General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[ty_taurus]

The Absolute State of WHM, hidden for blogposting.

In ARR, the two healers were...alright. Little bare, but that was to be expected. They were serviceable for the expansion they occupied. Scholar was far more interactive than WHM was; Aetherflow made them more flexible, but their lack of beefy GCD options meant that things fell through if they spent their resources foolishly. WHM had the two dots and Fluid Aura plus Stone spam. Not engaging in a vacuum and would definitely grow stale given enough time, but with some Cure 2s and Medica 2s thrown in it worked for an Intro to MMO experience. Scholar's avenue of interactivity wasn't my jam, but I saw the potential.

Heavensward: Cool. They added some spice. Wasn't all sunshine, but it appears Square at least built on their foundation. Assize was neat- choose strong healing or damage with your Cleric Stance toggle. The healing was rarely necessary, but the attempt at a choice was made. Upgraded Stone had a cool animation, but I'd have liked something...interactive with it. Aero 3 was great. Another noninteractive dot, but it at least had great utility in AOE scenarios too. Tetra filled in the gap for that ridiculously long Benediction cooldown. WHM's biggest issues in Heavensward were a crappy mana economy (boy does history ever repeat itself) and the fact that its competition was...well, some say "well-designed", I say "cartoonishly overtuned", but those aren't mutually exclusive things. Scholar could be both fun to play -and- doing comparable damage to a ninja. In that vein, WHM's glaring weakness that compounded this: its competition could fluidly damage and heal at the same time with the fairy, oGCDs, cards, all the weaving, etc. WHM had to stop and swap between them, and the amount of output it had for that weakness was nowhere near enough to make up for it.

But the design itself outside balancing it against its cohealers? It was okay. Serviceable. There was potential just like ARR. Whatever Yoshi-P said in interviews, there were several abilities to use in downtime that went with the healing abilities. Was it terribly interactive? No. Were the spells mostly boring push bars rightward/leftward spells, unrelated to one another with respect to decision making? Yeah. It'd get stale eventually. But baby steps, the MMO was in its first expansion after recovering from disaster. Seeing two Prey targets and a tankbuster coming up and using Cure 2 -> Regen -> Tetra was an alright flow if you don't spend too long staring at it. There's a little decision making, but it's mostly situational and depends on timing rather than kit considerations.

And then there was Stormblood: "What? What the f***? What is this crap? I thought you were headed someplace good last expansion? Are you rewarding thoughtless cure spamming? Ahhhhh!" This is where WHM went from promising honor student rough around the edges to sliding downhill into skeletal crack addict. Where Square could have leaned into decision-making and interactivity, they instead leaned into spending more and more time spamming while whittling away at downtime activities. Fluid Aura, once a decent damage/utility spell with a quick cooldown that could have seen interactivity added to it, was instead stripped down to a POTD soloing spell to be pruned entirely later on. No, no. Interactivity BAD! Spam Cure and Medica more! Good White Mages spam Cure!

Everything about the kit design after that has leaned more and more into "Good healers spam Cure 2 and Medica! Use it whenever it's off cooldown if you like! Spam it more! Afflatus Misery is your reward for spamming Cure 2 and Medica as often as possible! Who cares if you line it up with party damage or not, just use it. Once you're done with that, spend more time refreshing one dot and spamming Glare. No Cleric Stance toggle. Making decisions makes WHM brains go hurty. No skill ceiling for you! If you get good at streamlining your healing, you get rewarded with more Glare spamming!"

I've been bewildered ever since at the sheer number of people in this community who think this is a good direction. Interactivity bad. More spamming. Spamming good. Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare. Finally, WHM is in a good spot. Now that WHM is designed with a glut of free healing tools that don't reward thoughtful use and an anemic downtime activity that involves sleeping on your 1 key, it's the best. Iteration. Ever.

I wanted my elemental healing sorceress to journey onward to a fun, flowy kit with at least the interactivity of say, the RDM kit. Instead we've got....this. This spammy, brainless class. The "real healers" can lavish as much praise on this horrible class as they like; it's unrecognizable from the potential it used to have.

