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

[Saraide]

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Macrocosmos isnt the only example for this either. Ninja having so many dashes connected to important attacks made it very awkward in zodiark ex for no good reason. They very quickly changed that.

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I dont think I am going out on a limb here when I say people arguing for more job uniqueness would rather have it be intentional and designed instead of being on accident.

[Mikey_R]

I dont think I am going out on a limb here when I say people arguing for more job uniqueness would rather have it be intentional and designed instead of being on accident.

The question then becomes, what would someone prefer? Knowing that they design fights with specific jobs in mind that they might cheese certain mechanics, or have the fights be designed independent of jobs and have these cheese mechanics be a happy accident?

At this point though, the point has moved away from jobs uniqueness to encounter design, which is something I do think needs to be looked at. Why give all tanks access to a stun/interrupt and not have them be used, as an example (I think there is only 1 fight in all of EW that has an interrupt, that being the last boss in Ktisis, there might be one in Savage, but I do not know those fights).

[Saraide]

The question then becomes, what would someone prefer? Knowing that they design fights with specific jobs in mind that they might cheese certain mechanics, or have the fights be designed independent of jobs and have these cheese mechanics be a happy accident?

At this point though, the point has moved away from jobs uniqueness to encounter design, which is something I do think needs to be looked at. Why give all tanks access to a stun/interrupt and not have them be used, as an example (I think there is only 1 fight in all of EW that has an interrupt, that being the last boss in Ktisis, there might be one in Savage, but I do not know those fights).

I dont think you can seperate the two. The results of job design and combat design are always tied to each other.

[Semirhage]

I'm all for job uniqueness. FFXIV would benefit from hiring a MUCH larger job design team and giving personal attention to each job.

Having played WHM for years, I've only ever had one major caution when it comes to job uniqueness, and no it's not "boo hoo it creates a meta". It's when said "uniqueness" leads to a stagnant, permanent meta. It's when "uniqueness" just means "hmmm, how can we be distinct from each other. I know! I'll be superior at everything the combat system asks a class to do and every single piece of remotely difficult content absurdly caters to my strengths. You be good at superfluous things that don't actually afford you advantages, and worst-in-role for everything the combat system cares about. See! We're unique now! I'm good at everything and you suck. Also don't you dare ask to be good at anything important, that would be ~homogenization~".

That's the trap named Late Heavensward-Stormblood that I want to avoid.

[pikalovr]

I'm all for job uniqueness. FFXIV would benefit from hiring a MUCH larger job design team and giving personal attention to each job.

Having played WHM for years, I've only ever had one major caution when it comes to job uniqueness, and no it's not "boo hoo it creates a meta". It's when said "uniqueness" leads to a stagnant, permanent meta. It's when "uniqueness" just means "hmmm, how can we be distinct from each other. I know! I'll be superior at everything the combat system asks a class to do and every single piece of remotely difficult content absurdly caters to my strengths. You be good at superfluous things that don't actually afford you advantages, and worst-in-role for everything the combat system cares about. See! We're unique now! I'm good at everything and you suck. Also don't you dare ask to be good at anything important, that would be ~homogenization~".

That's the trap named Late Heavensward-Stormblood that I want to avoid.

the actual trap at least to me was the damage system and how certain damage types felt like they were never taken into account and fights themselves dealing certain damage types to make certain tanks far superior to others. you can have jobs tackle fights different ways. but when you blatantly ignore those jobs or the system that is forcing seperation even in their own roles for fights. it's really easy to look at the jobs themselves and go you're the problem. and not other systems or issues. which is why every job basically do the same things now. and we have such a stale combat system hell we only really have 2 buffs and 2 debuffs for bosses damage up/defense up for us and damage down/defense down for bosses. at least with jobs like RPR we're starting to see a pull towards more unique mechanics like arcane circle. that requires the entire party to cooperate and hit a basic GCD to give the RPR a free shroud off plentiful harvest. i mean sure it isn't hard or anything but when something as simple as arcane circle feels fresh somethings wrong imo.

[Reylah]

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.

That was literally just a map of where I have all the abilities on my keyboard with “()” for why I put it there and I said I didn’t play Scholar (like never played Scholar. I only have arcanist at 15 because it was needed to unlock WHM and BLM when I started playing) so I’m not going to comment on it. If it's different, that's great, but the three remaining healers very clearly have a huge amount of overlap.

