A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

Now how many of these occurred in your head or aren't massive stretches because you know.... Renethras posts etc?

/sigh

And just when I paid you that complement in the other thread. I'll ignore the rest until you can make a good faith post. Except this bit, because it actually has something in it worth discussing:

The issue is that Yoshida has allowed the game to outgrow his team by a significant margin. They haven't been able to keep up with the demands of the player base for years now and that's not really acceptable for a game of this size and stature.

Yoshi P has a lot of clout with Square, but it's not infinite. If it was, Dream Fitting wouldn't be in the game.

The issue is that FF14, like FF11 before it, generated a lot of money for Square. But the executives at Square have this interesting quirk. Instead of doubling down on things that make them money, they like pulling money from those sure bets to finance experimental ideas that often turn out to be boondogles. Like NFTs.

Seriously.
N.
F.
Ts.

And this isn't even a NEW thing. They did this as far back as Spirits Within, which is why the company's name is "Square-Enix" right now instead of "Squaresoft".

They have some of the most fantastic money generating games in video game history, but instead of capitalizing on those, they constantly try these experimental ideas. Now, some experimental ideas can be good, especially ones that advance on existing ones - I suspect Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link is going to be wildly popular...though it's always possible it won't be, I suppose - but they've tried all kinds of things seemingly to avoid "just give FFXIV more money".

Activision-Blizzard did this same thing. "We have the biggest cash cow in history in WoW, sir! What should we do? Put more money into it? Make sure it's sustainable for perpetuity?" "Oh HEAVENS no, man! We need to make a cash shop so we can fleece the loyal customers for all they're worth while mocking them for doing it and dump all the excess money into mobile gaming and trying to dethrone League of Legends! Duh!!"

Healer design is a problem. This is a factual statement and not an opinion. If it wasn't a problem, this constant back and forth wouldn't exist. It doesn't exist for Black Mage. It doesn't exist for Dancer. It doesn't exist for Gunbreaker. If the healers were in as good a state as these job, then it wouldn't exist for the healers either. But it does. If all people on the forums wanted to do was trash talk every job and every aspect of the game, then these other jobs as well as several others wouldn't be exempt from the same experience.

But people do complain about GNB. And PLD. Tanks in general. People DO complain about DNC. More Ranged in general, though. People DO complain about BLM via Casters in general. Basically anything that isn't Melee. Or SAM.

The difference with Healers and BLM is that if people don't like BLM, they can play RDM or SMN. So people don't complain about BLM who don't like BLM, they just swap to one of the MANY other options. They have 2 other options for just Casters, 5 if they just don't like Melee but want to DPS, 10 if they don't mind Melee and just want to DPS, and still 2 others if they want to play a selfish DPS (SAM and MCH). It's why I push so hard on the Four Healers Model all the time, as it would make Healers like BLM is. "Oh, I don't like WHM because it doesn't have a lot of damage buttons. But man, I love SCH because of all the damage buttons!", "I don't like AST because of the RNG, but man, WHM is great without the RNG!" It would remove the "problem" almost entirely, if not entirely.

Ooh curse those smart people with their rational takes and their logical conclusions, they should just submit to the anger and outrage of the hivemind!

I do tell you we're more alike than you think.

What SE needs to do is realize how much money THIS game pulls in, and devote more devs to it from other parts of the company. Hopefully the reason things are kinda 'ehh' moreso than ever is because so much of the company is focused on FF16, so once that's out, bring those devs into the fold to work on FF14

100% agreed.

I hope that it's just FF16 and FF14 gets the love and attention it needs after that.

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.

Agreed.

I'm not an AST person, but for AST to keep the random/RNG element AND not have "Balance fishing", what it needs to do is have several flavors of offense (crit, direct hit, and damage, maybe?), and then it can have a separate set for utility (mitigation, MP regeneration, and...I dunno, a Regen or something? Whatever, just a 6th something that isn't damage). Getting Bole in HW wouldn't have sucked if it WASN'T keeping you from a Balance.