Differentiating healer identities

[Semirhage]

I'd personally love an identity for WHM other than the one it's always had: the one that's expressly worse than the other three at the upper end because their buffs are better, but you're a "safety net" for people who play badly in exchange.

Who's excited for Paladin, the tank that's designed specifically to be weaker than the others because it's a "safety net"?

[KarmaYraeon]

I'd personally love an identity for WHM other than the one it's always had: the one that's expressly worse than the other three at the upper end because their buffs are better, but you're a "safety net" for people who play badly in exchange.

Who's excited for Paladin, the tank that's designed specifically to be weaker than the others because it's a "safety net"?

Understandable, though I will say that it isn't that its identity is that it is a safety net to compensate the other three healers, but simply that it has the capability and freedom to do so. Its reliability would be its biggest selling point compared to the other three.
The same can really be said for paladin amongst the tanks, and as for excitement, I know plenty of people who enjoy the class. Its literally 2nd most played tank in endgame content according to FFXIVCensus when writing this comment.

[Allegor]

I'd personally love an identity for WHM other than the one it's always had: the one that's expressly worse than the other three at the upper end because their buffs are better, but you're a "safety net" for people who play badly in exchange.

Who's excited for Paladin, the tank that's designed specifically to be weaker than the others because it's a "safety net"?

Imagine if PLD gets the WHM/SMN treatment: strip it off its dot, FoF, maybe even the 123 and aoe combos. It will be 11111111 spam with the occasional Sheltron to not cap the gauge, and do the Requiescat/swords combo every 2 mins, with their mitigations and invuln being left as "what if" actions. #perfect

[Semirhage]

Understandable, though I will say that it isn't that its identity is that it is a safety net to compensate the other three healers, but simply that it has the capability and freedom to do so. Its reliability would be its biggest selling point compared to the other three.

This describes Stormblood.

WHM is the safest pick! The healiest of the healers. Nevermind the fact that free, highly-available oGCD woven heals are more effective in FFXIV's combat system. Or that the other healers can quite comfortably heal content, and in fact their majorly wider and easier access to both defensive and offensive utility means AST can usually solo heal Ultimates first.

"More heals" isn't anywhere near as useful as it sounds.

I've said it many times before: the casters have the pecking order figured out. Ignoring the ridiculous favoritism toward BLM and melees in BLMeleewalker, you've got the two "utility" casters (with raises, party damage buffs, and defensive utility) sit lower than the selfish one that brings nothing else. The selfish one is easy to pick up, but widely considered difficult to master. It brings nothing but damage, so it's allowed to have the highest damage output as its identity.

Meanwhile the healer role is the Upside Down to the caster role. The "selfish" healer is often the worst, and has many cheerleaders arguing for that to remain the status quo. Why? What does WHM bring if it's the worst? It doesn't have utility to make up for anything. It has the crappiest access to mitigation. The longest cooldowns on its oGCDs. No minigame to juggle. Its job gauge is passive. In this state, it's just the designated baby rattle job. Purposefully designed to be the playpen for people who don't want to learn anything. Imagine redesigning the casters like that. I can see the job guide now. "BLM: this job is meant to be an entry point to the caster role. Its simplicity is the perfect introduction to the caster playstyle! More advanced players may want to pick up RDM or SMN."

Or they could just, like, pick the jobs that are actually designed with this game's combat system in mind and make sure they have highly available, comfortable access to their skill floors while focusing on building an actual gameplay loop instead of fixating their entire job identity on being -real gooder- at the skill floor.

[KarmaYraeon]

This describes Stormblood.

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding something, but I feel like what I meant might not have been put across properly.

