General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[ASkellington]

There's a part of me that feels like something will have to give on healer design as well if they are capable of addressing these concerns and I just wanna be done with EW's gameplay model and move onto the next thing. I've not felt this way before about past expansions as a whole, and it really makes me sad that I feel this way. I've taken breaks before and have no problem with that of course, it's just even then I'd think "I'll come back in a couple months and see the new content" whereas now it's more like "Damn, it's still well over a year before 7.0 comes in and maybe/hopefully fixes some of this."

This was me last expac going into EW. You have more hope than I do. That said, 7.0 is likely going to break whether or not I decide to stay subbed, even if I do like the RP community I found. FFXIV being story focused is fine to a point, but it is still an MMORPG and part of the MMORPG experience is whether or not your battle design is decent to great. Healers in this game aren't even decent at best.

Especially if YoshiP wants to bring in single players to the game. That works for DPS and it kinda works for tanks. But for healer? 86 levels of mostly 2 dps buttons when this game has solo encounters is ubsurd and on this alone I can't fathom why anyone thinks Healers are "ok".

And no "go level another job" is no excuse for the dev team to be lazy, neglectful or that oversightful of that single metric.

[SieyaM]

There is 0 difference between having that 6% damage or not. Same as there was barely a difference between 5% vs 6% Divination last expansion unless you were using a parser. The only upside to last expac's Seals BS is that Lord/Lady came from a card you didn't want.

Astrodyne and Seals-Divination were, are, and ever will be failures. They were better off making the Seals do the old card effects based on seal combination instead of this crap they gave us. But then that would take giving the healing role some thought now wouldn't it?

I would love for them to trash all this business and go back to the old system of StB anyway. Choosing to use a card or burn it for the added effect of royal road required thought and knowledge of the current party make up, even in regular 4 man roulettes. With the added effect of Lord and Lady of crowns giving you even more options to maximize your cards usefulness it meant that there was actually something engaging and thought provoking about the system, so much so that the minimal DPS options were almost necessary given the amount of time spent working the cards.

[ty_taurus]

I would love for them to trash all this business and go back to the old system of StB anyway. Choosing to use a card or burn it for the added effect of royal road required thought and knowledge of the current party make up, even in regular 4 man roulettes. With the added effect of Lord and Lady of crowns giving you even more options to maximize your cards usefulness it meant that there was actually something engaging and thought provoking about the system, so much so that the minimal DPS options were almost necessary given the amount of time spent working the cards.

Yeah, Stormblood may not have been perfect, but it was lightyears ahead of the trash Shadowbringers/Endwalker healers we're stuck with

[ForsakenRoe]

At this point if the devs told us 'yeh ok so we can make the healers fun and interesting but there's gonna be clear winners and losers, like we will not be able to balance them', I'll go 'yep dont care ship it', what seems to be an obsession with making things 'easier to balance' is just sterilizing the fun out of the game. Who gives a damn if class X is stronger than class Y, if both can clear the content? People with tools they're not meant to have. If we didn't have those tools telling us exact numbers, we'd never even know if SAM was ahead of or behind of MNK. It's within crit variance as it is. If AST ends up being ahead of WHM because it's got the old SB cards? I got news for you, it's already ahead of WHM. The joys of having a raidbuff, it would seem. Make the healer role fun, give it some uniqueness to each class again, sod the 'well the damage balance might be screwy' who cares? We keep getting told by some players that healers shouldn't DO damage, they should heal, so if AST is 5% ahead of WHM on damage, it's not even meant to DO damage according to some players, so who gives a rat's backside? Classes are the lens we view the game through, and the healer lens desperately needs cleaning off. Get a microfiber cloth and give it a good clean, I beg.

[Semirhage]

At this point if the devs told us 'yeh ok so we can make the healers fun and interesting but there's gonna be clear winners and losers, like we will not be able to balance them', I'll go 'yep dont care ship it', what seems to be an obsession with making things 'easier to balance' is just sterilizing the fun out of the game. Who gives a damn if class X is stronger than class Y, if both can clear the content? People with tools they're not meant to have. If we didn't have those tools telling us exact numbers, we'd never even know if SAM was ahead of or behind of MNK. It's within crit variance as it is. If AST ends up being ahead of WHM because it's got the old SB cards? I got news for you, it's already ahead of WHM. The joys of having a raidbuff, it would seem. Make the healer role fun, give it some uniqueness to each class again, sod the 'well the damage balance might be screwy' who cares? We keep getting told by some players that healers shouldn't DO damage, they should heal, so if AST is 5% ahead of WHM on damage, it's not even meant to DO damage according to some players, so who gives a rat's backside? Classes are the lens we view the game through, and the healer lens desperately needs cleaning off. Get a microfiber cloth and give it a good clean, I beg.

