General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[Fendred]

I'm unsure of why you continue to build narratives and draw conclusions that aren't there solely to suit your own opinions. Astrologian was more popular last tier for a number of reasons:

WHM didn't get DPS neutral Lilies until 6.1, making WHM more punishing to heal on as its primary healing mechanic was a DPS loss
They hadn't announced the Astrologian rework, and also had not subsequently then announced that nothing would be reworked until 7.0 - currently leaving AST in a state where if you were unhappy with 6.0 changes you'll just wait until 7.0, and also leaving people who may be happy with it in a place where they see no reason to get invested in trying to learn the job when it is guaranteed to be heavily changed in a year-ish anyways.
Macrocosmos completely invalidating the P3S heal check, "Death's Toll" with a press of 1 button, instead of relying on both healers to press multiple buttons to heal the party to full.
The amount of effort and strain required to play Astrologian optimally versus every other healer compared to the reward put into it. Astrologian's 6.0 changes satisfied very few and made the job significantly clunkier than it was in Shadowbringers.

Also: Scholar and Astrologian have always been played less than White Mage. Simplying their job mechanics by changing cards and removal of SCH's DPS kit has done nothing to appeal to the players who play White Mage. It's almost as if people who play White Mage will not go to Scholar or Astrologian no matter how much you make the jobs "WHM but fairy" and "WHM but card".



"We're golden" by making Scholar and Astrologian worse? Scholar is the most played healer in DSR due to how great it's healing kit is; just because you don't like something doesn't mean it needs to change - just play White Mage or Sage.

When I said they were more popular, I just meant that from my anecdotal experience of seeing more astrologians during the first tier of raiding. What the numbers say is that when healers do savage, the white mage handedly defeats astrologian, with sage/scholar being tied depending on region. We can say this because the February census show that people are leveling all the healers pretty uniformly. It's only when these jobs get stress tested via savage content that players lean heavily towards white mage over astrologian. The October census chart suggests sage is preferred over scholar, but the regional healer differences between Japan and the US indicate it may be a cultural difference.

There is an overall healer shortage, so pretty much the whole healer role is problematic. However, high complexity is clearly not the answer given the astrologian's position in these charts. Working within the current system, a focus on functionality would be a more immediate solution. That's all I really mean.

[ty_taurus]

Listen, I get irritable about this kind of stuff sometimes. I get it. It's not a great way to respond to people, but at the same time, game design is something I am deeply passionate about generally. I studied game design. I work in game design. I love healer and support roles and love how much better these roles have become over the years in many games, so it really frustrates me to see my favorite role in one of my favorite games suffer from bad design choices in the name of playing it as safe as possible. I see such a wellspring of potential being stifled and suffocated in the name of not scaring away this very specific, delicate community of healers who are deathly afraid of have anything more to press during their copious amount of healing downtime than 1 or 2 buttons even if the vast majority of content, and likely the only type of content this specific group largely experiences, doesn't ask you to master any additional skill in order to complete.

Whether intentional or not, I find the consistent opposition to discussing FFXIV's healers and what the problems are to be really disrespectful to the job design of healer and support roles in gaming. I shouldn't feel that way, but I do, and that makes it really grating on me over time. What we have is not good design. It's infuriating design. And while there's nothing wrong with not caring about it, not feeling the same passion that I or any others feel, not being bothered by the severe lack of gameplay by the role or the apparent distain for healer complaints the developers seem to feel, the constant opposition is nails-on-a-chalkboard aggravating to deal with, especially when a large chunk of it comes across as disingenuous and in poor taste.

But I also feel bad for being snappy about it also, and I don't like feeling like I've attacked anyone either. So its tough some days.

[ASkellington]

There is an overall healer shortage, so pretty much the whole healer role is problematic. However, high complexity is clearly not the answer given the astrologian's position in these charts. Working within the current system, a focus on functionality would be a more immediate solution. That's all I really mean.

High complexity is not the reason why AST is lower.

AST isn't complex. Its perceived as complex but there is nothing complex about the job if you choose to main it, same as any other healer.

AST is needlessly busy.

