General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[Shurrikhan]

This 100%. I started playing wow about a year ago and I love healing in it. 14's devs really don't have an excuse for their lack of creativity in job design. WoW has five tanks that all feel totally different and seven healers that all feel totally different. Yeah, balance issues and whatnot but I would happily trade balance for fun at this point. 14 has me just plain bored with its gameplay.

The sad thing is there have definitely been times where playing SCH or even WHM felt as fun to me in dungeons as do the most active of healer specs in WoW.

That rhythmic element of setup and capitalization of building up a big Bane, layering up to 3 types of Aero, etc., felt pretty darn good, and they could have added so much more to that (not further ramp-up relative to HW, but further synergy and capitalization).

[Valmaxian]

The sad thing is there have definitely been times where playing SCH or even WHM felt as fun to me in dungeons as do the most active of healer specs in WoW.

That rhythmic element of setup and capitalization of building up a big Bane, layering up to 3 types of Aero, etc., felt pretty darn good, and they could have added so much more to that (not further ramp-up relative to HW, but further synergy and capitalization).

I feel this too...Being able to stack DoTs broke up the Holy spam, and SCH DoT potential was just glorious. I wish they would give us those abilities back and let us play the game the way we want to, or implement a talent tree system that would allow players to choose between Heal/DPS/Support builds. Let us have some control over our gameplay experience.

[ForsakenRoe]

I feel this too...Being able to stack DoTs broke up the Holy spam, and SCH DoT potential was just glorious. I wish they would give us those abilities back and let us play the game the way we want to, or implement a talent tree system that would allow players to choose between Heal/DPS/Support builds. Let us have some control over our gameplay experience.

They can't even work out how to balance Crit as a stat vs the other substats (it's by far the best option, for basically every class bar BLM), I can't imagine they'd do anything as crazy as a talent tree, unless it was as part of an external system like Bozja where it's fully selfcontained. Though that does remind me of an idea I had of relic armor with set effects. Think Elemental Armor from Eureka, but you start at the start, and as you upgrade it you increase it's set bonus effect strengths. EG: GNB 2set: Blasting Zone now does +50/+100/+150 potency, or 'DRK 4set: Using Bloodspiller/Quietus grants Scourge for 15 seconds, increasing Haste by 1%. This effect can be stacked to a maximum of 10/25/40 times' (so rationing out Blood spending would let you keep getting faster and faster, till you hit max stacks and 1.50 GCD hardcap). Stuff like that, but the effects only happen inside of the hypothetical new Bozja-Eureka zone.

[Shurrikhan]

or implement a talent tree system that would allow players to choose between Heal/DPS/Support builds. Let us have some control over our gameplay experience.

I feel like that one's a can of worms, and has been since 1.8.

We started the game with "build your own job," even if its iteration was slipshod at best. By the time we switched from having classes/jobs (CNJ wasn't a healer so much as an elementalist who also healed, useful for cracking magic-weak fights; THM wasn't a healer or DPS so much as a resource-mover and nuker; GLD wasn't a "tank" so much as a defender and tag-teamer; etc.) to just having roles (and increasingly homogenized / template-heavy at that), any cross-role customization concepts have become largely dead by default.

Customization works in games like WoW because (in)equity works so differently there; there fights offer enough diversity that their jobs can offer unique advantages outside of just sheer fight-length DPS/HPS/SPS, especially at the higher (but not quite highest) difficulty levels. More importantly, because one will (or, has to) devote time towards each job (class > spec) in isolation, there is less of an expectation of transferrable output (be that through gear or skill), so people are more willing to take a good player through a fight for which their job underperforms slightly if that job at least also has some advantage later in the same raid. Similarly, people are typically less likely to discourage a difficult build that underperforms while learning so long as it's understood that there is potential payoff later along, as long as they're in some way benefiting from that future payoff (your improving sources players to their PuG pool later along / you're in the same guild or community / etc.). Because the parts aren't so immediately and easily exchangeable, there's a bit more lenience and a bit more of a long view.

