Healers need an overhaul

[ty_taurus]

The game was worse in an imbalanced state than it is in its current one. The devs could not design meaningful support abilities without making them so overpowering that not having them made the game less fun.

Like, I get the desire for something better, and I get that imbalance placed in the right places makes the game more fun, but people want something that the dev team has shown no desire or even ability to actually do. Healing is frankly the only time that the devs have given us something that we didn't ask for. And even in this day and age, people still get unreasonably mad whenever there's an imbalanced thing that adds flavor to a job, like AST trivializing that one mechanic in P3S.

I would much rather have an imbalanced game that's fun than a perfectly balanced game that's boring, and I feel like healing has become a victim of the latter in most cases. Balance is important, but it shouldn't come at the cost of enjoyment. I don't care that the old AST cards were a balance disaster. I would play that AST over our current AST 100% of the time if given the opportunity. I don't give a shit that new AST has balanced cards that I can rely on when using them is boring and yet somehow convoluted.

[Nethereal]

people still get unreasonably mad whenever there's an imbalanced thing that adds flavor to a job, like AST trivializing that one mechanic in P3S.

That was a dev oversight, they've nerfed skills for less. E.G. Adlo crit interaction, Selene completely removed for TEA, expedient nerfed possibly because of DSRU.
If that skill ever has an interaction like that ever again I would be surprised. They're probably not going to nerf it til they invent another fight with a similar mechanic.

The main problem with that example is that everything needs to be OP for nothing to be OP AST being the only class able to do that was just frustrating.
If classes are better at each other at something that's fine it's a nice spice but if a class is simply better, that's it, that's not fun.

[Recon1o6]

The game was worse in an imbalanced state than it is in its current one. The devs could not design meaningful support abilities without making them so overpowering that not having them made the game less fun.

Like, I get the desire for something better, and I get that imbalance placed in the right places makes the game more fun, but people want something that the dev team has shown no desire or even ability to actually do. Healing is frankly the only time that the devs have given us something that we didn't ask for. And even in this day and age, people still get unreasonably mad whenever there's an imbalanced thing that adds flavor to a job, like AST trivializing that one mechanic in P3S.

While some people take the approach of anything less than perfect balance is the end of the world, those people should be ignored just like those who claim to find a job hard yet they have never bothered to learn it.

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 even if it had some rough patches that the devs failed to fix.

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.


Unfortunately the devs are in the middle of a long term plan of dumbing everything to oblivion. Its only picked up the wider pushback it deserves now because it finally got around to dps jobs when in fact it should never have got off the ground.
For healers specifically, we need to rollback to Sb (sch, ast) and Hw (whm, ast) asap.

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

edit: I'm a week from my sub running out and SE has sent me no less than 4 emails now saying eorzea needs me to return. Maybe if healers weren't completely unnecessary, ast got its cards and time magic back, sch got its dots and selene back, whm got its elements back and expanded and sage got some more damage buttons I'd be more inclined to listen and sub for a month.
If they actually put some proper repeatable content in, I'd sub even more!

I'll keep an eye out for Ast's revision in 6.2 but I ain't holding my breath. The housing timer is off rn so I can afford to wait for the drip feed of content to 6.2 or 6.3.

[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.

[Nizzi]

I just wish we had one healer where you could definitively say "Yep, a dev mains this job." Going from something like Black Mage, where you can tell there's love and attention put into it, towards something like White Mage, is night and day.

[Liam_Harper]

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

This is why you'll never get your cards back.

If your argument for something involves insults and an attack at a group of players who don't share your opinion, no dev will ever listen to you.

[ty_taurus]

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.

FFXIV has always been very consistent about balance though, or at least, not having jobs be unviable for nearly all of the game's lifespan. Consider that WHM for example who has quite literally nothing to offer that any of the other healers can't offer, and yet people were taking it into Ultimate during the world first race streams.

EDIT: Unrelated to this post above, Misshapen Chair has a new video as of yesterday that's not specifically about healing, but is definitely something important to the ongoing healer discussion, and I wanted to throw it down here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d_fMH9Lwvs

[Niadissa]

Watched that video myself, he has some pretty solid points.

[MintnHoney]

This is why you'll never get your cards back.

If your argument for something involves insults and an attack at a group of players who don't share your opinion, no dev will ever listen to you.

Let's not be facetious: that isn't why those cards aren't coming back.

[Nethereal]

Let's not be facetious: that isn't why those cards aren't coming back.

They'll never come back because they have like 4-5 people balancing every single job and they can't justify the math required to balance AST cards.
Not to mention they're salty the community only used balance when they designed such an oh so great system.