#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

Also while we're at it, can SE please fix the sudden 'snap to ground' in the Medica 3 animation

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Honestly? If a group ever needs raw healing, subbing in a SGE instead of a WHM probably would've been better too considering that space laser mage, for whatever reason vomits HPS like crazy they just can't help but to top the HPS chart no matter what they do. To add insult to the injury, they also bring a wealth of extra, very accessible mitigations without accounting E.Prog in case their partner is a SCH - something that WHM also lacks.

This sounds weirdly similar to what I said of RDM/SMN's balancing in EW. Dumbing it down in ShB made healer dps seem too easy to do compared to tanks, so instead of returning the damaging tools they just lowered healer damage output.

Rather than lowered, IMHO they ignored that front while increasing the tank's. Then again, hey: same differences xD

[Tint]

As the game stands right now WHM really doesn’t have a gameplay niche, the fact it doesn’t have a niche makes it feel week in my eyes because whenever I play it all I feel is I could be achieving more on any other healer which is why it feels like a void of a class pick

If a class is badly designed to the modern games need its badly designed, just because it was kinda sorta good 10 years ago is meaningless

That's like saying WAR is good designed because it can replace the healer role.

The other healers stepping on WHMs toes is not WHMs fault. Why is AST the healer with the party buffs AND the mitigation tools while WHM has nothing? AST is the real problem here, not WHM.

But since the Lilly rework in ShB WHM at least as a gameplay niche and does not simply play like an AST without buffs. There is a place for WHM, it is not a "void of a class pick", even if it's not a meta job.

[Supersnow845]

That's like saying WAR is good designed because it can replace the healer role.

The other healers stepping on WHMs toes is not WHMs fault. Why is AST the healer with the party buffs AND the mitigation tools while WHM has nothing? AST is the real problem here, not WHM.

But since the Lilly rework in ShB WHM at least as a gameplay niche and does not simply play like an AST without buffs. There is a place for WHM, it is not a "void of a class pick", even if it's not a meta job.

I mean SCH can also do WHM but better (seraphism anyone), and SGE has more HPS throughput than any other healer

When you have 3 healers that have a rough niche and one that doesn’t it’s hard to call “everyone else” the problem

[AmiableApkallu]

Also while we're at it, can SE please fix the sudden 'snap to ground' in the Medica 3 animation

lol. At one point, I had a mind to file that as a bug report. (But then, doing my day job when I'm not actually at work struck me as Not Fun, and I let it drop…)

[Hyperia]

Right now, speaking as a career WHM since release, WHM has its place but its getting reduced each expansion and patch and most of that is just exploratry prog.

Think of WHM like this: Its a healing fire truck, and not just a little one but one of those huge monstrous airport fire trucks. It can put out a titanic amount of healing in nearly a blink of an eye. While this is awesome and used to be needed, healing requirements have gone from needing a big fire truck to a small fire truck, then to a fire extingusher to a wet blanket to "its ok to let it smolder", it wont catch on fire before the boss is dead.

So WHM is a great healer, if its needed, but there are no more healing fires that need a WHM.

[AmiableApkallu]

The other healers stepping on WHMs toes is not WHMs fault. Why is AST the healer with the party buffs AND the mitigation tools while WHM has nothing? AST is the real problem here, not WHM.

If the criticism is "while WHM has nothing," then the solution is to give WHM something, not to blame and take away from all the other healers.

My own spitball take of the day: Give WHM a lily spender for an AoE shield. Decouple Divine Caress from Temperance. Add an AoE that doesn't include Stun as a side-effect. Voilà! We've addressed WHM's glaring (pun-intended) lack of AoE mitigations and shields, and given Holy's Stun an opportunity to be used strategically on trash mobs.

Because…

WHM have the most raw and direct healing power potential of all the healer

is all good and well, but a poor identity or niche, because in Duty Finder, two Shield Healers paired together have to be able to pump out enough pure heals to deal with something like the opening of Seat of Sacrifice. Which is to say, thanks to Duty Finder, the Shield Healers have to be able to step on WHM's supposed niche of "raw and direct healing power". (And that's why the whole Pure/Shield split is silly, but that's a topic unto itself…)

[Tint]

This is such an irony. I want to remind you of the manifesto of this very thread:

~~Manifesto~~

• Self-sustain and healing abilities given to other roles.
  The choice/direction to give such abilities to roles outside of healer encroaches on the role.
  
• Over simplified DPS rotation
  Every job in FFXIV has a 'filler GCD' skill that they press when there are no other requirements. No role in the game pushes this skill more than healer. Not by a long shot. Our offensive capability should still feel dynamic and rewarding. Yes, we are healers, but we are also casters.
  
• Homogenization of healer jobs
  Barrier/Pure healer split is largely redundant. All healers essentially play the same with the exception of few and far between niche abilities.
  
• Excessive oGCD heals.
  These are not only abundant, but exceptionally powerful. This in addition to self-sustain on other roles reduces the dynamic of healing comrades.
  
• Lack of engaging content outside the most difficult duties (Savage/Ultimate). i.e. the threat level is too low.
  Healers should feel like they have a place in all forms of content. It is understandable that difficulty can't be so great as to bar progression of story-based content. However, innovative means should still be employed to make greater/full use of abilities.

