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.

[Calysto]

One thing I'm not certain of, though - I've seen it said the Devs (or Yoshi P) have said they'll never go back to HW designs. I'm guessing that means Cleric, but not sure since I've never seen the exact quote. Or even if there is a quote and it wasn't just made up... I'm curious if it was real/legitimate or not. And I don't think they ever want a repeat of Midas/Gordias.

Direct from YoshiP (wezll, his translator)
Live letter 66 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SXLmXt5lZk
at around 17mn

[Sebazy]

TLDR, Yoshi cites 5.0 as being the design choice that fits as many people as possible, not 3.0 or 4.0.

Basically, make it as friendly and accessible for sprouts as possible. This shows in healer design where for mainstream content, it really doesn't matter outside of logs if you go full try hard and min max everything into oGCDs or if you just roll Medica IIs and do the /manderville, resources are plenty and our kit is mighty, either way works just fine until you start progging Savage.

[ty_taurus]

As a quick aside, I did go through each sheet to adjust the answers tabs to be more readable in places, mainly increasing the cell size for fill-in answer columns and reduced the text size on specific answers that where quite long and thus impossible to read because they filled up more than a screen's worth of column space. Some of them had to have pretty small text, so you may need to zoom in to read them.

[ForsakenRoe]

I just want to get a clarification/enlightening out there because of:

WHM, for example, is one of the best designed Healers in MMOs IF you like to heal. The encounter design sucks for it since it doesn't really lean into healing, much, though. Now, if you like to damage? Yeah, FFXIV's Healers are all pretty badly designed for that. But that's why we have DPS Jobs, I guess? But WHM nails the fantasy of having powerful and efficient heals to keep your party alive. Put FFXIV's EW WHM into, for example, WoW's 4.1 Troll dungeons (the ones that caused a lot of healers in WoW to quit), for example, for a pretty solid time. Conclusion is: The Healer design isn't bad, much less "worst". But FFXIV's encounter design is becoming problematic with it breaking down the trinity to the point of obsolescence

Specifically the part in bold. See, Lilies heal for 400p, or 800 if singletarget. You get three per minute. But AST has CO (200, 500 over 15sec), CU (100 instant tick, 500 over 15sec), and Star (540p, 720 if charged). None cost you damage as they're all oGCD, and the three of them have 60s CDs, so you get 'three in a minute'. So WHM's 'powerful efficient heals' are... actually weaker than AST's tools, only able to beat out uncharged Star if you boost Rapture using PI. So while there's definitely an argument to be made about WHM 'feeling' good in terms of access to powerful heals, the objective maths says that it's not as strong a healer as AST. And we cannot consider Cure3 because you said 'efficient' and I'd consider both the GCD lost to it AND it's ridiculous MP cost to be 'inefficient' in most senses of the word. Add to that the frankly ridiculous MP pool AST has access to. Yeh WHM has Asylum, but it's a 90s instead, and Assize but you cannot hold that for a single second because 'you lose damage if you do that'. WHM is definitely not as 'efficient' or 'powerful' as one might think, it just 'feels' that way because the heal is delivered as one burst, rather than overtime

edit: oh and it has Horoscope, even if it's not charged it's 200p to 'top up' any of the other 3 tools, and it's a 60s CD too

edit2: and it has Lady of Crowns, RNG permitting, as a 'free Helios cast'

TLDR, Yoshi cites 5.0 as being the design choice that fits as many people as possible, not 3.0 or 4.0.

Basically, make it as friendly and accessible for sprouts as possible.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle, and you've got a gap like this.

A piece that shape fits in the hole. But so does a regular square. It'd have gaps in the picture, sure, but the point is it'd fit into the space. SE decided that people didn't want to bother figuring out what 'sticky-out-bits' fit into what 'sticky-in-bits' to solve the jigsaw, so they just made all the pieces regular squares

[CelestiCer]

(THE WALL OF TEXT)

Me attempting to Quote your comment -> " The text that you have entered is too long (12247 characters). Please shorten it to 3000 characters long. "



Your posts are literally " Four " times bigger then the limitation... you do this in the healer section, the DPS section and now in the General section of the forums... and you're still not proving a good point... Like just Stop =u=;

[ty_taurus]

So I thought of an interesting question that could be fun to discuss. There's no need to get very specific with these ideas, but start by picking a job. What are 1-5 actions you want to see added to that job in the next expansion (regardless of whether or not you believe they're realistic), and what are 1-5 actions you expect to see of that same job?

