Benchmark trailer

[currentlemon]

I don't want to hate on the devs too much when it comes to the healers. Yes, what they did was wrong, but I still believe that they'll make the changes each job desperately needs despite the odds against us. Though I am still keeping my expectations low. I think Deceptus said it best. The devs do listen to their players, but they are very slow to act at times or they completely misread the player base and make decisions based on their misjudgments.

The current situation with healers was completely based off their misjudgment and shortsightedness of the healer community.

[FusionSamurai]

I never said it was a mistake giving healers dps rotations. What I said was the forums were filled with dissatisfied casual players who complained that in dungeons, extremes and normal raids healers were not healing much because they were to busy with dps.

Yoshi P himself said the reason scholar lost all its dot glory was because they were leaving their co healer which was whm or Astro to do all the healing while they dps and just used faerie skills. Let’s stop acting like this is brand new. Yoshi P already spoke on this. This game caters to 80% which are casuals and that’s being generous. Healers pressing one button boring as heck? Yes but it’s the way they want it now. Complaining on the forums isn’t gonna change that. They have been very clear they want healers to focus more on healing. It is what it is. Y’all out here acting brand new like this is new news and y’all are so shocked

You're entirely wrong. The healer changes were an effort to balance the healers, because WHM always gets left in the dumpster at the end of expansions.

[Acece]

Did the healer community even want all these changes to healers? I know a couple Whm in Sb wanted Whm to be on par with Ast and Sch but I really didn't see too many healers begging to heal more when at the time we had god Kefka which is (or was) the hardest fight to heal. Besides a few slyphies I really didn't see it. Also blaming the community for their miss handling of healers is kind of dumb.

[FusionSamurai]

Did the healer community even want all these changes to healers? I know a couple Whm in Sb wanted Whm to be on par with Ast and Sch but I really didn't see too many healers begging to heal more when at the time we had god Kefka which is (or was) the hardest fight to heal. Besides a few slyphies I really didn't see it. Also blaming the community for their miss handling of healers is kind of dumb.

Literally nobody asked for SCH to get its entire kit gutted, so no.

[Allegor]

The only reason WHM was considerably more popular in 5.0 and even 5.1 was because the other 2 were utterly destroyed

[Semirhage]

For you two cases, how would you feel if WHM was more set up so that the difficulty came from pulling out maximum healing while doing mechanics? The end result would vary wildly admittedly, but if, like now but on a better designed skill set, the difficulty doesn't come from spamming attack spells on a striking dummy, but the loss of uptime from movement, with limited ways to gain free movement (like swiftcast and stuff)? The base job would be easy to do well in, but the moment you started to do any remotely difficult content, you'd quickly start dropping damage until you learned to get better at it?

I'd hesitate to make "movement" an explicit weakness. It's how basically every single mechanic in XIV works. You have to move somewhere to dodge a thing. Movement being an explicit WHM weakness is one of the myriad things that's made it such a chore to play in the past. When you have two classes, and one of them has a fake "weakness" that the game never bothers to touch on, and the other has a crippling weakness that the game picks at all the time, then you've wrenched the disparity between those classes pretty wide. WHM has historically had weaknesses that actually come up all the time in this game. AST and SCH haven't, not since early Heavensward for AST. Now, that's not necessarily a problem if you compensate for that disparity elsewhere, but from what I've seen of how Squeenix designs things, they tend to treat weaknesses as if they were all equivalent, wash their hands and call it a day. Even Black Mage, the iconic immobile turret of mages, has received a truckload of movement tools because it's such a bullsh*t thing to do to a class in this game of heavy movement requirements.

I don't like to say that WHM should be simple and boring for the sake of ease of play, but if it means that we can have nice, complex, dynamic, and engaging healer jobs, then it's a trade I'd be more than willing to do. Though admitedly, I've never liked WHM so I'm pretty biased there, but WHM is the only healer you get before level 30, sadly enough.

