Please Share Updates on 8.0 Job Design

[Pip_Chick]

Man... this made me remember Diurnal/Nocturnal sect Astro. It was so fun choosing which sect to pick based on my co healers.
When the Nocturnal sect got removed for the "split between pure and shield healers" I was so sad.
I would really like if we got the 2 sects back and be left to choose which we prefered. Can we have it back please?

[Raikai]

Man... this made me remember Diurnal/Nocturnal sect Astro. It was so fun choosing which sect to pick based on my co healers.
When the Nocturnal sect got removed for the "split between pure and shield healers" I was so sad.
I would really like if we got the 2 sects back and be left to choose which we prefered. Can we have it back please?

I don't heal anymore, but AST was my favorite back in the day. I mourn the loss of the sects...

Because it was for freakin' nothing!

I actually didn't mind it at first, but on practice the whole Shield healer / Pure healer segregation turned out to be nearly pointless, and let me ask: what happens when the 5th healer gets added? It suddenly steals old AST fantasy and becomes flex? Or they won't mind having unbalanced types of healers?

Not even mentioning... The amount of shielding or direct/regen healing the 'other' healer has is quite a lot for them to even be categorized in a box.

[Khryseis_Astra]

Man... this made me remember Diurnal/Nocturnal sect Astro. It was so fun choosing which sect to pick based on my co healers.
When the Nocturnal sect got removed for the "split between pure and shield healers" I was so sad.
I would really like if we got the 2 sects back and be left to choose which we prefered. Can we have it back please?

For some reason I really enjoyed Nocturnal AST, despite not enjoying either SCH or SGE much at all. And I loved being able to switch depending on co-healers as well.

Raikai makes a good point too: assuming they eventually add to the healer role, will the 5th one be a flex or assigned to pure/shield? Make another pure and let AST go back to flex! lol

[seolhyun]

i dont really expect 8.0 changes to be as big as people are hoping for. they said 7.x was going to change boss fights and it's mostly the same "do this dance every 10 sec in pre-assigned spots".

[Supersnow845]

I don't heal anymore, but AST was my favorite back in the day. I mourn the loss of the sects...

Because it was for freakin' nothing!

I actually didn't mind it at first, but on practice the whole Shield healer / Pure healer segregation turned out to be nearly pointless, and let me ask: what happens when the 5th healer gets added? It suddenly steals old AST fantasy and becomes flex? Or they won't mind having unbalanced types of healers?

Not even mentioning... The amount of shielding or direct/regen healing the 'other' healer has is quite a lot for them to even be categorized in a box.

SGE is already the flex healer as it stands

It’s a regen healer that has shields on its GCD

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]What I personally think ruined job design is 'team jump rope mechanics', some examples:

- Instead of being allowed to stand and cast heals, the healer now must jump rope in tempo with the rest of the party, so now they get more and more instant heals because they're not allowed to stand still.
- Instead of the physical ranged helping the BLM take a mechanic so the BLM can continue casting, the BLM is now forced to jump rope with everyone else, so no more casting, you get more instant casts now.
- If the tank moves to jump rope with the rest of the party, the boss might follow the tank and cause the melee grief, so now the boss is only allowed to stand in the middle and chaincast mechanics and not autoattack.
It's the departure from role mechanics that slowly encroaches upon and eventually ruins job design for me personally, every role does the same thing now, every role jumps the same rope. There's very few remaining unique struggles for each role, so every job basically feels the same when you do a fight.

[...]It's the ability to plan and schedule actions that means that fights can be designed around (excessive amounts of) active moment, because the fight designer can assume/require that players be in or near certain spots at certain times.

And even if they're all forced to do the same movement based mechs, at the very least they could've given us different ways how to deal with that. Something that they sort of 'nailed it' to some degree in ShB for green dpses healers:

WHM needs to abuse their lilies that was also used in tandem to maximize the healing and weaving needs whenever possible.
SCH gets away free for 1-3 shots/min before they're required to eat Ruin II losses but at the same time give purpose for Ruin II to exists.
AST was unique with their own 1.5s and probably should've stayed that way.

