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i keep seeing these kinds of videos but every healer i talk to loves the state of healing and on my data group healers are in low demand because they are everywhere so much so it takes 20-30 min camping ques to get the healer bounus from tanks......
i just speedwatched this 38 minute video 2 minutes after its release and i have to say i really agree/disagree with these statements, though there may/may not be a bit of extra nuance involved in [INSERT TOPIC HERE]
as someone who finally started trying other jobs in Shadowbringers, I always thought "that's just how healers are" this has opened up an entire world of possibility to me that I never realized I wanted, and really hope SE somehow find a way to address it, or at the very least take into consideration
Initial comment: day one blind alliance raid was the most fun I had in the game in forever. Don't have a blind static, and that raid made me love healing again. (EW raids weren't nearly as fun day one blind) Time to go do mentor roulette so I can hate it properly again. As usual.
Hot take: squenex gotta figure out got to prevent fight specific mechanics from being detected by cactbot. This is the reason why raids after the first few weeks become brain dead. Most players either have cactbot or follow the mass crowd. This raid, has quite a bit quicker mechanics, so I’m anticipating even with cactbot it should retain a tad bit of its difficulty.
@@EccleezyAvicii I don't think it's entirely cactbot, fights lose their edge bc most mechanics are scripted with definitive solutions. Once you know how to solve the puzzle, the mechanic becomes extremely easy and you'll never mess it up unless you just aren't paying attention. I think the game could do with more mechs that are about making the 'execution' part of the mechanic difficult, rather than the 'solving' part of the mechanic difficult. Stuff like queen bee, kinda. I bet if you compare the amount of vuln-ups/deaths that occur on that fight even like 5 years from now, to something like themis, queen bee will always have more deaths because it's more execution based vs "ha gotcha you weren't supposed to solve it that way," well after a couple weeks everyone knows how to resolve the mech and it isn't actually hard at all to resolve, it's simply a matter of knowing what to do
@ this is also true, hence why I mentioned the newer raids will prob retain some Difficulty. I was mostly referring to the new alliance raid. The Tornado Phase of the Dragon boss, the propagating Plus pattern on the last boss and his side to side cleaves, and the queen bee phase are all examples of mechanics I’d agree aren’t as “cactbotable” as they require more execution. This is the major difference too between Savage and ultimate raids. Savage typically just have more convoluted puzzles, but Ultimates have those on top of execution + action performance demands.
@stabegabe there's also the thing of ilvl creep so as time goes on the raids are just less dangerous. Even if people mess up, they are at less risk of dying because the raidwides are dealing less damage, the boss dies quicker etc etc
@@EccleezyAvicii I mean sure but I don't think they should have to design encounters around a TOS-breaking thing. I don't think this will be possible with how the current netcode is tbh, old stuff is catching up like technical debt, etc.
Healer is factually less rewarded than Tank. 'Adventurer in Need' defaults to tank even when the Healer ques are faster. There are multiple mounts and titles for playing each tank job as a reward for countless hours of dedication to your job in dungeon and raid content, meanwhile as a Healer you can get a mount by doing a quick lvl 30 conjurer quest or titles for rezzing people (which can also be done by dps). The role just feels less loved.
Not to mention the level 100 healer job quest is to just use Esuna….. That’s all. You talk to a npc and use Esuna. You talk to another, use Esuna. Another one? Esuna. It’s level 100……. That’s so weirdly insulting. Especially since Esuna has become so niche and barely used because the opportunity barely arises.
That implies that a player picks a job for the rewards rather than the experience, which is... weird. I wouldn't pick a job that I enjoy less just because there's more mounts tied to it.
Healing ogcds are so powerful that in majority non ultimate content wit competent parties that utilize mits you don't even need to use your entire kit i remember solo healing p2s when it was current as an example
This! A million times this!!!! The healing kits are so bloated and/or situational that I often never use certain abilities 99% of the time. Hell, sometimes I have to even re-read some skill descriptions because I haven’t used them in so long that I’ve forgotten what they even do.
This is my biggest issue with Sage. I have to use my Addersgall heals for MP... but there's nothing to heal. Sure, you can rotate between Kera and Tauro to somewhat keep yourself MP positive, but it still feels bad to see the gauge overcap just because there's nothing to use it on without overhealing for no good reason.
@@lolthesystemin normal content? If there’s nothing to heal, I’m assuming you’re just doing damage rotation, but lucid should be completely sufficient then. The only other explanation I can think of is your using to many gcd heals and need to be using more adder heals to begin with then, so I don’t understand what situation your in that your mp is low and you need it so you got to pop adder, like you shouldn’t need mp unless you expect damage, but then just use adder when it comes.
@@jamesunderwoood8412 in content in general. I didn't say I'm running out of MP, I even mentioned Tauro and Kera keep you somewhat MP positive (assuming you're mostly just DPSing), but Addersgall heals are supposed to be your source of MP recovery alongside LD, hence why you "should" be using them. Problem is, since there's nothing to heal, you end up overcapping, which also feels bad from a design perspective. I've run low on MP before just DPSing because I tend to run the low piety sets from The Balance, which expect you to never overcap Addersgall because they're MP negative with just LD, but I started using the mid piety sets because overhealing annoys me even more.
As a Warrior main nowadays, I feel like healers secretly hate me, bacause I've gotten so focused enough on throwing out mits at times that I really feel like I'm... Stealing their job for me wanting to play more optimally with my kit. Especially now that I have gotten comfortable enough with tanking as Warrior that I can genuinely keep the HP of the party up in dungeon bosses myself if the healer does go down. Can't do that in trials and Raids and the like, but dungeons must be absolute snooze fests for healers who have above average tanks, especially Warriors
WAR is legitimately a better designed healer. You have to consider your resources because you can only heal every 25 seconds, the timing which you use your heal matters a lot more. Closer to how healer mp management and timing their GCD heals mattered in the past
@larcgrumbles9529 Well, that's not entierly true, all of Warrior's mits, minus the universal mits like reprisal, all have some sort of healing element, Thrill of Battle gives you a heal of 20% of your health and gives your other moves a heal boost, Damnation has a regen, Shake it off is a party wide shield and regen, Equilibrium as just a straight up heal, and BloodWhetting as a quick shield and self heal machine. You are right in how you have to think about when to use all of these as they have cooldowns to them though.
Yeah as a healer main who decided to get over tank anxiety with WAR in Dawntrail, yeah... It doesn't feel particularly great from either end tbh. Worst part of Warrior is that it can unironically solo dungeon bosses meaning I kinda have to ask if they want me to solo or just wipe (There is NO reason I should have been able to beat boss 3 of Skydeep Cenote while soloing a tower, stack, and tankbusters as an inexperienced tank player). The most interesting thing I've developed one the healer side for dungeons is optimizing where I use the few heals I need on the tank (basically not having anything overlap with Bloodwhetting and keeping a count of 17secs in my head). Regarding the hate thing, it's really not your fault. Outside of premades you have no idea how competent your healer, tank, or dps are until youre in the thick of it so you kinda have to do what you can.
As a healer main. Can confirm, you are correct. There is nothing worse than rolling up to the dungeon on WHM only to see my tank is WAR… then I cannot switch to SGE or AST which have more for me to do… I’m just stuck clicking stone the entire time. It sucks. Like it’s great that WAR has the kit it has, but, there need to be more to do on healer man.
Hearing about old SCH reminded old AST. My favorite healer in the game. When I could swap between shields and regens. Extend buff duration. Manipulate cards (Although I've hated every iteration of the card system ngl). It was the one job I loved above all others. I really miss noct ast.
I do too!!! I think it helped create synergy between healers and helped people overcome their fears about shield healers or regen healers, depending on what sect people would "main" ^^ I hope you've found another class you enjoy to play just as much.
On one hand, I really miss AST having the ability to be shield healers, however, as someone who mains scholar and had to deal with asts who wanted to stay noct, it was painful. 💀 Square should’ve just made it so the bigger shield takes precedence.
Fellow old (noct) ast fan here. I start playing this game in 4.2 and ast was my first healer. It was super, super fun. The time magic, the card rng, accidentally "troll" a monk by giving them arrow card and watch their TP vanished. I could go on and on. Come ShB and I tried to love the new ast, but with removal of card rng, I can't really enjoy it. Then EW practically butcher the job for me by removing the sect because god forbid we disturb the regen vs barrier healer dichotomy. /rant over I feel like old man yelling at cloud meme....
I think this argument extends to the other roles in a lot of ways too, especially with the opt-in gambits you could do in each job. I think a lot of casual players overreact to these types of essays, opinions, etc. but what really needs to be hammered home is that the floor is not going to move, or at least it shouldn't. You can perform adequately and unless you seek top end content nobody has a right to criticize you for that. But that's no reason for the ceiling to come down, just so casual players can feel accomplished for no effort. That's a pretty insane mindset, if you ask me. I think around stormblood era, there was great compromise between casual and hardcore players. You could do anything you wanted, but it always felt like you could get better. Now, there's like.. 5 maximum tricks on any given job to learn and boom, you've got it. You're scoring competitive dps forever and ever until they take away your next friction point and then you have to think even less. If the floor stays where it is( and again, it should), you can stay on the floor and that's fine. Totally fine! But the ceiling needs to raise, and the population of the game needs to accept that they can't sit on the floor and touch the ceiling. I don't think there's any toxicity to that mindset, personally.
This is the best response I've seen on the subject, and one I entirely agree with. It's just a shame that so many of the people that this video is aimed at would disagree - people who would like to see the skill floor raised way up, specifically for the purpose of putting newer and more casual players off, because they think the game should be entirely catered to the hardcore crowd. I'm sure it would be more fun for the top 5 or 10% of players if this happened, but that's not a big enough player base to sustain the game.
100% this. In these discussions I see SO many people who don't play healer go "But I have anecdotal evidence that a lot of healers suck, this would just make that harder for them!" when you can move the skill ceiling without moving the floor.
that mindset is actually seriously harming WoW RN as it is SE REALLY need to dial it back before they fall into the same trap that leads to 1/2 of the basic group content in the game (normal/heroic dungeons and normal raids, on the road to heroic raids too) being considered pointless with M0 being where you go to actually learn your role at all (In a discussion about tanking in WoW on the forums, I unironically had someone tell me anything below M0 difficulty is too brain dead easy to learn a new role. at this point WoW is too far gone and the community too far lost to correct. FFXIV still has time to raise the ceiling without tossing the community with it)
"The scholar is a top-tier dedicated Broiling machine armed with a book and a fairy, that does half to work for you." -The Stormblood Guide to Scholar it's one of my favorite videos
The quote from Yoshi P you highlight bookending the final section of the video, and the way there was a noticeable improvement in Dawntrail's normal-difficulty content in terms of how engaging it felt to many, makes me cautiously optimistic for 8.0, for which (if what I've heard is correct) they've talked about re-evaluating job identity. I'd say the 7.1 dungeon and Alliance Raid are also positive omens; they suggest that the (small but very over-amplified) outcry over Dawntrail being too difficult for some didn't make them immediately backpedal. On the flipside, it does feel like the majority of the Dawntrail job changes have continued the trajectory of reducing or removing friction (Monk rework comes to mind, as does the viper 7.05 changes which I'm still sad about, and now DRG losing the Nastrond stacks in 7.1) and so I'm not sure what to think. At my most hopeful (probably naively so), I'd hope that this is a choice to temporarily alleviate job complexity to facilitate trying to push boundaries in terms of encounter demands - the new ultimate is certainly going to be interesting with that in mind - and that from that baseline their purported 8.0 job identity review might let them go back and restore a bit of that "stress" into job execution... they've shown they're willing to push us a bit harder now after all. But I can see why someone would call me delusional for expressing that hope, haha. I've seen a bunch of other comments here saying your video is too long and bloated, so I figure I should just chip in that personally I appreciated you couching this discussion in the context of your experience and perspective - first, because *so* much of this topic is infested with a bunch of people talking past each other and repeating the same talking points ("Game is too brainded!") and insulting each other without actually discussing the matter. I only started in Endwalker and my perspective is that of someone who primarily plays DPS and occasionally dips into healer for normal content. I genuinely find healer engaging in most cases (barring dungeon runs where some tanks obviously don't need healers), but I know that's because I don't have nearly the same familiarity with healer tookits as those who main healer and play it at a very high level. I honestly had a blast recently taking Scholar into the normal raids for gearing, partly because we still get plenty of players who aren't great at the fight mechanics and partly because it's still a learning experience for me as well. But it's easy to see how someone who knows exactly what they're doing would quickly reach a stage of rote repetition. I'm not sure if my comment adds anything to the discussion, but in any case, I enjoyed the video and it gave me a better understanding of why a number of healers are feeling dissatisfied with the role, so thanks for making it!
I want to have hope, too. I was going to unsub for good if they capitulated to people bemoaning the difficulty. As someone who mained AST/DRK/MNK in HW and SB I quit healing and tanking in Shadowbringers and LOATHE the monk changes in DT. They massacred every job I loved. As far as I'm concerned, they get one last chance to fix this in 8.0 and if I'm not convinced I'm out.
for me it just doesn't feel that rewarding to play anymore, I started at the tail end of shadowbringers gone through extremes and in endwalker I got into savage, by the third tier I was playing my job pretty well, still had more niche and low impact optimizations to go through, but imo they don't feel as impactful as the bigger ones. simplifying jobs and removing friction points just makes them feel shallow, there is no problems to overcome, everything blends in and learning process is over really quickly which leads to less satisfying micro optimization process. I am a person who likes to grind out games to a certain level, I like to get relatively good, not to get perfect, but good; and this job design is just alienating me I've played DRG on and off in hard content before and dragoon changes this patch are just.. depressing I do hope that in 8.0 the job system becomes more interesting again but I guess this game is just not for me until then
@@jamesk2325 Same boat here. I've been playing since HW, and if 8.0 won't finally take itself serious when it's coming to job design, I'm out. It's been, far, far too long to wait for those changes.
It wasn't "engaging", it was frustrating, especially if you have no mobility spells. Vanguard was a frustrating mess on healers with no mobility spells. Normal dungeons shouldn't be hard at all because it excludes people with various coordination difficulties from experiencing the main story. You want "harder" content to sweat over, go do Extreme or Savage. I think they should unlock the harder version of each dungeon as soon as you complete the normal version so you can attempt it immediately and keep the sweatlords happy.
this is a simple issue that the devs have restrained themselves too much to solve. the peoblem is simple: healer kits are made like they're supposed to heal a lot and attack a little. but fights are made like healer is supposed to attack a lot and heal a little. an easy contradictoin to solve. however, the devs have committed to making heavily scripted fights that depend on jobs working in a very specific way. which means changing jobs can easily break absolutely everything. so they can't change jobs with any kind of agility. AND they're also committed to a strict content release structure, which the job changes have to fit into. so we end with a problem that is frustratingly obvious to players and also incredibly difficult for the devs to solve. in my opinion anyway.
Your opinion is a good one, this also runs a little deeper, final fantasy XIV is still a "final fantasy" and white mages outside of holy and a few other moves have always been almost healer centric. The issue is mmos need to bring back the "rpg" and stop focusing so heavily on "enrage mechanics" that punish playing in any other way other than "We must dps this boss down NOW" This is what screws over what could be cool abilities like clemency and cover and that other move that makes you stop attacking to defend the people behind you. In a proper rpg these moves would be cool! But because this is an mmo first with a "QUICK DPS HIM NOOOOWWWWW" and with most moves being a "did you get hit? If yes your dead" to the point where what really is HP and does a game where most moves 1 hit really need an HP bar that goes up and up for seemingly no reason especially when the difference between 10k hp and 100k hp is really nonexistent as far as game mechanics are concerned? In a world however where mmos devs refuse to break this mold your 100% correct, what we need is a change in fight design all around. Not every bosses thing should be a "dps race" in a proper rpg this is ONE type of boss fight and raids honestly need a massive rework and have needed one for some time, but that's also why i'm not big into the raiding scene, I'm not a fan of "Well your heals don't matter anyway after a certain point cause the boss decides your all dead now, or sure you CAN use cover or throw out a clem to help save that healer but it doesn't matter in the end cause you took a dps loss so now everyone is screwed over." It really makes healer feel more like it should have more dps powers and makes paladin which should feel awesome , but instead feels lackluster over warrior who can self sustain without a dps loss.
Thank you for putting this into a video, this is pretty much exactly how I have been feeling more and more about the role over the past year and then some. I am not doing any cutting-edge or getting much blind progression in and it feels terrible how numbed down healing has become at this point - it almost feels like I am mostly in it for the 1-2 days of it being the best experience in the game right after a patch, like it has been with the current alliance raid or early normal raids. The role feels so incredibly fun when things go south and become more chaotic, it feels saddening how empty you feel when they go smooth.
One of the hardest points to make in these kind of discussions is the idea that 'the extra complexity some players are asking for (eg via giving SCH back some of its old DOTs, adding more attacks to WHM/SGE, etc) is optional, and players who don't feel comfortable making use of those extra buttons don't need to press them'. I have previously posted on the official forums, for example, about two simple changes to WHM: Shorten Dia's duration from 30s down to 12s, and add Water (later Banish) as an instantcast GCD attack with a 15s CD. These two changes are small enough that they could feasibly be thrown into any 7.X patch, and would take us from 35/50 GCDs per 2min being Glare3 casts, to 21/50. Additionally, by making the potencies of these non-Glare actions carefully balanced vs Glare's output, it becomes possible to 'ignore' them entirely, should the player not feel comfortable pressing them. As an example, I'd propose making the potency of Water/Banish 40p more than the equivalent Stone/Glare (so thanks to the 7.1 buff to Glare3, at max level, Banish3 would be be 380p). Ignoring this button entirely and just doing 'refresh DOT when it falls off, spam Glare' would be 98% of the potency output of the 'fully optimal' rotation that includes Banish Another example is SCH. We could have, for example, Broil at 310p, Biolysis (30s) at 350p, Miasma (24s) at 340p, and Shadowflare (15s, AOE) at 320p. Ignoring all three of these DOTs and just using Broil in their place would lose, if I remember right from the last time I did this maths, 560p per 2min cycle, less than two Broils in total. To make managing the DOTs more smooth in AOE (now that SGE has an AOE DOT), we could have Energy Drain upgrade to Bane, making it useful in AOE and also spreading the DOTs. And if we hypothetically tweak Bane to not reset Durations, then that opens up the potential to have Chain Stratagem be spreadable via Bane (as the duration reset is removed, preventing any 'infinite refresh loops'), which synergizes with the followup DOT Baneful Impaction being AOE. Also, I'm advocating for Excogitation and Protraction to be Deployable, with 50% effectiveness (so Excog would heal for 400p on anyone it's Deployed to, and Protraction would be 5% Max HP) Finally, we could try and address the 'healers should heal' side of things, by introducing new mechanics specifically for healers to deal with. Melee have positionals, Tanks have Interrupts (as rarely as they get used), so why not give Healers a Role-specific idea too? In other games (like WOW) there's something known as 'Heal Absorb', but here I'd suggest a thematic name like 'Aetherblight'. Effectively, a 'reverse shield', where the Aetherblight blocks your healing before you can hit the 'missing HP', in the same way a Succor blocks damage before it can hit your 'real HP'. This gives the healers a reason to heal, but we could have player agency in 'how to tackle the Aetherblight' by making it removable via Esuna. And on the flipside of healing through the debuff, it could also be made possible for a barrier to block the application of Aetherblight entirely, such that a SCH or SGE might rely on the old saying 'prevention is better than cure'. The best part about an idea like Aetherblight, though, is that currently the devs are constrained in how much damage a mechanic can do to the team. It can only do damage relevant to our Max HP, and has to be surviveable (even if it means using some mitigations/shields). So, if we have 130k HP as a non-Tank, then the raidwide can only deal, say, 180k damage. But with Aetherblight, which doesn't deal 'real' damage (merely blocks your healing until it's removed), it's theoretically possible to deal... any amount of 'damage', really. Someone with 130k Max HP could be slapped with 500k of Aetherblight and it'd be fine, so long as it's possible to remove it before it becomes an issue with a later mechanic. Such a mechanic would give Pure Healers more room to show their strong suit, and make 'raid difficulty' more varied/less reliant on this current pattern of 'here's a raidwide, use at least 2 10%'s and also Succor or you die' I could type essays about Healer design and ideas of how to improve it (and it could be argued that I previously have), I just hope that SE really does read the forums (specifically the EN ones) for feedback edit: I redid the SCH maths, it's not 560p lost per 2min if you were to spam Broil with those listed potencies, that was from an older version of the potency balancing I did. It's actually 390p, so even less damage lost! In fact, the damage of 'spam 48 Broils' is, according to PercentageCalculator.net, 97.44597249508841% of the output of the 'optimal rotation' of 'use 4 Bio, 5 Miasma, 8 Shadowflare, and fill the rest with Broil'
I'm apologize for only responding to the first paragraph, but the gaming landscape changed so much over the past 10 years. Everthing gets tracked and analized, even some websites telling you what abilities to use more often. There is for everything an optimal way of playing and with that idea they can't really add some extra buttons that are nice to have like everyone is clueless what their job does. Everything, including the boss fights, are much more optimized.
@@darkshadow0308 Ironically (as tank), if I had to pick someone to die without the ability to be rerisen, I'd pick the healer. DPS will deal more damage and I will keep the party alive. Tank needs reworked, not healer. If healer dies, the fight should fall apart. If tank dies, the fight should fall apart until the healer can rez the tank. If that doesn't happen fast enough, it should be a wipe. If DPS dies, the fight should be fine unless you need to hit a DPS check.
@@NimRyo Disagree entirely lol. There's already no job identity in healers. There're shield tanks that suck so bad at putting shields out that they can't pre-emptively shield a tankbuster in most content. There's white mage that can just heal well and shield better than all of the shield tanks. Most healers aren't unique but bunched into groups now. Tanks are getting so much healing they can often outheal a healer. Even dps have healing kits, sometimes two decent heals and a shield. We don't need high damaging healers. That just makes a rezzing dps. We need to focus on role identity. Tanks should tank. Not high heals, Not high dps. DPS should dps. Not high heals, not good tanks. Healers should heal. Not high dps, not good tanks. Obviously, compared to, say WoW where you have an extra dps, that split dps will have to go to the healers and tanks, because otherwise that'd be boring as heck. But still, it shouldn't ever say "Hey let's run this dungeon with a tank and 3 healers, or a tank and three dps." Each role should be required.
@@randomwannab118 That was meant as a semi sarcastic response one might use on how to make healers more impactful. If you want a real discussion though: Focusing on the role itself is not going to work. It's inherit nature of the healer job is to heal. Only focusing on that aspect will result in even worse of a role within the game and an even more boring job. That path is not something that's logistically possible in this game because of the basic fundamentals when it comes to role distribution and the whole holy trinity of roles. You could change it but at that point you are changing the game itself. That's a whole other can of worms....
As someone who didn't play healer (or tank) because I found playing those roles too stressful to deal with (and we're talking Endwalker here since that's when I started), I can't say I ever found myself asking Square-Enix to make them "easier" so I'd pick them up, and even with all these changes come Dawntrail? Yep, still not queuing up as tank and healer, so the whole idea that they made these changes for *me* not only went completely to waste, but those who did enjoy those roles *prior* to those changes now suddenly find them dull. Same issue with BLM & MNK apparently. I didn't like playing them, other people did, but SE made changes for *me* and not *them* and yet I still don't like playing them and now mains on those jobs aren't having fun either. Now I do understand part of the thought process on their part, that with so many jobs and the franchise-long allure of switching between them, they would very much like it if players can and enjoy playing as many jobs as possible (if not all of them), but we've reached a point where every job design decision is based on "how do we get more people to play it" and it results in those who already liked a job of now being the ones left out, or how the rigidness of "the role" results in having to make sure every job within said role can "do the thing" lest one or more be tossed aside because it's not optimal (and if there's one thing a lot of MMO players like to do, it's min-max the fun out of things). Trying to make every job unique yet useful is almost paradoxical at times when it comes to Final Fantasy 14 specifically due to the sheer number we have but also because a lot of people come into the game expecting what they loved about those jobs from other games in the franchise, BUT THEN RIGHT AFTER you have encounter design that slaps all of that down by necessitating that "the role" must dance to a certain tune and any job that can't gets shunned by the playerbase and becomes the "nail meets hammer" by the developers. I'm not entirely sure what the solution is either, because they probably can't somehow redo encounter design to require job specific things, up to and including dynamic boss fights that account for the fact that certain jobs showed up that time, or if jobs could cross-skill in a way that allows them to take up a new role (let that WAR heal, let the NIN dodge tank, remind people that WHMs were in the War of the Magi, etc) but that would mean making sure jobs all have fruitful options for borrowing and that, regardless of player choice, one remains functional in group content because player choice can sometimes end up just as stifling and "homogenized" as everyone chases the best-in-slot choices that comes with such systems.
i find it really funny you say this (in a good way) because the tail end of that last paragraph was exactly what happened back in heavensward! if you weren't playing meta, you just never got into content or struggled to perform as well as everyone using it so most team compositions were the same!
@@thiccie-chan447 Ironically, it's usually Heavensward that I see a lot of older players point to as the "gold standard" of job design and yet, that was apparently when jobs had the least amount of personal identity because it was all about borrowing the best things for cross-skills or omitting the "weakest" jobs thus making every job into a hybrid of some kind or some jobs being left abandoned outright, and the need for BiS skills meant you ran into the same problem other games with talent systems do; Everything ends up a cookie-cut build every time so as you said, identical team compositions for optimal results. It would suggest that the playerbase isn't any better at avoiding homogenizing as Square-Enix is, people just thought they had better control over it because they had to make a willful choice to fall in line with what encounters (and PF) demanded of them. It was player choice only insofar as another player made it for you, or else.
what people are missing with the "healers can't handle the kits they have, why give them more" argument is that they're viewing the cause and effect backwards. healer players mess up a lot because it is super easy to zone out and zero in on either mashing 1 or dumping heals. the two parts of the kit are very often separate and disconnected. but if kits were designed more holistically, like with the way sage heals you for doing damage, or scholar offers direct synergy between its abilities(deploy, recit, faerie gauge) people would be more engaged. more damage buttons, fewer set and forget ogcd heals(tetra stacks, bell, faerie gauge)
Not to mention that the other aspect is bad players also exist. It‘s weird that, by default, people seem to assume that every healer is a bad player who can’t learn and adapt. I’ve played with a summoner in shadowbringers once who never even entered bahamut phase and at no point am I claiming, “all summoners shouldn’t have so many summons because it’s too much for them”.
I feel like part of what you said applies to every job in XIV atm, except MAYBE DPS in general to some extent. If it wasn't for me being a psycho and liking to use every single aspect of my classes to their fullest potential, I wouldn't even use half of my kit for how mind numbingly easy the game gets sometimes, the game throughout ARR and HW barely had any moments were idk pressing the feint button was remotely necessary, or interrupt, or even the stuns some classes have, and I think that's a problem, and not because I want this game to be super hard and challenging. No FFXIV is a casual MMO and that's fine, what isn't fine is when the jump between a normal/hard trial to an extreme is GIGANTIC, suddenly having good machanics is important, and you want to use your OGCDs to help your party, tanks are using more mitigations and healers have to really be careful with their mana supply, the game actually becomes challenging, but the jump is too big for a player that may just be testing the waters and see if they like it
I've seen plenty of trials for hardcore and semi-hardcore savage and ultimate statics where the healer could not handle anything that went beyond the realm of spreadsheet healing. The moment something went wrong or misaligned, it was an instant wipe because they didn't know how to use their kit because Balance told them that healing was a braindead spreadsheet job. And it's not just some wannabe raiders or new players. They are streamers and top 50 parsers. Can just do some PF and see just how many people have meltdowns because they are incapable of using a gcd heal when party could not skip a mechanic on time, which resulted in a bit of extra damage.
