The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ty_taurus]

I guess that's my take on it, anyway.

If I may, let me expand on a few things that I think will help communicate my points a little clearer as I think I didn't communicate them that effectively.

On the topic of the Alphinaud trailer and Red Mage, I wasn't trying to compare the two, just using them both as an example of the kind of feeling I want to have when I look at the actual animations my character is performing. Yes, the gameplay is very different to a cinematic trailer, but the trailer gives of an impression--a feeling of what Sage looks like. Alisaie does this as well briefly for the RDM, and I think the actual gameplay of RDM does visually showcase the type of feeling she elicits in the trailer effectively. I also like SGE's animation, but I want my character to be fluidly fighting enemies , not just using the bug zapper over and over. Think of it this way... What looks cooler in a fighting game like Street Fighter or Tekken, a character spamming their jab, or a character pulling off one of their signature combos? That's not to say it should be a literal combo in the sense of a 1-2-3. You mentioned something like a RDM lite or a SMN lite would be perfectly fine, and I'll add BLM as well who does like to press their buttons in 3s. I just don't want to bust out the bug zapper for like 70% of a fight in most of this game's content. Day one alliance day is definitely a break from the norm, and I did heal that, but of course that's the exception, not the rule.

As for the example of "Would you prefer Quake/Tornado/Flood/Glare," it didn't have to be that specifically. I just meant, would you specifically not feel it would look better while you play if instead of twirling and glaring and twirling and glaring and twirling and glaring... that your character would cycle through a few different casting animations and spell effects of whatever visual style so long as that stayed on the same filler button?

As for the WHM concept, there were two propositions in that post. The first one was just focusing on the lily system suggestion...

- Budding Afflatus would be a GCD spell every 30 seconds with 2 charges that generates you a lily and nourishes the blood lily. This replaces the automatic generation of lilies and cuts into your offensive spell usage since it replaces an instance of Glare. All healing spells will consume lilies while you have them to nourish the blood lily when used, but can still be used without nourishing the blood lily when you have no lilies. This would have you generating lilies every 30 seconds manually. Solace and Rapture are just instant cast upgrades to Cure II and Medica whenever you have lilies, but they revert when you have no lilies (not necessary, but the animations are nicer).
- Water/Banish would be a GCD spell every 30 seconds with no charges that deals a little more damage than Glare and decreases the cooldown on Budding Afflatus by 10 seconds.

The question is, would you personally feel comfortable with a change like that, where your DPS does not earn you more healing, it just increases how often your healing will refund your DPS?

The second suggestion at the bottom of the other post was about taking this concept and building out WHM's DPS rotation more while giving the player the option to simplify.

- In this example, the idea of Budding Afflatus stays the same.
- Water instead becomes the precursor to Assize (with the suggestion that you do the damage first and then reactivate to heal)
- Dia becomes AoE with falloff.
- Afflatus Misery is still there.
- Tempest is added as a new stronger spell than Glare. Every 4 casts of any spell enables 1 use of Tempest.
- Soul Drain is a new spell that is half as strong as Glare, but restores MP and makes your next spell instant cast. If used after Tempest, the damage is increased to be the same as Glare's.
- When Holy is used after Tempest, it decreases the cooldown on Budding Afflatus by 5 seconds and is also DPS neutral.

Now, as the player, you can set these skills individually on your hotbar, and you also have the option to assign a PVP style auto combo to your hotbar if you prefer instead. This defaults to Glare, changes to Tempest when Tempest is available, and then goes to Soul Drain after Tempest before returning to Glare. So if you were to set the auto combo to your hotbar, pressing 1 1 1 1 1 1 would result in your character performing Glare > Glare > Glare > Glare > Tempest > Soul Drain. You would still need to use Dia, Assize, and Afflatus Misery independently, and if you want to combo into Holy, you have to do so manually, but the auto combo gets you very far if you choose to use that instead of setting each action separately.

I can't, of course, speak to how likely these concepts are or how the developers would view this in contrast to their goals with healing, but regardless, I'm more curious if you feel these options would be a compromise you could get behind.

[Renathras]

If I may, let me expand on a few things...

Hm...

I guess I don't consider healers like fighters, per se? Like Ryu from Street Fighter or even Sora from Smash aren't mages. When I think of a mage's duel, I think of something different. There are wizard duels and then there are mage duels. Wizard duels are things like Merlin from the Disney Sword in the Stone movie where he and she are swapping between different types of animals (and she cheats by using additional magic to go invisible) which he wins without killing her by becoming a germ and making her sick. Another example is Dumbledor vs Voldemort from I think it was the 4th Harry Potter movie. Wizard duels a contests of magic, but not in a direct contest of powerful spells. They also include a lot of trying to out-think the opponent and clever use of magics such as Dumbledor turning the flying shards of glass into more or less harmless sand.

On the other hand, when it comes to mages, I tend to think more an exchange of power. Which...would probably not be realistic (they'd just incinerate each other unless their spells contested somehow). I think more like this: https://youtu.be/OVXSWE7KE68?t=535 Or not as good of a "mage" example, but in Dragonball where the fighters contest with their energy projectiles in a more brute force contest of power.

In a very general sense, I consider mages more "crude but effective" magic users vs wizards "masters of the arcane arts" type magic users. A mage wouldn't have a spell to turn glass into sand, for example, or to turn into a germ. They would have Flare or Holy. Large, powerful, brute force spells that "do the job". And likewise, mages involved in healing are more combat medics whereas wizards that chose that route would be more akin to magically enhanced doctors or churgeons. (Which, contrary to the "does damage that heals; with lasers" SGE gameplay, is the actual LORE of SGE...a mix of doctor, wizard, and researcher.)

A Black Mage (non-FFXIV, more general fantasy) isn't cycling through hundreds of spells. They're probably casting the same powerful ones multiple times to batter enemy defenses and break them down. FF1 Black Mage/Wizard late game is mostly casting rank 3 Fire/Ice/Bolt spells (enemy weakness or just whichever you like the look of if there's no weakness to exploit). FFTactics, same story. Less wizard, more mage.

And I suppose that's the way I think of healers in games like this. Yeah, I'd think it silly if MNK just used Bootshine over and over again. Because MNK is a fighter. Combos and mixing up attacks is what I would expect. I might even expect more of a wizard style of combat from a SCH.

Conversely, I would expect more of a mage style of combat from a WHM or BLM or even to a point a RDM, though I'd expect RDM's to use slightly less "brute force" magics in favor of mixing the two schools they have access to together with some martial prowess. Likewise, I consider PLD's a type of mage (as opposed to wizard) in that they are much more focused on their martial skills, but their magic is straight and to the point - a brute force heal, a brute force attack spell, and a brute force area attack spell centered on their person, since a Paladin can be expected to be in the thick of battle and have plenty of foes immediately around them to strike with it.