The idea isn't simply to give whm more heals or to make its heals have a higher potency, but instead to reiterate how its abilities interact with one another in such a way that using its gcd to heal isn't a dps loss like it is for other healers. Astro for instance has some nuts ogcd healing available, but that also comes at the expense of weaving it in, or waiting on a cooldown. In the case of white mage however, it could be designed in such a way that allows or even incentivises the use of its gcd to heal. Using a healing gcd perhaps empowering follow up damage gcds so that healing is net neutral rather than a dps loss like it is for other healers. Make it a mirror to blm where the healing and dps are both a mutually inclusive dichotomy that feeds into itself, so that doing damage empowers its healing just like how its healing empowers its dps. It already dips a toe into this idea with the lily system, and how they (finally) made afflatus misery net neutral.

The premise is that not only does white mage keep its current identity as a new-healer-friendly job, but it gives it far more flexibility to do whatever it wants. It gets a level of consistency not afforded to any other healer. Where other healers focus on their ogcd's for effective healing, make it so white mage isn't limited to them in the same capacity. Where other healers being pressured into gcd healing would result in a dps loss, white mage could be designed in a way that means it doesn't face that problem. It could be as simple as making it so that using certain healing gcds grants stacking potency bonuses to certain damage gcds and vice versa, up to a cap, so that when it comes to using the opposing ability, you compensate the difference. You needed to use cure II for 2 gcds? Its ok, this bonus effect means that your next glare III has 300% potency to cover teh difference, so the damage you deal is the same as if you had simply been casting glare III the whole time. You're in down time after a spot of intense healing and now you're out of lilies? That's fine. Your dia/glare pushes your lily generation along slightly so you recover those lilies sooner. All the while, your beefy ogcd heals are still available, where other healers would have had to use them to avoid cutting into their gcd to heal, and so now they have far fewer options available to them should something go south.

tl; dr - the idea isn't to make white mage heal more or anything of the sort, but instead to tweak how its abilities interact with one another so that its gcd healing feeds into its gcd dps and vice versa, so that it has a degree of consistency that isn't afforded to other healers in the same way.

[ForsakenRoe]

The idea isn't simply to give whm more heals or to make its heals have a higher potency, but instead to reiterate how its abilities interact with one another in such a way that using its gcd to heal isn't a dps loss like it is for other healers. Astro for instance has some nuts ogcd healing available, but that also comes at the expense of weaving it in, or waiting on a cooldown. In the case of white mage however, it could be designed in such a way that allows or even incentivises the use of its gcd to heal. Using a healing gcd perhaps empowering follow up damage gcds so that healing is net neutral rather than a dps loss like it is for other healers. Make it a mirror to blm where the healing and dps are both a mutually inclusive dichotomy that feeds into itself, so that doing damage empowers its healing just like how its healing empowers its dps. It already dips a toe into this idea with the lily system, and how they (finally) made afflatus misery net neutral.

Damn, a healer that is nice and simple for casual players to get into, yet has a nice satisfying cycle of 'healing feeds damage' and 'damage feeds healing'? Wow, someone ought to make that into a proper idea. /s

[KarmaYraeon]

Damn, a healer that is nice and simple for casual players to get into, yet has a nice satisfying cycle of 'healing feeds damage' and 'damage feeds healing'? Wow, someone ought to make that into a proper idea. /s

I saw. I could make a longer post discussing various concepts as a potential rework like you have in yours, since I have different ideas than what you have presented. But in general, I feel like whm doesn't necessarily need more buttons (though additional tools would be nice and everyone likes a flashy new button) but instead a revision of its already existing tools to revisit the idea that it is the powerhouse GCD healer. To give it the same sort of power as what other healers do with ogcds. To make it more reliable when doing so without losing out on damage like the others would.

[AmiableApkallu]

Also my original point was that whm should be a job based on its consistency, whereas the ideas you have shown seem more to just be giving it more tools to use. While not terrible, it isn't what I was originally implying. Additional tools to supplement an idea is always welcome, but my original comment wasn't looking for more tools, just to adjust what is already there.

So, here's where I might start with job design: A job needs an "identity" and a "gimmick."

