Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

Both.

Why does it have to be one or the other?

Well, it's hard to develop at both extremes unless they want certain healer jobs to be the complicated ones.

[Shurrikhan]

Well, it's hard to develop at both extremes unless they want certain healer jobs to be the complicated ones.

Making specific healers "the complicated ones" is almost always problematic. If they're not rewarded for that, they're shunned. If they are, they invite pitchforks from those offended on the behalf of casual players who themselves couldn't possibly see that difference in what they play (or would still be better off with the less complicated option in practice).

More importantly, by what threshold/contrast are they "complicated"?

Compared only to current WHM? Then, to have just a couple "complicated ones," you'd have to leave the rest truncated.


No, generally, it's best to have each and every job be accessible at its core (seemingly "easy" to those doing only easy content) but capable of very high nuance for those who'd seek those optimizations out (i.e., decently "challenging" to those actually challenging themselves).

[Renathras]

Oh then this is where I would disagree. You are one of the core players and it's clear that you are the target audience for these changes.
I don't think there's any point of discussion any longer because simply put, we just simply disagree.

Wait...but...you just said you agree with that...? o.O

Regardless, it's probably the best solution, as it WOULD address different people's needs. Note that I'm not against a change in combat model and so on, but I'm not in favor of a massive over arching and all at once overhaul. Those tend to end poorly for everyone.

If healers are made too complicated then it would drive more away from Healing. A lot of players don't Heal even when it's not too hard to Heal in FF14.

Agreed.

For all people say that Healing is so braindead easy, many people don't think so and so don't take up the role.

Per your example, Group B not asking for a change and the change being made for them aren't mutually exclusive.

Right, but that's my point: The change was made for a subgroup of A, by group A's request. It wasn't made for group B at all. If the change as made for ACTUAL casuals, it would have been just removing the buffs entirely.

the perception from the dev team is what matters here.

Can you find a direct quote from the Dev team where they said "we did this for casual players"? I don't think that you can...

I do agree that the problem has been misidentified and the Devs have taken several steps in the wrong directions. Off the top of my head:

1) Big spikes of damage + long downtimes in between them.
2) Tons of healing in healer oGCDs.
3) Tons of healer oGCDs in general.
4) Fights too movement focused (this isn't just a Healer issue; BLM is now more mobile than RDM because IT HAS TO BE)
5) Tons of healing from Tanks.
6) Tons of healing from DPS.
7) Tons of mitigation from DPS.
8) That MUCH of that healing and mitigation costs DPSers and Tanks nothing (special shout-out to Clemency and Vercure actually costing damage to use, though they're still not SUPER MP limited; contrast Curing Waltz, Phoenix, Nascent for no trade at all)
9) Little unavoidable damage/damage telegraphs largely being pass/fail mechanics that outright kill or inflict a debuff a Healer can do nothing about if failed.
10) The Healer Jobs are all (arguably) near identical; especially in their DPS kits, but many of the heals have a 1-to-1 or near 1-to-1, meaning if people don't like the way current Healer Jobs play, there's no alternative to them that isn't "play a DPS/Tank". Having the Healer Jobs be more distinct would greatly help with that since people would have an outlet for something different (this also isn't just a Healer issue; Tanks are suffering from this one in a lot of ways right now, too, and there's a thread in the Tank forum of people talking/complaining about how the Tanks all feel too similar.)

More on point 8, as it's the big culprit a lot of the time with the 1/0 Healer clears: A TON of this healing is "for free". Back in ARR/HW, if a PLD wanted to heal the party, they could. They had Cure 1 as a Cross-Class option. But using it was a pretty big loss of damage and agro, AND it cost MP which they needed for Flash if they were reducing their agro by engaging in Cure 1 spam. Needless to say, Cure 1 spam was relatively weak AND only considered in dire situations. It was not a go-to that could be worked into the rotation seemlessly like it can be today. And Clemency is one of the BETTER (that is, lesser offenders) in this situation.