So I guess in this sense...I don't get tired of the same spell mostly being cast over and over, with a build up to a bigger spell from time to time (Misery) since that more or less fits the class fantasy for me for WHM and to a point for SGE (since I tend to think combat doctors learn a few basic combat techniques, but don't spend a lot of time with it; sorta like a Jedi Consular with Form 6 or the Paladin case, just with their non-combat spell knowledge being focused on a breadth of healing magics rather than swordplay). SCH I feel should have a bit more branching from it, but I also really like Broil 4's cast animation and sound effect, so it doesn't bother me as much as it otherwise might. But again, I think of SCH more like a wizard than a mage in this paradigm/using these definitions.

Another example is BLM. I felt BLM was much more a Black Mage in ARR. Now it's kind of a weird wizard hybrid since a lot of its spells are high power in game mechanics, but not really Black Mage spells. Other FF games, you don't see Black Mages with things like Xenoglossy as spells. Normally the ultimate Black Magic spell is either Flare or Ultima. Some games have more utility spells like Teleport/Warp (when not White Mage spells) or Frog, and stuff like Drain(HP)/Osmose(MP), but they tend to cast more the "big three" of Fire/Blizzard/Thunder 1-2-3-4, and they usually are the ones with Tornado/Break/etc as very high level spells.

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Honestly, my only issue with WHM casting, aesthetically speaking, is that Holy is supposed to be the ultimate offensive White Magic...and it's weaker than Glare. And point blank AOE. Holy should be Misery, basically. And Holy-Misery should be a full cast SPELL, not an instant cast.

But I got over that a while back and just kind of roll with it, though it has bugged me in FFXIV I guess the whole time, lol

So no, I don't get bored with it, so I wouldn't really feel more engaged with WHM having multiple animations/don't specifically feel it would look better, since I think the way it looks right now is more or less in line with the class fantasy. /shrug It is kinda funny how different two people's perceptions of a thing can be.

[Renathras]

For the concepts:

First Concept: If I understand correctly, you're saying no Lilies are generated automatically. The player has to hit a Rhizomata-like button every 30 seconds. It's a GCD that does no damage or anything. It just generates a Lily and nothing else, so it's kind of an button to press just for the sake of pressing (that is, you're replacing something automatic with a forced manual upkeep...). When activated, Cure/Medica spells become instant cast and, when used, generate 1/3rd a Misery. you then introduce a second button that has no charges and must be used on CD or the player will be punished with reduced damage output. Pressing it on CD makes your Rhizomata spell 20 sec instead of 30 sec, and it's a second forced manual upkeep button you must press or your damage will tank as your Misery drifts away from buff windows causing the gap between those who do it and those who do not to widen considerably.

I'm...not sure that's a good idea. In effect (not trying to be blunt, just my take) you're removing two buttons to replace with two uncessary upkeep buttons that players need to set two dipping birds on their keyboard to press every 30 seconds or their performance suffers, but the buttons themselves don't do anything interesting other than one is an attack spell that exists just to prevent you from drifting outside of burst windows and the other exists just to be pressed every 30/20 seconds because...uh...........pressing a button that doesn't do anything that isn't already automatic now is...fun...? o.O That is (not trying to be a jerk about it), Lilies are automatically generated now with no input, but the input you suggest does that...and nothing more. It doesn't generate healing (directly), it doesn't generate damage (directly), it doesn't generate mitigation, it...just generates a resource. And while such abilities exist in game, they're all oGCDs, I think. Probably for the reason people don't feel pressing a GCD to just let them do other things is fun..?

Instead of one upkeep spell (Dia) and an upkeep self-buff oGCD (Presence of Mind) that I need to keep up with, you've doubled the number I need to manage here...

But I think the bigger problem is the rotation doesn't work out. You want to be able to use Budding every 20 seconds, which is the point of Banish, but they'll get stuck synced to each other during the fight, I believe. I'll walk you through it here to show you what I mean.

Fight starts:
T = 0.0 - Budding - generate 1 Lily (spend it whenever) (CD refresh at 30.0)
T = 2.5 - Banish (CD refresh at 32.5) (Budding CD refresh now at 20.0)
T = 5.0 - Dia (expires at 35.0)
T = 7.5 -17.5 - Glare (1x Cure/Medica somewhere in here: Misery 1/3) - 5 casts
T = 20.0 - Budding - generate 1 Lily (spend it whenever) (CD refresh at 50.0)
T = 22.5-30.0 - Glare (1x Cure/Medica somewhere in here: Misery 2/3) - 4 casts
T = 32.5 - Banish (CD refresh at 62.5) (Budding CD refresh now at 40.0)
T = 32.5 - Glare (22.5-30.0 Cure/Medica could go here instead: Misery 2/3) - 1 cast
T = 35.0 - Dia (expires at 65.0)
T = 37.5 - Glare (22.5-30.0 Cure/Medica could go here instead: Misery 2/3) - 1 cast
T = 40.0 - Budding - generate 1 Lily (spend it whenever) (CD refresh at 70.0)
T = 42.5-57.5 - Glare (1x Cure/Medica somewhere in here: Misery 3/3) (Misery may also be cast here) - 8 casts
T = 60.0 - Misery may be cast here if not already done so. If not...Glare. (Problem! Banish is not off CD until the next GCD. Budding has 10 sec of CD remaining, meaning it is now drifting and the Banish reduction will be partly wasted!)
T = 62.5 - Banish (CD refresh at 92.5) (Budding CD now off CD with 5.0 sec wasted Banish reduction by the time it can be cast next GCD)
T = 65.0 - Budding - generate 1 Lily (spend it whenever) (CD refresh at 95.0) (Problem! Dia has now expired and not been refreshed!)
T = 67.5 - Dia (expires at 97.5)
T = 70.0-92.5 - Glare (1x Cure/Medica somewhere in here: Misery 4/3!!) (Misery must also be cast here BEFORE the Cure/Medica to avoid overcapping) - 9 casts (Problem! Budding is not off CD and is drifting. Banish is not off CD to shorten Budding's CD. Misery is at risk of overcapping.)
T = 92.5 - Banish (CD refresh at 122.5) (Budding CD now off CD with 10.0 sec wasted Banish reduction by the time it can be cast next GCD; the two are now in sync)
T = 95.0 - Budding - generate 1 Lily (spend it whenever) (CD refresh at 125.0) (Problem! Budding will not be off CD again until into the burst window. While that Misery may be fit within, this drift will continue over the course of the fight until it is outside of the window.)
T = 97.5 - Dia (expires at 127.5)
T = 100-120 - Glare (1x Cure/Medica somewhere in here: Misery 2/3) - 5 casts
T = 122.5 [Burst window starts] - Banish (CD refresh at 152.5) (Budding CD now off CD with 10.0 sec wasted Banish reduction by the time it can be cast next GCD; the two remain in sync, and will for the remainder of the fight. Only 2 Buddings per minute now.)
T = 125.0 - Budding - generate 1 Lily (spend it whenever) (CD refresh at 155.0) (From here on, only two Lilies will be generated per 60 min of the fight for the remainder of the fight.)
T = 127.5 - Dia (expires at 157.5)
T = 130-140 - For the remainder of the burst window, the player will need to cast 1 Cure/Medica (whether or not needed) to get in a Misery, and then filler with Glare (~5 casts to do all of this in); Misery 3/3, 0/3 once cast.
T = 142.5-150.0 - Glare (Cure/Medica cannot be cast here without a DPS loss, as it needed to be cast in the 130-140 window to ensure Misery under party buffs)
T = 152.5 - Banish (CD refresh at 182.5) (Budding CD now off CD with 10.0 sec wasted Banish reduction by the time it can be cast next GCD; the two remain in sync, and will for the remainder of the fight. Only 2 Buddings per minute now.)
T = 155.0 - Budding - generate 1 Lily (spend it whenever) (CD refresh at 185.0) (From here on, only two Lilies will be generated per 60 min of the fight for the remainder of the fight.)
T = 157.5 - Dia (expires at 187.5) (On the plus side, Dia will not further drift as long as the player uses Banish and Budding on CD)
T = 160-180 - Glare (1x Cure/Medica somewhere in here: Misery 1/3) - 9 casts

