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

[ASkellington]

Again, I'll shill GW2. Hell, there's even a tank/healer hybrid where you juggle mitigation and healing or another that has you focus on healing and, when there's no healing, plenty of buff manipulations because the devs aren't as allergic to status effects as these are.

Admittedly, healers are more 'support' and labeled as such rather than pure healers, so still not friendly to those who think it should go the way of sylphies.

WoW is... I'm cautiously optimistic. When the purchase by MSoft goes through, it might get better? The company has expressed interest in purging much of the studio and replace it to clean it of it's previous issues. Rumors of a firing list is even circulating. So maybe that down the road?

GW2 I've tried and... while I do like it I also don't and have issues with it.

I'll think about giving it a try again, but I really hate that they refuse to support the playstyle I want to go for.

And frankly from what I've seen, its PvP is better than its PvE.

WoW... nah. They've burned that bridge when they gutted my Shamrock. I miss my totems and water shield too much to come back. Thanks for the suggestions though! I'll keep on the lookout.

[Semirhage]

-snip-

I completely understand this position, and I know that's likely where the role would head if healers went in a good direction. I think it's total bullshit that WHM should be sacrificed on the Sylphie altar of bad, boring gameplay because Won't Somebody Think Of The People Who Refuse To Ever Improve, but I know that's where it's always gonna stay.

I've just also always taken umbrage at these two opinions when stated together, because it's nakedly hypocritical. If you're going to complain that current healer design is boring and insulting, and then turn around and say "oh but WHM should be left in the state I just spent the last twenty minutes bitching was boring and insulting", well. Awesome. So boring and awful WHM is how things *should* be then, I suppose.

I also object to this because this state of affairs is exactly where we were before all this bullshit started. WHM was the boring crap baby healer with zero complexity, and the other two were overpowered good-at-everything monsters clowning all over it in strength (if not popularity). Unfortunately, Square seems to think they can have their cake and eat it too- they want healers accessible and power-balanced, and that need to power balance them is going to bite the role in the butt if you have a designated paste-eater healer. In that case, you're either going to get the jobs power-balanced, in which case the "smart" jobs are going to piss and whine and kick and scream that they "deserve" to be stronger because they're better, or you're going to end up with WHM both garbage to play and with garbage output. And Square will see that, and perhaps think it's time to lobotomize the other healers yet again... I think the role needs a redesign, whether Square is too lazy to do it or not. The healers are going to suck until it does.

TL;DR I think giving all four healers good design with a high skill ceiling should be possible, and wanting to dumpstercan WHM so the other three can rise to their glory days again is a common opinion I oppose utterly. No, the Sylphies don't "need" a Glaremage. They weren't doing any damage anyway.

I like WHM's aesthetic, and I'm allowed to like it. It started with some promise in ARR and, despite some design choices I thought were BS, continued that into Heavensward. It's been constantly nerfed, lobotomized, and spat on ever since then. It's my baby, and I'm so, so tired of hearing the community think leaving it behind in the crap pile is a good idea as some sort of compromise for making the other three fun again.

[QooEr]

TL;DR I think giving all four healers good design with a high skill ceiling should be possible, and wanting to dumpstercan WHM so the other three can rise to their glory days again is a common opinion I oppose utterly. No, the Sylphies don't "need" a Glaremage. They weren't doing any damage anyway.

this is pretty much what i think it boils down to. white mage CAN be simple... on the HEALING side, which is what ultimately matters for actual accessibility for clearing content.


not to mention, glare spam might be "accessible", but by lowering the bar that much then every single other job in the game would be mount everest in comparison. is SMN linear algebra? is PLD multivariable calculus? is SAM set theory? is BLM quantum physics? like... what? all of these jobs are accessible. theres a difference between accessible for humans and accessible for pecking bird toys.

[KurohNeko]

This is effectively what the lead designer of this game told Healers in the latest live letter.

Consider if he had said that about your role (tank / dps) for a second and how you would feel.

Forget the leveling experience, it doesn't matter.

Forget dungeons up to 90, they don't matter.

Forget normal raids, EX's, and Savage, they don't matter.

If you want your job to be engaging, play Ultimate, the hardest content in the game that only a few percentage of actual players do.

Engagement shouldn't be either 0% or 100%. It shouldn't be either braindead easy in 95% of content or pull your hair out in the hardest thing the game offers.

Edit:

Yoshi-P's statement is about as tone deaf as the Lead Designer of WoW flat out saying they didn't want players playing a certain DPS spec. (Language warning)

Background: Instead of properly balancing a certain DPS spec, the WoW devs nuked it to the ground so people would play other things.

Sound familiar?

Healing in FF14 is quite broken. "We don't want pure healers like other MMO's for healers to do DPS" ok what are the DPS options? "Mash two buttons again and again." "More DPS buttons? You're a healer." Ok what are the healing options? "Bunch of buttons but pretty pointless when every class can pretty much heal itself."

Basically healers are worthless outside of savage and ultimate.

[Rilifane]

this is pretty much what i think it boils down to. white mage CAN be simple... on the HEALING side, which is what ultimately matters for actual accessibility for clearing content.


not to mention, glare spam might be "accessible", but by lowering the bar that much then every single other job in the game would be mount everest in comparison. is SMN linear algebra? is PLD multivariable calculus? is SAM set theory? is BLM quantum physics? like... what? all of these jobs are accessible. theres a difference between accessible for humans and accessible for pecking bird toys.