@@artjom94devil's advocate: obviously that's a really bad mindset and it's on them to improve but also i will say it feels extremely frustrating when you are shoved outside of the Spreadsheet because there is no substance to your job other than hard optimization. when i have to use excessive amounts of gcd heals at level cap outside of blind runs it only ever feels like a failure lol. obviously the correct thing to do is to keep it rolling but it's like. ah. that's damage i could be doing right now. because if i'm not casting broil i am doing the one thing my job does less efficiently. used to be that you could make up your damage a bit better, that being made to use gcd healing felt more mandatory. these days gcd healing has gone from a deal with the devil, to watching your neighbor slash your tires
I used to like healing as SCH when I started the game back in stormblood, and still enjoyed AST/WHM in ShB too. Over time they became more and more boring and EW content was so insanely braindead that it killed any interest I had in playing them. I don't see why SE resists giving them and dps tools to play with.
I have a lot of suggestions to make healing bit more engaging: 1. introduce more random, single target damage (p8s natural alignment, TOP p1 tethers) 2. more frequent, but less mit-or-die damage profiles (more p3s fire rain during adds, less run:dynamis) 3. reduce free regens from shield healers - soil/kera shouldn't heal, physis/whispering dawn should be weaker, etc. But buff single target heals more (incentivise kardia management, make aetherpact feel more impactful) 4. increased mp cost so piety is not a joke stat, and there's a little more decision making between dps and healing as well as more heal planning (final DSR phase being good example) 5. more interesting damage rotation - make dots 20 seconds for example, while adding a powerful GCD with 15-30 seconds cd. Do not add more "press on cd" abilities like psyche, or tie some kind of healing effect to them so there's a choice, like assize. I could keep going but imo there's a deeper issue beneath these surface level fixes. A lot of players already do not try healing because they are scared of the responsibility. Not just the requirement to heal, but requirement to not die at all. This is because healers basically decide the fate of the group in casual content (dungeons and normal raids). If there's a tank or dps player that keeps dying, you can probably keep going. If there's a healer that keeps dying, you can get hard stuck. I think devs tried to combat this by giving everyone so much free healing, and it kinda did the job because I could see myself solo healing the savage fights with smart GCD use. But that means they need to rely more on body checks to actually wipe the raid, which is basically what TOP was as a fight. I'm not sure how they can get away from overdependence on healers staying alive. With PCT being popular at the moment, this problem is even more obvious. Quite often you won't have smn or rdm in your groups, and your lockout is entirely dependent on healers staying alive. Another big issue is that this game does not teach how to heal, like at all. And not just in game either - so much conversation I see about healers in general discourse is about their dps and not much about healing optimisation. So many healers, even "healer mains", do not think about optimising cooldowns and mits in this game. I have seen many DSR/TOP healers that don't use buttons like aquaveil, don't think about kera/soil timings, no thought given to mp economy, etc. And they're not really punished for this either due to many factors, like gear/food creep or mechanics creep. But another huge factor is that this game is very bad at teaching you on how to learn from mistakes. Most people don't go to fflogs to look at damage taken and what they could've optimised. When a tank gets 1 shot by solar ray, there's no indication that aquaveil + benison could've saved that. So these healers clear DSR/TOP with suboptimal healing and have no feedback on if they played well. To be fair to devs though these healing optimisations are pretty abstract and it kinda goes hand in hand with fflogs use. TL;DR great video, I can see many problems and I have no idea how to fix them
@@suncommander7102you want dots to last… *a minute or longer*. My dude, it sounds like it just don’t want to have to hit the button. Why not just make it a button you hit once and the boss is dotted forever at that point?
@@jakerb89 that's a good idea, applying dot is just annoying. Same was with the viper's armor debuff, it got removed because it was annoying to deal with. Hope they do the same with reaper.
I absolutely agree and feel that specifically kit interaction (for healers) is the thing that feels the most lacking in FFXIV. Generally speaking, I prefer healing in WoW, and this is the sole reason why. There’s so much I can do with healing in WoW! The healing and dps kits interact together to make something truly fun and interesting to play, and in M+ there’s also a ton of opportunities for utility to shine. In WoW, you really get a chance to feel like your risk is rewarded, and it’s so fun. I love sooo many things about FFXIV more than WoW, but I really really hope that a change to healers is in the future for FFXIV.
It'd be fun if they made the overwhelming amount of OGCD healing tools that all healers have contain both a Defensive and Offensive trait to them, and I mean Every. Single. One. Some of this is already there as you mentioned with Afflatus Misery and Assize but I think they should lean even more heavily into it. And this MAY be too complicated for where the Devs want to go with healer, but bring back Cleric Stance, not how it used be where it lowers all your healing and increases damage, but use Cleric Stance as a way to bounce back-and-forth between the Defensive and Offensive trait on their OGCD's. This can either be a permanent stance like it originally was that you jump back and forth on, OR (and I like this idea better) it could be a role action with charges like True North - whenever you use Cleric Stance, your next OGCD will be the offensive version rather than the defensive version. I think something like this would make Healer play vastly more interesting, and raises the skill ceiling without also raising the skill floor. For example, Assize with no CS (Cleric Stance) would be as it is, but with CS activated, it would do 50% less healing and 50% more damage. Scholar's Aether Pact with no CS would be as it is, but with CS activated, it would instead provide a damage buff to the ally you're using it on. Astrologian's Celestial Opposition will instead do damage and provide a Bleed on all enemies rather than a heal and a regen on all allies. Sage's Pepsis would remove all allies shields but use the shield to do AoE damage rather than heal. There's all kinds of interesting things you can do with this approach and best of all, you don't have to add any more new abilities; you're just changing how an ability you already have works.
Thankyou for making this video, I have struggled to understand the conversation surrounding the state of healing, and you did a really good job of clarifying it for me.
I can very much relate to the healers getting to be boring for new players quickly part. Started as cnj in endwalker, and by the time I hit lvl 50 I was so bored of the 2 button damage rotation being the combat gameplay (because let's face it, you don't really heal a lot during doing the msq) that I became a dps player and have stayed one ever since
For me getting to 50 felt great bc Holy is such an impactful spell in dungeons and moving from trials to hard to extreme trials was a lot of fun. Also instant q is just so nice =w=
Rinon, you might be one of the best narrators I've ever listened to. You have an amazing narrator voice and the way you speak makes me really interested in listening to what you're talking about. Hope you have an amazing day!
I started playing after cleric stance had already been removed, so I wish I'd had a chance to play it. I almost wish they released a new healer who had cleric stance for more play style variety. I used to main healer in Overwatch and especially liked healers like Mercy who were rewarded for using her damage boost beam instead of her healing boost beam, and trying to use as little healing beam as possible because it came with the inherent opportunity cost of not damage boosting. That alone, coupled with her positioning and movement skill expression, took what was ultimately an extremely simple kit, and turned it into something both easily accessible but with an insane skill ceiling.
@kirigherkins as someone who played during cleric stance era, that's something you don't want. In theory it's nice, in execution it was horrid and unwieldy. It left you in points where you would enter cleric stance, dps, someone would fuck up a mech, and you're 10s out of the ability to heal without dumping your entire MP pool on inefficient heals. It just wasn't a good design
Haven't played Overwatch in a very long time but if I remember correctly, you can switch instantly between Mercy's healing beam and damage boost beam right? That's more akin to how healer works right now than back when original Cleric Stance was a thing in my opinion. Imagine if using either beams was locking you out of the other for a solid 5 to 10 seconds no matter what you do. That's what Cleric Stance was. Back when this is all we knew, I actually enjoyed it, but I would never want this to come back again, this was very restrictive for no actual reason other than SE never thought of having healer's damage stat being Mind instead of Inteligence before Stormblood.
@@Soulsnatcher89"you're 10 seconds out of the ability to heal". And there's your problem. Just change the 10 second to one second (almost like kardia) and you practically eliminate the punishment of mistakenly swapping stances. Iirc some tank stances were like that in Stormblood, but it was about exchanging enmity and damage instead of healing and damage.
@axylum4453 right but that wasn't how it functioned, and if it did that, it just makes it pointless. There's no reason then to have it exist if you remove the penalty. The point is to create a consequence, but if there's none because you can just swap back after 1 gcd, then its existence is pointless
Cleric stance was interesting to optimise with but realistically it was forced stance dancing. This is something that should be relugated to one job in the role instead of all of them, sage comes to mind, stance dancing between damage and healing could of worked with it. But yeah its not fun when every healer has to do it, it made playing AST a nightmare in HW.
I've been practicing healer in the most recent savage tier, after being a tank main for my past 6 years playing XIV. The last time I'd seriously played healer without gear to carry me or echo to pad was waaay back in Stormblood. But I was baby, and probably thought that spamming Aspected Helios was awesome and totally optimal to keep people alive. I've since learned that a lot of the kits we're given these days are actively promoting me to _not_ press my GCDs until absolutely necessary. And that in itself was really odd to me. Healers contributing to the damage pool is good. But all the other jobs in this game are given power-ups to their normal combos, OGCDs meant to be used in tandem with buffs and each other to get some good damage out. Most, if not all, of the level up rewards for healers are just extra things that make your healing do more. For DPS, sure, I get that. Tanks have a mix of upgrades to their defensives *and* their damage kit. But healers barely get anything to help their DPS output once they've reached Stormblood content. Dawntrail was the first big expansion we've had on the healer DPS kit in a while, and most of them are just 2-minute buttons, and the other is 1-minute. There's stuff all over to min-max, but it's not what I would personally call engaging, especially when the min-maxing has to be abandoned when pulls fall apart, for sake of keeping people alive and ensuring you have tools. In my eyes, there's gotta be less focus on the healers just having healing in their kit, and more like what tanks have: simplified DPS rotations to perform while doing their other jobs. I feel like the developers might be scared to commit to this, as there's a lot of instances of healer greed causing wipes in savage and ultimate. And while that's not a healer specific issue, the healer is the person most comps depend on to bring a pull back from the brink. Giving them a rotation of sorts to do while having to keep the party alive might just be an issue. But it's what I've observed in the other roles. Maybe something similar, or just making the party survival less dependent on a healer so they _can_ have something more exciting to do, would work to make the class appealing.
I am in complete favor of giving tanks a resurrection skill with a long CD (naturally to pick up a healer) to compensate if needed (specifically paladins) because there are healers who greed but it does require a bit of punishing for them to recognize what they’re doing and ultimately just get voted off if they won’t do their part
They listen to the player base. People fished for dps cards to they gave people DPS cards. People got mad about DPS cards so they tried to bring back old cards. Now people are mad about new cards. People complained about having too much MP. Beginning of DT had people complaining about MP economy. So they've nerfed the MP economy problems instead of making you take the decision of piety/mp management into your own hands. Anything you "could" do in the olden days,now in the days of people being slaves to dps killtimes and fflogs, is almost a requirement. They are removing those "friction" points (I'm so tired of this word when discussing game design to be honest) because the playerbase can't even stop being annoying about MCH damage in this game without intervention. The playerbase dictates the opener for SCH being using Diss/AF solely for ED for dps gains on opener. The playerbase fished for balance cards. The playerbase complained about MP. The playerbase complained about GCD heals. IT was not uncommon in tons of discussion both on and off the balance to hear people with a straight face say "If you're GCD healing you're trolling/bad at the game." I don't believe Healers are necessarily where they should be in terms of skill ceiling (with SGE being closest for me to enjoy it with its multiple filler/dps buttons that I think set an interesting comparison point for others to reference) but the issue is the minute you add in any potential for more dps and optimization it doesn't become an option anymore in the day of hyperfocused gamerbrains. It becomes a requirement/expectation. The difference between popping prepull Huton vs now using the Kunai is that now I can't be screwed if I don't hit hide in time but I still functionally have to maintain the same flow of combat to reward myself with DPS. If Healers were popping Fey Wind prior to pulls and then swapping for optimization anyways, then it's really not a "decision" you're making at that point. If people are optimizing encounters with Mit sheets then your miasma 2 becomes a "Use at x and y time unless people are dying" instead of an active choice you're making as a player. At the end of the day it's similar to Souls games. People who have been playing these games for 10+ years are going to feel apathy towards changes or negative towards them. The issue with looking at it from a perspective of an experienced player is that you will never have that same level of challenge again. Even if they briefly reintroduce challenge (like I'd say the 24 man is good for this) it will quickly be weeded out as you fall back into your knowledge and expertise with a kit. Even if they were to revert back to old scholar, you would still have the knowledge of how to manage your mitigation and not be as challenged as when the content was new/fresh. We still have people who can't heal in 8/24 man raids despite the discussions from veterans who make content for the game and the overabundance of tools in our kits. Players wait for guides instead of progging blind. That's an active decision they're making to make the difficulty of healing and their party prog lower. At what point do you punish players for trying to maintain level of ease in a video game. For all the posturing about how healing has to change how not bored are you going to be beyond the initial rush of a new encounter after you've learned how to manage it appropriately? Everyone's trying to chase a high after a decade in a video game that isn't going to come back, and if it does it will be fleeting. Things I agree with: - More engaging dps kits especially for SCH - More damage to be healed through more frequently so that even if you plan things out you're still having to engage more with the role - More kit synergy or cross class/role synergy to reward people who are coordinated and team players. I do agree we should push for change, but to insinuate that Square is making everything easy and sucky without examining the reasoning and context of it is, in my opinion, missing the forest for the trees. At the end of the day the playerbase this game has cultivated has basically been "do the most damage as often as you can and optimize to not use GCD heals." You're going to have to deal with pissing off the playerbase to get to the point where we need to be, and we've already kinda seen even the babysteps of that in DT cause everyone to lose their minds. I dunno if the playerbase is willing/able to embrace changes in any meaningful way because at the end of the day majority of the playerbase is just going to grab melds from the Balance, look up mit sheets and guides, and then go run the content until they get through the clear. Repetition breeds apathy, and in the age of short attention spans I don't know if people will stick around with more difficult content like Criterion or Chaotic 24 man stuff. Hopefully I'm wrong and they do some changes and it makes people happy.
This feels like a very well thought out video, and I'll need to think about it more to have a more solid opinion, but- I think the problem is you. 35:45 You mention that the most we see of damage in waves is maybe 2 in a row. You want 5, 6, 10. Also, at 30:30, you explain that you feel that the dev have not stepped up content engagement for healers this tier in any way, shape or form. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here and say you probably just memory-hole'd M3S, but, you reference this fight specifically. Before week 4-5, you, as the healer, needed to watch not just your health, but the caster and ranged HP too, as anything less than full health + shield result in the Octo/Quad dives killing Ranged party members. Brutal Impact hits you for 8x with an 8x TB following immediately after. You Fusefield has 8 huge raidwides that go off at a cadence determined by your party. Octo/Quad Bombarian Special has 5 HARD HITTING raidwides that happen back to back, WITH a knockback that inhibits your ability to reach other folks after the KB goes out. To give you some perspective, if you've never played League of Legends, I would encourage you to find a friend who's played since season 1-3, and ask them, "If you took a high silver/low gold player today and put them into Season 1 Ranked, what rank would they be?" The answer is at the *highest ranks*. The Rank 1 Season 1 player never made it back to rank one because he didn't rely on technical skill, he relied on strategy and tactics. Similarly, I think it's pretty clear that you, with the knowledge and expertise that you've carved into your soul through years of gameplay, are chasing a high that can really only be offered by Ultimate while fresh. I didn't hear one solution from you that would be actually affect gameplay in a meaningful way and also take that engagement budget you referred to. You talked a lot about SCH's Miasma II fondly, but also mentioned that while it was a DPS gain, you did enough damage while ignoring Miasma II entirely. But that is gameplay that SQEX has repeatedly expressed explicitly and implicitly is against their design philosophy. Maximizing minute damage gains for absolutely optimized parsing is not something the devs will ever care about, the same way that they don't care when remapping files utterly breaks Dalamud. Healing feels unengaging to you because you've continued to climb the mountain, and climb and climb, and you're more and more frustrated that there aren't more mountains available at your slope. I hate to say this because I know it probably hurts to hear and it sounds rude, but in a game that is PvE, if you have been playing it at the highest levels chasing harder and harder, pinnacle difficulty content, then a vast majority of the game SHOULD be unengaging to you. Every job and role has folks complaining about how much easier the jobs are to play. Tanks have no engaging Tank Mechs or opportunity for skill expression this tier, casters are all overly simplified and even BLM's have been grossly oversimplified, DRG was gutted in DT and then even moreso this most recent patch. Rangeds don't have an identity. You know what a vast majority of the people who make those complaints have in common? They almost all played the game for 4+ years. This isn't a problem for new players, and it isn't even a problem for all veteran players. It's a problem for veteran players who chase pinnacle content and challenge. I don't think the game is the issue. It's like a 17 year old boy who's lamenting all of the playground features that make the playground too safe and they took away all of the fun and exhilarating features away. Meanwhile in the background there are dozens of children running around having fun on the same playground behind him.
This right here sums it up perfectly. All I could think through the whole video was "are we playing entirely different games?" And yes, we really are. I am not great at the game, I can't get through a savage without having 10 levels and/or severe gear advantage. You can go through a whole tier in 24 hours. I'm super stoked for you that you are good enough and have a group good enough for that. The majority of players do not do savage, let alone clear it when it's current content when they have months to do so. You double talked like hell throughout the video in saying you want everything to be much more complicated/difficult but that you didn't and you wanted more flexibility/creativity, so I'll address both separately because each is a severe problem for the game as a whole More complicated/difficult: Dawntrail is a pretty solid step and IMO they nailed things for the majority of players. Content isn't just a walk in and clear with your brain shut off eating every mechanic. Did you miss the bit of whining on forums from people saying the fights are much harder? For most players, that "feeling of prog when doing savage", they got that from the NORMAL content this time around. Step things up even further with tighter windows and enforced dps checks and requiring high level healer play, and the game dies. I get it, if you're really good at the game, you can pick up on the "harder" things in normal (because you've seen them in savage) much quicker and the content becomes autopilot for you faster. That's not the average experience, if you make the normal content require days or weeks for the normal players to even get a first clear on, people stop playing because it's no longer fun and becomes a job. More flexibility/creativity: I'll start off that I don't really disagree with this inherently, but you should absolutely not be the one offering guidance here for the same reason as the previous paragraph. Because it would be VERY VERY easy to just entirely break the game design either by making multiple rotation options depending how a fight functions or offering methods for more cheeky dps tricks. If you have multiple rotation options, one of them is going to be the correct option for any given fight, and not using the right one means there's a dps loss, and the fight takes longer. Which can also mean depending on mechanics and how much flexibility/creating you are adding if you have multiple different people using different rotations that don't mesh with each other, you're likely to run into some issues and PLAYER friction rather than mechanical. Now for normal content, this might not be too much of an issue. For Extremes, this could effectively render them into a "difficulty" akin to savage when doing a PF due to player playstyle incompatibility as you already tend to get in Savage PF. On the other end with more tricks that let you do sneaky damage, because there will always be an "optimal" option and top end players will always tend towards that, it makes content worse and easier if you know how to do it optimally. StB was a different ballgame from today and the top end players were overall worse back then, but the true top end ones steamrolled content and became bored with it because there was zero challenge when you had the whole fight choreographed and knew all the tricks. That's why the the ceiling lowered, so the fights would not break due to a party of elites just absolutely stomping through things and removing all challenge even with some mistakes. Think of any dungeon roulette where you had 4 high geared high skill players, and just how much faster and how much less of fights you end up seeing and how much more boring it is. Now try to design a high end fight where high end players can clear it, but that doesn't fall to pieces with elite players, good luck.
While I do agree with your point about with high mastery, things should feel easier, and by nature more boring, I don't feel that doesn't mean that jobs haven't gotten easier and or simpler. I say this as someone who didn't enjoy old Machinist, I felt it was too clunky, but those who loved it REALLY loved it. I main Mch and love the new Mch, but I do lament some of the kit they lost, the depth of decision making that that kit provided, and was never really replaced. I do agree with you as well in regards to M3s.
@@SoftNapkins That is 100% correct. The game has gotten easier to play on top of the fact that pinnacle players are getting better, so they're getting it from both sides. However, I would say that that is a good thing for the game and the players also. Another point I didn't bring up in my comment, is HOW GOOD XIV players have it today. All of the flood of new players who joined in 5.5 or later have no idea that you couldn't fly in ARR zones pre 5.3. And even VETERAN players don't ever mention, or often even realize, that the absolute slog that was 2.X was made categorically worse by the fact that you did that whole questline grounded until you hit HW. I used to think, "Where was this game years ago when I was playing WoW?? I wish I switched years ago!" NO, I DO NOT. Cross class abilities? TP on a caster? Stance dancing for healer? Losing combo for failing positionals? The game is good TODAY because the devs have made it welcoming and friendly to new players. And honestly, their changes in EW for SMN were a stroke of genius. Every role should have a lower-performing job with training wheels to ease people into something new, and Casters didn't have that. It's the same with VPR in DT. The other thing that helps provide context is the average "seniority" of the playerbase- "seniority" being the number of years playing the game. When ShB released, the game, from ARR's release, was 6 years old. Just off the top of your head, what do you think the average seniority of the players was? For argument's sake, let's say it was 3 years- a perfect mix of new and old players. What do you think the average seniority of a player was in EW? I personally would say it less than 2 years at that point. Because the WoW exodus brought so many first time players that overwhelmingly almost drowned out the existing playerbase. Maybe I'm not correct in my numbers, the point stands regardless. The devs are making the game for their TOTAL audience, and their total audience has reverted in age- gotten less experienced, and I think these new changes reflect that. There are some games that only continue to grow in their complexity, with little regard for the experience of their new players. Just take a look at Path of Exile's talent tree and all of the systems in that game. It's become such a burden for new players, they literally are just starting over so they stop scaring new players away. I know this is a massive wall of text lol, I just feel really strongly that the devs are making fantastic improvements that are all getting drowned out by pinnacle raiders and the community thinks they represent, well, the community, and they don't. They represent what a lot of players admire- very high skill in the game. That makes us trust their opinion when it comes to clearing content, and that is relevant to the quality of content. But there is a perspective that an ultimate raider will never be able to have- and that's being new and overwhelmed by what they would consider to be the simplest things.
@@SoftNapkins That is 100% correct. The game has gotten easier to play on top of the fact that pinnacle players are getting better, so they're getting it from both sides. However, I would say that that is a good thing for the game and the players also. Another point I didn't bring up in my comment, is HOW GOOD XIV players have it today. All of the flood of new players who joined in 5.5 or later have no idea that you couldn't fly in ARR zones pre 5.3. And even VETERAN players don't ever mention, or often even realize, that the absolute slog that was 2.X was made categorically worse by the fact that you did that whole questline grounded until you hit HW. I used to think, "Where was this game years ago when I was playing WoW?? I wish I switched years ago!" NO, I DO NOT. Cross class abilities? TP on a caster? Stance dancing for healer? Losing combo for failing positionals? The game is good TODAY because the devs have made it welcoming and friendly to new players. And honestly, their changes in EW for SMN were a stroke of genius. Every role should have a lower-performing job with training wheels to ease people into something new, and Casters didn't have that. It's the same with VPR in DT. The other thing that helps provide context is the average "seniority" of the playerbase- "seniority" being the number of years playing the game. When ShB released, the game, from ARR's release, was 6 years old. Just off the top of your head, what do you think the average seniority of the players was? For argument's sake, let's say it was 3 years- a perfect mix of new and old players. What do you think the average seniority of a player was in EW? I personally would say it less than 2 years at that point. Because the WoW exodus brought so many first time players that overwhelmingly almost drowned out the existing playerbase. Maybe I'm not correct in my numbers, the point stands regardless. The devs are making the game for their TOTAL audience, and their total audience has reverted in age- gotten less experienced, and I think these new changes reflect that. There are some games that only continue to grow in their complexity, with little regard for the experience of their new players. Just take a look at Path of Exile's talent tree and all of the systems in that game. It's become such a burden for new players, they literally are just starting over so they stop scaring new players away. I know this is a massive wall of text lol, I just feel really strongly that the devs are making fantastic improvements that are all getting drowned out by pinnacle raiders and the community thinks they represent, well, the community, and they don't. They represent what a lot of players admire- very high skill in the game. That makes us trust their opinion when it comes to clearing content, and that is relevant to the quality of content. But there is a perspective that an ultimate raider will never be able to have- and that's being new and overwhelmed by what they would consider to be the simplest things.
@@Phyokathe thing is if you ask a lot of people who started in endwalker and talk about old features many will tell you they'd enjoy things like that. they think shadow flare sounds cool, they think expensive gcds sound interesting, they want to try a dot job, etc the issue isn't as simple as easy vs hard its about how much less engaging a lot of the moment to moment has become and a desire to shield players from stumbling blocks. i think it's fine if people wipe. people these days are so averse to wiping they just want to give up the second it happens! I don't think that's a good thing. fundamentally this is not about difficultly, difficulty is a byproduct of more explorative design
I come from a swtor healing perspective, I have noticed the difference between the two. One of the main things that I noticed is dispel or Esuna in swtor is needed during raids, higher up you go in difficulty the more they are needed to the point that some curses need to be removed in x amount of seconds or the target dies. Another is resurrect, doesn't matter who used the skill once it was, the skill for all healers in the raid the skill went into cooldown for about 3 minutes. So we really had to think about who we were bringing back. There were many times where if dps refused to get out of stupid we left you on the floor because it wasn't worth bringing you back. Healers also have a lot more dps buttons as well. Right now on FF14 I main white mage and I do enjoy it, but decision making is something you don't have to do as often. Can't comment on FF14 savage/extreme as due to a physical/pain disability I can't manage it.