...I think at this point, it actually settles into a static loop of Banish, Budding, Dia, Glarespam with a Cure/Medica in it (once per 30 seconds), Misery (once per 90 seconds), and any Cure/Medica cast outside of the 1 per 30 seconds is a DPS loss.

So basically, WHM as it is today, but worse, and with extra steps to achieve a weaker output result in both healing and damage...

My first thought was that, collectively, Banish knocks off 40 sec from all of Budding's CD's over 2 minutes (from 4 uses of Banish), which means instead of taking 3 minutes/180 seconds to generate 6 Lilies and 2 Miseries, you take 140 seconds, or 2 minutes and 20 seconds, making you drift off of burst windows. You'd either have to hold the first Misery 40 seconds or accept not using Misery in the 2 minute burst window. Even if we put in the 5th Banish at 2 min, that makes this 2 min 10 seconds. By the 4 minute window, we'd still be off (either 4 min 20 seconds then OR 4 min 30 seconds, I'd have to play this out all the way to be sure)...

...except as far as I worked it out, they actually fall in sync, and from then on for the rest of the fight will remain in sync, limiting you to 2 Lilies per minute and forcing Misery to drift out of burst.

Now, you can do some gigabrain stuff to try and address this. For example, you can delay the 122.5 Banish until after Budding. That's at least 2 GCDs, though, and that would drift Dia, so you'd need to wait until after the Dia, having Banish sit off CD for 7.5 seconds (3 GCDs), a DPS loss. You'd need to periodically do this, kind of like Leap Year having an extra day every 4 years to reset. You would also have a weird loss of healing flexibility in the burst window trying to fit Misery there and then not having the instant cast/damage neutral heal as an option after that point. This would make DPS neutral healing far more rigid than it is today during parts of the rotation. I'm also not sure if Budding would be a DPS loss or not. You're using a GCD that does no damage to have another GCD that does no damage and generates 1/4th of a Glare. Or...something like that, anyway. If all the ability potencies were what they are today, this would be a very clear DPS loss. You could backload some of that potency into Banish to make up for it, but it would have to be significant as you also have to remember Banish is drifting over the course of the fight having to sit on CD at various points.

You can't really include time 0 and time 120 because you have the extra use at time 0 when everything's off CD at the start of the fight. It may be me being half-asleep and about to go to bed, but I don't think this would consistently line up with the 2 minute meta even with optimal play. It'd drift either 10 or 20 seconds each 2 mins. And, at least at present, we're all slaves to the 2 min meta. Ask PLD...

The gigabrain maneuver is also highly unintuitive. THAT could be fixed (maybe) by giving Banish charges (something you explicitly avoided), but that may have further knock-on effects.

Hm...yeah, I'm half-asleep at this point, but I THINK this wouldn't actually work very well. I get what you're going for, but Banish's CD would have to be 20 sec for that to work since no matter how you play, either Banish is going to Sync to Budding at some point (or Budding to Banish) OR you'll have to drift Banish and possibly Dia and Misery. Charges might fix this, but I think that will not entirely fix it and will generate additional problems.

Something else to note is how...rigid...this rotation is. The burst window requires 3 DPS GCDs cast in a row to avoid drifting (even if we assume 20 second Buddings), meaning any healing in that time would have to be done with oGCDs to avoid losing damage. Additionally, the 4-5 other GCDs in the burst window HAVE to include one Cure/Medica (whether or not any healing is needed) to generate and fit Misery in the window. On the one hand, this is no worse than the game right now, but on the other hand, the game right now allows flexible Solace/Rapture use to address healing needs with 79 seconds before overcapping (you have up until the 4th Lily is generated at 80 seconds before you HAVE to spend a Lily before you overcap). This makes the rotation far less flexible to deliver on-demand healing if the party needs it, and parts of the rotation have the RDM melee combo problem of "Sorry, I can't heal/raise right now" outside of oGCD uses without tanking your damage. While the live game has this problem, it also has it with a far simpler rotation. If you have to heal someone with a GCD at 122.5, now what spell do you use at 125.0? Banish and Budding are both off CD and Dia needs to be refreshed in the next GCD.

It's both far more rigid in healing allowed GCDs and far more rigid in the damage GCDs, especially going into the burst window. The exact opposite of what healers are designed to be, even with oGCDs. WHM doesn't have enough oGCDs to cover that much necessary healing if it comes up at a bad time, causing them to either drift/miss burst losing more damage than in live, or to not heal and risk losing a DPS player just as they're in the middle of their burst phase, costing the party far more damage.

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Second Concept:

Again, not trying to be blunt, just offering you my honest appraisal:

Budding Afflatus is PROBABLY still going to have thee same problem. I'd have to walk this one out as I did the above one to be sure, but I don't think that's a salvageable concept unless you make it a 20 sec GCD that can hold charges (prevent immediate overcap if not used on CD). I get what you're going for of the "static Lily generation is slower but can be sped up", but keep in mind, this is KIND of what SB Lilies were, and that was not well received. I know, it wasn't the same, but it was the same KIND of thing - we have spells with CDs, and those CDs can be shortened by pressing a different button (back then it was casting Cure 1/2 on a target) so you can use them faster. Sounds great on paper, does not work well at all in practice. And that was BEFORE the 2 min meta.