In XIV, on the other hand, the parts are extremely exchangeable... as are the fights. With so little diversity in encounters' needs, there's little for jobs to uniquely offer. It's no surprise then that preferred job picks boil down basically just to whatever produces the most throughput over the given fight's length and that those throughputs so often follow what would be done on a striking dummy over that same time, nor that XIV players tend to avoid/bar jobs over far smaller percentage differences than is done on WoW.

I'd love to have a degree of customization... but I'd love also to have a game that could actually allow for it, and XIV isn't presently that. It'd have to go through some pretty fundamental shifts first, especially if even thinking about anything cross-/inter-role.

Now, could we possibly replace the bloated and lackluster Materia system with something more akin to a legendary effect or FF7R Materia? Sure. Though, there's a good chance that too will boil down to choice only on paper, not in practice. And I'd hate to see menu-play (swapping, by hand or by macro, materia for different types of content) become obligatory.

________

A brief continuation: My hope is that XIV will eventually lean into that interchangeability by reducing the grind needed for omnileveling and omnigearing and use that to come to an expectation that, yes, some fights will have different(ly) advantaged jobs, and that that's okay because anyone will have at least a couple of those leveled already. The goal of course will still be rough parity across a given fight and across a given tier, but the fact that one can swap about should provide just enough lenience for significant experimentation in fight design. That walks a fine line, though, as we want people to be able to play what they want, even while jobs become unique enough that, say, a {Green Mage} might feel a bit expected for {Thornmarch Unreal} or a {Paladin} might have unique ways to cheese certain other fights.

[ty_taurus]

I feel this too...Being able to stack DoTs broke up the Holy spam, and SCH DoT potential was just glorious. I wish they would give us those abilities back and let us play the game the way we want to, or implement a talent tree system that would allow players to choose between Heal/DPS/Support builds. Let us have some control over our gameplay experience.

I see the topic of skill/talent trees brought up once in a while, but I feel like that topic is kinda like saying "This chair is broken. What if it as a table instead?" Which is to say, while looking at a problem, your solution is not to fix the problem, but to just change the entire thing to something that's different. There's nothing wrong with FFXIV's approach to having linear toolkits on each of its jobs. That's not a negative quality, it's just being done in a way that is causing jobs to become flat and repetitive. That's a crime on the part of the job design, not the structure as a whole. Moreover, having skill/talent trees is not a fix and has countless ways that that can feel just as problematic if done poorly.

FFXIV is on a warpath for accessibility. At one point, this wasn't a bad thing either, but we've gone passed the threshold of "all jobs have nuance and varying amounts of subtle complexity, but are ultimately forgiving," to "every job needs to perform at near optimal levels regardless of how skilled the user is, and every change we make will push each job toward that end goal." Unless that job is BLM of course. This is stifling gameplay for many of the midcore and upward players in order to obtain a benefit to a casual audience that won't really appreciate those changes. Because so long as the job isn't punishingly difficult or has some aspect of clunkiness that isn't fun to play with (AST), a casual audience doesn't care if mashing buttons is getting them closer to DPS optimization. They don't care about avoiding GCD clipping or keeping their GCD rolling. They don't care about buff alignment. They don't care about proper action order. They just want to do their best and enjoy the game.

[Deceptus]

I see the topic of skill/talent trees brought up once in a while, but I feel like that topic is kinda like saying "This chair is broken. What if it as a table instead?" Which is to say, while looking at a problem, your solution is not to fix the problem, but to just change the entire thing to something that's different. There's nothing wrong with FFXIV's approach to having linear toolkits on each of its jobs. That's not a negative quality, it's just being done in a way that is causing jobs to become flat and repetitive. That's a crime on the part of the job design, not the structure as a whole. Moreover, having skill/talent trees is not a fix and has countless ways that that can feel just as problematic if done poorly.

IMHO specs used to exist until the homoginezation went nuts

Tanks had the more defensive role/spec (PLD) the offensive role (War) and the magic role (DRK)
Healers had the basic healer (WHM), the complex healer (SCH), and the support role (AST)
Selfish dps vs support dps etc etc etch.