So I'd like to know, whether in an overview or a more detailed explanation, what you would do with WHM if you had a genie wish and could do literally anything you wanted to it. I totally relate to your frustrations, and I really want every healer to feel like it has some element of engagement, and I also don't understand the logic of stapling a baby rattle onto WHM and saying "great job everyone! We did it!" But I'm not sure if I've seen you mention some things you'd personally do if you could. Care to share your thoughts?

[Semirhage]

So I'd like to know, whether in an overview or a more detailed explanation, what you would do with WHM if you had a genie wish and could do literally anything you wanted to it. I totally relate to your frustrations, and I really want every healer to feel like it has some element of engagement, and I also don't understand the logic of stapling a baby rattle onto WHM and saying "great job everyone! We did it!" But I'm not sure if I've seen you mention some things you'd personally do if you could. Care to share your thoughts?

That's tough to focus on anything specific, if only because the direction healers have gone in for the past several expansions has been just...yuck in so many ways. I've said before that picking one specific tree out of the forest of tedious design decisions is pointless; there are so many -things- that contribute to it. The one-note damage kits, the shallow healing kits, the stale healing elements of fight design, the way that stated development goals conflict with allowing the healer jobs to grow, etc. There have been several ideas on these forums over the years that I've liked. The WHM list you have in the OP is a great start. It adds interactivity to the job gauge. It adds a few choices. It at the very least causes your spells to do something to one another. It even fixes the Assize being a fake healing cooldown issue without just slapping another charge on it. I also like Arcane Ward as a concept. I think I said it a long time ago, but when I was complaining about the horrible lily system I mentioned another Korean grinder MMO I played years ago that did something similar. Not that the system was terribly interactive by itself either, but at least it, you know, steered the player toward playing the job skillfully, which the Stormblood "lol just spam healing GCDs" and the Shadowbringers "lol let's improve the reward for more spamming" gauge didn't. That game gave you a stacking MP refresh buff for every GCD cast, greased lightning style. The way it worked out was, the stacks fell off if you stopped casting for more than ~6 seconds. If you weren't casting very much, your MP economy was fine. If you kept your spells going, your MP was fine. What it punished was inconsistent casting. If you -must- keep WHM the simplest healer (which I wish wasn't a consideration, but we're in a landscape where simplistic braindead jobs are sooooooo good ), I'd say at least lean into things that show new players how skilled healers approach the game. Reinforce things like Always Be Casting. Minimize unnecessary movement. Dangle the promise of two or three reward scenarios in front of the player's face and make all of them tempting. They don't even need to be equally tempting, but "Cast another damage GCD" versus "press a healing button when Assize is almost off cooldown anyway or everyone's full because this is a dungeozzzzzzzz" isn't a set of tempting choices. In the current landscape, you heal when you have to, because you have to. And then you deal damage with your straight line flowchart of a DPS kit, because that's the no-choices path the game has laid before you.

I don't see healer gameplay improving anytime soon. Meaningful choice appears to be the polar opposite of CBU3's true north for the past several expansions, and WHM's eternal popularity isn't telling them to steer any differently. This is an MMO, and I don't expect a 4d chess game from a cRPG against my NPC opponent where I need to pause for 20-30 seconds to determine my next move out of a list of 50 different spells/abilities; we don't have that kind of time in our more fast-paced game. On the same token, I'd like to steer -away- from "There is one objectively correct button to press at this time" and "there are several objectively correct buttons to press at this moment but there's barely any difference between them and what you gain is more or less the same outcome no matter which one you choose". If I had to pick one design holy grail to melt into slag, it'd be that one. I also think it's going to be among the hardest dragons to slay, because that homogenization/deletion of choice is affecting way more than the healers.

[Rilifane]

In addition to everything Semi said, there's also the problem of extreme rigidity in party comp and toolkit on top of predictable, bursty damage and everything else.
I'll just compare it to WoW here for a moment.
In Cataclysm, a talent called "Archangel" existet which consumed Atonement stacks (up to 5) to increase your healing for 18s and recover mana. 30s cooldown. Atonement stacks were gained by casting Smite, your Glare-equivalent.
Almost no Holy Priests played with that talent as Smite had no synergy with anything from the toolkit so damage aside, Smite essentially did "nothing" but ate several talent points. But there were multiple ways in which you could benefit from it.
1) you traded 5 GCDs every 30s at most for a signifcant increase in healing (iirc it was 25% or even 30%), you had a controlled burst healing at the price of regularly sacrificing a GCD for damage. Since you always had a few openings even in a game with constant damage, it was entirely possible, it simply required attention and good timing.
2) the mana you regenerated was % based so anything that increased Int (your output stat that also increased max mana) recovered more mana - trinkets that temporarily increased Int increased the gain from both effects, same with Int pots which shared a cooldown with mana pots but if done right, an Int pot could actually give more mana back than a pure mana pot.
It was risky at times but overall, Archangel Holy was a beast in healing if done correctly and it allowed our group to drop a healer very early on to make up for our not-so-great dps.

