My Analysis of the Current Healer Meta-game in “The Feast”

[Aviars]

With the release of patch 4.25, many people have expressed confusion to many of the balance changes Square Enix made to the game, in particular, buffs to White Mage. For the last couple of seasons in Storm Blood, White Mage has held a moderate to small advantage over Astrologian and Scholar after the nerfs to WHM and Scholar and buffs to AST during season 5 and 6 of The Ranked Feast. The confusion arises with the release of Patch 4.25 Square Enix revealed that White Mage received buffs to protect and regen while Astrologian received a moderate nerf to Essential Dignity. Players asked, “Why buff White Mage when it was the stronger healing job in PVP?” At first glance this is a logical reaction the community would have considering the past couple of seasons, however in the following wall of text I will make an attempt to at least explain WHY it happened and why White Mage still might actually be WEAKER in the current state of Ranked Feast Season 7.

Pace of the Match, Long Cooldowns versus Short Cooldowns
The current pacing of matches, in my opinion, is not White Mage friendly. With the current system and constant high outputs of damage, stuns, and silences, White Mage struggles to keep up with its relatively long and inconsistent cooldowns compared to Astrologian and Scholar. I will make an attempt to illustrate how the game plays out for each job to show what I mean.
White Mage - White Mage as currently played generally make it a priority to have protect and assize use 3 lilies. These abilities when used without 3 lilies put you too far behind in keeping your team alive and generating mana, so it is essential for players to ensure that this happens. Benison on the other hand does not benefit lily to cast time wise for players to focus on it and Benediction is an ability that you cannot simply “plan” to use 3 lilies for in a consistent manner. With this in mind, we ask ourselves what happens during the period when these long cooldowns are unavailable. At this point White Mage really only has Cure I/II spam and potentially regen ticks to stall the Damage, during this time stuns and silences force White Mage further behind during which you may be forced to use Benediction without 3 lilies, causing you to be out of a cooldown for up to 2 minutes making the situation during that time much more stressful until you have access to protect and benison again. It should also be noted that when a White Mage uses there cooldowns, there is no way to recover from not using a certain amount of lilies with them.


Scholar – In its simplest form can best be summarized as a continuous cycle that feeds itself the more you use abilities. Adloquium gives a player a shield and the Scholar 5 Faerie Gauge. This in turn give the player room to broil to gain Aetherflow. Gaining Aetherflow gives the Scholar access to Lustrates that give 5 Faerie Gauge, an OGCD heal to use after broil/adloquium and lowers the main aetherflow cooldown that gives access to even more aetherflow. And the resulting Faerie Gauge gained makes it easier for the Scholar to heal and in turn have more room to broil. With the way scholar works, scholar really has no cooldowns that hold them back to keeping their team healed up in comparison to white, they are also not exactly punished for using cooldowns such as aetherflow in the wrong way because the cycle is designed to decrease it AFTER use and not before like lilies. With the way scholar works, they are far more suited to adapt to the current meta-game of constant damage, especially due to the fact their main mitigation, Adloquium, is a constant factor rather than a temporary one.

Astrologian – Astrologian is a job that very much benefits from low cooldowns for very important abilities. Essential Dignity sports a 10 second cooldown which essentially means it is up whenever you need it to the point it can be used at any time. It is effective when used at high health and at low health and when you happened to get stunned or silenced, Essential Dignity is there to fill the gaps in a similar constant fashion to how scholar plays. It is useful as a weaker version of benediction or as a Lustrate. In the meantime, Beni I into instant Beni II combos gives spam healing efficiency with a frontloaded Mega Heal (To explain this further Cure I into Cure II takes 3.6 seconds to complete while Beni I to Beni II takes 2.3 seconds for the same cost, White Mage can’t afford to be efficient in some cases compared to Astrologian). Also, their one long healing cooldown is similar to Scholar in that, using Beni I and Beni II reduces the cooldown. So it isn’t punished in the same way as longer cooldowns White Mage has. Also with the constant instants that Astrologian has access to, it is better equipped to react after stuns and silences than does White Mage.

