New Healer Request Next Expansion

[Brandedblade]

Could say the same to you.

My work gives me a touch of downtime, being mr. Positive helps fill the time.

[Billythepancake]

My work gives me a touch of downtime, being mr. Positive helps fill the time.

My work gives me downtime as well, just enough to go on the forums and discuss my issues with the current state of healers with people.

[Brandedblade]

My work gives me downtime as well, just enough to go on the forums and discuss my issues with the current state of healers with people.

What a coincidence, I get just enough time to tell people that it's not as bad as people make it out to be.

[Billythepancake]

What a coincidence, I get just enough time to tell people that it's not as bad as people make it out to be.

Neat. That's not going to stop me from disagreeing with anything, and/or change my opinion from my personal experience.

[Connor]

Not gonna get into the balancing discussion but I feel like there’s a really good amount of demand for the next healer job to be a ‘Chemist’ type job. I also love the idea, so I hope they’ll seriously consider it for the future since many others seem to also like the idea. I think having be ‘tactical’ would really fill a nice niche in the healer role too.

I mean, a ‘tactical’ playstyle for a new healer wouldn’t necessarily have to mean reducing that feeling for Scholar. Tactics come into play as a Scholar because of the importance of planning out ability usage to maximise damage output. It’s like, ‘which Aetherflow ability do I use so I can Broil more / which Fairy ability will give me more Energy Drain’.

A Chemist type job could have a variety of Mix potentials, and the ‘tactical’ elements would be based around what you plan to Mix and when, like if you want to Mix a buff potion or a DoT potion, heal potion or Regen, etc etc. Maybe it could have like a really big ‘attack potion’ with high potency, but it shares a cooldown with a ‘big heal potion’. Beyond this will be the standard ‘small 1.5s cast heal’ ‘medium 2 second cast heal’, ‘big aoe’, ‘weaker AoE with additional effect of Regen/shield’, etc etc. Which is a little lame, but also extremely necessary

Scholar has the identity of ‘Tactical DPS healer’ already (putting aside the lack of DPS abilities for that identity to make sense for now lol). So maybe a Chemist job could be a ‘Tactical X healer’? That’d mean two healers that are more about direct healing and regens with White Mage / Astrologian

(Addendum: I get that these ‘tactics’ are a crucial part of every healer but I just mean that they’re considered part of the Scholar ‘identity’ whereas they’re mostly associated with good play as a White Mage / Astrologian as opposed being part of what makes job ‘feel like the job)

Anyway, I think the most interesting part of discussing a Chemist type job is what weapon it should use. They aren’t really associated with a weapon in the same vein that other jobs are, and unfortunately the one they do use is already part of another job (Machinist). That said, there are plenty of ways they could differentiate a Chemist pistol from the Machinists gun. I love the idea of jobs going into battle with impractical or unconventional weapons, part of why I really wanted to play Arcanist when it was announced was just the novelty of running into a battlefield with a magical book lol. I think a magic bag would be pretty fun since the Chemist job could just pull whatever other items they need out it. Though, seeing another player pull a giant cannon or bomb out of a small bag might be a bit too comical for FFXIV lol

[CrimsonGunner]

i believe the iconic time mage will be the next healer and if not him then geomancer might since they were introduced in SB and weren't yet explored.chemist probably wont be for awhile cause of alchemist as a craft job but i can see the sage class with a skill related to potions might become real.

[Lambdafish]

But... why should balancing those categories be more important than balancing the different roles in proportion to party requirements? DPS queues are bad enough as it is. Everyone would benefit from more people healing (except possibly existing healers, but they'd also benefit from new options) and adding an extra healing class would do that.

I don't have a link but Yoshi P expressly answered this question. Back in ARR we had two kinds of healer, a pure healer (main healer) and shield healer (support). When AST came along, it could pretty much fill both those roles with a gimmick attached. What the dev team found is that the shield healer/pure healer design doesn't work and they could not find a way to add a new healer while this design philosophy existed. Ergo, in 5.0 they broke down the healers so that the "support healer" didn't exist anymore and each job had it's own gimmicks (SCH has pets and now directly influences the pet more, and has seraph, AST has cards, and WHM has Lilies), so now, when they add a new healer, it can simply use both support and large heals and have a gimmick of its own. One thing they did also (albeit poorly) is remove damage as an identity from SCH specifically. They did this with tanks as well, and it makes the healers more balanced overall.

Wanting to balance out those categories is just not a good excuse. (And neither is balancing the healers considering this is what we got out of it. The healers might be "balanced" but there are a lot of unhappy healers and there are signs of laziness all over the "balances").

TLDR of the above statement, the healers had to be redesigned so that more healers could be feasibly added.

(And while I'm on the topic, why is DRK not a magical tank? Why don't we need 2 more of those to even it out? If chemist is the next healer, by their logic we'd need another two non-magical healers, but I can't see that happening)

In what world is DRK a magic tank? Just because it uses MP as a secondary resource doesn't make it a new role. BRD used to use MP for foes, that doesn't make it a caster. CHM will most likely use MP, the same as the other healers, they would have a basic standardised toolkit the same as other healers (i.e. high MP raise) in order to remain balanced.


