Imagine having an unhealthy relationship with a class/role and claiming it as your "own". What the actual F. It's not your class, you don't own any artistic value or expression, or rights on how they get changed or the direction they take. You can like/dislike or play/not play. That's it.
I think you misunderstand what I meant. Certain people will gravitate towards certain classes. Say you've devoted 5 years + into a class and then the developers change everything about that class to not represent anything that resembles that class or why you originally picked it. I can understand why people would be upset because its a "pull the curtain" moment and the veil is lifted from people and they realise that all that investment they put in to mastering the class is worthless and a waste of time. I can certainly understand why that would upset people.
Whether you believe that is right or wrong is up to you but I can certainly understand the viewpoint of disillusioned Black Mages and Summoners.
Last edited by ddwarbird; 04-14-2025 at 08:06 PM.
This notion that old BLM was a 'cool kids, egotistical, elitist club' is such a self report. I have to question if you even play your preferred job at the baseline because standard BLM was always on the easier end to get into and play.
You might want to look into a little-known MMO called 'World of Warcraft'. Of the 7 Healer specs available to play, 3 are explicitly designed with 'do damage as part of your healing gameplay' in mind (Disc Priest, Mistweaver, Holy Paladin), and the other four have talents/abilities that massively feed into allowing you to do damage on the side while your HOTs are ticking/people don't need healing (Resto Druid can Catweave and have up to like 6 DOTs active at once potentially. Holy Priest has Empyreal Blaze to blast out heavy hitting Holy Fires and its new Hero Talent tree, Archon, allows it to use their not-Assize, Halo, a lot more often which deals damage that adds up. Resto Shaman has a talent that makes their Healing Rain (Asylum but a GCD and can have 100% uptime) also deal damage over time to enemies in it, and has totems that can deal damage passively akin to old SMN Egi Autoattacks).
The only healer that is remotely close in DPS design to FFXIV healers is Preservation Evoker, with a nuke (Living Flame, which also functions as their Cure1), a 30s CD (Flame Breath), a gauge spender that competes for healing resources (Disintegrate) and a 2min burst damage attack (Deep Breath). But even then, Flame Breath can be augmented with a talent that makes it take 80% of the damage it deals, and apply that as healing to an injured ally. Or a talent that makes it so that when you hit enemies with Flame Breath, your Living Flame hits X more targets on the next use, with X being equal to the enemy count hit by Flame Breath (up to 4 bonus targets iirc)
The idea that 'healers heal and that's their whole thing' is a cancer that should have stayed dead after Cataclysm's healing requirements were received so... divisively. M6S has conclusively shown that this playerbase simply isn't prepared for the idea of 'healers heal', and the funniest part is how nobody who says 'healers should heal' never seems to realize that, once we have gear, the amount of healing we need to do will sharply decrease, and we'll be back where we started.
Surely it'd be more sensible to have a small DPS rotation for the Healers, comprised of several actions of such similar potency that A: there is an 'optimal rotation' for the sweats, but B: the difference between 'optimal' and 'smash Broil over and over and ignore everything else' is so small that it doesn't ever cause an Enrage? Furthermore, having more damage buttons for the inevitable downtime would allow more variety in how those DPS buttons interlink with our healing output, allowing for more design space for the Devs to work with. They said pre-Endwalker 'we didn't really know what to do with SCH' when showing off Expedient. Maybe if they hadn't removed all the damage buttons and gone scorched earth on the idea of Healers pressing non-Heal buttons, they'd have ideas to work with?
Here is an example of what I came up with for WHM, while trying to keep the number of new buttons added to the Job low (to lower dev-time), keep the core of the job as intact as possible (to lower dev-time/retain familiarity), but still improve the DPS rotation in downtime. With just two buttons, Banish (15s CD) and Blessing of the Elementals (Costs 50 of a new gauge, built by casting literally any MP-cost spell), and reducing Dia from 30s down to 12s, this design's 'optimal damage rotation' per 2mins goes from having 35 Glare3's, all the way down to just 17. I even added some diagrams to illustrate this difference, and the best part is, with that design, over 60% of the GCDs a WHM would use for their damage rotation would be instantcasts. If BLM's justification was 'it needed to have the changes so it could keep up with the mobility demands of the new fight design', then this WHM design would fit perfectly with that thinking. It also requires zero actual hotbar spaces to be added, because those two required buttons (Banish/BOTE) could be gained by simply merging Cure1 with Cure2, and Medica1 with Medica2, given that we never use Cure1 after we get Cure2 anyway, and Medica1 is equal in potency to 'Medica2's cast, plus a single tick'. So, just frontload one tick of Medica2, reduce the duration by 3s, and boom, hotbar slot saved. It's surprisingly easy to come up with ideas on how to use the current designs as a foundation, and build upon them, when you don't arbitrarily handicap yourself with restrictions like 'Healers should not be allowed a DPS rotation (but Tanks ARE allowed one, despite being equally 'not-a-DPS'???)
Also, if people really want to follow the flawed mantra of 'healers should only heal', they might be interested in my SGE design where Diagnosis and Prognosis have no MP cost. Spam overheal to your heart's content!
Last edited by ForsakenRoe; 04-14-2025 at 09:10 PM.
This what gets me the most, people act like playing black mage at a basic level was this super hard unachievable goal, it really wasn't the only real difference was theirs actually room to mess up and be punished on black mage, but once you played the job you usually won't mess up. You didn't have to be this "elite gamer" to play black mage in Endwalker or early DT, you just had to actually know some basic fundamentals.
