Evercold White Mage first impressions

[HyperiusUltima]

I won't lie: What I saw from WHM was literally the thing we've been complaining about.

Glare Mage? How about Glare Mage+? If you're seriously going to believe that we're going to suck up to that as Healers, then maybe consider that even if you remove the button/heal bloat, you're going to run into the same issues that make Healers untenable in the first place: Lack of a DPS rotation during healing downtime.

I'm going to say it now: 8.05? We're going to see the same problem Healers have been seeing for 6 years now, and it will stay that way because despite Mr. Prime doing work to clear up button bloat on other jobs, we're still running into the same problem except worse with the new Evolved philosophy.

Design probably will skew heavily towards Evolved in Evercold, but I'm not holding my breath for it until they can take Healers seriously in all content, not just high-end.

[Nadda]

Quote Originally Posted by flowerfairy View Post
The appeal of healers to me has always been choice. Choosing who’s the best target to heal, choosing the most efficient heal at the moment, managing my resources as best as possible.

This is exactly what has made healing in FFXIV interesting up to this point. Making choices of which tools to use and where, and the consequences of those choices while trying to strategically DPS as much as possible.

I literally made this forum account just now (Hi!) to echo the dissatisfaction with what we saw with WHM at the dev panel, for what it's worth.

I very much agree with flowerfairy. Part of the reason I didn't jive with #Healerstrike is - I'm not looking for a complex dps rotation. Especially the way FF14 does it.

I like the freedom though of my healing kit to be able to use them however I wish.

Without Cure 3 if both healers are seperated in a split room mechanic how can I heal a cluster of players from far away. OR without asylum for that matter.

And like we just got Glare 4 and along with Assize, I enjoy in dungeons while I don't exactly need to flex my healer muscles I like being able to aoe mobs down.

[HyperiusUltima]

And like we just got Glare 4 and along with Assize, I enjoy in dungeons while I don't exactly need to flex my healer muscles I like being able to aoe mobs down.

I understand that part, but part of why you don't see many healers is because they're "uninteresting" or "boring" if you try to compare them to the "fun" of other jobs(while subjective, most people like engagement). That's why they tend to flock to DPS or Tank Jobs since they at least have things going for them in a kind of flow. They have more than one button to hit that matters. Healers have more than one button to hit only when healing is needed; outside of that, there's only Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis.

The Healer Gameplay Loop is pretty much the real thing to address because if we're still the same after this Evolved rework of the battle system? Then people aren't going to want to play Healer unless it's to beat the queues as you saw up front.

The #HealerStrike Thread has already left pages and pages of feedback regarding our discontent about Healers, but I'm not sure if they've thought it through. That's why feedback at this stage is important for Healers as a whole since they're developing still for the next 9 months.

[IgnisLilly]

The one saving grace I have is that they didn't touch holy during the demonstration. This means in addition to the new gauge spender, white mage is having three of it's vastly reduced buttons turned into damage buttons. Depending on what holy actually does, it's a good start. The lack of a dot, and the focus on White mage's identity being the "Heals make you do more damage" job has me very, tentatively, cautiously optimistic that we're not going to have the same dps rotation on all healers, even if they're a bit simpler than other roles.

So why isn't any of this being shown off in the demo? For the same reason paladin's full dps rotation wasn't engaged with at length, they wanted to talk about how healers are healing, not how they are dpsing. That's my hopeium, the concerns are still very important to bring up.

[Glitchima]

I'm concerned, but overall curious and interested to see what they are doing with WHM. I have switched to maining a healer for a couple patches now and I've been having a lot of fun leveling my healer alt, but out of the 4 jobs showcased at the development panel, WHM is definitely one I still have so many questions for.
I guess the first question would be related to the animations themselves, when it comes to job identity I do believe how your character moves/is animated does also play a role in this as well, so even something like the attack casting animation for white mage, to me, is one of the cool things about it. I'll be kind of sad if that animation is completely gone for good, I wonder if we will get to keep it for certain things like Holy...? It was untouched during the presentation, so I wonder if they have anything else in store that they simply haven't showed yet or something.

