Pipe Dreams: Expanding the healer pool

[Dzian]

Dancer was a pseudo healer but was used more as DPS and offtank because of high evasion. SMN was pigeonholed into curebotting because of their larger MP pool. That's very different from a job that is designed to take on the role of healer.

The MP pool part is true but one of the bigger reasons SMN ended up as healers was because of the Avatar mechanics. Perpetuation costs, Amount of TP they gave mobs in relation to the damage they did. The amount of damage avatars did in comparison to other party members. Even basic avatar stats like there accuracy, when your avatars are eating 9~10 mp every 3 seconds and landing very few hits to show for it. Thats a big reason smn was pigeon holed into healing

A little off-topic, but related.

To encourage playing other jobs (when there are 16 rather than 8), how about putting pre-requisites of certain jobs for dungeon content, eg you can only challenge Tam-Tara with BLM, WHM, SMN & CHM.

Because players can and are already encouraged to level multiple jobs (and levelling is reasonably quick), I can't see it preventing access to content significantly, and I feel that it would present a kind of puzzle as to how to successfully complete the dungeon in time..

While you can, I think you shouldn't be forced to. I'm of the belief that if you're favorite job is dragoon you should be able to complete all content as that class, sure you may need to level other classes to get certain skills / abilities. but you shouldn't be pushed into jobs you don't enjoy playing.

it was one of the big issues in 1.0 with av and cc aside from the drop rates if you wanted to to clear it you needed to stack black mages. or stack monks or stack something else. thats one thing i hope goes bye bye in ARR.

Needs to be a huge diversity in what jobs can do. If i'm on my paladin and not tanking then maybe i could be supporting the other paladin who is. (kind of envisioning some style of the cover system where i would occasionally help the other paladin block an attack or something) maybe simply buff my healing skills a little and help the other guy stay standing. it's a loose concept but diversity is key.

in some fashion whm and warrior had this already in 1.0. whm can pop cleric stance and throw out nukes and a couple of debuffs, warriors can switch between rampage and berserk. hopefully ARR expands on this across the jobs.

but yeah i'm a huge fan of diversity which is one reason i hope to see a ton of job options down the line and all with there own identity. which is partly why i think the armory system was so flawed in 1.0 and hoping its changed in arr.

[mikoto_qc]

The real problem with WHM is not Healing!
The real things that should concern you is the raise. In FFXIV:ARR you cannot raise while in combat. So what happen if the WHM die and there is only 1 whm in your Party during Instance Raid? You will now need a whm for the whm.

[Tibian]

Supported for more healing classes/options/skills.

[IndigoDarkwolf]

There's a lot that I agree with on this thread. I, too, think XIV could use another dedicated healer job to attract players into that role.

I agree that new jobs need to be added with care so as to create and fill new roles rather than trump an existing job's role or try to hybridize. As the player count in a raid goes up, deep mastery of one role becomes far more valuable than a shallower ability in multiple roles. You can combat this with raid buffs, as previous observed, but ideally you want a class to be welcomed into a group because they contribute valuable actions to the fight. Someone who's being brought along just for the raid buff is probably not going to enjoy their time as much as someone who is actually being depended on for a task in the fight.

I like the idea of WHMs being a single-target, high-value healer while some other job takes the role of AoE, mid-value or heal-over-time healer. As observed previously, a WHM might work with a single-target tank to hold a boss while an AoE or HoT healer is responsible for the good health of the rest of the party, either because the boss has AoE attacks or because a number of smaller foes enter the battlefield and distribute damage more-or-less evenly across the party. BRD seemed to sort of fill the AoE/HoT healer role already in 1.0, though I also recall people mostly liking BRDs for the MP regen buff they could endow on the WHMs and BLMs.

I also like the concept of a Synergist-type job, someone who's role is to simply to make everyone else better, though that's getting a bit off-topic.

