i'm sick and tired of the excuse for not having unique or varied jobs

[Allegor]

I could write a whole essay about it but I know it's like talking to a wall. All I'll say is if you can place over 80% of a job's entire kit in the same hotkeys/keybinds as another job *cough cough* healers *cough* then they're functionally the same, and aesthetics being practically the only thing keeping them separate.

[Deveryn]

I could write a whole essay about it but I know it's like talking to a wall. All I'll say is if you can place over 80% of a job's entire kit in the same hotkeys/keybinds as another job *cough cough* healers *cough* then they're functionally the same, and aesthetics being practically the only thing keeping them separate.

Nope. This is talking to a wall right here. You have to have the last word to boot.
You could write an essay and you'd probably sound more foolish for spending all that time and wasting ours.

Frankly, there's nothing wrong with being able to change from one to another and have things in more or less the same spot. That doesn't make everything the same. It's just consistent. That makes life easier when you go to PF something and someone filled your preferred job. The whole point of the job system is flexibility and if the difference is too drastic from one to the next, that complicates things a little too much and that flexibility is lost.

[anhaato]

Nope. This is talking to a wall right here. You have to have the last word to boot.
You could write an essay and you'd probably sound more foolish for spending all that time and wasting ours.

Frankly, there's nothing wrong with being able to change from one to another and have things in more or less the same spot. That doesn't make everything the same. It's just consistent. That makes life easier when you go to PF something and someone filled your preferred job. The whole point of the job system is flexibility and if the difference is too drastic from one to the next, that complicates things a little too much and that flexibility is lost.

"Wah wah wah I don't wanna think wah wah wah" that's what I'm hearing.

[Nizzi]

I guess it was wrong for me to expect Square Enix to actually apply themselves and make something that offers a unique and functionally different gameplay style that people were not getting before on a role that hadn't received a new job in it since 2015 with Heavensward.
I for one get excited when new job come out and it's the same as old job except with flashy lights and new animations! ME clap hands real hard and drool out my mouth excited for more!!! What will they copy next? I'm excited to see what job they copy and paste in 7.0. $40 + $15 a month subscription WELL SPENT!

[Kaliesto]

They could try to make a new Role that isn't DPS, Tank or a healer.

Something completely out of the norm.

(not sure what that would look like though).

Maybe Support Role and acts as the 9th member of a party going beyond the traditional 8? Basically it never attacks, and throws support and debuff spells as the trade off with no attack spells.

[pikalovr]

They could try to make a new Role that isn't DPS, Tank or a healer.

Something completely out of the norm.

(not sure what that would look like though).

Maybe Support Role and acts as the 9th member of a party going beyond the traditional 8? Basically it never attacks, and throws support and debuff spells as the trade off with no attack spells.

i mean theoretically BLU mage is what you'd be looking (it can be anything it wants tbh which technically makes it more than a DPS healer or tank) at but it'll never go standard. and i would much rather healers get turned into supports than an entire support role if anything.

[pikalovr]

i got to thinking bout it, and it would be extremely cool if we got advanced versions of each job. so people could actually see what a "harder" more complex unique job system would look like. make them levels 1-50 and let people do level 1-50 content with them and group up with other advanced job users. if you look on the thread about job inspirations, you'll see where i basically talk about learning advanced versions of jobs and some newer more complex jobs from each city state leader

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ation.../page2

[Reylah]

I could write a whole essay about it but I know it's like talking to a wall. All I'll say is if you can place over 80% of a job's entire kit in the same hotkeys/keybinds as another job *cough cough* healers *cough* then they're functionally the same, and aesthetics being practically the only thing keeping them separate.

Let me write that essay for you so some people can get a better picture.