WAR - the barbarian with an inner beast - is able to HEAL PARTY MEMBERS. When did that start making sense to people? "To angry to die" is one thing, but "so angry, it un-dies other people" is quite another. When did it make sense for WARs to become party healers in lore or mechanics? And that's before getting to the utter ridiculouslness of WAR using Bloodwhetting/Nascent and then AOEing 8+ enemies for 25 sec Benediction spam for themselves (and a party member) for 8 seconds. DNC has a 600 potency (two 300 potency) AOE party heals that cost no damage. Sure, it's on a 2 min CD, but its 1.5x Indoms for the cost of nothing other than the CD to use them. WAR and GNB both get pretty powerful heals on a 25 sec CD for a party member or themselves, and in WAR's case, or BOTH. GNB has a 90 sec 2 charge Regen, though that's not nearly as big an offender. All the Tanks have pretty strong self-heals just baked into their rotations. SMN has a big party heal baked into its rotation.

Clemency and Vercure are the only exceptions here, and they're probably still a little TOO powerful (contrast HW Cure 1 400 potency with Clemency's 1000, and that was MIND based curing; Clemency scales off of STR and Weapon Damage), but at least there's a strong tradeoff there, even if it can be made up by having a 5th DPS. And it's been a while, but I feel like the first iterations of Clemency cost more. Like 4,000 MP in ShB more, and probably more for lower levels (back before MP pools were fixed at 10k), meaning you could only use them so many times straight. Oh, and PLD didn't have self-healing baked into its core rotation NOR additional healing from Shelltron.

Then we get into mitigation. Every Job has at least one, several have two, some have three. With the right comp, you could have 16 mitigations easily with no Healers, and several of those will be 1 min meaning up twice every 2 minutes. That's something like 20-24 mitigations per 2 min time period in a party with zero Healers, meaning the party can mitigate literally everything without even needing a Healer around for that, Barrier or otherwise. Hell, some of the DPS have more party mitigation than WHM does!

Well, it's hard to develop at both extremes unless they want certain healer jobs to be the complicated ones.

That's honestly probably the best call at this point. We used to even have that system in this very game. If they leave the DPS alone, it won't be a problem. The people saying they're bored now can work harder to get the same result so they aren't bored. And if they all swap to the easiest Healer because it's the path of least resistance, then they can no longer claim they don't have an option.

The other thing is to do it with the content - which in theory should already be happening. As people have noted, P8S requires more healing than TOP does, and definitely more healing than P5 normal or Lapis Manalis.

...

No, it's really not. Firstly, because not being rewarded doesn't lead to things being shunned; some of the world first clears were with DRK and BLM when they were super hard but didn't offer any rewarding competitive advantage, the people playing them simply said "This is the Job I like, so it's what I'm playing." If it does comparable DPS, it won't be shunned in anymore than Jobs are now. What gets shuns is when things do LESS than comparable DPS.

Compare SMN to BLM. One is considered complicated by the playerbase while the other is considered braindead. There are quite a few metrics to determine "complexity".

Finally, while it's good for all Jobs to be accessible at their core, it's NOT always good for them all to have "very high nuance". You run into one of two problems. On the one hand, the people not doing the nuance are not able to clear content, which causes your "shunned" problem. On the other end, if the gap between mastering the nuance and not is small, then the high end people complain they aren't being rewarded enough. Granted, they're going to do this no matter, what, but the point is that this doesn't fix that problem.

The best solution is to have the Jobs actually be different and offer multiple skill levels.

In 5.X, SMN > BLM >> RDM in terms of complexity and difficulty, but they were all brought to content. Sometimes it's fine for some class or Job in a game to be "easy".

