#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

On the one hand, it seems silly, almost to the point of it being a textbook example of logical fallacies, to say 'I don't want to have design move forward, for fear of the few aspects of complexity the job still has, which I (general I, not me specifically) enjoy, being removed'

On the other hand, it's entirely justified to feel that way considering that SE has in fact removed any trace of friction from pretty much any other job, destroying what people liked about those jobs in the process if that's required for The Great Smooth-ening

I think there's ways to remove some things like Dissipation's wonkiness, Recitation not working with Manifestation/Accession, Fey Blessing not being useable under Seraph, etc. and for the 'complexity' that those interactions provided, to be available via something more sensible in the design. The issue is, 'is Square Enix willing to actually have complexity in their job kits?' And thus far, the answer seems to be 'no, the job kits need to have less friction than your car's tires on black ice', because they fear the possibility that someone will cause any amount of player-friction, and quit the game over it

I've been thinking recently, that the scale of 'complexity vs simplicity' is getting far too much time in the spotlight. Rather, 'intuitive vs counter-intuitive' needs to be a consideration. For example, WHM is 'simple' I'm sure most people would agree, but it is 'intuitive' (and that's good). Increasing how much complexity it has, without impacting how 'intuitive' it is, would be a good thing IMO (so long as the complexity is effectively 'for optimization only' via potency balancing etc). Something like SCH, however, with actions like Dissipation, Seraphism, Fey Blessing/Union and Summon Seraph, all of those are still quite 'simple' in their effects, I'd say, but their mutual exclusivity rules (that aren't really mentioned properly in the tooltips) are not 'intuitive', so it gives the appearance of 'complexity', when it's not actually complex, it's just jank.

edit:

I’m way late to the party but I still don’t understand what the 100 MP reduction on aoe healing spells was about lol. Like does this even actually help anyone? They reduced the MP cost on those skills we essentially aren’t allowed to use because of encounter design. How do they even come up with these ‘adjustments’?!

They just added Seraphism, an action wherein you spam AOE GCDs (and if you ET Accession, it's somehow more potent than a WHM's Cure3, for 60% the MP cost), I imagine there were some trigger-happy players who blasted a bajillion overheal with the action and then ran themselves dry

As for SGE, Toxikon now fully refunds the MP cost of the barrier that generates it (Dosis+Dosis is 800MP, applying barrier and then spending the resulting Toxikon is 800MP), so that's... a thing, I guess.

Rather than doubling Lucid's potency, I'd just remove it entirely. Saves us a button on the bars. Lucid restores 3850MP per minute, if it's used on CD, so all that needs to be done is to either reduce the MP consumption further to compensate for the loss of that button, or to boost MP recovery throughout the gameplay of the job further, to bring that 3850MP in via other sources. Stuff like how Assize gives 500MP per use. It could be argued that similar applies to Swiftcast, if the four healers all have unique/thematic ways to access 'you have instant cast time on next spell' then theoretically Swiftcast could be removed, saving another hotbar slot. Like, what if WHM has the ability to instantcast their next spell, AND it's free, when they use Thin Air? Do we need Swiftcast for Raise if that version of Thin Air were to exist (and learned at a much earlier level), allowing for the same Raise spell to also cost 0MP?

Remembering to press a button once per minute to be allowed to play your Job is not exactly what I'd call riveting gameplay. If it were, Invigorate and TP would still exist.