A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

I feel we already get that with new abilities. We got a more powerful Glare and Holy this expansion, as well as Misery being more powerful, and we got Aquaveil (which is kind of a nice little ability to have) and Lilybell (which my big complaint on is why the hell the CD is so long).

The constant cycling out of one attack animation for a new, bigger, flashier, even more blinding basic attack that many of us here are exhausted of 10 minutes after getting it is not a very satisfying ascension of power. Meanwhile, let's take a look at a job like Red Mage. The cost of their melee combo was reduced, so now they get to engage with their melee combo a lot more, they got a new attack in Resolution which adds a third climatic finisher to those now more frequent melee combos, and they got Magick Barrier, an exciting form of utility on a job that had nothing like it previously, allowing a Red Mage to actually contribute to sustain and mitigation more effectively. These are only a few of their changes, but they are the high points of what feels new and different about Red Mage, and that's a job that really didn't change very much, yet still felt like it got something new and valuable.

If we take a look at White Mage, they do indeed get Aquaveil, a tool that accomplishes something White Mage could already do with Divine Benison, and they get Liturgy, a really pretty looking form of healing that is extremely unnecessary in many normal forms of content because nearly all of that excess healing will go to waste and has an unnecessarily long 3 minute cooldown even when you do use it. Now, to be fair, when we take White Mage into more challenging environments, new Savage fights in particular introduces more frequent instances where Liturgy's nature of being placed and activating automatically as the White Mage takes damage is a very useful tool. Introduce a new tool, and introduce a new problem for that new tool to solve. That's a good thing. But this is only limited to those more challenging environments for the modestly skilled White Mage player.

None of that really feels like White Mage has evolved. The most impactful changes are things that are quality of life improvements that really should've been there a long time ago, like finally fixing Afflatus Misery in 6.1. That is really the only major change that feels like a real step forward for the job, and that's something that should've been there day 1 of Shadowbringers, but it took us 3 years to get that.

Honestly, I also find the "reinvent the wheel" doesn't always work out so well. Sometimes it works out great (like SMN; and still generates tons of backlash despite working out great), and other times, it works out horribly (like AST). You also have people that love their Job and just want some QOL tweaks getting complete revamps. In fact, most of the time MMOs change Jobs too much, people pine for "the good old days", sometimes for years.

That's correct. Reinventing the wheel does come with great risks, but it's an inevitable aspect of live service games. You might not feel like getting bored of things is a major threat, but there's a lot of market research that says otherwise. Most people want to see new things, even if it's quite difficult to squeeze new things in. Yoshida commented on a similar topic, though with regards to new jobs. “From a system perspective, if the number of jobs is fixed and well-balanced, there’s no need to add more, and adding new jobs would obviously cause a stir,” he said. “But nevertheless, we always need to add more jobs to keep providing new gameplay experiences.” This also applies to new actions for each existing job. The job actions trailer is one of the biggest moments that generates a lot of interest in an upcoming expansion. If certain jobs were revealed to be getting nothing, that could possibly have a really negative impact on the financial success of the next expansion. I can't really speak about concrete numbers on this, because I'm not their marketing producer. But it's important to understand why that can be a major factor even if it's not something that would affect your own perspective of the game.