General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[ForsakenRoe]

I think you missed my point. (also the sarcasm) My point is, the raidbuff classes will bitch and moan about how they 'put in sooo much effort (in SCH's case, this means pressing Chain once per 2 mins) compared to the personal dps classes, and they still don't keep up in rdps this is BS SE fix now'. The position we find ourselves in is probably the only 'real' solution: WHM does better than AST in a party where it's not super optimized logruns, AST has the potential to exceed in a more optimized environment because raidbuffs are multiplicative. This SHOULD be fine, in theory. No, I believe the issue is idiots who can't read logs, can't understand WHY something is meta, just that 'its meta so we need it', etc. WHM was not having a good time of it in SB, I know. It was my first class to 70 even (then I became a tank main). But we can't just have 'WHM is now stronger than AST' because the AST mains will cry about it. It's like, I'm sure you've seen at least one WAR main that moans about how WAR should be top damage, because that's somehow 'WAR identity'? Being 'top damage' is apparently an identity, I never knew. I'm not even suggesting we take WHM back to SB so I'm not sure where that even came from, SB was horrendous for WHM I agree. Pretty sure when people say 'go back to SB' they mean the number of buttons we had, WHM having Aero 3, SCH having Miasma and Shadowflare, AST having old-cards, not necessarily how the classes were balanced against each other. Because they weren't.

Let's go through the bullet point list:

- It's easy: Being easy doesn't mean it has to be bad damage, and arguably having 'easy' as an identifier for healing is a good thing. WAR's easy. SAM's easy. RPR's easy. I'm not asking for the healing side to be harder, I don't need Jimmy in the EX roulette having a meltdown and letting us die because he couldn't work out how to cast Medica 2. The DPS side of things needs a bit of work and I've already made the suggestion I think would fit the engine and the class design we're hampered by so far.

- It has no utility: neither does BLM or SAM and they end up top of the charts pretty often. Having utility or lack thereof seems to have no impact on whether a class is strong or not, it's down to the numbers balancing. You can yell at SE for that, not me, if anyone can land me a job at CBU3 I'll do the healer balancing but until then, it's not my problem to solve.

- No buffs: Do we mean DPS buffs? Or some other buff? If we mean DPS, see above. Other buffs kinda don't matter for anything because content is designed to be cleared without them. Expedient's nice, sure, but we don't 'need' it, cos we all have Sprint. It'd be nice to have a way to apply shields, since all three other healers have a way (with AST having Neutral), but that's also part of my ramble thread.

- MUST be weaker than utility jobs because it's easy: Again, not necessarily true. While I can go and look at funny colored bars and see 'hmm yep SAM is being beaten by NIN', the reverse was true only a few weeks ago, probably because everyone's starting to get BIS and it's logrun season. I'd say it'd be more accurate to say my stance is 'Should be a tiny bit weaker than an absolutely optimized to heck utility job (in this case AST), but if that utility job's party isn't on top form then the WHM will beat them'. In number terms, if we consider WHM to be '100%', AST should be up to 103% in a perfectly optimized scenario, but in less optimized environments it may well drop below, down to like 95-97% comparatively.

This game is so bad for 'monkey see monkey do' when it comes to meta stuff. Saw a SCH in a P8S practice party in week 2 saying SGE was trash DPS and was griefing if you brought it. At 95%, 20 seconds after he said it (because I decided to check there and then), it was 60 dps behind SCH. Sixty. Also Echo cleared week 1 with WHM/Sage despite the scuffed HP level of the doorboss, but AST SCH are now the top according to the naughty website. There's always gonna be someone who's the 'loser' when you make a ranking of 'who does more damage', someone's gotta be the lowest (unless by some miracle everyone is exactly even). If SE decides that 'loser' should be WHM every time, k, whatever I guess. If I can clear stuff with it, I'll play it still. Because I have tried in the past, thinking 'oh WHM bad, I'll play AST', in P4S week 1 prog. Never beat the doorboss, 50% enrages all the time. Turns out, you can't really rely on PF to take advantage of raidbuffs, and when about 15% of your damage as a healer is reliant on 'allies take advantage of raidbuffs', having all of my damage come from 'me' would probably have helped quite a lot.

I know the idea of 'WHM forever behind' sounds horrible, but I'm prioritizing 'is it fun' over 'is it perfectly balanced', because 'perfectly balanced' got us the cards system we have now. Or SGE being a pretty blatant reskin of SCH. I don't want 'balanced' if it comes at the cost of 'fun'. Because why play a game that isn't 'fun'? Why torture yourself playing something that would be, I guess 'tedious', but you reason to yourself 'its okay that it's not fun, because at least WHM and AST do exactly the same amount of damage'? We want the same thing, for all the healers to all be fun and engaging to play. I'm just saying, we can't have 'WHM more damage than AST' without considering what effects that has on stuff. Mostly the midcore AST players who will complain, because we all know the people who this would actually affect, the speedrun/logrun types, would just shrug and swap to WHM if it's better.