I'd agree, with a small caveat. As a former WHM main, what I didn't enjoy about this state of affairs was always being behind SCH and AST. And by always, I mean any patch ahead of either one was an anomaly the devs pretty swiftly corrected. I'd love great, fun design. I'd just like it applied to ALL of the healers, please. Not the superfriends who get all of the engagement, all of the tools, all of the utility, and are always and forever solidly meta because of their busted OP toolkits, while chopped liver sits in the corner because being the worst at everything and having zero engagement is "its identity".

[ForsakenRoe]

Yeh WHM wouldn't be an exception here, it'd be as crazy cool and fun as the other healers in this hypothetical. It might get left out of speedrun meta cos it doesn't have a raidbuff, but that's not exactly new for the class. And if idiots want to go 'sorry we dont want WHM for this weekly reclear/prog/not specifically going for 99s', then well, they're idiots and I don't feel particularly bad about calling them that. If crazy fun WHM can clear but it's 5% behind crazy fun AST because oops AST got it's old cards back, I wouldn't care, noone should care, because WHM is fun and AST is fun, and they can clear the content. The 5% dps difference between two healers is not gonna make or break an enrage timer. I checked healer stuff on the forbidden site earlier, and at 95% on P6S (pretty training dummy in terms of mechanics/movement), WHM was at 6.2k. 5% of that is 310. 310 damage per second, or over a 10min fight, 186k damage. On a boss with several million HP, that's like, 0.1% enrage. So yeh, if you have a 0.1% wipe, maybe it's the WHM's fault for not being on AST. Or, maybe it's actually within crit variance, and throwing a whole load of personal-DPS out to play AST and have the party be even more reliant on the raidbuff window going well, is actually not the greatest idea, especially if the WHM isn't as good at AST as they are at WHM.

[Semirhage]

I'd say WHM either gets a raidbuff or is stronger than AST in that scenario. If it's always weaker, why bring it? Unless WHM is redesigned to provide utility, it only brings damage if its damage is worse, what's the point of WHM? The buff healers need to take an L here. *Something* has to give. You can't have all the utility, all the flexibility, and be the best at everything, even if that best is whittled down to a few measly percentage points. With no material advantages, what you're down to is what AST has always been: Better WHM.

[ForsakenRoe]

If it's always weaker, why bring it? Unless WHM is redesigned to provide utility, it only brings damage if its damage is worse, what's the point of WHM?

Why play anything other than SAM if you're a melee? (edit, apparently it's DRG now?) Why play WAR when GNB does more damage? Why play WHM when AST provides more, both in the hypothetical and also right now? Many reasons. You enjoy the class more than the 'better one', you prefer it's aesthetics, you prefer it's gameplay, you prefer not smashing your hands into a bloody pulp doing that accursed 2min burst window over and over again in prog? If we simplify it down to 'why bring X when Y better' every time, you might as well just delete every class that isn't Y, because Y is better.

Raidbuff classes are supposedly in a delicate state. If the selfish classes do more, and have no reliance on any outside buff to be the strongest, then the raidbuff classes are 'extra busywork, but the payoff doesnt even match the selfish'. If the raidbuff classes do more RDPS via the party playing incredibly well and exploiting the raidbuff correctly (as the design intends, btw) then the raidbuff classes are better, and the selfish classes complain that 'theyre meant to be the top dps why am i being beaten by a DRG'. AST is better than WHM right now, you can go see the stats yourself. But people still play WHM, and WHM doesn't get kicked from parties. Why do people play WHM? They prefer it's aesthetics, or gameplay, or dont want to smash their hands into a bloody pulp because it was dog first and now they have to do cards DURING MANIFOLD AAAAAAA

Also, side note, we can't ever have a new healer, and Sage needs to be deleted too. It's just going to be 'SCH but worse', or if the balancing ends up the other way, 'SCH but better' and we can delete SCH. See how silly this can get if we look at 'which is better' as the only quantifier? Yeh it can suck to be 'the underdog' all the time, but if it's fun to play and you still clear, who gives a damn? PLD took L's the whole way through HW but some people kept playing it despite this. AST was so limp on healing power on release it struggled to clear The Vault, people still played it. WHM was super crusty in SB, still got world first in both ultimates. DRK got laughed at for all of SB, I still decided to main it from 4.3 onwards and had a great time with it, laughing at those warrior mains who needed Cover for TBs in O12S.

[Kabzy]

Why do people play WHM? They prefer it's aesthetics, or gameplay, or dont want to smash their hands into a bloody pulp because it was dog first and now they have to do cards DURING MANIFOLD AAAAAAA

Agreed, I've played both in savage and while no healer is particularly complex, I don't think it would make sense for the most braindead one (WHM) with the easiest recovery tools to be higher in DPS than a job that requires coordination and at least some thought. The difference isn't even that grand either.