Edit: Found a similar interview https://www.dualshockers.com/final-f...hadowbringers/

[Commander_Justitia]

TLDR of the above statement, the healers had to be redesigned so that more healers could be feasibly added.

Yeah I remember that interview too. It was impossible to add a new healer with a unique identity for shadowbringers.
How good a "support/tactical" healer sounds, or how dancer should have become one, it would have made balancing difficult. Even if a new healer would have had those support traits, it would have been weak and still would feel the same like other healers ultimately.

Every new healer has to be able to be good enough in dungeon and raid/trial environment, even if there are two times the same healer. As soon as you invent an interesting healer, you still need to give him abilities that let's you easily clear that content as good as the other three or it will be hard to implement it and turn out as niche healer, barely playable even if fun(sounds like blue mage destiny) .

I would like to see a melee healer/mitigator(but no shields) for example, like wow did it a bit with monk, could be a way... But then the whole party has to focus more on positioning to get the heals. The luxury of getting heals 30y away would be gone or more rare.

Anyway, I feel like many people would like to see a new healer but turn out to be the players later who will complain that it plays the same as others xD I think it's okay if current healer lose or lost some skills in order to be able to create a new unique healer again.

[Hatstand]

I don't have a link but Yoshi P expressly answered this question. Back in ARR we had two kinds of healer, a pure healer (main healer) and shield healer (support). When AST came along, it could pretty much fill both those roles with a gimmick attached. What the dev team found is that the shield healer/pure healer design doesn't work and they could not find a way to add a new healer while this design philosophy existed. Ergo, in 5.0 they broke down the healers so that the "support healer" didn't exist anymore and each job had it's own gimmicks (SCH has pets and now directly influences the pet more, and has seraph, AST has cards, and WHM has Lilies),

They gave SCH an identity as the fairy healer by reducing one of their fairies to a skin and gave them more direct influence of the fairy by removing the ability to manually direct embrace, and reducing the impact of positioning since she’s now immortal. Riiiight.

Also, while the lilies are a nice mechanic, I wouldn’t say they add an extra dimension of play like the fairy or the cards.

I’ve read the interview. I’ve heard their reasoning. I just think it’s incredibly bad reasoning.

so now, when they add a new healer, it can simply use both support and large heals and have a gimmick of its own.

So... they stripped support away from AST so they could give it to a new healer? What’s the point of getting a new healer if instead of adding something new to the healers as a whole we’re just getting the same healers distributed over more jobs? I feel the same about them removing the time mage aspects to AST, and will be annoyed if time mage is the next healer for that reason.

That said, I think it’s more likely that they stripped away AST’s support to give it to DNC, or to make things easier to balance.

One thing they did also (albeit poorly) is remove damage as an identity from SCH specifically. They did this with tanks as well, and it makes the healers more balanced overall.

But for what end? We need balance so that people can play the jobs they want without disadvantaging their team. This reasoning kind of falls apart if people don’t want to play the job. Which is why MCH got a complete rebuild. And why AST needs one, if they’re dead set against reverting their changes. And does that mean that we won’t get a new healer next xpac because they need to spend time on AST? Sooner or later the devs need to bite the bullet and admit that healers need some love, and fix the existing problems WHILE adding a new healer.

As for DRK being a magical tank, I was just picking the closest, because I don’t see why dps should have 3 categories while all the other roles have only one, if categories are going to end up influencing the number of each role we have.

Edit: it doesn’t help that the interviewee starts out by misrepresenting healer complaints. He says people are complaining about going 6 years without a new healer, but that they’re misrepresenting the situation because there was a new healer in HW 4 years ago. What those comments are pointing out is that by the time we get a new healer in 2 years at the least it will have been 6 years without a new healer.

Either the interviewee hasn’t paid enough attention to healer complaints to realise that or he’s deliberately trying to paint complaining healers in a hysterical light so he can brush off our complaints more easily. I think the former is more likely, but either invalidates him from responding to healer complaints because either he doesn’t understand our complaints or he’s actively trying not to address them. And boy is that depressing.

[Seku]

But for what end? We need balance so that people can play the jobs they want without disadvantaging their team.

As for DRK being a magical tank, I was just picking the closest, because I don’t see why dps should have 3 categories while all the other roles have only one, if categories are going to end up influencing the number of each role we have.

Not sure what the balance issue with healers are at the moment. But I get the feeling that despite any balancing that SE tries to do, the community will push towards a favorite among the classes. Which will cause the complaints for something else. This is always the case when there is a choice.

As for Dark Knight not being a magical tank, it kinda is. It uses MP for a tank busters and Damage. Not sure what else you'd want other than for a tank to be in cloth gear, and have a cast bar. Which they probably will never do the first (putting a tank in cloth gear), which is probably why DRK got made into a tank anyhow.

What tanks really need is a tank that doesn't use a sword.