I would like to say that although I liked the strategic aspect of figuring out when to cast things, including attacks and think it has its charm points, I'm not entirely against this more action-focused mode. My only real concern is for white mage to still *feel* like white mage, I feel like the newer expansions in recent years have been making me rather nervous because of these big changes they do for the jobs. Like, I feel like I'm crazy pointing out the changes they did for DRK, or more recent changes to RDM and discussing the removal or changes to their animation is one of the main complaints i have had as opposed to actually talking about the meta and a job's abilities and referring to its affect in-game, i simply want to know/see... how interesting or cool something looks, and how cool it is to play, and show my friends as i play. I know I fall in the minority because this discussion is rather rare, but overall I would like to just say I sincerely hope that they will be still taking in feedback and I do want to hope that white mage (alongside the rest of the healers, I feel this especially with astrologian is necessary) still retains its job expression. I don't care about playing perfectly and i don't care about damage numbers, I just want my character to look cool when he casts spells lol.

[Turtledeluxe]

I think its important to keep in mind that we are dealing with a sort of ARR level reset. It would have been better placed in DT, but it is what it is. As such there is no way to go into this without some tradeoffs, and I think those tradeoffs are worth it if the team commits to expanding on evolved reasonably, i.e not simply rebloating but bringing the best old and new ideas that make sense in the new job fantasy paradigm. In other words, yes evolved might feel a bit limited at first, but the team is setting up for it to grow over time, and that was not feasible under the old jobs and the meta.

That all said, I have to echo the observation that I am not seeing the wow factor with WHM. Imo to slim down the actions and keep players happy, you have to commit to the class fantasy, but I am not quite seeing that. If button contraint is an issue then use existing buttons in any number of creative ways. This was just a demo, and maybe we will get more than a winged glarebot. Idk. I feel like its almost there, it just needs that one more thing imo.

I see people writing up dissertations and I get it, but I just think its important to be reasonable given again, this is a reset and its not feasible to expect it to be the lvl 110 version of the old job. The game will offer that if you want that. This is a new lead designer and he does not deserve all the blame for every poor decision ever, especially with so much goodwill from his work on PVP.

I absolutely do not want to see him or the the team get griefed back into the old, dead husk of what was. Lets keep our eyes on the prize even if it means short term pain.

[Supersnow845]

^short term pain

WHM has been in the trash bin for about 11.5 of ARR’s 12 year existence

[Ankhira]

Its not only the deaf ears. If I remember correct, their home market likes to play easy mode after a tiring day from work.
They're not interested in playing busy jobs. They dont want to sweat in casual content.

The whole gameplay direction change is about "less time commitment, play when or whatever you like".

So keep the job as is? In no way did they ever have to sweat on WHM to do the bare minimum. Again, keep the job simple, but add optimization for those who want. WHM was already super chill in casual content, spam glare, cancel casts is no issue, use lilies, and spam holy in aoe, like the job was already NOT busy in the slightest.

[Turtledeluxe]

^short term pain

WHM has been in the trash bin for about 11.5 of ARR’s 12 year existence

But its not just WHM. There are fair criticisms for a lot of what we saw. From my perspective, feedback is fine but stuff like this is unfair when afaik, this designer did not have this level.of influence or authority until five minutes ago.

[Supersnow845]

But its not just WHM. There are fair criticisms for a lot of what we saw. From my perspective, feedback is fine but stuff like this is unfair when afaik, this designer did not have this level.of influence or authority until five minutes ago.

Why is it unfair?

Healer has been the most misunderstood, messy and underdeveloped role since ShB at a bare minimum more like really SB and then they proceed to show off 4 classes where the one healer they show is unequivocally the low point of the presentation

Whether the new designer had influence over the old jobs or not is irrelevant, they understood the average feedback of the collective roles and everyone know healer is the least liked role, and still somehow they put out the worst performance for it. Knowing feedback against the old jobs is worst for healer that would be the one you’d want to put the most effort into, right now the presentation seems to tilt towards “win more” for the already well liked jobs given the order of opinions of the three roles DPS>tank>healer is already the distribution of average opinion of feedback of the current design of the 3 roles

These presentations don’t occur in a vacuum of player feedback, they had to know what they were doing