I guess people will cry about jobs they play until the bar is set so low that no one will want to play them anymore.
The problem with things like m6s in particular is healers aren't expected to heal lots and haven't been expected to heal lots for a long time, so whenever you change the gameplay loop too drastically out of nowhere it's going to shock people and challenge people to actually adapt to that playstyle.
Making healing on healers more intense will require a slow process towards that, It's not a simple change that can be done on one fight when the entire game teaches you not to constantly heal.
BLM was never going to be an exception to the changes they make. I like the changes, I'm not happy with the job design right now but not mad about the BLM stuff is a win for me.
That second part is understandable. Buffing allies, granting damage to the team via a method that isn't just 'press Broil/Malefic/etc a lot of times', would be an ideal candidate I'd expect, as we're already focused on targetting allies with something else (the healing). Unfortunately, SE seems to disagree, as they've reduced how often AST is able to buff allies with single target buffs (used to be once per 30s, now it's once per 60s). If anything, we should be advocating for AST to have more cards to use, and less reliance on their own personal damage output. I think it's a shame that they increased Combust's potency by a whole 15 per tick, to make up for the reduced Card RDPS with the DT design, it's emblematic of the design being a huge misstep IMO. We should have at least one Healer, whose gameplay is very centred around 'buff allies, contribute damage via RDPS buffs', and AST would have made sense, but SE instead gave us 70p Combust, and Never-Crit Oracle
Problem with that is, the playerbase doesn't really tend to react well to messages of 'you are not good enough' from the game. With JP apparently locking out NIN, MCH, SMN and WHM from their PFs for M6S (which is dumb AF, my clear had a NIN, and me on WHM), I wouldn't be surprised if the phase is treated as more of an anomaly, with a 'promise to do better', rather than an indication of design to come. It'd be nice if it WERE how the game would be designed going forward, for sure, but again, once we have more gear, how much of that healing difficulty will remain? Will I still need to put Regen on both Tanks, or will a single Medica3 cover it, will I even need that or will Asylum and Assize be enough?
This is why I think that the solution should be twofold: Address the immediate problem now by adding a bit to the damage rotation, and that opens up space (and gives the devs time) to work on tackling Healing Requirements (tm) as the other half of the solution. Consider the following two options:
A: You have WHM, with a new 0-100 gauge. You can spend 50 of this gauge on a new GCD heal, which is damage neutral.
Stone/Glare gives 1 point of gauge.
Aero/Dia gives 1 point of gauge, plus 1 point per tick over its 12s duration (total of 5).
Water/Banish (15s CD, GCD) gives 5 points of gauge.
Holy gives 2 points of gauge per enemy hit.
Misery gives 5 points of gauge.
Regen gives 4 points of gauge, plus 1 per tick over its 18s duration (total of 10).
Cure2 gives 5 points of gauge.
Medica2/3 gives 3 points of gauge, plus 3 points per tick over its 12s duration (total of 15).
Cure3 gives 10 points of gauge.
Or, option B:
The gauge spender above exists, and does the same thing (GCD AOE heal, damage neutral), but there is no gauge. Instead, the action has a simple 60s CD.
In both of these examples, the CD would be 'roughly 60s', if you did the damage rotation 'optimally' you'd generate about 55-60 gauge per minute, thus giving design A a soft-CD of about 60s. However, where design B has a hard-CD of 60s that cannot be adjusted by the player's own gameplay, design A would allow a player who is pushing more healing out (eg, it's M6S add phase) to get gauge faster, and thereby get more casts of this damage neutral AOE healing move to use. A player who is struggling to keep up on healing (and therefore relying more on GCD heals), builds gauge faster, and gets to use the damage neutral healing move more often, which then not only helps them to heal while preserving their damage output, it also guides them towards actually dealing damage as a healer, not only to make use of the refund, but also because it leads the player to think 'hmm, I don't need to heal now, but I could do damage for a bit instead, and by the time I do need to heal again, the damage I'd be doing will build the gauge enough that I get to use this move again, instead of something crappy like Medica2 or Cure3'
Point is, SE seems to believe, and keeps designing Healers in such a way, that 'the healing side of the kit, and the damage side of the kit, should be as far away from one another as possible'. WHM's Misery is one of the few examples where they didn't do this, and it works very well. Use healing actions, receive damage refund, that's cool. So why not do the opposite too? Have, as listed above, an action which heals, but is charged up passively while you do the damage rotation, so that when you need it, you've already charged it and it's ready to go. And the worst offender is SGE, why couldn't we get a design for that, where it actually leverages Kardia, and the concept of 'you trigger a heal on someone when you deal damage', into an actual system wherein you can modify how Kardia works for a duration? Soteria amplifies the heal, that's cool, but why not have a way to add a Barrier effect to it, so we can set up Barriers for raidwides by dealing damage instead of relying entirely on E.Prognosis (which would still exist, as a 'safety net')? Why not have a way to make Kardia AOE at a much lower level, so that it's a more impactful part of our gameplay (Philosophia is kinda limp for a level 100 action IMO)?
The current designs for healers are a mishmash of missed opportunities IMO, but none moreso than SGE and Kardia
Last edited by ForsakenRoe; 04-15-2025 at 12:33 AM.
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