Has anyone quit healing?

[Payadopa]

Balance is absolutely a detriment to the game.
Meta slaves loose their collective shit if their favourite job is like x% below some else's. Or they operate under the assumption that everyone plays perfectly therefore you don't need [x] ability. Now all we have left is [increase DPS by x%].

It's high time we discard that unrealistic goal of achieving perfect balance. We've seen where it leads for two expacs.

>>>>> And, no, it doesn't mean go from one extreme to the other. <<<<<

But I'd happily play a weaker class if it is fun to play. Many jobs aren't, I'm sorry. Especially in conjunction with brain-dead content.

[Liam_Harper]

Balance is absolutely a detriment to the game.
Meta slaves loose their collective shit if their favourite job is like x% below some else's. Or they operate under the assumption that everyone plays perfectly therefore you don't need [x] ability. Now all we have left is [increase DPS by x%].

It's nothing to do with meta slaves. I love optimization, min maxing and generally lean towards the better classes but I agree this game is overbalanced. I want to be able to do fun crazy things from time to time. Especially when it's fun crazy things that require you play well and reward you for using your toolkit intelligently.

It's generally more often the casual players who shout for balance the loudest. The players who barely stepped foot in Savage demanding Astrodyne nerfs or the players who don't even play tank demanding WAR nerfs because of dungeons of all things. But to be honest, I'm not attacking casuals, I think players really need to stop blaming each other for how the game is instead of the developers who are selling us a product and are meant to be the professionals at making games. We don't make the game. We certainly don't put a gun to Yoshida's head and force him to make changes that make the game worse. If a game developer is unable to determine good feedback from bad and make a high quality product, they shouldn't be in the business. It's on them.

[ty_taurus]

It's nothing to do with meta slaves. I love optimization, min maxing and generally lean towards the better classes but I agree this game is overbalanced. I want to be able to do fun crazy things from time to time. Especially when it's fun crazy things that require you play well and reward you for using your toolkit intelligently.

It's generally more often the casual players who shout for balance the loudest. The players who barely stepped foot in Savage demanding Astrodyne nerfs or the players who don't even play tank demanding WAR nerfs because of dungeons of all things. But to be honest, I'm not attacking casuals, I think players really need to stop blaming each other for how the game is instead of the developers who are selling us a product and are meant to be the professionals at making games. We don't make the game. We certainly don't put a gun to Yoshida's head and force him to make changes that make the game worse. If a game developer is unable to determine good feedback from bad and make a high quality product, they shouldn't be in the business. It's on them.

To add a bit, I do think our community as a whole does have an unhealthy obsession with balance. Food is good and an important part of our lives, but becoming obsessed with food can lead to an unhealthy relationship with it. Game balance is much the same. It's important to have a strong balance, but becoming obsessed with attaining perfection largely means sacrificing things that have made jobs unique in the past.

[Semirhage]

To add a bit, I do think our community as a whole does have an unhealthy obsession with balance. Food is good and an important part of our lives, but becoming obsessed with food can lead to an unhealthy relationship with it. Game balance is much the same. It's important to have a strong balance, but becoming obsessed with attaining perfection largely means sacrificing things that have made jobs unique in the past.

My one sticking point with (lack of) balance is when said lack of balance always goes in favor of specific jobs, and never in favor of another. *cough cough* WHM always blowing chunks and AST/SCH getting unique tools that let it clown all over their competition, locking the role into a stagnant obvious meta that never changes.

[Lazariah]

My one sticking point with (lack of) balance is when said lack of balance always goes in favor of specific jobs, and never in favor of another. *cough cough* WHM always blowing chunks and AST/SCH getting unique tools that let it clown all over their competition, locking the role into a stagnant obvious meta that never changes.

It is so weird to me because it always seems like they are trying to cater TO WHM but in ALL the wrong ways. It's like they don't understand how to balance healing between the classes or what makes each healing class fun. Oh wait...they probably don't. They DESPERATELY need someone who mains healing on their dev team.

[Rilifane]

To add a bit, I do think our community as a whole does have an unhealthy obsession with balance. Food is good and an important part of our lives, but becoming obsessed with food can lead to an unhealthy relationship with it. Game balance is much the same. It's important to have a strong balance, but becoming obsessed with attaining perfection largely means sacrificing things that have made jobs unique in the past.