The cards, mean nothing because of the Seals system. The Seals system is garbage because for all the work you put into it underneath the Divination window it amounts to BARELY ANYTHING. And on top of that AST feels clunky switching off and on targets thanks to SE not wanting to work with a better tab targeting system. (oh and Draw/Play still aren't one button)

And that's not even taking into account that people left the job previously because of the way AST is currently (old cards vs seals system + removal of Nocturnal Sect)

Reinstating the older cards in some what would actually reduce the bloat, because you aren't trying to "wait 30s so you have 3 draws of seals, Lightspeed, Divination, Play/Draw, Play/Draw, Play/Astrodyne with Malefics squeezed in" provided Divination stays as RR Balance and the cards are extra buffs.

[Sebazy]

Astro was actually kind of popular last tier when the healing checks were easier, primarily because it added much needed stimulation for some players. That being said, when the difficulty in healing spiked, apparently its extraneous features became a hindrance rather than a source of amusement. If they can get the scholar and astrologian toolkits on the same page as the white mage and sage, we're basically golden.

Or maybe it was popular because Macrocosmos almost entirely sidestepped a huge heal check in P3S whereas comps with WHM routinely ended up using LB3 for it.

Again, I really can't stress it enough here. AST isn't a problem when it comes to healing. for ~1 minute and 50 seconds out of every 2 minutes it's APM is barely higher than the other healers. It's healing capability is absolutely fine. If you take the 2 minute burst window out of the equation, it's absolutely not a hinderance.

AST's biggest issue lays in that burst window period. Repeatedly doing a complex movement heavy mechanic such as P4S PT1 Pinax through the 2 minute burst window for hours on end during prog was a pretty rough experience at least for me. Reprogging and helping other groups on DNC and WHM was utter bliss by comparison.

And of course, another important detail is that if you miss your burst window on AST, that's a sizeable chunk of contribution gone right there and of course it leaves you the delicious choice of skipping your next window or continuing to go late for the rest of the fight. Yummy

[SargeTheSeagull]

I do wonder what other MMO’s (or other games with healers) are big in Japan and how healers work in those. It would at least give some insight as to what the devs have to compare 14 to and vice versa.

[Semirhage]

But I also feel bad for being snappy about it also, and I don't like feeling like I've attacked anyone either. So its tough some days.

Don't worry, you have me for that. I don't feel bad about it. Because I feel like at this point I've seen every single angle on the Sylphie attack vector. I'm beyond over it and uninterested in a "good faith discussion" about it. Because there really isn't common ground. You see, every discussion in this vein starts seemingly neutral. I want X, they want Y, there's a vague attempt to describe a world where X and Y have their time in the sun. But push them on it even a little bit and they start stamping their feet and revealing what they actually want: not X. They don't want Y. They want -not X-. Suggest a skill ceiling and the wailing and gnashing of teeth begins.

These people don't want low skill floors. They want nonexistent skill ceilings. They don't want accessible content, not really. What they want is healing to be an easy path to free stuff. Paying attention to your job's resources is bad. Even the existence of a suboptimal-but-still-present GlareMedica2 rotation that could satisfy the zero interactivity isn't enough. They want the lazy no-thought gameplay to be the optimal gameplay. They don't want to climb the mountain before them. They want to bulldoze it down, walk into the rubble, and declare they're at the peak now. They want an easy job that they can be told they're masters of by dint of unlocking the job stone.

Prod literally any Sylphie who claims they sympathize with the desire for more complex gameplay and that's the tantrum you're going to get. Every single time.

[ForsakenRoe]

my anecdotal experience

You probably shouldn't use 'my anecdotal experience' and then try to back it up with evidence, that's the wrong way round. You should be looking at the evidence for a pattern, and if your anecdotal experience matches it, that helps prove the theory but it's not 100% set in stone. The logic you pose (AST played less than WHM, therefore we should make AST as simple as WHM) is wrong imo for several reasons, firstly that the constant 'we have to make it as simple as WHM' is how we got all the healers losing their DOTs, secondly, it is ignoring all the reasons people may have played AST in the last tier and why they wouldn't now (for example, say, the last boss is overtuned and relying on other players via raidbuffs is less 'safe' for meeting the DPS check vs going personal-DPS with WHM?)

