Benchmark trailer

[Semirhage]

If the devs think the number of abilities healers have for dealing damage is the cause of them using said abilities so often, they've got support class game design all wrong.

"Healers spend too much time doing damage and not enough healing" is a consequence of low outgoing damage. Healers failing to keep the party alive and tunnel visioning on damage is a consequence of either being unskilled at healing, making a mistake, zoning out because the damage dealing is just so incredibly boring, or some combination of the three.

The current state of healers is down to a confluence of mindsets. Some of the most important are:
- Healing Should Be Easy So Sprouts Aren't Scared (which makes healing a snooze)
- Healers Should Heal Only And Nothing Else (which makes damage dealing a snooze, because apparently making damage kits boring is how you discourage using them?)
- Expecting Healers To Do Damage Is A Stain On The BadWrongEvil Community (which encourages newbie healers to never improve, which in turn empowers the idea that keeping healers simple and boring is a Good Thing That The Devs Want)

Those three mindsets keep dragging the healing role into the trashfire that it keeps returning to. Even when they make baby steps out of it, it just comes right back again. You don't catch the DPS forums making faces at the idea that they should, shock and horror, use Feint, or Addle, or buff the party, because DPS Should Deal Damage Only And Nothing Else.

[Lalatuni]

I agree completely. Imo the worst thing these changes have done is make playing efficiently and playing fun diametrically opposed to each other. Lilies on WHM, Aetherflow gutting attempts on SCH, it's seems like the devs and players who support them want to say "you aren't here to play well, yourre here to facilitate other ppls fun" like a healbot quest npc.

[ty_taurus]

If the devs think the number of abilities healers have for dealing damage is the cause of them using said abilities so often, they've got support class game design all wrong.

"Healers spend too much time doing damage and not enough healing" is a consequence of low outgoing damage. Healers failing to keep the party alive and tunnel visioning on damage is a consequence of either being unskilled at healing, making a mistake, zoning out because the damage dealing is just so incredibly boring, or some combination of the three.

The current state of healers is down to a confluence of mindsets. Some of the most important are:
- Healing Should Be Easy So Sprouts Aren't Scared (which makes healing a snooze)
- Healers Should Heal Only And Nothing Else (which makes damage dealing a snooze, because apparently making damage kits boring is how you discourage using them?)
- Expecting Healers To Do Damage Is A Stain On The BadWrongEvil Community (which encourages newbie healers to never improve, which in turn empowers the idea that keeping healers simple and boring is a Good Thing That The Devs Want)

Those three mindsets keep dragging the healing role into the trashfire that it keeps returning to. Even when they make baby steps out of it, it just comes right back again. You don't catch the DPS forums making faces at the idea that they should, shock and horror, use Feint, or Addle, or buff the party, because DPS Should Deal Damage Only And Nothing Else.

Something else I don't understand is why we can't also break healers down into how easy it is for them heal? Like one thing about ARR's WHM and SCH was that SCHs had a much harder time healing. We needed to manage our damage reductions and actually use our shields because our only real way to power heal the party was through succor spam. Meanwhile WHMs had a much easier time with Cure III and Medica II to make it very easy for them to respond to heavy damage with equally heavy healing. What's wrong with having some more complex healers for players that want that? Why does every healer NEED to appeal to every healer player? As long as the numbers are balanced at the end of the day, who not add some variety in how challenging different healers are? It seems to not be a problem for DPS players to have more complex DPS than others.

[Semirhage]

Something else I don't understand is why we can't also break healers down into how easy it is for them heal? Like one thing about ARR's WHM and SCH was that SCHs had a much harder time healing. We needed to manage our damage reductions and actually use our shields because our only real way to power heal the party was through succor spam. Meanwhile WHMs had a much easier time with Cure III and Medica II to make it very easy for them to respond to heavy damage with equally heavy healing. What's wrong with having some more complex healers for players that want that? Why does every healer NEED to appeal to every healer player? As long as the numbers are balanced at the end of the day, who not add some variety in how challenging different healers are? It seems to not be a problem for DPS players to have more complex DPS than others.

