necessary, nor why we should have to lose unique art assets and names over it. But at least this hard work can keep them from working on WHM or PLD for a while longer, right?

Actually the benefit is freeing up an ability and a trait slot on all tanks. Which could mean more unique/distinct abilities pre-50.

[Derio]

Does this mean Dreadwyrm, Blood of the Dragon and other temporary buffs will become permanent to eliminate rotation difficulty?

Shadowskin makes sense. And possibly we will see foresight become a trait for all tanks. Provoke obviously being all tank skill.

[Ririta]

Those black mage fixes are very nice, though I have to question: why are black mages constantly getting the best things in the game? Be it the new HW spells, quality of life fixes or raid viability, the only time I remember black mages not being between good and excellent was in 2.2, which was quickly fixed in 2.3.