Third, (this one gets its own paragraph) a LOT of the players who have logs as healer are not AST players, or WHM players, they're 'healer players'. That is, they swap about based on what is the best for the team. I am a dyed-in-the-wool WHM, but recently I've been seeing PFs missing Barrier Healers when I go for the P8S reclear, so I play Sage more. Does this swap me to being a Sage main? I learned all of phase 1 of P4S as AST, despite not liking AST much in it's EW incarnation, why? Because WHM was BAD on MP economy at the time and I didn't feel like stacking 600 piety just to make up for SE's cockup. I also did P3S reclears on AST every time, because Macrocosmos completely removed the heal check in Life's Agonies, not just for me, but for my cohealer too. Does this mean I was an AST main for that tier? My Allstar ranking seems to think so, but I actually got pretty even parses across all four healers. The only reason I can see why it's thinking I was an 'AST main' is because I didn't get a single parse of P3S as WHM. But my best for 1 is SCH, 2 is WHM, 3 is tied between AST and SGE, 4-1 is AST and 4-2 is WHM. I'd hazard a guess that a fair few healers are like me, swapping about either because of fight design or just to try to find SOME variety in the role

Fourth, correlation does not equal causation, as you will know. But if the logic of 'AST less logs than WHM, must be cos hard', surely we'd have to apply that to all the other classes, at which point the theory falls apart? WAR isn't harder than GNB in almost anyone's books, but it's got less parses (because it had lower damage in a very tightly tuned/overtuned tier). DNC has more parses than BRD and MCH combined, does this mean we should look at making them like Dancer? Remove BRD's DOTs, restore the RNG on the 123 combo for MCH? BLM has around half the parses of SMN, I guess we should remove the complexity of BLM so more people try it out? This is all rhetorical of course, we shouldn't change the design of a class completely based just on 'how many people play in savag' because every one of those players will have different reasons WHY they play that class in savage. Yeh, AST's harder to work with than WHM, it's got more moving parts to keep on top of. But some people play for the aesthetic, some play because they didn't level the alternative classes in the role, some people play specifically because it's 'harder', and they enjoy the extra challenge.

Heck, one of my two claims to fame in this game is that back in SB I was top allstars ranking for my server for DRK. This wasn't because I was good, believe me, I was dog-doo bad compared to the worldwide top players. It was because nobody else on my server played it. Despite all the naysaying, the 'its bad play WAR', the people who played DRK back then made it work, for whatever reason. Me, it was because I had mained WAR in 4.1 (then SE made it idiotproof with 'haha 5 fellcleaves IR'), then PLD in 4.2/4.3, and when they did the big DRK changelist of 4.3 I started dabbling more and more, until deciding I'd main it in 4.4, come hell or high water. I played it partially cos I liked the speed at the time, partially because DarkMind+TBN was hilarious for removing tankbusters from the fight (WARs not knowing what to do without cover on O12S always made me laugh), and partially because I'm a salty Brit who would 100% main something that everyone claims is 'bad' just to prove they're bloody idiots who should stop parroting what they hear on Youtube tier list videos. Now look where we are, DRK a shadow (lmao) of itself too, made into WAR 2 with the SHB rework because people said 'dont like dark arts pls fix' instead of playing a different job. Starting to feel like I'm cursed, every time I main a class, it gets made boring/poopy/not-fun so y'all better watch out before I start maining yours and make that suck too. Maybe I should be a BLM main and watch the universe implode

Also, as someone else mentioned, 'AST is too complex' isn't exactly true, considering me of all people was able to pick it up and get to the P4S doorboss enrage, week 1. Didn't clear though, many 50% enrages due to lack of damage. Sure would be nice if I could see who's pumping, and therefore who to card, SE!

[Nizzi]

When I said they were more popular, I just meant that from my anecdotal experience of seeing more astrologians during the first tier of raiding. What the numbers say is that when healers do savage, the white mage handedly defeats astrologian, with sage/scholar being tied depending on region. We can say this because the February census show that people are leveling all the healers pretty uniformly. It's only when these jobs get stress tested via savage content that players lean heavily towards white mage over astrologian. The October census chart suggests sage is preferred over scholar, but the regional healer differences between Japan and the US indicate it may be a cultural difference.

