#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Aravell]

Just checked, still the less played in savage healer, with at the very least a 10k players margin from the second less played healer, and this despite AST dealing a whopping 700+ more rdps than every other healer.
If you correct with this bias + the casualisation bias you mentioned, ie being a carbon copy of WHM but strictly better, it really seems we've lost a chunk of AST players, and this population will rapidly plummet the moment AST is nerfed.

Maybe I'm mistaken tho, I haven't done a full study about it (we need to hire a data scientist !!).

Huh, the highest damage healer in the game right now, not much harder to play than WHM, slowed down to the point where you can single weave and doesn't hurt your fingers when played for long periods anymore, but still the least played healer.

Turns out that, if you alienate parts of an already small playerbase, you might see it become smaller. Who knew? Certainly not the job design team!

Edit: I do seem to recall that there were quite a few people stating "Wow, AST looks great in DT, I'm definitely playing it!", wonder how many of them are still playing AST now?

[Somnolence]

"AST is even less played now, how could this happen ?

It has second-most M4S clears, after SCH. I speculate this is because latter floor clears are from more skilled players and these play jobs for their strengths and AST has best dps and best healing.

Unsurprisingly jobs that truly suck like DRK are unpopular. And the most popular tank is not WAR, but PLD.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Lol if AST numbers goes up, that's probably more because ppl get to play their "WHM but star and card VFX" finally after so many years. Who knows

[animeking]

I'm going to say the same thing that everyone else tells me when I've said the exact same thing about Healers, Tanks, and DPS.
If you don't like it play something else.
Or
This isn't like other games or other FF games.

I've played FFXI where, just about every job was unique to playing FFXIV ARR where, most jobs were unique to now FFXIV DT where, very few jobs are unique.

SE has made it very clear these past years, less individual unique jobs and more jobs per role that are basically the same and the only uniqueness is what the skills are named.

[gllt]

I already play lots of other games and I have free time so I'm going to use it to pester the devs to make this one better until the servers shut down or they directly kick me in the forehead.

[sharknado]

Lol if AST numbers goes up, that's probably more because ppl get to play their "WHM but star and card VFX" finally after so many years. Who knows

I'm leveling AST and Lightspeed probably shows SE should check faster gameplay with shorter GCD. Also stars and stuff.

SE has made it very clear these past years, less individual unique jobs and more jobs per role that are basically the same and the only uniqueness is what the skills are named.

They had the problem of a tank that could block physical attacks but the boss had magical ones. Old-style unique/job identity is extremely hard to balance if at all.

[EusisLandale]

They had the problem of a tank that could block physical attacks but the boss had magical ones. Old-style unique/job identity is extremely hard to balance if at all.

All they had to do was give Paladin their own version of Dark Mind. They had no problem doing it for Dark Knight while it was an avoidance based tank by way of Dark Passenger blinds and Dark Dance dodge and parry boosts after all.

[CaptainLagbeard]

They had the problem of a tank that could block physical attacks but the boss had magical ones. Old-style unique/job identity is extremely hard to balance if at all.

With the Job system, it's not really all that hard to be honest... As you can somewhat reasonably expect someone doing Savage to have more than 1 job leveled... If one tank is better at some fights, you just use that tank for those fights.

[Packetdancer]

Old-style unique/job identity is extremely hard to balance if at all.

Really, the only way you can truly "balance" a wide variety of distinct classes/jobs/whatever is to simply stop caring about making them all equally viable and just lean into making them all equally interesting. Which can work, but I'm not going to pretend like I've seen it work well often. Meanwhile, we as a community—at least at the high end—have also demonstrated if something is not "optimal" it may be shunned compared to optimal compositions; witness MCH being locked out of some PF groups back during Abyssos initially, which suggests "prioritizing unique play above balance and equal viability" may not be a strat that would work for this particular game.

I don't entirely like where things are at—leastwise for healers—as a player, but putting on my game dev hat, boy can I agree that this makes actually making things (mostly) equally viable at endgame a much less horrible task to tackle.

[sharknado]

With the Job system, it's not really all that hard to be honest... As you can somewhat reasonably expect someone doing Savage to have more than 1 job leveled... If one tank is better at some fights, you just use that tank for those fights.

Depends on their approach. Right now we say "you can play whatever you want". Whenever PLD had problems with an encounter in like SHB it got a rework. All jobs are similar but also valid for the end game content with small variations. WoW didn't had and disc priest was goto for most mythic world first races while failing as preemptive healer that has to hit something to heal in other content, with less organized groups and so on. Then they cut the outliers.

We can have a fight that needs a BLM to take a pact with a voidsent. Then specific tanks for specific bosses or content to complicate it more. WAR for dungeons, PLD/DRK for phys/magic bosses... And as most players would have the attitude of picking best job, best at endgame most would pick PLD/DRK as their first leveling job. And people that like WAR would be rejected like PLD in Hevensward.