Delete rescue from the game.

[Tigore]

At first, I was commenting on Waxsw's suggestion, but I might as well comment on how the Sage felt VS. the White Mage for the current 4 mans.

AoEs do feel a bit different for both. WHM can place Regen on the tank and spam Holy with Assize in between. The 3 stuns on the enemies pretty much offers enough mitigation with high DPS present. Everything is almost dead when they become immune to the stuns. SGE instead uses Physis to increase heals, pop Haima / Panhaima with the Physis buff, then demolish the pack with Phlegma and Toxicon. I know Waxsw disagrees with the Diagnosis shield making addersting procs damage neutral, but it feels like I can kind of do that for AoEs currently. Dyskrasia only starts to get used when the enemy count drops to around 3 ... Which is a very small time frame.

For single target bosses .... Pretty much the graphs that Waxsw linked is my feeling. SGE is another Glare Mage using a different name. The counter to AoE damage is Assize + Afflatus Rapture VS. Physis + Kerachole. Tank busters would be Regen + Divine Benson VS. Taurochole with Kardia mending the rest. Additional Aquaveil VS. Diagnosis shield if the tank is getting hit by a truck which is not often for geared tanks.

[Renathras]

...

It's all good, my man. I learn/think of new things all the time. It's one reason I stick around here even with quite a bit of toxicity because sometimes someone will say something and I'll think "Huh...yeah, that is pretty true, honestly". Like the melee Healer concept in general has long been a "we can't have that because encounter design", but...thinking about it, it seems more doable than it initially might seem. As for the Yoshi P thing...

My takeaway is that SE has heard "the usual complaints", and that they're choosing to design healers and content the way they are anyway.

I kinda think it comes down to, at least in part, that old meme, "Healers adjust." DPS can vibe to their rotation and not react to how the rest of the party is performing. Tanks can vibe to their rotation and mostly not react to how the rest of the party is performing (maybe they keep an eye out for someone who needs a spot mitigation/heal). Healers have to contend with everything from dragging clown fiestas kicking and screaming across the finish line to being (almost) superfluous in parties that can do mechanics perfectly while blindfolded.

And the way I see it: Healer design and philosophy seems to focus on the "clown fiesta" end of the spectrum. The complaints focus on the "being superfluous" end of the spectrum.

Basically. If you played in ARR or especially HW, you'd know it for sure, but if not, the short version is there used to be an ability called Cleric Stance. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. What it did was swap your Mind and Int values (back then all attack magic used Int, even on Healers) and then further cut any healing you did by 20%. What this meant was a WHM could hit it and their Stone/Aero spells would hit 3x or so as hard, but their Heals would only heal for something like 20% or less. And it had a 5 sec CD (like how Tank stances used to), so if you went into it and then the Tank took a couple crits to the face, YOU COULD NOT HEAL THEM (not well, anyway), which led to lots of wipes and lots of Healers getting bitched out.

Some high end players loved this because they loved "dancing" in between the stances...though in practice they really didn't "dance" much. At the time, SCH's Lustrate was a flat 25% heal (no matter what your HP was) and Eos spells ignored the Cleric nerf to Mind. So SCH would basically just sit in Cleric 99% of the time. WHMs, on the other hand, often didn't go into Cleric because the only ability they had that could do that was Benediction, which was basically the same as today (full 100% HP heal, long CD). So there was far less "dancing" and more "SCH players get to feel like badasses", which is why you often see SCHs talking up the glory days of HW far more than WHMs.

On the other hand of things, casual healers that would maybe use Stone and Aero some and didn't feel comfortable locking themselves out of healing, so they'd often not go into Cleric much or at all outside of soloing. But if they were doing 4 mans or 8 man ques with high end players, the high end players would bitch at them for not using Cleric and doing more damage. CONVERSELY, when high end players did casual content and hit Cleric at a bad time (because of the 5 sec lockout) or let people's health fall a little too low before getting out of Cleric to heal them, causing a wipe, THEY would get bitched at.