[GaiusDrakon]

In 5.X, SMN > BLM [...] difficulty

I wonder why anyone takes you seriously and is responding to you seriously

How can someone say this unironically lmao

Considering I have considerable "game-know-how"

lol

[Elissar]

In 5.X, SMN > BLM >> RDM in terms of complexity and difficulty

[Payotz]

Wait...but...you just said you agree with that...? o.O

Regardless, it's probably the best solution, as it WOULD address different people's needs. Note that I'm not against a change in combat model and so on, but I'm not in favor of a massive over arching and all at once overhaul. Those tend to end poorly for everyone.

I uhh... didn't? This whole entire time I've been talking about "breaking the bones" type of overhaul, and you clearly disagree with that.
And I think I've been pretty consistent in my messaging.

It's because they've all been designed into having stronger heals. The overhaul that is "needed" is to make heals a lot weaker. Like a WHOLE lot weaker. Like Cure 3 being 150 potency and only affecting 4 people around you, weaker.

I'm sorry I have trouble understanding what your argument is.
Are you arguing that they don't need to overhaul content to fit the healer design because a single GCD heal can cover most of the healing?
"Nothing at all needs to be changed" is not the goal for an overhaul. If anything, I'm arguing that the "overhaul" that the game needs requires breaking the healer design that the game has relied on for a very long time.

I'm arguing that there needs to be a fundamental redesign with how healing works.

I'm not talking about just numbers. I'm talking about how the healing abilites would function.

I'm talking forcing Succor to not heal and just do very weak barriers. I'm talking making Medica and Medica II type skill only function with the 3 nearest players around the healer. I would make the highest potency heal to just be 200 potency. I'm talking deleting 80% of the OGCD healing abilities in the game.

I'm also thinking about deleting the 2.5 GCD lock for GCDs for healers and turning the recast time and cast times to 1.5 seconds. I'm talking the fact that healing gcds are so few and precious that you have to figure out who to heal first.

I'm talking every 30% mitigation skill in the game to be deleted. I'm talking the Tank passives not having built-in mitigation, rather they HAVE to do their rotation perfectly to keep their 10% mitigation up. I'm talking Tenacity actually being needed in your gear cause the auto attacks of every boss in the game actually putting a physical vuln up on you. I'm talking deleting every invuln in the game.

When I say overhaul, I really meant overhaul. Like actual breaking the bones type of stuff that is never gonna happen in FFXIV.

And a LOT of old content needs to be reworked to fit that design, and that's not gonna happen in FFXIV either.

Just so there's no confusion.

I do not think Square Enix's currently philosophy for healer design is working. A whole overhaul, rework and a completely different perspective in healer design is needed for healer's to be engaging in both healing and dpsing.

No amount of "add more DPS buttons" would make healers fun, because adding more DPS buttons would just make DPSing fun. What the game needs is to break the whole foundation of Healers, implement weaker heals in a rotation that would open up to stronger heals, just like my example for Disc Priest.

No amount of pussyfooting around is gonna fix it. Just take one big giant hammer and destroy everything and rebuild it from the ground up taking lessons from other games that actually made healing fun. No "reasonable changes". No "incremental changes". Nope, just take a massive hammer and smash everything.

Do I think it's a good idea? No. Why? Simply put, the core playerbase would hate these changes. The mere mention of it would make them panic. There'd be riots in reddit and twitter and every PF listing imaginable. It would alienate everyone who got used to how easy healing everything from Dungeons to Expert to Normal to Extreme to Savage and Ultimate. People would quit cause their precious role has been slaughtered in half for something unrecognizable, just like SE did with Physical Ranged.

So Square is just gonna sit on this design for healers, because it's the most safe, and they can't risk alienating their only core players because they've driven out most of the ones who are looking for actual healing in a video game, and that's exactly what they should do. The ship has sailed. There is no way they can change the core of healer design now. They have no choice but to keep putting up mitigation checks.

---

Can you find a direct quote from the Dev team where they said "we did this for casual players"? I don't think that you can...

Also I know I wasn't being asked but here you go buddy.


God I remember being so mad about this one. Good times.

[Renathras]

I wonder why anyone takes you seriously and is responding to you seriously

How can someone say this unironically lmao

5.X, you potato, not 6.X.