[fulminating]

I don't understand what white mage is meant to be, which makes it hard to suggest ways to improve it. Like sure amdapor was the equal of mhach, but it just doesn't come across in the gameplay. Warrior and dark knight both have the unstoppable unkillable force bs in their backstory which is conveyed one way or another. Even among the healers scholar has tactics and faeries, albeit eroded a bit with the reduction in pet commands, ast has the delayed heals/attacks along with card minigame to do the time mage/fortune teller stuff.

In ff3 white mage had party buffs, general utility (status removal, toad, libra) and bonus damage on undead. In ff1 it was much the same, being able to bolster the elemental resistances and evasion of the party as well as having a hammer. White mage in ff14 doesn't really have all of this identity, although if it did I can imagine people being very upset receiving the gift of party haste and having to adjust their rotation. They could lean back toward the elemental stuff, giving it a distinct water/earth/air phase, but in terms of what it'd actually do who knows? Since they weren't above giving largesse back as temperance, perhaps they could have water/earth as a form of cleric stance, water augmenting healing and earth damage. Or if the light theming is important, the ability to stack light aspect on the target as a second bankable burst damage - some kind of damageless oGCD on a short cd - maybe as a partial refund from gcd healing or x regen/medica ticks?

[ForsakenRoe]

WHM has been painted into a corner with 'everything is glowy lights now', it's part of why I put Quake, Tornado and Flood in my idea, the other part being 'BLM gets Flare and Freeze', so it's only fair WHM gets to use it's element's highest level magic. Just need BLM to get Burst for the Lightning element coverage. Bringing back some of that elemental flavor from CNJ gives it more room in terms of VFX, but since SE took it away in the first place I'm assuming it's because the next caster is gonna be Geomancer. I suppose my suggestion of giving WHM the ability to shield with two new lily spenders would be analogous to how WHM of older games had stuff like nul-element spells. I guess we could give it a targetted buff that raises evasion, similar to how Aquaveil is a targetted %mit buff? I don't think it would work on raidboss autos, and it definitely doesn't work on tankbusters, so it'd likely be dungeon only. Maybe Scan/Libra as a 'the next X spells from the WHM exploit the target's weakpoint for extra damage', and lean into WHM as being 'it buffs itself' to contrast AST's 'it buffs the team'?

[Liam_Harper]

AST works for a very minimal return which for me is unnoticeable, maybe in savage and ultimate you can feel the difference between two and three seals but for what I do there just seems to be no reward. They need to find something for healers to be building towards.

Most of the time, no. Astrodyne + Minor Arcana + Redraw on average is maybe a bit over 2% of your overall rdps and healer dps isn't exactly high. You press the buttons just incase there's a sub 0.1% wipe if you don't, but in the large majority of runs it makes no noticeable difference at all.

[AmiableApkallu]

I know the idea of 'WHM forever behind' sounds horrible, but I'm prioritizing 'is it fun' over 'is it perfectly balanced', because 'perfectly balanced' got us the cards system we have now. Or SGE being a pretty blatant reskin of SCH. I don't want 'balanced' if it comes at the cost of 'fun'. Because why play a game that isn't 'fun'?

So, where does WHM get to shine?

I think my issue might be that when you're playing a job whose value is supposed to extend beyond the personal damage you bring, it's not fun when that value is no better (or is actually worse!) than all the other jobs in the role in every scenario.

[ty_taurus]

So, where does WHM get to shine?

I think my issue might be that when you're playing a job whose value is supposed to extend beyond the personal damage you bring, it's not fun when that value is no better (or is actually worse!) than all the other jobs in the role in every scenario.

The niche I'd personally like to see for WHM is being the best raiser. In my own concept of WHM, I'd give it the potential to do up to 3 instant cast raises at reduced MP cost by utilizing other tools leading up to Raise. This gives WHM a lot of safety as a healer, feeling similarly to the RDM in terms of how it shores up to the rest of the role. That does make it "less optimal" on paper, but simply having that in your back pocket holds weight.

[ForsakenRoe]

So, where does WHM get to shine?

I think my issue might be that when you're playing a job whose value is supposed to extend beyond the personal damage you bring, it's not fun when that value is no better (or is actually worse!) than all the other jobs in the role in every scenario.

WHM shines in this theoretical (and to a certain extent, now too) by being entirely self-reliant for it's damage, and being able to exploit downtime by dumping lilies to 'gain' damage where AST can't. The issue is people see WHM does less at the top end compared to AST, but conveniently forget that it's not just 'AST plays perfectly, gets better damage', it's 'AST and whole party plays perfectly, gets better damage'. I don't see why it's somehow weird to take the stance that, yes, since AST has to rely on it's entire party being gamers, it should have slightly higher top-end potential compared to WHM. WHM gets to shine in prog by not having an RSI inducing 2min window that lines up with every major mechanic like Manifold, is able to buy itself extra damage by dumping lilies in downtime, has Cure 3 as it's ace in the hole for massive HPS pump if it is really needed. Are there things that could be changed to make WHM better/compete better with AST? Of course. It's looking like it's about 5% behind AST (looking at Hegemone, the 'least downtime' fight, at 95%), and it could stand to be maybe at 2% behind. It could also get some QOL changes, such as 2 charges on Assize, 2 charges on Tetra, and I would have preferred Lilybell to be knocked down to 3 stacks, but 90s CD, to give it a niche vs Macrocosmos, that of 'it is available twice as often'. It'd also help address the fact WHM has almost zero OGCD game.

