A summary of healer issues

[GrimGale]

The point isn't just 'oh Holy Paladin has heal increase skill', these four effects are one talent called Blessing of Seasons, and they rotate through the four as you use them (so it's consistent and not RNG like AST was). There's other stuff Holy Paladin has that I did not list, the point was to illustrate that this one system (the Blessing of Seasons talent) has more variety in it's effects than the comparable system we have here (what the cards used to be for AST and what they are now). You're also listing four healers here vs the one example I gave. I could list every 'buff you can give to allies' for all seven of the WOW healers, but I'd be here for a long time. So I'll just do Holy Paladin:

- Aforementioned 4 Blessings of Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter
- Choice of passive aura between 3% DR, 20% movespeed while mounted, 'take more than 50% of your HP in a single hit and give out a damage buff to allies' Retribution Aura, 'reduce silence duration on allies' Aura (this one's more for PVP i think), swapping between them is GCD
- Aura Mastery increases the effectiveness of these passive auras, usually used on Devotion to increase it from 3% to 15% DR
- Blessing of Freedom removes anything that is CCing an ally and makes them immune to roots/stuns/slows for a bit
- Blessing of Protection makes target immune to physical damage for a while (makes them considered to have zero aggro for the duration too, so tanks will lose their mobs if you use it on them)
- Blessing of Sacrifice is Cover but actually useful
- Beacon of Light is Synastry but actually useful (considering all your healing is GCDs)
- A Stun, Interrupt, Taunt and Hallowed Ground (on a 5min CD, so theoretically you could purposely taunt a boss and invuln it's tankbuster. probably not worth the risk though). You can also use the invuln to soak a mech that a tank would otherwise have to eat, like those tank-specific meteors you occasionally see. These are not 'buffs you can give allies' per se, but being able to catch an interrupt that the DPS can't get, or soaking something so the tank can save their CDs for other stuff, is big utility to have in the back pocket
- A combat res. Not every class in WOW can resurrect in combat (and it's on a one-charge-per-5-mins system in a raid), so having someone that can CR is big

The only thing that we have left that gets any credit from me is Expedient, but I've always thought it'd be ridiculously good.



I also think removing Selene entirely was not great, but we have to consider, it was 'Selene vs Roused Whispering Dawn', the odds were so stacked against Selene's kit it'd have to be some real impactful stuff to compete with how good Eos was. And that'd just mean making SCH even more dominant than it already was

Oh yeah, I wasn't defending the barebone healing design in FFXIV. Holy Paladin skill interactions alone are probably more numerous than the skill interactions in all of FFXIV healer's kit in total.

[MatchaokaCha]

I just want them to add some type of fun and engaging rotation. They don't need to remove the mono-button playstyle since that can exist as a core base, but they really need to add skill ceilings that complements and engages the game environment in a fun way. A cardinal sin for game design is to be boring, and Square has succeeded in making me fall asleep (literally) this expansion. I'm sure this has been mentioned, but having 10+ jobs is completely antithetical to homogenizing them to function the exact same way. There's a complete lack of creative diversity, and it just feels like the devs aren't having fun designing these jobs anymore.

[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.

[Renathras]

Oh yeah, I'm not saying it's the only reason, but also a contributor. I know these forums don't like if you say that. lol You're supposed to only go against the devs who clearly don't understand their own game. I'd say the truth lies somewhere in-between.

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. But, just to reiterate, I do agree with a lot of what's being said here. Like healers being the ones who are there so others can have fun (in low level content. As an AST main I enjoy savage).

For what it's worth I was pleasantly surprised by the healing requirements for Barbs ex. So there is that.

Largely this.

I've said about homogenization many times in the past that the reason we have so much of it is that players asked for it, either indirectly or, in some cases, literally and directly.

With a lot of healing changes, it's because players asked for it either indirectly or directly as well. The reason we're where we are now isn't because the Devs hate the players, their own game, or Healing. It's because, over time, people have either asked for or demanded these changes. Yoshi P's exasperated "We thought this was what you wanted" after P5-8 dropped is kind of proof of that. They've done what they heard players asking for over and over - the 2 min meta, Tank homogenization, etc are also all results of this - and then gave it to them, only to be surprised when the old adage turned out to be true:

Players are REALLY good at identifying problems and REALLY bad at proposing solutions to them.