You know, when SMN had a 2 min cyclic rotation with various oGCDs and you had to ensure you had 4 Ruin IVs for Bahamut and spam other stuff like Addle in there because it counted as an "attack" and would trigger another Wyrmwave? When you had to strategically delay DWT/FBT by ~5 sec to keep things aligned and you played around Tri-Disaster refreshing your buffs AND DWT/FBT refreshing IT so you only had to hardcast Bio/Miasma once per 2 minutes? Where you had both Bane and Fester, where you had 8 total Egi-Assaults in a 2 minute time frame and used those to generate Ruin IVs, and you avoided overcapping THOSE while ensuring you had 4 of them for Bahamut, which was a separate button from DWT, and where you used the other Ruin IVs and Egi-Assaults in your cycle for movement uptime?

SMN was considered comparable or even harder than BLM at the time, which is why it doing about as much damage as BLM while having a Raise WASN'T seen as a huge problem since most people understood that the high difficulty meant that SMNs weren't often doing that full damage and IF THEY WERE, they were good enough they deserved it.

They made it slightly easier at some point (normalizing the Wyrmwaves), but I think that was in one of the patches, don't remember which. They also reduced SMN DoT potencies because they were surpassing BLM by a decent amount at one point (5.3, I'm going to say...)

Just because you don't actually know the game's history or mechanics doesn't mean we're all as ignorant.

Go ahead, question my "game-know-how" again as you say something absurd again.

If you're going to attack people, don't attack people for YOU being wrong.

(Personally, I found SMN easier, but they were considered pretty comparable and more difficult to wrap one's head around to a lot of people at the time.)

...

See above.

EDIT:

I uhh... didn't?

Maybe I misunderstood this exchange?

I do think it would be neat to see different variations on Healers, like SGE being a Disc Priest was honestly what I was thinking when they announced it. The problem is FFXIV's fight/encounter design and balance don't allow for it well.

...that's what I've been saying this whole entire time? I thought we had a mutual understanding that this was the point you were arguing against.

You quoted me saying I thought it would be neat to see different variations on Healers (Jobs) and I mentioned SGE being more "heals by doing damage" focused (Disc Priest) as an example, and you responded with "...that's what I've been saying this whole entire time".

I'm sorry for the confusion, but...that made me think you were saying that you agreed with the idea of changing some of the Healer Jobs up like that. If that isn't what you meant, apologies for the confusion, but maybe you can understand how that led to said confusion.

Just so there's no confusion.

I do not think Square Enix's currently philosophy for healer design is working.

I also agree it's not working, though I think the solution is to employ moderate, targeted, changes that get at the various problems I outlined in my last post...as...opposed to a whole overhaul.

(...though perhaps this depends on what one defines as an "overhaul", but from your replies to my posts so far, it seems what I've called for you don't define as an overhaul, so...working with that assumption/definition for now.)

No amount of "add more DPS buttons" would make healers fun, because adding more DPS buttons would just make DPSing fun. What the game needs is to break the whole foundation of Healers, implement weaker heals in a rotation that would open up to stronger heals, just like my example for Disc Priest.

For ONE Job, sure. For all Jobs, no.

One of the problems I forgot (and will now add) to my list above:

All the Healers are the same.

Our healing kits are a bit distinct, but largely do the same thing just in somewhat different ways, but our DPS kits are darn near IDENTICAL. What this means is that if someone doesn't like that...they have no alternative. It's that or go play DPS/Tank. A fantastic relief valve there would be if some of them played more differently. WHM playing just like it does today wouldn't be a problem if SCH had its SB damage kit for those who want that level of engagement.

It's why I promote the "4 Healers Model" so much. Having one Healer like now is fine. Having all four? Not so much. Having one Healer like SB SCH is fine. Or one like SB AST. Or a Disc Priest SGE.
...but not all of them. Why even HAVE 4 if they're all going to be the same?