1) The low damage on tanks (note that for later) means I find that the kardia healing replaces when I would cast a small heal. Sure it’s not as much potency but if I’m casting dosis as part of downtime dps it keeps the tank up just fine.

2) Yeah if you are looking at potency sure it's closer to cure/benefic but functionally I find that I’m hitting it in response to the same amount of damage as I would for the medium heals. This is mostly because I'm tapping eukrasia then hitting diagnosis for the shield. Again kardia healing from dosis covers most of the damage on tanks during boss fights and if the dps know what's up they can avoid 90% of the damage that would need a med heal. If they don’t they yeah I’ll just cast diagnosis. Also maybe its just me but I find that small heals are usually 10-25% of a tank health bar but like almost 50% of a dps rendering the medium heals excessive for them in most cases anyways.

3) Yep thats exactly what’s happening on that button. There are 2 core buttons that are defined by whether you are a pure or shield healer. This button and the “stronger AoE” are flavored by that divide. Lets not kid ourselves though, 1 extra tick vs an initial heal is not a functional difference. If that initial heal saves someone you should have been casting something stronger. Compared to the core functionality, much of the additional effects are akin to flavor text on an item in affecting how you use the ability.

4) Got me. I lost track of where I was when looking up how to spell tetragrammaton and wrote it over druochole instead of benediction. I had reconsidered benediction to be unique because it is just no questions asked 100% health bar which fall in line with the “white mage is the chonky healer” flavor (Same as cure 3 really, but more on that latter) and you can see that when I list it with the uniques latter on. Looking back I should probably just move tauochole here for sage because looking at the cooldown, potency, and damage reduction it's just a superior tetragrammaton for 1 addersgall.

5) Again this is just where these buttons are actually on my hot bar. I login que as healer, hit 5 to deal with any moderate AoE damage if I don’t feel like finding where I put the instant AoE cooldown on my bars for whatever job i’m on because that will often be off cooldown in time for the next AoE anyway.

6) Again, just where it is. It would be weird if I skipped straight from the 5 button to the 7 button in this list.

7) Scholar is not something I know. That's why I only listed WHM,AST, and SGE stuff and can point out how blatantly similar they are.

8) It's the only spell across all 3 jobs I have on my 8 button so by all rights it probably should be considered unique but it solves no problem that can’t be solved by 2 basic AoE heals other than 1 less cast. Great for optimization on prog or speedkills maybe but hardly a relevant difference to any other content because the fights are designed to give you the space to cast the 2 basic AoEs or a Stronger AoE (time for the shield ones is typically given during a cast beforehand) if you’re feeling spicy.


It's the same with benediction. It fits the supposed difference between WHM and AST as pure healers with WHM having beefier heals and AST requiring more setup time, but everything 700+ potency is pretty dang close to a full heal compared to non-tank health bars anyways.

[Reylah]

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 placeable 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 as 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.

Disregarding scholars again because I set a clear list of which healers I was talking about being explicitly limited to the healers I actually played and saw a large quantity of overlap between. Great for Scholar if it’s different but that doesn’t change the status of the other 3.

You’ve written up a nice list of what all these abilities do and the minor differences between them, but those differences don’t actually change their functionality.

When I need a shield for a tank buster I hit divine benison/celestial intersection/haima. It doesn’t matter if Ast shield is weaker than WHM by ~100 potency but has 100 more total with the heal. The heal only matters if the target already has damage but I am casting the shield because of incoming damage not damage already taken. If the target already has damage it's better but the shield is the biggest factor in why I'm using it.

In the case of 4) I do think it's weird that sage even has this ability considering the whole point of a shield is to eat the damage before it happens. I use this button when I accidentally cast EP late and need to turn it into a heal instead. Same for the single target shield. If I actually needed the heal itself I would cast the basic AoE instead.

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.

So first off we’re both going out on a limb by assuming what people want so I want to make it very clear that from here on out this is just my opinion based on my own experiences and my interpretation of what I’ve read from others.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean they are enough. Also I’m not sure you can call the extra effects like 10% DR or a regen flavours of the jobs when there is so much cross pollination between the jobs. If it were a case were WHM as the basic healer had higher initial potency on its heal, Ast had lower initial heals but had regens to make up for it, and SGE with its idea of preempting damage had the damage reduction, then maybe the argument could be made but right now its more of a question of which buttons are those extra effects on for each job.