Of course you're willing, you're a Scholar main. I've seen AST and SCH mains perfectly happy to sacrifice WHM on the complexity altar if it allows them to be OP again. Nevermind the fact that the DPS casters don't suffer from this problem, which shows we don't actually need to have an ankle-height skill ceiling baby class in order to keep the role healthy. I'll counter with this admittedly facetious question: How would you feel if the simplistic entry-level job was Scholar, and the three other healers got to enjoy complexity as a consequence of that? Make the fairy heals 200 real potency, delete most of the kit, whittle it down to Succor, Adlo, Lustrate, Bio, and Broil. Design finished. Beginner healers would be too intimidated by things as complicated as Excog after all.

[Dearche]

Even Black Mage, the iconic immobile turret of mages, has received a truckload of movement tools because it's such a bullsh*t thing to do to a class in this game of heavy movement requirements.

I suppose this is really the evidence of the disparity when it comes to attention and concessions that SE is willing to put into the DPS vs Healers. Agreed that movement's always been an issue for WHM and the game works to make WHM suffer almost deliberately because of it. Unfortunately, I'm just not able to come up with things to differentiate WHM without gutting what's little that's left of its job identity.

Of course you're willing, you're a Scholar main. I've seen AST and SCH mains perfectly happy to sacrifice WHM on the complexity altar if it allows them to be OP again. Nevermind the fact that the DPS casters don't suffer from this problem, which shows we don't actually need to have an ankle-height skill ceiling baby class in order to keep the role healthy. I'll counter with this admittedly facetious question: How would you feel if the simplistic entry-level job was Scholar, and the three other healers got to enjoy complexity as a consequence of that? Make the fairy heals 200 real potency, delete most of the kit, whittle it down to Succor, Adlo, Lustrate, Bio, and Broil. Design finished. Beginner healers would be too intimidated by things as complicated as Excog after all.

I already admitted that I am biased in regards to that opinion, but I do think that there should be at least one healer that is accessible to starting players that is easy to play even in the endgame, even if it's no longer true in extreme and savage.

As much as I would hate it, I would accept SCH being turned into the one button boring healer if SE did two things at the same time. The first is make SCH into it's own class that can be picked at character creation (maybe reverse ACN so that it's a healer instead of DPS if not straight out just create a new starting class for SCH). Second would be to make both AST and SGE into complex, fun, and interesting jobs to play with unique healing styles, not just a single gimmick to separate them like WAR and DRK.

If we could get those two things, while I'd cringe pretty badly, losing SCH's old complexity and interesting gameplay forever would be a sacrifice I'd be willing to make.

As much as I love SCH, I'm not that adverse to leaving it behind for greener pastures. The problem is that the only actually green pasture I see nowadays is all marked with red icons. I used to like WAR and DRK on the side, but now both of them have been gutted just like the healers, and GNB hasn't been doing it for me for some reason.

[ty_taurus]

Of course you're willing, you're a Scholar main. I've seen AST and SCH mains perfectly happy to sacrifice WHM on the complexity altar if it allows them to be OP again. Nevermind the fact that the DPS casters don't suffer from this problem, which shows we don't actually need to have an ankle-height skill ceiling baby class in order to keep the role healthy. I'll counter with this admittedly facetious question: How would you feel if the simplistic entry-level job was Scholar, and the three other healers got to enjoy complexity as a consequence of that? Make the fairy heals 200 real potency, delete most of the kit, whittle it down to Succor, Adlo, Lustrate, Bio, and Broil. Design finished. Beginner healers would be too intimidated by things as complicated as Excog after all.

I truly don't believe complexity must equate to performance, nor do I think having an easy-to-play healer means that WHM cannot be complex. The new lily system ShB introduced is already the perfect foundation necessary to create a rewarding healer that has options for complexity, but a much higher safety net.

