Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Saefinn]

When you think about it. AST had 8 separate cards that all did different things, 6 of them could be used to trigger 3 separate enhancements, 1 could do damage and 1 could heal. You could tactically hold onto a card you may wish to use later. There was meaning to how you played it and it was about how you adapt and use RNG to your favour.

ALL 8 of those cards offer you 1 effect and without being able to use them for enhancements, instead your RNG just affects potency.

I would argue than none of these really mean anything. The seals on the other hand just change your potency of Divination. That is the most meaning they have.

As illustrated by Laphicet, this is at the cost of its lore meaning, of how you use your cards in play, your decisions/choices in how you play them to your advantage. Sure people fished for the Balance (card fishing remains an issue, so making everything The Balance hasn't solved it, but 5.3 alleviated at least be allowing you to bypass some RNG).

And it's not longer about manipulating the hard that fate deals you to your advantage.


Dare I say the best change the could have made to avoid The Balance fishing would have been to remove Redraw or reduce its uses. Make players try to use their cards meaningfully instead of trying to fish for one to give the biggest numbers. And in its evolution, think about ways you can have AST taken advantage of whatever card is drawn. For me that'd have been a good progression for AST instead of "all your cards now have the same effect".

[RyuDragnier]

Dare I say the best change the could have made to avoid The Balance fishing would have been to remove Redraw or reduce its uses. Make players try to use their cards meaningfully instead of trying to fish for one to give the biggest numbers. And in its evolution, think about ways you can have AST taken advantage of whatever card is drawn. For me that'd have been a good progression for AST instead of "all your cards now have the same effect".

Or they could have changed the Balance from a straight damage potency buff to something else, since that was the main problem.

[Saefinn]

Or they could have changed the Balance from a straight damage potency buff to something else, since that was the main problem.

Possible, but I suspect the problem that'd then follow is a different buff gets fished, like The Arrow. If the pay off for fishing is greater than using the card you've got then fishing will happen because there are people who will try to optimise their best numbers.

[Lilseph]

Dare I say the best change the could have made to avoid The Balance fishing would have been to remove Redraw or reduce its uses. Make players try to use their cards meaningfully instead of trying to fish for one to give the biggest numbers. And in its evolution, think about ways you can have AST taken advantage of whatever card is drawn. For me that'd have been a good progression for AST instead of "all your cards now have the same effect".

The key word here is 'consistency'. It was probably difficult for the encounter designers to have to constantly balance fights around card RNG. It would lead to clearing the encounter being a matter of Drawing the "correct" amount of rDPS cards which is completely out of the player's control. Having DPS checks dictated by how lucky your AST is with cards sounds like a terrible idea. The new system is much better in that regard because they can more accurately predict how much rDPS the AST will bring and adjust the numbers accordingly. Not to mention how aggravating it would feel to pull absolutely nothing but utility cards in a 10 minute encounter or 30 minute dungeon.

They would have to either turn every card into a utility card which would make the Card system kinda too situational to properly use, or turn every card into a damage buffing card (which we actually got in Shadowbringers). Personally I'd prefer what we have now than the mess of Stormblood WHM being shoved to the wayside.

[Recon1o6]

The key word here is 'consistency'. It was probably difficult for the encounter designers to have to constantly balance fights around card RNG. It would lead to clearing the encounter being a matter of Drawing the "correct" amount of rDPS cards which is completely out of the player's control. Having DPS checks dictated by how lucky your AST is with cards sounds like a terrible idea. The new system is much better in that regard because they can more accurately predict how much rDPS the AST will bring and adjust the numbers accordingly. Not to mention how aggravating it would feel to pull absolutely nothing but utility cards in a 10 minute encounter or 30 minute dungeon.

They would have to either turn every card into a utility card which would make the Card system kinda too situational to properly use, or turn every card into a damage buffing card (which we actually got in Shadowbringers). Personally I'd prefer what we have now than the mess of Stormblood WHM being shoved to the wayside.

