The Healer Double Standard

[Critical-Limit]

Aim for balance but never perfect balance. Fighting games are full of interesting characters with different strengths skills and weakneses. However often there will be only like 12 tournament viable number of characters out of 24. That’s a healthy number. People who play at high end of the game have a decent number of characters to pick for winning high end games.

If you wanted perfect balance. Every character would need to be the exact same character, which is what is slowly happening to this game. I don’t think it’ll ever get that bad. But the closer we get to that the less interesting the game will become.

[Urthdigger]

Fighting games are a bit of a poor analogy. This is a cooperative game, not a competitive one. In a fighting game you can pick a low tier and likely lose, but that's your choice and you still get to play. In a co-op game, other people may get upset at you picking a low tier class, and may not allow you to play.

Secondly, the teams are bigger here. Think how a fighting game is at its worst balance, say only two characters are even considered worth playing. Every match is the same two characters over and over again. It's boring to play and even more boring to watch. Now look at FFXIV 8-man content. If only two healers are viable, those two healers are then always required for content, and are thus the ONLY healers in any group ever. Ideally any job is considered viable. At the very least there should be more viable jobs than party slots for the sake of variety.

[Hatstand]

Fighting games are a bit of a poor analogy. This is a cooperative game, not a competitive one. In a fighting game you can pick a low tier and likely lose, but that's your choice and you still get to play. In a co-op game, other people may get upset at you picking a low tier class, and may not allow you to play.

Secondly, the teams are bigger here. Think how a fighting game is at its worst balance, say only two characters are even considered worth playing. Every match is the same two characters over and over again. It's boring to play and even more boring to watch. Now look at FFXIV 8-man content. If only two healers are viable, those two healers are then always required for content, and are thus the ONLY healers in any group ever. Ideally any job is considered viable. At the very least there should be more viable jobs than party slots for the sake of variety.

In a fighting game you can choose a suboptimal character and play at lower levels. In ffxiv you can choose a suboptimal character and PUG. There’s never going to be a point where you can’t play your preferred class.

I also find it hard to believe that ALL the pre-built parties care so much about getting through the content as quickly as possible that they won’t take someone who will do it slightly slower. If some class in incapable of doing the job they’ll get left behind, but that’s a much bigger problem than lack of balance.

Personally I feel like the majority of players having less fun because their jobs are becoming simpler and more like one another is a bigger issue than a small percentage of people at the very top end getting rejected from speed-clearing parties.

[Deceptus]

Aim for balance but never perfect balance. Fighting games are full of interesting characters with different strengths skills and weakneses. However often there will be only like 12 tournament viable number of characters out of 24. That’s a healthy number. People who play at high end of the game have a decent number of characters to pick for winning high end games.

If you wanted perfect balance. Every character would need to be the exact same character, which is what is slowly happening to this game. I don’t think it’ll ever get that bad. But the closer we get to that the less interesting the game will become.

Problem with that mentality when it comes to healers is there's only 3 to choose from and two are mandatory for content. So they need to be balanced, and right now, they're not.

This is AFTER we missed out on a new healer because "they wanted to balance what they had". SE has had 4 years to "balance" healers, and so far they haven't done a great job. They need some new blood or something because what has been going on for the past 4 years isn't working.

To add onto the point about Astro: It was more butchered so that SE could try (and fail) to fight against the concept of 'The meta' and stringent party compositions which only applied in speed kills and world first bleeding edge racing.

This. SE needs to stop balancing around the top 1% of the player base and around the 90% and lower that the majority of plays like.

[Sloprano]

This. SE needs to stop balancing around the top 1% of the player base and around the 90% and lower that the majority of plays like.

Looking at it like that it makes sense with the restrictions of AF, limited fairy interactions and the cooldowns of things like Rescue and Chain Strat. It might just all work well in a well-planned fight like you find in Savage. But there is so much more content you play in than that. I'd wish they saw not only is a lot of time spent in lower-than-80 content for leveling, but also in the daily roulettes and the times to you try to fight something solo like in the MSQ. If they'd only first made sure that part is fun to play.

It might be the current rendition of not only healers but also rest of the jobs were only designed, tested and balanced for Extreme and upcoming Savage and now they're afraid of doing anything akin to 3.0 or earlier it might throw off a delicate number-crunched balance they achieved. If that is the case we might want for a seperate system like PvP and Eureka: You get a set of unbalanced and OP, but full and fun set of skills like with the old Primary, Secondary and Tertiary cross-class system to use everywhere else and then you have the current system we see today for Savage fights, where the developers can tweak and adjust so it fits in perfectly with the scripted fights.

[Connor]

Looking at it like that it makes sense with the restrictions of AF, limited fairy interactions and the cooldowns of things like Rescue and Chain Strat. It might just all work well in a well-planned fight like you find in Savage. But there is so much more content you play in than that. I'd wish they saw not only is a lot of time spent in lower-than-80 content for leveling, but also in the daily roulettes and the times to you try to fight something solo like in the MSQ. If they'd only first made sure that part is fun to play.

It might be the current rendition of not only healers but also rest of the jobs were only designed, tested and balanced for Extreme and upcoming Savage and now they're afraid of doing anything akin to 3.0 or earlier it might throw off a delicate number-crunched balance they achieved. If that is the case we might want for a seperate system like PvP and Eureka: You get a set of unbalanced and OP, but full and fun set of skills like with the old Primary, Secondary and Tertiary cross-class system to use everywhere else and then you have the current system we see today for Savage fights, where the developers can tweak and adjust so it fits in perfectly with the scripted fights.

I feel like for everything outside Savage we’re starting to see balancing be towards the absolute bottom than the absolute top. Healing requirements are the perfect example of this; devs want healers to heal which is fine, but then design all healing content around the idea that players are desperately struggling to meet healing requirements, which is almost never the case outside of savage in my experience.
It’s the same with DPS toolkits for healers. Developers aren’t simplifying it to address any kind of healer savage balance, it’s just because they don’t want healers to be too ‘complicated’. The same could even be argued for things like buffs/debuffs on healers. They aren’t trying to adjust healer strength in savage with removal do things like Virus and Disable, they just wanted to make healing easier for everyone outside of that content.
The real question is how they expect players to ever learn things like maintaining buffs or debuffs or DPS as a healer when they design content so that everything outside of savage doesn’t need those. And that ultimately leads to healers being incredibly bored because healing is far too easy but we don’t have anything to fill the huge amounts of downtime (which I assume will be much less in savage)

This is one thing I can definitely say I just don’t get. They balance the healing kit for savage, then balance everything outside of savage as low as they possibly can, so healers end up with an insanely powerful tool but barely anything to use it on. They don’t want healers to be overburdened, then give them a toolkit that assumes the player is overburdened

[Critical-Limit]

Problem with that mentality when it comes to healers is there's only 3 to choose from and two are mandatory for content. So they need to be balanced, and right now, they're not.

This is AFTER we missed out on a new healer because "they wanted to balance what they had". SE has had 4 years to "balance" healers, and so far they haven't done a great job. They need some new blood or something because what has been going on for the past 4 years isn't working.




This. SE needs to stop balancing around the top 1% of the player base and around the 90% and lower that the majority of plays like.

As long as those 3 healers can carry their own weight. Who cares if one is slightly stronger. You pick the stronger cuz it’s easier. But if all 3 can clear. There is no problem.