#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Absurdity]

I actually think dissipation is safe given that to the average “has literally no idea how to play SCH and thinks it’s a really weak WHM” Seraphism “feels” like it should be an upgrade skill for dissipation (even though they actually have totally different niches) and they had no problem introducing two more skill conflicts in SCH’s kit with dissipation/Seraphism and Seraphism/recitation

I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even notice the skill conflicts between those abilities.
It's no secret that they don't have a proper healer designer, so those skills were probably made by dps players who have no clue how to play Scholar either.

[Connor]

I’m way late to the party but I still don’t understand what the 100 MP reduction on aoe healing spells was about lol. Like does this even actually help anyone? They reduced the MP cost on those skills we essentially aren’t allowed to use because of encounter design. How do they even come up with these ‘adjustments’?!

Did they honestly think ‘oh yeah, making MP management easier will totally make healers want to play again!’

What’s next, filler spells becoming free and instant cast? Double Lucid Dreaming potency?

[ForsakenRoe]

On the one hand, it seems silly, almost to the point of it being a textbook example of logical fallacies, to say 'I don't want to have design move forward, for fear of the few aspects of complexity the job still has, which I (general I, not me specifically) enjoy, being removed'

On the other hand, it's entirely justified to feel that way considering that SE has in fact removed any trace of friction from pretty much any other job, destroying what people liked about those jobs in the process if that's required for The Great Smooth-ening

I think there's ways to remove some things like Dissipation's wonkiness, Recitation not working with Manifestation/Accession, Fey Blessing not being useable under Seraph, etc. and for the 'complexity' that those interactions provided, to be available via something more sensible in the design. The issue is, 'is Square Enix willing to actually have complexity in their job kits?' And thus far, the answer seems to be 'no, the job kits need to have less friction than your car's tires on black ice', because they fear the possibility that someone will cause any amount of player-friction, and quit the game over it

I've been thinking recently, that the scale of 'complexity vs simplicity' is getting far too much time in the spotlight. Rather, 'intuitive vs counter-intuitive' needs to be a consideration. For example, WHM is 'simple' I'm sure most people would agree, but it is 'intuitive' (and that's good). Increasing how much complexity it has, without impacting how 'intuitive' it is, would be a good thing IMO (so long as the complexity is effectively 'for optimization only' via potency balancing etc). Something like SCH, however, with actions like Dissipation, Seraphism, Fey Blessing/Union and Summon Seraph, all of those are still quite 'simple' in their effects, I'd say, but their mutual exclusivity rules (that aren't really mentioned properly in the tooltips) are not 'intuitive', so it gives the appearance of 'complexity', when it's not actually complex, it's just jank.

edit:

I’m way late to the party but I still don’t understand what the 100 MP reduction on aoe healing spells was about lol. Like does this even actually help anyone? They reduced the MP cost on those skills we essentially aren’t allowed to use because of encounter design. How do they even come up with these ‘adjustments’?!

They just added Seraphism, an action wherein you spam AOE GCDs (and if you ET Accession, it's somehow more potent than a WHM's Cure3, for 60% the MP cost), I imagine there were some trigger-happy players who blasted a bajillion overheal with the action and then ran themselves dry

As for SGE, Toxikon now fully refunds the MP cost of the barrier that generates it (Dosis+Dosis is 800MP, applying barrier and then spending the resulting Toxikon is 800MP), so that's... a thing, I guess.

Rather than doubling Lucid's potency, I'd just remove it entirely. Saves us a button on the bars. Lucid restores 3850MP per minute, if it's used on CD, so all that needs to be done is to either reduce the MP consumption further to compensate for the loss of that button, or to boost MP recovery throughout the gameplay of the job further, to bring that 3850MP in via other sources. Stuff like how Assize gives 500MP per use. It could be argued that similar applies to Swiftcast, if the four healers all have unique/thematic ways to access 'you have instant cast time on next spell' then theoretically Swiftcast could be removed, saving another hotbar slot. Like, what if WHM has the ability to instantcast their next spell, AND it's free, when they use Thin Air? Do we need Swiftcast for Raise if that version of Thin Air were to exist (and learned at a much earlier level), allowing for the same Raise spell to also cost 0MP?

Remembering to press a button once per minute to be allowed to play your Job is not exactly what I'd call riveting gameplay. If it were, Invigorate and TP would still exist.

[TheDustyOne]

I've been thinking recently, that the scale of 'complexity vs simplicity' is getting far too much time in the spotlight. Rather, 'intuitive vs counter-intuitive' needs to be a consideration.

This 100%. I also end up preferring the term depth over complexity whenever we talk about how hard a job is. A deep job is one that has many levels too it, so it can be enjoyed by those who only have a surface understanding of it as well as those who dive as far down as they can go, while complex sounds like it's hard for the sake of being hard. You can have jobs that are incredibly simple but have lots of depth, and complex jobs that have no depth and end up incredibly rigid in how you're supposed to play them. More complexity can have the potential for more depth, but you also hurt the surface level enjoyment if you start making it too complex.