On the surface, I agree with most everything in here, but these are also the arguments much of the healer community has been making for a few expansions now. The response from the devs has consistently been that they didn't want healers to have a complex dps rotation because they want to have healers focus on only healing. That, by its very design, will always keep us in the current problematic state you outlined here. It's also worth noting this isn't anything new, it's not a recent change. It's been this way for years now, much to our dismay. There is a portion of the healing community that does prefer it being an easier role where they only focus on healing and this is the direction the devs have taken and refused to divert from despite this same feedback being voiced for multiple expansions now. All this is to say... while I agree with you, it's an age-old complaint that the devs have heard and responded to by doubling down and reiterating this is the direction they want to take healers. Secondly, while I also thoroughly enjoyed SCH in the period you spoke of, it was one of the biggest reasons we got to where we're at. SCH had so much power if played well in that time period that progs all used them and their dmg was near a full dps, sometimes higher than other dps. In a party of competent players, you spent almost the entire fight optimizing your damage rotation. This is what you're asking for (since it gives you something to engage with when you don't need to heal), but it's what the devs reacted against. They don't want the competency of a healer to be judged by how well they optimize their damage rotation, and that's how healers were measured at the time. Lastly, the final reason they altered course was due to difficulty balancing. They were very vocal about how difficult it was to balance a fight when there was such a large deviation in damage based on whether the healer is properly damaging while healing. If they balanced around a party with healers doing "proper" dps rotations, then it would be impossible to meet the dps check in a party where your healers didn't do much damage. At the time, I hoped (as I'm guessing you would hope) that their response would be to tell these more passive healers that they need to learn to fully utilize their full kit. This was not their response. They chose (and have since doubled down on in every expansion) to say that healers should only really have to worry about healing, and their "fix" for the variable dps healers could perform was to dumb down the dps rotation to narrow the gap between skilled healers and those performing more poorly. This is a long response, I know. I feel you, and much of the healing community has been voicing all this feedback for years. I would love to have hope it will change, but they have shown absolutely zero evidence they want to revert any of their decisions in these areas. They have, by contrast, only cemented them further. I don't like the conclusion, but it's been a conclusion that's been present for years and is not new at all -- if you want a more engaging experience where your performance is more impactful and improvement can be better measured, healers in this game are not the role designed for you. If you feel this is too harsh a statement, read it instead as "the devs designed this role for a different type of person and mindset." It's a harsh reality that I didn't want to admit, but the only conclusion that is reasonable to make in my opinion. And they have tried in the past to satisfy both camps but realized it is an impossibility due to balance restrictions, so they made a choice and I see no evidence they would alter course. And lest you think otherwise, if they ever DO go back to giving healers more things to juggle, they will hit one of the same two problems as before -- either fights won't be balanced such that more casual healers can still complete them, or those casual healers will be making videos like this instead about how their preferred playstyle was sidelined for another.
One of my issues with healing is actually the base GCD toolkit (and SCH aetherflow) due to the fact that its just a DPS loss. It feels like a failure state when you need to use them. We got fancy new GCD heal upgrades, but why would i want to use Medica III when i have Rapture? And when i do need to use Medica III it feels like a punishment, a loss of both damage and MP economy. It feels like were stuck in the middle between "Healers should heal and damage should be secondary" and "Healers should focus on Damage and their healing tools should contribute to that" and the devs refuse to pick a side. Either make every OGCD a GCD so everything is a damage loss and we need to care about MP and Piety or make traits and mechanics that reward our damage rotations for using our healing skills in the right way.
Everyone talks about changing the healer role based off other games. This isn’t them other games. People complain that ff is going for simplicity… when you have a community that harps on people for not being optimized, I’d say it’s a good thing. Having played multiple MMOs, and recently playing WoW again after 7 years, I’d say what ff has mostly works. For me they can’t seem to decide if they want healers to be more oGCD or GCD. Thats my biggest gripe. You can’t compare the healing to WoW, because that game system is very different. And having gone back to it after doing ff for so long, I actually think WoW’s system is garbage. I don’t think they should take mechanics from it. Obviously OW mechanics won’t work because it’s a first person shooter. Trying to compare them is moot. Honestly, I disagree with most who thinks it needs more complex rotations. As someone who optimizes and perfects classes and rotations, I understand that there are people in the community who freaks if people aren’t optimized. They get dogged and treated like garbage. So no I disagree with people who say it’s too easy. For me it seems like they’re trying to make it more accessible for everyone unlike many other games. Can there be tweaks, of course. Will there be, probably. In the programming world, it’s never finished. We have an old saying, there done and done enough. It will never be done, just done enough based on deadlines. We used to say that if you let a programmer decide when it’s complete, you’ll wait forever. Games are constantly changing and upgrading. But saying it needs to be harder and essentially cutting out people from being able to play, I say shame on you. MMOs you can’t just put an easy mode on.
Thank you for voicing a lot of my feelings that were hard to put into words. I sometimes miss the old days of % based mechanics. It was silly and will never be put back but it was fun if your team pushed too much and mitigation might have been thrown out of wack and the adjustments made were fun on top of mechanics. I sometimes miss those days. I've started accepting and not caring about Savage healing due to the downtime/recovery. I missed the days of Largesse. I miss the days of StB AST. I have missed feeling something for awhile. I do like healing, but as you said: I am waiting for those moments of chaos, and enjoy the muscle memory and instinct of rapid firing an Essential on someone. But I shouldn't have to wait on chaos to do so. Thank you for this vid. I'm glad others feel similar ways about the state of healers right now.
While I appreciate that you use your platform to express issues with the game for greater visibility, I disagree on how you think on average play. I don't think old AST cards were a problem. What is the actual difference in outcome between optimal card play and just slightly suboptimal?
I think this applies to more than just healers, in terms of a lack of 'friction'. The skill ceiling for a good few jobs are being reduced, with the most recent example being the removal of a movement lock on Ten Chi Jin, but my biggest example this expansion being the addition of Flare Star on Black Mage. On the surface this ability doesn't seem bad, but its addition kills a lot of transpose lines. I think the games chases jobs having to be 'perfect' too much, and remove all 'annoyance' from them. Which tends to remove all the difficulty as well.
Rinon, I don't think you'll ever be in touch with the general user experience with the general user base. Or even high level players who have many hours, but aren't insulated by the cliques of "career" players. Healers pound for pound already have the highest skill ceiling in the game. To anyone not insulated by the cliques they're in, it is taxing work to play the role as well as you can given the situational changes that happen at any given point of the interdependent activity you're doing. It was frustrating as well to see the "low DPS check" talking point for the savage raid, when the damage differential between jobs made not all deaths during a prog run equal, or even remotely close for that matter. "We need to talk about encounter design." Is a conversation that would affect healing in a more productive way than any issues with the toolkits themselves.
Underrated comment tbh. Healing in my static and healing 7 nerds I've never met are 2 immensely different experiences and I'm one of the insane few who enjoys both experiences. As a career dps who will play literally anything I'm asked just to help people clear, it's easy to understand the gripes people have with healer but hard to disagree that some of that comes from years of experience and playing with other experienced players.
To talk about one fight design issue I believe really makes healing feel way worse, it's the prevalence of body checks after tough mechanics. It removes the recovery aspect of being a healer. If one person fucks up, you all die. If no one dies, you're there to look pretty and press ogcds. In the absence of making healer rotations more involved, the devs need to focus on recovery mechanics.
@@antarath517 I agree that body checks are out of control and make recovery useless. As a rdm main, I completely agree that there's a part of my kit that's almost meaningless because of fight design sometimes.
This whole chain TBH. Recently there was the early M4s clears complaining how much extra time before enrage there was on the boss HP in the end, while PF is burning (every day I feel more blessed for my static). "Let them eat cake" kind of thing, feels like. I will agree hard, however, on the idea of having some extra synergetic healer multi-tools that encourage you too use them for healing while also keeping your DPS engaging. Assize and Pneuma feel awesome, whereas I am always dubious on whether I am being a burden on my cohealer popping that Dissipation "because it's the optimal thing to do during burst".
I feel like this is very subjective. As a half static/half PF healer...I mean I really don't see it super difficult to heal, especially the last pandaemonium tier...in PF. P12S was a snooze fest for my heals, any big damage where I could be the knight in shining armor was easy to take care of...I mean I really think the core of what Rinon is talking about is how the healer kit works in content...and how once you really figure it out, figure out how damage works...it honestly is not that difficult, regardless of if you are in PF or a static, it is a role that could be much more fleshed out and rewarding. I think there are multiple conversation starters in this video, and the healing role in itself is one that people gravitate either towards, or very very far away from. But...again, what one finds hard another finds easy, and vice versa. I think the core identity of the role needs some work overall.
at the end of the day, what I am convinced of is that everything about modern square enix, at the top end of production, is laser-focused around the idea that absolutely everything has to have the biggest audience imaginable or it's a colossal failure - and that the best way to get that audience is to remove absolutely anything that might lead to anyone who touches it having a bad experience, at the cost of lessening the potential for good experiences. FF15 and FF16's combat being made incredibly easy, FF7 remake shifting gears to be extremely conservative in the second game but the biggest and most obvious cases of this are all within FF14: Every aspect of design is terrified at the very idea someone might have a bad experience. We made a new PVP mode that's pretty well designed, but we removed chat because people might have a bad experience if someone says something mean to them. You can't queue in with friends because what if people use that to make solo players have a bad experience. Dungeons have to be lobotomized so people can play with extremely rudimentary scripted AI, so we quintuple-down on every dungeon is the exact same layout and format and remove variation from dungeons that deviate. Bosses have to be made easier, level synch has to become even more lax, because if someone new picked up the game this month and wiped when they reached Stormblood, they would surely quit! I know a great many people who have tried FF14, got partway through Heavensward, and quit because they were incredibly bored with the gameplay - because there is no challenge. Making it as softball-easy and catering as hard as they possibly can to people who have no idea what they're doing and, pivotally, very often DO NOT WANT TO LEARN has created this self-feeding loop, because now players are given 600 hours of conditioning that the game is easy, mechanics do not matter, and everything will be cleared even if you put zero thought or effort in - you can floor tank every fight and still win - and then they cry because Dawntrail has a tiny handful of circumstances where if you die, the party might actually lose. Where if you ignore mechanics you might actually suffer for it. I honestly can't even really blame those people - if I played a fighting game and it forced me to fight easy-mode AI and disabled special inputs for my first 600 hours, if I somehow didn't quit by then it'd be incredibly jarring to get dumped into a real video game after sleeping for, I cannot stress this enough, literally hundreds of hours. Healing was the spear-tip of this - the changes in Shadowbringers to healers (and tanking, ESPECIALLY to Dark Knight) were ostensibly to entice more people to try out healing and tanking, but functionally meant a lot of people would *try* them then quit because either it was too boring or they weren't the kind of person who was going to keep playing long for /any/ reason. Cue "Not enough people are healing, we must make it EVEN EASIER, clearly!" Repeat, repeat. I don't know how they don't understand this.
Ok my real comment now. I do think you are extremely good at healing. I would consider myself a good healer and I think my highest savage parse is blue. I am just not as good as you are, so there are many instances I have to engage with more of my kit. Not to say your complaints aren't genuine. I'm also a good enough healer that most content is mindless. I don't think there's a good solution to balance out healing for everyone. I do think it should be more engaging, but maybe at this point you've been healing for so long that you've exhausted your ability to even optimize it more. Job homogenization is more worrying to me at this state. But I think you have hit that job ceiling and that is why you find it incredibly unengaging.
I think that everyone should of just kept telling people, including the devs: "Healing isn't meant to be easy, there has to be complexity and difficulty." and stuck with it. The game only degraded catering to the people who didn't want to step up and learn. Being a decent healer didn't require actual rocket science or hard work, it was still plenty easy with the old kits. People just didn't like having to try so much. Then you had the people who literally whined about being told to play better so everything ran better.
@@ScarletStarManorOK, and then you'd have to wait for ages to find healers to fill parties. Like it or not, accessibility is a mandatory concern when playing a multiplayer game where a particular role is necessary for PF / roulettes. If you alienate the current healer base, the health of multiplayer drops dramatically. Here in Japan we're waiting on tanks because nobody wants to play them, if the healer community gets alienated and quits to play DPS, our 30 minute PF wait will balloon into a 90 minute wait.
@ the answer to this was pretty simple a long time ago, stop homogenizing and start making separate classes with intended skill levels to appease people. Make a class that is easier to play then make one that requires more effort and then it’d be a fine compromise
@@kirigherkinsaccessibility and comfort are not the same thing. i think that all roles have points of friction that are integral to their identities. tank has been made more and more comfortable as has healer and it has created a situation where a lot of the time the healer does not even need to be present or do much more than press a ogcd or two here and there to provide value. the knockon effect of this is that any healer that does want to try, all they have to look forward to is greeding out extra damage while playing chicken with the party's health
@ScarletStarManor yeah. I'm sad the business of astrologian was dumbed down. We already had a slow healer. Why ruin my class to appeal to people who don't play it?
My experience with the current new alliance raid was that Healers actually had to do things there and I saw some healers complaining, I was confused because as a tank I RARELY ever struggle with content and on DPS I rarely ever feel targeted or in danger, so the fact that healers had work to do because the mechanic were slightly difficulty to keep pace with, which was fine because we can recover, we don't auto die, so it felt fine? I had no idea why people were complaining unless they just had awful connection.
I'll be honest, speaking purely as a casual non-savage player, who does basically nothing but Normal content, I've loved how healing in FF14 feels a lot more like healing in the earlier half of the series. Ever since FF1, when a class with heals gets attack spells, I'm always annoyed that they never have many good ones, because it feels like they're a wasted slot when healing isn't needed. For WHM, which is my main, it feels really nice to be able to make meaningful contributions to the group's damage output instead of just being a robot who spams healing spells and never has to think beyond triage. However, I also understand that it doesn't jive well with the Trinity system of MMOs. Personally, I love the feel, but I also do wish we had more attack spells to use, it still feels like having nothing but Harm as an FF1 White Mage. Cecil, for example, was both a tank and healer as far as the party roles in FF4 went. If you used him only for healing, you lose out on a lot of damage, but if you let people die you lose out on their damage. Balancing attacks and healing was a lot of how to play the game better, but aside from losing out on the turn of damage, there wasn't really any negative to using heals. That was a balance that always felt "good" to me, because the skill came from being able to heal without overhealing, but also being able to contribute to the fight. The problem, of course, is that despite it being a Final Fantasy game, it IS also an MMO. And in the turn-based combat of an MMO, where each turn is 2.5s and individual turns are far less valuable as a resource because of how many of them there are per battle and using a few of them inefficiently won't really do much harm to the fight or the group. And therein comes the problem - the healers don't really get to do their job in the traditional Final Fantasy way- they don't have the healing to do, but they also don't have the tools to do meaningful engaging damage in a way that takes more than one button, and we are long, long past the eras where spamming "Attack" until it's time to cast is acceptable gameplay. I'll be honest, I think that the way Warrior works, while a bit TOO overtuned for dungeons, is a good design concept for final fantasy. Instead of each role being basically one thing, each role has tools to do everything, but the two roles they don't fill will have a much weaker set of tools. Like how you CAN cast heals as a red mage in the old games, but you'll never keep up with something like a white mage, or how a summoner's lower level magic non-summon spells will never keep up with a black mage. But as always, we run into the game design compromise problem in FF14- it has to still be an MMO, and the final points you make, about how it doesn't take enough brain resources to make it feel good, and how the game's current design makes the ceiling too low. How do we make it so that healing badly in dungeons doesn't make the entire rest of the group unable to progress through what should be a very simple and straightforwards task, while making it so that mid and high end players get rewarded for playing well? It's no fun when the "Reward" is that no one is angry at you, rather than being impressed with your play. Tanks who mit well and position well are rewarded directly for it. DPS who do their jobs well are very very noticeable. But a good healer is invisible, unless they're NOT playing well. You'll notice if they aren't doing damage, but you won't notice much if they're doing weaker damage than tehy should. You'll notice if they aren't healing entirely, but not if they're struggling to keep the tank up - especially not if it's the tank's fault. Still looks like the healer's fault when the tank drops to a casual player. How do we make the healing role feel like it's more important to all the content, without making the role burdens unbalanced? I have no clue. I don't know if making it harder to do their damage correctly by adding more buttons to push is the right decision, or if a greater rework would be needed. You have plenty of good ideas, and better than any I could come up with, but the simple reality is this: There should be a separate toolkit for High Progression from Normal Gameplay, the same way as there's a different set of tools for PVP and PVE. Otherwise, the game is going to be permanently constrained by having to maintain that skill floor. Giving high end progression a weakened toolkit even has some potential lore justification - the high end content is all in-universe fanfic anyway, and it makes for a more embellishably dramatic story if the heroes have to have more challenging and engaging conflicts. Of course, that would present its own massive, massive set of issues with balance, too. This long-winded ramble is all to say, this is a great video that brought up tons of good points I'd never thought of, and seemed a good place to share my thoughts as a casual who used to do hardcore raiding a long, long, long time ago, so at least have some perspectives I guess.
I only do normal content, I don't do ex or savage since I feel the rotations and openers in this game are just insanely difficult and more of headache than anything else. And since it's a requirement to know these to do harder content I just stick with just normal content.
@@akarti813 Most class rotations on this game are a joke if you take the time to learn them, for 90% of the classes the depth boils down to: press everything as soon as it comes off cooldown with the only exception being abilities with multiple charges bc of the 2 minute meta, and don't break your combo gcds. In fact I'd argue playing rotations the intended way is actually easier than trying to do it any other way nowadays with how hard square is trying to push the 2 min meta. Half of our cooldowns have been merged together in DT so that the possibility of messing them up or drifting them apart isn't even possible anymore. How is it hard? Other mmos actually demand on the fly decision making or at least have more varied class design like priority system based rotations, ffxiv hardly has anything that actually makes it difficult.
@stabegabe well I'm glad everyone understand them and can do them. But I guessing not in the same vote cause I play samurai and I feel more confused than anything else and looking at the opener just makes me cringe.
While I agree with some statements, such as the current healer role issues, I can't agree on some of the other aspects. Stormblood, while having good change on the overall of the game, do also have many problems with the healer design, even though many will chuck it under, oh it's because it's making it unique. And to be fair, the biggest change and most valid point is just stormblood have an extra dot, even though rest of the aspect of healer is exact the same as now. The duality of the problem for healer, is that even with all the changes over the years, healer are still the most punishing job to play and have a higher responsibility in 90% of the content, especially with the recently 7.1 patch increased healing needs, and guess what? we actually have even lesser healer in Duty finder even though more healing is one of the thing the healer community have been asking for. The other aspect is just that gcd heal are weak while also not encouraged due to lost damage potency, on top of 0gcd being strong and enough to cover everything. I think we need to flip the script entirely, make 0gcd much weaker than now and make gcd heal stronger, or combine them so they have interaction with each other to encourage gcd while discourage 0gcd. Yet I have a feeling many will not welcome this and just prefer the same 0gcd situation
Given how popular Astrologian is right now, I wonder if the way forward for the Healer role is to make them a more broadly "support" focused role, not just defensives/heals. I'm not saying that they should pillage Astro's identity, but given that raw incoming damage just isn't as much of a concern outside of heal checks, giving them more to do on the party side between big hits could do a lot to revitalize the role. You could even tie this into the job's gauge. Make WHM's Blood Lily a resource you can either spend on Afflatus Misery for instant damage, or maybe a small party-side damage buff, or a short Vuln Up on the target. Maybe give Aetherflow a stronger DOT ability or boss damage down to spend it on, but with a longer cooldown. Give Sage an actual, literal gun. There's only so many ways you can heal damage, so it's inevitible that you'd run out of ways to make it interesting. Give healers more specific, situational abilities that they need to budget for and plan out, outside of whether or not it's off cooldown.
Astros popularity is due to it being white mage but better. At least in hard content, in nornal content sage still seems to be the most popular healer.
This video is all over the place in terms of addressing issues and presenting desires. There are a few things that need to be more seriously addressed in terms of making healing more difficult. The TLDR is that you personally are highly skilled at healing, so it won't present much of a challenge to you but it does still present a challenge to you personally. The only way you will be challenged personally is by playing with bad players so that you have to account for mistakes. #1. Healing is already difficult for a lot of mediocre players When DPS fails, the fight takes longer and maybe you hit enrage in high difficulty. When the healers fail, you hit a brick wall in the middle of the fight, even in normal content. This can lead to healer anxiety and less people playing healer because they don't want to very visibly fail the party like that. It also leads to a situation where a lot less players are good enough at healing to beat the fights. If this extends into normal mode, it will cause massive problems throughout the community. I can't imagine FFXIV wholesome and inclusive vibes holding up if healing becomes a major pain point. I would imagine bad healers would be openly flamed and dismissed from duties. I got into high difficulty healing with Dawntrail EX trials. There are significantly difficult heal checks for players who are used to normal mode healing. I also progged a lot of savage on healer. The fights are pretty challenging but get a easier when you have a complete heal and mitt plan (more on that later). I cleared M4S but not on healer since some of the mechanics starting at EE2 were getting too difficult for me to heal. I have also been in plenty of parties where I or others get dropped to raid wide damage because the healer was inadequate. It is a very frustrating experience since bad healers make a fight impossible to prog. #2. Healing is already an unpopular role There are a ton of healing buttons to the point where it can be daunting to learn. Queue times in normal content and the PF list shows that there is usually a deficit of healers at any given point in time. Making healing more difficult will only make this problem worse. Not to mention healer anxiety if failure becomes a real and common possibility. #3. Fight consistency is not likely to change, and for good reason This is a point where you don't really go into detail about what a less consistent fight design might look like. You need to really dig into it to realize why it's probably not going to happen. Basically the less consistent they make the fights, the higher the consistency demand on the player. Lets say an inconsistent fight mechanic is that two random players will be hit for heavy damage right before a raid wide. That would force healers to react, which is the fun part. The problem is it would just be simulating a mistake, almost as if two random players failed a previous mechanic and were either rezed or didn't outright die from damage. The problem is if multiple players actually were damaged going into the mechanic, now it becomes a lot more difficult since you have to heal up even more players or start triaging which ones will die. Not to mention if the already damaged players randomly get hit with the extra damage. Also not to mention if random damage happens back to back and happens to target the same player. In short, it can start making fights feel unfair and makes player inconsistency a much bigger problem. #4. Consistent fights with good, consistent players are trivialized with a heal plan If people don't make mistakes while also using mitts and heals in the same places every fight, you don't ever need to deviate from that plan. This is a big reason behind why you find healing boring and it isn't likely to change due to #3. If a healing tool can solve a mechanic, it will always be able to solve a mechanic. If you have a total plan for when to use each tool in a fight, you can use each tool at their designated times and never need to worry about cooldowns, since all the cooldowns have been planned out in advance. The only reason you would ever need to change plans is if someone makes a mistake. Valigarmanda comes close to breaking this rule, but you can simply have two heal plans, one for each order of phases. #5. Raising the skill ceiling without affecting the skill floor is easier said than done I cannot stress enough how incredibly difficult this is to do in practice. My comment is already way too long and this subject is way too complicated so I'm not going to go into much detail. The short of it is that this is basically a game designer's dream and if it was easy, they would do it all the time. It is also worth mentioning that raising the skill ceiling is utterly meaningless if there isn't content that requires the increased skill. For DPS players, you could always barse to show skill above the requirement, but that doesn't really make sense for the healer role. In conclusion the state of healer is an impasse. High skill players find it lacking. It's difficult or nearly impossible to increase the skill ceiling without also negatively impacting mid and low skill players along with the player base overall. Fixing the issue will take an incredible amount of design skill.
This address everything I was going to say, thank you. This video addressed nothing while complaining the entire time. There were these empty statements of "what needs to be done" and that alone shows where the difficulty of this lies, that there's no solution. If you don't like the state of healing in this game, WoW, ESO, and other games have different ways of playing healers than XIV does, and the solution is simply, play that game, not this one.
So what youre saying is that healer as a job is fine in punishing the player for getting better at it because there are shitty players? My brother in christ, you cant force a shitter to do more. I still see heal only WHMs and they still let people die. Do you really think that they should design jobs around the bottom of the barrel skill level?
no one ever talks about ilvl creep. many people i talk to and plan min ilvl no echo (aka MINE) runs of content always say something like "i miss this so much. this is so much fun". but there is no incentive to play MINE. you dont' get additional rewards for it. so no one does it, unless you have preforms dedicated to doing this. or you're on a DC that has a more varied PF content . the race to BiS might be necessary for Ultimate content, but for everything else, it just seems like a way to increase the safety net, skip mechanics, make big number go up and minmaxing parse. go into a dungeon without BiS and you get yelled at, because people only care about steamrolling things as fast as possible. healing gets more repetitive and boring because everyone shoots for BiS to minimize challenge, maybe that's a fundamental problem with MMOs. however, this isn't to invalidate that healer design has issues. its just no one ever talks about ilvl creep and completely ignores it as a potential issue, let alone the ability to apply handicaps to duty. no one wants to lower their ilvl voluntarily lol. and that ilvl creep creeps in as soon as patch x.01 and x.05. suddenly, 2/3 of every boss is skippable, really fun heal checks are skippable. but no one talks about this, despite it being a valid factor to consider in this discussion. all activity people ever do is just going for their reclears, savage reclears, etc. need to get the 735 weapon that is gonna take 7 weeks to get. and like i feel left out because, i just don't care about that (at least as much), but i brace myself for getting yelled at because i would dare go into EX with only 710-720 gear
i fully agree. go do mine coils as whm and you'll have the time of your life. absurdly good time. potency/mit creep is a lot of the problem and reassessing the ilvl system would help a lot even if it doesn't remove a lot of the issues with jobs' design
You missed the point a bit. The problem is not "content is too easy and here is why". The core problem is that healers are boring unless the content is difficult. Its a fundamental problem of the kit and role. There are too few ways to optimize. No mana/gcd management needed, no complex dmg rotation. You have too many ogcds to deal with everything and not enough interesting enough dmg rotation.
Part of the ilvl creep issue is that Vitality increases healthpools to the point where you can start leaving mitigations out and still be fine. If they would focus on ilvl increasing DPS output more than HP, those mitigations would still be required even after everybody is full BiS. You would still get the benefit of faster kills while not removing danger from mechanics.
@TheBubbeloo someone hire this man, quick! but unfortunately we know why this is, ilvl is meant to compensate skill. Not only rotations but dodging a mechanic too.
I agree with some of these points but heavily disagree with others. For example, MP management never added to the fun, switching fairies was super niche annoying, and cleric stance (as well as the old tank stances) felt like just another button to press before doing the actual fun bits. My current biggest issue with healers is the lack of offensive tools. White Mage feels the best to me personally right now due to the variety of healing tools and how misery currently rewards use of afflatus spells. And I love Liturgy.
If the moment of fun in healing whenever someone messes up then we clearly something is wrong with healing fundamentally. As much as I want to heal often it's the game design that forced us to be the Green DPS. I'm not exactly 'healing', I am DPSing against the boss DPS on a very tight script. DT is the first expansion I just went, screw it I'm done. I guess after 3 expansions of the same antics the burn out finally hits me.
This reminds me of the changes to DPS, Specifically Melee in my case: A lot of DPS used to have core fundamentals like Positionals, DoT/Debuff/Buff uptime as well as when to use your DPS-buffs. Not to mention simply understanding TP-efficient skills especially when AoEing. The lack of True North also meant you had to understand at any given time, what was your most efficient positional to execute.
Healers: "We want to do more in battle!" Squeenix: "Here's a bunch of oGCD abilities to heal and prevent damage." Healers: "No we want more GCDs to pick from." Squeenix: "Okay here's a bunch of GCD healing." Healers: "That's useless when the other players don't take damage." Squeenix: "Okay here's Dark Knight and Gunbreaker, tanks with higher damage but they don't have party-wide shields." Healers: "Oh my god those tanks are useless they force us to use our GCD healing I don't want to do that." Squeenix: "But you picked Healer." Healers: "Yes, for the quick queue times." Actual brain damage.
