A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

I don't understand why we can't actually sit down and try preserving things and experimenting with other approaches before we just chop off the limb. Or perhaps they do experiment and are unable to find a path that works, in which case it would actually be really nice to hear that and learn about what solutions they already tried.

My best guess is balance concerns. An example: Expedient. They gave us this new ability people were mocking vs SGE in the Job Actions trailer, but some smart people were noting at the time how it could be useful. Even some early EW guides were panning it. I remember Wesk Alber saying "You know what else gives people a few seconds of Sprint movement speed? Sprint.", implying that it was a silly action.

Then it turned out to be super powerful, not just for the damage reduction, but for the movement speed. To the point they nerfed its duration in half over fear of balance concerns.

And this isn't just an issue with Healers. The PLD rework was over balance concerns (not that they've got it right yet, but it's the impetus for it). Anything that is significantly different causes potential balance issues. Hell, look at this subforum here. How many times have I suggested the "4 Healers" model, which would allow each to be distinct, allow experimentation in different directions, and appeal to all types of players? And it is routinely derided.

The reason we're were we are now very much is because of what players asked for, complained about, and in some cases, demanded. Yeah, the Devs could have said "No. You may Balance fish until the heat death of the universe, we're not budging!" or "Nah, you White Mages get to keep lolLilies until the end of the game!", but they didn't.

If anything, the stuff that confuses me more at this point are the few things the Devs insist on not changing. SCH Faerie summon having a cast time after SMN's were made instant in ShB. How long they drug their feet on Living Dead. That all Healers must have a DoT even as they remove DoTs fro much of the rest of the game's Jobs. It's kinda strange what they do and don't decide must be kept.

Blaming the 2 minute meta on players is fair enough.

Glad we agree on that, at least.

Then you went weird. "Is he your uncle"? Whut? o.O This passes as an argument to you?

1) People who didn't like DoTs and were annoyed at how many there were and how they all had dissonant timers.

2) No idea on that one. I don't AST.

3) People endlessly complaining there was no need to have herr.

4) People who endlessly complained about SCH's clunk and wanted a non-clunk SCH (though this one I think was stupid considering SGE is completely primed to be a Chloromancer)

5) The people who said they were useless or never used anyway.

6) The people endlessly complaining how much more work SCH had to do in its rotation than WHM.

7) The people who kept complaining AST was too hard/complex.

8) No one as far as I can tell. 4.0 WHM was quite possibly the worst iteration of the Job in the entire game, and "every Job has a Job gauge of some kind now" was the reason for it, imo. I will die on that hill. WHM could have stayed HW minus Cleric Stance and been better off, but then it wouldn't be viable in the current game since it'd be too GCD heal reliant. Which is why the ShB and later EW changes were net positives for it.

9) Got me on that one. One point for Griffindor.

You got 2 out of 9. That's a ~22% success rate. You may be able to bring up endless things, but that doesn't mean they all support your position. Everything and the kitchen sink is not a very rational perspective, especially when used to avoid the obvious.

Healing is in the state it's in DUE TO TWO PIECES: ONE is the Devs, and you're right about that. THE OTHER is the players and their demands over the years. You can't ignore that second piece because you have a hate boner for the Devs. I mean, you CAN, but it just makes you wrong. I absolutely agree they should expand their team - FF14 is carrying Square's budget at this point, it could use more of it for itself - but that's no the sole reason for the current situation.

Healers are homogenized - IN PART - because we asked for it repeatedly over the last 8 years. It's shocking at this point WHM doesn't have an AOE shield since every other Healer does, but that's really the only point of major resistance to absolute homogenization the Devs have made when it comes to Healers. All the other things Healers have asked to be homogenized largely have been.

It goes once more to the adage:

Players are really good at finding problems, but extremely poor at proposing good solutions.

[fulminating]

It goes once more to the adage:

Players are really good at finding problems, but extremely poor at proposing good solutions.

"It was fun before and it's not fun now, can we go back?"

[Renathras]

"It was fun before and it's not fun now, can we go back?"

Sure. Let's go back to ARR.

I'm game.

(That wasn't the point, but I'm up for that.)

[Sebazy]

Cool

Now how many of these occurred in your head or aren't massive stretches because you know.... Renethras posts etc?

1) Show me a legit post that asked for Aero III to be removed here

2) Tried chat gpt yet? Maybe it'll give you some fresh material

3) So why didn't Eos get removed when people thought she was worthless for some ~2-3 years?

4) By all means link me to any post here that says 'yes, what I really want is a cut and paste SCH with lasers'.

