White Mage Attraction

[Supersnow845]

This is also an issue of intra-role imbalance. You can have tradeoffs, or no tradeoffs. Why do AST and SGE just have a crapload of completely free heals that cost them zero DPS? In a game where the DPS race is the point of basically every encounter, your potential DPS is a huge boon. Why bring a SnoozeMage with few oGCDs and a bunch of lossy GCD heals when you have another option that can heal for free and lose no DPS? Would you like a $5 piece of cake, or a $0 piece of cake?

Yeah I know the way this discussion normally ends is "lol bro who cares it's just five bucks it doesn't matter in the end why do you care so much" Because proportionally, 5 is infinitely more than zero.

One of the big things that has kept WHM an unattractive pick from a numbers standpoint is that, for the longest time, Square decided that WHM's "niche" was healing throughput. This might be a workable identity. In a different game. Because Square Enix has also made it abundantly clear: they want all party comps to be viable, and by viable, they mean comfortably so- not clearing by the skin of your teeth at the absolute skill ceiling, but clearable in a midcore, relatively chill party. One of the knock-on effects from this design consideration is that healers must all have healing throughput that comfortably clears everything. So if everyone has a massive amount of healing throughput as a baseline, what's the point of having -even more-? Making a class that's easier for someone really bad at healing to clear something I guess? It's not an advantage that makes WHM attractive to a skilled player. It's a safety net that makes them less attractive the more skilled you get.

That last part is basically the entirety of what’s always been wrong with WHM, you can’t balance content explicitly for savage in a game which is overwhelmingly biased to casual content, then put in a class that’s designed as the “newbie friendly” alternative without it messing up its sub-role balance generally to the detriment of the others.

Tanks get around this problem with WAR, it’s the newbie friendly tank but it also has its own powerful niche that is also specifically designed to attract newer people to tanking (massive self heal), WHM needs something like that or otherwise it just needs to have its balance disconnected from the others so that they aren’t dragged down endlessly by WHM.

Also please make another healer accessible at level 1, having so many threads where people ask for “what’s the best starting healing” and as an experienced healers you know WHM is the worst to start with because it teaches all the wrong habits but having to level something else up to get another healer when they can just pick CNJ massively biases WHM for no other reason than outdated game design

[Rilifane]

Yes and no. I can certainly appreciate healers determining how best to play the game as it is given to them, and I can still insist that it's a travesty that they don't fight harder to demand that the game evolve (or return to its roots -- apologies for having played FFXIV for ~1 year) so that their nominal role be valued.

Except that healers of all gameplay levels asked for more to heal for years.
We got told to wait until next tier or next expansion but nothing changed until Yoshi finally went on record saying that no, they're not going to increase incoming damage because muh poor stressed baby healers ~<3.

The reason why healers ask for better downtime gameplay is because every other attempt at making healers more engaging was ignored or met with flippant dismissal and excuses. Want a recent example? "Go play Ultimate" - except that Ultimate is and never was a heal check, it was always about mitigation and execution, not to mention it's only the tiniest fraction of battle content in this game and playing Ultimate would do nothing to improve the experience in solo duties, fates, treasure maps, dungeons, normal raids, alli raids, extremes and savage.
If we were lucky enough to even get acknowledged we got a tone-deaf answer or were met with flippant dismissal.

Good healers don't say that GCD heals are a dps loss because they don't want to heal. They say that GCD heals are a dps loss because pointless GCD heals are and a GCD heal is pointless when you have literally anything else available. If you use Medica II when Aslyum or waiting for Assize would've done the trick, you simply wasted a GCD and that has nothing to with not wanting to heal and everything to do with healing efficiently. So linking the fflogs calculations of rDPS, aDPS and nDPS proves nothing.

As long as the devs don't give healers a good reason to use GCD heals of course they won't. Why would anyone want to play intentionally worse?

lso please make another healer accessible at level 1, having so many threads where people ask for “what’s the best starting healing” and as an experienced healers you know WHM is the worst to start with because it teaches all the wrong habits but having to level something else up to get another healer when they can just pick CNJ massively biases WHM for no other reason than outdated game design

Preach.
Every time someone recommends playing CNJ/ WHM because it's sooo easssyyy :3 and starts at lv 1, I die a bit inside. It's the worst healer for learning by a huge margin.