But I don't know if it's the right mindset to ask 'where does WHM get to shine' in this game, where the only metric anyone cares about is damage. If we made WHM have more access to mitigations (Plenary now includes 10% mit, for example), noone's gonna care, because AST does more damage. If we made it so Thin Air makes the spell free and instantcast, so it can instant raise 3 people, 2 of which for free, noone will care, because that's not damage. The only thing we can do is either buff it's personal damage (and then AST mains will ask 'why they have to work so hard, and still don't keep up with WHM'), or add a raidbuff to WHM (and then AST mains will ask 'why is SE adding raidbuff to WHM that was our thing this is homogenization'). I think it's okay to have WHM be X damage, and AST to have 'X damage, plus/minus 2% based on player skill'. I've been on the receiving end of 'played AST, couldn't beat enrage because someone was underperforming', maybe it was partially me, but it was definitely also the RPR that was 1000 damage lower than they could have been. If I was WHM, I'd have probably been able to make up the difference by having more personal DPS, but it was at the time when WHM's MP was really not-good and I had already fully melded my gear with everything but Piety.

As another anecdote, a friend of mine has been doing this tier as SCH (as they do with every tier) and they've been having a great time struggling with the tankbuster bleeds, coming up with mitigation plans for everything etc. I went into my second clear of P8S week 4, on Sage, not knowing any mit plan or anything, just winging it as I went. Cleared phase 1 on the first pull and phase 2 on the third pull. SGE does less damage than SCH, but it doesn't matter, because SGE's Panhaima is perfectly suited for the raid design with all the bleeds. Perhaps what WHM needs is raid design that suits it's kit more than AST's, but the problem is that AST's kit is so plentiful and wide compared to WHM, it can seem like it has a tool for everything. And with Macrocosmos, even 'pump big HPS now' doesn't really give WHM the advantage anymore.

[AmiableApkallu]

But I don't know if it's the right mindset to ask 'where does WHM get to shine' in this game, where the only metric anyone cares about is damage.

You're the one who brought up giving up perfect balance for the sake of fun -- the point being, to not care only about damage, I thought? Anyway, a natural consequence of not-perfect balance is to ask where each job comes out ahead and behind.

And along those lines, "best raiser" (ty_taurus) and "doesn't depend on the party for DPS" both feel... uninspired to me. WHM gets to shine when the rest of the party is bad, basically. Yay?

[ForsakenRoe]

Yeh I'd like to throw perfect balance in the trash if it allowed us to have tangible increases in 'fun', but the devs seem to be pretty set on a certain course so what I want is probably not gonna happen. But you make my point for me quite well I think, two suggestions for 'WHM can shine in this situation' and they're both shot down for being 'uninspired'. 'does not depend on party for DPS' is literally SAM's niche, and it's been accepted as being a good niche for the class to have. Now it's not actually top DPS, it's actually like 6th, below even BLM on some fights, in this melee-centric meta, because raidbuff classes have outscaled it. So maybe the real issue is how raidbuffs double dip on gear scaling. If an AST gets an upgrade, or a melee in their team gets an upgrade, both increase the AST's damage. But if the same situation happens for a WHM, only the WHM's gear helps the WHM's RDPS. Should WHM get a raidbuff too? Should raidbuffs be reworked to be additive instead of multiplicative? Heck if I know and heck if I care, as long as WHM's within 2% of AST and can clear stuff week 1 that's enough for me to say 'yep things are ok'. Which is why we're currently having an issue, WHM's like 7% behind at 95th Yoshi give us 10 potency boost per tick on Dia please and thank you

[ty_taurus]

You're the one who brought up giving up perfect balance for the sake of fun -- the point being, to not care only about damage, I thought? Anyway, a natural consequence of not-perfect balance is to ask where each job comes out ahead and behind.

And along those lines, "best raiser" (ty_taurus) and "doesn't depend on the party for DPS" both feel... uninspired to me. WHM gets to shine when the rest of the party is bad, basically. Yay?

I mean it would shine by having more fun gameplay. RDM's gameplay is quite fun, but offers notably less DPS than BLM in exchange for Raise utility and a small amount of mitigation, but RDM players don't feel bad because all their good for is for when the party is "bad."

You can't look at utility as "well I guess all I'm good for is when other players are bad." You're exchanging DPS potential for clear security, which is extremely valuable and you should feel good about. You know how many times I've seen wipes or enrages in P7S because 3 or 4 people died during Famine's Harvest. Sure "Do the mechanics correctly" is what people should do, but the reality is they don't, and they wont.

Stop looking at raise utility as janitorial work and start looking at it for what it is: having the power to carry people through a mechanic that you can do when they can't. That's power, not weakness. It may not always be necessary, but sometimes value isn't about what you do, but what you can do, hense why RDM continues to see healthy play despite being a "prog job." It's used more than BLM is according to the evil website.