[Semirhage]

Why play anything other than SAM if you're a melee? (edit, apparently it's DRG now?) Why play WAR when GNB does more damage? Why play WHM when AST provides more, both in the hypothetical and also right now? Many reasons. You enjoy the class more than the 'better one', you prefer it's aesthetics, you prefer it's gameplay, you prefer not smashing your hands into a bloody pulp doing that accursed 2min burst window over and over again in prog? If we simplify it down to 'why bring X when Y better' every time, you might as well just delete every class that isn't Y, because Y is better.

Raidbuff classes are supposedly in a delicate state. If the selfish classes do more, and have no reliance on any outside buff to be the strongest, then the raidbuff classes are 'extra busywork, but the payoff doesnt even match the selfish'. If the raidbuff classes do more RDPS via the party playing incredibly well and exploiting the raidbuff correctly (as the design intends, btw) then the raidbuff classes are better, and the selfish classes complain that 'theyre meant to be the top dps why am i being beaten by a DRG'. AST is better than WHM right now, you can go see the stats yourself. But people still play WHM, and WHM doesn't get kicked from parties. Why do people play WHM? They prefer it's aesthetics, or gameplay, or dont want to smash their hands into a bloody pulp because it was dog first and now they have to do cards DURING MANIFOLD AAAAAAA

Also, side note, we can't ever have a new healer, and Sage needs to be deleted too. It's just going to be 'SCH but worse', or if the balancing ends up the other way, 'SCH but better' and we can delete SCH. See how silly this can get if we look at 'which is better' as the only quantifier? Yeh it can suck to be 'the underdog' all the time, but if it's fun to play and you still clear, who gives a damn? PLD took L's the whole way through HW but some people kept playing it despite this. AST was so limp on healing power on release it struggled to clear The Vault, people still played it. WHM was super crusty in SB, still got world first in both ultimates. DRK got laughed at for all of SB, I still decided to main it from 4.3 onwards and had a great time with it, laughing at those warrior mains who needed Cover for TBs in O12S.

I understand all of these arguments, and have heard all of them before. The only issue with them is what you're left with: the overlap between them consigns WHM to be the Memechinist of the role. Woohoo! So to recap, WHM's design principles are:

• It's easy
• It has no utility
• It has no buffs
• It MUST be weaker than the utility jobs because it's easy

Where is the room for growth in that? All these design principles leave room for is the Stormblood healing paradigm. All these arguments boil down to is "let's go back to Stormblood, except this time instead of choosing the crap that is Shadowbringers design we acknowledge that WHM sucks and it belongs there and proceed to do nothing about it."

Why not make WHM the ACTUAL BLM of the role? Give it a skill ceiling that's really tough to optimize so it "deserves" to output more damage? Why MUST it remain the weakest, easiest, least-engaging healer? It's a design armpit Machinists have occupied for a while now, and I've been bored of AST and SCH mains arguing that their hogging of all the utility, all the buffs, all the interesting gameplay loops, all of the identities, and having eternally cemented meta positions is correct, just, and good. It's circular arguments all the way down. Give. WHM. A. Niche. You joke that no new healer should ever be introduced, and in a way I agree: why the hell would you design a new healer if you know that AST and SCH's "identities" are "being better than everyone else by fiat, no you can't encroach on my identity of being more complex than you and eternally meta and superior in every way"?

To hell with going back to Stormblood if it means we learned nothing from it other than "AST and SCH being overpowered was a good thing actually". I realize most of the Healer subforum disagrees with me here, but I'll say it anyway: Stormblood was not good game design. Having two classes that are direct upgrades to the third in every single way is not healthy game balance. Just as "the easy one" isn't an identity, neither is "the best at everything". You do that, and mark my words we'll end up right back at Shadowbringers design. I am personally not okay with how Stormblood played out, and it blows my mind that this forum cannot understand that maybe, just maybe, one of the myriad reasons why WHM sucked so badly in Stormblood was that it wasn't allowed to improve because it had nowhere to go in the design space where its competition is defined as "you, but better". Why is magic DPS the only subrole that seems to understand that classes should actually pay for more flexibility with lower output, instead of just getting all of the flexibility with none of the downsides?

Yeh it can suck to be 'the underdog' all the time, but if it's fun to play and you still clear, who gives a damn?

I agree! So why is this argument ONLY applicable to WHM? AST and SCH mains, it sucks being weaker but if you're having fun who cares? Oh wait, we only care about "balance" insofar as it means AST and SCH are always better, and once they're there then it goes back to not mattering again.