So everyone was badmouthing everyone, and new players looking at the whole mess stopped deciding to play Healer and went DPS instead, making ques get the worst they've ever been (people will tell you ShB is when Healer was the most in need, but that's not actually true; it WAS highly in need, but it wasn't as bad as it was in the Cleric era)

Basically, new people weren't picking up Healing because they were terrified of Cleric, and the hardcores and casuals were at each other's throats over doing damage or not doing damage, using Cleric or not using Cleric.

I feel like the Devs really don't want a repeat OF THAT, and I think that's the reason they refuse to move to the "more damage" side. Not to mention they made all healer damage use Mind anyway, so Cleric itself is no longer useful.

.

Those logs, are numbers, there is absolutely nothing subjectve in numbers, both almost copies 1 to 1, similar casts, similar cpm, similar % of total actions... there is absolutely no argument that can deny it.

No, I'm not saying they're mechanically similar - if we ONLY look at their number of nuke casts...which IS significant because they are used so much but is also NOT the entirety of what goes into playing Jobs - I'm saying whether that feels different to people or not IS subjective.

To you, WHM and SGE feel identical, right?

To me, they do not. WHM's rotation is more broken up by Afflatus abilities and SGE's is not, while SGE has oGCD weaves and high Karachole uptime and WHM has nothing at all similar to that. Then there are the aesthetics. SGE attacks are sharp and fast, quad lasers that lance out and burn into an enemy. WHM's are more...I'm not sure the best descriptor, but circuitous, perhaps. Several small light sparks fly out and trace arcs towards the target, several in the middle form a bit of a spiral attack while those outside arc around the target then come back in for a second strike after the first have landed, but if feels more of a spirit attack.

Those FEEL different to me (and many other people), and are mechanically different, too, but they do not FEEL different to you.

That is what I mean about the FEEL being subjective.

And even if we look at the raw numbers of all their GCD attacks and only look at attack spells (whether or not we count Afflatus Solace/Rapture as that), they're not identical. Assize works nothing like Plegma, which isn't used like it. Misery and Toxicon are not at all alike.

The numbers do not lie, which is why I said nothing about the NUMBERS. I was strictly referring to the argument of FEEL. Feel is like taste, or even hearing and eyesight. No two people are exactly the same in what they feel. As for Ty's poll - I feel like the 5s actually count against your argument. Most people see 5 and think "middle" (I did) not realizing no 0 matters. I suspect if there was a 0 added, some of the 1s might drop to 0, but the 5s would stay 5s, so the average might not change as much as you'd think. Personally, I'd do 1-5 since that allows strong dislike, dislike, neutral, like, strong like. 1-5 people see 3 as neutral, but it allows some gradient in like/dislike. 0-10 can as well, with 5 again being the middle-point, but you start getting into a lot of overlap. Like what's the difference between a 2 and 3 in a scale of 0-10? There are some "deadzone" numbers that aren't good at capturing actual feeling well and some of the extra granularity is lost. A number of Jobs almost had no 4s, but had a lot of 5s and 3s, but what's the difference really. It creates a lot more subjective issues and people going "well, I fall somewhere in here...I'll just pick this one". 1s, 5s, and 10s are pretty understandable, and 9 is often see as "not perfect, but close", but there are some ranges that are kind of...iffy.

But at any rate, if there was 0-10, 5 would have a bit more meaning.

SCH's core identity wasn't gutted. It's core identity was always "heals using Aetherflow and Faerie abilities", which is true today as it was then. It's core DAMAGE ROTATION identity was gutted, however, but when I first picked up SCH in ARR, I wasn't thinking "Yeah, I want to play the DoT mage with some oGCD heals!" I was thinking "I've got WHM at 50 and when I get a SCH co-healer in Praetorium, I like they can make that shield field on the ground. I think I want to level that." Like, legit, the reason I leveled SCH in the first place was because Sacred Soil both looked cool and I loved the concept of making a protective field for my allies along with the barriers from Succor/Adlo (WHM had Protect and Stoneskin at the time, which I loved, but both of those got the axe...