I'm usually on board with the "FFXIV is not FFXI" train, but this is a case where I think FFXI players' feedback would be useful. Various jobs from FFXI may not have worked out the way that their designers intended, and there's every risk that new jobs in FFXIV won't work out as intended, either. Experienced XI players are going to be the experts behind their own reasoning about why jobs were assigned their roles. Also, XI is the closest analogy we have to XIV for making instructive observations about how various design decisions will work together, until we've learned more about the new combat system. That's not at all to say that I want XIV to follow XI's examples, just that we can learn a lot from how XI's design decisions affected its jobs.

[Wolfie]

I want to see party roles be shared by multiple classes, because having only 1 class that is a 'viable' healer, only 1 class that is a 'viable' tank, and 2376326089 classes that are DPS/CC is stupid as hell.

[fusional]

While wasting a party slot

were extra healers wasted party slots in WoW? No? was their healing ability equalized? no? ok then, chief.

The mistake was not equalizing healing ability

as a career healer dedicated to progression raiding from the beginning of TBC through the beginning of Cataclysm, i think you are completely and utterly insane

TBC is widely regarded both critically and by players as the golden era of WoW raiding, with most players preferring vanilla if not TBC. healing roles were different and ability was not equalized. the same largely applied to tanking and dps roles. during this era, WoW only saw growth. exponential growth.

enter WotLK, the beginning of the inevitable casualification of the game. growth plateaus.

enter cataclysm, casualification is stepped up, roles are equalized more, population begins to plummet.

enter MoP, casualification and role equalization are taken to extremes, population climbs a bit again for a few months before returning players find numerous flaws in the game and quit very vocally, and in droves.

now, correlation does not equal causation- so we can't draw a direct relationship between equalization of class roles with plummeting subscription numbers. and even in losing 2-3 million subscribers WoW still towers over the competition. but it is a pretty interesting trend which seems at least partially, if not largely, influenced by design choice

if what you opine is closer to the truth, then MoP should be regarded as the king of raid eras in WoW's history and raiding populations should continue to climb, because they would have 'gotten it right'

but the data suggests otherwise, and quite strongly

I also remember being a DPS paladin having to rely on cleanse macros in 10-man raids that had resto druids as healers because they could not remove diseases

which is soooooooooooooo hard to do when you only press 2 buttons to dps, right? especially when paladin cleanse was so much more efficient/OP in comparison (removing ALL poison and disease effects on a target. ask any priest who worked on Yogg (zero) how they feel about that)

all it took was clique + grid and it barely even took a second thought to spam cleanse on the entire raid. and better to give it to lolretadin than a dps class (or any class for that matter) which actually requires you to pay attention

[Reika]

Sure, WHM can be the end all be all healer, as long as they take all elemental attacks and give weak astral/light attacks in their place, thus stripping you of being able to do any kind of real backup damage..... but thats not going to fly is it :/

There needs to be more healer healers in XIV just like there needs to be more tank tanks and dps dpsers. Thats all i gots to say here. There already has been, and I expect there to be more, much close mindedness already and I expect it to loop endlessly.

EDIT: Oh but I will add this. Keep PLD, DRG, BLM, WHM. Delete all the rest, dont make any more. The 'anti-addition class/job that can fulfill the role of the current class/jobs-ists' should be fine with this, because every other class/job added will just be a useless filler job since we already have the 'purest best at their role' jobs already, and they dont want any of those. Everything else will just be that waste of a party slot.

[Mychael]

I want to see party roles be shared by multiple classes, because having only 1 class that is a 'viable' healer, only 1 class that is a 'viable' tank, and 2376326089 classes that are DPS/CC is stupid as hell.

I have to disagree, because in a party, you only need one tank and one healer; the rest of the slots are DD. By having several healer jobs, parties would be forced to choose one over the other unless the job had a specific identity other than healing.. Since you need multiple DD jobs in a party, they're a lot less competitive. Yes, you might do better if you stack all of one, but so what if one of five DD aren't the optimal class? But if there were two healers, anything that gave either an advantage (whether real or just invented by popular opinion) would make the class the ONLY OPTION in the closed minds of FFXIV players.

With respect to AoE heals, there would be obvious situations where AoE low healing would make that class the ONLY OPTION (if a mob spams AoE), and situations where a high-value single-target healer would be paramount to success (anything else). That's not doing anything for making interchangeable healers of equal efficacy.

