#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[TheDustyOne]

Pokemon games are intended for children. They can't make them so complicated you need a video tutorial to fight a gym leader.

Ironically, Pokemon games have a hell of a lot more depth than this game does when you get into the competitive scene, it's one of the examples I'd happily give as "easy to learn, hard to master".

Like this is something people seem to forget about 14, is that it adheres closest to the FF5 job system, to a fault. A healer is a healer first. All other roles are DPS other than Knight which is actually a Tank if you use it as one. FF1-10 are story-first games. The gameplay is not always the best at times. FF5 in particular, few people "level all the jobs", rather they just pick one job and stick with it until they level-out the character and then rotate. FF7 kills the "white mage" at the end of disc 1, that's the only FF game that explicitly removes the white mage, but the materia lets you give the magic to someone else. FF4 meanwhile always has a White Mage in the party that doesn't DPS until you get Holy, but Porom is removed from the party before getting that far, only Rydia can.

If it adheres to FF5s job system, can I put Black Magic on my White Mage? How about give my WHM a greatsword? This game does the opposite of FF5s job system in that it's very static, the job is the job and you don't have much say in how it develops, whereas 5 lets you experiment with different passives, bring in new spells/abilities from other jobs, etc.

When people haven't played another FF game, they keep asking why they can't be DPS Healer. Because That is NOT what the White Mage is, and has NEVER been. JP fans probably want this to stay that way the most.

FF1 WHM still could wield hammers, making them good for picking off enemies early game, later it would get Dia for undead enemies and Holy for anything else. It was primarily a healer sure, but it still had offensive capabilities. FF3 gave them Aero and debuffs like Silence. Rosa could wield bows and Porom could Twincast with Palom. FF5 as mentioned earlier you could give them another jobs moveset. Garnet, Eiko, and Yuna were also Summoners. All WHM had some offensive capabilities, and the ones that don't had supporting systems to give them offensive capabilities anyway. The closest to "pure healer" you get is FF1.

That doesn't mean AST and SCH have to adhere to that. Those jobs do not exist in previous FF games. But it's pretty clear that Square Enix simply photocopied White mage for all 4 healers, and just renamed the GCD spells without changing much else. People who play them, can switch between all of them, have the same GCD and oGCD's on the same buttons and they all play exactly the same, with only the Scholar having any variation on heal to dps ratio.

SCH has been around since FF3, FF11 as well, and was known for being a user of both Black and White magic. The fact that a legacy job like SCH is now relegated to being a WHM clone (but with shields) already tells me Square doesn't care for tradition and is willing to sideline it for the excuse they call healer design in this game.

[Saraide]

Pokemon games are intended for children. They can't make them so complicated you need a video tutorial to fight a gym leader.

You know that pokemon games get insanely complex once you dive deeper, right? If SE could pull off pokemon's level of "easy to enter, extremely difficult to master" literally no healer would complain.

[Dogempire]

Snippity Snap.

Eh, others have pretty much said what I want to say in response, but I'm just going to say that while yes, Pokemon's target audience is children, I use it as an example because every new gen has some sort of new gimmick to freshen up the competitive scene and make the otherwise formulaic game a bit more exciting, it's something that FF14 should try but doesn't because it would rather stagnate in homogenization, copy-pasting the same tired job formula onto old jobs that don't fall in line and calling it a "rework."

It's an issue of being creatively bankrupt and sticking to a formula without realizing that you can only do the same thing so many times before it stops being effective. They're taking this route anytime a job is problematic and difficult to balance, and with healers they just said "Screw it" and applied the same formula across the entire role, effectively nuking any depth or nuance it had over the course of a couple expansions.

I really hope that SE realizes that their formula is becoming tired and that they actually need to start taking risks with job designs again, because all I see with the current jobs is "We're playing it safe so that everything is easy to balance and so that every job can be played by a novice" as if a new player is completely incapable of learning the hardest job in the game through trial and error or maybe they would choose to pick the hardest job because it's the most fun to them.