The thing is day by day healers are trained/expected to be a dps machine in contents, as not being able to optimize downtime used for healing to do more dps instead will make people consider you a "bad healer" That's how GCD heals become an inconvenience and frustrating things to use, because it makes you feel like you're doing something wrong. Healing in end game bored me to death because it's just following the same script everytime and more GCD heals mean you get called out for playing unoptimizely. Doing casual content is more fun as a healer when you're queued into a newbie party because you don't have to worry about dps much and focus more on doing your actual job, healing.
the ogcds make the do-nothing problem worse, not better the gcds don't feed back into the rest of the kit and also aren't as strong or satisfying as the overtuned ogcds so they feel so bad to use it is like hitting a failure state those are two tanks out of 4 okay this last part is just a strawman. i play healer because i enjoy the highs of the role. i just want the lows to stop feeling so miserably low
@Naoto-kun1085 I'm not a hardcore player myself, so I don't really have a take on this. I do think at least half of the problem is the fight designs though. FFXIV end game is basically just memorizing a book for the exam, and it kinda forces people to build this mentality of doing everything to raise the dps as much as possible.
Thank you so much for putting this out there. It's worded so well and sums up exactly how I feel as someone who mained AST from HW but dropped it like a hot brick in EW, and now plays PCT in DT.
The challenging part of playing healer is queuing for roulettes. You never know if your tank and DPSs are going to make you earn your sub or not. Many tanks still don't understand mits.
The lack of mitigation is the frustrating part, especially when the tank is a Paladin and it's just like why tf are you playing Paladin when the whole point of the job is the extra mitigation with Sheltron and the various other mits? White Mage is cool though, I leveled it a bit before I dropped the game again and will probably continue if I go back
Tbh it is other way around too, I mostly use PLD to deal with new healers in roulettes. Someone questioned why only healers care about job being dummed down, personally after doing enoght dailies I don't want to increase healer complexety outside of dps part, since there is enoght of peeps that cannot handle it as is
@ err I’d say a bad healer is WAY less common than a bad tank. If you really wanted to mitigate lack of healer, Warrior-at least at higher lvl dungeons, and not paladin, would be a better approach. The actual common issue with healers is not that they don’t heal, but rather they only heal. Ie they stand there and just respond to incoming dmg with GCD heals, and any incoming damage that demands bursts healing might actually outpace their GCD if the tank doesn’t mit. This is a huge issue because 95% of tanks pull wall to wall, and cooldown timers/damage checks are designed around the whole party doing AoE. So with 3 players DPSing, the tank can quickly run out of mitigation tools, and unless they are a warrior in a multi target AoE situation, it becomes hard to sustain after the burst window.
I'll happily trade you my experience lol. Most expert dungeon runs, I basically never see my Excogs pop before its timer runs out. I have to ask my teammates to deliberately collect vuln stacks if I want less than 95% of my button presses to be broil or art of war. I appreciate the effort that tanks put in these days but I'd happily take some utterly dogwater ones that don't use cooldowns so I get to actually play the game.
This is a great yet tragic breakdown. Playing an Astrologian throughout Stormblood was some of the most FUN times of my (gaming) life. The amount of thank you's and other well wishes i received from random players was unbelievable. It felt like i had options and agency to vary my playstyle based on particular content and competency of group. Keeping in mind i was mediocre at best. To think the levels actual Ultimate level players could have pushed and played on is something both thrilling and scary - in a good way! Shame it all had to end, quite abruptly in AST case too ☠️
On the topic of encounter design and how it greatly impacts how fun healer is - I remember Xenosys Vex at one point stating that he would rather have fight mechanics be simple and jobs be complex, and I agree. I think that would go a long way to address this particular problem. No longer would you have a problem of being at the mercy of the encounter designers, because the experience would be more consistent across multiple different fights.
personally, i just want atonement-like combos on healers which interact with the rest of the kit. for example (scholar) no costs on lustrate or soil if you are weaving after the 2nd spell of the combo. so you can use more energy drains when you time it right. or getting access to a second dot after the third hit. dunno, just some interaction within the kit would be great D: edit: i also think whm and sge in particular have such good mp management that the ressource itself hardly matters at this point
Honestly, I think healer is exactly where it needs to be. Healer's in a great spot, minus some minor changes. Everyone else, however, isn't. Certain healers definitely feel way easier to play and the harder ones don't really reward you for the increased difficulty. Sage comes to mind, where the only thing you get for your efforts is an aoe that you can move around while you use it, which is weaker than your other aoe that you can move around when you use it. I wouldn't argue for the return of Cleric Stance. Stance is terrible, and when they took it out of the game, healer was much more fun. Tanks, dps, everyone else. That's where the problem exists. Wall pulling and surviving in previous expansions was a show of skill. It was fun. Now, each tank has an unlimited amount of healing capabilities. Warrior can solo almost any content without deaths. DRK is one of the least healing tanks in the game and it can even keep itself alive for most wall pulls. Paladin and GNB are similar where they simply refuse to go under half health. All dps have a self-heal or shield. Some have multiple self shields. Some have shields that affect the entire party that don't ever feel useful to use because nobody dies. Healer is fun. They have all these pretty items that they can throw out and have a fun time. The problem is that 99% of healers are standing in the middle of content looking at the abilities they could be having fun using and never being able to use them.
When I first started in Stormblood I was a scholar main. I know it's just a game but seeing you cover scholar made me cry a little. I miss it so much. I don't like it anymore. I don't like what they did to the theme of the job... And I feel like the development team doesn't listen to player feedback at all They're even simplifying Dragoon now. I don't know what to play anymore. I might just play PVP. Jobs are more fun there.
Living Liquid progression was the most fun I ever had on Healer. It is so great to see someone is fighting for what made healer fun on ffxiv. I tried to come back twice now, and each time the lack of complexity and feeling of being pushed left me bored very quickly. I miss the old ways healer worked when I had to try, thread in off globals, cram in damage by prepping or saving to be prepared, and who doesn't miss when skill made your damage numbers really matter and stick out? Accomplishments were a real thing. Solo healing Living Liquid was a real feat... doing it on more than one job meant something. Staggering movement between casts by moving just before casting finished when the server considered you done casting or during an instant cast during global cooldown was an art. It used to be that extreme effort gave amazing reward in endgame content. Maybe the Healer role would be better replaced as the Support role... give more buffs and debuffs to go along with the heals if SE is so afraid of letting the skilled healers do damage again with the power to think and plan ahead
My conclusion in the end is that the problem is not with the tool bloat but the content that doesn't incentivise you to use that whatsoever. I think that encounters have gotten more quality and complex, but the total difficulty of executing on your job + resolving the mechanics of the fight does not add up to 100 as it should. P10S was great and I want more of that level of content more often. As you said somewhere near the end, you finish a short segment of a lot of damage coming out and then the boss auto attacks for like 10 seconds to align with the 2 minute meta design of fights, and then the next damage instance comes out 30 seconds later which is not even enough to do any lasting damage, it can usually be covered with Reprisal, Feint/Addle, and Kera/Soil. If we're getting these crazy bloated kits, then start doing more Wave Cannons. However, the content is just not going to be designed around playing your job optimally as it'll be a problem if Lunafreya Nightingale cannot clear with 0/4 Lillybells and 0/6 Temperances used.
I fully agree that triage healing in this game is the best feeling in the world. Being able to dance the mechanics and pick up the pieces at the same time has an immense feeling of satisfaction. It' why I basically just throw myself at Alliance DR every day because having those 24-mans that just fall apart and you have to proverbially princess carry the entire raid to the finish line is peak satisfaction. Maybe I will start to throw myself at PF assisting as well if I get the time to do so for that same feeling. Hopefully 8.0 does see a nice meshing of DPS and Healing kit synergies / interactions as that would be a great way to increase the skill ceiling with affecting the skill floor.
This is a tough subject for me to weigh in on. Started Healing in EW and have stuck through it till now as my main role. I see and feel many of the problems you’re describing, outside of prog and really bad triage and recovery situations I feel redundant and unneeded. That we are just the Airbags of the group, we only exist for when things go wrong. I want to be more relevant. But I also came over from playing dps in wow, meters and parsing is common and expected somewhat in that games culture. I wanted to run from the rat race of damage and never go back. We aren’t free from it here, playing dps in ffxiv, it’s just more hidden. I heal because I don’t want my damage output to be my contribution to the groups success. I want it to be my defensive and supportive choices and the management of the resources they consume to be my contribution. Healer 1st DPS 2nd, Not DPS 1st Healer 2nd. Not to say I want to strip away the everyone does damage, rather I don’t want an increase in the complexity of healer dps to be an increase of our percentage of group dps over current levels. Recovery and prog are fun because we engage with our healing not our damage. My opinions are just my opinions though.
I started in Stormblood. I don't really care if I as a healer am "unneeded and unnecessary"; my main concern is that whenever that is the case (as it often is), the game's just boring. Completely and utterly banal, and as flavourful as the plainest oats. The reason so many of us are chomping at the bit for more "DPS abilities" is because it's simply the most practical solution; we get more to engage with and SQEX doesn't have to rework/rebalance the past 6 expansions worth of content. Having more supporting/buffing responsibilities would be far more ideal, but the game's quadrupled so far down this direction, that I don't really see such a thing being conceivable.
i’ve been playing since protect and stoneskin were a thing, i watched your video and think you communicated your thoughts and opinions really well and made a lot of strong points ! i do feel differently, i like how healer has changed, it feels more fluid and less clunky to me. i enjoy healer in its current state but totally empathize and see where you’re coming from. i do miss Selene though. that’s a point i will say i don’t enjoy , i miss the variety in scholar, the focus on dots, and how you could use either selene or eos :( i miss it so much
I tried healing for the first time as I've always wanted to try it and my cohealer said it would be the best time to do it since it's the first raid tier of the expac. And it's true what she said, "Healing is boring when your party knows what they are doing. It's more fun doing prog." So you hit the nail on the head, Rinon. I didn't start playing till SHB so i didn't know healing was so different. I've heard through the grapevine that healing haven't changed in a really long time.
Great video! I joined in 5.2 and played healer for about 5000 hours. In DT I swapped over to Picto and other DPS, and have been having way more fun. There is so much more to pay attention to and optimize on some DPS classes compared to healers, it is insane. I've never really been hopeful anything will change, but after Yoshida's comments on the game state, and showing he was serious about it with a lot of the encounter design in DT so far, I will say I am more hopeful than I have ever been before. He himself said that it is hard to show off your mastery of a job with the way they've set it up so far, and wants 8.0 to bring back some more individuality. So I'll remain cautiously optimistic about the future of FFXIV healer jobs. If it doesn't work out in 8.0, I suppose I'll just continue to enjoy my DPS classes.
Thank you so much. I have a hard time explaining how I went from being a one-trick scholar (ARR-StB) to not playing healer at all in higher level content. This video pretty much covers any reason I can think of as to why I don't think healing is fun anymore.
SE designs healers assuming that they can try to convince players who pilot them "wrong" to play them "correctly", and i hope that one day, they realize that they're fucking it up for the rest of us in the name of chasing a windmill the df astrologian who never uses cards cannot be convinced to play their job right no matter how much easier you make it, because that implies they believe they need help. they just don't care, nothing you can do will make them care
this is why i hate every comment about accessibility. if this healing was "accessible", you wouldn't be disbanding in every other PF because your healers don't want to press a cooldown they don't even have keybound! SE has been repeatedly forcing players to adapt to reworks and changes every expansion, for people who don't care, because to care would require them to have read any of the buttons on their hotbars in the first place!!!
@@nonemitigationexactly! accessibility and comfort are two different things! healing has not been made more accessible! it's been made more comfortable! and that comfort is the result of sanding away the things that made those jobs interesting and engaging. accessibility is about aiding those who CAN'T do something so that they may join in. comfort is about catering to those who don't WANT to do something that they're plenty capable of doing. but designing entirely around comfort only creates a more frustrating experience for everyone involved because now you're inviting people who don't care to try into playing with people who do- and that mismatch creates a lot of friction, way more than anything the jobs themselves posed to the players with their old designs
I remember absolutely LOVING whm back in ARR. A healer with some power behind it? Sign me up. Sure, when leveling THM to unlock WHM itself, and later other classes and jobs when bored, I realized the damage was still below actual dps, but it still felt great. Especially with fun things like several aeros, fluid aura, and even different levels of stone to mix it up. Add in cleric stance adding in some risk vs reward decision making and you had a job I was in love with from start to finish. Different heals had different uses (freecure used to be huge because of how MP used to be) so healing was often times a thought of what was best for the situation since Cure III was costly and low reach, Medica II was a slow heal, and Medica had better reach for your aoe. And dear gold ARR Holy was the absolute best. When combined with how many dps lacked in consistent aoe, the old damage was amazing to have. YOU were the dps during trash pulls. Sadly the job has lost that magic almost entirely. Visually especially, I miss the elemental magic that we lost for all these light balls. Holy getting neutrered in damage overtime, but also got a visual and audio downgrade in Holy III, just makes me sad. Also, does anyone else miss how MP used to be? I know it's by rights "better" now, but it just feels like MP management is out of my hands in favor of my spells all just being a flat percent of my pool.
This isn't just healer honestly. Every job is braindead with strict rotations or simple priorities. Job identity is gone, most job now work on the same burst window vs downtime, everything is timed around those burst windows. I'm at that point where I miss Reload and Dark Arts because, as clunky as they were, they made me feel like I was playing MCH or DRK. Instead I have BRD with more damage and edgy WAR. Even recently, my main NIN, got TenChiJin changed whit being able to move, while convenient, is another aspect of these job identity and quirks that is now gone.
Viper getting defanged 1 month after 7.0 is such a slap in the face. Good gods I miss SB era of job design. It wasn't perfect but I had way more fun than ShB jobs onward
Harrowing hell during every mechanic! That, or more mechanics like looper. Interesting patterns of single target and aoe healing at strict timings. We need problems to solve and the typical design of "raid damage, wait 30s, raid damage" is quickly solved. That said, M4S had a pretty vicious string of raid damage. Ahk Morn > slams > ion cluster > slams and KB > Harrowing Hell. And then during phase 2, you had to keep an eye on tank health during mechanics. This is in contrast to EW raids, I feel.
Im a healer, and the only thing we need to talk about is this: WHY IN HELL I HAVE TO CLEANSE EVERY DEBUFF ONE BY ONE WITH A 2 SECOND GLOBAL COOLDOWN. WHY.
Honestly, Esuna should be ogcd. 0.7 second cast. Someone stands in bad breath and it does affect you a bit. You have to sit there for 4 seconds now, or actually heal and make the guy suffer for his mistakes if he doesn't know to eat the fruit.
My quick fix, from my understanding by using this videos' info as a baseline: - Put the Tank Invuln on the Healer kit, which in turn gives it to the tanks instead, promoting synergy and enabling more lethal tank damage output. - Make Savage boss attacks crit, TB Auto Attacks and raidwides, randomly on an individual roll and lower the encounter DPS check to include deaths in the calcs. - Give Nascent Flash also to healers and name it something healer appropriate, making them the powerhealers in dungeons instead of the Warrior.
The only thing I really want to do in XIV is play healers in a way that is fun an engaging no matter how hard or easy the content I play gets and to once again experience healing the way it used to be--not by reverting to old job design, but by seeing new job design that captures the magic and fulfillment that healing had before Shadowbringers. But I have sat on the cusp of completely giving up hope for now years, sometimes swaying back and forth between sides. I sincerely hope your voice signals change in the future sooner than in another 2 years, because I don't think there has ever been a more meaningful and important video on XIV healers than this one.
Hearing you talk about Stormblood SCH was a hit of nostalgia for me. SB was when I started the game and I've never been as engaged with jobs ever since. Call it rose-tinted goggles or whatever but the game really did reward you for learning intricacies and nuance back then, now it's just a whole lot of nothing.
rinon make a video without mentioning miasma 2 challenge: impossible but i do agree, giving healer more offensive tools to OPT-IN to beyond spamming glare/broil/malefic/dosis instead of *MORE* healing tools could do alot for the role. that and maybe make MP management more interesting. ... maybe we do need miasma 2....
Back in SB everyone complained that whm needed to gcd heal a ton more than sch and Astro. Everyone wanted them to change whm, so SQ gave us the upgraded Lilly system in SHB so that it was a de facto ogcd healing since it wasn’t a Dps loss. My point is that I don’t think people are going to like how it feels to spend a bunch of your time gcd healing. They could have asked SQ to make SB sch and Astro like whm, but instead they wanted whm to be like sch and Astro.
I'm glad you touched on the AST changes, because the Dawntrail rework really killed my enjoyment of the job. The cards were far from perfect before, but having to make those decisions whenever I drew a card was the only thing that kept AST engaging as otherwise I'd just be mindlessly spamming Malefic. With all the variance and decision making stripped away from the job, it's now in the same spot as the other healers for me -- unengaging and frankly not fun in most situations, as you said. I really just want to have things to do and think about while playing healer, and unfortunately none of the healers in their current state provide that.
@@Naoto-kun1085 That's valid, honestly, and a compounding issue with AST is that since it keeps getting reworked every expansion, you end up with a bunch of different groups of people who all like different iterations of the job and want different things from it. I think it's gotten to the point that a huge amount of people will be unhappy with whatever they do with the job.
This is why I always had so much more fun with healing in WoW. On top of there being almost no homogeneity making each class feel varied and unique, unavoidable damage is much more prevalent, making you HAVE to actively heal much more. That, plus the lack of oGCDs and healers just having better damage kits is what makes healing so much more engaging over there.
Wow also puts much more dots for failed mechanics or mechanics that keep ticking if it is not resolved fast. This is much better than the vuln stacks and rezz spam gameplay for healers as seen in M3S case in this video.
My engagement with healers was always minimal and I'm mostly a casual player who never did proper raiding in this game. I've noticed the gradual shift towards "encounter-based" design somehwere around the end of SHB and towards in trials and dungeons. It annoys me greatly as value of me as a player and my job only correlates with my knowledge of the said encounter. It's annoying and discouraging when you get punished for every minor mistake and it becomes boring when the fight is solved. There is not sweet spot and I really hope that this kind of approach shifts in the nearest future.
rinon love your content but i think these videos are starting to get a bit bloated. i’m more than eight minutes in and im only now starting to hear your first concrete point on the state of healing in 14. i understand the need for setup but this is just straining my attention a bit regardless, i’m looking forward to watching the rest of the video and hearing your thoughts, just wanted to provide a bit of feedback
thanks for the feedback, noted, I wanted to take my time with my yap in this video to provide context just because I'm wary about being negative; I don't really like to be in general so I wanted to make sure I explained myself as best I could
Good video. The description regarding the mental cost is a perfect way to put it. I've unfortunately just decided to take a break from the game at the moment. The fight design is improving, slowly. But you still feel like you're playing a redundant role. It took me half way through the savage tier to realise that there is no engagement past the first few pulls and with the amount of sustain tools jobs have for more casual content it just works against our kits. I hope SE can figure it out. Because current savage aint it.
SB Scholar vs now is, to me, the perfect encapsulation of the problem. During SB fell in love with Scholar and almost became a healer main during the second year of SB because of it. When ShB released, seeing how much they had gutted Scholar caused me to effectively drop healing until DT. I really hope 8.0 breathes new life into job design as a whole, because ShB and EW steadily, systematically made most jobs hollow shells of what they were in SB.
oh crap... sorry. I 100% agree with your initial thesis. FFXIV healing is a role where things feel worse the better your party gets at a fight. Synergy between damage and heals is absolutely the key here.
Ultimately if healers are meant to do damage, they should have a rotation. Two buttons where one of them is doing the majority of the heavy lifting is not a rotation. Having a dot you reapply every 30 seconds is just extremely par for the course and isn't even worthy of note. That said, it would be nice to see them branch out with the healer role in general. I joke that WAR is a green tank considering how much work Shake It Off and Nascent Flash can do to keep an entire team up if handled well. But that got me to thinking: why can't healers have an actual attack rotation where challenge comes from a similar spot to the Cleric Stance days of having to balance healing vs damage? Like a mirror to lilies, why not have damage skills that feed into potent healing options? Healers are objectively both a DPS and healer role, and the DPS side of their kit being so chronically undercooked is wild at this point. If their two sides just played together more effectively, you could create interesting and dynamic situations where the solution to say a chain of raid wides isn't simply using your ample supply of oGCDs.
As someone who plays both WoW and FFXIV healing, I never want healers to not DPS, XIV just rarely has those moments of “oh shit I need to spam healing to save the group” unless something ABSOLUTELY goes terribly wrong, so the really basic DoT>Stone/Glare spam DPS rotation with an arsenal of instant healing for boo-boos is extremely un-engaging to me. I miss back when I could control my fairy as a SCH and made macros after disabling her auto-cast and positioned her around constantly to heal various targets between me and her and it was so FUN. Now we’re just green DPS with the most boring rotations in the game.
I've only been playing healer for extremes, but it's wild to me that as Scholar I have 7 buttons dedicated to buffing my gcd heals in some way, and not a single reason to press a gcd during either of the first two extremes. I figured the fact that every healer got a buff and brand new animation for their AoE heal meant they'd be more relevant, but apparently not. So far my most fun experience as a healer this game has been as Dancer, during a dungeon run where our healer dc'd mid final boss. Managing curing waltz, improv, and shield samba in a clever way to keep the viper and dark knight alive was so much fun
Simplification of healers is one of the main reasons why I left FF14 back in Endwalker. The role felt empty. Basic content was just spamming 1s and the dot with a oGCD to top off heals. I wore two buttons down on my controller due to just spamming Glare (Trigger R + A). I jumped to WoW and the game feels like StB when it comes to role identity. I actually have kits seem whole. Almost all healers have "kicks" (stuns, interjects, knock-ups, etc.) that can be used to help the party as a form of mitigation. Almost everything is on the GCD. Some stuff is insta-cast, but have that GCD cooldown. Mana management is important, especially at higher levels of content. Each healer has a clear identity on how they heal: Holy Paladin building gauge to use on healing while in melee, Restoration Druid using HoTs to heal, etc. I am glad I found healing sanctuary in WoW, I know that others don't want to go beyond FFXIV to find their healing sanctuary. I am hoping that those who like FFXIV can get their healing sanctuary back when it comes to healing.
Unfortunately, healing in XIV has been destroyed and the most shocking thing to me is that the majority of players - who do not play healer - just don’t care. Yet, water down one tiny aspect of any DPS job and they think the sky is falling. I’ve played since ARR and all of my healer friends have quit. I’m joining them now too. This game is no longer for people who enjoy healing and support.
Most healer’s can’t be trusted to play the simple baby healer job-I play WAR in all casual content because I can’t trust the healers who do expert or msq stuff. idk how I could be on board with them having a harder job to play
@@misterbxivunfortunately, most of the experienced and skilled healer players gave up playing healer, either because of sheer boredom or to join in with the strike. What you have left now are healer newbies - who will need more time to develop skills - or people who play healer for quick queues but don’t know the ins-and-outs of the role (as flimsy and lacking as those are). People in the community who tell healers their problems don’t matter bear some responsibility for this situation too.
Some anecdotes from me in Support here. Back in StB it was actually exciting to run the level cap Dungeons on healer. At least for me it took a while to figure out how much resources to dump into a given trash pull, especially the big ones we were still allowed back then, to: A) keep the party alive B) deal dmg C) have Enough ready for the boss. We also actually had fun Healer only meme runs of thr ivalice raids. These days, level cap Dungeons on sch are usualy rather boring on the healing Front. Even if people mess up mechanics it rarely taxes the whole kit. Let alone having to figure out how to deal with big pulls because SE is already stopping Tanks from pulling any actually interesting amounts of trash. Can't comment too much on savage in Dawntrail so far, as my Casual static broke up over non-raid related drama mid tier.
We have this conversation about healing every few months, every expansion for the past three expansions. Yes the non-healing kits of healers are not robust enough to provide engaging gameplay at any level once people are not making mistakes and whatever changes to fight design in Dawntrail was never going to fix that 😭
@@Naoto-kun1085 "Nothing ever seems to be good enough for them" implies that something was ever done to address the complaints. That isn't the case, nothing has been done to change the core gameplay problem that has been complained about for years.
All of those old Scholar fairy actions being superfluous - Interrupts, AOE cleanses, etc - Is a very clear indication that FF14 encounters are not engaging enough on their own. Healing can't improve until encounter design does. Like it or not, 14's bosses being a set of memory game dances is the problem with tank and healer designs. You can't have interesting ways of tackling mechanics when timings are so reliable, and tools are so homogenized.
Sometimes I wonder if the "only being interesting when something goes wrong" problem is unavoidable because you can out plan just about anything. The rest of the party properly using their utility buttons is somewhat in competition with just-in-time healing being relevant, and the common solutions like followup damage to combo you out seems to have the difference between good and bad healers be too great Then additionally, it seems like its fundamentally in competition with tanks and dps wanting any sense of agency over their living at all. It's really not fun to be completely 100% dependent on your healer when they let you down, but that situation does restore a lot of weight to your healing
Thanks again to Ash Echoes for sponsoring today's video, you can join me and download Ash Echoes Global now by using my link: ae.neocraftstudio.com/Rinon
i keep seeing these kinds of videos but every healer i talk to loves the state of healing and on my data group healers are in low demand because they are everywhere so much so it takes 20-30 min camping ques to get the healer bounus from tanks......
i just speedwatched this 38 minute video 2 minutes after its release and i have to say i really agree/disagree with these statements, though there may/may not be a bit of extra nuance involved in [INSERT TOPIC HERE]
I just speedread this comment in 38 seconds and I agree/disagree with this comment, thank you for adding your positive/negative opinion to the mix
My reply does not address the content of your comment and sidetracks into a completely different topic
my comment is just blatantly inflammatory for the sake of stirring up arguments.
i have nothing to add but still want to get in on the joke
something about being first 1 hour after the video posted
as someone who finally started trying other jobs in Shadowbringers, I always thought "that's just how healers are"
this has opened up an entire world of possibility to me that I never realized I wanted, and really hope SE somehow find a way to address it, or at the very least take into consideration
Omg its the ff14 guy, its him!
Initial comment: day one blind alliance raid was the most fun I had in the game in forever. Don't have a blind static, and that raid made me love healing again. (EW raids weren't nearly as fun day one blind)
Time to go do mentor roulette so I can hate it properly again. As usual.
Hot take: squenex gotta figure out got to prevent fight specific mechanics from being detected by cactbot. This is the reason why raids after the first few weeks become brain dead. Most players either have cactbot or follow the mass crowd. This raid, has quite a bit quicker mechanics, so I’m anticipating even with cactbot it should retain a tad bit of its difficulty.
@@EccleezyAvicii I don't think it's entirely cactbot, fights lose their edge bc most mechanics are scripted with definitive solutions. Once you know how to solve the puzzle, the mechanic becomes extremely easy and you'll never mess it up unless you just aren't paying attention. I think the game could do with more mechs that are about making the 'execution' part of the mechanic difficult, rather than the 'solving' part of the mechanic difficult. Stuff like queen bee, kinda. I bet if you compare the amount of vuln-ups/deaths that occur on that fight even like 5 years from now, to something like themis, queen bee will always have more deaths because it's more execution based vs "ha gotcha you weren't supposed to solve it that way," well after a couple weeks everyone knows how to resolve the mech and it isn't actually hard at all to resolve, it's simply a matter of knowing what to do
@ this is also true, hence why I mentioned the newer raids will prob retain some
Difficulty. I was mostly referring to the new alliance raid. The Tornado Phase of the Dragon boss, the propagating Plus pattern on the last boss and his side to side cleaves, and the queen bee phase are all examples of mechanics I’d agree aren’t as “cactbotable” as they require more execution. This is the major difference too between Savage and ultimate raids. Savage typically just have more convoluted puzzles, but Ultimates have those on top of execution + action performance demands.