It's more how people played and focued on it. I played SCH like I did WHM until SB when I really started delving into the game mechanics. I remember watching a video that explained what an Action/oGCD was and that it was different from a Spell/GCD. That was around 4.3, I guess? Until then, I just thought of them as "cast time" and "instant cast", and used things like Tetra for emergency healing because there was no delay to the effect (Benediction is, to this day, STILL strange in that it has a slight delay, which Rescue inherited for some god unknown reason...)

And something I don't think the "high end players" of this game realize is...that's the norm. You might be thinking "man, you were just BAD" (except WHM played that way, and I mained WHM, so it actually was fine since WHM had so few oGCDs back then anyway), but what you don't realize is: That's the normal. It's why a scrub like me can get high Blue in 4 and 24 mans (where we're comparing against almost the entire playerbase) because I know how to keep my GCD running and know how to weave oGCDs. It's not because the skill ceiling is low - I get Gray/Green in Savage, Green/BARELY Blue in Extremes; you "skilled" players are easily able to get higher skill expression out of the Jobs - it's that the game doesn't explain these concepts and so the general playerbase legitimately doesn't know about them. (NOTE for reference: I don't run any stuff, I just look my name up now and again on the forbidden site out of curiosity)

It's why I point out how a lot of proposed changes for high end players can and will affect the average player (a 45-55 in 24 mans is what the average probably is) since I don't think high end players actually understand that. It's like trying to talk physics to Stephen Hawking, he may not even be CAPABLE (prior to death, I mean) of dumbing his own mind down to the level of the average person. When someone gains a high level of mastery, it's a rare person that can remember what it's like not having it or what it would be like to one who doesn't.

Note you even made the point: "go to any savage fight you want" - the thing that less than 30%, if that, of the player base even attempts.

.

Not sure what else I wanna comment on, though one thing that jumps out at me is pointing out that MP isn't an issue for SGE because Dosis is 400 MP. If they're casting 900 MP Eukrasian Diagnoses or 1000 MP Eukrasian Prognoses, that changes a bit. It doesn't seem like a lot, but trade out 400 MP spells for 500 MP ones and your MP economy starts to decline. The more of them the more this changes. WHM had bad MP economy until the Misery change, which saved them 4 Glare casts (vs non-damage neutral Misery) per minute, which is 1600 MP. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but that was a difference between some Piety WHM being unviable and 0 Piety WHM now being fine.

And I'd note that the single biggest/most consistent complaint aside from "more DPS abilities" on the long form survey was people complaining about Healers doing so much DPS and GCD heals being a "damage loss" discouraging their use. It seems like a large chunk of the healer community WANT to cast GCD heals and that be a core part of their playstyle. In WoW, for example, I liked Resto Druid because a lot of the playstyle was keeping a steady stream of HoTs ticking across the entire raid. Some people really enjoy that kind of gameplay, and the hyper-focus on "any GCD heal is bad" is actually detrimental to the game and something a large swath of the healing community actually DOESN'T like.

It's also a reason that WHM Lilies/Misery is so well received, because it effectively lets you use Cure 2/Medica without penalty, at least occasionally.

[Sebazy]

So everyone was badmouthing everyone, and new players looking at the whole mess stopped deciding to play Healer and went DPS instead, making ques get the worst they've ever been (people will tell you ShB is when Healer was the most in need, but that's not actually true; it WAS highly in need, but it wasn't as bad as it was in the Cleric era)

Say what? Since when?

