Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Aravell]

Never having experienced pre-ShB healer design, I don't want to pretend it was some golden age we need to return to but I've had a recurring experience where I come up with an idea to make healers more fun, I tell my friends, and they say "Oh, that's just like how it was in Stormblood!" '-_-

I think the fact that new players who have never experienced Stormblood can independently come up with designs that they think would be fun that matches up with what we had in Stormblood is certainly quite a bad look for the dev team.

It proves that quite a lot of people who are seeking a more fulfilling gameplay experience would greatly enjoy what we had in Stormblood, which they ripped away for no reason in Shadowbringers, and then giving us gameplay that barely anyone can say that they truly enjoy. Some people say they like the current healers, sure, but how much of that is because of ease of play rather than genuine enjoyment?

While I personally enjoyed Heavensward more than Stormblood, I think reverting to the design principles of Stormblood would serve to cater to the most amount of people.

[Valence]

I genuinely don't care what they do. Summoner, Machinist, and Ninja have all gotten multiple major overhaul over the years until they found reasonably comfortable spots (even if I am one of the weirdos that misses gun/bow mage). If they make a change and it doesn't stick, that's fine. It doesn't have to be that way forever. They can just change it again.

I agree with everything you said, but this? No, just no.

New MCH and SMN are nothing better than what they did to healers in ShB and onward. It's the same asinine bland recipe.

[Valence]

As a "new" healer who started playing during 5.3, I agree with what these veteran healers are saying and would love to see the role reworked. I really enjoyed healing while "leveling" but it was also cause I slowly did minimum item-level content with friends and random pfs as I went through the expansions. When I started doing current content it was honestly a whiplash with how you were expected to do 90% of your healing with ogcds. It's clear the healing philosophy was different in just how damage came out in older fights. They encouraged the use of gcds and even stopping dps at times to make sure you had enough resources during certain mechs, (coils, twin, bahamut, thordan, o4s, o8s, shinryu are ones I can think of off the top of my head) and it's a huge reason why I enjoy older fights more tbh. Using aetherflow felt impactful, not something you dumped whenever. Or sometimes physick was just genuinely the more optimal choice due to speed, mana management, and the weave window it gave (not as much with how lvl 90 scales with old content now though tbh).

Like there was probably a level of "we were noobs" that contributed to that at the time, but even when I went back to do old fights with new people, that feeling isn't completely gone despite how lvl 90 stats make healing "easier" now. As someone who LOVED dot smn, I would have absolutely loved sch even more (holy shit I'm so sad I missed that).

Tldr there are plenty of new healers that are unsatisfied with the role as it currently is as well.

There is definitely the GCD/oGCD issue, but even in Stormblood tbh the OGCD spamm started rearing its ugly head already.

People often forget though that what truly made healing and party sustain apart was that the battle system got dramatically maimed when they reworked how MP itself works. Any dungeon run as a healer back then for example, was a whole different beast: you had a variable pool of total MP (13-16k depending on the healer), with GCD spells generally costing less than they do today with the exception of AoE (Holy was 1600 MP for example which stayed in line with physical jobs expensive AoEs). This meant essentially that running a dungeon when trying to push further than just healing your party and dropping offensive spells here and there, if you actually went to spamm AoEs (and healers had pretty good AoE dps as a result, more than today's, it was competing with tanks), you drained your MP very fast, and you also had incentives to pair it smart with abilities like Lucid used strategically, but also the old Thin Air for example (that made all spell MP null for a short duration), that kind of things.

Overspending could literally run you dry of resources and unable to heal the tank anymore. MP regen was also relatively slow so it was definitely not back up to full for the next pull at all. In counterpart, the pool itself allowed for a lot more before running out. It also gave incentives for people to play together as a team and use their party resource refreshes (Refresh, Tactician, Manashift, or Manasong/Turret depending on the expansion).

Just that alone made mere dungeons incredibly less dull to run. They were not harder or easier mechanically. The battle system was still more than just a ghost of its former self. And that's why I do think that the state of healers currently doesn't just have consequences on healers alone. It bleeds over the whole combat system.

[ty_taurus]

I just want to add my voice in support. I started playing the game in Shadowbringers as a level 1 Conjurer and I started doing high-end content with Asphodelos as a level 90 Sage. I've healed throughout almost the whole of Endwalker. I quite like the design philosophy where my skill expression as a healer is "as much healing as necessary, and as much damage as possible" but the damage side is so boring and shallow.

I've stopped doing roulettes and casual content as healer because there's no gameplay there - I have way more available healing than is needed and no depth in my dps kit. But on a dps job those same roulettes can still be a lot of fun. You don't need to optimise your rotation in order to clear but you do so anyway just for fun.

