Letter from the Producer LXII

[Corue]

They're going to be genderlocked forever, aren't they?

[Darkplanet]

I definitely somehow missed the news that no head pieces would work with the new races, so I was immediately horrified to read that but then relieved they were modifying over 500 pieces of gear, then confused cause dancer reveal had a viera with a head piece, then grateful that the development team is obviously so passionate about this game.

[LyraKuroneko]

.

A lot of items do share the same models though and are just resized to the needs.

For example : earring seems to at best have 2 models. Else there are moved and resized.

for chest piece it seems to have hyur midlander m, f, roe m, lala m (most of them at least) it is adjusted for the rest of the races. For more difficult attire there is obviously more models but you have the idea.

As the benchmark isn't out I can't tell you if Viera and Rhoth share what piece, or if they reworked them all, obviously. However they did said that all headpieces had to be reworked and that will take time.

[galbsadi]

They're going to be genderlocked forever, aren't they?

I wouldn't quite expect "forever," but it's probably going to be a while.

Granted, given the lifecycle of MMOs, it might not be FFXIV we're playing at that point...might be FFXX or something.

[Shougun]

I definitely somehow missed the news that no head pieces would work with the new races, so I was immediately horrified to read that but then relieved they were modifying over 500 pieces of gear, then confused cause dancer reveal had a viera with a head piece, then grateful that the development team is obviously so passionate about this game.

What a ride haha, glad you got off at a happy place though .

[PharisHanasaki]

A lot of items do share the same models though and are just resized to the needs.

For example : earring seems to at best have 2 models. Else there are moved and resized.

Yes, but the reszing and moving doesn't happen magically.

[LyraKuroneko]

Yes, but the reszing and moving doesn't happen magically.

I wouldn't bet it's the same team doing both. It can be moved/resized by code alone.

[PharisHanasaki]

I wouldn't bet it's the same team doing both. It can be moved/resized by code alone.

But it still needs to be worked on. Are you trolling D:?

[Halivel]

They're going to be genderlocked forever, aren't they?

Time will show. Knowing Japanese way of dealing with things, such answer can be considered as covered no. However, knowing Yoshida and his wishing to please community and knowing his team, who surprisingly often do things without notifying him (how often does he tell about it on streams, lol?), I personally will not be surprised if they will suddenly break into his room with bunch of concepts and draft models. ツ So it would be correct to say that chance is nor very high due to amount of work, but there is a chance.

[Eloah]

Actually no. Whether heals are direct, shields, or HoTs it really doesn't matter how they come so long as the player doesn't get KO'd. All healers can heal, so they are balanced when looking at just that. If the dev team continues to look at healing balance in this regard, the problem is going to continue well into 5.0. The reason why healers are unbalanced is because two of the three are saturated with utility, and the last has none at all except lesser single target versions that don't help the raid much, if at all.

Not exactly. spf1200 is right though, it boils down to HoTs and Shields. If you were to remove those two forms of healing from each healer, and look at what they have left, you'd see that that is basically all WHM had going for it. AST still offers a tone of other things, and while they'd be hit hard SCH still has utility. The main issue is WHM is supposed to be like the healer version of BLM. But where big damage numbers are good, big heals are not, relatively speaking. You are right about the utility, but it's because of the HoTs and Shields that it's more noticeable.

Not to mention that Yoshi-P mentioned in an interview they were only looking at the healers as HoTs and Shields, and they need to stop that. The indication is that they will probably try and focus more on their feel and playstyle more than their kits. Since when you get down to it how many different ways can you dress up a heal, or damage, or a shield...?