[ty_taurus]

Largely this.

I've said about homogenization many times in the past that the reason we have so much of it is that players asked for it, either indirectly or, in some cases, literally and directly.

With a lot of healing changes, it's because players asked for it either indirectly or directly as well. The reason we're where we are now isn't because the Devs hate the players, their own game, or Healing. It's because, over time, people have either asked for or demanded these changes. Yoshi P's exasperated "We thought this was what you wanted" after P5-8 dropped is kind of proof of that. They've done what they heard players asking for over and over - the 2 min meta, Tank homogenization, etc are also all results of this - and then gave it to them, only to be surprised when the old adage turned out to be true:

Players are REALLY good at identifying problems and REALLY bad at proposing solutions to them.

You know that actually reminded me of a comedy skit about Slytherin someone did several years back that had the quote "Look, you came to me, said you needed a break from studying... I got you petrified for 160 days out of the school year. I'm a good friend. What are you complaining about?"

Basically, yes, there are things that people have complained about over the years, but it is entirely on the design team that their solution to many problems is to just remove it. Astrologian's cards had really not be worked on very much. Outside of the experiment of making Balance a 20% DPS buff during HW and swapping Spear's cooldown reduction to a critical hit buff, nothing else had actually been done to address any concerns of balance. So why was the next step to turn every card into Balance? On the topic of Scholar, Selene had only really undergone a single major change as well when the spell speed/skill speed buffs were replaced with a flat attack speed and Fey Caress. Because Fey Wind was a damage increase, which was becoming increasingly more evident that Selene was effectively the "right" choice every time despite Caress and Silent Dusk being basically decorations on your hotbar, there did need to be some kind of change, but again, that change was to give Selene the French Revolution treatment.

It's giving pre-penicillin era "you scratched your leg? Time to amputate."

I don't understand why we can't actually sit down and try preserving things and experimenting with other approaches before we just chop off the limb. Or perhaps they do experiment and are unable to find a path that works, in which case it would actually be really nice to hear that and learn about what solutions they already tried.

[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.

[Sebazy]

Largely this.

I've said about homogenization many times in the past that the reason we have so much of it is that players asked for it, either indirectly or, in some cases, literally and directly.

With a lot of healing changes, it's because players asked for it either indirectly or directly as well. The reason we're where we are now isn't because the Devs hate the players, their own game, or Healing. It's because, over time, people have either asked for or demanded these changes. Yoshi P's exasperated "We thought this was what you wanted" after P5-8 dropped is kind of proof of that. They've done what they heard players asking for over and over - the 2 min meta, Tank homogenization, etc are also all results of this - and then gave it to them, only to be surprised when the old adage turned out to be true:

Players are REALLY good at identifying problems and REALLY bad at proposing solutions to them.

Blaming the 2 minute meta on players is fair enough.

Blaming the Endwalker healer culling on players though? Do you actually believe the tripe you just typed there? Are you Titanmen? Are you trying to revise history? Is Yoshida only listening to a very specific person here? Is he in fact your Uncle?

Who asked for Aero III to be removed?

Who asked for AST cards to become unclickable and by extension, who asked for Undraw?

Who asked for Selene to literally be deleted?

Who asked for Sadge to be a thinly disguised copy pasta number on SCH?

Who asked for our debuff kits to get deleted and handed over to DPS?

Who asked for SCH to lose key abilities such as Bane?

Who asked for AST to lose all of it's time extension kit?

Who asked for 4.0 Lilies?

Who asked for 4.0 SCH to launch without a single spammable AoE in it's kit?

Want me to go on? The material is endless.

Healing is in the state it is because SE don't have the manpower or depth of talent to do better. They have close to the same small team they had at the release of ARR but twice the number of jobs and a far less forgiving and monumentally more clued up player base to deal with.

Healers aren't homogenised because we asked for it 6 years ago. They are homogenised because they literally don't have the man hours in which to truly make the healers unique with the team Yoshida or his finance department wants to stick by.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

That link explains it in more depth, but the TLDR is that SE's job design team is one of the smallest in the industry.