[Kinseykinz]

A little off-topic, but related.

To encourage playing other jobs (when there are 16 rather than 8), how about putting pre-requisites of certain jobs for dungeon content, eg you can only challenge Tam-Tara with BLM, WHM, SMN & CHM.

Because players can and are already encouraged to level multiple jobs (and levelling is reasonably quick), I can't see it preventing access to content significantly, and I feel that it would present a kind of puzzle as to how to successfully complete the dungeon in time.

This would encourage use of non-standard jobs and perhaps make it more agreeable to play them in open-world content.

This sounds good to some of you on paper but does in fact FORCE people to play roles/jobs they don't want to....which is what you are trying to avoid.

Examples:

I wanna go on the run as Bard, but the Party already has it's one Bard for the run but still needs it's one Monk to enter> I have monk leveled and the other Bard doesn't. Guess who's not going Bard...

Me and my friends are in a silly mood and want to go cream Moogles as a merry band of WHM's and PLD. But we're now forced to take in a certain amount of other roles like 2 BLM's etc. Now we can't do what we want.

Also, your point that 'we can level fast and are encouraged to level multiple jobs' negates the need for the 'must have x,y,z jobs to enter' anyway. Based on your logic, if my main WHM isn't good for the content (or someone else is the whm for that battle) I should have leveled at least one other role to play. So I go in on my non-main. Same thing happens whether SE 'forced it or not' Lets not make them 'force it'.

Again, as long as the game developers develop jobs/classes and new content that is well-balanced, all jobs will be equally useful...just maybe not in all situations (which is a good thing....if you like battle and class diversity that is). As long as the new classes/jobs are balanced yet different enough in some way to the current roles, they WILL be in demand. No job should be the 'go to' for every possible type of content. When that happens, there is also a discrepancy.

Right now, since White Mage/CNJ is basically the only role* that can naturally heal other players, it is basically, required in any grouping of 8. Another way of looking at this is that there are only ever 7 slots available in a party, not 8, because a White Mage will always get 1 slot. No other job/class in the game at the moment (including tanking roles) has the same 'must have' priority.

* To appease the nit-pickers; yes PLD can do a couple group healing abilities or buffs and cure as they have access to CNJ abilities/their own job abilities BUT relying on a tank to heal you is typically not good for business. Bards can also through out a buff or heal here and there but again, they save that for 'oh poop' moments and are not true healers. Even class/job self-heals are not powerful enough to warrant not needing a WHM....if they were, people would have stopped using WHM's.

[Zantetsuken]

Thanks to the OP for the breakdown of healing types.

Here are the healing options I'd like to see (ranked by overall healing effectiveness)

1. White Mage = Traditional Heals (Very Strong), Smart Heals, Heal over time (med)
2. Time Mage = Heal over time (Strong), Heal Zones, Bubble~type spell.
3. Chemist/Mechanist (love this job... see sig) = AOE potions, Attack Heals (gun)
4. Arcanist = Heal Aura (carby-heal mode)
5. Paladin = Smart Heals/Heal Aura (a conduit, radiating heal spells to other PT members)
6. Dancer = Transfusion Heals
7. Bard = Heal over Time, Raise Max HP
8. Summoner = Burst Smart Healing (Pheonix/Siren/etc... very strong but long cooldown)
9. Red Mage = Traditional Heals/Heal over time (both are weak on party, but strong on self)
10. Blue Mage = Can learn a variety of healing abilities - but overall healing potential is weak.

Other ideas:

Bishop (2nd PGL job - inspired by FFTA) uses "Preventative Healing" - Healing force recovers a % target's current HP - can over-heal up to 120% of Max HP. (this style of healing is good for preparation for big battles, or to keep a tank healthy - it's potency drops greatly as the target loses HP)

Geomancer - "Conditional healing" - Healing spells availability correspond to weather, terrain, and other conditions. Can be powerful and would require little or no MP (which would be typical for GEO spells)

Devout/Seer - "Power Healing" - Essentially an Uber WHM with very limited HP but has overcharge smart healing spells with very large AOEs and Zone Healing.