People fail to realize that a healer is made of both the healing side and the dps side and the complexity of the dps side doesn't affect the accesibility of the healing side. But I constantly hear that WHM should be simple on the dps side from the same people that say healers should only focus on healing and keep everyone at full HP. It just makes no sense. They prefer to use Cure I over Glare, what does it matter for them if the dps kit is more engaging?
Having one healer that is more straightforward on the healing side and doesn't dip too deep into delayed heals, layering mitigation and requiring to plan ahead is nice. It doesn't even have to be WHM but it would work well with the theoretic class fantasy of being a powerhouse. Strong, impactful skills, quality over quantity, straightforward raw and bursty healing. A kit that isn't bloated with the same skill on a myriad of different cooldowns and some small flavour added here and there. Healing is and never will be the core part of healer gameplay but the kits can at least reflect the corresponding class fantasy.
And with the dps kit they should just go wild on all healers, no exceptions.

[BingleNingle]

I don't think I said one has to be a dumpstercan, I said we can't pretend there aren't players who are currently challenged or don't want more and that it's a devs job to balance that out with something that's still challenging for those who choose it, along with other jobs that are less straightforward.

If you're opposed to having something for people who aren't or don't desire to be at your level then you are exactly the complaining elitist people are raving about, midcore or not. It isn't just a game for us, and the problem now is that it isn't really a game for us even though it easily could be without gatekeeping across the board one way or another.

And honestly I think the most immediate problem is tanks. One of them does our job for us and the other just got the ability to do much the same. That's a design problem. Yes our gameplay is still boring with that fixed, but I don't think "casuals" are our enemy and we spend too much time being angry at some notion that things aren't challenging enough and end up conflating two separate, albeit connected problems.

Also can we stop implying people who don't want to do what we want to do are somehow deficient? I know these forums are only here for us to insult each other but it detracts from our argument and I don't really like belittling people I'm playing a game with unless they actively hurt me.

[SeverianLyonesse]

TL;DR I think giving all four healers good design with a high skill ceiling should be possible, and wanting to dumpstercan WHM so the other three can rise to their glory days again is a common opinion I oppose utterly. No, the Sylphies don't "need" a Glaremage. They weren't doing any damage anyway..

I think there's room for a middle ground between what Chair suggested and what you guys want for WHM.

Make WHM a "one-button combo" mage, just give it *multiple* one-button nukes. Add Quake and Tornado, maybe Flood. And maybe have a system that encourages using them in phases like BLM.

As you have said before, WHM can still be a simple job while not being totally bereft of engagement and strategy. It doesn't need fancy combos to accomplish that and imo would feel best just being an unsubtle bombardier like BLM is.

[Katori96]

Make WHM a "one-button combo" mage, just give it *multiple* one-button nukes. Add Quake and Tornado, maybe Flood. And maybe have a system that encourages using them in phases like BLM.

Would not mind a system where if u use a heal ur next DPS spell gets a potency increase for WHM tbh.

[Semirhage]

I don't think I said one has to be a dumpstercan, I said we can't pretend there aren't players who are currently challenged or don't want more and that it's a devs job to balance that out with something that's still challenging for those who choose it, along with other jobs that are less straightforward.

You didn't, but that's not something I was directing at you. Most of my post wasn't directed at you, but at the corpus of opinions I see all too often around WHM. You stick around WHM arguments for a while, and you start to get this...pattern. Yes, yes, WHM should be improved. But not like...*improved* improved. Slow down there, it can't be actually good or anything. Better, but be really careful; hit the brakes! We can't expect Square to make it actually fun or anything, just...a little better maybe.

It nearly always comes alongside a dissertation on why 1111111111111 is horrible, insulting game design, unworthy of being called gameplay at all. It's boring. It's awful. Nobody would want to play that way. And then as part of the dissertation's closing argument, there's always "anyway, here's why this design paradigm I just spent a ton of energy raging about is PERFECT for keeping on [a healer I don't play or care about]".

I'm the evil gatekeeper healer who's sick of the jobs getting dumbed down. There hasn't -been- any meeting halfway. Things get simplified, made even more impossible to fail. And we still have threads on the front page complaining that this game's story content is too hard. Seems like even though we've hit rock bottom with simplification, it's still too hard. I've been calling for raising the skill ceiling. I've even conceded long ago that Square doesn't want to increase healing requirements. Fine. Then give us downtime activities that are commensurate with a human level of brainpower, instead of 121111111111111111. But we can't even do that. Not because the people complaining about it can't do it, but because Square seems to think that its mere existence would be too scary. I'm pretty comfortable belittling people whose opinions have contributed to ruining my fun. WHM has been destroyed to appeal to people who didn't want to play it in the first place. I don't begrudge them that if they didn't ask for it, but I'm going to be direct with anyone who argues for keeping it in its ridiculous present state.

[Silver-Strider]

Would not mind a system where if u use a heal ur next DPS spell gets a potency increase for WHM tbh.

There was a suggestion to give Regen/Medica 2 a Thundercloud-esque proc for Dia. I still think it's a good idea.