5) Are you hallucinating? Maybe get some water and sit down, also please link your source material. Preferably something that isn't from Titanmen, bonus challenge, can you find it without having to use google keywords? I'm not convinced.

6) Again, cite your sources. You're either lying or just plain deluded.

7) As above, people complained about AST's HPS throughput early on, then they complained about balance fishing later. I don't remember ever seeing a complaint thread over abilities such as time dilation getting traction.

8) Ironically I'd argue 3.4 was the worst state WHM was ever in, but if google says 4.0 was worse then I guess that's what you're going to go with right? Remember 3.4 literally had to spend time standing there doing nothing and not casting at all to conserve mana. As worthless as Lilies were, Thin Air was an incredible ability and it at least allowed WHM to actually do stuff for the entire fight. Do you remember this? I'm not sure google does.

9) Might want to double check your numbers there sir.

Seriously though, I don't have a hate boner for the devs. I'll always merrily say that they did an incredible job with the design of 2.0. The issue is that Yoshida has allowed the game to outgrow his team by a significant margin. They haven't been able to keep up with the demands of the player base for years now and that's not really acceptable for a game of this size and stature.

[Renathras]

Now how many of these occurred in your head or aren't massive stretches because you know.... Renethras posts etc?

/sigh

And just when I paid you that complement in the other thread. I'll ignore the rest until you can make a good faith post. Except this bit, because it actually has something in it worth discussing:

The issue is that Yoshida has allowed the game to outgrow his team by a significant margin. They haven't been able to keep up with the demands of the player base for years now and that's not really acceptable for a game of this size and stature.

Yoshi P has a lot of clout with Square, but it's not infinite. If it was, Dream Fitting wouldn't be in the game.

The issue is that FF14, like FF11 before it, generated a lot of money for Square. But the executives at Square have this interesting quirk. Instead of doubling down on things that make them money, they like pulling money from those sure bets to finance experimental ideas that often turn out to be boondogles. Like NFTs.

Seriously.
N.
F.
Ts.

And this isn't even a NEW thing. They did this as far back as Spirits Within, which is why the company's name is "Square-Enix" right now instead of "Squaresoft".

They have some of the most fantastic money generating games in video game history, but instead of capitalizing on those, they constantly try these experimental ideas. Now, some experimental ideas can be good, especially ones that advance on existing ones - I suspect Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link is going to be wildly popular...though it's always possible it won't be, I suppose - but they've tried all kinds of things seemingly to avoid "just give FFXIV more money".

Activision-Blizzard did this same thing. "We have the biggest cash cow in history in WoW, sir! What should we do? Put more money into it? Make sure it's sustainable for perpetuity?" "Oh HEAVENS no, man! We need to make a cash shop so we can fleece the loyal customers for all they're worth while mocking them for doing it and dump all the excess money into mobile gaming and trying to dethrone League of Legends! Duh!!"

Healer design is a problem. This is a factual statement and not an opinion. If it wasn't a problem, this constant back and forth wouldn't exist. It doesn't exist for Black Mage. It doesn't exist for Dancer. It doesn't exist for Gunbreaker. If the healers were in as good a state as these job, then it wouldn't exist for the healers either. But it does. If all people on the forums wanted to do was trash talk every job and every aspect of the game, then these other jobs as well as several others wouldn't be exempt from the same experience.

But people do complain about GNB. And PLD. Tanks in general. People DO complain about DNC. More Ranged in general, though. People DO complain about BLM via Casters in general. Basically anything that isn't Melee. Or SAM.

The difference with Healers and BLM is that if people don't like BLM, they can play RDM or SMN. So people don't complain about BLM who don't like BLM, they just swap to one of the MANY other options. They have 2 other options for just Casters, 5 if they just don't like Melee but want to DPS, 10 if they don't mind Melee and just want to DPS, and still 2 others if they want to play a selfish DPS (SAM and MCH). It's why I push so hard on the Four Healers Model all the time, as it would make Healers like BLM is. "Oh, I don't like WHM because it doesn't have a lot of damage buttons. But man, I love SCH because of all the damage buttons!", "I don't like AST because of the RNG, but man, WHM is great without the RNG!" It would remove the "problem" almost entirely, if not entirely.

Ooh curse those smart people with their rational takes and their logical conclusions, they should just submit to the anger and outrage of the hivemind!

I do tell you we're more alike than you think.

What SE needs to do is realize how much money THIS game pulls in, and devote more devs to it from other parts of the company. Hopefully the reason things are kinda 'ehh' moreso than ever is because so much of the company is focused on FF16, so once that's out, bring those devs into the fold to work on FF14

100% agreed.