At best, Budding will be an extra button to juggle for no reason other than busywork. And if it's not an attack spell, it doesn't really fix the problem of "twirl your staff". But ignoring that, the only way for it to work is for it to have a base 20 sec CD and allow 2 charges, and at that point, it's REALLY just an extra button to juggle for the sake of having an extra button to juggle.

Every 10 seconds (4 casts) you get 1 cast of Tempest. Since it's any spell, not just Glare, that would include Dia, Misery, Solace, Rapture, or any Cure/Medica spell. Problem here is every 4 instead of every 3. The reason is 3 casts + 1 = 10 seconds (standard spell speed). But 4 + 1 = 12.5 seconds. So the fight time use will be casting your first spell at T = 0, 2.5/5.0/7.0 Tempest at T = 10, 12.5/15.0/17.5/20.0 Tempest at 22.5, 25.0/27.5/30.0/32.5 Tempest at 35.0 ...I may be wrong, but I don't think this will line up well with 60 sec OR 120 sec.

Soul Drain seems...odd for a WHM spell. I guess you could argue Stasis or something, but it seems rather more like a Necromancer or at least Black Magic. Name aside: It making your next cast instant doesn't help with you're still using 2 GCDs. So it just allows for a movement tool. Which would be nice...except it's on a rigid timetable. Tempest is cast every 5 GCDs. This means Soul Dran must be cast on the 6th immediately after it. The instant cast spell comes out on the 7th (and half-way to the next Tempest). While this allows a lot of free movement over the course of a fight, it's only free movement at very specific times. And unlike, say RDM or SGE, there's no flexibility as to where it can fall, meaning it could be completely wasted. Of course, Soul Drain may be pushed to the right 1 or 2 GCDs, but doing so comes at the cost of half a Glare's worth of lost DPS.

Using Holy in this case...is Holy now a targeted spell? An AOE around the caster? Does it still do a bit less than half a Glare's damage? It decreases the CD of Budding Afflatus, but it can't be spammed to decrease Budding's CD as that reduction only applies if used after Tempest. Also it seems from reading this that you're now competing between Soul Drain for Glare damage + MP vs Holy for 1/2 Glare damage + slightly faster Lily generation. You can use Holy instead and delay Soul Drain, but then you're losing another 1/2 Glare damage to gain MP and get an instant cast spell that may or may not be worthless free movement.

I'm...going to have to not be asleep when I look at this again. But on the surface, I imagine there would be...problems. XD

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I get what you're trying to do, I think, but I don't think either of these would work mechanically.

In terms of compromise/feel...I don't think they would work. The first one makes for a rigid damage rotation and highly constrained GCD healing without tanking your damage, with both becoming VERY tight into the burst window. Even if we ignore the mechanical issues of drift and stuff, the rigidity is going to be a problem. This has a lot more of a GNB feel to it, which some Tank players already have issue with (in their case, it's hard to weave oGCD defensive CDs in Continuation combos) where your damage rotation is surprisingly rigid (though in bursts, not the entire time; the long CDs MUST be used on CD, though, and due to no charges, there's no wiggle room in the matter, and likewise Dia), and in the case of a Healer, this could lead to wipes if people get greedy and try to maintain their DPS uptime.

The healing side of things (without large DPS losses) is also much more rigid. On paper it should be more flexible, but now you HAVE to spend healing only in certain windows to keep from overcapping Misery or drifting it out of burst. This creates a second layer of rigidity, and worse, one that can result in dead party members.

One of the things people like about healer rotations in general and WHM in specific is how flexible they are and NOT on a rigid rotation like a DPS. As I've said before SGE could be an exception (because Kardia; if this was SAGE'S rotation, it would be generating healing and could weave Kardia in oGCDs to move the spot healing around while maintaining its DPS rotation provided the player's good at playing AST and moving between targeting the boss and targeting party members), but WHM not really. Making the damage rotation rigid would make it feel constraining and less fun and more stressful to more casual players. Making the healing more rigid is even worse, though.

...the Second Concept doesn't seem to have quite this problem. In theory, one could drop Holy, but you still have Budding Afflatus as an unnecessarily rigid CD that must be maintained, and if you need a heal just after Tempest, you're losing Glare potency because you're having to delay Soul Drain.

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I think you have to drop the manual Lily generation. You could have a Lil generating long CD oGCD like Rhizo, but I don't think a GCD Lily generator that removes automatic generation is a good idea. Water is fine (being able to delay Assize healing is actually a good idea). Dia being Aoe is also fine. Misery being as it is today, also fine.

I wouldn't mind every N Glare casts, Glare becomes something more powerful with a neater animation (I said before High Glare, but whatever is fine), and this just taking the Glare button spot is fine. It can't be a separate thing you use instead of Glare, though, since then you're doing that weird "do you hold it for burst or not" strangeness. One thing I do like about it is that it triggers from any spell cast, making it a mini-Misery and allowing use of normally not used GCD healing spells like Regen. Depending on what Tempest's Potency is, this could allow for healing at a minimal or zero damage loss. Though that's also the PROBLEM with any spell; since it's any spell and not just healing spells, we still run into "if you miss a Glare, it's a loss". The reason DPS neutral Misery generated by heals works is that it doesn't create an optimal Glarespam to get optimal damage. It allows you to SWAP Glare FOR heals.

Soul Drain (name aside) is...probably not a great idea. I get where you're trying to have a 1-2 combo with Tempest that rewards you with free movement, but if this is part of your MP generation (to maintain MP), then that's bad because it forces use and makes it non-optional. And requiring it after Tempest means potentially delaying healing, which creates a rigidity there, which as I said above should be avoided on any Healer Job that can't generate passive healing (SCH/SGE). The instant cast next spell is nice, but either comes at the cost of 1/2 Glare OR at the cost of rotational rigidity in when it comes out.

If this was a DPS Job, not a Healing Job, you could have some CDs (think stuff like True North/Perfect Balance) to manipulate that - like get a Tempest whenever you want using one CD which could let you plan out a Soul Drain just before movement and shift your Tempest to there. But for a Healing Job, dancing around damage mechanics like that while addressing healing needs might be problematic.

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I think what you're ultimately going for is "something to consolidate a few existing buttons so there's room to add new buttons with the same total number of hotbar spaces used; some way to HAVE to press buttons other than Glare, some way to see more spell animations, some way to do this without overly changing the existing rotation, some way to encourage/reward damage with either healing, more damage buttons, or both, some way to refund some healing so it's not always a damage loss, and some way to require consistently optimal use of the new abilities in order to avoid drift/dps losses (in other words, to make it where people don't just outright ignore them because they don't produce any difference in performance/output)"

I THINK that's more or less the bird's eye of what you're attempting, anyway.