Which advocates to take away healing from all other roles (at least to some degree) to let the healer role shine again. See any parallels to taking away from other healers so the "pure" healer can shine more?

Which advocates against homogenisation of the healer role. So is "I can do everything" now good design or not? Should WHM become more homogenized or the other healers less?

Talks about excessive and too powerfull oGCD healing and wants it dialed back, but now you are trash talking WHM for being too weak.


Yes, WHM is too weak, compared to the other healers. But it is not too weak to clear content. Buffing WHM will lead to more homogenisation, power creep and will cut down the time we spend with healing even more.


Keep in mind that we have just seen this in the tank role. DRK was lacking behind and just recently got additional self healing added. Which is the opposite of the first point of the manifesto.

[AmiableApkallu]

Which advocates to take away healing from all other roles (at least to some degree) to let the healer role shine again. See any parallels to taking away from other healers so the "pure" healer can shine more?

Which advocates against homogenisation of the healer role. So is "I can do everything" now good design or not? Should WHM become more homogenized or the other healers less?

Talks about excessive and too powerfull oGCD healing and wants it dialed back, but now you are trash talking WHM for being too weak.

So long as something like Seat of Sacrifice's opening mechanic exists, I am going to argue that trying to establish a strict distinction between "pure" vs. "shield" healers is an exercise in sadness. And to WHM specifically, I look back to FFI and FFIV, and I see something more akin to "jack of all trades."

On the healing front, my issue with WHM isn't that it's "weak." It's that its kit sings essentially one note, and only one note: restore HP. The kit lacks breadth to the point of being anemic and almost non-functional. A little bit more access to party-wide shields and mitigations would go a long ways towards having some semblance of control over the raid-wides that hit for ~100% of HP bars — instead of hoping that literally anyone else in the party hits a mitigation, which is an asinine identity for a healer and WHM. It would pair well with reducing tanks' and DPS's access to those same tools.

And none of that needs to change what differentiates WHM from the other healers: what WHM does, it does directly, immediately, and on the GCD. It doesn't preclude WHM from being the healer that prefers to restore HP in large quantities and quickly. It doesn't preclude a future where someone remembers that White Mages were one half of a calamity, and they probably didn't Cure III the world into oblivion, so maybe WHM can get an assortment of direct, immediate, on the GCD, elementally-aspected offensive spells. That all leaves plenty of room for WHM's current, nearest competitor, AST, to differentiate itself with delayed and over-time based healing, and with buff-based offense, to say nothing of how one might evolve SCH and SGE.

[ForsakenRoe]

We don't need to buff WHM, because that's a vertical expansion of its capabilities. For example, changing Asylum from 100p per tick to 150 per tick, won't solve WHM's issues. Increasing Medica2 to Medica3 (and the HOT potency by 25 per tick as a consequence) sure as heck didn't solve anything. It either needs to be a horizontal expansion of its capabilities (eg giving it more variety in its tools, and therefore more coverage of what things it can do), or a change to the fight design that uniquely benefits WHM moreso than the other healers.

Over here in a different thread where I keep some ideas, the OP there contains (but originally it was posted in this thread) an idea I call 'Aetherblight', effectively a debuff that acts as an anti-shield that prevents you from healing your actual HP bar until sufficient healing has been dealt to the afflicted player. This has many useful design benefits for the game, I would argue. More variety in raid mechanics would become available with its addition, and when it's used in conjunction with other things. For example, while the Aetherblight is active in one fight, it could reduce your movespeed somewhat, making it harder to get to positions for mechanics. It could apply a constant DOT that lasts only while as the Aetherblight remains, so dealing with it faster means less total healing to worry about. A great aspect of such an idea though, is that it unshackles the devs from one of their strictest limitations: Our HP pools. Say we have healers (the squishiest members of the party, alongside the casters) with a HP pool of 150k. We can't really go much beyond 180k, because it requires a lot of mitigation and barriers to survive even that. A mechanic that applies Aetherblight to the party, could apply an absurd sounding amount like 600k, literally 4 healthbars worth (displayed as diamonds over the HP bar, in the same way that 'you have more than a HP bar worth of shielding applied' is), and it's completely fine as long as there's a feasible way to handle it before the next mechanic makes it a problem.

Aetherblight, or a system like it, would incentivize WHM's sheer throughput as a good way to much more rapidly handle the negatives of having Aetherblight afflicting you. An AST could regen through it with its OGCD HOTs like CO and CU, or potentially use Macrocosmos to remove half of it instantly (if it's coded in such a way), but a WHM could clear the Aetherblight more 'responsively', reducing how much total DOT damage the party takes, or how slowed they are, depending on what the encounter design dictates that Aetherblight does (in addition to its primary effect of 'blocks your healing'), if anything. If Aetherblight were implemented, such that 'if you have a barrier active when the attack hits you, the Aetherblight aspect of the attack is negated', then that makes it easier for SCH/SGE to handle, by giving an alternative solution (prevent it in the first place, instead of healing through the effect after it's become a problem). But, it's also bad for WHM because they can't apply barriers like the others. So, what if WHM had the ability to spend a Lily to apply barriers, like how SCH/SGE can spend a Flow/Gall to do Pure Healing? Now, WHM is not only able to deal with Aetherblight by preventing its application entirely, but it's the healer that can do it without sacrificing damage, with by far the most frequency (every 20s, versus the long CDs SCH/SGE have to use). What if a tank takes a tankbuster that applies an absurd amount of Aetherblight as a side effect, say, 5x their own HP bar worth? That's gonna take a long time to heal through for many healers, so it could be implemented such that 'Aetherblight can be removed via Esuna'. But a WHM has Benediction to instantly clear it, so they don't necessarily need to Esuna it.