In high-end content healing can be fun while progging and finding little tricks to squeeze the most value out of your kit, then by the time it comes to reclears all the fun has vanished. I do like Criterion but I can't see myself healing savage any more in Dawntrail.

Never having experienced pre-ShB healer design, I don't want to pretend it was some golden age we need to return to but I've had a recurring experience where I come up with an idea to make healers more fun, I tell my friends, and they say "Oh, that's just like how it was in Stormblood!" '-_-

It’s people like you that keep me from completely giving up on FFXIV. Thank you, truly.

There’s a reason why Stormblood is consistently referenced when talking about better healer design. Stormblood was not perfect, and few people suggest we return to its design literally. But the overall level of complexity in Stormblood’s job design is the happy medium between the complexity of Heavensward (which despite its reputation of being the most complex era of FFXIV was not actually all that complex and your average players still had little difficulty clearing all forms of core content shy of Savage) and the overly simplistic Shadowbringers and Endwalker. In other words, the game was neither too difficult for the average player nor too easy for the skilled player.

“The best video games are easy to play and difficult to master.” -Nolan Bushnell

If we looked back at Stormblood and took inspiration from its general level of depth and applied that to the evolution of jobs moving forward, we could have a much better environment for all types of players.

[ForsakenRoe]

The “hey guys I have a great idea; yeah yeah that’s just SB healing” is basically one of the two recurring jokes on the healer forums along with “random person comes in says ‘if you want DPS complexity play a DPS’ then proceeds to never respond again”

They are basically the two things that keep the healer forum alive

Ironically, just saw a video recommended to me on YT where someone went with the latter (direct quote: Why should I pushing the Glare button, when I should be pushing the Cure button instead? Like, I shouldn't have the time, or the MP, to cast Glare...' etc ). I'll give them credit though, tehy said that tanks shouldn't be dealing as much damage either, so 'equal rights for the non-DPS roles', just not the way that some might have expected. It's at times like this, though, I wish we had a 'Got a hot take about FFXIV healers? Sorry pal, your take is actually stone cold, having been put to the debate floor many times over, here's a list of common 'not-takes'' link we could deploy

It proves that quite a lot of people who are seeking a more fulfilling gameplay experience would greatly enjoy what we had in Stormblood, which they ripped away for no reason in Shadowbringers, and then giving us gameplay that barely anyone can say that they truly enjoy. Some people say they like the current healers, sure, but how much of that is because of ease of play rather than genuine enjoyment?

I do also think that, of the players who started post-SHB and never experienced the 'good ol' days' us old codgers pine for, I expect many who say 'no don't change it I like how it currently is' say so out of a fear that SE might make things worse, and don't consider the possibility that things could improve (or do, but don't want to run the risk, after all AST's been through the wringer several times now so it's not a great track record for SE)

If a Stormblood Classic server existed, or a PTR where players could play both SB rotation healers and EW rotation healers side by side, I'd expect a lot more players would have similar views to what we do: SB is a good baseline to work off of, add the fixed lilies for WHM and start from there. Also, since we as a playerbase now default to RDPS instead of ADPS for barsing, AST's buffs are attributed to the AST, so it would have less stranglehold on PFs

[Maltothoris]

Well sadly we still have a month left to go before we any info considering jobs or the media tour. Do you think they will go out of their way again to try and get a healer main on the tour like how they did with Endealker or not do so like they did with Shadowbringers?

[hunter2]

Who was the healer rep for EW and what was their reaction?

[ty_taurus]

Who was the healer rep for EW and what was their reaction?

I don't recall what creator healer players were there or asked questions. I do know that Rinon has spoken about how dull healing is outside of specifically blind prog. And he did specify that the prog be blind, because the fun comes in seeing the mechanics and figuring out how to plan your heals. Once that pattern is learned, or if you're simply aware of the mechanics ahead of time like virtually every party finder ever, that healing is very dull. He commented about how Stormblood was the right balance, and gave an example of how interesting and rewarding it was to use Miasma II because you had the agency to be aggressive with it and your Aetherflow, but that also means that you would be punished if you were too aggressive. But that was what made it good. He commented how each healer could absolutely spare an extra attack or two to spice up their DPS game, amongst other topics. This was not in anything related to the media tour or anything, but an in-depth YouTube interview with him I came across.

[Maltothoris]

Edit: Actually it was Zepla who was the healer at the endwalker media tour.

[ty_taurus]

Edit: Actually it was Zepla who was the healer at the endwalker media tour.

For what it's worth, she did try asking about how they were addressing some of the criticism that healers were receiving, and the response was to try Sage. That's also the interview where Sage was described as being designed with healer feedback in mind. Which is why, regardless of how content the majority of players are with healers, Sage is still a failure, because it failed to satisfy the people it was targeting.