And I think this is something the devs themslves fostered - by constantly going all "Oh no, you feel like class XY is a bit ahead of you? No worries, we got you. There! All balanced. Feeling better?" whenever a balancing issue was brought up and in a game where you can play all classes on one character no less. So a buff doesn't perfectly align with other buffs on its own like with other classes? Okay, let's streamline it. Only phys ranged have full uptime and melees and/ or casters don't? Alright, let's make it easy enough for everyone to have full uptime.
The thing is that the devs seemed to have started using "viable" and "perfectly balanced" interchangeable. There will always be a last within a role. And it's okay if that changes from tier to tier. Yes, it's okay if a class someone likes is bottom tier for a bit. Not to the extreme like in WoW where every months a different spec got hit with the sledgehammer and nuked into oblivion but being viable is enough because the majority of players doesn't even come close to the level of gameplay required for it to make a difference whether you chose "viable" or "strong". And the few people who do are entirely fine with switching to a different class for speedruns, parse runs and races because they have different mentality than your average player.

If you keep kissing every boo-boo caused by a perceived lack of balance you'll foster a community so obsessed with balance they'd rather sacrifice any uniqueness than see their favourite job be only "viable".
And I hate this obsession with balance. I'm fine with AST deleting a single mechanic in an entire raid tier. I'm fine with WAR having absolutely silly selfheal and being able to not only heal them but also the party if the healer died. I'm fine with RDM having the ability to chain ress an entire full party in a pinch. I was also fine with RDM and SMN both being ahead of BLM for a time during ShB and everyone and their cat raising an eyebrow when I joined on BLM instead of one of the casters that is not only easier to handle for the group while bringing the same dps but also bringing nice utility. GNB could be dead last by a good margin among tanks and I'd still prefer it because I like the gameplay.

Let us have nice things like Rescue cancelling LB3 animation look or PLDs doing silly cover strats for giggles and other things instead of deleting them because balance over all.
Balance isn't the holy grail of class design even if a good portion of the playerbase treats it as such after years and years of getting encouraged by the devs. If you keep balance-coddling a playerbase they'll eventually demand it without exception for everything.

[ThorneDynasty]

It's nothing to do with meta slaves. I love optimization, min maxing and generally lean towards the better classes but I agree this game is overbalanced. I want to be able to do fun crazy things from time to time. Especially when it's fun crazy things that require you play well and reward you for using your toolkit intelligently.

It's generally more often the casual players who shout for balance the loudest. The players who barely stepped foot in Savage demanding Astrodyne nerfs or the players who don't even play tank demanding WAR nerfs because of dungeons of all things. But to be honest, I'm not attacking casuals, I think players really need to stop blaming each other for how the game is instead of the developers who are selling us a product and are meant to be the professionals at making games. We don't make the game. We certainly don't put a gun to Yoshida's head and force him to make changes that make the game worse. If a game developer is unable to determine good feedback from bad and make a high quality product, they shouldn't be in the business. It's on them.

Off-track, but I don't think I've seen any people demanding WAR nerfs for anything except the self-healing. Specifically in dungeon pulls, but also people get tired of WAR who don't reset when the boss above 50% when the rest of the party is wiped. Like yeah PLD can also heal themselves (and even replace the party healing even better than WAR), but not for completely free so you don't see them forcing everyone else to sit on the spectator seat.

[Liam_Harper]

Off-track, but I don't think I've seen any people demanding WAR nerfs for anything except the self-healing.

That's what I'm talking about. The dungeons are bland and hit like wet noodles, but instead of fixing that, let's just nerf WAR heal and we can continue with the same numerically balanced boring classes that don't do anything interesting in our 3 corridor 3 boss dungeons for the next decade. Exciting.

I remember back before WoW was bad, playing things like Blood Death knight which makes WAR look like an utter joke when it comes to self healing. Yet that was fine because things hit hard enough that the average player couldn't pull it off, it took player skill and gave tanks those glory moments to live for. You'd love to see a good Blood Death Knight in your group. Same with a lot of classes, many had crazy things they could do in the hands of a good player.

In ff14 we don't get those crazy moments to live or strive for. We're obsessed with numerical balance and blandness. If a class can do something fun and crazy we want to nerfbat it so it's as boring as the other classes because it'd be "unfair". Even the class design itself is quite barebones with a combination of dps/heal GCDs, oGCD's to weave and a 2 minute burst with no traits, tier bonuses, trinkets, talents and so on, so all the devs have to do for balancing is tweak potencies and make the numbers similar. As players we've been conditioned to believe it's meant to be that way. Personally I just want my gameplay to be fun and exciting from time to time.