Here's an example pic of a mockup of how it'd look on the UI:



Assume that John Finalfantasy is a Viper, he liked the look of the guy on the front of the box. As such, he's got Second Wind, Bloodbath, but you don't know if he even has them on his bars. How would you personally handle this situation? Eyeballing the size of the Aetherblight (the purple bit), it looks to be about 20, maybe 25k worth of healing you have to do to remove it. As a WHM, do you Esuna it (that costs a GCD), do you try to heal through it (that costs a GCD, but it can be damage neutral because a Solace would probably handle it), do you wait for the next instance of AOE healing to be needed, and try to handle it at the same time there, do you use a Tetra or a Benediction to clear the debuff? Or... Did this situation ever even arise at all? Was it a mechanic that you knew John was going to do, you knew he'd get that Aetherblight as part of the strategy you're using to tackle the fight, and as such, because you used Divine Benison on John, did you simply prevent the application of the Aetherblight from ever happening? With such a system, you have choices, options, on how to handle the situation, and where you might choose one option, a different healer might find a different option more suited to them. Not just 'a different WHM might choose to Esuna instead of Cure2', I equally mean in the sense of 'in the situation of 'both tanks have Aetherblight, deal with it now', an AST might choose to use Synastry to clear both Aetherblights at once, whereas a WHM might use Benediction on one and Tetra on the other, a SCH might Lustrate each of them, a SGE might Zoe-Pneuma both at once, or perhaps Kardia-Krasis-Soteria to handle one, and Haima the other to prevent their application', etc.

There's ways to make WHM's kit feel more desireable, without changing anything about the job itself. They just take a lot more effort to implement than 'change the job', because that kind of change affects all healers (and to an extent, all jobs), even if they're not a problem. Like, I don't think that RDM having VerCure and Magick Barrier does much to this idea, because VerCure kinda sucks and is single target, and Magick Barrier is a %mit rather than a shield effect and so it wouldn't block the Aetherblight. A job like WAR or PLD, with their Shake it Off/Divine Veil applying a partywide barrier, however, that might be an issue. In fact, IIRC I worked out that, in order to foil the 1Tank3DPS EX roulette runs, all you need to do is have a boss that uses a raidwide that does this:

- each 15s, the boss does a raidwide that deals, say, 500 damage, and gives 20k of Aetherblight to the party. If the 500 damage is blocked by a barrier, the Aetherblight is negated.
- each 1s the Aetherblight is on the party, a DOT also ticks and deals 1% of your max HP as damage. This DOT is not fatal, and will leave the affected player at 1HP.
- all AOEs in the fight also deal incredibly low amounts of damage (let's say 500, for consistency), but also apply a decent amount of Aetherblight.

So, ignoring the DOT entirely because 'its not fatal' the next raidwide that comes in will deal 500 damage to your remaining 1HP and you'd die. Standing in an AOE does almost nothing to your real HP, but if you're only at 1HP because of Aetherblight's attached DOT in this encounter, the AOE is suddenly fatal despite doing so little damage. Such a boss would be incredibly forgiving as it deals so little 'real damage', but still poses a real threat to the party that has to be healed through and cannot be ignored.

A WHM/AST can just press Medica3/Helios Conjunction once per 15s, and the Aetherblight (plus the associated DOT) is handled entirely. A SGE/SCH can put up a barrier and block the application in the first place, or use Ixochole/Indom to blast the Aetherblight off instantly, before the DOT can do any real harm. Especially a SCH, they could use Seraph to block two different instances of the debuff being applied via Consolations. But, a 1T 3DPS party may not have the required CDs to handle the situation. The WAR wouldn't be able to keep all three players alive with Nascent Flash, a PLD would lose so much damage using Clemency on each individual player to make the run pointless compared to just bringing a Healer. Melee/Ranged could SecondWind, but A: cooldown's too long to use on every instance and B: I think it needs to crit to break 20k, which isn't exactly a reliable strategy. I think the only DPS comp that could reliably handle such a situation, is at least 2 Dancers rotating Curing Waltz to heal, and Improv Finish to shield, at which point... probably better to just bring a Healer?

The best part though, is that the lore justification for such a mechanic is already in the game. After The Vault, it can just be explained that 'the reason we couldn't heal Haurchefant is that the spear applied a LOT of Aetherblight, and that prevented us from healing him. Also, the very large hole caused a significant DOT while the Aetherblight was active, and Alphinaud panicked and forgot that Esuna exists'.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk