What was so wrong with stormblood healers that required they be changed?

[Maltothoris]

Indeed, it such an issue that in 4.5 which they actually buffed whm, something they noted they usually try to not do before a new expansion. Assize was basically super buffed there, healing and damage from 300 to 400 and then cd reduced from 60 to 45 seconds. There also their old traits from arr and hw.

Overcure was Grants a 15% chance that after casting Cure II, your next Cure III will cost half MP. Buff duration: 15 seconds.

Esuna had a 20 percent chance that it would be free.

And Medica had a trait where each cast Grants a 20% chance that Medica will cost half MP.

[IceBlueNinja]

Repose annoys me so much because it's just Sleep but worse. It offers literally no benefit being ST except being 200 MP less, which is a complete nonfactor. A healer cannot even use Repose to attempt to salvage a large pull gone wrong, so literally what is the point? Get rid of it and rework that one SHB healer role quest. Free up a slot for the healers.

same with esuna 95% worthless until a few dungeons like troia and that dungeon where meteion talks alot

[Zolvolt]

I think the biggest problem with the removal of Cleric Stance wasn't that the ability itself was well-designed. It had problems. It was sticky, it essentially locked you out of non-flat healing for two GCDs, we all know why it wasn't great. The problem with Square removing old CS was that they took something jank that added a little risk-reward and engagement, and instead of improving upon or replacing it, they just entirely deleted what little engagement was gleaned from it. I consider CS removal part of the downward spiral for the role because it was in the first "wave" of "don't improve engagement, just delete it!" horrible design philosophy that the role has eaten over and over ever since.

but also they gave us a 5% dps buff cleric stance in stormblood and people litterally did not use it. I remember static members of mine telling me it wasn't worth taking. That says something to the devs also.

edit: Yes I was the person who didn't take esuna or protect but did take cleric stance. not sorry about it.

[Semirhage]

but also they gave us a 5% dps buff cleric stance in stormblood and people litterally did not use it. I remember static members of mine telling me it wasn't worth taking. That says something to the devs also.

edit: Yes I was the person who didn't take esuna or protect but did take cleric stance. not sorry about it.

What's also horrid is that WHM didn't have Ruin 2 or the fast GCD Malefic during Stormblood. Clipping your GCD to Cleric Stance was a loss on the job that originally had it. *shakes fist*

[Calysto]

What was wrong with HW/SB healers ? they were different jobs and SE had to balance them. The guy that did that probably left and nobody wanted to do it.

ShB was supposed to be a reset of healers to "build upon". So far with EW it was not.

Unless you want to be hopeful that all healers were 1 job, now they're like 2 (kinda), so maybe 7.0 will have them split again into 4 distinct jobs ; but the ShB "base" seems so flawed and almost no feedback went anywhere.

[Sebazy]

What was wrong with HW/SB healers ? they were different jobs and SE had to balance them. The guy that did that probably left and nobody wanted to do it.

We've had 1 person leave the job design team at some point around 2019/2020 (Tsuyoshi Yokozawa) who was replaced to keep the team at 4. Outside of that the team is still essential the same 4 people we've had since ARR.

I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that what enthusiasm this team had for the healer role is long gone. Thus we get little but cut and paste abilities with very little effort made to synergise or reinvigorate our core gameplay loops. Name some completely new and original healer specific ability that truly hit the ground running without requiring multiple painful reworks to shape it into something decent? It's surprisingly tricky really... Earthy Star? Macro Cosmos? Expedient? Excog?

There are plenty of abilities like Lilybell that come close as well, but for these almost the entirety of the rest of our kit either feels like a cut and paste of something prior (With some being particularly egregious such as Temperance) or launched in a laughably dismal state and required an extended game of hot and cold before they got to the point of being somewhere between usable and decent.

This stark lack of attention to detail and polish across the role has been a running theme since forever really. It should have been painfully obvious that 3.0 AST wasn't going to work in Gordias. It should have been painfully obvious that 4.0 SCH wasn't going to work in anything outside of the solo MSQ and so forth.

SE keep making these mistakes and promptly refusing to learn from them or take steps to ensure a better standard. IMO the blame lies squarely at Yoshida's feet by now. He has no time for healers and it's shown for years in his interviews. I'm confident that healers will remain in this weird state until he stands down as lead.

[IceBlueNinja]

but also they gave us a 5% dps buff cleric stance in stormblood and people litterally did not use it. I remember static members of mine telling me it wasn't worth taking. That says something to the devs also.

edit: Yes I was the person who didn't take esuna or protect but did take cleric stance. not sorry about it.

I am the opposite loved protect but did no use cleric stance at all in stormblood or esuna tbh lol. 14 is the only ff where esuna only has like 5% use. Blue mage healer stance exvu makes it such a meme which is like old selene of sch heard she had a haste and aoe esuna. I wonder why healers dont get a haste spell . I dont really count lightspeed or presence . I mean a haste for all the healers even if it must have a 2 min cd like rescue.

[VentVanitas]

SE keep making these mistakes and promptly refusing to learn from them or take steps to ensure a better standard. IMO the blame lies squarely at Yoshida's feet by now. He has no time for healers and it's shown for years in his interviews. I'm confident that healers will remain in this weird state until he stands down as lead.

I've never seen developers that are simultaneously too unaware of glaring issues yet too eager to overcorrect something that isn't broken or particularly problematic. They waste a lot of development time and resources "fixing" easily avoidable problems that they've created themselves.

[Semirhage]

I'd want another major change to overall job design if we were to bring back a haste buff tbh. There are so many jobs that -really- don't want skill/spell speed. A temporary speed up out of the blue just screws up their cooldown alignment. This is even more true now that we're on Mr. Two Minute Burst's Wild Ride.

[ForsakenRoe]

They waste a lot of development time and resources "fixing" easily avoidable problems that they've created themselves.

'lets make it so everything lines up at 2mins'
'oh bother, now PLD doesnt do good damage because it's built around doing sustained damage, how do we fix this'
'uhhh make it burst at 2mins like the rest of them by reworking it a bit'

if we didnt have such a strict 2min fiesta, more 'sustained' damage could be a viable damage method for healers. say, a healer that has several dots?