I don't disagree, but there are two historical things that pose an issue with that. Not that *I* have a problem with addressing those things, but we've seen them play out in how healer design has worked over the past 6ish years.
1) The "complicated" healers tend to...not be happy when the "simple" healer has equivalent output. Rabble rabble "we should have more output for being more complex" rabble rabble, which totally ignores the fact that, if designed this way, what you end up with isn't simple vs complex; you get novice intro class vs directly superior upgrades. I've seen this argument break out basically every time Babby's First WHM gets anywhere close to the damage output AST and SCH have. That's the rub though. If WHM has nothing going for it other than direct healing and damage, and it doesn't uniquely shine at either one of them, then it's just dead weight.
2) Historically, for WHM at least, "simple" hasn't just been a DPS complexity thing. It's lacked anything engaging to do outside spamming Stone and basic b*tch heals that don't really build to anything, maybe the occasional utility oGCD with a long cooldown, often from the role system. There's simple, and then there's simple. WHM's unbelievably simplistic design drags the entire role down when you factor in Squeenix's need to keep the jobs balanced. When your competition can regen, and do fantastic personal damage, and shield, and reduce incoming damage, and buff party damage, and buff party speed, and debuff the boss, and move really easily, and weave without difficulty, and their downside is that they can bring the entire party from empty to full with three twitches of their fingers instead of two, then the healer that can do only the first two things reliably, and maybe the second two every now and then has a really hard time keeping up in the grand scheme of things.

Complexity can be a sliding scale. Squeenix has historically screwed the pooch by making it -very- black and white on healers. If we just go back to the Wonder Twins plus Level 90 Conjurer, expect the same gross imbalances of the past to come back. I'm so tired of WHM being the "baby healer" just because the world outside Cure and Stone is scary.

[Dearche]

Something else I don't understand is why we can't also break healers down into how easy it is for them heal? Like one thing about ARR's WHM and SCH was that SCHs had a much harder time healing. We needed to manage our damage reductions and actually use our shields because our only real way to power heal the party was through succor spam. Meanwhile WHMs had a much easier time with Cure III and Medica II to make it very easy for them to respond to heavy damage with equally heavy healing. What's wrong with having some more complex healers for players that want that? Why does every healer NEED to appeal to every healer player? As long as the numbers are balanced at the end of the day, who not add some variety in how challenging different healers are? It seems to not be a problem for DPS players to have more complex DPS than others.

THIS.IS.THE.PROBLEM.RIGHT.HERE!

SE goes out of their way to make Gunbreaker, a tank for DPS players that's both fun, active, and busy, while in the same expac, gutted EVERY.SINGLE.HEALER! There's been no attempt at making any of the healers interesting, instead just consolidating them and making them all identical aside from their signature differences.

SE's proven than they can do it as long as they're motivated, but it feels like while they can scape a little bit of motivation for tanks (seeing as how badly they treated WAR and DRK), they couldn't be arsed in the slightest for healers.

I don't like to say that WHM should be simple and boring for the sake of ease of play, but if it means that we can have nice, complex, dynamic, and engaging healer jobs, then it's a trade I'd be more than willing to do. Though admitedly, I've never liked WHM so I'm pretty biased there, but WHM is the only healer you get before level 30, sadly enough.

I don't disagree, but there are two historical things that pose an issue with that. Not that *I* have a problem with addressing those things, but we've seen them play out in how healer design has worked over the past 6ish years.
1) ...
2) ...

For you two cases, how would you feel if WHM was more set up so that the difficulty came from pulling out maximum healing while doing mechanics? The end result would vary wildly admittedly, but if, like now but on a better designed skill set, the difficulty doesn't come from spamming attack spells on a striking dummy, but the loss of uptime from movement, with limited ways to gain free movement (like swiftcast and stuff)? The base job would be easy to do well in, but the moment you started to do any remotely difficult content, you'd quickly start dropping damage until you learned to get better at it?

