A summary of healer issues

[Aravell]

I certainly remember number-minded players saying that if you don't fish for balance you're doing it wrong. Or that if you use the 'wrong' fairy you're trolling or whatever. Full disclosure, I'm raiding myself, so that's essentially my crowd. lol And guess what? Cards were all turned into balance and both fairies are the same now. It doesn't take rocket science to see where this idea came from.

If you look back at that time, I can guarantee that almost every complaint about not getting The Balance and the SCH not using Selene all came from DPS mains. The rdps metric didn't exist back then, so the only way to get the funny number on the funny number site is for an AST to feed you The Balance. I personally remember a lot of DPS mains whining about not getting The Balance, but I most certainly have never seen any AST main worth their salt complain about the cards.

This shows that the card changes aligns with their aim of making sure the DPS players have as much fun as possible, regardless of what this does to the healer role.

[ForsakenRoe]

If you look back at that time, I can guarantee that almost every complaint about not getting The Balance and the SCH not using Selene all came from DPS mains. The rdps metric didn't exist back then, so the only way to get the funny number on the funny number site is for an AST to feed you The Balance. I personally remember a lot of DPS mains whining about not getting The Balance, but I most certainly have never seen any AST main worth their salt complain about the cards.

This shows that the card changes aligns with their aim of making sure the DPS players have as much fun as possible, regardless of what this does to the healer role.

The Selene complaints were definitely from DPS mains, but not for 'not using Selene', it was 'using Selene made me run out of TP and now I can't press my buttons'. And if you said 'press Purification' to a monk in this situation, they'd say 'but that's dps loss'

Same with Arrow, caused people to run out of TP too fast, makes their gameplay feel janky because their GCD is delayed a bit to wait for a TP tick, leading back to the point: it affected the DPS main's enjoyment of the game, so it had to go

Side note, did you know that WOW healers now have more variety in buffs they can give their allies than we have here? Once upon a time I remember people bragging about how cool it was that AST was a healer that had a big focus on giving out buffs to allies as well as doing regular healing stuff. Now it's all just flat damage increases, meanwhile Holy Paladin's able to give out 'Multistrike as additional holy damage', 'Restore 15% max MP over 30s (healer only)', 'Healing dealt increased by 15% and healing received increased by 30%' (great for tanks since their selfhealing tools will doubledip), and 'CDs restore 30% faster' (and this one affects stuff that's already on CD because somehow a game first made in 2004 managed to iron that jank out, and this one couldn't). What do we have, flat damage increase, with 'party wide flat damage increase' as our big 2min moment. Dull as dishwater, and by the looks of it, designed for people who like to drink the stuff

[GrimGale]

The Selene complaints were definitely from DPS mains, but not for 'not using Selene', it was 'using Selene made me run out of TP and now I can't press my buttons'. And if you said 'press Purification' to a monk in this situation, they'd say 'but that's dps loss'

Same with Arrow, caused people to run out of TP too fast, makes their gameplay feel janky because their GCD is delayed a bit to wait for a TP tick, leading back to the point: it affected the DPS main's enjoyment of the game, so it had to go

Side note, did you know that WOW healers now have more variety in buffs they can give their allies than we have here? Once upon a time I remember people bragging about how cool it was that AST was a healer that had a big focus on giving out buffs to allies as well as doing regular healing stuff. Now it's all just flat damage increases, meanwhile Holy Paladin's able to give out 'Multistrike as additional holy damage', 'Restore 15% max MP over 30s (healer only)', 'Healing dealt increased by 15% and healing received increased by 30%' (great for tanks since their selfhealing tools will doubledip), and 'CDs restore 30% faster' (and this one affects stuff that's already on CD because somehow a game first made in 2004 managed to iron that jank out, and this one couldn't). What do we have, flat damage increase, with 'party wide flat damage increase' as our big 2min moment. Dull as dishwater, and by the looks of it, designed for people who like to drink the stuff

Okay to be fair, if we're gonna include "Healing increases" as counting towards buff variety, healers in FFXIV do get a bit more than flat DPS increases.

AST's Exaltation and Collective Uncounscious give a buff that reduces damage.
WHM's Temperance applies a buff that reduces damage taken by partymembers and increases the potency the caster's healing. Asylum increases healing done.
SGE's Krasis increases healing recieved, Holos mitigates, same as Kerachole and Taurochole.
SCH's Dissipation increases healing action potency, Chain Stratagem increases the crit rate recieved by target, Whispering Dawn is a magic mitigation plus healing done and Expedient increases speed and mitigates.

So with all four healers we have: More damage done, Less damage taken, More crit done, More healing taken/More healing done and Movement Speed up.

Obviously this isn't much. These support actions are as barebones as they can be: Simple numerical increases/decreases, with the unique exception of Expedient which grants Movement speed.

[Iedarus]

SCH's Dissipation increases healing action potency...

Healing magic potency. A button so anti synergistic it anti synergizes with itself. That's why it's just a glorified Energy Drain button.

