Healer suggestion video

[Sarixis]

I'm curious how much digging you've done here and what your general thoughts are on many of the conversations that bounce around.

I only occasionally wallflower here since in my experience the conversation vacillates between thoughtful points and baseless complaining/opinions. The latter of which gets mentally exhausting very quickly just to even glance at. Outside of some of the discussion in this thread I'm not really browsing the forums much since I've been very burned out and dissatisfied with XIV lately.

One thing I will say for certain from observations is that everybody has their own idea for how the healers, and jobs in general should be, myself included. And from a designer's perspective while that kind of feedback is excellent, it is impossible to make a class design that will please everyone. Because I understand what happens behind the curtain, I know that while redesigns that are massive facelifts for a class are fun to make, they cost so much money and for a role the dev team is clearly not invested in improving, unlikely to ever happen.

[Silver-Strider]

I only occasionally wallflower here since in my experience the conversation vacillates between thoughtful points and baseless complaining/opinions. The latter of which gets mentally exhausting very quickly just to even glance at. Outside of some of the discussion in this thread I'm not really browsing the forums much since I've been very burned out and dissatisfied with XIV lately.

One thing I will say for certain from observations is that everybody has their own idea for how the healers, and jobs in general should be, myself included. And from a designer's perspective while that kind of feedback is excellent, it is impossible to make a class design that will please everyone. Because I understand what happens behind the curtain, I know that while redesigns that are massive facelifts for a class are fun to make, they cost so much money and for a role the dev team is clearly not invested in improving, unlikely to ever happen.

How difficult would you say it would be to repurpose a skill?
One of my suggestions for improving WHM is to repurpose old skills, like Protect, into low level versions of our current toolkit such as Aqua Veil.
Since I know there was at one point a PvP version of Protect that was single target and lasted only a few seconds, could they return that version of the skill into a PvE environment and have it upgrade into Aqua Veil in a fairly reasonable amount of time and effort or would it be too difficult?

[Sarixis]

How difficult would you say it would be to repurpose a skill?
One of my suggestions for improving WHM is to repurpose old skills, like Protect, into low level versions of our current toolkit such as Aqua Veil.
Since I know there was at one point a PvP version of Protect that was single target and lasted only a few seconds, could they return that version of the skill into a PvE environment and have it upgrade into Aqua Veil in a fairly reasonable amount of time and effort or would it be too difficult?

I consider repurposing assets from old skills an ideal approach and it was definitely a major aspect of my own videos. From a development perspective, you already have all of the visual assets for VFX (visual effects) and any animations needed so no more money or QA time is needed for that. You also save money because there's no concerns about having to do revisions on any visual assets which saves a lot of money. This just leaves programming time and necessary QA for that which definitely costs far less money and time than trying to make an entirely new ability from scratch. I'm also personally of the camp that finds it charming when games find creative ways to re-use assets.

[glamazon]

Why won’t they do something to implement this

[SpiralMask]

Why won’t they do something to implement this

devtime/mahnours, differences in creative direction ("we honestly have no idea what to do with scholar"), lack of interest, and the people actually able to suggest changes like these very likely have not seen this video (because it's an in-depth english youtube video--so big language barrier possible there--posted on their english forums, which are basically never visited by even the community managers, let alone the devs), or if they have, see the first two examples.

or if it was seen and understood by them, it may have been dismissed out of hand (like everything else related to healers) for being a healer-related piece of media/discussion.

[glamazon]

Iwoder if someone would translate

[RinaShinomiya]

Interesting video exploring why WHM might be the most popular healer despite its shortcomings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zMG-o_w0aM

tl;dw: This person believes WHM's popularity isn't because its straight forward or easy or powerful but because it's simply the only option during character creation and by the time you get more options you're supposed to either a) play a DPS for 30 levels (which the character creation doesn't really explain), b) downlevel 20 levels while the story is getting good c) you're already familiar with WHM for 70 levels by the time Sage rolls around, d) WHM doesn't teach about oGCD healing which other healers rely heavily on, making the transition in playstyles harder.

Regardless if they are correct or not i do think that giving only 1 healer option during character creation is bad game design. Scholar should be available at level 1 too and frankly SCH and SMN have so little in common with each other these days i wouldn't mind separating these into individual classes.

[Shurrikhan]

Interesting video exploring why WHM might be the most popular healer despite its shortcomings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zMG-o_w0aM

Welp, that's about the first XIV vid I've been in complete agreement with. : o

[Sarixis]

Now that I've finally had a healthy amount of time away from XIV and got to devote some creative energy to different topics for a bit; I'm finally working on a video discussing simple ways to help improve and vary combat for tanks and healers.

I'll temper expectations now because I don't really want to be put on an impossible to achieve podium:
1. These are just my own personal wants based on my own familiarity with the Final Fantasy series that wouldn't be unreasonable to implement.
2. Don't expect anything on the level of a complete overhaul. At that point it'd be more productive to sacrifice 7.0 for the purpose of switching the game to a brand new engine imo.

Hopefully you guys look forward to it. Honestly the time away has really helped me rethink how I want to approach suggesting improvements to jobs in general (namely that going forward I will only be approaching things from a content designer's perspective not a balance designer).

[SeverianLyonesse]

Interesting video exploring why WHM might be the most popular healer despite its shortcomings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zMG-o_w0aM

tl;dw: This person believes WHM's popularity isn't because its straight forward or easy or powerful but because it's simply the only option during character creation and by the time you get more options you're supposed to either a) play a DPS for 30 levels (which the character creation doesn't really explain), b) downlevel 20 levels while the story is getting good c) you're already familiar with WHM for 70 levels by the time Sage rolls around, d) WHM doesn't teach about oGCD healing which other healers rely heavily on, making the transition in playstyles harder.

Regardless if they are correct or not i do think that giving only 1 healer option during character creation is bad game design. Scholar should be available at level 1 too and frankly SCH and SMN have so little in common with each other these days i wouldn't mind separating these into individual classes.

Makes sense and is consistent with some of my casual healing friends.

Imo ARC should be re-classified as a healer. There are other changes they could make if they wanted, but given how ARC story plays out and the fact that we don't have healing options at character creation, this just makes too much sense.