



As a healer main in this game for nigh on 14 years all I can say is that I’m tired. My role has been eroded of complexity and expression for 3 expansions. I’ve watched the tanks do my role for me for 2 expansions and my feedback and critiques continue to fall on deaf ears.
I have no idea who modern healers are designed for but I know now it’s not me. This is the first expansion I’m truly considering dropping the healer role and not returning, so if that was the goal- congratulations I guess
Gimme shadowflare and bane and ill be happy. another single target dot doesnt really do anything for the class other than bloat. Now if miasma served some other function that benefit the toolkit sure.Like if ed cost fairy gauge instead of aetherflow and miasma had a chance to generate 5 fairy gauge.
#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE




A bit tangential thing to bring up: Ph.Chemist.
Seeing a good amount of players who actually give SE the applause for even coming up with such idea (if you can even call those ideas... lol) makes you wonder why there's a good chunk of playerbase who would never trust their healers to have anything but 1 button spams, or anything but a true healbot.
GCD Benediction, GCD Manadiction, Instant Raise, and GCD Elixir - and yet there are also people wondering why there's a screaming to trim down our healing actions... ain't this role cooked up badly lol.
"Outside obvious jokes/sarcasm, I aim to convey my words to the future readers who may come across mine posts. Can I change -your- mind, somehow? Potentially... but that's not why I'm writing. You and I have wrote our piece(s). We don't necessarily need to change each other's mind. But we can change other's."


Long, sorry in advance
It can't be put into words how I truly feel about Phantom Chemist's implementation. This is now the third attempt they've had at implementing the job (first try resulted in them giving up and making AST/MCH from the scraps, second try resulted in them giving up and making SGE), and this is what they managed to come up with? I don't normally tend to run the 'I could do better than the devs' angle, but in this particular case, I'd argue that I did indeed do better than the devs (by accident), entirely because of how low the bar currently is
It is very apparent that A: there isn't a dedicated 'Healer Designer' on the team (it's handled by the Caster dev AFAIK), B: They do not really care about how fun a Healer is, only that it is 'functional', and 'less 'this is very apparent' and more 'this is what it feels like to me', C: it feels to me like the Phantom Jobs were designed with the first step in the process being 'how does this resolve a mechanic in Forked Tower?' Chemist has effectively been designed into being the Rick and Morty butter robot, where its only purpose is 'you exist to circumvent the Resurrection Restriction debuff'. Similarly, Ranger and Thief are pretty weak designs IMO, with their main draw being 'can destroy traps' and 'can find traps, and unlock some special doors' respectively. The only thing I remembered about Ranger from older games was 'it can attack 4 times' and it doesn't even do that
And the worst part about OC, the most egregious IMO, is that it's an openworld zone full of monsters with unique attacks, it's side content so balance doesn't need to be strictly adhered to (some PJobs have literal instant-kill attacks and invulns), and despite this they still didn't give a Phantom Blue Mage. Tural is the place that Blue Mage originates from, and the only mention that seems to be made of it is the Fishing part of the Crafter Role Quests, where it's played for laughs haha funny fish magic
But back to Healers...
Cure1 etc. - We could very easily have these upgrade to their higher forms with traits. For example, Physick is 450p. Adlo is 300p, with a 180% shield (540p). Adjust Adlo so that it is 450p with a 120% shield, and it still would provide a 540p shield, but with Physick's 450p of actual healing baked in. Make the MP cost 500MP like Physick, instead of the 1000MP cost of Adlo, because the 'cost' of the spell is the fact it's a GCD
60s CDs (I assume you mean Aquaveil, Protraction, Exaltation and Krasis) - Give actual interactivity between these actions and the other parts of the kit. Have Protraction be Deployable. Have Exaltation (and other non-Card OGCDs) be duplicated to your Synastry partner at reduced effectiveness. Have Aquaveil... grant Regen for 9s after it expires or something, IDK? At least Krasis synergises with other things (by increasking Kardia throughput, can combo it with Soteria, etc) but I'd change its effect entirely as part of a rework
120s DOT (Baneful) - I actually don't mind that this is a 120s CD. Shadowflare was a 60s CD in SB, I see this as being kinda similar. The real issue is that we don't got anything to fill the gaps in our kit that were left when Miasma, Bane, Shadowflare were removed, and this can't possibly fill that gap.
If we had, say (numbers are examples, balance as needed):
Broil - 340p
Biolysis - 20p on cast, 35p per tick for 30s (370p)
Miasmalysis - 280p on cast, 10p per tick for 24s (360p), replaces Ruin2 as the 'mobility' action
Shadowflare - AOE, 100p on cast, 50p per tick for 15s (350p)
Bane - Upgrade to Energy Drain, that makes it AOE. Deals bonus damage equal to Bio/Miasma's 'on cast' potency, if they're present on the target (so that Bane-ing Miasma is worth it in AOE situations).
Then we could simply have Baneful as it is now, a 120s CD, but give it Bane's effect as a bonus (IE, Chain grants a buff that upgrades Bane to Baneful (and gives a free use of Bane/Baneful) for 1 use). Ideally, Bane would deal bonus damage equal to the 'on cast' potency of Bio/Miasma, such that spreading Miasma is still worth it in AOE. Instead of the 'reset duration, but penalise potency' effect Bane had in SB, I'd also suggest that Bane doesn't reset durations, but doesn't penalise the potency. With that, we wouldn't need to worry about 'infinite loops' and could open the opportunity to making Chain Stratagem be spreadable via Bane too. That way, a 2min window on a trash pack would be <Bio, Miasma (Chain, Baneful), Shadowflare>, and that'd spread not only both the DOTs to all of the mobs, but also Chain itself.
Also, if we condense Physick and Adlo (as mentioned above) all of this takes exactly 0 extra hotbar spaces to implement. And with those potency values, 'Broil only, zero DOTs' would be about 97-98% of the potency output of 'perfectly optimized, not a single DOT tick missed' gameplay. And if BLM can be 7% ahead of SMN and SE doesn't think that's an issue, then this should be perfectly acceptable too
Sage/Scholar similarities - Lol and Lmao
AST Cards - They won't touch them in 8.0, citing either 'we need to get more data about whether people prefer this new system' or 'our data indicates that players prefer the deterministic no-RNG version of Cards (we won't show you the data though)'
As for waiting till 8.0, first of all that assumes that they'll do anything in 8.0. It's entirely possible that 'the Healers are functional, they can clear content, therefore we don't need to change course' is the prevailing wisdom.
But if they were considering making changes, 7.3 would be a perfect time to test the waters IMO, as we don't need to worry about balance so much. There's no new Ultimate in that patch, so needing to adapt to a sudden job kit redesign won't be an issue. We could start with small changes, such as adjusting DOT timer/potencies, or extending the janky snapshot window that lets you doubledip Pepsis' Heal and the protection of the Barrier via a buff to make it into an actual mechanic for the job, or readding a couple of old actions like Water or Miasma and seeing how the playerbase reacts
Rather than 40p for 30s, it'd probably feel way better to use if it were 80p for 15s. Same potency as the ST version, but way less likely to lose duration due to mobs dying before the duration can fully run its course

