A summary of healer issues

[Sebazy]

Yoshi P is already on the record saying the reason they gutted the Healer DPS kits was because they thought it was too stressful, the same logic they gave for reducing healing requirements.

Hiya, a fairly important clarification here. I'm fairly confident that the 'healer DPS is too stressful' thing was in response to removing Cleric Stance specifically leading into Stormblood.

The real healer dps kit culling aka Shadowbringers was in the name of balance and homogenisation and a quick search of interviews can confirm this:

https://twinfinite.net/ps4/ffxiv-sha...ers-interview/

[size=1]Yoshida-san wants any healer to contribute equally to DPS/Healing or specialize in one of the other with little issue. This standardization across the healers is also reflected in the changes made to tanks.

With the removal of hate combos and DPS stances, every tank is better suited to focus on maximizing their DPS and whoever is the main tank at the time can just flip on their tank stance to hold the enemies’ attention.

It feels a bit like they are surrendering a bit of job identity and specialization with these changes in Shadowbringers, but the goal is a noble one: total job balance across the board and 100% viability no matter how difficult the content is.

So no, Shadowbringer's healer DPS kit culling was *NOT* because Yoshida felt that healers were getting too stressed. It's because that as the link above shows, he was still somehow clinging to the belief that WHMs were doing all the healing and SCH was doing all the DPS right through Stormblood. This was to simplify and speed up the process of balancing healers.

[ForsakenRoe]

but the goal is a noble one: total job balance across the board and 100% viability no matter how difficult the content is.

Looks at PLD and WAR at the start of this tier
Looks at WHM at the start of last tier
Actually, looks at WHM any point after week 8 when AST SCH invariably ends up the 'meta' again because of the raidbuffs

We are down to one dot, one nuke, maybe one extra thing like Assize. And they STILL can't balance WHM vs AST because they're inherently not comparable. How much more needs to be sacrificed to make the classes 'balanced'? Do we need to remove the DOT too? And yet somehow, despite having different raidbuffs, or none at all, the DPS output of the melee is more closely balanced. Looking at 'overall across the tier, 95th percentile' on the verboten site, the difference between the top melee (DRG) and the bottom (SAM) is about 300 dps. Comparing the healers, the difference between top (SCH) and bottom (SGE) is also 300.

'So what's the problem, that's the same difference!'

The problem is that the DPS are doing twice as much damage as the healers, so the difference between their top and bottom as a percentage of their total output is lower. In essence, despite being 'the same integer value', the difference between the two healers is actually TWICE as large as the melee! Bearing in mind the melee have much more intricate rotations, Raidbuffs vs not, different positional bonus strength, etc, I think we can safely say that the presence of raidbuffs, or the intricacy of the rotation, should not and/or does not have a significant impact on the amount of output a player can get from a class. Or if it DOES, it's the LACK of damage rotation that's causing the wider gulf, which would be the opposite of their intended outcome, either way the question remains:

Why do the healers need to keep getting lobotomized for the sake of 'balance', when we can see that it's clearly not working? Why not, instead of kneecapping AST way back when, increase the power of WHM to be more competitive?