[Semirhage]

For you two cases, how would you feel if WHM was more set up so that the difficulty came from pulling out maximum healing while doing mechanics? The end result would vary wildly admittedly, but if, like now but on a better designed skill set, the difficulty doesn't come from spamming attack spells on a striking dummy, but the loss of uptime from movement, with limited ways to gain free movement (like swiftcast and stuff)? The base job would be easy to do well in, but the moment you started to do any remotely difficult content, you'd quickly start dropping damage until you learned to get better at it?

I'd hesitate to make "movement" an explicit weakness. It's how basically every single mechanic in XIV works. You have to move somewhere to dodge a thing. Movement being an explicit WHM weakness is one of the myriad things that's made it such a chore to play in the past. When you have two classes, and one of them has a fake "weakness" that the game never bothers to touch on, and the other has a crippling weakness that the game picks at all the time, then you've wrenched the disparity between those classes pretty wide. WHM has historically had weaknesses that actually come up all the time in this game. AST and SCH haven't, not since early Heavensward for AST. Now, that's not necessarily a problem if you compensate for that disparity elsewhere, but from what I've seen of how Squeenix designs things, they tend to treat weaknesses as if they were all equivalent, wash their hands and call it a day. Even Black Mage, the iconic immobile turret of mages, has received a truckload of movement tools because it's such a bullsh*t thing to do to a class in this game of heavy movement requirements.

I don't like to say that WHM should be simple and boring for the sake of ease of play, but if it means that we can have nice, complex, dynamic, and engaging healer jobs, then it's a trade I'd be more than willing to do. Though admitedly, I've never liked WHM so I'm pretty biased there, but WHM is the only healer you get before level 30, sadly enough.

Of course you're willing, you're a Scholar main. I've seen AST and SCH mains perfectly happy to sacrifice WHM on the complexity altar if it allows them to be OP again. Nevermind the fact that the DPS casters don't suffer from this problem, which shows we don't actually need to have an ankle-height skill ceiling baby class in order to keep the role healthy. I'll counter with this admittedly facetious question: How would you feel if the simplistic entry-level job was Scholar, and the three other healers got to enjoy complexity as a consequence of that? Make the fairy heals 200 real potency, delete most of the kit, whittle it down to Succor, Adlo, Lustrate, Bio, and Broil. Design finished. Beginner healers would be too intimidated by things as complicated as Excog after all.

[Dearche]

Even Black Mage, the iconic immobile turret of mages, has received a truckload of movement tools because it's such a bullsh*t thing to do to a class in this game of heavy movement requirements.

I suppose this is really the evidence of the disparity when it comes to attention and concessions that SE is willing to put into the DPS vs Healers. Agreed that movement's always been an issue for WHM and the game works to make WHM suffer almost deliberately because of it. Unfortunately, I'm just not able to come up with things to differentiate WHM without gutting what's little that's left of its job identity.

Of course you're willing, you're a Scholar main. I've seen AST and SCH mains perfectly happy to sacrifice WHM on the complexity altar if it allows them to be OP again. Nevermind the fact that the DPS casters don't suffer from this problem, which shows we don't actually need to have an ankle-height skill ceiling baby class in order to keep the role healthy. I'll counter with this admittedly facetious question: How would you feel if the simplistic entry-level job was Scholar, and the three other healers got to enjoy complexity as a consequence of that? Make the fairy heals 200 real potency, delete most of the kit, whittle it down to Succor, Adlo, Lustrate, Bio, and Broil. Design finished. Beginner healers would be too intimidated by things as complicated as Excog after all.

I already admitted that I am biased in regards to that opinion, but I do think that there should be at least one healer that is accessible to starting players that is easy to play even in the endgame, even if it's no longer true in extreme and savage.

As much as I would hate it, I would accept SCH being turned into the one button boring healer if SE did two things at the same time. The first is make SCH into it's own class that can be picked at character creation (maybe reverse ACN so that it's a healer instead of DPS if not straight out just create a new starting class for SCH). Second would be to make both AST and SGE into complex, fun, and interesting jobs to play with unique healing styles, not just a single gimmick to separate them like WAR and DRK.

If we could get those two things, while I'd cringe pretty badly, losing SCH's old complexity and interesting gameplay forever would be a sacrifice I'd be willing to make.

