#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Connor]

Anyone remember when the healer strike thread was about…healers?

[Shurrikhan]

Anyone remember when the healer strike thread was about…healers?

Our issues have outlasted Pepperidge Farm, so... no?

[klu]

Anyone remember when the healer strike thread was about…healers?

Every bit of discussion on that topic has been had. Now we're whining at people who want to see the echo chamber decomiasioned.

[Daudream]

you know... this thread would be about healers more if a certain someone didn't constantly pop up trying to derail it because a complaining healer killed their dog in an alternate universe.

but looking back at recent talks that are not just bumps I'd say this is still about healers, even if people aren't talking about the different jobs directly.

[Connor]

I mean the last 2-3 pages are mostly non-sequitur about whether the game is in maintenance mode or not. I don’t think that’s a healer issue lol.

Like we could take pretty much every ability healers have and find some blatant flaw in it. Like, Cure 1 etc, why are they still around? What’s up with the 60s exact-same-but-totally different single target cool-down they all get? Who thought that would be fun? A DoT on a 120s cool-down? Whatever the hell is going on with Sage design (oops it’s all SCH!). Astrologian’s cards - what horrific rework will do they have in store for them this time

If you ask me 1116 pages isn’t nearly enough to outline all the issues with healers. We need more; maybe then they’ll finally get the message.

Also, do we really have to wait until 8.0 for healers to be fun again? Like I’m sure they could do something to make it a bit less mind-numbing. Idk turn the 120s cooldown attacks into like, actual real spells/abilities that have an actual purpose?

[Uzephi]

A DoT on a 120s cool-down?

(Snip)

Idk turn the 120s cooldown attacks into like, actual real spells/abilities that have an actual purpose?

Remove baneful impaction, give us Miasma and Bane back. Odd that SGE gets e.dyskrasia at 82, give us our old AOE dots. That'd make more sense.

[Supersnow845]

Remove baneful impaction, give us Miasma and Bane back. Odd that SGE gets e.dyskrasia at 82, give us our old AOE dots. That'd make more sense.

It would help if e dyskrasia wasn’t actually a loss in 99% of situations

Hard to feel jealous of SGE when you actively don’t want to press their AOE DOT

[ForsakenRoe]

Long, sorry in advance

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.

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...

Like we could take pretty much every ability healers have and find some blatant flaw in it. Like, Cure 1 etc, why are they still around? What’s up with the 60s exact-same-but-totally different single target cool-down they all get? Who thought that would be fun? A DoT on a 120s cool-down? Whatever the hell is going on with Sage design (oops it’s all SCH!). Astrologian’s cards - what horrific rework will do they have in store for them this time

Also, do we really have to wait until 8.0 for healers to be fun again? Like I’m sure they could do something to make it a bit less mind-numbing. Idk turn the 120s cooldown attacks into like, actual real spells/abilities that have an actual purpose?

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

It would help if e dyskrasia wasn’t actually a loss in 99% of situations

Hard to feel jealous of SGE when you actively don’t want to press their AOE DOT

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

[MetaBoi]

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.

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.

[Chasingstars]

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

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.