Can Healer Balance Survive a 4th Healer?

[Liam_Harper]

To be honest, I don't see the engagement in their design of "this raidwide is really big so you must press Succor or die" then back to Broil/Malefic spam. Sometimes you might have to add a few Medica II along with your 150 Glares. The most interesting parts of healing this tier for me were e11s cycles or e12s Terminal, where the damage is frequent and lasted long enough that you have to space out and plan your resources.

"You need a shield to live" doesn't suddenly make healing exciting, which is why the pure/shield divide seems to be going down the wrong track. It just adds a bland necessity that restricts job comps a bit.

I want to see how they're expanding on shields, if we're getting pure shields, their plans of how to turn a small piece of a toolkit into an actual playstyle, if they have any intention of increasing the frequency of damage rather than just making raidwides bigger, if they've heard any of the feedback about engaging dps and so on. But we've had literally nothing. If they don't change anything and simply make Sage a SCH clone, AST a WHM clone and make raidwides on the last boss of each Savage tier hit hard while everything else hits like wet noodles, what's the point?

[technole]

E12S Terminal enrage isn't interesting at-all, it's just dependent on the party hitting their debuffs to help the healers. It's been the same story for years with A8S, O4S, E4S. "screw the healers doing damage, just heal mechanics". Lame way to finish fights.

If you go by what they did to aiming jobs is they pulled raid buffs from Machinist and Bard initially and gave them to Dancer. They won't be clones, not even the tanks are clones. Another healer will probably have no raid buff or be the selfish healer like White Mage is today. Astro has the most to lose with it's heavy buff toolkit, and Noct sect. Scholar less so, but Chain fits it's role as a strategist.

There is a lot ways they can go with a healer reset, it's a lot more than shield or die things. There are already several mechanics that requires more than one heal to survive today, or sequences of things that have to be executed or it's a wipe. But the creativeness around that is there many ways to push that boundary aside from Succor, or another. Whether phases of individualized healing or people die, it used to be the thing in ARR. Dispels in A3S and TEA were ok, but that was done before. Tighter windows for healing is something they always save for savage/ultimates to separate the casual healers. T

The only hints so far is they upped the target for savage healing, much more at minimum ilvl, but that's really all they can do with the toolkits in the 5.x series. With a redesigned meta in 6.0 they can put more limits on oGCD healing, change the skills completely, and tailor more mechanics around it. Way easier when you can design all of it at once versus two years into an expansion.

[Mimilu]

"You need a shield to live" doesn't suddenly make healing exciting, which is why the pure/shield divide seems to be going down the wrong track. It just adds a bland necessity that restricts job comps a bit.

For me, I think the pure vs shield dichotomy is kind of too shallow to really allow for more interesting healers.
Instead, I think they could go further/more general and split healers into Proactive vs Reactive.
Proactive healers would set things up before damage is done (shields, damage down buffs/debuffs, heal bombs) while Reactive would heal after damage is done (burst heals, regens, drain heals).
This would at least give them more things they could design a healer around other then if it can place shields or has higher burst and/or regens. :B

[ItMe]

Proactive vs Reactive.

That's a really neat idea.
I think that would at least help the healers click better conceptually at least.

[Crushnight]

I generally have no hope anything meaningful will happen to healer design or to content design to warrant their current healing approach.

All tanks have gap closer, never incorporated into fight design
All tanks have silence, barely used in fight design
All tanks have stun, one fight in ShB wants that stun

Ranged dps have Bind, heavy, and silence, only silence is ever considered and that is usually filled by the tank

All Healers have sleep now, only the last role quest even wants it(really worth taking that from Whm allowing them to have something more unique to them >_>).

They set up stuff that could make fights more interesting and just never work around these things, making the tools virtually useless outside of PoTD/HoH and solo shinagens. That Sage reveal trailer is just shockingly bad especially when you compare it to Reaper reveal trailer.

[Lyth]

Let's be real. The only Healer reveal video that could ever top the Reaper reveal would involve a Lalafell, with an oversized backpack, lobbing potions at their teammates. Gundam newtype SCH 2.0 Alphinaud never stood a chance.

I don't think that a proactive/reactive dichotomy really works in a game like FFXIV, where everything is scripted down to the millisecond.

[Liam_Harper]

Instead, I think they could go further/more general and split healers into Proactive vs Reactive.

Indeed, there's a lot of good ideas they could work with really, but what concerns me is if they'd had any big plans to shake up healing design or had heard our feedback, we should have heard something a long time ago. They'd want to reassure us and give us hints of what's to come. We wouldn't be getting things like "ED is nerfed and Succor costs less now, please heal moar" or "we hear you and increased raid damage" when everything below e12s requires less healing than ever before.

Shield healing could be made interesting, but tacking 2 dps buttons, a Succor and Adlo clone onto Sage and calling it a day would be miserable. A lot of Endwalker is probably made by now and once it's released we're stuck for 2 years. They rework classes sometimes but generally not an entire role. Where is the dev communication?

[Acece]

Just design all 4 healers to have different ways of dealing dps weather is buff/debuffs or just raw dps, also give each healer a different dps rotation to make it more obvious.

They'll probably going to make sage like sch but either worse or better depending if they have to sacrifice dps to shield/heal lol.

[Mimilu]

Let's be real. The only Healer reveal video that could ever top the Reaper reveal would involve a Lalafell, with an oversized backpack, lobbing potions at their teammates. Gundam newtype SCH 2.0 Alphinaud never stood a chance.

They really kind of screwed themselves over by teasing a Chemist-like job during the MSQ and then not really delivering (unless Sage is going to surprise use with some kind of Mix mechanic).

I don't think that a proactive/reactive dichotomy really works in a game like FFXIV, where everything is scripted down to the millisecond.

XIV's always had this dichotomy to a certain extent but it was most prevalent in ARR and got muddied as we progressed through the expansions with things like having to balance both of AST's sects, SCH getting more and more reactive heals, their shields getting nerfed with either lowered/split potencies and/or higher MP cost and their fairies getting homogenized, and WHM and Diurnal!AST getting their own mitigation oGCDs.
I think that now that there's going to be 2 of each type of healer (proactive and reactive) and that they're balancing the more high-end content around having one of each, they should focus on differentiating the two styles.

[GrimGale]

Also consider what the trailer shows us: Big pew pew lasers hurting an enemy. They could have shown a shield absorbing the attack against Alisae, they could have showed a massive heal healing both a weakened WoL and Alisae, they could have shown any "utility" part of the Sage's kit. But no, the healer part of sage is a "place your hand here and glow" thingy that could have been done by any other class with a potion.

The big eye catching moment for sage is the lasers, honestly sage could have been a caster dps at this point. Nothing about it is about healing or protecting.