[Jojoya]

You can’t be a healer in this game because the game just doesn’t exist in a state that rewards it

How does game design reward tanks?
How does it reward DPS?

How would you translate those rewards into rewards for healers?

[Sani2341]

How does game design reward tanks?
How does it reward DPS?

How would you translate those rewards into rewards for healers?

Tanks and DPS both have parts of their kits they can optimize which will noteably impact kill Speed.

Healers only technicly do. Because the moment you realize 'ogcd heal good' that's about 90% of the way to max "speed enemy death Up" healers can get. (And it's litteraly 'how much can you spamm this button that's got no cd or relevant resource cost.)

[Supersnow845]

How does game design reward tanks?
How does it reward DPS?

How would you translate those rewards into rewards for healers?

Tanks and DPS optimise their rotations, tanks can optimise sharing their mitigations and DPS can optimise the use of incidental heals

Healers don’t have incidental heals (assize and star are exceptions) so basically if the DPS can replace a healer heal with an incidental DPS heal it’s always a gain to do so, then from there healers really only have ABC. Think BLM had non standard, GNB has “do AOE rotation to keep cartridges aligned”, and other things like that. Healers optimisation ends at ABC

you could either fix this by giving healers tank like rotation so damage optimisation becomes an actual factor, you could cut oGCD healing so organisation of GCD healing becomes a factor, or up the damage so the same as option 2 is achieved

[Ramiee]

How does game design reward tanks?
How does it reward DPS?

How would you translate those rewards into rewards for healers?

Making the DPS system interesting so those who get good at healing and spend 90% of their time pressing dps buttons have more fun. And no a ability every minute or two isn't interesting to the core, chainging 1-1-1-1-1 spam is the main thing that should be touched.

[Flay_wind]

Well, how healers can be rewarded...
For example they are given healer specific things to do, and just not be a target for a split party stack.
I.e. add more cleanseable things, add actual healing not tied to just party taking damage like dragon heads in Shinryu EX or something. Maybe add "negative" health that needs to be healed, before health can be restored normally.
If all of that is too complicated, then i dunno.
As long as fights in the game will continue to be "sustained single target damage DPS checks" and the most important metric to overcome that is DPS, nothing will change.

[Ramiee]

Well, how healers can be rewarded...
For example they are given healer specific things to do, and just not be a target for a split party stack.
I.e. add more cleanseable things, add actual healing not tied to just party taking damage like dragon heads in Shinryu EX or something. Maybe add "negative" health that needs to be healed, before health can be restored normally.
If all of that is too complicated, then i dunno.
As long as fights in the game will continue to be "sustained single target damage DPS checks" and the most important metric to overcome that is DPS, nothing will change.

I think everyone here wants a better dps system and more healing to do. I can tell you now if I was forced to GCD heal I would actually play healer more because I have a ton of heals that are almost completely useless outside of prog and ultimates.
Literally the way to fix healerless runs in casual content is to add cleansing for stuff that will kill people if sync'd if they get a certain amount.

[Flay_wind]

I think everyone here wants a better dps system and more healing to do. I can tell you now if I was forced to GCD heal I would actually play healer more because I have a ton of heals that are almost completely useless outside of prog and ultimates.
Literally the way to fix healerless runs in casual content is to add cleansing for stuff that will kill people if sync'd if they get a certain amount.

We have some of that, i.e. cleanseable Dooms and what not, but those are somewhat rare. And the amount of times i've seen healer not Esuna'ing others and/or themselves is way too high. But the game does not teach proper Esuna usage at all.
As things are now, it's usually just damage, oh, and here's your dummy sticker aka a Vuln Up.

Edit: But to make a more engaging DPS rotation. SE could give healers a couple more damaging buttons on shorter cooldowns separate from our usual 30 seconds DoT.
I.e. let's say 460 potency attack on a 15s cooldown and 540 potency on 30s cooldown.
Add a channeled 5 seconds spell that pulses damage every second like a Flamethrower on a 60s.