This is the reason I actually wanted to have an ultimate in 7.3. Since .5 patches tend to run longer, they could've done some funky job changes in 7.5 till 8.0 to get the feedback and start making changes before we get the 8.0's savage. White Mage is dealing 10% more than any other healer? Sure, who cares, Savage is already over and let us have some fun in extremes at least. Sage has a weird healing interaction with Zoe? Cool, that will get patched out before hurting any relevant hard content. Scholar has insane AoE now? I'll pick Scholar for dungeon runs now.


I think 7.5 is a little too late in the schedule to be testing things, there's probably not enough time between 7.5 and 8.0 to take action on the feedback (which also would take some time to come in). If we look at something like Eureka, the feedback about Anemos, and how people gravitated towards doing 'FATE Trains', didn't come in fast enough for them to design Pagos with that in mind, hence Pagos was widely reviled on release. Fast forward to Pyros (and especialyl Hydatos, flat rectangle that it is), and it was much more 'FATE Train' friendly, with aetheryte attunement levels being much more fair, etc. If we take that to show that 'SE makes a patch in Patch X.Y, then takes feedback during patch X.Y, but cannot implement changes based on that feedback until Patch X.(Y+2)', then 7.5 would be too late as by this maths it'd require until 8.1 to make changes based on the feedback. If the changes were made in 7.3, however, it'd mean that 7.5 is the earliest time that feedback on those changes could be acted upon, and that's close enough to the expansion that they could easily justify doing 'feedback-changes, plus expansion stuff, all at once'



I can only assume Blue Mage and Beastmaster are being reserved for a later patch for phantom jobs as all of the phantoms come from FF5, if not that is a major missed opprotunity. And from what I can tell from the JP side of the narrative, because of course there is differences between JP and ENG text, the WoL is basically one of the most knowledgeable outsiders about the whalaqee and blue magic aside from Martyn and Whastrach. As otherwise the JP MSQ narrative likes to portray the concept of blue magic as esoteric and shamanistic and spiritual and also that the whalaqee as a barely known tribe mostly talked about in rumors who seem strange in their reverence of ceruleum (aka: blue phosporous water). Which how this ties into the crescent, we the WoL, have stumbled upon an ancient form of fifth era magic outside the crescent and are one of the people pioneering it with job crystals. While that is all good and stuff from a narrative and worldbuilding standpoint, I hope that 8.1 or 8.4 comes full circle and actually allows us to play blue mage in normal content as level 100 would be right when the WoL as a blue mage would visit Tural for learning blue magic and therefore visiting the whalaqee, if not that is going to be a major missed opportunity.
As blue mage is just a more fascinating concept for a healer, as it very much has a "build your ability kit" approach on what works and what doesn't work. Meaning a blue mage healer wouldn't be nearly as forced to take mitigation and healing and that it would be by player agency to make a call for having more or less for fights. As its also designed in a way healers wish they were designed, as a dps first, healer second. Which is the fundamental flaw with most healers, they are a healer first, a dps second, even tanks are more closely designed as a dps job with just some extra mitigation and enmity and healing.




At least the community kinda invented a use for thief in that it’s a far better gold farmer than an endless chain of “my holmgang macro didn’t go off” but it’s obvious they completely phoned it on chemist and no other phantom job is even remotely a healer (the closest is ironically oracle but that’s only to internally compensate for starfall deleting your HP bar)
As a healer main in this game for nigh on 14 years all I can say is that I’m tired. My role has been eroded of complexity and expression for 3 expansions. I’ve watched the tanks do my role for me for 2 expansions and my feedback and critiques continue to fall on deaf ears.
I have no idea who modern healers are designed for but I know now it’s not me. This is the first expansion I’m truly considering dropping the healer role and not returning, so if that was the goal- congratulations I guess
|
|
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
|