FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[Sebazy]

No, it's ALSO the best it's been in terms of balance. I've played WHM since ARR, the engagement is the same as it was. I've even shown you that before... The only issue there is, as I said above, needing fewer GCDs for healing. On average, you cast an Afflatus ability more or less as often as you would have cast an Aero 1 (HW) or Aero 3 (SB), so it has parity in that sense, and unlike ShB, doing so is always damage neutral (or a damage gain if Misery is used during burst windows).

SCH? AST? Oh yes, they DEFINITELY were different back then. WHM? Not so much other than you don't have to deal with Cleric like HW, but that was also true in SB.

But it's not that simple. Resource limitation was a real concern pretty much from Titan Hard Mode onwards. MP was a valuable resource and perhaps even more starkly compared to today, Time was also highly precious and multiple factors all compounded to steal it away from you whilst your tank's HP was dwindling. Hit Cleric at a bad moment? Cool that's 2 GCDs spent in limbo unless you want to blow Bene, if bene is down that's potentially as much as 8 seconds before you're able to get more healing on the Tank. Having to think, plan ahead and assess risks just isn't something we have to do anymore despite that being a fundamental part of healer gameplay in most other MMOs. Our kits allow us to just delete problems, repeatedly. That's an issue.

Nope. And that game seemed so much a failure that...well, it's not around anymore, is it?

It failed because it was a vertical progression MMO and EA refused to invest sufficiently in keeping the content treadmill going. And yet despite it's commercial failure, it's well loved enough that the community reverse engineered the game and had their own private servers up and running well within a year of the game shutting down, one of which is celebrating it's 9th birthday this year. If you think Warhammer Online was another Wildstar, you are sorely mistaken. Was it perfect? No, far from it. But it still remains a benchmark of excellent class design to this day.

The issue here comes less down to Healer design and more a combination of FFXIV's encounter design (which you seem to at least acknowledge) and that FFXIV's combat system is very rigid.

Of course I acknowledge it, didn't I say as much in my last post?

The problem is, how do you propose that SE change encounter design to keep someone like me satiated without also pounding a fresh spout back into the dirt in the process? How do you stretch a healer that can full heal an 8 man party repeatedly and in very short order with very little planning, pre casting or wind up time required and all of that on stack of short cooldowns? I've been saying it for years that SE have designed themselves into a corner they're at the stage where they've dug a pit in it as well now. Healer design is every bit as big a part to play as content design is, arguably more so at this stage IMO.

Did you play WoW in 4.1 as a Healer, by chance? I was the only Healer I knew that didn't boycott doing dungeons that patch. Cataclysm saw so many Healer players retire because their healing kits WEREN'T powerful enough for the content. FFXIV's Healers now would work in that kind of content just fine.

If that was the raid on the fire island with a load of mini bosses dotted around, then yes? Ironically that was the only time I actually healed PvE with any degree of consistency. Some old friends I raided in EQ with needed a healer so I rolled up a Worgen Priest and off I went. It was pretty good fun and I remember it being hard work. Prior to that I was a Tauren Shaman and was primarily a PvP healer for the most part. The only PvE I did was tagging along as a guest by invite due to being very well known on my server.

The one really big issue right now is that encounter design isn't actually flexing Healer toolkits AND/OR the Healers have WAY too many and too powerful oGCD heals. Fix either of those issues and the entire landsape would change.

Agreed, the thing is, I think you're underestimating just how much incoming damage it will take to actually stretch our current kits thin to the point where MP and cooldowns will become a precious resource to the same sort of level that we had in ARR Coil Prog. Not only are our oGCD kits overblown, our GCDs are mighty enough that it's irrelevant anyway. To point back at Warhammer Online, a Warrior Priest that wasn't utilising their kit correctly couldn't just stand back and yolo out Medica IIs to deal with it. Both issues need to be addressed to solve this.

I didn't say they were the best designed, now did I

Oh I could have sworn you said something like:

WHM, for example, is one of the best designed Healers in MMOs IF you like to heal.

I love to heal, enough so that I was ranked #4th worldwide on HPS for WHM in Gordias, arguably the hardest Savage raid tier this game will ever have (as well as #2 worldwide as AST on Creator, I only managed #24th on Midas thanks to a house fire forcing me to play on a 13" Thinkpad for what time I did manage to raid). I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'd love for every fight to be as hectic as the likes of Godka or BarbEX but that's Wildstar levels of hardcore and isn't sustainable. Thus the kits need to be re-evaluated and addressed as well.

SCH and AST were objectively better off in SB.

Why is that when you post your opinion, it's objective, yet when someone else tries to counter, you try to dismiss it as subjective? Give it a rest or back it up with actual figures and facts.

And just to clarify my point here, look at two of the very best SCHs worldwide, Ayessa Faile and Fretty Pupi, both mained SCH and were extremely highly ranked, come 4.0 and Deltascape, did either of them prog as SCH? Heck no. Both SCH and AST suffered strangely unnecessary quality of life hits with Stormblood.