[Renathras]

I don't understand why we can't actually sit down and try preserving things and experimenting with other approaches before we just chop off the limb. Or perhaps they do experiment and are unable to find a path that works, in which case it would actually be really nice to hear that and learn about what solutions they already tried.

My best guess is balance concerns. An example: Expedient. They gave us this new ability people were mocking vs SGE in the Job Actions trailer, but some smart people were noting at the time how it could be useful. Even some early EW guides were panning it. I remember Wesk Alber saying "You know what else gives people a few seconds of Sprint movement speed? Sprint.", implying that it was a silly action.

Then it turned out to be super powerful, not just for the damage reduction, but for the movement speed. To the point they nerfed its duration in half over fear of balance concerns.

And this isn't just an issue with Healers. The PLD rework was over balance concerns (not that they've got it right yet, but it's the impetus for it). Anything that is significantly different causes potential balance issues. Hell, look at this subforum here. How many times have I suggested the "4 Healers" model, which would allow each to be distinct, allow experimentation in different directions, and appeal to all types of players? And it is routinely derided.

The reason we're were we are now very much is because of what players asked for, complained about, and in some cases, demanded. Yeah, the Devs could have said "No. You may Balance fish until the heat death of the universe, we're not budging!" or "Nah, you White Mages get to keep lolLilies until the end of the game!", but they didn't.

If anything, the stuff that confuses me more at this point are the few things the Devs insist on not changing. SCH Faerie summon having a cast time after SMN's were made instant in ShB. How long they drug their feet on Living Dead. That all Healers must have a DoT even as they remove DoTs fro much of the rest of the game's Jobs. It's kinda strange what they do and don't decide must be kept.

Blaming the 2 minute meta on players is fair enough.

Glad we agree on that, at least.

Then you went weird. "Is he your uncle"? Whut? o.O This passes as an argument to you?

1) People who didn't like DoTs and were annoyed at how many there were and how they all had dissonant timers.

2) No idea on that one. I don't AST.

3) People endlessly complaining there was no need to have herr.

4) People who endlessly complained about SCH's clunk and wanted a non-clunk SCH (though this one I think was stupid considering SGE is completely primed to be a Chloromancer)

5) The people who said they were useless or never used anyway.

6) The people endlessly complaining how much more work SCH had to do in its rotation than WHM.

7) The people who kept complaining AST was too hard/complex.

8) No one as far as I can tell. 4.0 WHM was quite possibly the worst iteration of the Job in the entire game, and "every Job has a Job gauge of some kind now" was the reason for it, imo. I will die on that hill. WHM could have stayed HW minus Cleric Stance and been better off, but then it wouldn't be viable in the current game since it'd be too GCD heal reliant. Which is why the ShB and later EW changes were net positives for it.

9) Got me on that one. One point for Griffindor.

You got 2 out of 9. That's a ~22% success rate. You may be able to bring up endless things, but that doesn't mean they all support your position. Everything and the kitchen sink is not a very rational perspective, especially when used to avoid the obvious.

Healing is in the state it's in DUE TO TWO PIECES: ONE is the Devs, and you're right about that. THE OTHER is the players and their demands over the years. You can't ignore that second piece because you have a hate boner for the Devs. I mean, you CAN, but it just makes you wrong. I absolutely agree they should expand their team - FF14 is carrying Square's budget at this point, it could use more of it for itself - but that's no the sole reason for the current situation.

Healers are homogenized - IN PART - because we asked for it repeatedly over the last 8 years. It's shocking at this point WHM doesn't have an AOE shield since every other Healer does, but that's really the only point of major resistance to absolute homogenization the Devs have made when it comes to Healers. All the other things Healers have asked to be homogenized largely have been.

It goes once more to the adage:

Players are really good at finding problems, but extremely poor at proposing good solutions.

[fulminating]

It goes once more to the adage:

Players are really good at finding problems, but extremely poor at proposing good solutions.

"It was fun before and it's not fun now, can we go back?"

[Renathras]

"It was fun before and it's not fun now, can we go back?"

Sure. Let's go back to ARR.

I'm game.

(That wasn't the point, but I'm up for that.)