Lets look at my hotbars for my healers WHM, AST and SGE (I haven't touched scholar):

1) cure/benefic/Dosis (all small heals and dosis because its sages small heal)
2) cure 2/benefic 2/diagnosis (all medium heals)
3) regen/aspected benefic/Eurasia (regen/setup for shield button)
4) benediction/essential dignity/tetragrammaton (all single target emergency heal)
5) medica/helios/prognosis (basic AoE heal)
6)esuna (not like its used much but this is where I have dispels on my bars in other games)
7)medica 2/aspected helios/- (AoE regen and some days I'm tempted to put a second prognosis here for eukrasian prognosis after hitting eukrasia just for habit's sake of "stronger AoE" on 7)
8)cure 3 (unique to white mage as a larger cast AoE heal but rarely used because the fights are designed so that the jobs without it can get by just fine)

shift-1)stone/maleific/dosis (single target damage)
shift-2)aero/combust/toxicon (Damage over time and toxikon because why not, though again I might just have a second dosis here for a smoother transition with eukrasia and eukrasian dosis)
shift-3)holy/gravity/Dyskrasia (AoE)

The other buttons are scattered wherever mostly because the packet of astrologian card buttons takes up most of my mouse buttons (M3-M5 + shift Ms) causing AST to unalign(ironically) from the other jobs.

What can we get from this? Well the vast majority of healer kits are the same with minor differences for flavor at best. Sage has the most differences in but those are all because Eukrasia just consolidates some of the buttons with no real change in functionality. This can be expanded to cover the major cooldowns/ogcds as well.

comparable major cooldowns:
aqua veil/exaltation/ tauochole (single target damage reduction)
asylum/collective unconscious/Physis 2 and kerachole(Instant AoE regen)
divine benison/celestial intersection/haima (single target shield, presumably for a tank buster)
planetary indulgence/ horoscope/pepis (group heal requiring setup)
liturgy of the Bell/earthly star/ phanhaima (massive group heal/shield)
temperance/-/krasis (healing buff)
Assize/celestial opposition/holos and ixochole (instant AoE heal)

Though there are a few more unique abilities and more instances of extra effects like mana, damage, or damage reduction for flavor here, there is still a ton of overlap in what is mechanically done by each healer. Obviously there are some unique job abilities like benediction, divination, toxikon, etc…

Lilies, cards, and addergall/sting are all job gauge things and so yeah they should be unique and job defining. That said they are also peripheral to playing the role. Sure it's not optimal to ignore them but with cards no longer tied to divination for AST ignoring them is a negligible dps loss in most content. 3-5% on 1/4, 1/8, or 1/24 people, depending on what content you are running, with 66% uptime is barely worth calling relevant even in prog. Clearly a simplification, but the point is they are just there for seals (also barely relevant) and the illusion of doing something. It's just more fun to use them than not. Lilities give you the equivalent of 3 more glares a minute to make up for the 3 glares you didn’t cast and addersgall is a shared charge system for some of your abilities while adderssting just lets you cast dosis equivalents while moving.

None of those affect how you fill the healing role in the party. No, that's not a call for “healers should only heal”, I just mean that when the game gives you a problem for healers to solve, your job gauge is rarely, if ever, a factor in how you solve it.

In fact your job is barely a factor in how you solve it. The difference between “shield healing” and “pure healing” is whether you want to finish your cast before the damage goes out or after. That's about the only difference I can see. For every shield that lets you cast and stop the damage there is a regen that lets you cast and go back to what you were doing while it fixes the damage.

The more I look at the overlaps between 3 of the 4 healers the more I become concerned that the devs are becoming… I hate using this word, especially for devs… lazy. Because you can look at these abilities and look at the fights and say “ok so this is where they want me to use X ability and this is where I should use Y” and it becomes excruciatingly clear that the fights are made so that you can clear them only using the core tools. When testing a fight it's no longer “can all healers clear this fight?” but instead “if one healer can clear this fight, the rest can.” They don’t have to ask themselves “Can this healer solve this problem?” just “Do all healers have a button for this? Then we can add this mechanic”.

