Korean Live Letter and Job changes (Translated)

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Unless they design fights where you're severely punished for lacking the burst healing of a White Mage, it won't matter what they do. Frankly speaking, I want them to do precisely that. There should be a significant trade off for buffing your damage to the extent Astro does. Right now, there is literally no drawback to bring one but a massive DPS loss if you omit them.

I agree. I agree SO much.

But it will never happen, because creating content that's so difficult to heal you feel you NEED a WHM will cause imbalance. That's the problem with a job that specializes in higher healing. The content has to be able to be cleared by ALL healers, which means they'll never make Cure III a necessity, which in turn means you'll never need the higher burst healing a WHM potentially brings.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I agree. I agree SO much.

But it will never happen, because creating content that's so difficult to heal you feel you NEED a WHM will cause imbalance. That's the problem with a job that specializes in higher healing. The content has to be able to be cleared by ALL healers, which means they'll never make Cure III a necessity, which in turn means you'll never need the higher burst healing a WHM potentially brings.

I don't think Cure III or burst healing should be mandatory, but the fights could be designed in such a way that omitting a White Mage makes progression harder. I believe you mentioned on the healer forums having it so White Mage is the safer option whereas Astro pushes out raid utility. Unfortunately, the devs seem too afraid to bump up healer requirements even slightly.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

White Mage is the safer option whereas Astro pushes out raid utility. Unfortunately, the devs seem too afraid to bump up healer requirements even slightly.

I really do feel like this could fix healer balance quite a bit. Right now WHMs identity, if you can call it that, is higher burst healing. But AST comes so close to those potencies and content is so lacking in damage there's no reason you need the WHM.

If they made it so WHM was overall a much safer healer, and AST took more effort to heal but buffed the party with it's current buffingpower, both healers would have an identity, drawbacks, and would both be considered when considering your raid group.
And it accomplishes this without lazily throwing WHM dmg up utility just to even the fields. I really hope they're considering this...

[Khalithar]

I think "requires more skill to play but has a higher payoff" is a paradigm this game is desperately lacking.

I can definitely agree with you on this, but I also see a lot of posters demonize simplicity as though it's some horrible thing. Having a wider range of viable Jobs with differing skill floors/ceiling is a good thing overall in my opinion.

[Altena]

snip

I absolutely agree. My stance on AST is that it was just massively over-"balanced"..
They buffed its ability as a healer, in addition to the thing that made them desirable - Balance.
In my opinion, all they needed to do to make AST viable was to improve their cards. They didn't need the healing buffs.

I think the major thing that AST needs is a rollback to the old Balance that wasn't nearly as strong as it is today.

I'm fine with the buff to the cards in general but Balance didn't need to be touched. There was no reason to buff that particular card as it was the one thing that made people "draw" themselves toward bringing AST to raids.

Why buff the one thing that made them strong / desirable even further?
They really have 2 options in my opinion..
1) Keep the healing buffs, but nerf Balance back to its old state. Keep the new spread CD's etc.
2) Tone down their healing buffs, keep the Balance buff.

Right now they just have too much.

The simplicity of PLD and WHM should absolutely see the advantage of being the "safer" options.

[Ririta]

I don't think Cure III or burst healing should be mandatory, but the fights could be designed in such a way that omitting a White Mage makes progression harder. I believe you mentioned on the healer forums having it so White Mage is the safer option whereas Astro pushes out raid utility. Unfortunately, the devs seem too afraid to bump up healer requirements even slightly.

2.0 was like this. Only white mage had Proshell, while turn 2 ADS had only magical attacks (and could hit like a truck). Graniteskin was very useful for soaking Death Sentences and avoiding drawing aggro (when enmity management was still a thing). Scholar couldn't reliably top everyone with AoE heals (relying on Eos' cooldown). Holy was extremely useful for T4 spiders and T5 snakes. And, of course, bosses hit a lot harder. Regen made a lot of difference when both tanks were being mauled by 1800 damage Hood Swings and auto attacks, not to mention Twintania's Infirmity...

The 2.0 tank meta is to blame for our current situation. SE got so scarred from the warrior/paladin fiasco (paladin was so OP that they allowed the party to ignore some mechanics) that they never made a boss that's able to kill a tank with auto-attacks and skills again. It's all about tank busters. So now we have this weird meta where both tanks and healers are more measured by their ability to help with the party's DPS than actually doing their job.

[Niqote]

I really do feel like this could fix healer balance quite a bit. Right now WHMs identity, if you can call it that, is higher burst healing.

*whispers* Give us Haste

[Marxam]

I think "requires more skill to play but has a higher payoff" is a paradigm this game is desperately lacking.

Yes it is and the only classes where its apparent are tanks. Any tank that can hold hate during their dps stance while adding self sustain and rotating cds to keep healer in cleric longer is proof of this philosophy Among the tnaks, war was always pushed the hardest when it came to tanking because it had such good skills like decimate and FC. Any WAR main can agree that the class gets more fun the more reckless you are with your tanking stances. Obviously, you can tell who the pro tanks are from the bad ones by simply looking at how much dmg they are taking and if the healers are struggling. Most content now, and some ex primals if trust the healers, I always drop to Deliverance after the Unchained opener and simply rotate cds. The same for when I'm PLD or DRK.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

I don't see anything wrong with the balance SCH got the fairy AST got the cards and WHM got the shaft(I meant staff damn auto correct :P).

[Sylve]

Maybe we'll get lucky and have actual healing-intensive fights again?

Which will be healing intensive for exactly 4 weeks when everyone has used the most optimal path possible to overgear the requirements for the content and we're back to falling asleep at the wheel....

I kinda want them to add in scaling difficulties.
Pick your mechanical difficulty (Normal v Savage/EX etc) and then a literal slider that increases the power of the mobs in the dungeon. Obviously, The drops would scale their ilvls based on the difficulty bonus. For example, if it drops i300 for +0 Savage Raid, then if you do +1 Savage the items would be i310 etc, up to a maximum for that patch stage.

Be even better if there were minor cosmetic differences per difficulty tier.

I'd actually also really like it if they looked at the Occultist in Revelation for inspiration on Cleric Stance functionality.
It has a skill called "Adapt" whereby it flips its Damage Dealing skills to have the exact same effect but healing on allies instead of damage to enemies (IE, skill places a DoT with an AoE damage pop when it expires on enemies, it will Regen and AoE burst a heal at the end for allies).
The Adapt only has the Global Cooldown, and is quite fun to be juggling the Damage/Healing since the cooldowns don't reset between versions. If you dropped the AoE DoT field, you can't then Adapt and drop it as a Healing field. Makes for some interesting gameplay.