XIV EW Job-Gameplay is Terrible... Why?

[Rekh]

Would do them well to open a job position called "Get Player Feedback Outside of Reddit and twitter Analyst" The downward trend of xiv has a lot do from where they gather player feedback, most likely.

[Absurdity]

Needless to say, WhM isn't exactly a shining example of the good Stormblood's designs.

I would generally praise Stormblood as the last time the job design was actually good.
Yes, I even liked SB Machinist...when it worked.

But Whitemage is certainly an outlier there, it was bad, really bad, and it was one of the first instances I can remember where the devs stubbornly insisted on a design that the playerbase told them in advance was going to be awful, only to then spend the rest of the expansion trying to fix said awful design.

Funnily enough even with SB WHM being terrible I preferred it over AST for O9S, simply because I couldn't trust my random pug co-healer to not eat dirt during Earthquake and leave me to solo that phase.

[Aravell]

I'm gonna be honest, I think everyone seems to be hyper-fixating on how bad SB lilies were and dismissing the entire job.

I mained WHM for 2 tiers in SB and played it for every fight in savage multiple times. WHM wasn't bad, the only annoying thing about it was the aggro problem during aggro resets in O4S P2 and aggro issues in O8S P2 due to how early Heartless Angel is. WHM worked just fine, could heal everything, could contribute damage, it just didn't have a good job gimmick in the expansion that everyone got a job gauge and gimmick (also their capstone ability was garbage on release).

[Kisshu]

Part of it for me is also that the lv 90 bosses are very easy, bland and boring for the most part. Sure, there are a few stand out between them that require a bit of thought, but most of them just have 2-3 attacks that you just dodge left/right or out/in for.
The few that I have fun with are the likes of Peacekeeper, Proto-Omega, Scarmiglione and Durante.

[ty_taurus]

I'm gonna be honest, I think everyone seems to be hyper-fixating on how bad SB lilies were and dismissing the entire job.

I mained WHM for 2 tiers in SB and played it for every fight in savage multiple times. WHM wasn't bad, the only annoying thing about it was the aggro problem during aggro resets in O4S P2 and aggro issues in O8S P2 due to how early Heartless Angel is. WHM worked just fine, could heal everything, could contribute damage, it just didn't have a good job gimmick in the expansion that everyone got a job gauge and gimmick (also their capstone ability was garbage on release).

The thing about it for me is, if we’re ignoring the lilies, what’s different about SB WHM that HW WHM didn’t have? Thin Air is their only good thing that came from SB WHM. Divine Benision is fine I guess, but is it really a noteworthy quality of WHM gameplay? I wouldn’t say so. And Plenary was just humiliatingly terrible, as you noted.

So sure, the rest of WHM might not have been as embarrassingly poorly designed as the lilies and plenary, but the rest of WHM was just HW + Thin Air.

[Colt47]

The problem is it all becomes too stale too quickly. That's really the issue more than anything else and it carries over to PvP and other parts of the game. There's no way to shake things up in such a strict "do it right or not" type of rotation, and the game is super limited by the tab target system.

[Aravell]

The thing about it for me is, if we’re ignoring the lilies, what’s different about SB WHM that HW WHM didn’t have? Thin Air is their only good thing that came from SB WHM. Divine Benision is fine I guess, but is it really a noteworthy quality of WHM gameplay? I wouldn’t say so. And Plenary was just humiliatingly terrible, as you noted.

So sure, the rest of WHM might not have been as embarrassingly poorly designed as the lilies and plenary, but the rest of WHM was just HW + Thin Air.

And that's exactly the point. SB WHM is not so different from HW WHM.

That's why I said people are hyper-fixating on the lilies being bad and dismissing SB WHM as some kind of unplayable garbage when it wasn't. It was fine, not amazing, but also not unplayable garbage.

[Absurdity]

And that's exactly the point. SB WHM is not so different from HW WHM.

That's why I said people are hyper-fixating on the lilies being bad and dismissing SB WHM as some kind of unplayable garbage when it wasn't. It was fine, not amazing, but also not unplayable garbage.

Of course it wasn't unplayable, you could still clear all content just fine. It simply performed outright worse than both SCH and AST with it's only "gimmick" being that you could spam Cure 3 when needed, which was nice in situations where everything went wrong but isn't exactly a useful job identity.

And it being basically just HW WHM is exactly why it's considered bad, the job was already lagging behind at the end of HW and while the other two healers got actually useful new toys SB WHM got a completely dysfunctional job mechanic.

[ty_taurus]

And that's exactly the point. SB WHM is not so different from HW WHM.

That's why I said people are hyper-fixating on the lilies being bad and dismissing SB WHM as some kind of unplayable garbage when it wasn't. It was fine, not amazing, but also not unplayable garbage.

Right but because both HW and SB WHM are basically the same, so if we’re trying to compare the two, we can definite SB specifically by what did change: less DOTs, Fluid Aura got kneecapped, the lilies were added and were an atrocity against the human race as was Plenary, Divine Benison, better MP management with Thin Air, and both the damage and healing of Assize now are had full functionality thanks the the Removal of old Cleric Stance. But in comparison to AST who was already outperforming WHM at the end of HW, they got more OVCD healing, more damage, a reworked Spear, higher buff uptime with Sleeve Draw, and a nerfed Balance. So the healing competition was now even further out of WHM’s reach despite little changing.

So while HW may have been almost the same, it represents what I would describe as a more competitive standing in the healer lineup and a better damage profile at the cost of a weaker MP economy.

[Colt47]

MMOs sort of break when the game is in a content lul and it's on the final patch before an expansion. Basically our gear is equivalent to level 95 characters right now except we are doing level 90 scaled content, and they are sort of tweaking numbers on the stuff we are fighting at 90 as they go up the patches to cover that weird gear gap that you'd see otherwise. The reality is the job design is okay, there's just a lot of preferences going around as to what people want from the jobs they are running.

The only criticisms I have with the job designs right now is that Addersting is an annoying resource because of only being gained on a shield breaking, which is completely dependent on the content. DRK is still a bit confusing with what the expected rotation is supposed to be. I know the community has figured out an optimal rotation but anyone who is playing casually is just sort of left in the dark. They also need to just flatline every jobs skill unlocks for pre-50 and make sure everyone is getting an AOE at the same time, so there aren't any weird dungeons where some jobs have an AOE skill and others don't.

That being said, I feel that the healing role, which is psychologically taxing as is, probably deservers a bit of a break. Even if the designers make mitigation matter more, it still doesn't change the fact that using mitigation is an option not a requirement. Someone can choose not to use it even though it might be objectively better to use it then not, and if they make it harsher, the one who really gets punished is the healer. What I mean is that unless the healers has run the same dungeon a LOT of times, if the tank suddenly dies they likely wont know if it was their own fault or the tanks fault. This is especially true since earlier dungeons sometimes let tanks pull an entire hallway without using much mitigation while the healer spam heals them. From the perspective of the healer, it just seems like they didn't do a good enough job.