A summary of healer issues

[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~

[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.

[Deceptus]

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.

And this has been proven to be 100% not the case. When all things were considered at the highest level, WHM and SCH were healing at almost equal weights and damaging at almost the exact same level.

This is a prime example of Yoshi-P not understanding his own game, or his battle design team decisions.

[QooEr]

i find it funny that the goal was for all healers to have similar mobility and healing prowess. Instead, whm is the least mobile job in the entire game to the point it has to clip its gcd regularly to use its ogcd skills; and right next to it is ast with incredible mobility and over 2100 free healing potency every minute.

If that scenario where one healer does all the work wasnt true in stormblood, they made it a reality in shadowbringers.
All of these healing parses are from last tier, and all of the healers did orange or pink damage.

[Recon1o6]

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

Link to Article

ty for the interview link

This, is without doubt a the devs deliberately ignoring WHY players were choosing sch and ast, and whm even in roulettes was almost extinct
1. it wasn't fun
2. it was weaker in all areas (mobility, mp management, damage, rdps, utility)
3. they didn't like how certain jobs synergised together and decided to remove synergy instead of adding it to the jobs that lack it
4. clearly they do not take into account how skill level affects the jobs
5. No realisation that healing has a hard cap whereas damage does not

Consequently they refused to buff whm and instead crippled the other two healers
they did the same with the tanks as well, which is why we have Marauder, Greatsword Marauder, gunbreaker and magic marauder

In the yoshi p stream just prior to 5.4, he also said they removed bard songs because "they would make bard unbalanced"
Excuse me?
An entire core mechanic being restored to its flavour and utility uses, none of which affected dps, would make the job unbalanced?

This is why the job designers desperately need some new blood, or at least start giving the same love to every other job as they do blm

[Rymi64]

ty for the interview link

This, is without doubt a the devs deliberately ignoring WHY players were choosing sch and ast, and whm even in roulettes was almost extinct
1. it wasn't fun
2. it was weaker in all areas (mobility, mp management, damage, rdps, utility)
3. they didn't like how certain jobs synergised together and decided to remove synergy instead of adding it to the jobs that lack it
4. clearly they do not take into account how skill level affects the jobs
5. No realisation that healing has a hard cap whereas damage does not

Consequently they refused to buff whm and instead crippled the other two healers
they did the same with the tanks as well, which is why we have Marauder, Greatsword Marauder, gunbreaker and magic marauder

In the yoshi p stream just prior to 5.4, he also said they removed bard songs because "they would make bard unbalanced"
Excuse me?
An entire core mechanic being restored to its flavour and utility uses, none of which affected dps, would make the job unbalanced?

This is why the job designers desperately need some new blood, or at least start giving the same love to every other job as they do blm

how is pld magic marauder when they play nothing alike? Everyone know's DRK and WAR play similar but saying PLD plays like marauder is wrong flat out. And what do you mean by removed bard songs?

[Liam_Harper]

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.

It's impressive how many things are wrong in that one statement.

[Kabooa]

It's impressive how many things are wrong in that one statement.

Maybe don't isolate it from the rest of the article.

To clarify, I doubt he was talking about any live server speedruns, and more about testing in house. "A scenario" means anything, and there's nothing factually wrong about what he said.

In a scenario where damage intake can challenge the white mage kit in Stormblood, the scholar isn't going to be healing with them.

They're going to be using broil, because Succor was a horrible heal.

While it might seem like God Kefka is a good metric to use given its healing check, it's not. Speedruns are not only at max gear, God Kefka was still initially tuned to be cleared without a white mage, because not every raid composition was going to have one.