[Punslinger]

Yes and no. I can certainly appreciate healers determining how best to play the game as it is given to them, and I can still insist that it's a travesty that they don't fight harder to demand that the game evolve (or return to its roots -- apologies for having played FFXIV for ~1 year) so that their nominal role be valued.

We have. Repeatedly. There is a 130-page healer quit thread going back three years. There is an 81-page thread with a very detailed, and repeatedly-updated first post outlining everything wrong with healers in FF14: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-healer-issues.

YoshiderP has instead said that he doesn't want to "stress" healers by making fights that require them to do their job. He kicked the healer off of his internal play-testing team for being "too good" (note: said healer was just starting to clear EXs, while BLM-maining YoshiderP parses orange in Savage). He has made it abundantly clear that he wants healing to be the Little Timmy role, the one you give to the slow kid in the FC so that he can feel like he's contributing, without worrying that he'll mess up and hold you back from clearing. It has an absurd amount of healing to deal with a pathetic amount of incoming damage, and it isn't allowed to have more than two DPS buttons, because that would fry Sylphie's brain, and then Sylphie would get mad that she no longer gets a free carry just for putting a green icon next to her name.

[Semirhage]

Oh no. I had another essay pop into my head. Here we go.

Why Lilies Aren't All That Great: Version 2022

So, Square has played their cards close to the chest when it comes to their broad-strokes vision for Healers as a role. Sometimes they'll give a reason for changing something, but they dialed the transparency on job design WAY back after the healers had a (justified) meltdown when Stormblood previewed. Square barely gave us a justification for some of the crazier changes; they said, "just try it out". It's said often on the forums that nobody at Squeenix headquarters plays a healer at any level of proficiency above "occasional roulette", or that they don't give much thought to the role at all. What gets into their heads when they do think about healers? Without some sort of fireside chat with explanations, all we can do is look at some of their more bizarre changes and try to pick a pattern of behavior out of the patch notes.

Stormblood lilies, one of the most memed changes. During the preview, before Square incorporated any feedback, a chance (!) of granting a lily when casting Cure or Cure 2. Gave pathetic low single-digit second discounts on the next non-Benediction healing oGCD you cast. Baffled the crap out of any healer who knew how to play this game. Why would you incentivize your two least-efficient (mana, time, potency, you name it) heals BEFORE using your most efficent, free ones? What did this system incentivize? Cure spamming.
Fey gauge. Rewards healing with even more healing. Sits full most fights. What? Why? Why is one regen the only use of this gauge? Scholars rarely need this much healing. What would the designer of such a gauge imagine the player does? Heal spamming.
Energy Drain removal. Why would you get rid of your Aetherflow dump? What the hell? What are you supposed to do with your remaining stacks? Sure, if you've got to Lustrate that darn Dragoon then you do it. But why leave Scholar with no useful way to drop their remaining Aetherflow charges when they aren't needed? What does this incentivize? Heal spamming.
No Scholar AoE on Stormblood launch. Who would greenlight this? Scholar was dead in the water when it came to dungeon damage. What would a Scholar end up doing in this scenario? Spam heals? Stand around and do nothing?
Why does Freecure still exist? This passive has been a meme for nearly four expansions now. Its MP conservation is never worth the time wasted fishing for it. What does this ability exist to incentivize? Cure spamming.
Why is Sage's MP economy directly tied to using its Addersgall heals? The MP you get back from using those heals isn't a nice bonus; it's mandatory if you don't want to eventually run dry. What happens in the event that you don't need the healing? Was that even a consideration? What does this incentivize? Heal spamming.
Why does at least one healer have gross mana economy issues when a new expansion drops? Not just some niche scenario, but spamming their cheapest GCD for an entire fight while maintaining casts runs them dry on MP, and there's no decision they can make other than standing around not casting anything to fix it. What sort of healer tested this? One that stands around and doesn't do anything between heals.

From my perspective, something's starting to take shape. Square hasn't come out and painted a picture of what their idea of a good max level healer looks like, but if you look at the shape drawn by their weird design decisions, you can fill in the blanks. Minimizing healing? Keeping your GCD rolling? Getting a feel for how your tools can weave into the rest of your kit? Supporting your party with intelligent use of your tools? Nope.