@stabegabe there's also the thing of ilvl creep so as time goes on the raids are just less dangerous. Even if people mess up, they are at less risk of dying because the raidwides are dealing less damage, the boss dies quicker etc etc
@@EccleezyAvicii I mean sure but I don't think they should have to design encounters around a TOS-breaking thing. I don't think this will be possible with how the current netcode is tbh, old stuff is catching up like technical debt, etc.
Healer is factually less rewarded than Tank. 'Adventurer in Need' defaults to tank even when the Healer ques are faster. There are multiple mounts and titles for playing each tank job as a reward for countless hours of dedication to your job in dungeon and raid content, meanwhile as a Healer you can get a mount by doing a quick lvl 30 conjurer quest or titles for rezzing people (which can also be done by dps). The role just feels less loved.
Not to mention the level 100 healer job quest is to just use Esuna….. That’s all.
You talk to a npc and use Esuna. You talk to another, use Esuna. Another one? Esuna.
It’s level 100……. That’s so weirdly insulting. Especially since Esuna has become so niche and barely used because the opportunity barely arises.
That implies that a player picks a job for the rewards rather than the experience, which is... weird. I wouldn't pick a job that I enjoy less just because there's more mounts tied to it.
You know what, I've never thought about the tank mount reward thing, but you're absolutely right.
@@aethon0563If you like both equally, it becomes a consideration.
@@mintparfait but if you enjoy both, why not do both? That actually makes the extra rewards matter less.
Healing ogcds are so powerful that in majority non ultimate content wit competent parties that utilize mits you don't even need to use your entire kit i remember solo healing p2s when it was current as an example
This! A million times this!!!! The healing kits are so bloated and/or situational that I often never use certain abilities 99% of the time. Hell, sometimes I have to even re-read some skill descriptions because I haven’t used them in so long that I’ve forgotten what they even do.
This is my biggest issue with Sage. I have to use my Addersgall heals for MP... but there's nothing to heal.
Sure, you can rotate between Kera and Tauro to somewhat keep yourself MP positive, but it still feels bad to see the gauge overcap just because there's nothing to use it on without overhealing for no good reason.
@@lolthesystemin normal content? If there’s nothing to heal, I’m assuming you’re just doing damage rotation, but lucid should be completely sufficient then. The only other explanation I can think of is your using to many gcd heals and need to be using more adder heals to begin with then, so I don’t understand what situation your in that your mp is low and you need it so you got to pop adder, like you shouldn’t need mp unless you expect damage, but then just use adder when it comes.
@@jamesunderwoood8412 in content in general. I didn't say I'm running out of MP, I even mentioned Tauro and Kera keep you somewhat MP positive (assuming you're mostly just DPSing), but Addersgall heals are supposed to be your source of MP recovery alongside LD, hence why you "should" be using them. Problem is, since there's nothing to heal, you end up overcapping, which also feels bad from a design perspective.
I've run low on MP before just DPSing because I tend to run the low piety sets from The Balance, which expect you to never overcap Addersgall because they're MP negative with just LD, but I started using the mid piety sets because overhealing annoys me even more.
I didn't even unlock all my healer job skills when I was doing savage.
As a Warrior main nowadays, I feel like healers secretly hate me, bacause I've gotten so focused enough on throwing out mits at times that I really feel like I'm... Stealing their job for me wanting to play more optimally with my kit. Especially now that I have gotten comfortable enough with tanking as Warrior that I can genuinely keep the HP of the party up in dungeon bosses myself if the healer does go down. Can't do that in trials and Raids and the like, but dungeons must be absolute snooze fests for healers who have above average tanks, especially Warriors
WAR is legitimately a better designed healer. You have to consider your resources because you can only heal every 25 seconds, the timing which you use your heal matters a lot more. Closer to how healer mp management and timing their GCD heals mattered in the past
@larcgrumbles9529 Well, that's not entierly true, all of Warrior's mits, minus the universal mits like reprisal, all have some sort of healing element, Thrill of Battle gives you a heal of 20% of your health and gives your other moves a heal boost, Damnation has a regen, Shake it off is a party wide shield and regen, Equilibrium as just a straight up heal, and BloodWhetting as a quick shield and self heal machine.
You are right in how you have to think about when to use all of these as they have cooldowns to them though.
Do not feel guilty for using the tools you are provided.
Yeah as a healer main who decided to get over tank anxiety with WAR in Dawntrail, yeah... It doesn't feel particularly great from either end tbh. Worst part of Warrior is that it can unironically solo dungeon bosses meaning I kinda have to ask if they want me to solo or just wipe (There is NO reason I should have been able to beat boss 3 of Skydeep Cenote while soloing a tower, stack, and tankbusters as an inexperienced tank player). The most interesting thing I've developed one the healer side for dungeons is optimizing where I use the few heals I need on the tank (basically not having anything overlap with Bloodwhetting and keeping a count of 17secs in my head). Regarding the hate thing, it's really not your fault. Outside of premades you have no idea how competent your healer, tank, or dps are until youre in the thick of it so you kinda have to do what you can.
As a healer main. Can confirm, you are correct. There is nothing worse than rolling up to the dungeon on WHM only to see my tank is WAR… then I cannot switch to SGE or AST which have more for me to do… I’m just stuck clicking stone the entire time. It sucks. Like it’s great that WAR has the kit it has, but, there need to be more to do on healer man.
Hearing about old SCH reminded old AST. My favorite healer in the game. When I could swap between shields and regens. Extend buff duration. Manipulate cards (Although I've hated every iteration of the card system ngl). It was the one job I loved above all others.
I really miss noct ast.
I do too!!! I think it helped create synergy between healers and helped people overcome their fears about shield healers or regen healers, depending on what sect people would "main" ^^ I hope you've found another class you enjoy to play just as much.
@@eldeldritchrr Well I haven't found enjoyment in any of the healers this time around. For the very first time I started maining DPS lol
On one hand, I really miss AST having the ability to be shield healers, however, as someone who mains scholar and had to deal with asts who wanted to stay noct, it was painful. 💀 Square should’ve just made it so the bigger shield takes precedence.
Fellow old (noct) ast fan here. I start playing this game in 4.2 and ast was my first healer. It was super, super fun. The time magic, the card rng, accidentally "troll" a monk by giving them arrow card and watch their TP vanished. I could go on and on.
Come ShB and I tried to love the new ast, but with removal of card rng, I can't really enjoy it. Then EW practically butcher the job for me by removing the sect because god forbid we disturb the regen vs barrier healer dichotomy.
/rant over
I feel like old man yelling at cloud meme....
@@kozhcaelum8495
god i loved doing that as old ast.
i mained that though stromblood.
good times
i was so sad when the changes got announced
I think this argument extends to the other roles in a lot of ways too, especially with the opt-in gambits you could do in each job. I think a lot of casual players overreact to these types of essays, opinions, etc. but what really needs to be hammered home is that the floor is not going to move, or at least it shouldn't. You can perform adequately and unless you seek top end content nobody has a right to criticize you for that. But that's no reason for the ceiling to come down, just so casual players can feel accomplished for no effort. That's a pretty insane mindset, if you ask me.
I think around stormblood era, there was great compromise between casual and hardcore players. You could do anything you wanted, but it always felt like you could get better. Now, there's like.. 5 maximum tricks on any given job to learn and boom, you've got it. You're scoring competitive dps forever and ever until they take away your next friction point and then you have to think even less.
If the floor stays where it is( and again, it should), you can stay on the floor and that's fine. Totally fine! But the ceiling needs to raise, and the population of the game needs to accept that they can't sit on the floor and touch the ceiling. I don't think there's any toxicity to that mindset, personally.
This is the best response I've seen on the subject, and one I entirely agree with. It's just a shame that so many of the people that this video is aimed at would disagree - people who would like to see the skill floor raised way up, specifically for the purpose of putting newer and more casual players off, because they think the game should be entirely catered to the hardcore crowd. I'm sure it would be more fun for the top 5 or 10% of players if this happened, but that's not a big enough player base to sustain the game.
100% this. In these discussions I see SO many people who don't play healer go "But I have anecdotal evidence that a lot of healers suck, this would just make that harder for them!" when you can move the skill ceiling without moving the floor.
100% this. I wished I could give more than 1 upvote.
that mindset is actually seriously harming WoW RN as it is
SE REALLY need to dial it back before they fall into the same trap that leads to 1/2 of the basic group content in the game (normal/heroic dungeons and normal raids, on the road to heroic raids too) being considered pointless with M0 being where you go to actually learn your role at all (In a discussion about tanking in WoW on the forums, I unironically had someone tell me anything below M0 difficulty is too brain dead easy to learn a new role. at this point WoW is too far gone and the community too far lost to correct. FFXIV still has time to raise the ceiling without tossing the community with it)
I wonder how you raise the ceiling without affecting the floor.
"The scholar is a top-tier dedicated Broiling machine armed with a book and a fairy, that does half to work for you." -The Stormblood Guide to Scholar
it's one of my favorite videos
Broiling machine*
The quote from Yoshi P you highlight bookending the final section of the video, and the way there was a noticeable improvement in Dawntrail's normal-difficulty content in terms of how engaging it felt to many, makes me cautiously optimistic for 8.0, for which (if what I've heard is correct) they've talked about re-evaluating job identity. I'd say the 7.1 dungeon and Alliance Raid are also positive omens; they suggest that the (small but very over-amplified) outcry over Dawntrail being too difficult for some didn't make them immediately backpedal. On the flipside, it does feel like the majority of the Dawntrail job changes have continued the trajectory of reducing or removing friction (Monk rework comes to mind, as does the viper 7.05 changes which I'm still sad about, and now DRG losing the Nastrond stacks in 7.1) and so I'm not sure what to think. At my most hopeful (probably naively so), I'd hope that this is a choice to temporarily alleviate job complexity to facilitate trying to push boundaries in terms of encounter demands - the new ultimate is certainly going to be interesting with that in mind - and that from that baseline their purported 8.0 job identity review might let them go back and restore a bit of that "stress" into job execution... they've shown they're willing to push us a bit harder now after all. But I can see why someone would call me delusional for expressing that hope, haha.
I've seen a bunch of other comments here saying your video is too long and bloated, so I figure I should just chip in that personally I appreciated you couching this discussion in the context of your experience and perspective - first, because *so* much of this topic is infested with a bunch of people talking past each other and repeating the same talking points ("Game is too brainded!") and insulting each other without actually discussing the matter. I only started in Endwalker and my perspective is that of someone who primarily plays DPS and occasionally dips into healer for normal content. I genuinely find healer engaging in most cases (barring dungeon runs where some tanks obviously don't need healers), but I know that's because I don't have nearly the same familiarity with healer tookits as those who main healer and play it at a very high level. I honestly had a blast recently taking Scholar into the normal raids for gearing, partly because we still get plenty of players who aren't great at the fight mechanics and partly because it's still a learning experience for me as well. But it's easy to see how someone who knows exactly what they're doing would quickly reach a stage of rote repetition.
I'm not sure if my comment adds anything to the discussion, but in any case, I enjoyed the video and it gave me a better understanding of why a number of healers are feeling dissatisfied with the role, so thanks for making it!
I want to have hope, too. I was going to unsub for good if they capitulated to people bemoaning the difficulty. As someone who mained AST/DRK/MNK in HW and SB I quit healing and tanking in Shadowbringers and LOATHE the monk changes in DT. They massacred every job I loved.
As far as I'm concerned, they get one last chance to fix this in 8.0 and if I'm not convinced I'm out.
for me it just doesn't feel that rewarding to play anymore, I started at the tail end of shadowbringers gone through extremes and in endwalker I got into savage, by the third tier I was playing my job pretty well, still had more niche and low impact optimizations to go through, but imo they don't feel as impactful as the bigger ones.
simplifying jobs and removing friction points just makes them feel shallow, there is no problems to overcome, everything blends in and learning process is over really quickly which leads to less satisfying micro optimization process.
I am a person who likes to grind out games to a certain level, I like to get relatively good, not to get perfect, but good; and this job design is just alienating me
I've played DRG on and off in hard content before and dragoon changes this patch are just.. depressing
I do hope that in 8.0 the job system becomes more interesting again but I guess this game is just not for me until then
@@jamesk2325 Same boat here. I've been playing since HW, and if 8.0 won't finally take itself serious when it's coming to job design, I'm out. It's been, far, far too long to wait for those changes.
It wasn't "engaging", it was frustrating, especially if you have no mobility spells. Vanguard was a frustrating mess on healers with no mobility spells. Normal dungeons shouldn't be hard at all because it excludes people with various coordination difficulties from experiencing the main story. You want "harder" content to sweat over, go do Extreme or Savage. I think they should unlock the harder version of each dungeon as soon as you complete the normal version so you can attempt it immediately and keep the sweatlords happy.
@Ternalin excluding people who play 700 hours and are insulted by the idea of learning or improving in that time is a good thing actually
this is a simple issue that the devs have restrained themselves too much to solve.
the peoblem is simple: healer kits are made like they're supposed to heal a lot and attack a little. but fights are made like healer is supposed to attack a lot and heal a little. an easy contradictoin to solve.
however, the devs have committed to making heavily scripted fights that depend on jobs working in a very specific way. which means changing jobs can easily break absolutely everything. so they can't change jobs with any kind of agility.
AND they're also committed to a strict content release structure, which the job changes have to fit into.
so we end with a problem that is frustratingly obvious to players and also incredibly difficult for the devs to solve.
in my opinion anyway.
Your opinion is a good one, this also runs a little deeper, final fantasy XIV is still a "final fantasy" and white mages outside of holy and a few other moves have always been almost healer centric. The issue is mmos need to bring back the "rpg" and stop focusing so heavily on "enrage mechanics" that punish playing in any other way other than "We must dps this boss down NOW" This is what screws over what could be cool abilities like clemency and cover and that other move that makes you stop attacking to defend the people behind you. In a proper rpg these moves would be cool! But because this is an mmo first with a "QUICK DPS HIM NOOOOWWWWW" and with most moves being a "did you get hit? If yes your dead" to the point where what really is HP and does a game where most moves 1 hit really need an HP bar that goes up and up for seemingly no reason especially when the difference between 10k hp and 100k hp is really nonexistent as far as game mechanics are concerned?
In a world however where mmos devs refuse to break this mold your 100% correct, what we need is a change in fight design all around. Not every bosses thing should be a "dps race" in a proper rpg this is ONE type of boss fight and raids honestly need a massive rework and have needed one for some time, but that's also why i'm not big into the raiding scene, I'm not a fan of "Well your heals don't matter anyway after a certain point cause the boss decides your all dead now, or sure you CAN use cover or throw out a clem to help save that healer but it doesn't matter in the end cause you took a dps loss so now everyone is screwed over." It really makes healer feel more like it should have more dps powers and makes paladin which should feel awesome , but instead feels lackluster over warrior who can self sustain without a dps loss.
Thank you for putting this into a video, this is pretty much exactly how I have been feeling more and more about the role over the past year and then some. I am not doing any cutting-edge or getting much blind progression in and it feels terrible how numbed down healing has become at this point - it almost feels like I am mostly in it for the 1-2 days of it being the best experience in the game right after a patch, like it has been with the current alliance raid or early normal raids. The role feels so incredibly fun when things go south and become more chaotic, it feels saddening how empty you feel when they go smooth.
One of the hardest points to make in these kind of discussions is the idea that 'the extra complexity some players are asking for (eg via giving SCH back some of its old DOTs, adding more attacks to WHM/SGE, etc) is optional, and players who don't feel comfortable making use of those extra buttons don't need to press them'. I have previously posted on the official forums, for example, about two simple changes to WHM: Shorten Dia's duration from 30s down to 12s, and add Water (later Banish) as an instantcast GCD attack with a 15s CD. These two changes are small enough that they could feasibly be thrown into any 7.X patch, and would take us from 35/50 GCDs per 2min being Glare3 casts, to 21/50. Additionally, by making the potencies of these non-Glare actions carefully balanced vs Glare's output, it becomes possible to 'ignore' them entirely, should the player not feel comfortable pressing them. As an example, I'd propose making the potency of Water/Banish 40p more than the equivalent Stone/Glare (so thanks to the 7.1 buff to Glare3, at max level, Banish3 would be be 380p). Ignoring this button entirely and just doing 'refresh DOT when it falls off, spam Glare' would be 98% of the potency output of the 'fully optimal' rotation that includes Banish
Another example is SCH. We could have, for example, Broil at 310p, Biolysis (30s) at 350p, Miasma (24s) at 340p, and Shadowflare (15s, AOE) at 320p. Ignoring all three of these DOTs and just using Broil in their place would lose, if I remember right from the last time I did this maths, 560p per 2min cycle, less than two Broils in total. To make managing the DOTs more smooth in AOE (now that SGE has an AOE DOT), we could have Energy Drain upgrade to Bane, making it useful in AOE and also spreading the DOTs. And if we hypothetically tweak Bane to not reset Durations, then that opens up the potential to have Chain Stratagem be spreadable via Bane (as the duration reset is removed, preventing any 'infinite refresh loops'), which synergizes with the followup DOT Baneful Impaction being AOE. Also, I'm advocating for Excogitation and Protraction to be Deployable, with 50% effectiveness (so Excog would heal for 400p on anyone it's Deployed to, and Protraction would be 5% Max HP)
Finally, we could try and address the 'healers should heal' side of things, by introducing new mechanics specifically for healers to deal with. Melee have positionals, Tanks have Interrupts (as rarely as they get used), so why not give Healers a Role-specific idea too? In other games (like WOW) there's something known as 'Heal Absorb', but here I'd suggest a thematic name like 'Aetherblight'. Effectively, a 'reverse shield', where the Aetherblight blocks your healing before you can hit the 'missing HP', in the same way a Succor blocks damage before it can hit your 'real HP'. This gives the healers a reason to heal, but we could have player agency in 'how to tackle the Aetherblight' by making it removable via Esuna. And on the flipside of healing through the debuff, it could also be made possible for a barrier to block the application of Aetherblight entirely, such that a SCH or SGE might rely on the old saying 'prevention is better than cure'.
The best part about an idea like Aetherblight, though, is that currently the devs are constrained in how much damage a mechanic can do to the team. It can only do damage relevant to our Max HP, and has to be surviveable (even if it means using some mitigations/shields). So, if we have 130k HP as a non-Tank, then the raidwide can only deal, say, 180k damage. But with Aetherblight, which doesn't deal 'real' damage (merely blocks your healing until it's removed), it's theoretically possible to deal... any amount of 'damage', really. Someone with 130k Max HP could be slapped with 500k of Aetherblight and it'd be fine, so long as it's possible to remove it before it becomes an issue with a later mechanic. Such a mechanic would give Pure Healers more room to show their strong suit, and make 'raid difficulty' more varied/less reliant on this current pattern of 'here's a raidwide, use at least 2 10%'s and also Succor or you die'
I could type essays about Healer design and ideas of how to improve it (and it could be argued that I previously have), I just hope that SE really does read the forums (specifically the EN ones) for feedback
edit: I redid the SCH maths, it's not 560p lost per 2min if you were to spam Broil with those listed potencies, that was from an older version of the potency balancing I did. It's actually 390p, so even less damage lost! In fact, the damage of 'spam 48 Broils' is, according to PercentageCalculator.net, 97.44597249508841% of the output of the 'optimal rotation' of 'use 4 Bio, 5 Miasma, 8 Shadowflare, and fill the rest with Broil'
I'm apologize for only responding to the first paragraph, but the gaming landscape changed so much over the past 10 years. Everthing gets tracked and analized, even some websites telling you what abilities to use more often. There is for everything an optimal way of playing and with that idea they can't really add some extra buttons that are nice to have like everyone is clueless what their job does. Everything, including the boss fights, are much more optimized.
I'm a SCH main. Died the first time
I did a final boss in a normal dungeon
recently. They proceeded to finish
the fight without me from 80%
Ironically, the healer dying is the only time I really have to think as a tank in normal content
@@darkshadow0308 Ironically (as tank), if I had to pick someone to die without the ability to be rerisen, I'd pick the healer. DPS will deal more damage and I will keep the party alive.
Tank needs reworked, not healer. If healer dies, the fight should fall apart. If tank dies, the fight should fall apart until the healer can rez the tank. If that doesn't happen fast enough, it should be a wipe. If DPS dies, the fight should be fine unless you need to hit a DPS check.
@@randomwannab118 So make healers deal more damage and remove rez from all dps classes. Now healers are more impactful.
@@NimRyo Disagree entirely lol. There's already no job identity in healers. There're shield tanks that suck so bad at putting shields out that they can't pre-emptively shield a tankbuster in most content. There's white mage that can just heal well and shield better than all of the shield tanks. Most healers aren't unique but bunched into groups now. Tanks are getting so much healing they can often outheal a healer. Even dps have healing kits, sometimes two decent heals and a shield. We don't need high damaging healers. That just makes a rezzing dps.
We need to focus on role identity. Tanks should tank. Not high heals, Not high dps. DPS should dps. Not high heals, not good tanks. Healers should heal. Not high dps, not good tanks. Obviously, compared to, say WoW where you have an extra dps, that split dps will have to go to the healers and tanks, because otherwise that'd be boring as heck. But still, it shouldn't ever say "Hey let's run this dungeon with a tank and 3 healers, or a tank and three dps." Each role should be required.
@@randomwannab118 That was meant as a semi sarcastic response one might use on how to make healers more impactful.
If you want a real discussion though:
Focusing on the role itself is not going to work. It's inherit nature of the healer job is to heal. Only focusing on that aspect will result in even worse of a role within the game and an even more boring job. That path is not something that's logistically possible in this game because of the basic fundamentals when it comes to role distribution and the whole holy trinity of roles. You could change it but at that point you are changing the game itself. That's a whole other can of worms....
As someone who didn't play healer (or tank) because I found playing those roles too stressful to deal with (and we're talking Endwalker here since that's when I started), I can't say I ever found myself asking Square-Enix to make them "easier" so I'd pick them up, and even with all these changes come Dawntrail? Yep, still not queuing up as tank and healer, so the whole idea that they made these changes for *me* not only went completely to waste, but those who did enjoy those roles *prior* to those changes now suddenly find them dull.
Same issue with BLM & MNK apparently. I didn't like playing them, other people did, but SE made changes for *me* and not *them* and yet I still don't like playing them and now mains on those jobs aren't having fun either.
Now I do understand part of the thought process on their part, that with so many jobs and the franchise-long allure of switching between them, they would very much like it if players can and enjoy playing as many jobs as possible (if not all of them), but we've reached a point where every job design decision is based on "how do we get more people to play it" and it results in those who already liked a job of now being the ones left out, or how the rigidness of "the role" results in having to make sure every job within said role can "do the thing" lest one or more be tossed aside because it's not optimal (and if there's one thing a lot of MMO players like to do, it's min-max the fun out of things).
Trying to make every job unique yet useful is almost paradoxical at times when it comes to Final Fantasy 14 specifically due to the sheer number we have but also because a lot of people come into the game expecting what they loved about those jobs from other games in the franchise, BUT THEN RIGHT AFTER you have encounter design that slaps all of that down by necessitating that "the role" must dance to a certain tune and any job that can't gets shunned by the playerbase and becomes the "nail meets hammer" by the developers.
I'm not entirely sure what the solution is either, because they probably can't somehow redo encounter design to require job specific things, up to and including dynamic boss fights that account for the fact that certain jobs showed up that time, or if jobs could cross-skill in a way that allows them to take up a new role (let that WAR heal, let the NIN dodge tank, remind people that WHMs were in the War of the Magi, etc) but that would mean making sure jobs all have fruitful options for borrowing and that, regardless of player choice, one remains functional in group content because player choice can sometimes end up just as stifling and "homogenized" as everyone chases the best-in-slot choices that comes with such systems.
i find it really funny you say this (in a good way) because the tail end of that last paragraph was exactly what happened back in heavensward!
if you weren't playing meta, you just never got into content or struggled to perform as well as everyone using it so most team compositions were the same!
@@thiccie-chan447 Ironically, it's usually Heavensward that I see a lot of older players point to as the "gold standard" of job design and yet, that was apparently when jobs had the least amount of personal identity because it was all about borrowing the best things for cross-skills or omitting the "weakest" jobs thus making every job into a hybrid of some kind or some jobs being left abandoned outright, and the need for BiS skills meant you ran into the same problem other games with talent systems do; Everything ends up a cookie-cut build every time so as you said, identical team compositions for optimal results.
It would suggest that the playerbase isn't any better at avoiding homogenizing as Square-Enix is, people just thought they had better control over it because they had to make a willful choice to fall in line with what encounters (and PF) demanded of them. It was player choice only insofar as another player made it for you, or else.
what people are missing with the "healers can't handle the kits they have, why give them more" argument is that they're viewing the cause and effect backwards.
healer players mess up a lot because it is super easy to zone out and zero in on either mashing 1 or dumping heals. the two parts of the kit are very often separate and disconnected. but if kits were designed more holistically, like with the way sage heals you for doing damage, or scholar offers direct synergy between its abilities(deploy, recit, faerie gauge) people would be more engaged. more damage buttons, fewer set and forget ogcd heals(tetra stacks, bell, faerie gauge)
Not to mention that the other aspect is bad players also exist. It‘s weird that, by default, people seem to assume that every healer is a bad player who can’t learn and adapt. I’ve played with a summoner in shadowbringers once who never even entered bahamut phase and at no point am I claiming, “all summoners shouldn’t have so many summons because it’s too much for them”.
I feel like part of what you said applies to every job in XIV atm, except MAYBE DPS in general to some extent. If it wasn't for me being a psycho and liking to use every single aspect of my classes to their fullest potential, I wouldn't even use half of my kit for how mind numbingly easy the game gets sometimes, the game throughout ARR and HW barely had any moments were idk pressing the feint button was remotely necessary, or interrupt, or even the stuns some classes have, and I think that's a problem, and not because I want this game to be super hard and challenging. No FFXIV is a casual MMO and that's fine, what isn't fine is when the jump between a normal/hard trial to an extreme is GIGANTIC, suddenly having good machanics is important, and you want to use your OGCDs to help your party, tanks are using more mitigations and healers have to really be careful with their mana supply, the game actually becomes challenging, but the jump is too big for a player that may just be testing the waters and see if they like it
I've seen plenty of trials for hardcore and semi-hardcore savage and ultimate statics where the healer could not handle anything that went beyond the realm of spreadsheet healing. The moment something went wrong or misaligned, it was an instant wipe because they didn't know how to use their kit because Balance told them that healing was a braindead spreadsheet job. And it's not just some wannabe raiders or new players. They are streamers and top 50 parsers. Can just do some PF and see just how many people have meltdowns because they are incapable of using a gcd heal when party could not skip a mechanic on time, which resulted in a bit of extra damage.
@@artjom94devil's advocate: obviously that's a really bad mindset and it's on them to improve but also i will say it feels extremely frustrating when you are shoved outside of the Spreadsheet because there is no substance to your job other than hard optimization.
when i have to use excessive amounts of gcd heals at level cap outside of blind runs it only ever feels like a failure lol. obviously the correct thing to do is to keep it rolling but it's like. ah. that's damage i could be doing right now. because if i'm not casting broil i am doing the one thing my job does less efficiently.
used to be that you could make up your damage a bit better, that being made to use gcd healing felt more mandatory. these days gcd healing has gone from a deal with the devil, to watching your neighbor slash your tires
@@cutejustice Time to nerf Summoner. Carbuncle only, Solar Bahamut is now Big Carbuncle.