There is an overall healer shortage, so pretty much the whole healer role is problematic. However, high complexity is clearly not the answer given the astrologian's position in these charts. Working within the current system, a focus on functionality would be a more immediate solution. That's all I really mean.

Apologies for the following wall of text:

The thing is that this has always been the case across expansions. Back during Shadowbringers when AST was in a better spot with its cards and WHM was arguably in the worst spot due to being a turret mage and having no way to heal without losing DPS. This has always been the case between the White Mage and Astrologian dichotomy. White Mage is just more popular, even though AST has always enjoyed the luxurious spot of being a better healer in practically every regard to WHM, even down to AST's GCDs being better despite being copies of White Mages.
This is the problem with changing kits based on numbers, or trying to change jobs to appeal to people who don't have any interest in playing them. Aesthetics can carry a job a long way, and that holds true even into Savage where people typically take jobs they are more comfortable on rather than playing meta picks, especially when healers are so tightly balanced (relative to DPS or tank jobs, at least) which can further compound the effort to play Astrologian optimally feeling like a waste of time when you can play White Mage and perform similarly numerically with less effort.

Aesthetics carrying White Mage as the most popular job in the game has always been true for White Mage, especially after the huge changes to AST and SCH in Shadowbringers - White Mage players are not swapping to AST or SCH despite them being better numerically and on HPS, or in ShB AST's case vs ShB WHM, able to move& heal freely without losing DPS. I think Square Enix should try to come up with an answer for this question - if White Mage is the most popular job in the game; how is it that despite what they've done to healer complexity and DPS in ShB onward to make them "simple" like White Mage, healer is the least played role across all content in the game and is only getting worse?

I don't think:

It's only when these jobs get stress tested via savage content that players lean heavily towards white mage over astrologian

is necessarily fair assessment because when we look at the actual HEALING throughput of these jobs, WHM has the lowest HPS of all four healers across Abyssos. So are players picking WHM because it performs better under stress despite it numerically being worse than AST, SCH and SGE in terms of healing? (Overheal aside) Probably not. Rather, it's a multitude of factors that I don't think anyone will ever be able to understand fully. Rather, I think SE should go back to making this role as diverse as possible to appeal to people that they've lost with healer changes, and also appeal to new people who don't like healers as they are now. SE trying to funnel some of the WHM player base into Astrologian and Scholar hasn't worked in the past, so I'm really uncertain why they keep trying to do it.

ASkellington's post pretty much sums my feelings about AST proper - it's hard to say the job is complex; rather it is needlessly busy for very little reward compared to WHM, especially after Misery no longer being a DPS loss in 6.1. A good example of a job with complexity in Endwalker is Black Mage; it is very simple on a base level and intuitive, but if you're curious, take a look at The Balance's optimization guides and see all the cool complexities that BLM has with nonstandard lines, transpose optimization, etc. This is what every healer should strive for - obviously in varying levels and less than a DPS, but I believe they should all be simple to pick up with more meat on the bones in terms of complexity than they currently have.

Working within the current system, a focus on functionality would be a more immediate solution. That's all I really mean.

I agree with this, and this is why I feel like SE's decision to not rework DRG and AST following the SAM outcry over Kaiten was a huge double edged sword and really, really bad for healers. Dragoons definitely won there, but Astrologian lost. Astrologian definitely needs a rework; the job is in an awful state and essentially gets to remain in it's bloated, RSI inducing state until early 2024. In fact, this entire design philosophy shift is bad for healers because it essentially means there's nothing that SE will do to fix the healer drought this expansion outside of just making Savage easier - which does nothing for the casual content where healers are also consistently in need and instant queues. Astrologian is in a very bad state, and the healer role in general is; I just don't further "WHM-ification" is what will appeal to people who have left the role or have no interest in it due to the lack of engagement within it.

