Healers need an overhaul

[UkcsAlias]

An approach where everything is imbalanced but fun is shown by several games to not only be viable but much more fun than the current status of ff14. Jobs were at their heights in HW and SB depending on the individual job when jobs were imbalanced but still fun and encounter design still encouraged "weaker" jobs over stronger ones in some instances. That is why its the golden age of job design .....

This is only the case when in low to high skill levels the balance is somewhat similar. And only the extremely skilled would be able to exploit the true strenght. Otherwise even for the relatively high skilled games, a lot of jobs will already be called useless. People always look at a skill level above them for building a meta, as that shows them there is room for improvement.

Providing that even the weaker jobs are still viable, then its fine. Pvp shows this, not every job is equal but they are all unique and fun and a team of weaker jobs can still flatten a supposed stronger one with player skill.

PvP is a completely diffirent aspect with a diffirent balance approach. A lot of things you can do to players are impossible in PvE, and a lot of PvE aspects do not show in PvP. In most PvP games its still individual skill that beats class balance, and usualy simpler jobs (that normaly are weaker) end up being stronger because of that simplicity.

if ast does get its cards back in 6.2, then that will bring a lot of players back to the job. Because it was fun and useful in contrast to what parsers screech who care only about their E-peens

Any measurement tool is horrible at nuances, and on that just causes people to blame each other (hence i think its good that its bannable). And especialy in mid/high to low skill ranges such information is usualy incomplete. The best measurement is still looking at such players. And from experience, we can say that in such skill level no player can properly do that. But its usualy that players who lack such knowledge are still using such tools and blindly looking at it to state when a healer did good or bad. The most simple example: measuring the dps of a healer is a garbage metric. If the tank is taking excessive damage, the healer has to heal that and reduce the dps that way, but at the same time, that damage taking can be used to allow the DPSs to deal even more damage with AoE's.

Sadly i cant comment on the cards system as i joined ffxiv too late for that. But i am quite well aware of balance potential, and what simplification sometimes can do. In the current system however i generaly just ignore the exact cart and only just apply it in the way of 'it boosts some damage, so a dps gets it' (you only need to look for a few cards), and sometimes looking at the sun/moon/star-icons to optimize those by rerolling a card. I can imagine this being more complex to also being more rewarding.