Identity answers the question, "If you had to make a cutscene where this job gets its badass moment in the spotlight, what does it do?" SE's answers are something like:

• SGE: Haima
• AST: Cards/fate/time

Gimmick answers the questions, "What's my unique gameplay? What fun buttons do I get to push?" Answers here might be, or ought to be, something like:

• SGE: Kardia, Eukrasia
• AST: Cards/fate/time

My problem, then, with "consistency" is that it's neither an identity nor a gimick. It can be a feature of a job's design, but by itself, it's not enough to build a job.

[ForsakenRoe]

I saw. I could make a longer post discussing various concepts as a potential rework like you have in yours, since I have different ideas than what you have presented. But in general, I feel like whm doesn't necessarily need more buttons (though additional tools would be nice and everyone likes a flashy new button) but instead a revision of its already existing tools to revisit the idea that it is the powerhouse GCD healer. To give it the same sort of power as what other healers do with ogcds. To make it more reliable when doing so without losing out on damage like the others would.

The idea I linked adds 4 buttons, two of which are to give WHM the ability to spend it's lilies on shielding instead of healing (because healing isnt always needed, and it'd give WHM a way to actually mitigate things more often than once per 2min), but they can be left out if absolutely needed. For the sake of argument, lets say they are, and we just add the other two buttons, a GCD damage skill, and a GCD AOE heal that is damage neutral. Those two buttons already fit easily onto my hotbars on account of WHM having less buttons than a lot of other classes in the game, but even then if we really need to have more space to add them, we can make Cure 2 an upgrade to Cure 1, and Medica 2 an upgrade to Medica 1. Revision of it's existing tools isn't going to cut it here, because the main problem with not just WHM, but healers in general, is that their damage kits are just too barren as is. We cant do much to 'revise' Glare and Dia into something more interesting, if it's only those two skills we're working with. We could change Dia to be 12 seconds duration like my suggestion, but that on it's own isn't really going to do much to help. It just changes us from 2111111111112111 to 2111121111211112.

Adding one extra button would also not really do much on it's own. The reason it works better when you put them together is the idea that the 'extra button' generates more gauge than a Glare cast does. It gets the player to the new powerful healing tool faster, meaning damage feeds healing, like you suggested. WHM already can push a lot of burst healing power when needed, with Plenary Indulgence > Rapture, or PI>Cure3 if we really need to. PI-Rapture is 600 potency per GCD and it's damage neutral now that Misery got buffed. Outside of condensing Cure1/2 and Medica1/2 in the way I suggested, I don't really see what else we could do to change up what it's other skills do. Plenary combined with Thin Air? Only thing that comes to mind is not changes to the effect, but just QOL changes like 'Assize has 2 charges, so you can hold one for healing if needed' (cough UCOB) or 'Tetra has 2 charges'. I'm rambling, but my point is, we don't need to revise the tools WHM has to let it compete better against the other healers, because it doesn't have as many tools as they do to begin with. It's a tale as old as time, when we ask 'how does AST handle J-Waves or Curtain Call, constant waves of damage', they can say 'Celestial Opposition, Collective Unconscious, Earthly Star, Horoscope, Macrocosmos, Neutral Sect shielding'. WHM has Temperance, Asylum, Assize if it lines up, Lilybell, 3 Raptures and then it's out, and has to spam Medica or Cure3. Giving it the changes I suggested would at least give it 2 more GCDs of healing from the gauge spender, which might not be 'enough' but it's at least a start. Changing what other stuff does won't help enough I think, since it's already 'behind' in number of tools. Unless you're thinking of adding the PVP style regen to Temperance as an additional effect, which sure I'd take that

[Succor]

While I agree it's great for healers (or any class) to have different identities, it's difficult in practice to differentiate too much. Being different means having different strengths and weaknesses. But then people start complaining "why can class X do Y and I can't??? It's so unfair, I'm being punished for playing X!!!!", so devs make everything more same-y and bland. And then conversely people complain that everything is too similar.