What does this Mean – With what I explained above Scholar and Astrologian, in general, are better equipped to deal with the constant damage output, stuns, and silences that the current Meta-game supports. White Mage while strong with cooldowns, is by far the most vulnerable when it’s cooldowns are down, and that fact is compounded more so due to the fact White Mage has the longest cooldowns and is punished more for either a mistake or being forced to using cooldowns without three lilies in comparison to the other two jobs. And due to white mage being vulnerable so often, there is more chances for the other team to take advantage of that due to the current nature of the Meta-game explained above. White Mage basically has to rely on their cooldowns, while Astrologian and Scholars bottom line typically do not due to the fact that their cooldowns are relatively much shorter or close to non-existent. The window of weakness is much smaller for Astrologian and Scholar, while it is much bigger for White Mage.

Increase in Health and Damage Potency
4.25 gave us increased health pools and less effective damage potency buffs. This change technically help healing on the overall level, but White Mage did not benefit as much compared to Scholar and Astrologian. Prior to these changes, health was lower, and therefore abilities like protect were much more effective in preventing deathblows while Astrologian may not have been able to react in time. However with the health increases while still good for White Mage, benefitted jobs like Astrologian and Scholar more than White Mage. Astrologians have more room to hit high potency Essentials in a low health situation when before the target would have more of a danger of being dead than alive. Scholars then have more room to work with broils than there was before. White Mage on the other hand doesn’t necessarily gain a benefit from higher health pools and what made them have an advantage over perhaps Astrologian was made irrelevant. Where there was an advantage became only a disadvantage due to how vulnerable White Mages are during the down time of their cooldowns. It basically boils down to the fact that this change did a lot to nullify the weaknesses for short cooldowns while nullifying the inherent strengths of having long cooldowns, and since everything about White Mage is about having longer cooldowns, it is obvious to me why White Mage in general might be struggling compared to the other two healing jobs.

Current Leaderboard Rankings
While the above was about the theory behind the current state of the healer meta-game, I will illustrate through the leaderboards that the current standings do a lot to support my thoughts on the matter. Link below is to the leaderboards that I am referring to from 4/4/2018.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...?dcgroup=Chaos

Chaos – Current rank 1 by a large margin is an Astrologian. Majority of other healers in the current top 10 are also Astrologian.
Primal – Current Rank 1 by a large margin is Astrologian. Rank 2 is a scholar and I also believe rank 3 plays scholar as well.
Aether – Currently the only healer I know of in the top 10 is a scholar.
Mana – Obvious healers in the top 10 are scholars and astrologians.
Gaia – Current Rank 1 is an astrologian. Features mostly tanks in the top 10
Elemental - Rank 1 player is a scholar. Other top 10 players include at least 1 scholar, 1 astrologian and maybe 1 white mage.

To me, the current leaderboards support the theory that White Mage is the least preferred job in the current state of Feast play, especially to higher ranked ones.

Conclusion and what to consider for the future
The current pacing of the Feast games in the current Meta favor short/no cooldowns, either in direct healing or mitigation, in comparison to longer cooldowns. The constant high damage and frequency of burst that the current game supports is far more likely to exploit the vulnerabilities presented by a naked White Mage compared to what Scholar and Astrologian currently offer to their teams. The increased health did more to weaken the viability of longer cooldowns and also strengthened the viability of shorter/no cooldown type of playstyles. This currently results in a White Mage that is inherently weaker for the current game than Scholar or Astrologian, and due to how White Mage probably performed in the pre-season led to White Mage getting buffed, which in the end didn’t fix the inherent problem White Mage has. Buffing a cooldown like Protect doesn’t help the White Mage vulnerability during its downtime.

So what should Square Enix do in this case? Buff White Mage again? Personally there are more issues in the Feast than individual class balance. The straight buff to damage for all jobs made White Mage more vulnerable in cooldown downtime. Increased health for all jobs made White Mage strengths much less prominent. The new map pretty much defeats defensive play/downtime after kills that White Mage requires to replenish cooldowns. To make White Mage on par with Astrologian and Scholar in the current system with 9 skills and what-not would potentially make White Mage much too strong.

It is also widely known that Square Enix is currently trying to revamp the system due to negative reviews of current PVP, so honestly, I don’t believe that discussing balance changes in the current system is a good use of time. If it is going to change drastically like we probably expect, there would be a potentially new set of balance to discuss.

For the most part, I made this post due to people continuing to make claims that White Mage was buffed for no reason and that other classes deserve buffs. I think that it is clear due to the current leaderboards and theory I discussed above that White Mage is currently not as strong as people would like to think and other healers are actually quite strong in the current situation.

Let me know what you think in the comments, and thanks for reading