What is imbalanced about the healers. I keep seeing this said everywhere.

[Meta-Flare]

When I heal I am a white mage and I have no issues, and the gameplay is fun to me. My friend is astro amd loves it and seems to do just sa well. When we have a scholar they seem just as fine despite the fact they seem to forget they're a healer some times lol.

So what are these balance issues everyone talks about? I genuinely am not aware.

[Metsonm]

Mainly damage potential, both personal and raid. This ties into utility, too.

Basically, right now if you look at DPS numbers WHM is consistently falling behind the other two in higher end fights. It is also a selfish class so provides an additional 0 raid DPS. This is contrasted by Scholar being able to boost crit chance and attack speed, and Astro just being a buff machine all around. Mitigation is also mentioned, as WHM only has divine benison, but that's down to identity, mostly.

There's also an issue of identity, mentioning it. When designing Astro they made it too similar to White Mage in the basic kit. AsBen is just Regen, Dignity is functionally just Tetra, etc. This has led to Astro being described as "WHM with cards" or blatantly "Better WHM".

Overall balance isn't the worst I've ever seen in a game, WHM can still clear everything. But it does kind of sting.

[Meta-Flare]

I see. I always knew that sch had a higher dps and thought the balance was that whm has such big heals. Then ast is a bit of both of the jobs with utility. The sheer power of my heals always seemd like a fair trade off as a whm. To me that was the balancing. I also feel like I do ok damage when needed. I dont claim to be a numbers guys but they all seem balanced to me due to the different mechanics and themes. It honestly feels like people are blowing the "imbalance" out of proportion.

[Metsonm]

The problem with using healing as a metric of worth for healers is in this game there is only so much damage being done to the party in any encounter. Fights are extremely scripted.

This means if a boss outputs 1million points of damage over the fight and Scholar heals 1 million points of health it's fine. White Mage can in theory put out, say 2 million. Unfortunately that's an extra million wasted that could have been put into something else.

After a point White Mage heal nukes become superfluous, but the dev team keeps deciding to put their skill points into the pure healing tree when they've already capped it out.

[Legion88]

The problem is that there is a moment when having bigger heals isn't any advantage anymore, and in FFXIV this moment is reached with relative ease, and the option to give more and better support is far better.

[Lyth]

A couple of points that haven't really been touched on.

Barrier shields are incredibly powerful in this game. A sufficiently strong shield, applied pre-pull or during phase changes, can last you a very long time before you need to do any further healing. Until you see hard limitations placed on shields (i.e. a maximum hard cap on all shield effects, and a decay in effectiveness over time), SCH is going to dominate healing as they have been for the past six years. There's also the fact that using shields to mitigate critical damage generates a lot of limit gauge. You can do the same thing healing back up, but shields are just that much more consistent.

As far as AST vs. WHM is concerned, most dps players just want bigger numbers. So as long as AST has Balance (and SCH has Chain Strategem), people are going to ask you to switch off of WHM once you clear content, simply so that they can get their bigger numbers. Most players don't look at the trade-off between personal and raid dps. They just want to know how you can make them look good.

You want to fix healers? Place hard limitations on barrier shields and just get rid of effects like Balance on healers.

[Meta-Flare]

The problem with using healing as a metric of worth for healers is in this game there is only so much damage being done to the party in any encounter. Fights are extremely scripted.

This means if a boss outputs 1million points of damage over the fight and Scholar heals 1 million points of health it's fine. White Mage can in theory put out, say 2 million. Unfortunately that's an extra million wasted that could have been put into something else.

After a point White Mage heal nukes become superfluous, but the dev team keeps deciding to put their skill points into the pure healing tree when they've already capped it out.

That makes sense. But wouldnt the bigger heals mean more uptime for doing damage as you can get away with letting people dip a bit more than others? Wouldn't that impact it?

Would the solution be to just give whm some more damage spells then? Or would changing the lily gimmick to something esle make a difference? Currently the lilies let you do ogcd more often meaning less casting of gcd heals meaning more dps time no? At least that is the intent I thought.