[ForteNightshade]

If you look back at that time, I can guarantee that almost every complaint about not getting The Balance and the SCH not using Selene all came from DPS mains. The rdps metric didn't exist back then, so the only way to get the funny number on the funny number site is for an AST to feed you The Balance. I personally remember a lot of DPS mains whining about not getting The Balance, but I most certainly have never seen any AST main worth their salt complain about the cards.

This shows that the card changes aligns with their aim of making sure the DPS players have as much fun as possible, regardless of what this does to the healer role.

You were in different circles then. I know several players of varying skill levels who despised the old card system because it essentially boiled down to "Balance fishing". This opinion is especially prevalent in the speed kill community as Balance was king. A lot of people also disliked how certain cards were worthless. Bole, for example, was never worth using as you were never going to rely on inconsistent mitigation. It's no different than current Lady, which every Astro hates drawing. With all that said, I do think they could have done a better job adjusting the system than scraping it entirely. I, personally, liked old Astro a lot more than every other iteration.

Alas, the old Astro would never work in today's landscape. Arrow would completely destroy nearly every job, Spear is just a baby balance that would be even weaker due to the insane value of the two minute meta, Ewer and Bole are both worthless and we'll assume Spire would be turned into a Direct Hit boost given TP is no longer a thing. Which would just be an even weaker Balance. So old Astro would be even more of a "Balance or bust" job today than ever before. That's the problem with FFXIV's design philosophy. Damage is overwhelmingly the best option. Anything that sacrifices damage for resources or defensive benefits seldom has any value.

[Shurrikhan]

You were in different circles then. I know several players of varying skill levels who despised the old card system because it essentially boiled down to "Balance fishing". This opinion is especially prevalent in the speed kill community as Balance was king. A lot of people also disliked how certain cards were worthless. Bole, for example, was never worth using as you were never going to rely on inconsistent mitigation. It's no different than current Lady, which every Astro hates drawing.

...So we replaced those actual gamble elements with "Which melee|ranged each has the greatest burst dps during their 2min, their 60s mid-burst, and their shifted 30s between-bursts? DPad up to 3 times to target them and deliver a ST damage buff unnoticeable without a parser. If your top 2 DPS are of the same type at each of those windows, well, sucks for you and your rDPS, I guess?"

The Seals aren't, in themselves, a bad system, and we should be thinking about what would be better than either, but more than a little difficult to look at the current state and honestly think, without substantial inebriation, "Yeah, this is better than it was in Shadowbringers."

The old system's main problems were simply that...

• Royal Road was preemptive and therefore forced rather than retroactive and therefore optional (cast Card, then optionally buff it),
• there were zero relative balancing passes ever attempted on the cards themselves (at least old Spear had some unique value over Balance available to it via a hastened reset for tank immunities, whereas new Spear was just a 5% damage buff trying to compete with Arrow's ~8% and Balance's 10%),
• there were zero relative balancing passes ever attempted on the Royal Road effects (Expand had twice the value of Extend, which had twice the value of Empower),
• that there was no need to split Ewer and Spire into separately TP and MP (same is true for StB Refresh and Tactician, ofc),
• and that Bole could only reasonably be used on an MT since it offered no flat eHP boost.

That it was still more entertaining and capable of nuance despite all those issues says something in itself about the current iteration of "Find the melee/ranged, and maybe do your seals if you really want to."

With all that said, I do think they could have done a better job adjusting the system than scraping it entirely. I, personally, liked old Astro a lot more than every other iteration.

Yup. Agreed.

[ForteNightshade]

...So we replaced those actual gamble elements with "Which melee|ranged each has the greatest burst dps during their 2min, their 60s mid-burst, and their shifted 30s between-bursts? DPad up to 3 times to target them and deliver a ST damage buff unnoticeable without a parser. If your top 2 DPS are of the same type at each of those windows, well, sucks for you and your rDPS, I guess?"

Oh, don't get me wrong. I never said it was a good decision. The whole shift from Astro has clearly been one failed iteration after another considering we'll soon be on the fourth rework. I do recall Yoshida outright saying players only cared about Balance, which is why they made the changes they did. Although, that was always a problem of their own making for precisely the reasons you outlined. They still seemingly operate with the idea players will sacrifice damage for utility despite them never making said utility worthwhile. If there's one positive I can give on the Endwalker job design, they have gotten better about not doing that. Even if Lady shows they remain a bit too stubborn.

I've long thought the logical step for Royal Road would have been to split the cards into two slots: Offensive and Defensive. This immediately makes resource or utility cards have actual value as they're no longer competing with damage. It also allows them to balance a smaller number of cards against each other. I also much prefer how cards like new Spear made you have to be aware of which jobs benefited from it. Of course, that's before they gutted a good amount of unique gameplay aspects like Bard interacting with Crit. All in all, I suspect the Astro changes were more about simplicity in balancing than listening to player feedback.