I just think both your proposals generate too much rigidity, make the DPS rotation too rigid at moderate to high levels of correct play, and make the healing much too rigid for a Job that isn't passively healing when it's locked into its serious damage rotation phases. Remember WHM also has the fewest oGCDs (only two that directly heal, Tetra and Assize, with the latter being on CD use, and the only other ones being Bene which has a weird delay and should be used more smartly and Asylum which provides slow healing that might not meet emergency needs), and they don't generate passive healing like SGE does while DPSing or SCH does anytime it's not using Dissipation. So this also would create a far bigger gulf between optimal and non-optimal play.

Having all healing spells generate 1/3rd a Misery wouldn't do...well, any of that. It would make healing more flexible while providing the same overall damage output, and wouldn't create weird optimization schema other than if you DID cast a GCD heal during the burst window, you'd be obliged to cast two more. But that's far less counterintuitive or rigid play than either of the above proposals, I think...

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I don't mean to rag on your ideas, just analyzing them. And it's actually an interesting thought experiment.

It's already got me thinking of how passive healing (Eos/Kardia) generation allows for those Jobs to be FAR more flexible in their potential damage kits and rotations, for one thing. It's kind of a no brainer to think about it, but the implications for damage rotations are significant. Thanks to Eos, SCH can have short "RDM melee combo" phases where it needs to press several damage abilities together (even if out of oGCDs) because Eos will somewhat make up the gap. (Also SCH has way more healing oGCDs than WHM...). And likewise, Kardia allows for SGE to have a full on damage rotation if desired because each of those buttons also applies healing, and the SGE can even manually target it while keeping up its burst. Imagine if RDM could freely Vercure (without interrupting combos) as an oGCD action weave between every part of its melee combo, the 1-2-3-Holy/Flare-Scorch-Resolution (basically, if each attack gave a passive heal)? That would or a Verraise, if you will. This would allow it to do its damage combo while also providing its utility.

SGE can do this as well because of Kardia. There wouldn't be a "sorry, I'm in my burst window" because damaging in its burst window is actively providing the healing needed by the party. If it had an AOE Kardia for 4 GCDs on a 60 or 120 sec CD, the rotation would be 100% feasible without issue. (Oh, and it also has as many oGCDs as SCH, more or less...)

...but, this does have me thinking more than ever that a dps rotation for WHM is a bad idea - no passive healing, only 3 healing oGCDs not tied to rigid CD usage (Tetra on a shortish CD, Asylum on a moderate one, Benediction on a long one). Benison has 2 charges and 30 sec CD, but doesn't heal (and the barrier's the size of a Cure 1; not exactly "save the day" material)

[ForsakenRoe]

The main reason Dedicated healer/Support healer split would not work is super easy to foresee: in the format this game has for encounter design, healing is binary. You have enough, or you don't and wipe. Coincidentally, this is the reason the devs don't 'understand what we want' from healers. Tanks don't complain that they 'want to do less damage, and focus more on mitigating and holding aggro', because everyone playing tanks likes to hit Confiteor and Double Down (well, when they crit). Only healer seems to have this split of players, where some want to do more damage, and some don't want to. Anyway, back to the point, once the 'Dedicated Healer' is at the point where their healing is causing big amounts of overheal, the questions come up: Do you force them to swap to a Support healer for more damage? Do you ask them to do damage when they don't need to heal (completely negating the point of them being 'the dedicated healer')? Is there some reward in place for them overhealing, to enforce the idea that they shouldn't be doing damage?

Let's say the healing in a raid is covered 100% by the Dedicated healer. If it's possible to remove some healing GCDs from their load, by having the Support healer throw out some occasional heals like Indom or such (tools they would need to have, in order to get through solo-healer content like a 4man dungeon), then the Dedicated healer does what with the newly freed up GCDs? Presumably, damage. So instead of 4 healers who all do somewhere in the ballpark of 6k damage, it reads to me like this idea is 'lets have 2 healers that do 6k, and 2 healers that get saddled with more of the healing responsibility, and because of that only get up to 2k damage.' Now, this might sound satisfying at first, having a healer that is 'the dedicated HPS machine'. But this is meant to be for the benefit of 'players who don't want the stress of managing a DPS rotation', right? So, here's the kicker: with this idea, the point of failure for 'we didn't have enough healing' goes from two healers, to mainly being the burden heaped onto just one. 'Why didn't we survive this mechanic' changes from 'we didn't get healed enough from WHM, maybe also if we had more mit from SCH it'd help WHM keep up' to 'the WHM did everything wrong'. Especially when you factor in how in this tier, where a DPS missing Feint or Addle would often translate to 'where was shields and mits SCH/SGE?', and when you say 'I used them, you didn't use Addle' they say 'go again' and drop the conversation before the fault can properly be assigned. The healer is the first point of blame for a wipe, and this would just reinforce that perception like tenfold imo

Unless we're suggesting keeping mits on the Support. In which case, it's the Pure/Barrier split, renamed? I'm not getting it. But all in all it sounds like a design being written for a FFXIV that doesn't exist, and cannot exist, because people have formed a perception of how it plays. Over 8 years of 'healers need to pump as much damage as possible' is not going to be undone. Even if the gameplay is changed to try and enforce one healer to be 'the HPS bot' and one to be 'on standby to spotheal', people in this game will find ways to try to reduce the GCDs used by HPSBot, so they can do damage too. The only solution that comes to mind is to make HPS requirements tuned in just the right way, to have HPSBot's HPS be mandatory, and DPS requirements such that Support-Healer's DPS is mandatory. Enforcing the 1/1 the Pure/Barrier split is meant to. However, as with P/B, that would only work in week 1/2/3 prog. Once gear comes in, we're back where we are now. And it still doesn't address the fact that in more casual content like dungeons, if SupportHealer is able to heal through the EX roulette (and they'd have to be able to by design), HPSBot Healer's HPS is going to be redundant.

So while I can appreciate the sentiment behind the idea, I think it's just not feasible in execution.

[ty_taurus]

I also want to bring up something in regards to older Final Fantasy games. We've brought up the White Mage of old and how it differs and compares to the White Mage of FFXIV, but there's actually a massive component that differs between these examples that we've neglected in this references: the player.

If you play FFIV, it's true that Rosa's offensive options are quite limited, having access to Aim and Holy and that's about it. But you as the player are not controlling only Rosa. You're also controlling Cecil, Kain, Rydia, and Edge. Your gameplay while playing FFIV is not defined by Rosa, but by your access to the entire team, so it makes sense to have characters be more binary in their toolkits, because you're also inputting commands from the other 4 characters.

But in FFXIV, the character you control is the only character you control. So while the labelled White Mage of older games may have been limited offensively, you as the player were not, unless you played FFI, FFIII, or FFV with a party of only White Mages. Meanwhile here, your gameplay is entirely dictated by your job. And even if we want to bring up that same criticism for FFXI which did have very limited offensive options as well, FFXI featured the sub job system, and you know what seems to be listed as one of if not the best sub jobs for White Mage? Black Mage. It gave White Mage greater offensive capabilities, more debuffs, better MP management, and spikes for passive damage.

