#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Azurarok]

Playing MH Wilds reminded me that that series has 3-4 weapon classes that can manage a healing support role (Hunting Horn, Light Bowgun, Prowler, Sword & Shield if you squint at it as an Item user) and they all play completely differently.

This game has 4 healer jobs and they're only about as different as the note sets on each Hunting Horn

[Xurtan]

To be fair that's not even just a healer issue, all of the classes have been homogenized to Tural and back. :v) Tanks are basically identical outside of some numbers and aesthetic. Healers are just... more egregious because we really only get one button to press. Hell, I was looking at some of my logs and 57.58% of my casts for a full clear of m1s are just me casting Fall Malefic (152 times, to be specific). Another 6.44% of casts is Combust, so my dot. Yay. So about 65% of the fight I'm just pressing two buttons (90% of which is ONE button, but I'll be generous). It's genuinely abhorrent.

[Kacho_Nacho]

To be fair that's not even just a healer issue, all of the classes have been homogenized to Tural and back. :v) Tanks are basically identical outside of some numbers and aesthetic. Healers are just... more egregious because we really only get one button to press. Hell, I was looking at some of my logs and 57.58% of my casts for a full clear of m1s are just me casting Fall Malefic (152 times, to be specific). Another 6.44% of casts is Combust, so my dot. Yay. So about 65% of the fight I'm just pressing two buttons (90% of which is ONE button, but I'll be generous). It's genuinely abhorrent.

Fair point. Honestly, I wish CS3 would stop being so focused on job balance and would work on making the jobs fun again, especially the healers because they are the canaries in the coal mine at the moment.

[Azurarok]

It's not even necessarily job balance that's doing it. Other times it's to cater to players who don't usually play the job, or because some perfectionists can't stand anything that might keep their rotation from going smoothly in any way, or because they dealt with a bad healer/tank and want them eliminated somehow.

[Rithy255]

Fair point. Honestly, I wish CS3 would stop being so focused on job balance and would work on making the jobs fun again, especially the healers because they are the canaries in the coal mine at the moment.

I agree I think job balance is important, but job balance means nothing if the jobs themselves aren't fun or meaningful.

I think issues with DPS are relatively easier to solve compared to support based jobs (tanks/healers), with Supports I really have I hard time believing by 8.0 they would actually be in a decent spot, I mostly think they will go back on "2 minute meta".

The issue is I think support jobs are more of a afterthought towards balance, It's much easier to make skills all the same but rebranded under a different name in the case of tanks, In the case of healers the heal kits might feel slightly different but all end up again feeling the same, with the added downside that you got so much healing bloat that theirs not really room for interesting damage buttons on healers, this is also partly effecting tank rotations being boring 1, 2, 3 snoozefest.

The solution at least would make the baseline of healer and tank kits more interesting without so much "bloat skills" tanks for example don't really need as much defensives as they do, I also don't think healers do, the last factor of this is also that encounter design effects support jobs way more then DPS jobs, for a properly balanced and fun game encounters need and should always take into account what both Tanks and Healers have, especially hardcore content.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think a re-assessment of what is considered 'the baseline kit' for the Healers especially, is required. I think SE perceives too much of their kit as 'this is a shared baseline, that every healer needs an equivalent to'. Stuff like SCH/SGE having Adloquium/E.Diagnosis, or Succor/E.Prognosis, okay that's fine. The most basic GCDs to perform your role (applying barriers to keep team alive through the damage) can be 'shared', that makes sense to me. But then we have stuff like Indomitability/Ixochole, or Lustrate/Druochole, or Pepsis/Emergency Tactics, and it starts to get a bit silly. Look at WHM and AST. Certain actions are similar (eg the GCDs, Benison/Intersection, Aquaveil/Exaltation), but there's a fair few that just are not comparable. Where WHM has 3 uses of Rapture per minute, AST instead gets Star, CO and CU, but two of them are Regens rather than 'instant healing', and one (Star) asks the player to use it 10s in advance to make the most of the healing, so the gameplay of the two at least feels a little different there. It's the damage GCD loop that lets them down, and makes them feel 'samey'.