When people complain about the healers all being the same it indicates to me that, regardless of the differences that exist, the distinctions are insufficient. I expect the reason why people feel like healers play the same is because the amount of times they interact with the features that distinguish a job or make that job’s buttons unique is too low.

The example you give highlights the trap I feel the dev have fallen into: conflating the idea that a lacking a 1 button answer means lacking an answer at all. The new healer doesn’t have to have the same ~300 potency AoE heal every healer has. They just have to have a way of healing the group. What if instead of the same basic AoE that other healers have the new healer instead uses the setup and consume mechanic that planetary indulgence/horoscope/pepis currently have where they set up a buff on people through some other action and then consume it to heal the group? and that is their basic way of healing everyone instead of being an extra button in most other healer’s kits.

The question is “how does the healer able to heal a group of people?” The easiest answer has been to give a button that does that instead of thinking about the different ways of accomplishing that goal. Before people say “oh thats just another mechanic you’re sharing” This is just an example of another way of solving the AoE healing problem that the devs have already thought of but just gave to everyone instead of keeping as a unique mechanic to a job. It's part of why they can’t make things that feel unique, because they don’t let mechanics be unique.

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?

This is another trap. Especially in the heavily scripted fights of FFXIV. Consider this:

A boss uses an ability that does AoE damage to the group that requires 900 healing to heal off. The next time the boss uses the AoE is in 15 secs. That means that all each healer has to accomplish is generate 900 healing in that 15 sec window to be equal with each other for that mechanic. This thought process can be applied to income damage/outgoing healing mechanics in a fight design outside of standing in death. % heal reductions are % increases in healing required (shield healers will have an easier time during this if shields aren’t reduced). Flat healing reduction (X amount of heals are blocked) is a flat increase in the hps required (with smaller base heals shield healers will have a harder time). All of this is if you want to stay health neutral. If you are one of the hardcore sadistic healers who says you >0 is all a healthbar needs to be then you have more wiggle room and if you’re a dev who wants to ramp up tension you can put the hps requirement just higher than the healers can manage and have healthbars slowly go down against crushing odds as the music ramps up.

Using the paradigms I mentioned above (WHM big basic heals, AST regen, SGE DR and shields, new consume healer ‘NH’ for short)

WHM cast 2 450 heal basic AoEs.

AST casts a 300 heal AoE with a 100 heal tick every 3 secs for 12 secs (700 per cast) and then another before the next burst. sure it's over healing but that will carry into the next burst or help with any other damage happening.

SGE pre-cast a 500 damage (higher potency than the WHM heal because you have to get the timing right or its not as effective) shield with 15% DR before the ability, reducing the damage to 715 and the shields eat all but 215 so they cast a 300 heal basic AoE heal.

NH sets up the buff precast like the SGE then consumes the buff for a 900 point heal. I realize this needs more depth to seem balanced. Let's say that the buff increases the next heal on the target by 300% so they’re base AoE is lower like 300. They’ve now healed the mechanic in 1 cast of the consume but they will need to spend more time setting up for the next burst. To offset the deceased downtime most of their dps comes from maintaining DoTs on the boss. Maybe there is an AoE way to spread the buff but it only increases the heals by 200% instead of 300%. Idk. Don’t get hung up too much on the numbers because those can and should be tweaked. I’m not going to try to design and balance a whole new job in a few days. The point is all of the healers can accomplish the same throughput of healing in time for the next boss mechanic. But they differed in the way they did it.