It took a tank to get a guaranteed insta queue pop for most of ARR through HW. As bad as it was initially, AST was still mighty in leveling dungeons (as long as you didn't want to AoE dps) and was very popular right up until it hit a wall with Gordias Savage. People will tell you ShB was when healers were in the shortest supply because yeah, that's when healers were at an all time low. The casuals still had no new healer to play and the hardcores were burning out left right and centre.

Before you dismiss this as subjective because I wrote it, here's a couple of old posts from Reddit from around that era:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...lers_or_tanks/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._ques_usually/

And a few from the official forums here:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Roulette-Bonus

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...er-then-healer.

Meanwhile if you just do an open search for Reddit Healer Queues, there's an absolute tidal wave of comments mentioning around late 2019 onwards aka Shadowbringers.

You are at least correct about the whole warfare over healer DPS during that era though. That was pretty messy!

[Tigore]

Re-checking my Sage toolbars, the times I said Prognosis was when I was actually talking about the single target Diagnosis. Sorry if this caused any confusion.

[Renathras]

...

I know it's all anecdote, but I had instant ques for Healer in HW and SB. ARR was the only time I remember waiting, and it was generally less than 5 mins. Most of HW, I had instant ques on Healer, didn't need a Tank. Probably goes to the whole "anecdote is not data" thing. SB was when Healers were the shortest supply, though...which is a bit odd, when you actually think about it. I think it was SB when I dug through the FFXIV census numbers with the Wayback machine and posted them a few months ago here.

ShB is when the hardcores like to say it was the worst because they were upset about SCH having its DPS kit gutted and AST its cards simplified, but SB was actually when it was the worst, which is why the Devs made the ShB changes in the first place.

Though I was actually wrong about one thing - for DPS, the worst the ques ever were was the patch NIN as released. 2.4, I think?

[Sebazy]

Yeah, ARR to HW was an awful time to solo queue as a DPS full stop really.

For whatever reason late Stormblood as a DPS didn't feel quite so bad to me at least (I was playing Redmage a good bit for roulettes and alliance) but that's 100% subjective and I can't back that one up with anything so I could be wrong there. I suspect early SB was awful with both Sam and RDM being popular+decent at the time.

I don't really think the ShB healer gutting was in response to SB directly thought, I'm pretty confident it was a second go at what was initially started with 4.0 SCH. Just this time they didn't quite such a problematic hole in the kits (Remember 4.0 left SCH with no spammable or mobile AoE) so were able to stick to their guns on it. The plan was already in motion.

[WaxSw]

No, I'm not saying they're mechanically similar - if we ONLY look at their number of nuke casts...which IS significant because they are used so much but is also NOT the entirety of what goes into playing Jobs - I'm saying whether that feels different to people or not IS subjective.

To you, WHM and SGE feel identical, right?

YES, because guess what? Dpsing is what we do for the most part and that part is identical, only difference you can feel is AoE,buff optimization and even their resources generate at the same rate and are used in similar ways, if for you having different animations is enough I'm glad for you but I play an MMO not a movie and thus only different shiny animations is not nearly enough.

And even if we look at the raw numbers of all their GCD attacks and only look at attack spells (whether or not we count Afflatus Solace/Rapture as that), they're not identical. Assize works nothing like Plegma, which isn't used like it. Misery and Toxicon are not at all alike.

True in a gcd basis they're only an 85% the exact same job and over the whole fight they are only 65% the same job THEY ARE SO DIFFERENT. Honestly I don't know how someone can look at those logs and still defend SE crap design

SCH's core identity wasn't gutted.

It was the moment they removed the dots, deleted a fairy, changed the way it worked and remove any kind of micro management.