Square lives in a world where they think damage is constant. Everywhere. All the time. A good healer is a Cure spammer. oGCDs are for emergencies when the constant terrifying onslaught of incoming damage gets even higher. A skilled healer *might* get a damage spell in once in a blue moon, but otherwise stands around waiting for that constant tidal wave of incoming damage to fix. They view healers the way the Sylphie meme does. As a terrified newbie. So the healer kits are designed the way a Cure spammer would design them. Because good healers are Cure spammers.

So where do Shadowbringers lilies fit into this? They were lauded as Square finally discovering a positive direction to take WHM in. After a full expansion of a worthless job gauge, now there's a gauge that sees use. Hallelujah, we're finally turning this role around everybody. WHM is functional again!

Is it, though? What are lilies if not rewards for C U R E S P A M M I N G? They just made the reward attractive enough to use this time. Square Enix hasn't learned a single effing thing about how skilled healers play. It's not a light at the end of the tunnel. It's further evidence that Square is digging their heels in and forging ahead with the same BS idea for how to design healers they had all along: Cure spamming good. Good healers are Cure spammers. You're bored with the game? How? Aren't you spamming Cure? If you just cast Cure some more, maybe you'd see how good our design is.

Maybe if the role had a whisper of design that led me to believe Square understood that clever, or conservative, or well-timed healing should reward downtime with extra utility/damage/whatever, I'd believe otherwise. But ALL of the incentive systems in this role with the mild exception of Addersting reward you for spamming your abilities, not for using them well. Because good healers are Cure spammers. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think Square designed Shadowbringers lilies after a come to Jesus moment where they learned the right lesson from the disaster that was Stormblood lilies. They just decided the main problem with them was that they didn't reward you for Cure spamming enough. Ah, there we go. Fixed. Increase the reward for Cure spamming, now we've got them playing like pros.

[Supersnow845]

Oh no. I had another essay pop into my head. Here we go.

Why Lilies Aren't All That Great: Version 2022.

I love how the only reason we ever forced squares hand in making a positive DPS change to WHM (that of misery going from 900 to 1240) was because we had reached a point where WHM had become so bad people actually began to ban them from parties

Square gates healers but they sure as hell won’t let you ban their precious sylphie class from any content because they can’t design it properly

[ForteNightshade]

In the parlance of the game, /doubt. The "community's" favored formulas say otherwise.

Nothing listed there devalues the use of GCD healing when necessary. The problem being it's never necessary outside week 1-2 prog. Even then, the need is sparingly small. The community didn't arbitrarily decide one day GCD is bad. They realized throughout throughout the tail end of Heavensward and into Stormblood how little of it they can get away with. This has only be exasperated by the continual addition of new, insanely powerful, oGCD heals and the lessening of outgoing damage. When I can do the entirety of P4S door boss without a shield GCD shield, what value do they have? Why should I ever care to press Eukrasia Prognosis when I have at least two of Holos, Panhaima, Pneumba, Ixocholoe, Keracholoe and Physis II for every single mechanic he does. In fact, I sometimes even have three going because damage is so spaced out I can literally stack a ridiculous amount of free mitigation. Keep in mind, of those six abilities, only two of them are on a 120s CD. Keracholoe is a measly 40s despite being a better version of Whispering Dawn with a 10% shield on top of it.

Give us a reason to GCD heal and we'll start doing it again. Unfortunately, the devs refuse due to wanting to make healing as easy as possible. When I can go through an entire dungeon without touching the tank once save for throwing Haima, Panhaima and maybe a Taurcholoe, why would I put any value on GCD heals?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[…]But anyway, a rational player would place value on healing so that the game design itself might come to value it. Why would a game designer ramp up damage so high that a healer would find it necessary to use GCD heals when the players complain that "GCD heals are a DPS loss"?

Have you ever considered how certain action(s) are (close to) meaningless?
• A cast of Medica II when you can just wait for Assize to come off cooldown and/or throwing out Rapture when you need to move.
• A cast of Succor when you can let Whispering Dawn + Fey Blessing + Embrace spams do their magic.
• A cast of Asp Helios when you could’ve just let your currently glowing earthly star grow and explode.
• A cast of E.Prognosis when there’s Ixochole/Kerachole/Physis II already ticking.