I'll start with Sage.

What I want to see
- [Attack Spell] - Replaces Soteria, has the same potency as Dosis (AoE with falloff), and has a higher MP cost. It applies 4 stacks of Soteria's effect to your Kardia target when cast normally, or when cast under Eukrasia, applies 2 stacks of a buff to your Kardia target that applies Kardia healing to all party members around them.
- [Proto-Pneuma] - A stronger version of Pneuma that is strictly a DPS tool with no healing attached. After it's used, it can be recast as regular Pneuma once per cooldown.

What I expect
- [Defensive Cooldown] - The large wall cast by Alphinaud during the cutscene fight with the EW final boss, or by Fourchenault during the conjoined role quest that is basically a wider Passage of Arms. It requires you channel to keep it up.
- [Healing Cooldown] - Another OGCD recovery tool that applies a barrier to the party initially, and when the barrier breaks on someone, heals that party member.

[AmiableApkallu]

So I thought of an interesting question that could be fun to discuss. There's no need to get very specific with these ideas, but start by picking a job. What are 1-5 actions you want to see added to that job in the next expansion (regardless of whether or not you believe they're realistic), and what are 1-5 actions you expect to see of that same job?

White Mage

My answers might change if you ask me this again another day, but today, my mood is...

What I want to see

• Protect: Delete Collective Unconscious from AST and give it to CNJ/WHM. If Y'shtola (1.0 Limsa Intro) and Kan-E-Senna (Ghimlyt Dark) can use it, then so can we.
• Afflatus Something: AoE shield/barrier.
• Seraph Strike: From PvP.
• Afflatus Purgation: From PvP. If it keeps the stun (unlike below), then it ignores stun immunity.

What I expect

• At Lv.94, SGE's Rhizomata, except it grants a lily.
• At Lv.98, additional charges for exactly two of the following: Thin Air, Tetragrammaton, Aquaveil, Temperance.
• At Lv.100, Afflatus Purgation: SGE's Pneuma, except it grants a regen effect to the party instead of triggering Kardion. Uses the same animation as the PvP skill.

[IDontPetLalas]

"added" to your job , not "stolen" from a job. if you want CU for WHM, no problem, I'll take "Coma"- for AST- CU but with 20% damage reduction as one of the 5 skills.

[Renathras]

Direct from YoshiP (wezll, his translator)
Live letter 66 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SXLmXt5lZk
at around 17mn

Cool, appreciate that. I always like to see sources of quotes that people pass around to make sure they're saying what they seem to be saying and what context (if any) they're said under.

...

In terms of making changes that affect people, it's important to consider their feelings in the matter, even if you cannot poll them directly. It's why sweeping changes to policy and law are often only done after extensive studies (not always polls) that try to determine how people think about them and what the effects would be on the people who dislike them, even if that number isn't known or known precisely. Any viewpoints (via poll) used to suggest policy change must at least acknowledge these effects and what the perception would be by those people in doing it, and good studies would also indicate a confidence level as to how well they think they are representing the people as a whole.

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?

Oh, my apologize.

Let me correct that:

SCH and AST might not be better off in SB. SCH and AST might be better off in ShB and EW. They could be the best they've ever been right now.

Better?

Of all the things to call me on for being subjective, something you agree with and that an absolute majority of people in both Ty's survey and my own agree with seems to be an odd choice. But have your gotcha, I suppose? /shrug

What else...

"(which you seem to at least acknowledge)" does mean you acknowledged it. Yes. So...why are you trying to correct something that's right? I said "seem" because I didn't want to put words in your mouth if you did not. There was no hidden meaning to the word.

"Was that the one with the Fire island?" I think that was 4.2. 4.1 was then they re-released two prior Troll themed raids, the Vanilla WoW 20 man one in Stranglethorn Vale and the 10 man one near the Blood Elf starting area from Burning Crusade, as 5 man dungeons that were extra hard. Those were the two you had to do for the badges or whatever (Tomestones, let's call them Tomestones) for the 4.1 patch. They were beastly hard, and Cataclysm had the stupid "triage healing model" where they tuned encounters to hit like FFXIV but gave you healing tools like a level 15 WHM in power that all cost as much as Cure 3. Needless to say, it was bad. So many healers quit that patch, they finally toned it down in the following patches. By 4.3 or so (I think that was the one with the 3 Bronze Dragonflight dungeons), they had relaxed the healing and people's gear was high enough healers were able to actually work again, and those were SO much better. But in 4.1, healing in WoW was absolute hell.