Anyway, when talking about intuitive vs counter-intuitive, that's why I don't mind the loss of fairy abilities when under Dissipation; the fairy has its own abilities apart from me, and so I intuit that I lose those abilities when I lose the fairy. The same was also true when Carbuncle was the source of the raid buff rather than the SMN; make sure to get it out before you summon Bahamut because that's a Carbuncle ability, not a Bahamut ability.

If anything, SMN needs more of that, even if we don't want it to be the raid buff; Carbuncle-assaults that it has to manage before you go into your primal and demi summons, shields and utility to give to the party, etc.

One thing I find kinda unintuitive is Requiescat affecting all of PLDs spells despite the fact you only ever want to use it on the Confiteor combo; you're taught at level 68-80 to use it on Holy Spirit, with emergency uses of Clemency in the process, then by 90 you never want to use it on Holy Spirit again and Clemency is more punishing as an emergency heal in the process. I find old Requiescat more intuitive to work with; all spells are affected, Confiteor consumes all remaining stacks.

Also I feel like Divine Might would be more intuitive if it also affected Clemency. Yeah I know we complain about how much the non-healers heal at the moment, but Clemency is one of the few non-healer heals that's actually somewhat well designed since it has a big tradeoff in damage and a high MP cost. I can see the argument that it would affect when you can comfortably heal without affecting your rotation too much, but if you have to rely on Clemency, your rotation should be secondary anyway.

Rather than doubling Lucid's potency, I'd just remove it entirely. Saves us a button on the bars.

The biggest problem with Lucid and MP management in general at the moment is the lack of the whole "management" part. Managing resources is only interesting when you have competing options. Imagine if Lucid was instead a lily spell on WHM; do you use the lily on Lucid now to keep up your damage rotation (lol) or do you hold on to it in case you have to use it on a heal? Messing up this decision can cost you damage if you had to use Cure II, or leave you dry over time. The more scripted encounters makes this something we can plan for, but it's at least something more interesting than a standard cooldown.

Bring back MP restoration on Energy Drain Square.

[Aravell]

Something like SCH, however, with actions like Dissipation, Seraphism, Fey Blessing/Union and Summon Seraph, all of those are still quite 'simple' in their effects, I'd say, but their mutual exclusivity rules (that aren't really mentioned properly in the tooltips) are not 'intuitive', so it gives the appearance of 'complexity', when it's not actually complex, it's just jank.

What one person considers jank, another person considers an interactive and cohesive part of the larger kit.

I wouldn't call any of those abilities jank, it's not hard to use them once and learn what they lock out, you know, 'learning from mistakes' instead of having mistakes removed from the game entirely.

What's actual jank though, is the fairy deciding to cast Embrace instead of actually using the thing you told it to do 2 GCDs ago, but that problem has since been somewhat solved.

[Azurarok]

so any chance the mobile version has better healer gameplay

I think it'd be funny if it did, at least

[mallleable]

What I noticed with SCH's "jank" when leveling it is that almost all of it can be attributed to hotbar bloat. I tried mapping my SCH hotbar in a way that matched how my SGE hotbar is set up, but it kept pushing back. I would always end up with some actions that I could not find a comfortable place to up them without moving something else. Trying to make a mental model of what everything does, and how they interact with each other was incredibly frustrating. I felt like an idiot, like I'm not big enough nerd to understand it. So I think just doing some tidying up on SCH hotbars, commit to certain ideas, and clean up some redundancies would do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of cleaning up the "jank" -- especially if we want a little more offensive actions, and mechanics.

Learning or relearning a nnew class should be a fun experience, and not like trying to navigate the mogstation.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

so any chance the mobile version has better healer gameplay

I think it'd be funny if it did, at least

They'd probably have a more condensed version of skillset; say, 3-6 buttons, which technically already shot down one of our issues being 'healing button bloat' lol.

[Supersnow845]

What I noticed with SCH's "jank" when leveling it is that almost all of it can be attributed to hotbar bloat. I tried mapping my SCH hotbar in a way that matched how my SGE hotbar is set up, but it kept pushing back. I would always end up with some actions that I could not find a comfortable place to up them without moving something else. Trying to make a mental model of what everything does, and how they interact with each other was incredibly frustrating. I felt like an idiot, like I'm not big enough nerd to understand it. So I think just doing some tidying up on SCH hotbars, commit to certain ideas, and clean up some redundancies would do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of cleaning up the "jank" -- especially if we want a little more offensive actions, and mechanics.

Learning or relearning a nnew class should be a fun experience, and not like trying to navigate the mogstation.

I think that’s intentional design of SCH, it has a lot of skills but very little actual bloat

About the only skill I think you’ll find most people agree is bloat is blessing

[Rehayem]

This is kinda old news but I wanted to share this during the height of the thread before DT launch. My friend got mass reported by people because she had a PF up linking this thread and inviting people for discussion. She got issued a "caution" the day she logged in after maintenance, for using PF in the unintended way.