Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Laphicet]

I personally suggest for anyone wanting to have some good old heal fun to revisit some old content on minimum item level no echo. For example Shinryu. - there is a mechanic where you needed to heal the dragon heads that were linked to your teammates. Felt pretty cool mechanic to me. Would be great if they implemented something like that in majority of the content. That felt pretty creative to me.

So why is it okay to force healers to have to run minimum ILVL or otherwise gimp themselves in order to actually use most of their kit, when tanks and DPS get to use most of their kits even in casual content AND EVEN DURING STORY INSTANCES. I shouldn't have to go out of my way to handicap myself in order to "have fun".

[technole]

So why is it okay to force healers to have to run minimum ILVL or otherwise gimp themselves in order to actually use most of their kit, when tanks and DPS get to use most of their kits even in casual content AND EVEN DURING STORY INSTANCES. I shouldn't have to go out of my way to handicap myself in order to "have fun".

Their scaling from minimum ilevel to even just tome-level is almost too high for any content in the game.

I get why YoshiP said ultimate because it's only tweaked to one ilevel, having BiS or max available ilevel at the time.

[Liam_Harper]

Unfortunately, there are people who like the dumbed down, braindead state of healers right now. So those voices will affirm their assertion that their decisions are good ones.

It's frustrating because those people only like the current state of healers because it's easy. Low effort and same reward. They don't like it because it's well designed, engaging, interesting or because they want to master it. They are the type of players who want to put in the bare minimum.

It's also worrying because somewhere down the line the devs might easily apply this to dps and tanks. SMN was very likely the first step towards that to test the waters. The result of it was SMN popularity spiked. There is literally no reason for a development team that favors accessibility over fun not to apply this to more jobs down the line, given how successful it looks on paper.

I personally suggest for anyone wanting to have some good old heal fun to revisit some old content on minimum item level no echo. For example Shinryu. - there is a mechanic where you needed to heal the dragon heads that were linked to your teammates. Felt pretty cool mechanic to me. Would be great if they implemented something like that in majority of the content. That felt pretty creative to me.

Miv ilv no echo does not increase the frequency of raid damage. Who cares if raidwides hit slightly harder when you have 30-60 sec downtime to handle it.

[shao32]

It's also worrying because somewhere down the line the devs might easily apply this to dps and tanks...

Well actually tanks has suffered the same fate Healers did, just less noticeable due tanks having more DPS skills, just look at DRK a tank who use to have an engaging gameplay downgraded to be just a mere spam all your stuff on burst and spend 45s of you 60s gameplay loop doing nothing but 1 2 3 soul eater combo.

Combats don't help either when there is little tank busters to dealt with making mitigation management almost inexistent, it's a same that Yoship don't believe that tanks and healer should have more engaging experience and instead they should be complete oversimplified so non-Tank/Healer mains can pick them up casually anytime at the cost of not allowing the players who want to invest on the roles had fun with a rewarding gameplay experience like if you was a DPS main.

[Reiryuu]

Well actually tanks has suffered the same fate Healers did, just less noticeable due tanks having more DPS skills, just look at DRK a tank who use to have an engaging gameplay downgraded to be just a mere spam all your stuff on burst and spend 45s of you 60s gameplay loop doing nothing but 1 2 3 soul eater combo.

Tanks don't have it nearly as bad as healers. At least not right now. At least there's stuff to do on a tank and there's an actual rotation with a gauge that actually allows you to do more stuff whether you really *need* to or not. For healers especially as ilvl goes up and content gets older, healer gameplay suffers because most of our stuff heals... and no one really needs much healing as those factors kick in.

[shao32]

Tanks don't have it nearly as bad as healers. At least not right now. At least there's stuff to do on a tank and there's an actual rotation with a gauge that actually allows you to do more stuff whether you really *need* to or not. For healers especially as ilvl goes up and content gets older, healer gameplay suffers because most of our stuff heals... and no one really needs much healing as those factors kick in.

I didn't say they are as bad as Healers just they had suffered the same treatment from the dev team, Healers are actually bad yeah but we have tanks like DRK wich is almost at the same level of oversimplicity of the healers, like really Darkside gauge is totally useless.

