Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

[Deceptus]

You here when they added the Lily job gauge to White Mage in Stormblood and everyone trashed on it and the Lilies remained useless for almost the entire expansion even after loads and loads of people complaining how bad they were? They totally listen to feedback alright.

For anyone who doesn't know just how bad Lilies were for a huge portion of Stormblood: You had a 20% chance upon using Cure 1 or Cure 2 to generate one Lily. Divine Benison was locked behind getting at least 1 lily. Lilies were consumed upon using certain healing cooldowns and lowered their cooldowns by a percentage. People complained constantly how badly they were only to finally be changed late Stormblood. Plenary Indulgence was equally as bad but is a whole other can of worms.

Now you see why I have a pessimistic outlook on healer design, reworks and healer changes.

And then those same developers deleted SCH's energy drain without compensating elsewhere. Energy drain was the SCH stack dump when healing wasn't required and was used to build fairy gauge.

The devs have changed / added multiple systems without properly considering their ramifications or how they'll actually be played in game.

It seems to be a very whack-a-mole approach IMHO.

- Perhaps the most outright laughable example is when Yoshida openly acknowledged they weren't balancing Bard and Machinist with Piercing in mind despite Bard having such a massive power creep that even after nerfing Piercing by 50% going from Heavensward to Stormblood, it still remained the strongest DPS in Alphascape.

Even more laughable? In Shadowbringer press / media tour Yoshi-P said "He doesn't like taking away abilities from jobs" ( in relation to RDM)

Yoshi-P on Red Mages (2 part GIF):



Meanwhile on Scholar

[Lyth]

In Shadowbringer press / media tour Yoshi-P said "He doesn't like taking away abilities from jobs"

I find this bit of developer/player interplay to be interesting in FFXIV. You can't actually balance anything without having the ability to remove actions and apply nerfs. In the vast majority of games, whenever a job/character starts dominating, the dev team just tells you to stuff it, applies some nerfs, and everyone moves on, the better for it. FFXIV's dev team just can't seem to handle that sort of confrontation. They want to create the impression that they're only handing out nice things ("you get a buff, and you get a buff"). But you can't balance anything through upward balance. That just leads to this realm of progressive power creep, especially defensively, where everyone can sustain, rez, and invuln with impunity.

It also leads to situations in which certain jobs are forever powerful. So rather than being open about the fact that they want to nerf a job that's viewed as mandatory, the dev team quietly do most of their nerfs on expansion release, when players are least likely to notice. Then people start complaining and those historically dominant jobs start making their way slowly back up to the top. This whole 'pure healer' (WHM/AST)/'shield healer' (SCH) is about power balance as well. It's really about offering up a better SCH alternative to the playerbase, just to keep everyone from running the same comp for ten years. It's the same thought process why they created an entire 'BRD' sub-role, and then proceeded to build a better BRD. You get a lot less pushback that way.

[technole]

Scholar is just ok, the job had been a headache to YoshiP from the get-go. Seraph was a cool change, giving Scholar a weaving double shield ability almost like Neutral Sect, so you can broil/ruin/move and get shields up. However it doesn't preclude the fact the job is kind of boring after awhile, because you just really hit dawn on cool down, and tell your raid group to stand in the soil for mitigation/regen things. Nevermind all the knock the party around mechanics this savage tier, that your fairy has to be constantly re-placed.

This expansion they only did numbers/potency changes outside of the major job changes they highlighted on live letters such as Monk and Astro. I liked this approach, because they can do small things without causing havoc or having to reverse decisions. Although it always gives them breathing room to "reset" things when new expansions come out so they can quietly delete/replace skills.