[Shurrikhan]

I also want to bring up something in regards to older Final Fantasy games. We've brought up the White Mage of old and how it differs and compares to the White Mage of FFXIV, but there's actually a massive component that differs between these examples that we've neglected in this references: the player.

If you play FFIV, it's true that Rosa's offensive options are quite limited, having access to Aim and Holy and that's about it. But you as the player are not controlling only Rosa. You're also controlling Cecil, Kain, Rydia, and Edge. Your gameplay while playing FFIV is not defined by Rosa, but by your access to the entire team, so it makes sense to have characters be more binary in their toolkits, because you're also inputting commands from the other 4 characters.

But in FFXIV, the character you control is the only character you control. So while the labelled White Mage of older games may have been limited offensively, you as the player were not, unless you played FFI, FFIII, or FFV with a party of only White Mages. Meanwhile here, your gameplay is entirely dictated by your job. And even if we want to bring up that same criticism for FFXI which did have very limited offensive options as well, FFXI featured the sub job system, and you know what seems to be listed as one of if not the best sub jobs for White Mage? Black Mage. It gave White Mage greater offensive capabilities, more debuffs, better MP management, and spikes for passive damage.

Might it then be more appropriate to think of WHM in a player-equals-whole-party game as... what it affords the party/team/composition (as compared to a given alternative character for the slot)? And should we consider there as being potential additions or reductions to that WHM kit or its contextual affordances based on what they wanted to convey about the character?

[ForsakenRoe]

But in FFXIV, the character you control is the only character you control. So while the labelled White Mage of older games may have been limited offensively, you as the player were not, unless you played FFI, FFIII, or FFV with a party of only White Mages. Meanwhile here, your gameplay is entirely dictated by your job. And even if we want to bring up that same criticism for FFXI which did have very limited offensive options as well, FFXI featured the sub job system, and you know what seems to be listed as one of if not the best sub jobs for White Mage? Black Mage. It gave White Mage greater offensive capabilities, more debuffs, better MP management, and spikes for passive damage.

And in FF9 Garnet and Eiko both have access to Summons, and in FF10 Yuna had access to Summons (and if you played on Expert Sphere Grid, anyone could be the 'WHM'. Wakka WHM lets go), and in FF5 you could choose anyone to be a WHM but also give them any other job's actions once you'd levelled it, to complement what the WHM lacks, list probably goes on but those were the extra that immediately came to mind

[ty_taurus]

And in FF9 Garnet and Eiko both have access to Summons, and in FF10 Yuna had access to Summons (and if you played on Expert Sphere Grid, anyone could be the 'WHM'. Wakka WHM lets go), and in FF5 you could choose anyone to be a WHM but also give them any other job's actions once you'd levelled it, to complement what the WHM lacks, list probably goes on but those were the extra that immediately came to mind

in FFX, you also can swap people in and out of combat, so even though your active party size is 3, you really have 7 characters to work wtih.

XII is the really weird case. You have an active party of 3 and a total cast of 6. You can swap them in and out of battle like in X, but only if they're not being targeted. By late in the game, usually that's not happening until they're KOed. Then you have the original in which everyone is a blank slate and can learn everything. After that came the Zodiac Job System in which you'd get a max of 6 of the 12 available jobs and never be allowed to switch. If you picked White Mage in that version, you were stuck with that, and White Mage was not great in that version because it couldn't really do much, at least until you could unlock great swords and start actually hitting things which you could do if you took a specific Esper I believe. And after that, the remaster allowed you to pick up a second board after defeating Belias, so White Mage becomes a job you can match with other jobs, where it's commonly viewed as best paired with Machinist for the added time magic and guns.

[ForsakenRoe]

in FFX, you also can swap people in and out of combat, so even though your active party size is 3, you really have 7 characters to work wtih.

Actually I just had a thought, that is true for most of the game but a very specific point, it's not: The Via Purifico. Imagine having to solo through that dungeon-prison-thing, as Yuna, but you didn't have summons, ugh. Yeh you meet up with allies at certain times in there, but when you start out you're on your own, and have at least 3 random encounters to go through solo

[Renathras]

There are 3 realities about gamers that game designers need to understand and recognize:

You're forgetting the groups between 2 and 3 - those that research and learn about the game, encounters, mechanics, and their classes and party composition, but don't chase the meta or strive for "perfection" they work for "what is fun for our group that is 'good enough' to achieve results." You know, the people that took MCH's in their group or that run double caster. And there are a lot of these people. Basically, "the midcore". (1) is a very small fraction of the playerbase. (2) is often seen on PF, but not the majority of it, and not most friends and midcore players and groups. These people are all (4). Or perhaps we should call it 2.5. The people that read about the meta and the Balance and YouTube guides and so on, but not all of it, and they aren't slaves to it. They don't swap to flavor of the month/patch Jobs, theykind of just go with whatever they and their friends always use/bring and make it work. That is, people who are somewhat skilled and somewhat researched, but aren't chasing the meta. This is probably the majority of non 1%ers who still engage with the endgame (3) don't really engage with the endgame and may not even know how to unlock Savages or Extremes, much less do anything with them.)

And you can argue people are "still supporting" but that isn't what's relevant.

What's relevant is what is the focus of the player. It's a distinction that has meaning, and I think by not grasping that...that may be the key you're missing to understanding the people who don't think as you do, honestly. If you can understand its significance, you might understand the problem and why your proposals aren't quite fitting.

The main reason Dedicated healer/Support healer split would not work is super easy to foresee: in the format this game has for encounter design, healing is binary.

Yeah, but that's making a lot of assumptions. For example, perfect play. You never need a SMN or RDM Raise with perfect play. With adequate gear and perfect play, you shouldn't need Pots, and players should be able to clear all encounters the first time in min ilevel gear.

Yet we find in the field, that isn't the case. People often like having spares. I was in an Ex5 group earlier where someone swapped to a SMN so we'd have a third Raise to push prog. Many groups even on farm make occasional mistakes. People continue to equip better gear despite the min ilevel gear being sufficient. While healing is an either you have enough or you do not, many groups want the added comfort of having more. For progression and for early clears with a group, I often layer more shielding than I do once we have played the fight a lot and have sufficient gear to not be inches from death if a mitigation is missed.

Some Tanks do complain. And complain a lot. When we went from SB to ShB, Tanks complained about losing their agro tools, which didn't do as much damage (e.g. they were, in effect, asking to do less damage). This was as big of a bombshell with the community as the SCH and AST changes were. To this day you can skim through any Tanking forums on this game and people wills till bemoan not having agro tools and agro management not being a part of a Tank's core identity anymore, and many Tank players complaining they feel like a "Blue DPS".