First and foremost, I believe complexity should come at the cost of DPS contribution regarding healers. How well or not-so-well you perform should directly hit your personal DPS and support contributions, and not so much your ability to heal. For example, I would love to reevaluate SCH's resources to make the faerie gauge your resource for OGCD heals and your Aetherflow your resource for DPS (SE won't do this, but I think it would really help clean up how SCH plays). Aetherflow should be generated in excess from proper use of barriers and support tools that requires planning and understanding of fights to maximize your Aetherflow gains and thus maximize your DPS.

Meanwhile, WHM should get access to more ways they can generate lilies and nourish the blood lily, but still have access to Solace and Rapture, meaning a certain amount of your DPS is practically guaranteed on a casual scale as healing directly rewards you with DPS forgiveness. There's a higher skill ceiling for how you nourish the blood lily outside of your normal lily gains, but a certain amount of it is given to you simply from healing. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling. That's the key. It's easier said then done, of course, but that is a combat designer's job after all.

[Semirhage]

the only actually green pasture I see nowadays is all marked with red icons.

This is correct, and why I've swapped to DPS this expansion. You not only feel like you have a real impact on your party's performance, but your job is actually fun to play. And perhaps even more importantly, becomes more fun to play the better you get at playing it.

Reiterating here what I've said elsewhere. To oversimplify the reason I think healers are as boring as they are in this expansion: Two of the axioms job design operates by are "WHM has to suck" and "All comps have to be viable". If both must be true, then in order to make Suck competitive with non-Suck, you have to make the non-Suck jobs suck. That's the direction we were always headed since Stormblood. There's a weird world WHM operates in where it's got all these seemingly holy writ stupid rules that shackle its job design. It can't have utility. It can't be complex. It has to be newbie-friendly. It has to be so easy to understand that a level 30 Monk could figure out its 80 kit. It can't shield too much, that's not its identity. It can't buff, that's not its identity. It can't do too much personal damage, that'd scare the DPS. It can't have Proshell exclusivity, that might make it "maaaaaaandatory". It can't have Graniteskin, that would be "tooooooooo poooooowerful". It can't have decision making, that's too frustrating for new players.

I've always been of the mind, why don't we just...not do those things? Perhaps it could have an identity that isn't pinned down by all of these things that it's not. Maybe it could be designed in a way that's fun and interesting, where you could technically spam Medica in easy content but you could juggle some buff systems, make some decisions, figure out cool ways to level up my understanding of the class like using Swiftcast to fish for procs on Red Mage that don't actually hurt me if I don't know about them, but can drastically improve my output if I do? Squeeze a bit of frigging fun out of the role. No more of these entirely (or in Scholar's case, almost entirely) passive job gauges. Get a job designer who understands how this game's combat system works and actually likes playing healers. No more of this job design from people who clearly main DPS and design healers like a DPS main who doesn't really care about healing past "keeps me alive".

[Dearche]

...

To be honest, for a few years now, I've thought that the core issue was SE's strict adherence to the holy trinity (well, the holy trinity in general for most games).

By making two of the three roles the cornerstone of the entire party's survival and the third just being the facilitator to getting through content at a decent pace, you're forced into a difficult spot when trying to balance between casuals and veterans. The heavier the burden, the more reluctant for a developer to make the role complex, but in turn it's very difficult to make a simple job fun and exciting to play without raising the difficulty which would lock out lower skilled players.

People get frustrated with wipes, so SE obviously needs to avoid them as much as possible in standard duties, but how do you do that while satisfying healers?

Anyways, maybe a more proper distribution of responsibility when it comes to wipes is what's needed to fix things, but that's something for a more dedicated thread.

Definately though, if we healers were moved to a more support position instead, it could actually fix a lot of things without SE making our base kit more complex and difficult to use for beginners. Imagine if all they did for AST was reduce the card draw CD to 15s? Frankly, that alone might make me switch to AST again and make it my main like back in parts of HW.