Keep the basic GCDs (the ones that, ideally, we don't use anyway, if things are going well) as the shared 'this is the baseline kit of the job', but allow the additional abilities to be more diverse in their gameplay. SGE more focused on Kardia as a mechanic, SCH more focused on interplay between themselves and the Faerie, WHM can stay the 'basic, press button receive heal' healer, and AST focused more on the cards (to create a gameplay more focused on buffing allies, rather than doing damage directly). Add one or two new damage actions that interact with these diversified healing kits, and the problem is fixed (somewhat). The biggest example of this is SGE, due to how its damage triggers Kardia

I agree I think job balance is important, but job balance means nothing if the jobs themselves aren't fun or meaningful.

'Job Balance' is a very nebulous term, given that we've never had perfect balance between the Healer jobs. Even now, with the majority of our damage as a Healer being from a single nuke button, and a 30s DOT, they still can't get them perfectly balanced. AST's gone through how many reworks, because it's a balancing nightmare, and even now, it's still not balanced against WHM. At some point, people gotta accept that 'good enough is good enough', and if the situation is 'All four healers are fun to play, and all four healers can clear all the content in the game, but the price we pay for those fun designs is that there's a disparity of, say, 2-3% damage between <top healer> and <bottom healer>', that should not be reason enough to remove all the fun in pursuit of 'job balance', because we're never going to get them perfectly balanced against one another.

An example I'm looking at as I type this, is M1S (95th%), AST seems to be 1200 DPS ahead of WHM. Yet despite this difference (about 7%), WHM still has more logged runs for the fight than AST (over twice as many). So if that many people prefer to play the 'weaker job', either A: they don't know it's weaker, or B: they DO know it's weaker, and are actively choosing to play it despite that. In either case, why did we sacrifice 'fun design' in pursuit of 'perfect balance', when we haven't even gotten perfect balance from the sacrifice, and so many players don't seem to care about the balance in the first place (whether by not being aware, or being aware but actively deciding 'don't care')?

[CaptainLagbeard]

Job Balance hasn't ever been perfect, but the current state of things is a complete lack of balance as healers barely count as a role...

As for WHM/AST... I suppose it's just the general bad design of certain things on the job, with stuff like useless cards (10% more overhealing is such a strong effect) and Earthly Star sometimes refusing to place itself down unless you try to set it down like 5 times.

[Xurtan]

It's an interesting issue all around, because I think in a vacuum damage and fight difficulty HAS gone up. The problem is we keep getting OVERLOADED with healing and mitigation each expansion, with traits enhancing them all. Not only that, but DPS are getting group heals or have group shields, tanks can ALSO group shield or have shields/heals, and just... it's a lot. If I need to GCD heal it's pretty much just because things have gone really wrong, or I'm essentially solo healing. We really shouldn't need to only have one person healing to actually have any fun in this game. I'm not sure what the solution is, interesting class design is something that FFXIV was never HUGE on but even the bits of it we had have been carved away bit by bit over the years. There need to be fewer mitigations and heals across the entire job base, and we probably need abilities that force us to actually make decisions for what is most useful at a given point, plus kits that interact with each other. e.g, even if it's just 'You cast 4 damage spells and can then burn these 'stacks' on a higher damage hit OR a heal OR a buff' or something, that's still... nuance? Sure, there's always going to be an "objectively best", but the balance in this game is really tight in comparison to most others as it is. It's never going to be PERFECT. The way fights and dungeons are designed has a focus on healers DPSing, and that's fine - but give us more than 1, sometimes 2, buttons to do it with. Look at Vanguard's Blood Mage, look at WAR's Disciple of Khaine or Warrior Priest, the Friar in DAOC, the Medic in Wildstar, etc etc. Good healing kits are totally possible.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Lucy Pyre mentioned our thread in her latest video. She breaks down everything wrong with the current state of FFXIV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcQfbShd4bM

[Mawlzy]

Lucy Pyre mentioned our thread in her latest video. She breaks down everything wrong with the current state of FFXIV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcQfbShd4bM

Unfortunate that her ideas are presented in that ridiculous voice.