[Reylah]

You can see a lack of attention to individual healer’s abilities with Macrocosm making a whole mechanic irrelevant in p3s because they just didn’t consider what each job could do to solve that mechanic. This would be less atrocious if there were other sorts of mechanics that other healers could “cheese”, but in a world where all the healers have been forced to have the same core abilities the idea that the one new mechanic amongst the healer lvl90 abilities wasn’t tested in a raid in same expansion the ability is available (like this isn’t even an old ability they forgot about coming back and biting them in the rump) is… I’ll say “bizarre”, to avoid using stronger words.

I say it wasn’t tested because everything the devs have said about balance and given as an excuse for homogenization leads me to believe they wouldn’t want 1 job to stand so far ahead of all the others when solving any given problem. If the other healers each had a different way of addressing problems and AST’s just had the best solution for this situation that would be fine along as the other healers had other places to shine. But they don’t because everyone else has the same kit as before and AST got the only new toy, healing that scales from damage taken.

Also if you just read macrocosm’s tooltip, It's basically a 50% damage reduction on anything that doesn’t kill you. In a game that relies on large bursts of damage to jump scare healers, how was the ability to cut any damage spike in half not considered when designing a fight? My money is on that getting capped in the upcoming AST changes just because it sticks out like a sore thumb in healer power.

I know that sounds like “the outlier is bad, don’t let one class have something unique” but that's not what I’m getting at.

If everything's the same then any one outlier is likely to upset the scales.

Since all dps burst are aligning to 2min burst cooldowns they can’t introduce a dps with a burst cycle that lines up at 1.5mins because it will either have to hold its burst, have high enough burst that it doesn’t need to line up with 2min cooldowns and thus be insane, or just feel bad because they don’t get to be apart of the burst window. It also doesn’t help that the fights are choreographed around every job behaving the same way. The big moments are designed to line up with 2min cooldowns. It's why the music works so damn well but it's also the reason we can’t have anything different.

The devs saying they can’t think of anything new and unique is disappointing because they wrote themselves into a corner where nothing can be different without seeming wrong. We can’t have new things because everything else is the same either on the micro level of healer and tank skills or the macro level of 2 min burst rotations.

[Mikey_R]

Lets look at my hotbars for my healers WHM, AST and SGE (I haven't touched scholar):

1) cure/benefic/Dosis (all small heals and dosis because its sages small heal)
2) cure 2/benefic 2/diagnosis (all medium heals)
3) regen/aspected benefic/Eurasia (regen/setup for shield button)
4) benediction/essential dignity/tetragrammaton (all single target emergency heal)
5) medica/helios/prognosis (basic AoE heal)
6)esuna (not like its used much but this is where I have dispels on my bars in other games)
7)medica 2/aspected helios/- (AoE regen and some days I'm tempted to put a second prognosis here for eukrasian prognosis after hitting eukrasia just for habit's sake of "stronger AoE" on 7)
8)cure 3 (unique to white mage as a larger cast AoE heal but rarely used because the fights are designed so that the jobs without it can get by just fine)

1) Diagnosis IS Sage's small heal, Dosis is not. As you are aware, Dosis is Sage's single target attack. The extra healing from Kardia is Sage's equivalent to the Scholar's Fairy. PLUS, Diagnosis is weaker by 50 potency than Cure and Benefic (450/500)
2) Going by the above, Sage has no equivalent for a GCD big heal, nor does Scholar.
3) We are now onto the regens/shield. Obviously, WHM and AST have a regen, though AST trades 3 seconds (1 tick) of regen time for an initial heal. Sage's Eukrasian Diagnosis and Adloquium are the same, except for MP cost.
4) Shield healers have no way to restore a large amount of HP with 1 button. You also listed 2 WHM actions and 1 AST. The closest you get will be Lustrate/Druochole, both can be spammed, as long as you have the stacks for it, but that is obviously using resources that could go somewhere else. This means it is more beneficial for shield healers to keep people healthy and not let them drop low.
5) Did you expect a healer wouldn't get one? Though Sage's is weaker and the best Scholar can do (on the GCD) is Succor, unless you want to use up Emergency Tactics (15 second cooldown)
6) I mean, of course, you can dress it up however you want, but it will perform the same thing, just like all revives. Would it be nice to have something job specific? sure, but even then I wouldn't expect it to do anything extra.
7) Sure, but Scholar has no equivalent, unless you want to put Succor here, but then it has no basic GCD heal equivalent.
8) It is worth noting that the AoE for Cure 3 is smaller than Medica/Medica 2, it has the benefit of being a targeted AoE and it is also incredibly powerful for an AoE.