Indeed, even RIGHT NOW, this is one reason people cite for liking SCH (Energy Drain optimization) and AST (Arcanum powerweaving burst and "keeps me busy" feeling), and why people who DON'T like any form of complexity constantly pick WHM, despite the others seemingly being of a similar difficulty on paper. Even with Healers being as overlapped as they are now, those distinctions make some stand out for people. Better to make them more distinct than just shift them all to some new spot where they're still dropped all on top of each other's toes.

Again, there's no issue with WHM being like it is right now. The issue's when all 4 Healer Jobs are.

We see this with Tank complaints, too, where Tanks are often complaining how their Jobs are too similar, especially WAR and DRK. It's not a problem that 1 Job is a certain way, it's a problem when every Job in that Role is that same way.

Also I know I wasn't being asked but here you go buddy.

"This alignment will make it easier to coordinate timings for burst damage in high-end duties, as well as assist with trying a new Job with a similar rotation cycle."

Where does it say "casual players" in there?

[Payotz]

Maybe I misunderstood this exchange?

Oh yeah nah. I was agreeing with the "Content needs to be adjusted" part. Not the job thing part. Since that was one of my original arguments.

I also agree it's not working, though I think the solution is to employ moderate, targeted, changes that get at the various problems I outlined in my last post...as...opposed to a whole overhaul.

And again, this is why I don't think discussions can continue. I do not think "moderate, targeted" pussyfooting changes can fix it. Hell, it's not even anywhere near enough.
That's honestly my whole entire point.

For ONE Job, sure. For all Jobs, no.

What are you talking about? Every healer needs an overhaul. Hell tanks too for that matter.
Both tanks and healers need a fundamental redesign. A massive overhaul. No amount of "small incremental patches" will help them.

The design is fucked. Have the devs do the ARR thing and play and study other games. Then have them break every tank and healer down and build them back up.
Start with the healers first and then the tanks and then after that, maybe physical ranged.

"This alignment will make it easier to coordinate timings for burst damage in high-end duties, as well as assist with trying a new Job with a similar rotation cycle."

Where does it say "casual players" in there?

You just glossed over it. Let me help you out.

We understand that some of you would prefer jobs to be designed around more complex playstyles, similar to how they were in Heavensward, but that’s not what we’re going for. When both the jobs and content are challenging, it can become harder to play. We’ll maintain the current direction we’ve taken since 5.x, which seems to be the most accessible for the majority of players in the long run.

And majority of the players in FFXIV are? Casual.
And so with that context, we can read the following lines

Many jobs will have the recast of their primary offensive abilities aligned to 60 or 120 seconds. This alignment will make it easier to coordinate timings for burst damage in high-end duties, as well as assist with trying a new job with a similar rotation cycle. However, do note that not all abilities will be adjusted to 60 or 120 second timers; for instance, the black mage ability Ley Lines will still have a recast time of 90 seconds.

So they dumbed down the job design and homogenized the cooldowns just to make "High-End duties" (that are supposed to be for "hardcores" btw) easier.
And they all made it easier for the majority of players .

And the majority of players are Casual.

And before you say anything, there is no mention of hardcore players on that post .

[Renathras]

Oh yeah nah. I was agreeing with the "Content needs to be adjusted" part. Not the job thing part.

Fair enough.

And again, this is why I don't think discussions can continue.

Discussions can always continue as long as one person says they won't continue with them. Especially if the decision isn't binary/all-or-nothing. It's not like an atheist arguing with a theist (even then, there's a neutral ground of agnosticism). It's not "no change at all" vs "every change possible". Most people already agree some changes need to happen. What those are and how extensive they should be are active topics of debate. I won't hold you to the fire on it, though, more just saying it's entirely possible. The alternative is for you to just give up (since, as you say, SE likely wants to leave things alone) and accept things as they are. But that doesn't sound great to me, personally...

What are you talking about? Every healer needs an overhaul. Hell tanks too for that matter.

