An interview with Yoshida and his thoughts on healers in 5.0

[Seoulstar]

[KDSilver]

They made Dancer a support job DPS while MCH is in a horrible spot since the beginning of Stormblood.
Good joke.

[Sebazy]

It's plenty possible to have wildly diverse styles of healer within an MMO.

Warhammer Online and Rift are two great examples that were likely achieved on a fraction the budget FFXIV should be getting.

Of course, the difference here is that in one case, the staff had an active interest in making engaging healer classes. Whilst in the other, the staff clearly have zero interest in healers beyond spending 10 minutes before a press build is due.

I'd dearly love SE to prove me wrong on this, but they haven't managed it in 4 years so far.

[Lozza]

This response disappoints me. I see no reason to believe that magically we will somehow end up in a place different from where we are now at the end of SB and where we were at the end of HW. With SCH top pick for heals and AST edging out WHM due to both rdps and pdps. If they had said, "yeah healers have a uniqueness or identity issue we want to rectify" maybe I'd go along with this. But we're getting the same line as we did for SB, "we haven't balanced them", and weirdly "we want to make WHM easier". WHM is already the easiest healer. It isn't getting sidelined because it's hard. It's getting sidelined because they over buffed SCH and AST since the 5.0 launch.

I feel tanks were in a worse place balance wise, and yet they are getting a job this expac. While tanks identities seem more unique than healers, they don't always live up to those identities. PLD has less defense than WAR, DRK has less dmg than WAR. DRK could have been the less def more small heals from skills, and even there WAR beats it again. PLD and DRK (in their tank stance) both rely on gauges/mechanics (blood price) that require getting hit, when the game tries to encourage you to not get hit. WAR has no such weakness in defiance - they can always generate gauge. And yet it's healers that need balancing so bad they can't possibly introduce another job.

[guardin]

You have to be fuckin kidding me

calm down. you know this is true. dont be spoiled. we only have 2 range classes and they desire as much as anyone to get new toys too and who cares about ques cause we will have trust system early on. as for end game, the ques are hardly ever bad. Cant handle facts then become or research what it takes to be a dev and see how far you get. Healers will get completely reworked in 5.0 and all feel brand new and better. thats more important than a new name doing the exact same thing with no distinction

[Sebazy]

Healers will get completely reworked in 5.0 and all feel brand new and better. thats more important than a new name doing the exact same thing with no distinction

I'll believe it when I see it. The same was promised for 4.0.

Instead we got a bunch of rushed and poorly thought out changes across the board. All 3 jobs had glaring oversights that could have easily been spotted during the design process by anyone who actively played them.

Yoshida's comments about WHM yesterday didn't help things either.

SE are clearly woefully out of touch with how healers actually play in this game.

*edit* before I come across as too jaded. Don't get me wrong, there are occasions where SE do actually get things right with healers. Thin Air for WHM is a great example of that. Abilities like this that hit the nail on the head shouldn't be such a rarity though.

[Seoulstar]

calm down. you know this is true. dont be spoiled. we only have 2 range classes and they desire as much as anyone to get new toys too and who cares about ques cause we will have trust system early on. as for end game, the ques are hardly ever bad. Cant handle facts then become or research what it takes to be a dev and see how far you get. Healers will get completely reworked in 5.0 and all feel brand new and better. thats more important than a new name doing the exact same thing with no distinction

I'm failing to see how anyone is being spoiled here. We've been told the same excuse twice now. I think we have a reason to be upset. Also, I want to add, there are five ranged classes, not two. Yes, there are two physical ranged classes. But that does not mean there is literally only two ranged DPS classes in the game.

[LashL]

We have a hard time with balance so we added other roles in the pool of the clearly perfectly balanced drk and mch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[Lozza]

I'm failing to see how anyone is being spoiled here. We've been told the same excuse twice now. I think we have a reason to be upset. Also, I want to add, there are five ranged classes, not two. Yes, there are two physical ranged classes. But that does not mean there is literally only two ranged DPS classes in the game.

I think the issue here is how SE chose to classify the jobs combined with the lack of a dedicated slot for support. BRD is clearly support dps, I have assumed DNC will be the same - this is a good thing, since assuming some lvl of balance BRD won't have an automatic slot in groups. However MCH is not a support dps, or rather perhaps players don't treat it as such. MCH competes for slots with other dps jobs, usually at the expense of a caster (though not always). It would seem from interviews that SE believes ranged dps are all support dps.

I've played other MMOs where there is a dedicated slot for support dps that is only filled with a normal dps if after 20 mins in the queue there are no support dps queuing at all. If FFXIV had a dedicated support dps slot I'd feel less bad about the lack of a healer. But honestly my issues with the lack of a healer is more that they are trying to feed us the same excuse as they did before SB launched and we are now in the same place as we were in HW, albeit with less of a gap between healer performance - while tanks that have had large balance issues all expac (that they never even attempted to fix) are getting a new job.

[Enla]

I'll believe it when I see it. The same was promised for 4.0.

Instead we got a bunch of rushed and poorly thought out changes across the board. All 3 jobs had glaring oversights that could have easily been spotted during the design process by anyone who actively played them.

Yoshida's comments about WHM yesterday didn't help things either.

SE are clearly woefully out of touch with how healers actually play in this game.

*edit* before I come across as too jaded. Don't get me wrong, there are occasions where SE do actually get things right with healers. Thin Air for WHM is a great example of that. Abilities like this that hit the nail on the head shouldn't be such a rarity though.

I still remember the state SCH was in when SB came out. We had trouble healing most dungeons due to our reduced potency and I very much felt like a burden to my FC whenever we would do content together on the road to 70. Hell the person who taught me SCH outright quit the class and moved to AST/WHM in the aftermath of it and still hasn't come back due to how badly SCH started the 4.0 patch cycle. Which is to say nothing of the fact that they then buffed us and then OVER buffed us over the course of the expansion because they once again just fundamentally don't understand how to balance the healers in this game.