I used to like healing as SCH when I started the game back in stormblood, and still enjoyed AST/WHM in ShB too. Over time they became more and more boring and EW content was so insanely braindead that it killed any interest I had in playing them. I don't see why SE resists giving them and dps tools to play with.
i miss my 3 sch dots so much and selenea speed skills having 2 sch was so cool speed and shields
Why they ruin it?
The infantilization of the Sch kit is what made my husband quit healing.
@@garygordon9243jp plsyers complained and said healers should heal.
I have a lot of suggestions to make healing bit more engaging:
1. introduce more random, single target damage (p8s natural alignment, TOP p1 tethers)
2. more frequent, but less mit-or-die damage profiles (more p3s fire rain during adds, less run:dynamis)
3. reduce free regens from shield healers - soil/kera shouldn't heal, physis/whispering dawn should be weaker, etc. But buff single target heals more (incentivise kardia management, make aetherpact feel more impactful)
4. increased mp cost so piety is not a joke stat, and there's a little more decision making between dps and healing as well as more heal planning (final DSR phase being good example)
5. more interesting damage rotation - make dots 20 seconds for example, while adding a powerful GCD with 15-30 seconds cd. Do not add more "press on cd" abilities like psyche, or tie some kind of healing effect to them so there's a choice, like assize.
I could keep going but imo there's a deeper issue beneath these surface level fixes. A lot of players already do not try healing because they are scared of the responsibility. Not just the requirement to heal, but requirement to not die at all. This is because healers basically decide the fate of the group in casual content (dungeons and normal raids). If there's a tank or dps player that keeps dying, you can probably keep going. If there's a healer that keeps dying, you can get hard stuck. I think devs tried to combat this by giving everyone so much free healing, and it kinda did the job because I could see myself solo healing the savage fights with smart GCD use. But that means they need to rely more on body checks to actually wipe the raid, which is basically what TOP was as a fight. I'm not sure how they can get away from overdependence on healers staying alive. With PCT being popular at the moment, this problem is even more obvious. Quite often you won't have smn or rdm in your groups, and your lockout is entirely dependent on healers staying alive.
Another big issue is that this game does not teach how to heal, like at all. And not just in game either - so much conversation I see about healers in general discourse is about their dps and not much about healing optimisation. So many healers, even "healer mains", do not think about optimising cooldowns and mits in this game. I have seen many DSR/TOP healers that don't use buttons like aquaveil, don't think about kera/soil timings, no thought given to mp economy, etc. And they're not really punished for this either due to many factors, like gear/food creep or mechanics creep. But another huge factor is that this game is very bad at teaching you on how to learn from mistakes. Most people don't go to fflogs to look at damage taken and what they could've optimised. When a tank gets 1 shot by solar ray, there's no indication that aquaveil + benison could've saved that. So these healers clear DSR/TOP with suboptimal healing and have no feedback on if they played well. To be fair to devs though these healing optimisations are pretty abstract and it kinda goes hand in hand with fflogs use.
TL;DR great video, I can see many problems and I have no idea how to fix them
Disagree with all the points, especially with point 5. Dots should last for at least 1 minute
@@suncommander7102you want dots to last… *a minute or longer*. My dude, it sounds like it just don’t want to have to hit the button. Why not just make it a button you hit once and the boss is dotted forever at that point?
@@jakerb89 that's a good idea, applying dot is just annoying. Same was with the viper's armor debuff, it got removed because it was annoying to deal with. Hope they do the same with reaper.
You leave my Kerachole alone.
The paragraphs were agreeable but your bullet point suggestions were godawful.
I absolutely agree and feel that specifically kit interaction (for healers) is the thing that feels the most lacking in FFXIV.
Generally speaking, I prefer healing in WoW, and this is the sole reason why. There’s so much I can do with healing in WoW! The healing and dps kits interact together to make something truly fun and interesting to play, and in M+ there’s also a ton of opportunities for utility to shine.
In WoW, you really get a chance to feel like your risk is rewarded, and it’s so fun.
I love sooo many things about FFXIV more than WoW, but I really really hope that a change to healers is in the future for FFXIV.
It'd be fun if they made the overwhelming amount of OGCD healing tools that all healers have contain both a Defensive and Offensive trait to them, and I mean Every. Single. One. Some of this is already there as you mentioned with Afflatus Misery and Assize but I think they should lean even more heavily into it.
And this MAY be too complicated for where the Devs want to go with healer, but bring back Cleric Stance, not how it used be where it lowers all your healing and increases damage, but use Cleric Stance as a way to bounce back-and-forth between the Defensive and Offensive trait on their OGCD's.
This can either be a permanent stance like it originally was that you jump back and forth on, OR (and I like this idea better) it could be a role action with charges like True North - whenever you use Cleric Stance, your next OGCD will be the offensive version rather than the defensive version. I think something like this would make Healer play vastly more interesting, and raises the skill ceiling without also raising the skill floor.
For example, Assize with no CS (Cleric Stance) would be as it is, but with CS activated, it would do 50% less healing and 50% more damage.
Scholar's Aether Pact with no CS would be as it is, but with CS activated, it would instead provide a damage buff to the ally you're using it on. Astrologian's Celestial Opposition will instead do damage and provide a Bleed on all enemies rather than a heal and a regen on all allies. Sage's Pepsis would remove all allies shields but use the shield to do AoE damage rather than heal.
There's all kinds of interesting things you can do with this approach and best of all, you don't have to add any more new abilities; you're just changing how an ability you already have works.
Thankyou for making this video, I have struggled to understand the conversation surrounding the state of healing, and you did a really good job of clarifying it for me.
I can very much relate to the healers getting to be boring for new players quickly part. Started as cnj in endwalker, and by the time I hit lvl 50 I was so bored of the 2 button damage rotation being the combat gameplay (because let's face it, you don't really heal a lot during doing the msq) that I became a dps player and have stayed one ever since
For me getting to 50 felt great bc Holy is such an impactful spell in dungeons and moving from trials to hard to extreme trials was a lot of fun. Also instant q is just so nice =w=
Rinon, you might be one of the best narrators I've ever listened to. You have an amazing narrator voice and the way you speak makes me really interested in listening to what you're talking about. Hope you have an amazing day!
I started playing after cleric stance had already been removed, so I wish I'd had a chance to play it. I almost wish they released a new healer who had cleric stance for more play style variety. I used to main healer in Overwatch and especially liked healers like Mercy who were rewarded for using her damage boost beam instead of her healing boost beam, and trying to use as little healing beam as possible because it came with the inherent opportunity cost of not damage boosting. That alone, coupled with her positioning and movement skill expression, took what was ultimately an extremely simple kit, and turned it into something both easily accessible but with an insane skill ceiling.
@kirigherkins as someone who played during cleric stance era, that's something you don't want. In theory it's nice, in execution it was horrid and unwieldy. It left you in points where you would enter cleric stance, dps, someone would fuck up a mech, and you're 10s out of the ability to heal without dumping your entire MP pool on inefficient heals. It just wasn't a good design
Haven't played Overwatch in a very long time but if I remember correctly, you can switch instantly between Mercy's healing beam and damage boost beam right? That's more akin to how healer works right now than back when original Cleric Stance was a thing in my opinion. Imagine if using either beams was locking you out of the other for a solid 5 to 10 seconds no matter what you do. That's what Cleric Stance was. Back when this is all we knew, I actually enjoyed it, but I would never want this to come back again, this was very restrictive for no actual reason other than SE never thought of having healer's damage stat being Mind instead of Inteligence before Stormblood.
@@Soulsnatcher89"you're 10 seconds out of the ability to heal". And there's your problem. Just change the 10 second to one second (almost like kardia) and you practically eliminate the punishment of mistakenly swapping stances. Iirc some tank stances were like that in Stormblood, but it was about exchanging enmity and damage instead of healing and damage.
@axylum4453 right but that wasn't how it functioned, and if it did that, it just makes it pointless. There's no reason then to have it exist if you remove the penalty. The point is to create a consequence, but if there's none because you can just swap back after 1 gcd, then its existence is pointless
Cleric stance was interesting to optimise with but realistically it was forced stance dancing. This is something that should be relugated to one job in the role instead of all of them, sage comes to mind, stance dancing between damage and healing could of worked with it.
But yeah its not fun when every healer has to do it, it made playing AST a nightmare in HW.
I've been practicing healer in the most recent savage tier, after being a tank main for my past 6 years playing XIV. The last time I'd seriously played healer without gear to carry me or echo to pad was waaay back in Stormblood. But I was baby, and probably thought that spamming Aspected Helios was awesome and totally optimal to keep people alive. I've since learned that a lot of the kits we're given these days are actively promoting me to _not_ press my GCDs until absolutely necessary. And that in itself was really odd to me.
Healers contributing to the damage pool is good. But all the other jobs in this game are given power-ups to their normal combos, OGCDs meant to be used in tandem with buffs and each other to get some good damage out. Most, if not all, of the level up rewards for healers are just extra things that make your healing do more. For DPS, sure, I get that. Tanks have a mix of upgrades to their defensives *and* their damage kit. But healers barely get anything to help their DPS output once they've reached Stormblood content. Dawntrail was the first big expansion we've had on the healer DPS kit in a while, and most of them are just 2-minute buttons, and the other is 1-minute. There's stuff all over to min-max, but it's not what I would personally call engaging, especially when the min-maxing has to be abandoned when pulls fall apart, for sake of keeping people alive and ensuring you have tools.
In my eyes, there's gotta be less focus on the healers just having healing in their kit, and more like what tanks have: simplified DPS rotations to perform while doing their other jobs. I feel like the developers might be scared to commit to this, as there's a lot of instances of healer greed causing wipes in savage and ultimate. And while that's not a healer specific issue, the healer is the person most comps depend on to bring a pull back from the brink. Giving them a rotation of sorts to do while having to keep the party alive might just be an issue. But it's what I've observed in the other roles. Maybe something similar, or just making the party survival less dependent on a healer so they _can_ have something more exciting to do, would work to make the class appealing.
I am in complete favor of giving tanks a resurrection skill with a long CD (naturally to pick up a healer) to compensate if needed (specifically paladins) because there are healers who greed but it does require a bit of punishing for them to recognize what they’re doing and ultimately just get voted off if they won’t do their part
Had to comment. Just to appreciate you using the 3rd DT dungeon ost. Shit is so majestic.
damn good song
They listen to the player base.
People fished for dps cards to they gave people DPS cards.
People got mad about DPS cards so they tried to bring back old cards.
Now people are mad about new cards.
People complained about having too much MP.
Beginning of DT had people complaining about MP economy.
So they've nerfed the MP economy problems instead of making you take the decision of piety/mp management into your own hands.
Anything you "could" do in the olden days,now in the days of people being slaves to dps killtimes and fflogs, is almost a requirement. They are removing those "friction" points (I'm so tired of this word when discussing game design to be honest) because the playerbase can't even stop being annoying about MCH damage in this game without intervention.
The playerbase dictates the opener for SCH being using Diss/AF solely for ED for dps gains on opener. The playerbase fished for balance cards. The playerbase complained about MP. The playerbase complained about GCD heals. IT was not uncommon in tons of discussion both on and off the balance to hear people with a straight face say "If you're GCD healing you're trolling/bad at the game."
I don't believe Healers are necessarily where they should be in terms of skill ceiling (with SGE being closest for me to enjoy it with its multiple filler/dps buttons that I think set an interesting comparison point for others to reference) but the issue is the minute you add in any potential for more dps and optimization it doesn't become an option anymore in the day of hyperfocused gamerbrains. It becomes a requirement/expectation.
The difference between popping prepull Huton vs now using the Kunai is that now I can't be screwed if I don't hit hide in time but I still functionally have to maintain the same flow of combat to reward myself with DPS. If Healers were popping Fey Wind prior to pulls and then swapping for optimization anyways, then it's really not a "decision" you're making at that point. If people are optimizing encounters with Mit sheets then your miasma 2 becomes a "Use at x and y time unless people are dying" instead of an active choice you're making as a player.
At the end of the day it's similar to Souls games. People who have been playing these games for 10+ years are going to feel apathy towards changes or negative towards them. The issue with looking at it from a perspective of an experienced player is that you will never have that same level of challenge again. Even if they briefly reintroduce challenge (like I'd say the 24 man is good for this) it will quickly be weeded out as you fall back into your knowledge and expertise with a kit. Even if they were to revert back to old scholar, you would still have the knowledge of how to manage your mitigation and not be as challenged as when the content was new/fresh. We still have people who can't heal in 8/24 man raids despite the discussions from veterans who make content for the game and the overabundance of tools in our kits.
Players wait for guides instead of progging blind. That's an active decision they're making to make the difficulty of healing and their party prog lower. At what point do you punish players for trying to maintain level of ease in a video game. For all the posturing about how healing has to change how not bored are you going to be beyond the initial rush of a new encounter after you've learned how to manage it appropriately? Everyone's trying to chase a high after a decade in a video game that isn't going to come back, and if it does it will be fleeting.
Things I agree with:
- More engaging dps kits especially for SCH
- More damage to be healed through more frequently so that even if you plan things out you're still having to engage more with the role
- More kit synergy or cross class/role synergy to reward people who are coordinated and team players.
I do agree we should push for change, but to insinuate that Square is making everything easy and sucky without examining the reasoning and context of it is, in my opinion, missing the forest for the trees. At the end of the day the playerbase this game has cultivated has basically been "do the most damage as often as you can and optimize to not use GCD heals." You're going to have to deal with pissing off the playerbase to get to the point where we need to be, and we've already kinda seen even the babysteps of that in DT cause everyone to lose their minds.
I dunno if the playerbase is willing/able to embrace changes in any meaningful way because at the end of the day majority of the playerbase is just going to grab melds from the Balance, look up mit sheets and guides, and then go run the content until they get through the clear. Repetition breeds apathy, and in the age of short attention spans I don't know if people will stick around with more difficult content like Criterion or Chaotic 24 man stuff. Hopefully I'm wrong and they do some changes and it makes people happy.
This feels like a very well thought out video, and I'll need to think about it more to have a more solid opinion, but-
I think the problem is you.
35:45
You mention that the most we see of damage in waves is maybe 2 in a row. You want 5, 6, 10. Also, at 30:30, you explain that you feel that the dev have not stepped up content engagement for healers this tier in any way, shape or form.
I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here and say you probably just memory-hole'd M3S, but, you reference this fight specifically. Before week 4-5, you, as the healer, needed to watch not just your health, but the caster and ranged HP too, as anything less than full health + shield result in the Octo/Quad dives killing Ranged party members. Brutal Impact hits you for 8x with an 8x TB following immediately after. You Fusefield has 8 huge raidwides that go off at a cadence determined by your party. Octo/Quad Bombarian Special has 5 HARD HITTING raidwides that happen back to back, WITH a knockback that inhibits your ability to reach other folks after the KB goes out.
To give you some perspective, if you've never played League of Legends, I would encourage you to find a friend who's played since season 1-3, and ask them, "If you took a high silver/low gold player today and put them into Season 1 Ranked, what rank would they be?" The answer is at the *highest ranks*. The Rank 1 Season 1 player never made it back to rank one because he didn't rely on technical skill, he relied on strategy and tactics.
Similarly, I think it's pretty clear that you, with the knowledge and expertise that you've carved into your soul through years of gameplay, are chasing a high that can really only be offered by Ultimate while fresh. I didn't hear one solution from you that would be actually affect gameplay in a meaningful way and also take that engagement budget you referred to. You talked a lot about SCH's Miasma II fondly, but also mentioned that while it was a DPS gain, you did enough damage while ignoring Miasma II entirely.
But that is gameplay that SQEX has repeatedly expressed explicitly and implicitly is against their design philosophy. Maximizing minute damage gains for absolutely optimized parsing is not something the devs will ever care about, the same way that they don't care when remapping files utterly breaks Dalamud. Healing feels unengaging to you because you've continued to climb the mountain, and climb and climb, and you're more and more frustrated that there aren't more mountains available at your slope.
I hate to say this because I know it probably hurts to hear and it sounds rude, but in a game that is PvE, if you have been playing it at the highest levels chasing harder and harder, pinnacle difficulty content, then a vast majority of the game SHOULD be unengaging to you. Every job and role has folks complaining about how much easier the jobs are to play. Tanks have no engaging Tank Mechs or opportunity for skill expression this tier, casters are all overly simplified and even BLM's have been grossly oversimplified, DRG was gutted in DT and then even moreso this most recent patch. Rangeds don't have an identity.
You know what a vast majority of the people who make those complaints have in common? They almost all played the game for 4+ years. This isn't a problem for new players, and it isn't even a problem for all veteran players. It's a problem for veteran players who chase pinnacle content and challenge. I don't think the game is the issue.
It's like a 17 year old boy who's lamenting all of the playground features that make the playground too safe and they took away all of the fun and exhilarating features away. Meanwhile in the background there are dozens of children running around having fun on the same playground behind him.
This right here sums it up perfectly. All I could think through the whole video was "are we playing entirely different games?" And yes, we really are. I am not great at the game, I can't get through a savage without having 10 levels and/or severe gear advantage. You can go through a whole tier in 24 hours. I'm super stoked for you that you are good enough and have a group good enough for that. The majority of players do not do savage, let alone clear it when it's current content when they have months to do so. You double talked like hell throughout the video in saying you want everything to be much more complicated/difficult but that you didn't and you wanted more flexibility/creativity, so I'll address both separately because each is a severe problem for the game as a whole
More complicated/difficult: Dawntrail is a pretty solid step and IMO they nailed things for the majority of players. Content isn't just a walk in and clear with your brain shut off eating every mechanic. Did you miss the bit of whining on forums from people saying the fights are much harder? For most players, that "feeling of prog when doing savage", they got that from the NORMAL content this time around. Step things up even further with tighter windows and enforced dps checks and requiring high level healer play, and the game dies. I get it, if you're really good at the game, you can pick up on the "harder" things in normal (because you've seen them in savage) much quicker and the content becomes autopilot for you faster. That's not the average experience, if you make the normal content require days or weeks for the normal players to even get a first clear on, people stop playing because it's no longer fun and becomes a job.
More flexibility/creativity: I'll start off that I don't really disagree with this inherently, but you should absolutely not be the one offering guidance here for the same reason as the previous paragraph. Because it would be VERY VERY easy to just entirely break the game design either by making multiple rotation options depending how a fight functions or offering methods for more cheeky dps tricks. If you have multiple rotation options, one of them is going to be the correct option for any given fight, and not using the right one means there's a dps loss, and the fight takes longer. Which can also mean depending on mechanics and how much flexibility/creating you are adding if you have multiple different people using different rotations that don't mesh with each other, you're likely to run into some issues and PLAYER friction rather than mechanical. Now for normal content, this might not be too much of an issue. For Extremes, this could effectively render them into a "difficulty" akin to savage when doing a PF due to player playstyle incompatibility as you already tend to get in Savage PF. On the other end with more tricks that let you do sneaky damage, because there will always be an "optimal" option and top end players will always tend towards that, it makes content worse and easier if you know how to do it optimally. StB was a different ballgame from today and the top end players were overall worse back then, but the true top end ones steamrolled content and became bored with it because there was zero challenge when you had the whole fight choreographed and knew all the tricks. That's why the the ceiling lowered, so the fights would not break due to a party of elites just absolutely stomping through things and removing all challenge even with some mistakes. Think of any dungeon roulette where you had 4 high geared high skill players, and just how much faster and how much less of fights you end up seeing and how much more boring it is. Now try to design a high end fight where high end players can clear it, but that doesn't fall to pieces with elite players, good luck.
While I do agree with your point about with high mastery, things should feel easier, and by nature more boring, I don't feel that doesn't mean that jobs haven't gotten easier and or simpler.
I say this as someone who didn't enjoy old Machinist, I felt it was too clunky, but those who loved it REALLY loved it. I main Mch and love the new Mch, but I do lament some of the kit they lost, the depth of decision making that that kit provided, and was never really replaced.
I do agree with you as well in regards to M3s.
@@SoftNapkins That is 100% correct. The game has gotten easier to play on top of the fact that pinnacle players are getting better, so they're getting it from both sides.
However, I would say that that is a good thing for the game and the players also.
Another point I didn't bring up in my comment, is HOW GOOD XIV players have it today. All of the flood of new players who joined in 5.5 or later have no idea that you couldn't fly in ARR zones pre 5.3. And even VETERAN players don't ever mention, or often even realize, that the absolute slog that was 2.X was made categorically worse by the fact that you did that whole questline grounded until you hit HW. I used to think, "Where was this game years ago when I was playing WoW?? I wish I switched years ago!" NO, I DO NOT. Cross class abilities? TP on a caster? Stance dancing for healer? Losing combo for failing positionals?
The game is good TODAY because the devs have made it welcoming and friendly to new players. And honestly, their changes in EW for SMN were a stroke of genius. Every role should have a lower-performing job with training wheels to ease people into something new, and Casters didn't have that. It's the same with VPR in DT.
The other thing that helps provide context is the average "seniority" of the playerbase- "seniority" being the number of years playing the game. When ShB released, the game, from ARR's release, was 6 years old. Just off the top of your head, what do you think the average seniority of the players was? For argument's sake, let's say it was 3 years- a perfect mix of new and old players. What do you think the average seniority of a player was in EW? I personally would say it less than 2 years at that point. Because the WoW exodus brought so many first time players that overwhelmingly almost drowned out the existing playerbase. Maybe I'm not correct in my numbers, the point stands regardless.
The devs are making the game for their TOTAL audience, and their total audience has reverted in age- gotten less experienced, and I think these new changes reflect that. There are some games that only continue to grow in their complexity, with little regard for the experience of their new players. Just take a look at Path of Exile's talent tree and all of the systems in that game. It's become such a burden for new players, they literally are just starting over so they stop scaring new players away.
I know this is a massive wall of text lol, I just feel really strongly that the devs are making fantastic improvements that are all getting drowned out by pinnacle raiders and the community thinks they represent, well, the community, and they don't. They represent what a lot of players admire- very high skill in the game. That makes us trust their opinion when it comes to clearing content, and that is relevant to the quality of content. But there is a perspective that an ultimate raider will never be able to have- and that's being new and overwhelmed by what they would consider to be the simplest things.
@@SoftNapkins That is 100% correct. The game has gotten easier to play on top of the fact that pinnacle players are getting better, so they're getting it from both sides.
However, I would say that that is a good thing for the game and the players also.
Another point I didn't bring up in my comment, is HOW GOOD XIV players have it today. All of the flood of new players who joined in 5.5 or later have no idea that you couldn't fly in ARR zones pre 5.3. And even VETERAN players don't ever mention, or often even realize, that the absolute slog that was 2.X was made categorically worse by the fact that you did that whole questline grounded until you hit HW. I used to think, "Where was this game years ago when I was playing WoW?? I wish I switched years ago!" NO, I DO NOT. Cross class abilities? TP on a caster? Stance dancing for healer? Losing combo for failing positionals?
The game is good TODAY because the devs have made it welcoming and friendly to new players. And honestly, their changes in EW for SMN were a stroke of genius. Every role should have a lower-performing job with training wheels to ease people into something new, and Casters didn't have that. It's the same with VPR in DT.
The other thing that helps provide context is the average "seniority" of the playerbase- "seniority" being the number of years playing the game. When ShB released, the game, from ARR's release, was 6 years old. Just off the top of your head, what do you think the average seniority of the players was? For argument's sake, let's say it was 3 years- a perfect mix of new and old players. What do you think the average seniority of a player was in EW? I personally would say it less than 2 years at that point. Because the WoW exodus brought so many first time players that overwhelmingly almost drowned out the existing playerbase. Maybe I'm not correct in my numbers, the point stands regardless.
The devs are making the game for their TOTAL audience, and their total audience has reverted in age- gotten less experienced, and I think these new changes reflect that. There are some games that only continue to grow in their complexity, with little regard for the experience of their new players. Just take a look at Path of Exile's talent tree and all of the systems in that game. It's become such a burden for new players, they literally are just starting over so they stop scaring new players away.
I know this is a massive wall of text lol, I just feel really strongly that the devs are making fantastic improvements that are all getting drowned out by pinnacle raiders and the community thinks they represent, well, the community, and they don't. They represent what a lot of players admire- very high skill in the game. That makes us trust their opinion when it comes to clearing content, and that is relevant to the quality of content. But there is a perspective that an ultimate raider will never be able to have- and that's being new and overwhelmed by what they would consider to be the simplest things.
@@Phyokathe thing is if you ask a lot of people who started in endwalker and talk about old features many will tell you they'd enjoy things like that. they think shadow flare sounds cool, they think expensive gcds sound interesting, they want to try a dot job, etc
the issue isn't as simple as easy vs hard its about how much less engaging a lot of the moment to moment has become and a desire to shield players from stumbling blocks. i think it's fine if people wipe. people these days are so averse to wiping they just want to give up the second it happens! I don't think that's a good thing. fundamentally this is not about difficultly, difficulty is a byproduct of more explorative design
I come from a swtor healing perspective, I have noticed the difference between the two. One of the main things that I noticed is dispel or Esuna in swtor is needed during raids, higher up you go in difficulty the more they are needed to the point that some curses need to be removed in x amount of seconds or the target dies. Another is resurrect, doesn't matter who used the skill once it was, the skill for all healers in the raid the skill went into cooldown for about 3 minutes. So we really had to think about who we were bringing back. There were many times where if dps refused to get out of stupid we left you on the floor because it wasn't worth bringing you back. Healers also have a lot more dps buttons as well. Right now on FF14 I main white mage and I do enjoy it, but decision making is something you don't have to do as often. Can't comment on FF14 savage/extreme as due to a physical/pain disability I can't manage it.
On the surface, I agree with most everything in here, but these are also the arguments much of the healer community has been making for a few expansions now. The response from the devs has consistently been that they didn't want healers to have a complex dps rotation because they want to have healers focus on only healing. That, by its very design, will always keep us in the current problematic state you outlined here. It's also worth noting this isn't anything new, it's not a recent change. It's been this way for years now, much to our dismay. There is a portion of the healing community that does prefer it being an easier role where they only focus on healing and this is the direction the devs have taken and refused to divert from despite this same feedback being voiced for multiple expansions now. All this is to say... while I agree with you, it's an age-old complaint that the devs have heard and responded to by doubling down and reiterating this is the direction they want to take healers.
Secondly, while I also thoroughly enjoyed SCH in the period you spoke of, it was one of the biggest reasons we got to where we're at. SCH had so much power if played well in that time period that progs all used them and their dmg was near a full dps, sometimes higher than other dps. In a party of competent players, you spent almost the entire fight optimizing your damage rotation. This is what you're asking for (since it gives you something to engage with when you don't need to heal), but it's what the devs reacted against. They don't want the competency of a healer to be judged by how well they optimize their damage rotation, and that's how healers were measured at the time.
Lastly, the final reason they altered course was due to difficulty balancing. They were very vocal about how difficult it was to balance a fight when there was such a large deviation in damage based on whether the healer is properly damaging while healing. If they balanced around a party with healers doing "proper" dps rotations, then it would be impossible to meet the dps check in a party where your healers didn't do much damage. At the time, I hoped (as I'm guessing you would hope) that their response would be to tell these more passive healers that they need to learn to fully utilize their full kit. This was not their response. They chose (and have since doubled down on in every expansion) to say that healers should only really have to worry about healing, and their "fix" for the variable dps healers could perform was to dumb down the dps rotation to narrow the gap between skilled healers and those performing more poorly.