As a minor note, if you go to the site that shall not be named and look at "deaths" it gives a total list of all logs uploaded, and you can sort by that to see what healers are being played in Savage rather than just using Lucky Bancho's "if they have a 615 or higher weapon" statistics (which I think are valuable themselves) and interestingly, Scholar is the second most played healer this tier, and for DSR, even Astrologian is played more than Sage.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Don't worry, you have me for that. I don't feel bad about it. Because I feel like at this point I've seen every single angle on the Sylphie attack vector. I'm beyond over it and uninterested in a "good faith discussion" about it. Because there really isn't common ground. You see, every discussion in this vein starts seemingly neutral. I want X, they want Y, there's a vague attempt to describe a world where X and Y have their time in the sun. But push them on it even a little bit and they start stamping their feet and revealing what they actually want: not X. They don't want Y. They want -not X-. Suggest a skill ceiling and the wailing and gnashing of teeth begins.

These people don't want low skill floors. They want nonexistent skill ceilings. They don't want accessible content, not really. What they want is healing to be an easy path to free stuff. Paying attention to your job's resources is bad. Even the existence of a suboptimal-but-still-present GlareMedica2 rotation that could satisfy the zero interactivity isn't enough. They want the lazy no-thought gameplay to be the optimal gameplay. They don't want to climb the mountain before them. They want to bulldoze it down, walk into the rubble, and declare they're at the peak now. They want an easy job that they can be told they're masters of by dint of unlocking the job stone.

Prod literally any Sylphie who claims they sympathize with the desire for more complex gameplay and that's the tantrum you're going to get. Every single time.

Truth time. This is how I feel. I guess I am a slyphie...

[MintnHoney]

Truth time. This is how I feel. I guess I am a slyphie...

Acceptance is the first step to recovery.

Jokes aside, it's okay to want to play a simple game, and it's okay to want to play a game in a simple way.

Let's use the theme park mmo moniker for a moment: you, as someone who goes to the theme park, may enjoy simply wandering the park. You might enjoy stopping to sit at a bench to people watch with some candy or food, and you may enjoy going on the merry-go-round, the ferris wheel, or would enjoy a slow ride that's meant to give you a certain vantage on the park (e.g. the Yoshi's Island ride at Nintendo Land), but avoid roller coasters and water-related rides, or virtual reality, bumper cars, etc.. No one's going to tell you that you're wrong for enjoying yourself the way you want and, on the off-chance that they do (and that you're not doing something actually illegal or indecent), they would be the assholes. But on the flipside, other people do enjoy roller coasters, water rides, virtual reality, and/or bumper cars, so those people will go on those rides. If you were to try to stop other people from going on those rides just because you don't like them, then you would be the asshole.
Even if you go with friends to a theme park, there will be times where said friends will want to go on a ride and you don't want to; if they do go, and you don't go, that's not the end of the world. They enjoy the ride, you can do something in the meantime, or just wait and watch, and then you meet back up, tease the friend who threw up, continue through the park, and life goes on.

It's the same idea here: you can go do whatever you want, yes, but if you want to play in certain kinds of content because you want to play a certain way, then you simply don't go to the content that demands you play in the way you don't like to. The opportunity cost is that you don't go to that portion of content. Curiosity can lead you to trying the content, but, if it's not to your taste and you really don't enjoy playing that way, then it's not for you and that's okay.
You just have to remember that there are people out there who like the same game, but like to play the other content and play in such a way that the game was designed but not necessarily to your taste, and that's okay also.

In the case of these threads of complaints and requests to add more to the role, it's not as if you're not being considered. There are snide comments sometimes, yes, but ultimately, requests have evolved over time to acknowledge that players who play on the simpler side do, in fact, exist for many reasons and the forum threads have also evolved as a result, to try and incorporate ways to leave you with the gameplay that you have enjoyed so far while still allowing them access to the gameplay that they crave and have been denied. The hard part is finding a way to convey this to the development team in such a way that they (1) understand it, (2) care about it, (3) believe it, and then (4) implement it with enough care so that they don't accidentally leave out one side of the fence for the other (as they traditionally have done for the role).

But that's just my thoughts and observations on the matter.