Actually, that's not the case, thereby having even less reason to have destroyed the cards

The devs in a reddit interview said that they don't really need to take into account job balance for raids. Only if there's something that commpletely breaks a mechanic

If the devs did that, then we wouldn't have E4s cleared by a bunch of summoners a dancer and a paladin with no healer in sight.

[Lilseph]

The devs in a reddit interview said that they don't really need to take into account job balance for raids. Only if there's something that commpletely breaks a mechanic

Would you happen to have the source link for this? I would really like to read it.

If the devs did that, then we wouldn't have E4s cleared by a bunch of summoners a dancer and a paladin with no healer in sight.

That's actually a huge exaggeration. All the Summoners were alternating Titan-egi and also holding Demi-Phoenix specifically for high damage phases. The Dancer and Paladin were there for the mini healing and the strong party mitigation. Heck, at the end of the video in the final phase, everything started to snowball the moment one person got KO'd. That E4S clear required a very high amount of coordination, which would be impossible to do for the average party. There is no reason not the bring a Healer unless you're specifically in it for the meme.

[Recon1o6]

Would you happen to have the source link for this? I would really like to read it.
That's actually a huge exaggeration. All the Summoners were alternating Titan-egi and also holding Demi-Phoenix specifically for high damage phases. The Dancer and Paladin were there for the mini healing and the strong party mitigation. Heck, at the end of the video in the final phase, everything started to snowball the moment one person got KO'd. That E4S clear required a very high amount of coordination, which would be impossible to do for the average party. There is no reason not the bring a Healer unless you're specifically in it for the meme.

Here's the link https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...4_battle_devs/
It was a famistu translation posted on reddit, I was a little mistaken on that front since it was from january but the content I was correct on

Famitsu: So many gates to pass. Did the addition of GNB and DNC affect the raid designs in any way?

Masaki Nakagawa (Ozma): We leave the job balance to the battle system team, so we as the battle content team just need to be conscious about each of the roles, so we don't really need to be bothered by it.
Nabeshima: I was also told i didn't need to worry about the balance. The only mention was the "interrupt system" they added in 5.0.

Masaki Nakagawa (Ozma): [We all check the new actions for each job and sometimes are conscious, but it doesn't really affect the difficulty of designing fights.

Daisuke Nakagawa: The job adjustments and raid designs are done at the same time when we work on an explansion, so it's not realistic to start designing the raids after waiting for the final job adjustments, because we simply won't be able to make it on time.

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Therefore if they don't need to look at job balance, then there was no "balance" need on the encounter level to remove the cards.

Its not an exaggeration of low healing requirements if the hardest raid in a tier can be done without a healer. If that's not proof they don't into account just how abundant our heals are then what is?

[Lilseph]

Here's the link

Thanks! Was definitely an interesting read. Regardless though, the old card system caused a hefty imbalance when it came to the three healers with Diurnal being essentially a better WHM. Shadowbringers has the best "healer balance" we've had so far. If anything, they really only need to add a bit more for healers in terms of tools during downtime.

Its not an exaggeration of low healing requirements if the hardest raid in a tier can be done without a healer. If that's not proof they don't into account just how abundant our heals are then what is?

There isn't less healing per say, there's actually more; it's just that the new healing tools they've introduced compensate for the extra outgoing damage so it feels more same-y.

I think it's more of a testament to the strength of the sustain that those jobs have. Putting up what amounts to double the potency of Media II, and having access to a Manaward every 90/30 seconds respectively is pretty insane. Not to mention having Addle for practically every raidwide and mechanic. WAR and PLD are pretty self-explanatory, and the DNC has a mini Medica that's slightly stronger than actual Medica.

Finding the fights easier to heal and being able to find and use downtime says more about your improvement as a healer skill level-wise. Also keep in mind that e4s is the first raid tier of this expansion. In Stormblood, o4s (Neo Exdeath) is similar in that regard because it's literally just "healing downtime the fight", yet that's never really ever brought up. They just need to fill in the gap for downtime so it isn't monotonous.