As much as I love SCH, I'm not that adverse to leaving it behind for greener pastures. The problem is that the only actually green pasture I see nowadays is all marked with red icons. I used to like WAR and DRK on the side, but now both of them have been gutted just like the healers, and GNB hasn't been doing it for me for some reason.

[Semirhage]

the only actually green pasture I see nowadays is all marked with red icons.

This is correct, and why I've swapped to DPS this expansion. You not only feel like you have a real impact on your party's performance, but your job is actually fun to play. And perhaps even more importantly, becomes more fun to play the better you get at playing it.

Reiterating here what I've said elsewhere. To oversimplify the reason I think healers are as boring as they are in this expansion: Two of the axioms job design operates by are "WHM has to suck" and "All comps have to be viable". If both must be true, then in order to make Suck competitive with non-Suck, you have to make the non-Suck jobs suck. That's the direction we were always headed since Stormblood. There's a weird world WHM operates in where it's got all these seemingly holy writ stupid rules that shackle its job design. It can't have utility. It can't be complex. It has to be newbie-friendly. It has to be so easy to understand that a level 30 Monk could figure out its 80 kit. It can't shield too much, that's not its identity. It can't buff, that's not its identity. It can't do too much personal damage, that'd scare the DPS. It can't have Proshell exclusivity, that might make it "maaaaaaandatory". It can't have Graniteskin, that would be "tooooooooo poooooowerful". It can't have decision making, that's too frustrating for new players.

I've always been of the mind, why don't we just...not do those things? Perhaps it could have an identity that isn't pinned down by all of these things that it's not. Maybe it could be designed in a way that's fun and interesting, where you could technically spam Medica in easy content but you could juggle some buff systems, make some decisions, figure out cool ways to level up my understanding of the class like using Swiftcast to fish for procs on Red Mage that don't actually hurt me if I don't know about them, but can drastically improve my output if I do? Squeeze a bit of frigging fun out of the role. No more of these entirely (or in Scholar's case, almost entirely) passive job gauges. Get a job designer who understands how this game's combat system works and actually likes playing healers. No more of this job design from people who clearly main DPS and design healers like a DPS main who doesn't really care about healing past "keeps me alive".

[ty_taurus]

Of course you're willing, you're a Scholar main. I've seen AST and SCH mains perfectly happy to sacrifice WHM on the complexity altar if it allows them to be OP again. Nevermind the fact that the DPS casters don't suffer from this problem, which shows we don't actually need to have an ankle-height skill ceiling baby class in order to keep the role healthy. I'll counter with this admittedly facetious question: How would you feel if the simplistic entry-level job was Scholar, and the three other healers got to enjoy complexity as a consequence of that? Make the fairy heals 200 real potency, delete most of the kit, whittle it down to Succor, Adlo, Lustrate, Bio, and Broil. Design finished. Beginner healers would be too intimidated by things as complicated as Excog after all.

I truly don't believe complexity must equate to performance, nor do I think having an easy-to-play healer means that WHM cannot be complex. The new lily system ShB introduced is already the perfect foundation necessary to create a rewarding healer that has options for complexity, but a much higher safety net.

First and foremost, I believe complexity should come at the cost of DPS contribution regarding healers. How well or not-so-well you perform should directly hit your personal DPS and support contributions, and not so much your ability to heal. For example, I would love to reevaluate SCH's resources to make the faerie gauge your resource for OGCD heals and your Aetherflow your resource for DPS (SE won't do this, but I think it would really help clean up how SCH plays). Aetherflow should be generated in excess from proper use of barriers and support tools that requires planning and understanding of fights to maximize your Aetherflow gains and thus maximize your DPS.

Meanwhile, WHM should get access to more ways they can generate lilies and nourish the blood lily, but still have access to Solace and Rapture, meaning a certain amount of your DPS is practically guaranteed on a casual scale as healing directly rewards you with DPS forgiveness. There's a higher skill ceiling for how you nourish the blood lily outside of your normal lily gains, but a certain amount of it is given to you simply from healing. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling. That's the key. It's easier said then done, of course, but that is a combat designer's job after all.