This is a long response, I know. I feel you, and much of the healing community has been voicing all this feedback for years. I would love to have hope it will change, but they have shown absolutely zero evidence they want to revert any of their decisions in these areas. They have, by contrast, only cemented them further. I don't like the conclusion, but it's been a conclusion that's been present for years and is not new at all -- if you want a more engaging experience where your performance is more impactful and improvement can be better measured, healers in this game are not the role designed for you. If you feel this is too harsh a statement, read it instead as "the devs designed this role for a different type of person and mindset." It's a harsh reality that I didn't want to admit, but the only conclusion that is reasonable to make in my opinion. And they have tried in the past to satisfy both camps but realized it is an impossibility due to balance restrictions, so they made a choice and I see no evidence they would alter course. And lest you think otherwise, if they ever DO go back to giving healers more things to juggle, they will hit one of the same two problems as before -- either fights won't be balanced such that more casual healers can still complete them, or those casual healers will be making videos like this instead about how their preferred playstyle was sidelined for another.
Yes, I agree, tanks should be more self-sufficient than they already are.
"Your impact is barely noticed" as a Phys ranged main I would reply the meme "First time ?" with a rope around my neck xD
Definitely a MCH main lol
One of my issues with healing is actually the base GCD toolkit (and SCH aetherflow) due to the fact that its just a DPS loss. It feels like a failure state when you need to use them. We got fancy new GCD heal upgrades, but why would i want to use Medica III when i have Rapture? And when i do need to use Medica III it feels like a punishment, a loss of both damage and MP economy. It feels like were stuck in the middle between "Healers should heal and damage should be secondary" and "Healers should focus on Damage and their healing tools should contribute to that" and the devs refuse to pick a side. Either make every OGCD a GCD so everything is a damage loss and we need to care about MP and Piety or make traits and mechanics that reward our damage rotations for using our healing skills in the right way.
I've always thought it might be interesting if MP usage was swapped to oGCDs and regen was on the GCDs instead.
Everyone talks about changing the healer role based off other games. This isn’t them other games. People complain that ff is going for simplicity… when you have a community that harps on people for not being optimized, I’d say it’s a good thing. Having played multiple MMOs, and recently playing WoW again after 7 years, I’d say what ff has mostly works. For me they can’t seem to decide if they want healers to be more oGCD or GCD. Thats my biggest gripe. You can’t compare the healing to WoW, because that game system is very different. And having gone back to it after doing ff for so long, I actually think WoW’s system is garbage. I don’t think they should take mechanics from it. Obviously OW mechanics won’t work because it’s a first person shooter. Trying to compare them is moot. Honestly, I disagree with most who thinks it needs more complex rotations. As someone who optimizes and perfects classes and rotations, I understand that there are people in the community who freaks if people aren’t optimized. They get dogged and treated like garbage. So no I disagree with people who say it’s too easy. For me it seems like they’re trying to make it more accessible for everyone unlike many other games. Can there be tweaks, of course. Will there be, probably. In the programming world, it’s never finished. We have an old saying, there done and done enough. It will never be done, just done enough based on deadlines. We used to say that if you let a programmer decide when it’s complete, you’ll wait forever. Games are constantly changing and upgrading. But saying it needs to be harder and essentially cutting out people from being able to play, I say shame on you. MMOs you can’t just put an easy mode on.
finally! the patch has been out for 48 hours now, i needed my rinon yap video
Thank you for voicing a lot of my feelings that were hard to put into words.
I sometimes miss the old days of % based mechanics. It was silly and will never be put back but it was fun if your team pushed too much and mitigation might have been thrown out of wack and the adjustments made were fun on top of mechanics. I sometimes miss those days.
I've started accepting and not caring about Savage healing due to the downtime/recovery. I missed the days of Largesse. I miss the days of StB AST. I have missed feeling something for awhile. I do like healing, but as you said: I am waiting for those moments of chaos, and enjoy the muscle memory and instinct of rapid firing an Essential on someone. But I shouldn't have to wait on chaos to do so.
Thank you for this vid. I'm glad others feel similar ways about the state of healers right now.
While I appreciate that you use your platform to express issues with the game for greater visibility, I disagree on how you think on average play.
I don't think old AST cards were a problem. What is the actual difference in outcome between optimal card play and just slightly suboptimal?
I think this applies to more than just healers, in terms of a lack of 'friction'. The skill ceiling for a good few jobs are being reduced, with the most recent example being the removal of a movement lock on Ten Chi Jin, but my biggest example this expansion being the addition of Flare Star on Black Mage. On the surface this ability doesn't seem bad, but its addition kills a lot of transpose lines.
I think the games chases jobs having to be 'perfect' too much, and remove all 'annoyance' from them. Which tends to remove all the difficulty as well.
I still miss my second nastrond
Rinon, I don't think you'll ever be in touch with the general user experience with the general user base. Or even high level players who have many hours, but aren't insulated by the cliques of "career" players. Healers pound for pound already have the highest skill ceiling in the game. To anyone not insulated by the cliques they're in, it is taxing work to play the role as well as you can given the situational changes that happen at any given point of the interdependent activity you're doing.
It was frustrating as well to see the "low DPS check" talking point for the savage raid, when the damage differential between jobs made not all deaths during a prog run equal, or even remotely close for that matter.
"We need to talk about encounter design." Is a conversation that would affect healing in a more productive way than any issues with the toolkits themselves.
Underrated comment tbh. Healing in my static and healing 7 nerds I've never met are 2 immensely different experiences and I'm one of the insane few who enjoys both experiences. As a career dps who will play literally anything I'm asked just to help people clear, it's easy to understand the gripes people have with healer but hard to disagree that some of that comes from years of experience and playing with other experienced players.
To talk about one fight design issue I believe really makes healing feel way worse, it's the prevalence of body checks after tough mechanics.
It removes the recovery aspect of being a healer. If one person fucks up, you all die. If no one dies, you're there to look pretty and press ogcds.
In the absence of making healer rotations more involved, the devs need to focus on recovery mechanics.
@@antarath517 I agree that body checks are out of control and make recovery useless. As a rdm main, I completely agree that there's a part of my kit that's almost meaningless because of fight design sometimes.
This whole chain TBH. Recently there was the early M4s clears complaining how much extra time before enrage there was on the boss HP in the end, while PF is burning (every day I feel more blessed for my static). "Let them eat cake" kind of thing, feels like.
I will agree hard, however, on the idea of having some extra synergetic healer multi-tools that encourage you too use them for healing while also keeping your DPS engaging. Assize and Pneuma feel awesome, whereas I am always dubious on whether I am being a burden on my cohealer popping that Dissipation "because it's the optimal thing to do during burst".
I feel like this is very subjective. As a half static/half PF healer...I mean I really don't see it super difficult to heal, especially the last pandaemonium tier...in PF. P12S was a snooze fest for my heals, any big damage where I could be the knight in shining armor was easy to take care of...I mean I really think the core of what Rinon is talking about is how the healer kit works in content...and how once you really figure it out, figure out how damage works...it honestly is not that difficult, regardless of if you are in PF or a static, it is a role that could be much more fleshed out and rewarding.
I think there are multiple conversation starters in this video, and the healing role in itself is one that people gravitate either towards, or very very far away from. But...again, what one finds hard another finds easy, and vice versa. I think the core identity of the role needs some work overall.
at the end of the day, what I am convinced of is that everything about modern square enix, at the top end of production, is laser-focused around the idea that absolutely everything has to have the biggest audience imaginable or it's a colossal failure - and that the best way to get that audience is to remove absolutely anything that might lead to anyone who touches it having a bad experience, at the cost of lessening the potential for good experiences.
FF15 and FF16's combat being made incredibly easy, FF7 remake shifting gears to be extremely conservative in the second game
but the biggest and most obvious cases of this are all within FF14: Every aspect of design is terrified at the very idea someone might have a bad experience. We made a new PVP mode that's pretty well designed, but we removed chat because people might have a bad experience if someone says something mean to them. You can't queue in with friends because what if people use that to make solo players have a bad experience.
Dungeons have to be lobotomized so people can play with extremely rudimentary scripted AI, so we quintuple-down on every dungeon is the exact same layout and format and remove variation from dungeons that deviate.
Bosses have to be made easier, level synch has to become even more lax, because if someone new picked up the game this month and wiped when they reached Stormblood, they would surely quit!
I know a great many people who have tried FF14, got partway through Heavensward, and quit because they were incredibly bored with the gameplay - because there is no challenge.
Making it as softball-easy and catering as hard as they possibly can to people who have no idea what they're doing and, pivotally, very often DO NOT WANT TO LEARN has created this self-feeding loop, because now players are given 600 hours of conditioning that the game is easy, mechanics do not matter, and everything will be cleared even if you put zero thought or effort in - you can floor tank every fight and still win - and then they cry because Dawntrail has a tiny handful of circumstances where if you die, the party might actually lose. Where if you ignore mechanics you might actually suffer for it.
I honestly can't even really blame those people - if I played a fighting game and it forced me to fight easy-mode AI and disabled special inputs for my first 600 hours, if I somehow didn't quit by then it'd be incredibly jarring to get dumped into a real video game after sleeping for, I cannot stress this enough, literally hundreds of hours.
Healing was the spear-tip of this - the changes in Shadowbringers to healers (and tanking, ESPECIALLY to Dark Knight) were ostensibly to entice more people to try out healing and tanking, but functionally meant a lot of people would *try* them then quit because either it was too boring or they weren't the kind of person who was going to keep playing long for /any/ reason. Cue "Not enough people are healing, we must make it EVEN EASIER, clearly!" Repeat, repeat.
I don't know how they don't understand this.
Ok my real comment now. I do think you are extremely good at healing. I would consider myself a good healer and I think my highest savage parse is blue. I am just not as good as you are, so there are many instances I have to engage with more of my kit.
Not to say your complaints aren't genuine. I'm also a good enough healer that most content is mindless. I don't think there's a good solution to balance out healing for everyone. I do think it should be more engaging, but maybe at this point you've been healing for so long that you've exhausted your ability to even optimize it more.
Job homogenization is more worrying to me at this state. But I think you have hit that job ceiling and that is why you find it incredibly unengaging.
I think that everyone should of just kept telling people, including the devs: "Healing isn't meant to be easy, there has to be complexity and difficulty." and stuck with it. The game only degraded catering to the people who didn't want to step up and learn.
Being a decent healer didn't require actual rocket science or hard work, it was still plenty easy with the old kits. People just didn't like having to try so much. Then you had the people who literally whined about being told to play better so everything ran better.
@@ScarletStarManorOK, and then you'd have to wait for ages to find healers to fill parties. Like it or not, accessibility is a mandatory concern when playing a multiplayer game where a particular role is necessary for PF / roulettes. If you alienate the current healer base, the health of multiplayer drops dramatically. Here in Japan we're waiting on tanks because nobody wants to play them, if the healer community gets alienated and quits to play DPS, our 30 minute PF wait will balloon into a 90 minute wait.
@ the answer to this was pretty simple a long time ago, stop homogenizing and start making separate classes with intended skill levels to appease people. Make a class that is easier to play then make one that requires more effort and then it’d be a fine compromise
@@kirigherkinsaccessibility and comfort are not the same thing.
i think that all roles have points of friction that are integral to their identities. tank has been made more and more comfortable as has healer and it has created a situation where a lot of the time the healer does not even need to be present or do much more than press a ogcd or two here and there to provide value. the knockon effect of this is that any healer that does want to try, all they have to look forward to is greeding out extra damage while playing chicken with the party's health
@ScarletStarManor yeah. I'm sad the business of astrologian was dumbed down. We already had a slow healer. Why ruin my class to appeal to people who don't play it?
My experience with the current new alliance raid was that Healers actually had to do things there and I saw some healers complaining, I was confused because as a tank I RARELY ever struggle with content and on DPS I rarely ever feel targeted or in danger, so the fact that healers had work to do because the mechanic were slightly difficulty to keep pace with, which was fine because we can recover, we don't auto die, so it felt fine?
I had no idea why people were complaining unless they just had awful connection.
I'll be honest, speaking purely as a casual non-savage player, who does basically nothing but Normal content, I've loved how healing in FF14 feels a lot more like healing in the earlier half of the series. Ever since FF1, when a class with heals gets attack spells, I'm always annoyed that they never have many good ones, because it feels like they're a wasted slot when healing isn't needed. For WHM, which is my main, it feels really nice to be able to make meaningful contributions to the group's damage output instead of just being a robot who spams healing spells and never has to think beyond triage.
However, I also understand that it doesn't jive well with the Trinity system of MMOs. Personally, I love the feel, but I also do wish we had more attack spells to use, it still feels like having nothing but Harm as an FF1 White Mage.
Cecil, for example, was both a tank and healer as far as the party roles in FF4 went. If you used him only for healing, you lose out on a lot of damage, but if you let people die you lose out on their damage. Balancing attacks and healing was a lot of how to play the game better, but aside from losing out on the turn of damage, there wasn't really any negative to using heals. That was a balance that always felt "good" to me, because the skill came from being able to heal without overhealing, but also being able to contribute to the fight.
The problem, of course, is that despite it being a Final Fantasy game, it IS also an MMO. And in the turn-based combat of an MMO, where each turn is 2.5s and individual turns are far less valuable as a resource because of how many of them there are per battle and using a few of them inefficiently won't really do much harm to the fight or the group.
And therein comes the problem - the healers don't really get to do their job in the traditional Final Fantasy way- they don't have the healing to do, but they also don't have the tools to do meaningful engaging damage in a way that takes more than one button, and we are long, long past the eras where spamming "Attack" until it's time to cast is acceptable gameplay.
I'll be honest, I think that the way Warrior works, while a bit TOO overtuned for dungeons, is a good design concept for final fantasy. Instead of each role being basically one thing, each role has tools to do everything, but the two roles they don't fill will have a much weaker set of tools. Like how you CAN cast heals as a red mage in the old games, but you'll never keep up with something like a white mage, or how a summoner's lower level magic non-summon spells will never keep up with a black mage.
But as always, we run into the game design compromise problem in FF14- it has to still be an MMO, and the final points you make, about how it doesn't take enough brain resources to make it feel good, and how the game's current design makes the ceiling too low. How do we make it so that healing badly in dungeons doesn't make the entire rest of the group unable to progress through what should be a very simple and straightforwards task, while making it so that mid and high end players get rewarded for playing well?
It's no fun when the "Reward" is that no one is angry at you, rather than being impressed with your play. Tanks who mit well and position well are rewarded directly for it. DPS who do their jobs well are very very noticeable. But a good healer is invisible, unless they're NOT playing well. You'll notice if they aren't doing damage, but you won't notice much if they're doing weaker damage than tehy should. You'll notice if they aren't healing entirely, but not if they're struggling to keep the tank up - especially not if it's the tank's fault. Still looks like the healer's fault when the tank drops to a casual player.
How do we make the healing role feel like it's more important to all the content, without making the role burdens unbalanced?
I have no clue. I don't know if making it harder to do their damage correctly by adding more buttons to push is the right decision, or if a greater rework would be needed. You have plenty of good ideas, and better than any I could come up with, but the simple reality is this:
There should be a separate toolkit for High Progression from Normal Gameplay, the same way as there's a different set of tools for PVP and PVE. Otherwise, the game is going to be permanently constrained by having to maintain that skill floor. Giving high end progression a weakened toolkit even has some potential lore justification - the high end content is all in-universe fanfic anyway, and it makes for a more embellishably dramatic story if the heroes have to have more challenging and engaging conflicts.
Of course, that would present its own massive, massive set of issues with balance, too.
This long-winded ramble is all to say, this is a great video that brought up tons of good points I'd never thought of, and seemed a good place to share my thoughts as a casual who used to do hardcore raiding a long, long, long time ago, so at least have some perspectives I guess.
I only do normal content, I don't do ex or savage since I feel the rotations and openers in this game are just insanely difficult and more of headache than anything else. And since it's a requirement to know these to do harder content I just stick with just normal content.
@akarti813 not to mention I find the prospect of doing the rotations to be more monotonous and sleep inducing than interesting and stimulating.
@@akarti813 Even with viper or dancer, where it has a glowy button telling you what to press or summoner that has like 6 buttons?
@@akarti813 Most class rotations on this game are a joke if you take the time to learn them, for 90% of the classes the depth boils down to: press everything as soon as it comes off cooldown with the only exception being abilities with multiple charges bc of the 2 minute meta, and don't break your combo gcds. In fact I'd argue playing rotations the intended way is actually easier than trying to do it any other way nowadays with how hard square is trying to push the 2 min meta. Half of our cooldowns have been merged together in DT so that the possibility of messing them up or drifting them apart isn't even possible anymore. How is it hard? Other mmos actually demand on the fly decision making or at least have more varied class design like priority system based rotations, ffxiv hardly has anything that actually makes it difficult.
@stabegabe well I'm glad everyone understand them and can do them. But I guessing not in the same vote cause I play samurai and I feel more confused than anything else and looking at the opener just makes me cringe.
While I agree with some statements, such as the current healer role issues, I can't agree on some of the other aspects.
Stormblood, while having good change on the overall of the game, do also have many problems with the healer design, even though many will chuck it under, oh it's because it's making it unique.
And to be fair, the biggest change and most valid point is just stormblood have an extra dot, even though rest of the aspect of healer is exact the same as now.
The duality of the problem for healer, is that even with all the changes over the years, healer are still the most punishing job to play and have a higher responsibility in 90% of the content, especially with the recently 7.1 patch increased healing needs, and guess what? we actually have even lesser healer in Duty finder even though more healing is one of the thing the healer community have been asking for.
The other aspect is just that gcd heal are weak while also not encouraged due to lost damage potency, on top of 0gcd being strong and enough to cover everything.
I think we need to flip the script entirely, make 0gcd much weaker than now and make gcd heal stronger, or combine them so they have interaction with each other to encourage gcd while discourage 0gcd. Yet I have a feeling many will not welcome this and just prefer the same 0gcd situation
Given how popular Astrologian is right now, I wonder if the way forward for the Healer role is to make them a more broadly "support" focused role, not just defensives/heals. I'm not saying that they should pillage Astro's identity, but given that raw incoming damage just isn't as much of a concern outside of heal checks, giving them more to do on the party side between big hits could do a lot to revitalize the role.
You could even tie this into the job's gauge. Make WHM's Blood Lily a resource you can either spend on Afflatus Misery for instant damage, or maybe a small party-side damage buff, or a short Vuln Up on the target. Maybe give Aetherflow a stronger DOT ability or boss damage down to spend it on, but with a longer cooldown. Give Sage an actual, literal gun.
There's only so many ways you can heal damage, so it's inevitible that you'd run out of ways to make it interesting. Give healers more specific, situational abilities that they need to budget for and plan out, outside of whether or not it's off cooldown.
If they keep refusing to give healers more to do then I'd be down with this idea. Just give us something lol
Astros popularity is due to it being white mage but better. At least in hard content, in nornal content sage still seems to be the most popular healer.
This video is all over the place in terms of addressing issues and presenting desires. There are a few things that need to be more seriously addressed in terms of making healing more difficult. The TLDR is that you personally are highly skilled at healing, so it won't present much of a challenge to you but it does still present a challenge to you personally. The only way you will be challenged personally is by playing with bad players so that you have to account for mistakes.
#1. Healing is already difficult for a lot of mediocre players
When DPS fails, the fight takes longer and maybe you hit enrage in high difficulty. When the healers fail, you hit a brick wall in the middle of the fight, even in normal content. This can lead to healer anxiety and less people playing healer because they don't want to very visibly fail the party like that. It also leads to a situation where a lot less players are good enough at healing to beat the fights. If this extends into normal mode, it will cause massive problems throughout the community. I can't imagine FFXIV wholesome and inclusive vibes holding up if healing becomes a major pain point. I would imagine bad healers would be openly flamed and dismissed from duties. I got into high difficulty healing with Dawntrail EX trials. There are significantly difficult heal checks for players who are used to normal mode healing. I also progged a lot of savage on healer. The fights are pretty challenging but get a easier when you have a complete heal and mitt plan (more on that later). I cleared M4S but not on healer since some of the mechanics starting at EE2 were getting too difficult for me to heal. I have also been in plenty of parties where I or others get dropped to raid wide damage because the healer was inadequate. It is a very frustrating experience since bad healers make a fight impossible to prog.
#2. Healing is already an unpopular role
There are a ton of healing buttons to the point where it can be daunting to learn. Queue times in normal content and the PF list shows that there is usually a deficit of healers at any given point in time. Making healing more difficult will only make this problem worse. Not to mention healer anxiety if failure becomes a real and common possibility.
#3. Fight consistency is not likely to change, and for good reason
This is a point where you don't really go into detail about what a less consistent fight design might look like. You need to really dig into it to realize why it's probably not going to happen. Basically the less consistent they make the fights, the higher the consistency demand on the player. Lets say an inconsistent fight mechanic is that two random players will be hit for heavy damage right before a raid wide. That would force healers to react, which is the fun part. The problem is it would just be simulating a mistake, almost as if two random players failed a previous mechanic and were either rezed or didn't outright die from damage. The problem is if multiple players actually were damaged going into the mechanic, now it becomes a lot more difficult since you have to heal up even more players or start triaging which ones will die. Not to mention if the already damaged players randomly get hit with the extra damage. Also not to mention if random damage happens back to back and happens to target the same player.
In short, it can start making fights feel unfair and makes player inconsistency a much bigger problem.
#4. Consistent fights with good, consistent players are trivialized with a heal plan
If people don't make mistakes while also using mitts and heals in the same places every fight, you don't ever need to deviate from that plan. This is a big reason behind why you find healing boring and it isn't likely to change due to #3. If a healing tool can solve a mechanic, it will always be able to solve a mechanic. If you have a total plan for when to use each tool in a fight, you can use each tool at their designated times and never need to worry about cooldowns, since all the cooldowns have been planned out in advance. The only reason you would ever need to change plans is if someone makes a mistake. Valigarmanda comes close to breaking this rule, but you can simply have two heal plans, one for each order of phases.
#5. Raising the skill ceiling without affecting the skill floor is easier said than done
I cannot stress enough how incredibly difficult this is to do in practice. My comment is already way too long and this subject is way too complicated so I'm not going to go into much detail. The short of it is that this is basically a game designer's dream and if it was easy, they would do it all the time. It is also worth mentioning that raising the skill ceiling is utterly meaningless if there isn't content that requires the increased skill. For DPS players, you could always barse to show skill above the requirement, but that doesn't really make sense for the healer role.
In conclusion the state of healer is an impasse. High skill players find it lacking. It's difficult or nearly impossible to increase the skill ceiling without also negatively impacting mid and low skill players along with the player base overall. Fixing the issue will take an incredible amount of design skill.
This address everything I was going to say, thank you. This video addressed nothing while complaining the entire time. There were these empty statements of "what needs to be done" and that alone shows where the difficulty of this lies, that there's no solution. If you don't like the state of healing in this game, WoW, ESO, and other games have different ways of playing healers than XIV does, and the solution is simply, play that game, not this one.
10 mins in i was looking for this comment, thanks for writing it.
So what youre saying is that healer as a job is fine in punishing the player for getting better at it because there are shitty players?
My brother in christ, you cant force a shitter to do more. I still see heal only WHMs and they still let people die. Do you really think that they should design jobs around the bottom of the barrel skill level?
@MadamePianissima what are you on about, did you reply to the wrong person or something?
@@Soulsnatcher89 "WhAt ArE yOu On AbOuT?"
I accept your concession
no one ever talks about ilvl creep. many people i talk to and plan min ilvl no echo (aka MINE) runs of content always say something like "i miss this so much. this is so much fun".
but there is no incentive to play MINE. you dont' get additional rewards for it. so no one does it, unless you have preforms dedicated to doing this. or you're on a DC that has a more varied PF content . the race to BiS might be necessary for Ultimate content, but for everything else, it just seems like a way to increase the safety net, skip mechanics, make big number go up and minmaxing parse. go into a dungeon without BiS and you get yelled at, because people only care about steamrolling things as fast as possible. healing gets more repetitive and boring because everyone shoots for BiS to minimize challenge, maybe that's a fundamental problem with MMOs. however, this isn't to invalidate that healer design has issues. its just no one ever talks about ilvl creep and completely ignores it as a potential issue, let alone the ability to apply handicaps to duty. no one wants to lower their ilvl voluntarily lol. and that ilvl creep creeps in as soon as patch x.01 and x.05. suddenly, 2/3 of every boss is skippable, really fun heal checks are skippable. but no one talks about this, despite it being a valid factor to consider in this discussion. all activity people ever do is just going for their reclears, savage reclears, etc. need to get the 735 weapon that is gonna take 7 weeks to get. and like i feel left out because, i just don't care about that (at least as much), but i brace myself for getting yelled at because i would dare go into EX with only 710-720 gear
i fully agree.
go do mine coils as whm and you'll have the time of your life. absurdly good time. potency/mit creep is a lot of the problem and reassessing the ilvl system would help a lot even if it doesn't remove a lot of the issues with jobs' design
@@armorparadei kept playing FF14 thanks to a Europe discord for MINE pf/recruiting
You missed the point a bit. The problem is not "content is too easy and here is why". The core problem is that healers are boring unless the content is difficult. Its a fundamental problem of the kit and role. There are too few ways to optimize. No mana/gcd management needed, no complex dmg rotation. You have too many ogcds to deal with everything and not enough interesting enough dmg rotation.
Part of the ilvl creep issue is that Vitality increases healthpools to the point where you can start leaving mitigations out and still be fine. If they would focus on ilvl increasing DPS output more than HP, those mitigations would still be required even after everybody is full BiS. You would still get the benefit of faster kills while not removing danger from mechanics.
@TheBubbeloo someone hire this man, quick!
but unfortunately we know why this is, ilvl is meant to compensate skill.
Not only rotations but dodging a mechanic too.
I agree with some of these points but heavily disagree with others. For example, MP management never added to the fun, switching fairies was super niche annoying, and cleric stance (as well as the old tank stances) felt like just another button to press before doing the actual fun bits. My current biggest issue with healers is the lack of offensive tools. White Mage feels the best to me personally right now due to the variety of healing tools and how misery currently rewards use of afflatus spells. And I love Liturgy.
If the moment of fun in healing whenever someone messes up then we clearly something is wrong with healing fundamentally.
As much as I want to heal often it's the game design that forced us to be the Green DPS. I'm not exactly 'healing', I am DPSing against the boss DPS on a very tight script.
DT is the first expansion I just went, screw it I'm done. I guess after 3 expansions of the same antics the burn out finally hits me.
This reminds me of the changes to DPS, Specifically Melee in my case:
A lot of DPS used to have core fundamentals like Positionals, DoT/Debuff/Buff uptime as well as when to use your DPS-buffs.
Not to mention simply understanding TP-efficient skills especially when AoEing.
The lack of True North also meant you had to understand at any given time, what was your most efficient positional to execute.
Healers: "We want to do more in battle!"
Squeenix: "Here's a bunch of oGCD abilities to heal and prevent damage."
Healers: "No we want more GCDs to pick from."
Squeenix: "Okay here's a bunch of GCD healing."