If you never needed to use those GCDs by the time those alternative abilities could’ve achieved the same result, then THOSE healing GCDs are meaningless, period. Maybe they’ll keep your party ‘happier’ cause they like seeing that GCD spellcast on your name and/or seeing their HP healthy, but that’s it. It doesn’t contribute toward the duty’s objective as good as those alternatives.

In the end players are just adjusting. They made GCD healing so meaningless objectively outside clown fiestas. Even then at 90 you still have abundant options to fix the clownery before actually dipping into an actual, necessary GCD heals. Oh yeah, you also have co-healer too to cover even more mistakes, so that’s fun.

[Renathras]

I think the problem here is all the other healers have an identity, but also get the same tools WHM has.

AST has buffs (cards) but also has all the buttons WHM has, with most of them being equal or better. The only thing WHM has that AST doesn't is Cure 3, which is highly niche situational and both AST _AND_ WHM have other tools to cover for that. Anytime you use Cure 3 on WHM you could conceivably use Plenery boosted Rapture, Medica 2, Medica (with that boost), Asylum, and Assize. Mix any of those together and you're meeting whatever needs Cure 3 has. Cure 3 USED to be spamable with long lasting Thin Air, but since that was nerfed to 2 charges, it isn't even a really great buff. Otherwise, AST has every ability WHM has as far as I can think of off-hand, or a version that's close enough to make no difference. The only other thing I could think of is Bene, but Essential Dignity is a scaling Tetra with two charges.

SCH has Eos, Sacred Soil as a better Asylum, Fey Illimuniation for a nearly as useful Medica 2 that's oGCD, and Seraph for an even more powerful one with shields. Fey Blessing and Indom cover AOE healing, and it has several different things that can equal or exceed Temperance. It can also make the most bonkers powerful shield in the game and spread it to an entire party, allowing an effective "pre-Cure 3". SCH can arguably match or exceed WHM raw healing in emergencies, which is just bonkers. And it has a party damage buff.

SGE is a weaker SCH. Its raw healing IS weaker than WHM's, but it also has shields, the most spamable party-wide mitigation in the game with Karachole, and can mix Zoe with Pneuma for an extremely potent party heal. It also arguably matches WHM's personal DPS, and does so while splash healing the tank/Kardia target. Included in its kit are two party-wide Regens as well with Physis and Kara.

So, against that, what does WHM have?

"It's the Regen healer!"

Yeah, no: So are all the others.

"Oh, uh...well, it has...strong damage!"

Yeah, no: All the others either roughly equal (SGE) or exceed (SCH, AST) its damage contribution to the party.

"Well, it has powerful heals!"

Yeah, no: AST matches its healing, and SCH can often enough for the few times it's needed. SCH can also us mitigation or mass shielding to negate or minimize the need for that healing. Only SGE can't match WHM's raw healing, but it has CDs for shielding, mitigation, and even a couple powerful burst heals if it needs to. Besides, due to game balance, there's no situation in the game that DEMANDS WHM's raw healing that exceeds what any other healer could do in that situation.

"Oh, so...it's...uh...easy to play?"

Yeah, no: Are any of the healers NOT? AST is more plates to juggle and SCH is arguably up there, but SGE isn't really significantly harder than WHM, just takes a different thinking/approach.


"Well, it has the best crutch back-up heals if it is played badly?"

Yeah...that's it.

So why does every other healer have what WHM does (or better) and WHM has no niche in which it excels? I kind of agree that removing HoTs from the other healers is the solution here, since the other obvious solution is make fights that require WHM's raw healing, but that would make WHM must-have for those fights, so that's no good.

.

Really, the only things WHM has going for it are that it IS the easiest to play (though again, others aren't necessarily HARD, per se), it has the best back-up crutches in the game if everything's gone horribly wrong (which can occasionally be useful, but is that a good identity?), and it has Misery (which is a dopamine hit, but...it's only damage neutral, so if you REALLY think about it, it shouldn't be). It's not exceptional in the ways that AST (buffs and raw healing) or SCH (mitigation and powerful shielding) are, and even SGE is half-way to SCH just without Chain Strat.