But nooo, it's easier to give everybody and their mom faster casts & instants. Even BLM wasn't safe from that apparently, lol.

Also are you two ghostposting? :P /j

[Supersnow845]

It just feels like another element of their design getting lazy in that rather than designing fights for 8 players, they design them for 2, MT and everyone else

It must massively cut down on fight development time to just go “okay we only need to consider 2 players for this mechanic, the MT and everyone else”

[Pip_Chick]

I don't heal anymore, but AST was my favorite back in the day. I mourn the loss of the sects...

Because it was for freakin' nothing!

I actually didn't mind it at first, but on practice the whole Shield healer / Pure healer segregation turned out to be nearly pointless, and let me ask: what happens when the 5th healer gets added? It suddenly steals old AST fantasy and becomes flex? Or they won't mind having unbalanced types of healers?

Not even mentioning... The amount of shielding or direct/regen healing the 'other' healer has is quite a lot for them to even be categorized in a box.

If they add a new healer, they would either have to turn back the AST changes, and so making the years the job fantasy got deleted all for nothing, but annoyance to the players, or ignore the unbalance and make the sacrifice moot. I am just sad they ruined a job fantasy for something like SGE who also failed to deliver in being a more battle focused healer.

You want to play Healers? Why not try:
WHM
WHM but book
WHM but gambling problems
WHM but nerf gun

[Taranok]

Man... this made me remember Diurnal/Nocturnal sect Astro. It was so fun choosing which sect to pick based on my co healers.
When the Nocturnal sect got removed for the "split between pure and shield healers" I was so sad.
I would really like if we got the 2 sects back and be left to choose which we prefered. Can we have it back please?

Honestly, diurnal/nocturnal never should have been a thing. It was a bandaid to force the healer to heal like a WHM or SCH at a time when it was inferior to both (literally, the class flat launched in a worthless state and had trouble healing the dungeons of HW.)

But, what I want is really to have uniqueness breathed into healer (and tank) design. The buster meta FFXIV uses is extremely toxic to the game as a whole, but especially tank and healer design. AST happens to be a poster child of this because it flat couldn't heal well enough until it was turned into a copy of both healers that preceded it with the push of a button, with one of those 2 (SCH) also being turned into the other (WHM.)

So long as the concept of tank busters exist as a major and primary mechanic of fight design, both healers and tanks will continue to have terrible, homogenized gameplay full of binary pass-fails and no uniqueness to speak of. Just think, Synnastry could have been a stance, and AST could have been closer to WoW's paladin circa legion era. But alas, the devs don't understand how to make anything unique anymore, and long ago abandoned the concept of uniqueness.

[ty_taurus]

Honestly, diurnal/nocturnal never should have been a thing. It was a bandaid to force the healer to heal like a WHM or SCH at a time when it was inferior to both (literally, the class flat launched in a worthless state and had trouble healing the dungeons of HW.)

But, what I want is really to have uniqueness breathed into healer (and tank) design. The buster meta FFXIV uses is extremely toxic to the game as a whole, but especially tank and healer design. AST happens to be a poster child of this because it flat couldn't heal well enough until it was turned into a copy of both healers that preceded it with the push of a button, with one of those 2 (SCH) also being turned into the other (WHM.)

So long as the concept of tank busters exist as a major and primary mechanic of fight design, both healers and tanks will continue to have terrible, homogenized gameplay full of binary pass-fails and no uniqueness to speak of. Just think, Synnastry could have been a stance, and AST could have been closer to WoW's paladin circa legion era. But alas, the devs don't understand how to make anything unique anymore, and long ago abandoned the concept of uniqueness.

For clarification, Astro’s healing style was always similar to White Mage’s. The sects not only changed whether your aspected heals were regens or barriers, but also offered a flat healing boost. To “compensate,” the potencies of Astro’s heals were lower. I think it was something like 380 potency for Benefic to White Mage’s 400 potency Cure. It’s only AOE healing was Helios and Aspected Helios, other than Collective Unconscious which is more difficult to use compared to Asylum. So it wasn’t so much that it had a different style of healing that was bad, just that the healing boost from your sects wasn’t enough to justify the lower potencies, which was enough to make Astro struggle a bit.