Not really, no. I outlined the 10 overall problems, but the big main issues of the situation as a whole are that encounters deal damage at too regular an interval and that oGCD healing and passive/incidental healing and mitigation from Tanks and DPS is more than sufficient for encounters given the right comp, and even given the wrong comp, oGCD healing from Healers is too strong negating the use of GCD heals that actually lean into things like resource management or disrupt spamming their basic nuke over and over again. (WHM has slightly less of an issue with this due to Afflatus abilities, but it's still there.)

The first HAS to be changed. And for people saying "we can't change encounters!" or "encounters have always been this way!", that's absolutely false, as one can tell just by comparing ARR Coils encounters (or even Extreme Trials) or HW Alexander ones to today's encounters. Can you imagine a modern encounter where a DPSer has to give up DPSing for a bit to be a Gorilla? Encounters have changed and continue to change, and were not always this way. So that is a baseline that has to happen, as anything else is just papering over the problem with band-aids and not actually fixing anything.

The second doesn't require a complete rework of the Healer kits themselves, though some would need to change more than others. WHM's kit has been remarkably similar since ARR. One less DoT (Aero 3 wasn't in ARR and Thunder wasn't Cross-Class after patch 2.1), the same basic set of GCD heals. The main changes are that some of its extra abilities were given to the Role as a whole (Lucid Dreaming/Shroud of Saints, Repose, debateably Esuna but that's more just a name since SCH and later AST had their own that was identical). But the core Cure 1, Cure 2, Cure 3, Medica, Medica 2, and Regen have stayed the same this entire time. Benediction and Presence of Mind (and arguably Divine Seal since Temperance exists), too. What changed was it got Assize, Asylum, and Tetragrammaton, and later the Lillies, though the Lilies are just Cure 2 and Medica by another name that still break up Glarespam (did an analysis of this in the Healer forum, but the short version is, WHM actually casts its Glare less than the other Healers do theirs...ironically, given then community name of "Glarespam"). The only significant changes here are that the oGCD kit needs to be altered to be weaker, and WHM doesn't have a lot of those for it to matter too much. On the opposite end of the spectrum, SGE has a ridiculous amount of oGCD healing for a not-even-Pure Healer, especially since the entire design of the Job practically screams for its healing to be generated via attack spells primarily.

...so while some do require some work, others do not, and total reworks aren't necessary, at least for all of them.

The third thing requires reworking the Tank and DPS kits, not the Healer kits.

Both tanks and healers need a fundamental redesign. A massive overhaul.

You likely won't get universal agreement on that...

Start with the healers first and then the tanks and then after that, maybe physical ranged.

You mean BRD? MCH and DNC seem to be where their players enjoy them and they aren't really content breaking other than DNC's Curing Waltz when mixed with other DPS/Tank heals and mitigation.

And the majority of players...

...doing high-end content, are not casual.

And before you say anything, there is no mention of hardcore players on that post .

Correct: Which is why midcores would be the correct reading.

[ty_taurus]

SMN was considered comparable or even harder than BLM at the time, which is why it doing about as much damage as BLM while having a Raise WASN'T seen as a huge problem since most people understood that the high difficulty meant that SMNs weren't often doing that full damage and IF THEY WERE, they were good enough they deserved it.

Whoa whoa whoa, hold on a second. Since when do you believe that someone performing a difficult job optimally was deserving of high damage output?

We had a conversation not long ago about the concept of an optional auto-battle system that could allow the designers to expand on healer DPS gameplay comfortably without alienating people who aren't interested in healer DPS gameplay as the Auto-battle system would allow them to have their rotation-lites condensed onto one button, but you were against this concept specifically for the reason that someone playing their DPS gameplay manually would likely have a higher damage output than someone using auto-battle as they would be more capable of adapting to nuance, like waiting for party buffs or using spells for mobility. You even specified that you felt players using auto-battle should deal more damage than players who don't use it. But now here, you're saying someone who works harder to play their job perfectly deserves that high output? What made you change your mind?