comparable major cooldowns:
1)aqua veil/exaltation/ tauochole (single target damage reduction)
2) asylum/collective unconscious/Physis 2 and kerachole(Instant AoE regen)
3) divine benison/celestial intersection/haima (single target shield, presumably for a tank buster)
4) planetary indulgence/ horoscope/pepis (group heal requiring setup)
5) liturgy of the Bell/earthly star/ phanhaima (massive group heal/shield)
6) temperance/-/krasis (healing buff)
7) Assize/celestial opposition/holos and ixochole (instant AoE heal)

I added the numbers for ease of comparison.

1) Aquaveil is just damage reduction, Exaltation is a damage reduction with a heal at the end, Taurochole is a damage reduction with a heal at the start and it lasts longer, Scholar has no equivalent.
2) Asylum is a placable ground target with a heal increase, Collective is around the user, Physis 2 grants a heal increase and Kerachole has a damage reduction. Scholar has Whispering Dawn and Sacred Soil which has a damage reduction. The fun thing here is that Physis 2 has the strongest regen ticks.
3) Divine benison is just a shield, Celestial intersection has an initial heal (and the shield is weaker), Haima is unique in how it works and it has a heal based on how many shield stacks are left.
4) Add Emergency Tactics/Succor to the list. Sage here is different has you have to have the shield survive to make use of it, you wouldn't Eukrasian Prognosis just for this.
5) Scholar has no equivalent, unless you want to put Sacred Soil here.
6) Temperance is also a Damage reduction, AST has Neutral Sect, which also adds a shield to Aspected Benefic/Helios, Sage has the shortest lasting one which also has nothing extra and SCH (Dissipation) has the longest lasting one that comes with no fairy but a refill of Aetherflow.
7) Indomitability for Scholar. Also, again, all behave differently.

Though there are a few more unique abilities and more instances of extra effects like mana, damage, or damage reduction for flavor here, there is still a ton of overlap in what is mechanically done by each healer. Obviously there are some unique job abilities like benediction, divination, toxikon, etc…

But aren't these differences what people want? These are the job flavours after all. This is why I keep saying, you have to look past the oversimplification and see that there is more there. You also make mention that, once you solve a fight with one healer, you have solved it for all. I would say that is an oversimplification, however, humour me with this simple scenario. A new healer doesn't have an AoE heal, the boss does AoE damage, this new healer has no effective way to deal with it, so you wouldn't bring it. This is why I say every healer and tank need to have some sort of basic toolkit. There are going to be overlaps, that is inevitable.

When testing a fight it's no longer “can all healers clear this fight?” but instead “if one healer can clear this fight, the rest can.” They don’t have to ask themselves “Can this healer solve this problem?” just “Do all healers have a button for this? Then we can add this mechanic”.

If they were vastly different, and there was a mechanic a healer couldn't do, would you rather they changed the job to be able to handle it, or have to restrict the boss design in order to accommodate?

I'm just going to add Macrocosmos here. You have a healer that can cheese a mechanic, this is something unique to 1 healer. You then complain that the Devs have missed this obvious loophole and they obviously haven't tested this. But this is what you wanted. You wanted the healers to be unique and if it means a healer can cheese a mechanic, that is what will happen. Also, it was NEVER the devs that said anything about homogenisation, that has always been the playerbase complaining about it and that was because people didn't like it when one job had an obvious advantage which meant not taking other jobs. Jobs have been made 1/2 minute because people used to complain that, say, Monk's buffs didn't line up (they were 90 seconds), the blunt/slashing etc. debuffs went as it just caused the piercing META which caused people to forgo casters and the list goes on.