It's not because the skill ceiling is low - I get Gray/Green in Savage, Green/BARELY Blue in Extremes; you "skilled" players are easily able to get higher skill expression out of the Jobs - it's that the game doesn't explain these concepts and so the general playerbase legitimately doesn't know about them. (NOTE for reference: I don't run any stuff, I just look my name up now and again on the forbidden site out of curiosity)

Quoting this because there are 2 things I want to unpack:

-I do agree that the game barely teach anything and I wish SE did something related to that

-If you yourself don't run content and admit to not have much experience then my question is, What makes you think that your changes are good to the game when you don't even comprehend the true extent of those systems you're planning to change? This is not a "Hawking don't understand the mind of the normal person" this is more like someone trying to eliminate all the quantum theory because they don't know how to work with eigenvalues.

and that leads me to the next point

Note you even made the point: "go to any savage fight you want" - the thing that less than 30%, if that, of the player base even attempts.

(over 50% of the max level population try them)

I say that because the changes you proposed for "skill ceiling" WOULD ONLY AFFECT THEM, for the majority of the playerbase that do not play into raid buffs/don't use them properly your change of toxicon is just a removal of skill ceiling while getting nothing in exchange.

It seems like a large chunk of the healer community WANT to cast GCD heals and that be a core part of their playstyle.

And that's why in Ty's poll the most requested change were offensive actions and the 2nd most requested removal was GCD healing actions (most requested in WHM case) followed by oGCD healing actions, right?

It's also a reason that WHM Lilies/Misery is so well received, because it effectively lets you use Cure 2/Medica without penalty, at least occasionally.

Not exactly that, Missery change was well recieved because it allows whm to have something because until that change afflatus was a dumpster fire almost of the same magnitud of 5.0 Sch without ED, Whm's were discouraged to interact with their core system in any way and were widely considered a liability compared to Ast

The key of afflatus is how they are balanced because Whm lacks oGCD healing on the same degree the rest of the healers have and that ocasionally you mentioned, those two things keep Whm in check and having a ceiling because similar to the oGCDs of other jobs those GCDs are part of a limited, time/resource based set of tools that the healer want to maximize.

Your proposal of damage neutral toxicon would be like making cure1,2,3 medica 1,2 and regen generate lillies, it would be a mess because it would only increase RNG reliance of the job while removing that skillful play of trying to maximize the limited resources.


After reading this I honestly believe that you should try to optimize the damage on WHM or SGE in any mild-intense healing enviroment, I think it would help you to see why those changes would hurt the game since it looks that there are some core concepts on the healing that you do not have interioriced.

[Renathras]

Yeah, ARR to HW was an awful time to solo queue as a DPS full stop really.

For whatever reason late Stormblood as a DPS didn't feel quite so bad to me at least (I was playing Redmage a good bit for roulettes and alliance) but that's 100% subjective and I can't back that one up with anything so I could be wrong there. I suspect early SB was awful with both Sam and RDM being popular+decent at the time.

I don't really think the ShB healer gutting was in response to SB directly thought, I'm pretty confident it was a second go at what was initially started with 4.0 SCH. Just this time they didn't quite such a problematic hole in the kits (Remember 4.0 left SCH with no spammable or mobile AoE) so were able to stick to their guns on it. The plan was already in motion.

That may be true. Though they did have the ED reversion on SCH (by popular demand, or at least highly vocal demand)

[GoatOfWar]

I think a really good middle ground would be to give the player something that shuts it down. Something like an enchantment on the helmet to make yourself immune to Rescue. I wouldn't want to remove the ability and understand why people don't want it removed, but there's no valid reason to deny me the ability to opt out from it either.

[ty_taurus]

At the end of the day, this is a multiplayer game. Rescue or no rescue, the decisions made by other players directly influences your ability to live, die, win, and lose regardless of whether or not a healer can attempt to reposition you. Getting mad at Rescue doesn't make sense when another player can also just drag their telegraphed earthshaker on top of you and force you die in the opposite direction. Should we allow players to opt out of that as well? Include a setting that prevents you from taking damage that is directed at other players? That doesn't make sense and breaks the game.

If you are unhappy with Rescue, what you are actually unhappy with is that your performance is tied to other players, and the solution to that issue is not removing Rescue, it's playing a single player RPG.