Healers: "That's useless when the other players don't take damage."
Squeenix: "Okay here's Dark Knight and Gunbreaker, tanks with higher damage but they don't have party-wide shields."
Healers: "Oh my god those tanks are useless they force us to use our GCD healing I don't want to do that."
Squeenix: "But you picked Healer."
Healers: "Yes, for the quick queue times."
Actual brain damage.
The thing is day by day healers are trained/expected to be a dps machine in contents, as not being able to optimize downtime used for healing to do more dps instead will make people consider you a "bad healer"
That's how GCD heals become an inconvenience and frustrating things to use, because it makes you feel like you're doing something wrong.
Healing in end game bored me to death because it's just following the same script everytime and more GCD heals mean you get called out for playing unoptimizely. Doing casual content is more fun as a healer when you're queued into a newbie party because you don't have to worry about dps much and focus more on doing your actual job, healing.
the ogcds make the do-nothing problem worse, not better
the gcds don't feed back into the rest of the kit and also aren't as strong or satisfying as the overtuned ogcds so they feel so bad to use it is like hitting a failure state
those are two tanks out of 4
okay this last part is just a strawman. i play healer because i enjoy the highs of the role. i just want the lows to stop feeling so miserably low
@Naoto-kun1085 I'm not a hardcore player myself, so I don't really have a take on this.
I do think at least half of the problem is the fight designs though. FFXIV end game is basically just memorizing a book for the exam, and it kinda forces people to build this mentality of doing everything to raise the dps as much as possible.
Thank you so much for putting this out there. It's worded so well and sums up exactly how I feel as someone who mained AST from HW but dropped it like a hot brick in EW, and now plays PCT in DT.
The challenging part of playing healer is queuing for roulettes. You never know if your tank and DPSs are going to make you earn your sub or not. Many tanks still don't understand mits.
So true. Like the number of tanks that does use arm’s length and reprisal is just depressing.
The lack of mitigation is the frustrating part, especially when the tank is a Paladin and it's just like why tf are you playing Paladin when the whole point of the job is the extra mitigation with Sheltron and the various other mits? White Mage is cool though, I leveled it a bit before I dropped the game again and will probably continue if I go back
Tbh it is other way around too, I mostly use PLD to deal with new healers in roulettes. Someone questioned why only healers care about job being dummed down, personally after doing enoght dailies I don't want to increase healer complexety outside of dps part, since there is enoght of peeps that cannot handle it as is
@ err I’d say a bad healer is WAY less common than a bad tank. If you really wanted to mitigate lack of healer, Warrior-at least at higher lvl dungeons, and not paladin, would be a better approach.
The actual common issue with healers is not that they don’t heal, but rather they only heal. Ie they stand there and just respond to incoming dmg with GCD heals, and any incoming damage that demands bursts healing might actually outpace their GCD if the tank doesn’t mit. This is a huge issue because 95% of tanks pull wall to wall, and cooldown timers/damage checks are designed around the whole party doing AoE. So with 3 players DPSing, the tank can quickly run out of mitigation tools, and unless they are a warrior in a multi target AoE situation, it becomes hard to sustain after the burst window.
I'll happily trade you my experience lol. Most expert dungeon runs, I basically never see my Excogs pop before its timer runs out. I have to ask my teammates to deliberately collect vuln stacks if I want less than 95% of my button presses to be broil or art of war. I appreciate the effort that tanks put in these days but I'd happily take some utterly dogwater ones that don't use cooldowns so I get to actually play the game.
This is a great yet tragic breakdown. Playing an Astrologian throughout Stormblood was some of the most FUN times of my (gaming) life.
The amount of thank you's and other well wishes i received from random players was unbelievable.
It felt like i had options and agency to vary my playstyle based on particular content and competency of group. Keeping in mind i was mediocre at best.
To think the levels actual Ultimate level players could have pushed and played on is something both thrilling and scary - in a good way!
Shame it all had to end, quite abruptly in AST case too ☠️
On the topic of encounter design and how it greatly impacts how fun healer is - I remember Xenosys Vex at one point stating that he would rather have fight mechanics be simple and jobs be complex, and I agree. I think that would go a long way to address this particular problem. No longer would you have a problem of being at the mercy of the encounter designers, because the experience would be more consistent across multiple different fights.
personally, i just want atonement-like combos on healers which interact with the rest of the kit. for example (scholar) no costs on lustrate or soil if you are weaving after the 2nd spell of the combo. so you can use more energy drains when you time it right. or getting access to a second dot after the third hit. dunno, just some interaction within the kit would be great D:
edit: i also think whm and sge in particular have such good mp management that the ressource itself hardly matters at this point
Honestly, I think healer is exactly where it needs to be. Healer's in a great spot, minus some minor changes. Everyone else, however, isn't. Certain healers definitely feel way easier to play and the harder ones don't really reward you for the increased difficulty. Sage comes to mind, where the only thing you get for your efforts is an aoe that you can move around while you use it, which is weaker than your other aoe that you can move around when you use it. I wouldn't argue for the return of Cleric Stance. Stance is terrible, and when they took it out of the game, healer was much more fun.
Tanks, dps, everyone else. That's where the problem exists. Wall pulling and surviving in previous expansions was a show of skill. It was fun. Now, each tank has an unlimited amount of healing capabilities. Warrior can solo almost any content without deaths. DRK is one of the least healing tanks in the game and it can even keep itself alive for most wall pulls. Paladin and GNB are similar where they simply refuse to go under half health. All dps have a self-heal or shield. Some have multiple self shields. Some have shields that affect the entire party that don't ever feel useful to use because nobody dies.
Healer is fun. They have all these pretty items that they can throw out and have a fun time. The problem is that 99% of healers are standing in the middle of content looking at the abilities they could be having fun using and never being able to use them.
Healers in XIV are babysitters now.
When I first started in Stormblood I was a scholar main. I know it's just a game but seeing you cover scholar made me cry a little. I miss it so much. I don't like it anymore. I don't like what they did to the theme of the job... And I feel like the development team doesn't listen to player feedback at all
They're even simplifying Dragoon now. I don't know what to play anymore. I might just play PVP. Jobs are more fun there.
The unfortunate reality is that SCH and DRG are changing this way because of player feedback
But from where? Because even the JP community doesn't like the changes to DRG @@mikas131
they really have no clue how players feel
@@alexmaganda5827 They listen to the squeaky wheels. Nobody squeaks when they like something.
@@mikas131jp players, sure as hell isnt western players considering how vocal they are against these changes on the forums.
Living Liquid progression was the most fun I ever had on Healer. It is so great to see someone is fighting for what made healer fun on ffxiv. I tried to come back twice now, and each time the lack of complexity and feeling of being pushed left me bored very quickly. I miss the old ways healer worked when I had to try, thread in off globals, cram in damage by prepping or saving to be prepared, and who doesn't miss when skill made your damage numbers really matter and stick out? Accomplishments were a real thing. Solo healing Living Liquid was a real feat... doing it on more than one job meant something.
Staggering movement between casts by moving just before casting finished when the server considered you done casting or during an instant cast during global cooldown was an art.
It used to be that extreme effort gave amazing reward in endgame content.
Maybe the Healer role would be better replaced as the Support role... give more buffs and debuffs to go along with the heals if SE is so afraid of letting the skilled healers do damage again with the power to think and plan ahead
My conclusion in the end is that the problem is not with the tool bloat but the content that doesn't incentivise you to use that whatsoever. I think that encounters have gotten more quality and complex, but the total difficulty of executing on your job + resolving the mechanics of the fight does not add up to 100 as it should. P10S was great and I want more of that level of content more often. As you said somewhere near the end, you finish a short segment of a lot of damage coming out and then the boss auto attacks for like 10 seconds to align with the 2 minute meta design of fights, and then the next damage instance comes out 30 seconds later which is not even enough to do any lasting damage, it can usually be covered with Reprisal, Feint/Addle, and Kera/Soil. If we're getting these crazy bloated kits, then start doing more Wave Cannons. However, the content is just not going to be designed around playing your job optimally as it'll be a problem if Lunafreya Nightingale cannot clear with 0/4 Lillybells and 0/6 Temperances used.
I fully agree that triage healing in this game is the best feeling in the world. Being able to dance the mechanics and pick up the pieces at the same time has an immense feeling of satisfaction. It' why I basically just throw myself at Alliance DR every day because having those 24-mans that just fall apart and you have to proverbially princess carry the entire raid to the finish line is peak satisfaction. Maybe I will start to throw myself at PF assisting as well if I get the time to do so for that same feeling.
Hopefully 8.0 does see a nice meshing of DPS and Healing kit synergies / interactions as that would be a great way to increase the skill ceiling with affecting the skill floor.
This is a tough subject for me to weigh in on. Started Healing in EW and have stuck through it till now as my main role. I see and feel many of the problems you’re describing, outside of prog and really bad triage and recovery situations I feel redundant and unneeded. That we are just the Airbags of the group, we only exist for when things go wrong. I want to be more relevant. But I also came over from playing dps in wow, meters and parsing is common and expected somewhat in that games culture. I wanted to run from the rat race of damage and never go back. We aren’t free from it here, playing dps in ffxiv, it’s just more hidden.
I heal because I don’t want my damage output to be my contribution to the groups success. I want it to be my defensive and supportive choices and the management of the resources they consume to be my contribution. Healer 1st DPS 2nd, Not DPS 1st Healer 2nd. Not to say I want to strip away the everyone does damage, rather I don’t want an increase in the complexity of healer dps to be an increase of our percentage of group dps over current levels. Recovery and prog are fun because we engage with our healing not our damage.
My opinions are just my opinions though.
I started in Stormblood.
I don't really care if I as a healer am "unneeded and unnecessary"; my main concern is that whenever that is the case (as it often is), the game's just boring.
Completely and utterly banal, and as flavourful as the plainest oats.
The reason so many of us are chomping at the bit for more "DPS abilities" is because it's simply the most practical solution; we get more to engage with and SQEX doesn't have to rework/rebalance the past 6 expansions worth of content.
Having more supporting/buffing responsibilities would be far more ideal, but the game's quadrupled so far down this direction, that I don't really see such a thing being conceivable.
As someone who loved healing in WoW, your points about unengaged/disengaged are super valid to me
i’ve been playing since protect and stoneskin were a thing,
i watched your video and think you communicated your thoughts and opinions really well and made a lot of strong points !
i do feel differently, i like how healer has changed, it feels more fluid and less clunky to me. i enjoy healer in its current state but totally empathize and see where you’re coming from.
i do miss Selene though. that’s a point i will say i don’t enjoy , i miss the variety in scholar, the focus on dots, and how you could use either selene or eos :( i miss it so much
Smoother like your brain.
I tried healing for the first time as I've always wanted to try it and my cohealer said it would be the best time to do it since it's the first raid tier of the expac. And it's true what she said, "Healing is boring when your party knows what they are doing. It's more fun doing prog." So you hit the nail on the head, Rinon. I didn't start playing till SHB so i didn't know healing was so different. I've heard through the grapevine that healing haven't changed in a really long time.
Great video! I joined in 5.2 and played healer for about 5000 hours. In DT I swapped over to Picto and other DPS, and have been having way more fun. There is so much more to pay attention to and optimize on some DPS classes compared to healers, it is insane.
I've never really been hopeful anything will change, but after Yoshida's comments on the game state, and showing he was serious about it with a lot of the encounter design in DT so far, I will say I am more hopeful than I have ever been before. He himself said that it is hard to show off your mastery of a job with the way they've set it up so far, and wants 8.0 to bring back some more individuality. So I'll remain cautiously optimistic about the future of FFXIV healer jobs. If it doesn't work out in 8.0, I suppose I'll just continue to enjoy my DPS classes.
Thank you so much. I have a hard time explaining how I went from being a one-trick scholar (ARR-StB) to not playing healer at all in higher level content. This video pretty much covers any reason I can think of as to why I don't think healing is fun anymore.
SE designs healers assuming that they can try to convince players who pilot them "wrong" to play them "correctly", and i hope that one day, they realize that they're fucking it up for the rest of us in the name of chasing a windmill
the df astrologian who never uses cards cannot be convinced to play their job right no matter how much easier you make it, because that implies they believe they need help. they just don't care, nothing you can do will make them care
this is why i hate every comment about accessibility. if this healing was "accessible", you wouldn't be disbanding in every other PF because your healers don't want to press a cooldown they don't even have keybound! SE has been repeatedly forcing players to adapt to reworks and changes every expansion, for people who don't care, because to care would require them to have read any of the buttons on their hotbars in the first place!!!
@@nonemitigationexactly! accessibility and comfort are two different things! healing has not been made more accessible! it's been made more comfortable!
and that comfort is the result of sanding away the things that made those jobs interesting and engaging. accessibility is about aiding those who CAN'T do something so that they may join in. comfort is about catering to those who don't WANT to do something that they're plenty capable of doing.
but designing entirely around comfort only creates a more frustrating experience for everyone involved because now you're inviting people who don't care to try into playing with people who do- and that mismatch creates a lot of friction, way more than anything the jobs themselves posed to the players with their old designs
@@nonemitigation I really like how every try hard comment like this has to make up a healer to be mad about. Lovely strawman.
@@notGeistnormally id agree but this actually happened with M4S lol
I remember absolutely LOVING whm back in ARR. A healer with some power behind it? Sign me up.
Sure, when leveling THM to unlock WHM itself, and later other classes and jobs when bored, I realized the damage was still below actual dps, but it still felt great. Especially with fun things like several aeros, fluid aura, and even different levels of stone to mix it up.
Add in cleric stance adding in some risk vs reward decision making and you had a job I was in love with from start to finish. Different heals had different uses (freecure used to be huge because of how MP used to be) so healing was often times a thought of what was best for the situation since Cure III was costly and low reach, Medica II was a slow heal, and Medica had better reach for your aoe.
And dear gold ARR Holy was the absolute best. When combined with how many dps lacked in consistent aoe, the old damage was amazing to have. YOU were the dps during trash pulls.
Sadly the job has lost that magic almost entirely. Visually especially, I miss the elemental magic that we lost for all these light balls. Holy getting neutrered in damage overtime, but also got a visual and audio downgrade in Holy III, just makes me sad.
Also, does anyone else miss how MP used to be? I know it's by rights "better" now, but it just feels like MP management is out of my hands in favor of my spells all just being a flat percent of my pool.
As an Astro main, I'm not happy with the 1 shot and done cards. I miss being able to use the cards more than once per dungeon.
I miss stormblood scholar so much. 💔
This isn't just healer honestly. Every job is braindead with strict rotations or simple priorities. Job identity is gone, most job now work on the same burst window vs downtime, everything is timed around those burst windows. I'm at that point where I miss Reload and Dark Arts because, as clunky as they were, they made me feel like I was playing MCH or DRK. Instead I have BRD with more damage and edgy WAR. Even recently, my main NIN, got TenChiJin changed whit being able to move, while convenient, is another aspect of these job identity and quirks that is now gone.
Viper getting defanged 1 month after 7.0 is such a slap in the face. Good gods I miss SB era of job design. It wasn't perfect but I had way more fun than ShB jobs onward
Harrowing hell during every mechanic!
That, or more mechanics like looper. Interesting patterns of single target and aoe healing at strict timings. We need problems to solve and the typical design of "raid damage, wait 30s, raid damage" is quickly solved. That said, M4S had a pretty vicious string of raid damage. Ahk Morn > slams > ion cluster > slams and KB > Harrowing Hell. And then during phase 2, you had to keep an eye on tank health during mechanics. This is in contrast to EW raids, I feel.
Im a healer, and the only thing we need to talk about is this: WHY IN HELL I HAVE TO CLEANSE EVERY DEBUFF ONE BY ONE WITH A 2 SECOND GLOBAL COOLDOWN. WHY.
Honestly, Esuna should be ogcd. 0.7 second cast. Someone stands in bad breath and it does affect you a bit. You have to sit there for 4 seconds now, or actually heal and make the guy suffer for his mistakes if he doesn't know to eat the fruit.
luckily for you they’ve maybe esuna is an insta cast now
As a bard main i try my best to keep up with my cleansing ability bc of this
My quick fix, from my understanding by using this videos' info as a baseline:
- Put the Tank Invuln on the Healer kit, which in turn gives it to the tanks instead, promoting synergy and enabling more lethal tank damage output.
- Make Savage boss attacks crit, TB Auto Attacks and raidwides, randomly on an individual roll and lower the encounter DPS check to include deaths in the calcs.
- Give Nascent Flash also to healers and name it something healer appropriate, making them the powerhealers in dungeons instead of the Warrior.
The only thing I really want to do in XIV is play healers in a way that is fun an engaging no matter how hard or easy the content I play gets and to once again experience healing the way it used to be--not by reverting to old job design, but by seeing new job design that captures the magic and fulfillment that healing had before Shadowbringers. But I have sat on the cusp of completely giving up hope for now years, sometimes swaying back and forth between sides. I sincerely hope your voice signals change in the future sooner than in another 2 years, because I don't think there has ever been a more meaningful and important video on XIV healers than this one.
Hearing you talk about Stormblood SCH was a hit of nostalgia for me. SB was when I started the game and I've never been as engaged with jobs ever since. Call it rose-tinted goggles or whatever but the game really did reward you for learning intricacies and nuance back then, now it's just a whole lot of nothing.
rinon make a video without mentioning miasma 2 challenge: impossible
but i do agree, giving healer more offensive tools to OPT-IN to beyond spamming glare/broil/malefic/dosis
instead of *MORE* healing tools could do alot for the role.
that and maybe make MP management more interesting.
... maybe we do need miasma 2....
To bloat jobs even more? no thanks
Back in SB everyone complained that whm needed to gcd heal a ton more than sch and Astro. Everyone wanted them to change whm, so SQ gave us the upgraded Lilly system in SHB so that it was a de facto ogcd healing since it wasn’t a Dps loss.
My point is that I don’t think people are going to like how it feels to spend a bunch of your time gcd healing. They could have asked SQ to make SB sch and Astro like whm, but instead they wanted whm to be like sch and Astro.
I'm glad you touched on the AST changes, because the Dawntrail rework really killed my enjoyment of the job. The cards were far from perfect before, but having to make those decisions whenever I drew a card was the only thing that kept AST engaging as otherwise I'd just be mindlessly spamming Malefic. With all the variance and decision making stripped away from the job, it's now in the same spot as the other healers for me -- unengaging and frankly not fun in most situations, as you said. I really just want to have things to do and think about while playing healer, and unfortunately none of the healers in their current state provide that.
@@Naoto-kun1085 That's valid, honestly, and a compounding issue with AST is that since it keeps getting reworked every expansion, you end up with a bunch of different groups of people who all like different iterations of the job and want different things from it. I think it's gotten to the point that a huge amount of people will be unhappy with whatever they do with the job.
thank you bringing this up! its good that i am not the only one who thinks like this!
This is why I always had so much more fun with healing in WoW. On top of there being almost no homogeneity making each class feel varied and unique, unavoidable damage is much more prevalent, making you HAVE to actively heal much more. That, plus the lack of oGCDs and healers just having better damage kits is what makes healing so much more engaging over there.
Wow also puts much more dots for failed mechanics or mechanics that keep ticking if it is not resolved fast. This is much better than the vuln stacks and rezz spam gameplay for healers as seen in M3S case in this video.
I could never heal in WoW. There wasn't anyone I wanted to keep alive.
My engagement with healers was always minimal and I'm mostly a casual player who never did proper raiding in this game. I've noticed the gradual shift towards "encounter-based" design somehwere around the end of SHB and towards in trials and dungeons. It annoys me greatly as value of me as a player and my job only correlates with my knowledge of the said encounter. It's annoying and discouraging when you get punished for every minor mistake and it becomes boring when the fight is solved. There is not sweet spot and I really hope that this kind of approach shifts in the nearest future.
rinon love your content but i think these videos are starting to get a bit bloated. i’m more than eight minutes in and im only now starting to hear your first concrete point on the state of healing in 14. i understand the need for setup but this is just straining my attention a bit
regardless, i’m looking forward to watching the rest of the video and hearing your thoughts, just wanted to provide a bit of feedback
thanks for the feedback, noted, I wanted to take my time with my yap in this video to provide context just because I'm wary about being negative; I don't really like to be in general so I wanted to make sure I explained myself as best I could
Another banger Rinon video essay
thanks for the third essential dignity SE
dont worry, in 8.0 you will get 2 more stacks, another big ogcd aoe heal+mit and surecast cd will be decreased by 30 seconds!
Good video. The description regarding the mental cost is a perfect way to put it.
I've unfortunately just decided to take a break from the game at the moment. The fight design is improving, slowly. But you still feel like you're playing a redundant role. It took me half way through the savage tier to realise that there is no engagement past the first few pulls and with the amount of sustain tools jobs have for more casual content it just works against our kits.
I hope SE can figure it out. Because current savage aint it.
SB Scholar vs now is, to me, the perfect encapsulation of the problem. During SB fell in love with Scholar and almost became a healer main during the second year of SB because of it. When ShB released, seeing how much they had gutted Scholar caused me to effectively drop healing until DT. I really hope 8.0 breathes new life into job design as a whole, because ShB and EW steadily, systematically made most jobs hollow shells of what they were in SB.
oh crap... sorry.
I 100% agree with your initial thesis. FFXIV healing is a role where things feel worse the better your party gets at a fight.
Synergy between damage and heals is absolutely the key here.
Ultimately if healers are meant to do damage, they should have a rotation. Two buttons where one of them is doing the majority of the heavy lifting is not a rotation. Having a dot you reapply every 30 seconds is just extremely par for the course and isn't even worthy of note.
That said, it would be nice to see them branch out with the healer role in general. I joke that WAR is a green tank considering how much work Shake It Off and Nascent Flash can do to keep an entire team up if handled well. But that got me to thinking: why can't healers have an actual attack rotation where challenge comes from a similar spot to the Cleric Stance days of having to balance healing vs damage? Like a mirror to lilies, why not have damage skills that feed into potent healing options?
Healers are objectively both a DPS and healer role, and the DPS side of their kit being so chronically undercooked is wild at this point. If their two sides just played together more effectively, you could create interesting and dynamic situations where the solution to say a chain of raid wides isn't simply using your ample supply of oGCDs.
As someone who plays both WoW and FFXIV healing, I never want healers to not DPS, XIV just rarely has those moments of “oh shit I need to spam healing to save the group” unless something ABSOLUTELY goes terribly wrong, so the really basic DoT>Stone/Glare spam DPS rotation with an arsenal of instant healing for boo-boos is extremely un-engaging to me.
I miss back when I could control my fairy as a SCH and made macros after disabling her auto-cast and positioned her around constantly to heal various targets between me and her and it was so FUN.
Now we’re just green DPS with the most boring rotations in the game.
I've only been playing healer for extremes, but it's wild to me that as Scholar I have 7 buttons dedicated to buffing my gcd heals in some way, and not a single reason to press a gcd during either of the first two extremes. I figured the fact that every healer got a buff and brand new animation for their AoE heal meant they'd be more relevant, but apparently not. So far my most fun experience as a healer this game has been as Dancer, during a dungeon run where our healer dc'd mid final boss. Managing curing waltz, improv, and shield samba in a clever way to keep the viper and dark knight alive was so much fun
A dancer who uses curing waltz, you are a god
@Naoto-kun1085 what's stopping me is I've pressed an oGCD first and its handled the healing needed.
Simplification of healers is one of the main reasons why I left FF14 back in Endwalker. The role felt empty. Basic content was just spamming 1s and the dot with a oGCD to top off heals. I wore two buttons down on my controller due to just spamming Glare (Trigger R + A).
I jumped to WoW and the game feels like StB when it comes to role identity. I actually have kits seem whole. Almost all healers have "kicks" (stuns, interjects, knock-ups, etc.) that can be used to help the party as a form of mitigation. Almost everything is on the GCD. Some stuff is insta-cast, but have that GCD cooldown. Mana management is important, especially at higher levels of content. Each healer has a clear identity on how they heal: Holy Paladin building gauge to use on healing while in melee, Restoration Druid using HoTs to heal, etc.
I am glad I found healing sanctuary in WoW, I know that others don't want to go beyond FFXIV to find their healing sanctuary. I am hoping that those who like FFXIV can get their healing sanctuary back when it comes to healing.
Unfortunately, healing in XIV has been destroyed and the most shocking thing to me is that the majority of players - who do not play healer - just don’t care. Yet, water down one tiny aspect of any DPS job and they think the sky is falling. I’ve played since ARR and all of my healer friends have quit. I’m joining them now too. This game is no longer for people who enjoy healing and support.
Most healer’s can’t be trusted to play the simple baby healer job-I play WAR in all casual content because I can’t trust the healers who do expert or msq stuff. idk how I could be on board with them having a harder job to play
Tbf i dont want to be insulted over playing healer wrong when seeming its in its easiest state. Another knock on effect
@@misterbxivunfortunately, most of the experienced and skilled healer players gave up playing healer, either because of sheer boredom or to join in with the strike. What you have left now are healer newbies - who will need more time to develop skills - or people who play healer for quick queues but don’t know the ins-and-outs of the role (as flimsy and lacking as those are). People in the community who tell healers their problems don’t matter bear some responsibility for this situation too.
@@jameraxiv This just isn't true in the slightest. You gotta touch grass and get out of your ridiculous echo chamber.
@ Which echo chamber am I in? Edit: And which part isnt true?
Some anecdotes from me in Support here.
Back in StB it was actually exciting to run the level cap Dungeons on healer. At least for me it took a while to figure out how much resources to dump into a given trash pull, especially the big ones we were still allowed back then, to:
A) keep the party alive
B) deal dmg
C) have Enough ready for the boss.
We also actually had fun Healer only meme runs of thr ivalice raids.
These days, level cap Dungeons on sch are usualy rather boring on the healing Front. Even if people mess up mechanics it rarely taxes the whole kit. Let alone having to figure out how to deal with big pulls because SE is already stopping Tanks from pulling any actually interesting amounts of trash.
Can't comment too much on savage in Dawntrail so far, as my Casual static broke up over non-raid related drama mid tier.
We have this conversation about healing every few months, every expansion for the past three expansions. Yes the non-healing kits of healers are not robust enough to provide engaging gameplay at any level once people are not making mistakes and whatever changes to fight design in Dawntrail was never going to fix that 😭
@@Naoto-kun1085 "Nothing ever seems to be good enough for them" implies that something was ever done to address the complaints. That isn't the case, nothing has been done to change the core gameplay problem that has been complained about for years.
All of those old Scholar fairy actions being superfluous - Interrupts, AOE cleanses, etc - Is a very clear indication that FF14 encounters are not engaging enough on their own.
Healing can't improve until encounter design does.
Like it or not, 14's bosses being a set of memory game dances is the problem with tank and healer designs. You can't have interesting ways of tackling mechanics when timings are so reliable, and tools are so homogenized.
Sometimes I wonder if the "only being interesting when something goes wrong" problem is unavoidable because you can out plan just about anything. The rest of the party properly using their utility buttons is somewhat in competition with just-in-time healing being relevant, and the common solutions like followup damage to combo you out seems to have the difference between good and bad healers be too great
Then additionally, it seems like its fundamentally in competition with tanks and dps wanting any sense of agency over their living at all. It's really not fun to be completely 100% dependent on your healer when they let you down, but that situation does restore a lot of weight to your healing