Has anyone quit healing?

[Dogempire]

This is such a red herring.

It's never been about "this job is so bad it can't clear the fight." It's about what it brings to the table.

Take, for example, patch 4.4 (and really a lot of patches, but let's focus on the final tier of Omega just for simplicity's sake). White mages could clear it, but no one took a white mage by choice - only if they couldn't find the other healers - because SCH and AST were just better. More healing, more DPS, more utility, more mobility.

Patch 3.4 was the same. "But white mages were great for dungeons!". etc

So I say yet again: If the standard is only "can clear the fight", no job adjustments have ever been needed. For healers, tanks, and DPS. SE might as well have just left everything the same at the beginning of each expac.

I was thinking about that when I wrote the reply but it didn't relate to the point I was trying to get across so I didn't include it. Sure there are jobs that groups desire a lot more than others, heck I play physical ranged even though the melee and caster roles just objectively bring more to the table than physical ranged does. Despite that I don't think that SE should be homogenizing jobs just to appease raiders (I say homogenizing because at the moment this is how they're balancing things) because even with how much they've gutted both SCH and AST and how little WHM has lost, they've still completely failed to make it so that there isn't a meta healer comp.

IMO it's better that they preserve job/role identity and focus on balancing second, instead of focusing on balancing and gutting jobs and roles of what made them fun in the first place just to make them balanced, and fail in the end.

[Recon1o6]

I was thinking about that when I wrote the reply but it didn't relate to the point I was trying to get across so I didn't include it. Sure there are jobs that groups desire a lot more than others, heck I play physical ranged even though the melee and caster roles just objectively bring more to the table than physical ranged does. Despite that I don't think that SE should be homogenizing jobs just to appease raiders (I say homogenizing because at the moment this is how they're balancing things) because even with how much they've gutted both SCH and AST and how little WHM has lost, they've still completely failed to make it so that there isn't a meta healer comp.

IMO it's better that they preserve job/role identity and focus on balancing second, instead of focusing on balancing and gutting jobs and roles of what made them fun in the first place.

This is completely accurate, and damning. Homogenisation is not the way to balance, or make things fun

instead of destroying the healers, what they should be doing is giving each one a niche/playstyle, then balance the numbers. Its the numbers after all that make up the balance, not the abilities.
You could have the most fun kit in the world, but the potencies are 100 each, while another healer with a dull uninteresting playstyle consisting of 4 buttons (heal, aoe heal, raise, nuke) but does 1000 potency with everything. Assuming both could clear the content, which would raiders take? the latter almost every time.

Now if you had the two kits but with equal potency totals. which one would raiders take? they'd let the player decide, which one would the players take? the fun one every time

Thats why whm's are the most of the 3 healers atm (it has a second button to press every 93 seconds) and its why healers are in such short supply

Current scholar compared to what it used to be is too easy, too safe, doing aoe damage isn't even fun

You mean current HEALERS are too easy, safe and unfun.

[Risvertasashi]

IMO it's better that they preserve job/role identity and focus on balancing second

That's a fair opinion to hold. All the same, "can clear fights" isn't any real standard of balance. You'd be hard pressed to find any class-based game out there where there's some class that literally cannot complete content.

But if you want to count games that have undesirable classes that have difficulty finding groups because of that undesirability, then you'll find many, many more.

-

But back to the subject at hand, if such is your opinion, mine is this:

SCH shouldn't be a god tier healer just because "more complex" or whatever. All healers should be as closely balanced as possible.

I've been through every healer meta in this game and I couldn't care less about how "unique" a job is if I effectively can't play it because the playerbase excludes it. Though each healer job still has pretty significant differences, what the old SCH enthusiasts are really crying about is the lowering of DPS buttons/options (which is fair) and no longer necessarily being the strongest healer (which um... yeah sorry not sorry, but no thank you).

[Dogempire]

SCH shouldn't be a god tier healer just because "more complex" or whatever. All healers should be as closely balanced as possible.

I guess I worded my post poorly since it's not just one person who thinks that's what I meant. I'm not looking to make scholar so much better than every other healer, I just want the job to have a lot more room for optimization, down to being able to tell your fairy who to heal while you maybe focus on another target. At the moment you can't even control Eos, Selene is no longer an option, and they just completely did away with the pet bar in favor of loading your hotbar with more skills. That is to say I don't think you shouldn't be able to assign pet bar skills to your hotbar, but I think that having a separate bar for your pet has its own charm that disappears the moment you're required to put the skills on your hotbar or just never use them at all.

[Absurdity]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your flight attendant speaking. To your left you will see the Great Healer Circular Forum Argument funnel cloud in the beginning of its rotation. As we begin our descent you will see "More Complicated Jobs Deserve Higher Skill Ceilings" and as we touch down we'll catch "It's Only Fair If Higher Skill Ceilings Come With More Powerful Potential", and before the fasten seatbelt sign turns off you'll hear "But Just Because We've Defined Other Healers As Necessarily Both Duller And Weaker Than Scholar Doesn't Mean It Can't Be Balanced Somehow" at the terminal.

Thank you for flying FFXIV Forum airlines.

So...care to remind me where it says anything about WHM? I assume that's what this is about...because it always is, even thought it didn't so much as mention that WHM is supposed to be the "easy healer for new players".

what the old SCH enthusiasts are really crying about is the lowering of DPS buttons/options (which is fair) and no longer necessarily being the strongest healer (which um... yeah sorry not sorry, but no thank you).