So, in fact, yes, that is happening, and has been for 4 years. Surely you're aware of it? If you've seen the legendary 0 DPS healer that runs away from enemies before using Assize, you must have seen the far more common Tank who complains about being a Blue DPS and not doing "Tank things" like managing agro and positioning bosses? It is not "Only healer" which has this split. If you'd like, I could probably find you some posts on the Tank section of this forum of Tanks complaining about not having agro (and others telling them they're dumb to complain about it), as well as on r/ffxivdiscussion and YouTube. Very much an active thing.

So are DPS players who want a more support focus and are annoyed there's not more of a Support role in FFXIV, though that's far less because they actually have options (DNC, BRD, and RDM all kind of scratch that itch to varying degrees)

GNB is kind of an exception to this rule since it was a Tank specifically designed to appeal to DPS players.

...oddly, SGE was supposed to be this for healers. I don't understand how they got it so right with GNB and so wrong with SGE, though...

once the 'Dedicated Healer' is at the point where their healing is causing big amounts of overheal, the questions come up: Do you force them to swap to a Support healer for more damage? Do you ask them to do damage when they don't need to heal (completely negating the point of them being 'the dedicated healer')?

What is your party?

Are you a 1% hardcore static party pushing world firsts and trying to set speedrun records? Then you'll ask players of ALL Roles/Jobs to switch. "I know you like WAR and it was good for the clear, but now we're pushing speed runs and you have to swap to GNB or DRK..." "I know we had you on RDM for clears and you love the rotation, but you have to swap to BLM now or get out of our one Caster spot..." The 1% do this. The rest of the community doesn't.

If I'm on SCH or SGE and my FC asks me to sub in for one of the statics and I join and see the other Healer is a SCH or SGE, I swap over to WHM. If it's WHM, I swap to SCH or SGE.

You can ask your party to do whatever you want, and depending on if your static/friends group are hardcore min-maxers and meta-chasers or just a group of friends where most only have one 90 (or one geared one, anyway), you kind of make do with what you have. So the answer to this question depends on your group.

I've long noted min-maxers are going to min-max. It's what they do. The price for min-maxing is you don't always play what you "like", you play what the meta is. And this is true regardless of Role. As noted, MCH's were asked to change. PLD/WARs were asked to change. RDMs were asked to change. RPRs were asked to change. And even in the healer role, WHMs and sometimes ASTs and SGEs were asked to change. This is no different than the current live game.

As I noted before, at its worst, this paradigm produces no worse results than what we have today with the live game.

If it's possible to remove some healing GCDs from their load, by having the Support healer throw out some occasional heals like Indom or such (tools they would need to have, in order to get through solo-healer content like a 4man dungeon), then the Dedicated healer does what with the newly freed up GCDs?

Whatever they feel like, honestly.

If the party is doing risky things, they may use healing or mitigations. If everyone's on the ball, they can Glarespam with ease, fluidly moving back to healing as soon as the damage picks up again. An Ex5 party I had earlier the BLM consistently was ploping his Ley Lines just far enough away from the boss he was outside of my Assize. Well, I devoted a few GCDs to keeping him alive. If I didn't, he'd die. (BLM's always been a "healers adjust" Job, and "adjusting" with GCDs if it increases their damage contribution is better for the party anyway, to a point.)

So not necessarily damage, but if they do some 1 button spam damage (you know, they kind they already have to do today? Again, this is no worse than what we already have live...), where's the problem here? They aren't going to get "bored" since they aren't the Support/Damage oriented Healer, that's their co-healer. Who is getting to do more damage as healing needs are less with fight practice and better gear. Everyone wins here. As I said above, Dedicated Healer archetype people aren't opposed to pressing damage buttons. They're opposed to their mental energy having to be expended on damage rotations instead of healing needs and boss mechanics. That is, their enjoyment of the game comes from boss mechanics and managing party health and mitigation, not performing an "exciting" and "fun" rotation. To them, 1 button spam as their filler isn't just acceptable, it's what they'd prefer to the alternative.

So, here's the kicker: with this idea, the point of failure

No, it remains unchanged from today. Overall, because mitigation abilities don't JUST exist on Healer Jobs (and Healer Jobs don't have enough of them for min ilevel or near min ilevel runs), it's a party-wide responsibility. You can argue people would blame the healer instead of the DPS who didn't use Feint...

...but they already do that today. Again, at its worst this idea is no worse than what we have live right now.

But all in all it sounds like a design being written for a FFXIV that doesn't exist, and cannot exist, because people have formed a perception of how it plays.

Who?

This is literally how the game is played in high end speedruns now. How little pure healing can we get away with? Can we swap to SCH/AST? Can we solo WHM (or AST) heal so we can swap in another DPS? People were doing this in SB, ShB, and EW, as well as obviously in HW and ARR, where the paradigm was pioneered.

And for casual content, where a single healer can already provide for a 24 man party without needing a co-healer in live, this would be no different than it is today. Right now you can solo heal 24 mans if your party are doing the mechanics correctly. At that level of tuning, it doesn't matter if you get the good party with the meta SGE/AST healers or if you get stuck with the SGE/SGE or WHM/WHM party who can't even get Atamos platforms right.

The only thing that would need to be "changed" is for the Support based Healers to have more Support functionality and the Dedicated ones to have tools for sustained healing. Right now you can go into Ex3 and probably have one healer solo heal it with the other as just an emergency backup. People were solo healing ZodEx in 6.0. In 6.0, "selfish" WHM Glarespam was considered a liability to their party if they were doing actual healing, so (in an odd twist on this paradigm), their co-healer was basically solo-healing P1-4S with the WHM just doing support and suplemental healing with their oGCDs. The high damage bleeds are far more easily handled by having your WHM or AST use HoTs on the afflicted party members with additional support from your SCH/SGE's oGCD supporting heals.

There's no "the game can't do this" because the game is, quite frankly, already functioning this way in all but name, and has for 2 Savage raid tiers (unintentionally or otherwise) and 4 patches worth of Extremes now.

Over 8 years of 'healers need to pump as much damage as possible' is not going to be undone.

Well, first off, not 8 years, but that aside - as I noted above, it's already been undone.

Even if the gameplay is changed to try and enforce one healer to be 'the HPS bot' and one to be 'on standby to spotheal', people in this game will find ways to try to reduce the GCDs used by HPSBot, so they can do damage too.

Some will.

...and we'll be no worse than we are today. Again, at its worst, this idea is equal to the present day. "But the Dedicated Healer might have some people play it where they cast Glare" isn't much of a counter when that's...what we have right now. If the "worse off" argument is "things will be like today", then that means this is already a better paradigm.

if SupportHealer is able to heal through the EX roulette (and they'd have to be able to by design), HPSBot Healer's HPS is going to be redundant.