I hope that it's just FF16 and FF14 gets the love and attention it needs after that.

I've long thought the logical step for Royal Road would have been to split the cards into two slots: Offensive and Defensive. This immediately makes resource or utility cards have actual value as they're no longer competing with damage. It also allows them to balance a smaller number of cards against each other. I also much prefer how cards like new Spear made you have to be aware of which jobs benefited from it. Of course, that's before they gutted a good amount of unique gameplay aspects like Bard interacting with Crit. All in all, I suspect the Astro changes were more about simplicity in balancing than listening to player feedback.

Agreed.

I'm not an AST person, but for AST to keep the random/RNG element AND not have "Balance fishing", what it needs to do is have several flavors of offense (crit, direct hit, and damage, maybe?), and then it can have a separate set for utility (mitigation, MP regeneration, and...I dunno, a Regen or something? Whatever, just a 6th something that isn't damage). Getting Bole in HW wouldn't have sucked if it WASN'T keeping you from a Balance.

[Absurdity]

Yoshi P has a lot of clout with Square, but it's not infinite. If it was, Dream Fitting wouldn't be in the game.

Dream Fitting wasn't forced into the game by the mogstation lady.

The community was asking for a way to preview outfits on their ingame character because more often than not you buy a mogstation outfit only to find out that it looks god awful on your character or dyes terribly.

IMHO it goes deeper than that. FFXIV 1.0 outsourced significant amounts of world design to an unnamed Chinese studio, needless to say, that's not a route I can imagine SE going down again

They've been outsourcing armor designs, environment assets, monsters and weapons to Lemon Sky Studios for Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers (not sure about Endwalker) so it's actually not only likely, it already happened.

[Sebazy]

They've been outsourcing armor designs, environment assets, monsters and weapons to Lemon Sky Studios for Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers (not sure about Endwalker) so it's actually not only likely, it already happened.

That's true, I completely forgot about the mog station stuff in particular being heavily outsourced. Didn't know monster assets were though, good to know and it's great that SE haven't shut down that route after getting burned in the past.

[ty_taurus]

That's true, I completely forgot about the mog station stuff in particular being heavily outsourced. Didn't know monster assets were though, good to know and it's great that SE haven't shut down that route after getting burned in the past.

What about asking a question about that in a future Q&A?

"With each expansion increasing the total number of jobs available, this also means it becomes more time-consuming to not only manage the balance between jobs, but also ensure they're all fun and enjoyable. How does your team manage this steadily increasing work load, and are there any plans to expand the team responsible for job adjustments to ensure every job gets the right amount of attention?"

[Sebazy]

What about asking a question about that in a future Q&A?

"With each expansion increasing the total number of jobs available, this also means it becomes more time-consuming to not only manage the balance between jobs, but also ensure they're all fun and enjoyable. How does your team manage this steadily increasing work load, and are there any plans to expand the team responsible for job adjustments to ensure every job gets the right amount of attention?"

Great question IMO. I like it.

[Sebazy]

Yoshi P has a lot of clout with Square, but it's not infinite. If it was, Dream Fitting wouldn't be in the game.

The issue is that FF14, like FF11 before it, generated a lot of money for Square. But the executives at Square have this interesting quirk. Instead of doubling down on things that make them money, they like pulling money from those sure bets to finance experimental ideas that often turn out to be boondogles. Like NFTs.

This is an interesting one that would make for a great deep dive for sure.

From where I see it FFXIV's budget is strange.

In terms of the core in house team within CBU3, it's been fairly consistent and Yoshida has gone on record many a time proclaiming that he prefers to keep a smaller tight knit team which is fair enough. That coupled with the difficulty of actually hiring in the JP market is why I think that SE need to consider outsourcing ideas from a Mythic equivalent.

Server and system costs have definitely increased, we've had extra data centres and capacity has generally been sufficiently scaled up in line with expansion projections which is great but issues or improvements beyond that have generally been ignored or brushed under the rug (EU Duty rubber banding in Sigmascape anyone?).

The thing that catches my eye in terms of spending is the quality and quantity of voice acted sequences though. ARR had some truely abysmal voice acting that might as well have been done on Fiverr. I'm still amazed that old Cid's lines in Praetorium were kept around for as long as they were. That was some truly dire delivery and no amount of 'interference' could mask it . Compare that dross to the quality of what's followed and it's night and day. Tons of stuff has voice acting now, the quality is top notch and the actors have been fairly consistent over the years. That sort of quality can't come cheap. I wonder if that's where Yoshida decided to spend the money feeling that his team had the rest well in hand.