That sort of choice doesn't exist here. One could argue that the classes are our specs but their toolkits are fixed. There is always exactly one way to play each healer with no way to modify their style to lean closer towards support or dps or even raw healing. The path is completely predeterminded and that's the end of it. I'm not saying that talent trees are the solution to all of our problems but we suffer from a lack of choice on every level.
Everything in this game is completely railroaded from start to finish and yet what you have to do on healer varies wildly depending on content and other players. The healer in a chaotic clownfiesta alli raid with everyone dying faster than you can hardrezz and collecting stacks like pokemon has the exact same toolkit as the top-end raider in a coordinated static where the WAR basically solo heals the savage boss that gets deleted before the only healcheck in the entire fight comes up.

All healers could be so much but the devs insist on us not being able to make choices, let alone meaningful ones.
Healers currently suffer most from their numerous design choices that eliminated any form of interaction, choice, variety and skill ceiling but the problem is a much bigger one than just the lack of downtime activity for healers. While it would help if we finally get a decent downtime kit, the game itself has issues and they doubled down on all of them.
*cough*2minburstsnobodylikes*cough*

[currentlemon]

Wow. I really like the suggestions you made for WHM. Especially, Arcane Ward. It's like a Ley Lines for BLM but built specifically for WHM and it is more forgiving, even though there is nothing wrong with that. Regen is gone and replaced entirely with unique spells, which I like. Ensuna is gone too and instead has been merged with Cure I, which is an interesting change. Also, props for keeping the number of buttons low. I counted a total of 29 spells for WHM after reading the list again.

[Renathras]

Sometimes, the best thing to do in an echo chamber is try to NOT be an echo chamber. One way is to look outside the chamber and see if your collective views match those of the outside world. For one example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX-cBCA7114

Have a read through the comment section on this video. Something that stands out to me is how...different...their collective and average views seem to be vs this forum. This isn't to say that can't be an echo chamber as well (though that's less likely since YouTube commenters are probably a more general cross-section of society than specialized forums like this are) or that they're necessarily a majority (though, again, they're probably a more general cross-section), but it's instructive to see those views seen as alien or "contrarian" here are, in fact, likely not either of those things and are somewhat mainstream views when looking at the more general population.

[AmiableApkallu]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX-cBCA7114

Have a read through the comment section on this video. Something that stands out to me is how...different...their collective and average views seem to be vs this forum.

The views expressed in the comments add nothing of real value to the views I've seen expressed in the forums or on Reddit, or hold in my own head. It's the same experiences and opinions and arguments, repeated, everywhere.

It's a fool's errand trying to determine what the "mainstream" view is from what is almost certainly the tiny fraction of players that bother to comment on the Internet. And it's somewhat irrelevant since it's not like someone's going to go, "oh, this is a good/bad thing because it's the mainstream view."

What we're ultimately stuck with is SE's own view of healing (as of 2021, anyway):

Mrhappy1227: Healers in Final Fantasy XIV often discuss how often they are casting DPS spells despite being healers. Often nicknaming jobs like White Mage a “Glare Mage” as an example. The Media Tour build has some new healing skills that also have damage components to them. Has the team taken any feedback from the players on improving interactivity with the healers? Whether that be more interesting DPS skills or more prominent healing requirements.

Yoshida: So I totally understand that those healers that have a very high player skill level and they’ve really mastered their jobs go into these different raids or battles and when they do have some downtime between their heals they do cast more offensive spells. Some of them desire to have more technical aspects of it so they are more active and I totally understand that sentiment. But of course the basis of a healer is to heal so I think the development team and I have this thinking of getting that sense of exhilaration from doing really good heal work.