The only “restriction” on the boss is an upper limit to the Healing per second the boss requires (which already exists). There can be other non-AoE mechanics in those 15 secs that won’t add to the AoE heals per second requirement for that slice of the boss fight but the healers only have to spend 2 casts in 15 secs solving this mechanic and can spend the rest dealing with other things.
Want more pressure? Increase the damage or decrease the time until the next cast of it. The only time restriction is the lower limit of 3 cast (~7.5 secs) from the AST relying on the initial heal of their ability then they begin to be a tad weaker in the mechanic because they have to cast 3 things instead of 2. Then they may want to use a cooldown instead. Upper limit of damage is capped at either A) whatever straight up kills the party or B) ~1800-2100 damage in 15 secs required if we assume you’re ok with forcing the NH to spam their basic AoE for 15 secs straight and not have buffs up for the next burst. Also assuming the lack of any major cooldowns, party buffs or tank LB3s because at a certain point you just kinda hit that realm anyways. Want less pressure? Do the opposite. Devs have plenty of levers are their disposal to tweak fights. What if they pulse that damage over the 15 secs instead of a burst? Same hps requirement but the SGE shield will last longer and the WHM will have to space out their cast instead of casting back to back.

You might say “but the NH is still casting an AoE '' yeah, but it's not the main way they are solving the mechanic that comes from the buffs they consume. Same for SGE the bulk of the damage never hits a health bar because of DR and shields and they get to keep their eukrasia mechanic.

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.

Not quite. What I wanted was for AST to not be the only healer who had the ability to “cheese” a mechanic through a unique skill but for others to also have abilities that let them excel at different mechanics. If we grind things down to spreadsheets again and if I stop and think about it, Macrocosmos isn’t actually a cheese it's just an insanely powerful tool given the right circumstances and no other healer had something comparable and I am miffed because I feel the devs missed this precisely because they have been paying so little attention to how healers actually interact with fights and mechanics due to homogenizing the rest of the healer kits and seeming to balance around that.

The real problem is that Macrocosmos in its current design is essentially a 50% DR (that’s not far off a tank LB3) on anything that doesn’t kill you and just way too strong vs a big damage spike compared to anything other healers have its power level is close to a LB. I’m beginning to wonder how many potential abilities were cut or hamstrung from healers or other jobs for stepping too close to the LBs territory. Especially strong group defensives that didn’t slip through the cracks like Macrocosmos and were tossed because they might steal the glory from tank LB3s.

A better design might have been to have Macrocosmos stagger the damage so it stores 50% of the damage and then doles it out the stored damage over time reducing the need for immediate burst healing and instead allowing regens and longer duration DRs to get more value without making half of the mechanic’s damage obsolete. That also opens up room for WHM to have a flat huge group burst heal, and SGE the have a large group shield with 20-30% damage reduction both good against burst.

Um… SCH… a pulsing shield that also pulses a big heal from the big fancy fairy good for multihit/heavy damage overtime… uh see below for how far off my rocker I’m sliding.

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about Scholar because by my own admission I don’t know salt about Scholar… but if we run with the idea that the fairy provides passive healing and that they are a shield healer then if we give damage reduction extra text to SGE we can treat the fairy as an extra regen text making SCH a hybrid shield/small regen healer with better recovery than SGE through more healing with the fairy. It sounds like they have a fair amount of unique mechanics like deployment tactics for spreading their shields so maybe double down on that for spreading AoE shields by reducing/removing the cooldown and replacing succor. With more buff management shift dps into maintaining dots so you can bring back the dots I hear folks cry for. Gives them a reason to spend time making the fairy less jank? Idk man this time I am way out of my depth and you can just ignore this section if you see nothing good.

None of this addresses current incoming vs outgoing damage in fight designs that can cause a lot of healer downtime but I would hope that if the devs took a closer look at what breathing room healers have they might tweak some things.

This also barely touches on healer downtimes and what to do in them other than having some healers stay buisier managing buffs for healing and moving some of the remaining time that would be spent on single target spam into dot maintenance so it has to happen less.

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.

And these advantages mean more when everything is almost cookie cutter and then you find the gingerbread man with the third arm(to better dunk his foes in milk). If everything's the same then even the small difference can become exaggerated, like a dip in an ice skating rink. But if everything is uneven but within an acceptable range people care less about the difference like grass in a park. DPS jobs do exactly this. With the exception of designated “selfish” jobs the DPS have wildly different mechanics(by healer standards) but theoretically stay in roughly the same contributed damage range. They also still have unique mechanics that interact with the basics of what they do like dualcast for RDM and standard step for DNR.

Going back to what I said earlier (oh gods sooo much earlier) the current difference between healers are extra text that you barely interact with when making decisions but the difference between BRD, DNR, and MCH are parts of the core to how you play that job (song,dances, um… packing the heat? Still low level on MCH by I know it plays differently from the others). Outside of the burst window problem there is still a difference between the flavor of the jobs.