[ty_taurus]

IMHO specs used to exist until the homoginezation went nuts

Tanks had the more defensive role/spec (PLD) the offensive role (War) and the magic role (DRK)
Healers had the basic healer (WHM), the complex healer (SCH), and the support role (AST)
Selfish dps vs support dps etc etc etch.

This was something I said before as well--your "tree" is the ability to switch jobs whenever you want. AST and SCH can be looked at as two different "specs" of healer. It's just peculiar that, in a game where you can play any job you want, that there's an apparent hatred for nuance between different jobs within the same role when, if anything, FFXIV's job system creates the absolute healthiest environment for job nuance. Having situations where one job clearly has an advantage in one fight, but a different job has an advantage in another, I think, is really cool as long as the unique advantages of specific jobs are able to see fights where they are preferenced in a fairly balanced manner. AST having a clear advantage over other healers in P3S, for example, is perfectly fine and cool if the other healers (mainly WHM) could also have fights where their unique qualities also shine. As long as those mechanics are still quite doable with all other healer comps, it not only allows some jobs to feel really good in some fights, but also empowers players who have job knowledge of multiple jobs within their role.

[Deceptus]

This was something I said before as well--your "tree" is the ability to switch jobs whenever you want. AST and SCH can be looked at as two different "specs" of healer. It's just peculiar that, in a game where you can play any job you want, that there's an apparent hatred for nuance between different jobs within the same role when, if anything, FFXIV's job system creates the absolute healthiest environment for job nuance. Having situations where one job clearly has an advantage in one fight, but a different job has an advantage in another, I think, is really cool as long as the unique advantages of specific jobs are able to see fights where they are preferenced in a fairly balanced manner. AST having a clear advantage over other healers in P3S, for example, is perfectly fine and cool if the other healers (mainly WHM) could also have fights where their unique qualities also shine. As long as those mechanics are still quite doable with all other healer comps, it not only allows some jobs to feel really good in some fights, but also empowers players who have job knowledge of multiple jobs within their role.

It also encourages players to play other jobs within the role and not be stubborn and stick with a single one. Broadening your horizons is generally a good thing IMHO.

[Shurrikhan]

It also encourages players to play other jobs within the role and not be stubborn and stick with a single one. Broadening your horizons is generally a good thing IMHO.

What's funny is that there's a very easy way to create anchoring throughlines in role while allowing jobs to be distinct and to have as much cross-role reach as seems organically reasonable: Just have all primary stats be (differently) relevant --instead of 4 names for "Power"-- and allow anyone to use any type of gear so we're picking between balanced of STR, DEX, INT, and MND instead of just "the only type usable by my job" vs. "the only type usable by my job".

There will still be some actual viability issues, as things like Plate set might always provide enough STR to meet the penalty of their added weight, thus making a Plate-wearing White Mage a bit ridiculous outside of a fortified add-beacon (Medica spam go) and a cloth Warrior a massive waste of cloth's lack of focus-penalty on spellcasting (as it has no spells anyways), but the healer-centric play one learns in playing a traditional MND job will also transfer proportionately to playing a MND-based support-style Monk, etc.

[Succor]

This was something I said before as well--your "tree" is the ability to switch jobs whenever you want. AST and SCH can be looked at as two different "specs" of healer. It's just peculiar that, in a game where you can play any job you want, that there's an apparent hatred for nuance between different jobs within the same role when, if anything, FFXIV's job system creates the absolute healthiest environment for job nuance. Having situations where one job clearly has an advantage in one fight, but a different job has an advantage in another, I think, is really cool as long as the unique advantages of specific jobs are able to see fights where they are preferenced in a fairly balanced manner. AST having a clear advantage over other healers in P3S, for example, is perfectly fine and cool if the other healers (mainly WHM) could also have fights where their unique qualities also shine. As long as those mechanics are still quite doable with all other healer comps, it not only allows some jobs to feel really good in some fights, but also empowers players who have job knowledge of multiple jobs within their role.

I agree fully with your points. I think the issue arises when some people play only specific classes, and feel excluded from particular content. They start complaining that healer X can do Y while they cannot, so then the devs feel compelled to homogenize everything so people stop complaining about "broken" classes.