Both roles are in the same boat wich seems like they are being made for ppl who don't wanna play the roles instead for those who want to and yes sadly Healers are in the bottom of that boat.

[Semirhage]

snip

Which healers shlump down into dead last place in role balance with regularity? Oh it's just WHM? Gosh, maybe it has something to do with a design direction that says you're artificially stonewalled against doing more than one thing at a time, and you can't even be a standout at that one thing. Yeah I know you think it needs improvement. I think this trashfire of design doesn't stand up to its peers in most scenarios by definition, and the last place throne has a WHM butt indentation for fundamental design reasons that aren't an accident. BLM is the "simple" mage. It doesn't do much outside damage. It has a history of being uncomplicated, straightforward. And yet somehow playing it is engaging, mastery is tricky, it doesn't spend all its time mashing 111111111, and it sees the meta crown quite a bit. Because Yoshi mains it.

I'm down to lazily repeating "111111111" because my days of writing essays on why healing lilies were an awful idea are much less frequent than they used to be. I don't *have* improvement suggestions anymore. They've been nerfing my favorite job aesthetic into lobotomy and stupidity without cease for almost seven years now. Ever since they buffed the sense out of AST (while WHM ran out of MP doing its basic rota...oh how history repeats) back in 3.4 it's been a swirl around the toilet bowl. The Stormblood WHM design was objectively terrible, and they didn't care until the complaints reached an expansion drop. I tried a solo duty in Shadowbringers as WHM, and Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare made me want to gouge my eyes out.

I boil most of my complaints down to "111111111" because it's straightforward. Everyone with two neurons to rub together knows what it's aiming at. And the only rebuttal I get is that it's "lazy" or "unconstructive". Good? I'm utterly uninterested in debating the finer gameplay intricacies of smashing Glare hundreds of times during an instance like a cavebeast. Why offer some small tweak they could apply to make it play acceptably? It doesn't matter if I put an hour of work in or ten. Yoshi will blow a raspberry at anything if it gets mentioned at all. "Nope, anything more than Glare spamming is too scary" has been the firm message for a long time. So screw it, I'll spend as much effort carefully criticizing WHM's design as Square spends designing it: zero. Strap a dev to a chair and make them play through the MSQ as a healer. It's bad design. I'm equally uninterested in the devil's advocacy that you *technically* press Tetra once a minute so it's not all 1111111111. Just as I'm uninterested in your boring deflection about blue parses. Don't pretend like even most grey parses don't press Glare an embarrassing number of times in a given instance.

I still see "fix healers....but also not that much, and also what do you expect?"

Entertaining. Gameplay. What a wild concept, I must be a maniac.

[Deceptus]

I think overall, the most glaring thing, is that we were explicitly told in Stormblood that we didn't get a new Healer because the FFXIV Devs needed to "work on healers and get them in a better place" (paraphrasing). This was repeated for Shadowbringers.

What was the result of all that work? Extremely simplified and homogenized gameplay across the entire Healer role to the point of pressing the exact same two buttons from Lvl 4 to Lvl 90, 75% of the time or more.

Is this really the best they could offer or come up with?

Is the creativity well that empty for Healers?

[Sebazy]

My logs have historically been bad at the best of times and my p4s part 1 logs are particularly bad.

A big fat 0 percentile on AST on one of my runs still had me pressing that 1 key 99 times.

Compelling gameplay right there

[SeverianLyonesse]

Entertaining. Gameplay. What a wild concept, I must be a maniac.

Thing is, with WHM the needed changes are kind of painfully obvious compared to the other healers.

Just bring back Stone and Aero spells alongside Glare and Dia, maybe add a water spell. No gimmicks, just let the purest healer also be the purest DPS with two DoTs and two or three straight-up damage bombs. If BLM gets to have weird arcane stuff like Scathe, Foul, and Xeno on top of Fire/Ice/Lightning, I don't see why WHM shouldn't be allowed to have Earth/Wind/Water spells on top of holy spells.