"Agreed, the thing is" - honestly, I think oGCDs are way too powerful. I feel like healing should be far more GCD based. GCD heals should be the strong ones with oGCD heals being agumenting them. So skilled healers in good parties can shift more to the oGCD side, but people using GCD heals should be able to get through the healing requirements, and the shift should be from GCD to oGCD as encounter teams get better. Right now, it's not that way. The oGCDs are the first line heals rather than the last line or secondary help. Instead of "Use Asylum if Medica 2 isn't quite enough healing", it's "Use Medica 2 if Asylum isn't enough healing".

"Oh, I could have sworn you said" - "one of the". Those are important words. I do agree the kits need to be re-evaluated, but I suspect we think different parts of the kits are in need of reevaluation.

Oh, and I don't mind MP being a more needed/managed resource at all. If we toned down the oGCDs, that might actually be relevant.

So while there's definitely an argument to be made about WHM 'feeling' good in terms of access to powerful heals,

I think this is, in fact, what people mean.

Also AST robbing WHM of its kit, getting lower MP costs for the same potency abilities (the GCDs), and then getting better MP regeneration skills (and robbing WHM of Lucid Dreaming/Shroud of Saints back in SB as well when it became a Role action) is, in fact, something I've spoken out against before.

WHM has this feeling/history because it was compared to SCH (whose GCD heals have always been weaker in potency) and Cure 3 initially, and then ShB Thin Air. Though it should be noted WHM's Lily heals are 100% MP free to use and also have no cast time requirement. I should also note ShB Thin Air was ALSO robbed from us... <_<

Me attempting to Quote your comment ->

I'm hardly the only one with long posts. In fact, other people have me beat in length sometimes. I just tend to be replying to several people instead of making several smaller posts in a row. I don't see you complaining about anyone else doing it, so no, I don't think I will.

Also: Edit button, that's how. There's a kind of stupidly small character limit, but if you make a post less than that, then hit edit...apparently you can post as long as you want after that. I'm sure there's SOME upper limit, but I have no idea what it may be.

So I thought of an interesting question that could be fun to discuss. There's no need to get very specific with these ideas, but start by picking a job. What are 1-5 actions you want to see added to that job in the next expansion (regardless of whether or not you believe they're realistic), and what are 1-5 actions you expect to see of that same job?

I think this isn't the best way to frame the question - button bloat is real and many people would like to REMOVE (or combine) some actions. For example, I think most everyone thinks that Cure 1/Benefic 1 should be merged with Cure 2/Benefic 2, and probably Medica/Helios with Medica 2/Aspected Helios. Also, a lot of "actions added" might not be "ACTIONS added" so much as "EFFECTS added". For example, I think WHM should get the Protect effect added (same as PvP, though it comes from Seraph Strike; reduces damage taken by 10% for 10 seconds) to Plenary Indulgence. PI already puts a buff on party members (which is what the AOE heals proc off of), so having that buff also reduce damage taken would be an easy addition.

That said...sure, I'll do mine:

White Mage

What I want to see

- Protect effect added to Plenary Indulgence
- Thin Air reverted to ShB's duration based instead of charge based
- Another charge on Tetra (if we aren't removing/toning down oGCDs)
- The mythical Cure IV (and it should have the floaty animation that Holy/Glare do)
- A Lily spender either barrier or HoT. Something that can be used on someone (at least the Tank) even if everyone's at 100% without it being a waste.

What I expect

- An upgrade to Glare
- An upgrade to Dia (it was missed this expansion vs Glare and Holy and just had a potency boost)
- An upgrade to Holy
- Some new capstone - ARR was arguably Benediction, HW Tetra, SB Plenary, ShB Temperance, EW Lilybell. Maybe a Collective Unconscious-like bubble like Y'Shtola and Kan-E-Senna use?
- Some ability or upgrade of an ability around level 96, maybe Asylum finally gets a mitigation, who knows - call this the mystery bucket. If a new ability, might be another Lily spender (Regen maybe?)