Sure, but roulette doesn't work by letting you pick your party members from a pool. You get stuck with what you get, just like now. Again, this is no worse than the game is right now...

So while I can appreciate the sentiment behind the idea, I think it's just not feasible in execution.

Fair enough. I'm just looking at your critiques and all of them support the position that, at its worst, this solution is no worse than/more or less identical to what we have now. And at its best...it's better and more interesting, pleasing more types of players.

.

But, it was a thought experiment moreso than a proposal.

Sorry to intrude,

No need to apologize. Discussion is great. I want to thank you guys for having this nice one.

I think this depends on the player. You say anchor, but that's only true if there's no drift, no boss mechanics causing you to miss or delay things, no untargetable phases, and you consistently use all CDs on CD. If any of those things are not met, it isn't an anchor. You also get into those issues of abilities that are tied to a resource and so break on death regardless.

I think it's important to note here that what I'm describing there is "flavor of ice cream". I wasn't telling you one is better than the other. I was telling you which one I like and don't like vs which ones you like and don't like, and how that's part of our impasse. I wasn't saying either was better or either was wrong. I think the ice cream analogy is apt. If I like vanilla and you like chocolate and Ty likes strawberry, none of us can - or should, anyway - tell the other(s) that they're wrong. It's a flavor, and we like what we like and don't what we don't. I don't like tomatoes and onions but I like pickles. Maybe you love tomatoes but dislike pickles. Maybe someone else loves them all and yet another person hates them all. Taste isn't "right" or "wrong". It just is and is individual.

So here, what I was more saying is you guys like those kinds of abilities. To me, they're annoying upkeep things I just have to remember to press with a periodicity, but are otherwise boring. Dia for example. I could put a dipping bird by by keyboard to press the Dia button every 30 seconds and Presence of Mind every 60. To me, that's not enjoyable or interesting gameplay, while fitting in Glares where I can and smoothly transitioning to Lilies or the odd Medica 2 I find enjoyable.

On the other hand, you see the Glare as the dipping bird button and the CDs as things you're actively considering how to use, and you also like being punished for sub-optimal play. So you prefer those CDs. I don't derive joy from being punished; but again, this is taste. I could make some joke about "don't kink shame", but basically it's that. We all like our own things.

And to my way of thinking, that's fine - takes all kinds to make the world go 'round.

That's the very basis of why I think each type should have a Healer that matches that. Instead of having all vanilla healers and swapping all healers to chocolate, or even variations of chocolate (cookies and cream, moose tracks, chocolate chip, and standard chocolate), why not just stick with one vanilla, another chocolate, another strawberry, and another coffee...for those people who chose the wrong taste buds growing up.

If you play FFIV, it's true that Rosa's offensive options are quite limited, having access to Aim and Holy and that's about it. But you as the player are not controlling only Rosa.

Yes, but also no. FF9, FF6, and I think FF4 allows you to set individual controllers to different players. It was, in fact, possible to control only Rosa. You can argue about how common this was, but I played several of those with my cousin and other times with a friend where we split the players and I generally played the healers (e.g. Garnet and Eiko) while he played the offensive characters (Zidane and Stiener). The party shifts during the game move things around (I also played Freya and I think Quiena, but we tended not to have Quiena in the party more than necessary because neither of us could figure out h/she's gameplay/mechanics), and it depended on the game.

FF6 because of the Magicite system lets you basically entirely build your characters, and I tended to make heavily support/buff/defensive/healing focused ones to support my friend's offensive ones. I'd often have a few offensive options because of the nature of the game (e.g. the Summon for the equipped Magicite), but it was more ancillary or vestigial, and I also often focused on the healing or defensive Summons, anyway.

One thing to remember is that some players in MMOs like to fully dedicate themselves to a single focus while others like to spread. For example, Mage specs when I played WoW were all offensive focus. There was a TINY bit of Control-support in the form of Polymorph and some Ice abilities if you were Frost spec, but that was about it. Me personally, I preferred Balance Druid since I could shift and provide some support healing (or even emergency spot tanking) if needed, but many players enjoyed being wholly dedicated to their role. Holy Priests back in the day were not played offensively at all. Most Mage specs, Rogue specs, and Warlock specs were almost entirely, or outright entirely, DPS focused. I think it was Prot Paladin and maybe Prot Warrior that were tanking focused. Ran into someone recently on Reddit who commented he loved FFXIV Tanking because WoW tanking is boring as you only have 4-8 (some as few as 4) damage buttons on your tanks and their focus is almost entirely on threat, positioning, and defensives. Granted, to me, that sounds like what I enjoy when tanking, but this person had the opposite taste - again, taste isn't right or wrong. It was just interesting hearing how in Shadowlands/thenewone that WoW tanks are so heavily narrow focus in tanking.

But, WoW also has a lot of hybrid or hybrid-adjacent classes/specs. Ones that aren't pure damage, healing, or tanking and dabble a little in providing spot support of the other roles.

A good game appeals to both types of players, in those given roles.

Right now, FFXIV only does this for the golden child role, DPS. DPSers have options from pure selfish (SAM, BLM) to heavy support (DNC, BRD, RDM), to somewhere in between (everyone else). Healers don't have this option to focus on their desired playstyle and are forced to kind of straddle several, whether they want to or not, leading to dissatisfaction. Bereft of the option to pick one Healer class to go deep healing or another to go deep support, we're all forced to be half healing, half supporting, and this makes most everyone unhappy other than the people that like that exact mix. Which sucks because we have 4 (arguably 5 if noct was brought back) healing Jobs, so we could actually have ones that more closely lent to that.

Also: The FF1 meta was an all WHM party. I learned that from 8-Bit Theater.

Summary: Don't underestimate how some people DO want to specialize and NOT be hybrids.

And in FF9 Garnet and Eiko both have access to Summons, and in FF10 Yuna had access to Summons (and if you played on Expert Sphere Grid, anyone could be the 'WHM'. Wakka WHM lets go), and in FF5 you could choose anyone to be a WHM but also give them any other job's actions once you'd levelled it, to complement what the WHM lacks, list probably goes on but those were the extra that immediately came to mind

While true, most characters in games are built with stat growths in mind. OG FF7 the characters had base stats but also different rates of stat growths. This means while you COULD make any character into a Black Mage, some were much better at it and some much worse. Even in games with pretty free character building, like FFTactics, most true hybrid/jack-of-all-trades combinations were weaker than specialized ones. For example, a Black Mage + Summoner was better than a Knight + Black Mage or Knight + Summoner. While you COULD do those, they were generally poor options.

Often, there are some kind of niche "things that shouldn't go well together, but go together like peanut butter and jelly!", but you also get a lot of duds and find that you get stronger combinations by paring like-things together. For example, paring a White Mage and Time Mage as a healing and support buff character.