I really DO like WHM, but it's like all the other healers are stepping on its toes, but if it asks to step on theirs, it's berated by the teacher for being a bully.

[UkcsAlias]

If you never needed to use those GCDs by the time those alternative abilities could’ve achieved the same result, then THOSE healing GCDs are meaningless, period. Maybe they’ll keep your party ‘happier’ cause they like seeing that GCD spellcast on your name and/or seeing their HP healthy, but that’s it. It doesn’t contribute toward the duty’s objective as good as those alternatives.

Until that clown fiesta happened and you wasted all your oGCDs already and are forced using GCD heals, and an aoe targets you. Suddenly this turns into an issue. This while such aoegcd could have mitigated a lot of damage (especialy with bosses that show when they are about to do a strong global aoe). Saving some panic heals can do a lot.

Not every team is equaly fluent. And especialy in 4 player content, you do not have a backup healer.

Now you might say, if you had to resolve to that, its still the team that made the flaws, which is true. But your mistake could have still caused the wipe to happen. While your 10 cycles of not using a dps ability barely made any dent to begin with, and the wipe wasted a lot of time.

Sure, not all content requires you to use these (most doesnt). But there are those cases which arent standard. Also, those aoe healing over time abilities can provide a lot of health over time. And 1 gcd for such buffer can be very much worth it. And the less organized a team is, the more you are forced to rely on GCDs (and the higher the difficulty, the less usage they will see since those demand organized teams).

Keeping people on lower health will influence their decison making, since at safe health a lot more things can become viable as tactic. And those things can also result in a higher damage output. But most important: no matter how much GCDs you saved not using those abilities, the moment 1 dps dies, that dps loss will exceed every single dps you saved. Trying to keep them alive is nearly always more viable for dps output (the only case when it isnt, is when the dps was bad anyway).

[Renathras]

Most scenarios that most players will encounter will involve normal mode content with standard party comps of players of average skill playing their jobs and mechanics less than perfectly.

But anyway, a rational player would place value on healing so that the game design itself might come to value it. Why would a game designer ramp up damage so high that a healer would find it necessary to use GCD heals when the players complain that "GCD heals are a DPS loss"?

Honestly, I hate to see dogpiles.

You make some good points. I think the problem is the game's design is going in a weird direction vs healing.

We have too many oGCDs and they're too powerful AND they have too short of CDs so there's no reason to hold them. So players never need to hit a GCD heal because they always have oGCDs for that. I'm old enough I remember playing Vanilla WoW (no, not "Classic", the OG Vanilla) where Paladin had a 1 HOUR (60 minute...again 1 HOUR) CD that was basically Bene if Bene also sapped all your MP. Druid had a combat raise but it was also on a 1 hour CD (and it had no spamable "normal" raise)

Abilities like that were powerful, but you had to carefully consider using them because they would not be available again for a long time if you later had a more urgent need. The "Elixir problem" from single player RPGs, basically.

You had less powerful abilities that were available more often, but most were still things like 5 or 10 minute or so CDs.

In FFXIV, we started with ARR and HW having few oGCDs, and they were longish CDs so for more clutch situations. WHM at level 50 had exactly one oGCD heal, Bene. It had a button that boosted healing (Divine Seal, I think?) and had Presence of Mind for quicker casting of GCDs. That was it. And party AND TANK damage was also much higher relative to health bars. You couldn't hit Assize or Asylum and ignore healing for the next 20 seconds like you can now. Not only did you have to use GCD heals, but probably several.

But at this point, we have so many oGCDs, they're so powerful, and they have short, accessible CDs, that there's no reason to not use them...and they remove the need to even cast a GCD in most situations. Combine this with lower damage to the party in encounters, and it creates a situation where most GCDs a healer uses are damage just weaving the occasional oGCD and calling it a day.

So the game has designed itself into a weird corner were we have insanely powerful heals (GCD and oGCD), but very little unavidable damage, and our oGCDs are so powerful, so plentiful, and so frequent in CD time that there's no reason to ration them. And because we have so many and they do all the healing we need, we have no need of GCD heals past about level 60 leveling dungeons. Some Jobs (SCH) arguably don't even need them well before then.

Either our heals need to be nerfed, damage needs to be buffed, oGCDs need to be pruned, or...I dunno, something.