#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Aravell]

What's everybody else's thought?

I honestly think lack of confidence in direction is only one part of it. There's also the lack of creativity and crippling fear of upsetting certain players.

Let's look at VPR, they said they want a fast and technical job. There's many ways to achieve it, first thing that comes to my mind is short GCD, mode switching, maybe with poison application and consumption for various buffs or debuffs. What did they do? They ripped out timers from MNK so they can slap timers onto VPR, that shows lack of creativity. Another thing that shows lack of creativity is when SGE launched as a 80% copy of SCH, but we already beat that one to dust already.

Now, as for crippling fear of upsetting players, we only need to look at the latest balance patch. The easiest way to make sure all is balanced for the savage patch is to nerf PCT and give some minor buffs to other jobs that are lacking a bit, but they instead massively buffed everything else (not you MCH) to compensate, which led to an undertuned savage raid and a nightmare of future balancing. They're so scared of upsetting people that they don't even dare deal out necessary nerfs.

[Azurarok]

Also we don't really know how they're analyzing what data they've gathered.

I'm led to believe they saw the population spike during ShB and decided the job changes were in the right direction, then they decided to double down on it from the second spike they got in EW, when really the former was from the pandemic and the latter was the WoW exodus. The story and what gameplay there was left was what gave the game staying power.

[Saraide]

That's a whole bunch of 'nothings' said lol.



This is the only important sentence amongst those word salad. #healerstrike lives rent free lmao but also thanks for the free bump,

Anyway...

===========

Might go a little bit tangent here: there's this interesting post made in DPS forum (first post); I wonder if the same can be said for good amount of healer 'reworks' as well. Personally, lack of confidence had never crossed my mind before.

What's everybody else's thought?

That was my thought aswell. The immediate changes to a core mechanic of viper is proof job designers have no confidence in their own work.

[Aravell]

Also we don't really know how they're analyzing what data they've gathered.

I'm led to believe they saw the population spike during ShB and decided the job changes were in the right direction, then they decided to double down on it from the second spike they got in EW, when really the former was from the pandemic and the latter was the WoW exodus. The story and what gameplay there was left was what gave the game staying power.

I've said before in another thread, they may have the data, but are they parsing the data correctly? Data without feedback is worthless.

[ForsakenRoe]

I've said before in another thread, they may have the data, but are they parsing the data correctly? Data without feedback is worthless.

You can see pieces of how they parse data by looking at BLU. They consider BLU a success, while in reality, it's interacted with (by the players who do actually interact with it) for like 48 hours after each update it gets to level, learn new actions, and then the absolute vast majority drops it until the next update. A small amount of players continue to use it for the weekly Masked Carnivale challenges, and an incredibly small number use it for doing the raid challenges (source: Morbol acquisition rate is incredibly low even now).

Yet SE considers it a 'success', enough that they're willing to do a second Limited Job, even in the face of all the negative feedback about how 'it sucks to take a fan favourite job from older games, and limit it to 'old content' etc. And that's to say nothing of the fact that, with two Limited Jobs, they'll have to do a BLU update, and also a BST update, where previously it was just a BLU update. So they'll now have twice as much workload in the 'limited jobs' pipeline. I don't think they will be able to keep up, and my prediction is that BLU will stop seeing updates once BST comes out

[Azurarok]

Let's look at VPR, they said they want a fast and technical job. There's many ways to achieve it, first thing that comes to my mind is short GCD, mode switching, maybe with poison application and consumption for various buffs or debuffs.

I would've been much more interested in VPR had the dual wield and combined blade been stances that mattered. Have the slower combined blade for maintaining buffs/debuffs and maybe even utlity while the dual wield be for high speed dps instead of the tired 'charge resource for burst' design we've got

[Tigore]

I am also wondering why they had to remove the Gnash debuff too. Playing around with the rotation, we have a couple 40 second cooldown combos with 2 stacks that applied it automatically in the past. It only really affects when there are streams of adds coming in as opposed to hitting everything at once. But other than that, I am still pressing similar buttons under most controlled situations. I am following the yellow border buttons and pressing 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 etc for the GCDs when the burst is done.