That being said I don’t think we would do any sort of dramatic addition of offensive skills moving forward. By having these offensive abilities some players, like new healers, might feel pressured like “oh do I have to have good DPS while I’m healing?” or some players might be aggressive like “oh hey you have an offensive skill in your kit, why don’t you use it?” and I don’t think that’s optimal either.

Amusingly, while trying to dig that up, I found the "just go play Ultimate" quote, but it's actually everything said before that that's interesting now that Asphodelos is actually out (emphasis is mine):

Q: Healers are currently putting out too much healing compared to damage taken and have few damage-dealing options and limited flexibility in battle. People are even clearing Pandæmonium with tank-only parties. Are there plans to make healers more vital to parties?

A: We hold back on the difficulty of the initial Savage raids of each expansion to allow more people to clear, which goes for Asphodelos as well.

I imagine a lot of comparisons are being drawn between the current encounters and the Savage encounters added in Patch 5.4, but the difficulty will be gradually increased as players get more comfortable with their jobs again.

[Renathras]

Oh, I don't disagree.

I'm more pointing out that this forum is kind of an echo chamber. The people here believing it represents the entire community or is the only mainstream view - a weird kind of appeal to authority/appeal to consensus fallacy - need to stop doing that. This would, one can hope, make them more open to compromise positions (like the "leave WHM alone and change the others" - a position even Misshapen Chair has suggested) instead of their current hardline positions.

But, as you say, in the end it doesn't matter. It's what Yoshi P and the Devs decide they want to do. Which is presently stay the course.

[T-Owl]

Oh, I don't disagree.

I'm more pointing out that this forum is kind of an echo chamber. The people here believing it represents the entire community or is the only mainstream view - a weird kind of appeal to authority/appeal to consensus fallacy - need to stop doing that. This would, one can hope, make them more open to compromise positions (like the "leave WHM alone and change the others" - a position even Misshapen Chair has suggested) instead of their current hardline positions.

But, as you say, in the end it doesn't matter. It's what Yoshi P and the Devs decide they want to do. Which is presently stay the course.

Lets be real, with how widespread high dps uptime is on all levels of content facing the problem of being stuck to spamming 1 button for most of any given content is probably an issue a high percentage of healer players face and when it comes to casuals, I don't think we can assume them caring much about how classes play on a technical level because they will just perform based on gut feeling and focus more on aesthetics. If White Mage would have the hardest dps rotation of all healers in this game, it probably would still be the most popular healer because its the iconic one which you can pick up at level 1. Hell, it may even end up giving us a higher quality of healers at high levels, because newbies get used to it.

And the leave White Mage alone position is inheritly flawed because one point of critic is already how much the noob healer identity is already crippling White Mage.

[flowerfairy]

It's no secret to anyone frequenting the forums that I'm not a huge fan of the current healer design. I have my own ideas of what I'd like to do with the healers, and I like to do general theorycrafting on potential designs for them. I'll put links to these in the spoiler window below for anyone interested in that sort of thing:

WHM

AST

The WHM idea is really cool. AST was a little hard to follow without a flowchart but the cards sound fun to use. I like the MP management on both and the risk of blowing too much on Tempest/Celestial Fate can run you dry, honestly I want resource management in general to come back for all jobs with more impact on their gameplay. No more 120s burst gameplay please.

[Renathras]

I don't think we can assume them caring much about how classes play on a technical level because they will just perform based on gut feeling and focus more on aesthetics.

That's a bad assumption. First, from the Lucky Bancho numbers, we see the simplest Jobs are the most played across all rolls: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...b_populations/

The most played Jobs in each role right now are WAR, WHM, RPR, DNC, SMN. The second most tend to be ones considered somewhat easy as well, like SAM and RDM.

Secondly, "casuals" often are interested in doing better, but the people you really have to worry about are the mid-core, who absolutely do care about things at a technical level, but don't perform (for whatever reason) at the top percentile levels and don't want or need more mental juggling.

Which also means that based on this, if WHM was made the most punishing healer, that would not, in fact, remain the most played.

No serious critic is worried about "the noob healer identity" hurting WHM. Outside of when WHM legitimately did not do damage and could not maintain MP for a whole fight, it has not been crippled, and we don't see the "noob dps identity" crippling RPR, DNC, RDM, or SMN. The only things hurting those Jobs are when their dps is too low vs the others in their role.