A summary of healer issues

[SpiralMask]

@grimgale: personally, while i'm fine with jobs having running a gradient of simple to complex, i think even a 'simple' job should have something to do when there's no healing needed.
SCH used to have their dot management (now removed), AST used to have their cards (now lobotomized), etc. it's still really weird that rather than giving WHM a downtime activity they took away the other two's for ShB

[Mimilu]

I thought Quake Flood and Tornado where ancient level spells mostly associated with BLM.

Most people want them for XIV's WHM because they have/had Earth, Water, and Wind spells, versus BLM, which have Fire, Ice, and Thunder spells.

[SweetPete]

I know square loves to surprise us but I’d really like it if they created a test server for us to test the new skills so we can give feedback on gameplay and just if we like them or not. Instead of giving influencers and such time to test the jobs when obviously none of them are main healers and will just say they love everything SE does just to save face. They end up adjusting multiple jobs throughout the entire expansion which is not necessary if they got it right sooner. They can focus on other things. Job adjustments can be limited. I really hope they give this some thought. Our current healers are solid proof that SE, their own testers and even our lovely influencers have absolutely no idea what they talking about when it comes to healers. No shade just the truth.

[Absurdity]

I know square loves to surprise us but I’d really like it if they created a test server for us to test the new skills so we can give feedback on gameplay and just if we like them or not. Instead of giving influencers and such time to test the jobs when obviously none of them are main healers and will just say they love everything SE does just to save face. They end up adjusting multiple jobs throughout the entire expansion which is not necessary if they got it right sooner. They can focus on other things. Job adjustments can be limited. I really hope they give this some thought. Our current healers are solid proof that SE, their own testers and even our lovely influencers have absolutely no idea what they talking about when it comes to healers. No shade just the truth.

Even the influencers aren't really "testing" anything, they simply get an early look at it. People who got early access to the ShB jobs told SE for example that SCH not having Energy Drain isn't gonna work out. SE did nothing about it and look what happened? They had to put ED back in post-launch since yes, it did indeed not work.


SE's in-house testing quite obviously isn't enough and since they don't do major changes mid expansion unless a vast majority complain about it or it is literally unplayable they need more testing and, most importantly, more outside feedback prior to the design being implemented...or you end up with the current terrible healer design for 2 years and no hope for any changes since it is technically "functional".

[Deceptus]

Even the influencers aren't really "testing" anything, they simply get an early look at it. People who got early access to the ShB jobs told SE for example that SCH not having Energy Drain isn't gonna work out. SE did nothing about it and look what happened? They had to put ED back in post-launch since yes, it did indeed not work.

Lets also not forget that in the 96 questions asked across all "influencers", THREE involved healing, and those were hand waved away.

[ItMe]

Lets also not forget that in the 96 questions asked across all "influencers", THREE involved healing, and those were hand waved away.

Where can we read/see these 96 questions and the dev responses?

[Maltothoris]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...our_interview/

Well here's one example though this was famitsu.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...interview_not/

Here's another example as well.

As you can see very few questions about healers were asked overall during the time of the media tour.

I don't recall exactly where the huge list of questions was regarding healers was but ya you could see it's overall low on their priority list.

[ItMe]

Thank you for the links Maltothoris~

[MPNZ]

I thought Quake Flood and Tornado where ancient level spells mostly associated with BLM.

Aero is also a BLM spell, but WHM needs to be able to DPS for story content, and its lore in FF14 is tied to both Ampador and the elementals which makes them into a mixture of like of druid and priest archetypes. Though, because of the elementals influence it's not impossible to expand it with several elemental based-spells, but it's kind of hard to think of anything because of like DPS dominancey. And combat is better designed closer to platinum games combat standards instead of mobile gaming's tap-to-win designs. Though this does not mean that they should totally abandon lower skill levels as implement low skill floors with mastery rewarded through access to difficult areas, defeating stronger overworld mobs, or being way better at PVP. There is currently just way too little reward for several of the different MMO taxonomies, but combat design should not be pigeon-holed to play as almost carbon copies of one another regardless of ease of design and balace

[Mimilu]

Twinfinity interviewed Yoshi-P with some info about the healer design choices:

Link to Article

While all the healers can heal just fine, there were big disparities in DPS capabilities.

He explained that Healer DPS is impacted by a lot of factors such as mobility and healing potency, with both of those things impacting the amount of “wiggle room” you have to DPS.

This flexibility is key, and rather than have certain healers specialize in one aspect or another, they decided to even the toolset across the board for all the healers.
The healer that struggled the most in the Stormblood era was White Mage. It appeared to be designed to be the “ultimate” potency healer. For some raid groups, this niche might have been helpful for clearing and progression.

However, most groups favored Scholar and Astrologian, both of which had far better mobility, quicker casts, and DPS potential. When you have a group that knows what they are doing, having that little bit extra healing juice isn’t as useful as being able to get the kill as quickly as possible before other players can make a mistake and cause a wipe. The faster the better.

Additionally, Yoshida-san described a scenario where White Mage and Scholar are paired up to heal. Scholar is primarily a barrier healer and lacks the ability to cure to the extent that a White Mage can. As a result, the White Mage is stuck doing most of the heals while the Scholar can DPS away.

“We went into reviewing all of the actions of these three healer jobs, which are all kind of convoluted and kind of tangled into each other, and sort of made sure that we were addressing the different stress points.” said Yoshida

Yoshida-san wants any healer to contribute equally to DPS/Healing or specialize in one of the other with little issue.