As for PCT, a nerf to their personal DPS might have been the most sensible action. They have no business doing comparable personal damage to BLM AND buffing the party's damage done for the 2 minute burst. If anything, the order for personal DPS could probably be something like this for the top. The equal signs were approximate since we have things like VPR's lack of unique survival cooldowns vs BLM's lower health with more hard casting to compare.

VPR = BLM > SAM > MCH = MNK

If a DPS is meant to be more "selfish" with possibly less survivability, then their personal damage needs to reflect that. The BLM numbers will likely need to be slightly higher in potency numbers than it looks to others since having hard casts longer than the GCDs kind of self nerfs that number compared to other classes.

[Azurarok]

Gnash's removal probably can be attributed to the maximum number of buff/debuffs a target can have. Same reason why healers lost all their dots, apparently. And there's still been issues with too many buff/debuffs on players that's kept them from receiving a tank lb3 and such. The "~ ready" buffs they've added in DT's apparently made it worse too.

You'd think if it's being an active problem to both job and fight design it should be major priority.

[Connor]

Gnash's removal probably can be attributed to the maximum number of buff/debuffs a target can have. Same reason why healers lost all their dots, apparently. And there's still been issues with too many buff/debuffs on players that's kept them from receiving a tank lb3 and such. The "~ ready" buffs they've added in DT's apparently made it worse too.

You'd think if it's being an active problem to both job and fight design it should be major priority.

Isn’t the buff/debuff cap something that’s only really encountered in extremely specific circumstances like certain ultimates or Bozja though? I don’t get why they’d think ‘let’s get rid of this skill in case the player happens to do the 0.1% of content it might be a problem’ lol. Like surely it makes more sense to look at what it is about that context that’s causing so many buffs/debuffs in the first place lol (i.e debuff vomit in certain encounters).

Is there like some technical reason why they can’t just…make it higher? lol. I imagine it’s probably a bit more complicated than that lol, but maybe a workaround would at least make it a bit less restrictive.

As someone who prefers support oriented playstyles with a focus on buffing/debuffing, it’s extremely disheartening to know that basically that can’t ever be realized because you might hit the cap. Plus, how are they ever going to give healers new DoTs while the debuff cap is in place? They basically can’t because of 24-mans where 24/60 debuff slots are going to be taken up by damage over time (assuming 3 DoT per healer). I mean, that requires a lot of assumptions lol, like 100% uptime, but in theory. Then assuming there’s 1 Bard in every party that’s 50% of the potential slots taken solely by damage over time. Add in things like damage reduction debuffs or Trick Attack (what’s it called now? Dokumori?) and you might hit the 60 cap lol.

I really hope they look into either increasing it, working around it (maybe squish certain buffs/debuffs into one icon over two?), or something. It’s sad to think that these technical limitations affect actual job design itself to the point we’re losing abilities over it

[LynxDubh]

Gnash's removal probably can be attributed to the maximum number of buff/debuffs a target can have. Same reason why healers lost all their dots, apparently. And there's still been issues with too many buff/debuffs on players that's kept them from receiving a tank lb3 and such. The "~ ready" buffs they've added in DT's apparently made it worse too.

You'd think if it's being an active problem to both job and fight design it should be major priority.

You'd think it would warrant them to make healer changes to mitigate this issue as well. Why not make AST, WHM, or even SGE revolve around other forms of damage other than DotS and then throw SCH a bone and give them one back.

They don't even have to be massive changes, just give replace the dots with a skill that is more interesting and shakes up the downtime, then one extra skill that goes with it.

For example you could:

SGE - Give it a 1-2 branching combo. The first finisher is for damage, the second finisher is for gaining stakes of Addersting. Heck, even a self damage amp would be interesting.

WHM - Let it have a couple of skills that build up to an elemental nuke. I think ForsakenRoe has quite a few posts that have that as a fun element.

AST- Maybe a self buff or a buff you can cast on someone? AST should be kept bust with its card system in an idyllic world, so I'm not against it keeping its 1 nuke+1 dot downtime.

SCH- Give one extra dot to manage with a shorter duration, like 18-21 or something.

These are all just spitballs, but I think you get the point.