I've yet to see someone actually complain about SCH not being OP enough, that sounds more like a strawman to me.
The issue is that SCH simply feels inferior to any of it's previous iterations, not from a performance perspective (because it seems to be doing fine in that regard) but from a gameplay perspective.
I would take SB SCH over ShB SCH any day, even if it dealt the least dps out of all 3 healers and they took Recitation (the only really good new ability) away.

[ForteNightshade]

This is such a red herring.

It's never been about "this job is so bad it can't clear the fight." It's about what it brings to the table.

Take, for example, patch 4.4 (and really a lot of patches, but let's focus on the final tier of Omega just for simplicity's sake). White mages could clear it, but no one took a white mage by choice - only if they couldn't find the other healers - because SCH and AST were just better. More healing, more DPS, more utility, more mobility.

Patch 3.4 was the same. "But white mages were great for dungeons!". etc

So I say yet again: If the standard is only "can clear the fight", no job adjustments have ever been needed. For healers, tanks, and DPS. SE might as well have just left everything the same at the beginning of each expac.

To be fair, a significantly contributor to that stigma was how that site we all know ranked parses. Bringing a White Mage straight up hurt your overall percentages in the same way Black Mage, Samurai and Monk did. Hence why no one wanted any of them. Granted, it wasn't the only reason as some jobs were simply balanced poorly but it certainly played a role. That isn't the case anymore as now rDPS and/or aDPS is used. Therefore, bringing a White Mage won't hurt your logs.

With all that said, there are ways SE could balance jobs without resulting to homogenization. They're simply too stubborn and opted for an easier solution. White Mage, for instance, suffered because of their insistence of it being a "raw healer" in a game that not only doesn't demand significantly healing but also where they don't want any one healer to be better than the others in that aspect. Monk saw a similar problem despite the melee not being nearly as homogenized. Nevertheless, I would actually prefer some imbalance if it meant jobs returned to having more identity. Shadowbringers just... isn't interesting in terms of overall job design. Far too many "safe" choices. That isn't to say I don't find several jobs fun. I do. But I'm not going to praise things like Machinist when it more or less amounts to "spam this one button five times. Which is what all the tanks do."

Healers and tanks suffered the most, but SE's overall direction focused too much on balance. Or more specifically, simplistic instead of creative balance.

[Risvertasashi]

I've yet to see someone actually complain about SCH not being OP enough, that sounds more like a strawman to me.

No one literally says it should be OP. The parlance is "It should have a higher skill ceiling than other healers" and similar. Sometimes they'll leave it implied, other times they'll come out and say "well of course more effort should be rewarded, and a higher ceiling means more effort."

frequently it's accompanied with "Well the lesser jobs can clear content so I don't see what's wrong with intentionally making some jobs stronger."

It's what Semirhage was referring to on the previous page, and it was a genuine argument seen on these forums before ShB, and it's occasionally come up since.

So...care to remind me where it says anything about WHM? I assume that's what this is about...because it always is, even thought it didn't so much as mention that WHM is supposed to be the "easy healer for new players".

This was another argument used to justify WHM's weakness here on the forums in Heavensward and Stormblood.

SE has never taken this position, at least that I'm aware of.

[Liam_Harper]

Despite that I don't think that SE should be homogenizing jobs just to appease raiders (I say homogenizing because at the moment this is how they're balancing things) because even with how much they've gutted both SCH and AST and how little WHM has lost, they've still completely failed to make it so that there isn't a meta healer comp.

IMO it's better that they preserve job/role identity and focus on balancing second, instead of focusing on balancing and gutting jobs and roles of what made them fun in the first place just to make them balanced, and fail in the end.

The biggest causes of meta healer comps are the fact AST doesn't pay any dps tax on oGCD's (and loses the least for GCD heals) and to a lesser extent that WHM doesn't have any shields. You can't place taxes on 2 out of 3 healers and not expect the 3rd to be top. WHM/SCH means someone has to bite the bullet and pay to heal, so naturally AST + Other becomes meta. AST's Noct almost exists just to compensate for WHM's shortcomings.

I do agree on preserving job identity. Classes should be designed to appeal to the players who like that playstyle. But I'd also mention that I'm against Enix's current policy of having gaping holes in the toolkit and flaws as class identity. Excessive tax, immobility, clipping, ghosting and lack of core abilities required in Savage should never be what defines a class. BLM is a case of turret fantasy done right, for example. WHM is not.

[Mortex]

The biggest causes of meta healer comps are the fact AST doesn't pay any dps tax on oGCD's (and loses the least for GCD heals) and to a lesser extent that WHM doesn't have any shields. You can't place taxes on 2 out of 3 healers and not expect the 3rd to be top. WHM/SCH means someone has to bite the bullet and pay to heal, so naturally AST + Other becomes meta. AST's Noct almost exists just to compensate for WHM's shortcomings.

I do agree on preserving job identity. Classes should be designed to appeal to the players who like that playstyle. But I'd also mention that I'm against Enix's current policy of having gaping holes in the toolkit and flaws as class identity. Excessive tax, immobility, clipping, ghosting and lack of core abilities required in Savage should never be what defines a class. BLM is a case of turret fantasy done right, for example. WHM is not.

Funny enough in this speed kill meta astro diu is being played together with whm. So whm doesn’t need to heal at all and can go full damage.

[Absurdity]

Funny enough in this speed kill meta astro diu is being played together with whm. So whm doesn’t need to heal at all and can go full damage.

I would've said "AST's Noct was made just to compensate for WHM's shortcomings", past tense, because shields are a joke nowadays and if you really absolutely need shields at some point you always have neutral sect.