[Kalise]

That makes sense. But wouldnt the bigger heals mean more uptime for doing damage as you can get away with letting people dip a bit more than others? Wouldn't that impact it?

Nope. Since a lot of healing is done using oGCD heals which don't impact your uptime of using damage spells.

Also, given the way that in raids the damage comes in with predictable bursts, you can already get away with letting people dip a bit since you know "Well, I'm going to be casting an AoE heal in X seconds anyway"

Would the solution be to just give whm some more damage spells then? Or would changing the lily gimmick to something esle make a difference? Currently the lilies let you do ogcd more often meaning less casting of gcd heals meaning more dps time no? At least that is the intent I thought.

Giving WHM more personal damage would help. However, devs seem to regard them as a "Pure Healer" job and thus keep neglecting to do so.

Also, Lilies don't work because you only gain lilies from using GCD heals. So the concept of using GCD heals to let you use your oGCD heals to reduce the number of GCD heals you use quickly becomes farcical.

It was a particular design that literally every WHM player noticed right away but that the devs have been completely oblivious to since their inception.

[Rongway]

That makes sense. But wouldnt the bigger heals mean more uptime for doing damage as you can get away with letting people dip a bit more than others? Wouldn't that impact it?

The reason this doesn't benefit the party as much as it sounds like it should has to do with the predictability and distribution of damage over the timeline of a given fight. Say a raidwide AoE for a particular fight can drop all the DDs to half health. Clearly you can't let them get hit twice by that AoE without healing them, because the second hit will kill them. Fortunately, regardless of which job you're playing, it only takes one AoE heal (and maybe an oGCD) to get them high enough to survive a second one. So if you know another one is coming right away (some bosses cast their raidwide AoEs twice), you do an AoE heal. Now everyone will survive the next hit, and you can go back to attacking. If you know another raidwide AoE isn't coming for a while, you can just let regens do their thing and you don't even have to touch the party for another 30-60 seconds.

That one job can heal bigger than other jobs doesn't make a big difference--each healer can put out the healing required for the party to survive (barring people ignoring mechanics); so the difference comes down to which healer contributes the most damage.



The lily mechanic is a particularly bad mechanic because WHMs aren't expected to be casting Cure/II often enough for it to make an impact. Between Regen effects and oGCDs on their normal timers, the Cure : oGCD ratio is far far lower than the 3:1 that the lily mechanic implies.

[Lozza]

When I heal I am a white mage and I have no issues, and the gameplay is fun to me. My friend is astro amd loves it and seems to do just sa well. When we have a scholar they seem just as fine despite the fact they seem to forget they're a healer some times lol.

So what are these balance issues everyone talks about? I genuinely am not aware.

Healers are unbalanced at the moment, a few people have addressed the various issues already. Prior to the recent AST buffs though WHM was still the go to healer for progression, with the switch to AST once groups were comfortable with the fight. Since the AST buffs though WHM is pretty much back in the same position it was in before SB. Though honestly the gap is no where near as large as it was back before SB when WHM were pretty much trash due to no rdps and much harsher mp issues combine with the worst tools available to recover.

Frankly SB did a good job of bringing the tanks and the healers better into line. Before the SB launch WHM were not wanted, they were often locked out even of clears for easy EX trials like Bismark. PLD were in the same boat, they were the trash tier tank. Frankly I feel that tanks right now are more unbalanced than healers are - so I find it really odd they got a shiny new toy while SE complained they couldn't possibly make another healer while the balance issues remain.

Healers do fall behind tanks in one major issue, that of identity. Tanks have clear identities (even if they don't actually adhere to those identities in play) where as healers are... Well a WHM is merely a bad diurnal AST, and a noct AST is a bad SCH. When your static/group/FC is pressuring you to lvl AST because it's the same as WHM only better, you'll be able to pick it up fast, the heal skills are pretty much all a carbon copy, oh and you get the tetra skill earlier and it has a lower cd... I'm sure you can see the problem.