Heck I’m even willing to not die on the burst window hill if the devs will wake up and realize just how much room they have to play with anywhere else. I wonder if internally they even just doubled RDM black and white mana generation for kicks and giggles, just to see what would happen. Oh gods I’m losing it.

[Ilyrian]

It's just pressing button in a game that has *don't stand in the fire* one-shot mechanics.

The whole engine can't provide anything more than that without removing the GCD.

[pikalovr]

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As i've stated before a few unique abilities make a unique kit it does not. and super minor changes don't automatically create a new ability. a single tick loss for a on apply heal is literally negligible since you're casting for the regen anyways. meaning the target most likely has taken damage anyways and you're using regen to keep them up or heal them for the next big mechanic while you spam your one DPS button. there's no more thought being put into it than the other regens. hell if fae gauge had more to do then the fairy link would have more to think about than that one minor change.

also SCH has excog which is their "panic" high heal ability, which is what abilities like benediction are for. but SCH will always be more unique than the other jobs regardless of how simple kits get. cause you need to have summons that do stuff or it's no longer SCH. unlike say AST SGE and WHM where you can have WHM copy the seal system just with elementals instead or SGE could copy it using different scientific stacks. think like addersgall and toxicon and a third one, after using them in a set combination you unlock a self buff due to mixing them all correctly.

cards were a great mechanic to base AST around. cause it's something that makes sense and alot harder to justify a WHM or SGE having access to something similar. which is why i wish they'd lean heavier into the few unique mechanics/resources we have left like aetherflow and the fae gauge, like lillies/elemental effects, like cards/seals, like addersgall/toxicon stacks. give them more reasons to why they couldn't just be x flavored mechanic like cards. and for the love of god give fae gauge something else to do i'll take another single target damage ability for it at this point.

eukrasia basically just being a hey we could've given you three more buttons but we decided to give you one button to access them instead, is a horrible way to try to create artificial uniqueness. especially when the other 3 jobs can access their DoTs easier and SCH doesn't need to wait an entire CD (yes ik it's short but you still technically need two GCDs to use your shield) to shield everyone. instead get rid of eukrasia and make it a passive ability similar to RDM dual cast. after casting an addersgall or toxicon ability your GCDs get augmented to their eukrasian counterparts. making a far more interactive way to reach them and incentivizes you to think about your resources more for DoT upkeep.

here's plenty of ways to make jobs lean into what makes them unique more. both in the damage, utility, and heal departments. but the issue is people can't understand basic fight creation and understand that you can make fights that allow jobs to handle it different ways. like i brought up with the casters in my P1s example.

they just assume we have to let jobs sit there and suffer or let every job basically do the same thing to appease how fights are made.

now this next part isn't aimed at you Reylah. but to a certain man who can't understand basic job balance and fight design.

YES FIGHT DESIGN AND JOB DESIGN GO HAND IN HAND. IT'S EXPECTED IF YOU MAKE 19 JOBS THAT YOU LOOK AT ALL 19 JOBS WHEN MAKING A FIGHT. TO MAKE SURE EACH JOB CAN EITHER BRING A UNIQUE WAY TO GET THE FIGHT DONE AT SIMILAR TIMES. OR WAYS TO HANDLE CERTAIN MECHANICS THAT OTHERS CAN'T.

[Hazama999]

I'll extend that to saying who cares if a certain combination of jobs works really well together? There's a strange obsession among the players with the idea that every job and every combination of jobs should be equally optimal. Maybe it feels like shit if a certain combination of jobs dominates the top of the speed clear charts, but at the end of the day who cares? If each job is unique, fun, and viable, it shouldn't matter so long as you get to enjoy a playstyle that perfectly fits what you like playing. Unfortunately job identity has been largely replaced with role identity. Healers feel the pain from this most of all.

100% agree with you here. I'd be perfectly fine with having all jobs be able to clear content while at the same time having a fluctuating optimal level relative to the content. Ultimately, and this is just me talkin', I don't much mind X job being ever so slightly better than Y job... in a game in which you can just have both on the same character.

Somewhat tangential, but I wonder... what is the JP playerbase's stance on the current state of jobs?