Alright, here’s the last video in my series covering the jobs in each role in Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail. Today, we’re talking about the Healing jobs, and it’s a bit more of an honest rant than a calculated discussion.
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Outro Song: Strange Fantasy – Chaxti
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound
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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Introduction
0:24 A Slight Disclaimer
1:40 Rant Begins
30:55 Discussing a Reddit Post
source
I have mained Summoner for years and only in the past 2-3 years have i started playing around with Scholar and i recently discovered that even at higher levels you still have Ruin II in addition to your main DPS button which has made it a great deal more interesting just having that one extra button to press (i will usually pop it immediately after the main DPS button as a follow up)
"Mechanics in this game are pass/fail" this is a major part of the problem as I see it, they design really powerful healer jobs and then make content that is antithetical to having healers at all. Once you hit DT dungeons/trials a tank death isn't the healer's fault, it's a tank skill issue because the tank kits are so stupidly powerful and even boss damage is a joke.
White mage's less of the ogcd heals is pretty much the only reason I play any healers. I wish healers had less ogcds, especially when most content…. like 90% doesn't even need those ogcds most healers have. The whole just play ultimates / savage / whatever if you want to play a challenge on healer and heal…. which is a bit asinine to me. Why should the basic elements of a job be locker behind the content 1% of players actually engage with???? Like broooo?
Idk. I main BLM, WHM, and DRK. And this expansion so far has felt boring as fuck from a gameplay perspective, even with the more interesting (to a point) content design the gameplay cycle of all of my mains has become so dull and its discouraging.
I truly wish Healers in FF14 would've followed the path of WoW healers. Just doing the War Within story dungeons in easy mode, I healer more in one dungeon than I have healed in FF14 for years.
Also, with the capstone Lv100 abilities it's as if they do not know what to do with the healers anymore.
Lv100 Sage Philosophia: 3 mins cooldown to AoE heal passively as you do damage.
Discipline Priest in WoW: Power Word Radiance, almost same effect under a 18 secs cool down+ 2 charges.
Unfortunately they are not going to drastically change the healers for they would have to re writte the whole dynamics from all the fights beginning from zero.
I mean listening to the rant a bit there is more then just what you say for the healer dps rotation i just cant help but hear you speak on a subject you dont even know about i know you said your a casual player but to complain and ask for changes when you dont even know what your talking about is kinda crazy. Granted, i understand healing is not as fun as it can be, but objectively, your points are not great simply because you dont really know how to play the classes you're talking about. No offese tho man, i did enjoy the video. And im gonna look at more of them. Commenters pls reply if you want to discuss
20:00 Don't conflate Bad design with boring one. Healing kits are well designed in FFXIV, but they are boring.
Capstone abilities are so weird this expac.
Divine Caress would be amazing to have as WHM, but its linked to Temperance for no reason.
Philosophia has same problem as Dissipation. It buffs GCD healing, but its AoE Kardia… meaning you have to deal dmg to get aoe kardia, but it buffs gcd healing…
Seraphism is amazing, but its on a healer that already has insane tools without it.
Sun Sign is just another 10% ogcd mit on an ogcd healing god.
Another problem is WHM Liturgy works in comparison to AST Macrocosmos.
Both are 180s LV capstone abilities, but only one of them simply works all the time and other is dependent on Whm itself taking dmg that has to be perfectly spaced to make sure Bell actually works.
Most people complaining about healers haven't played them in extreme, let alone savage/ultimate/unreal – so I tend to take most of the ranting (not specifically yours) with a pinch of salt. If people are bored when healing, then try to maximise DPS or seek out harder content. It's not really the jobs fault if you're doing story/easy content, because at higher levels of content they need to use all of their toolkit unless their static is very good and very organised.
The problem with these types of roles in many MMO's are that you can either have mechanically complex bosses and easy rotations OR complex rotations and easy bosses – you can't really have both, except to cater to < 1% of players. There's no way a healer could pull of a dps style rotation whilst healing/progging savage or ultimate. The issue in FF14 is that healers are expected to do DPS and the fights are tuned for that, whereas in WoW, not so much. The solution, IMO is to either reduce boss health, increase dps damage output and make healers actually have to heal more and not worry about DPS – they should be casting ogcd heals and be more active in healing throughout the fight.
I've seen so many wipes because healers are trying to maximise DPS – and that's a game design fault and a player mentality fault (caused by the game). They simply need to force healers to actually heal and not focus on DPS, DPS should be a secondary concern – keeping your team alive to do it should be your primary concern. Sadly, the fights aren't designed like that – although this could easily be changed.
Edit: I said this before watching the vid, and we're basically both saying the same thing, roughly (still haven't finished it yet). As you said, there are big spikes of damage, then nothing – the spikes could stay, but we need more regular raid/player damage to actually force healers to heal.
Hit the nail on the head. Healing sucks in 14. Forced to squeeze out as much damage as possible while having 3-4 damage spells at most. Absolutely sleeper.
Scholar has pprobably the best kit atm in combination with Astro. The fact SCH gets a party srpint with buff is pretty powerful and on top of that has a more dmg dealing abilities and combos than others.
My issue was very simple, and it's part of why I quit playing to go back to old mmo's. When I started playing 14 in 2016 I found the idea of healers needing to contribute to the dps check refreshing for about two years. When they started revolving pve content around demanding healer dps and less on doing what their role is named after, it started losing its luster. It got to a point where I saw healers complaining whenever they had to hard cast a heal, as a healer. It just made them feel like a green dps with only a few dps spells, this was the same issue I eventually had with tanks where there was nothing unique that tanks had to do, they became blue dps who occasionally have to press a mitigation or taunt. The removal of threat management in shadowbringers was my personal last straw and playing any tank job became boring.
As much as I hear it's just nostalgia talking, these issues are why I finally stopped playing 14 entirely last year and went back to vanilla/tbc wow. No the pve content isn't as difficult as savages or ultimates, but the roles feel unique from each other. Tanks have to juggle threat management because healers and dps can rip threat off of you easily unless you properly pay attention and manage each mob's threat bar, plus proper mitigation, plus spacial awareness to avoid pulling too many mobs or slowing/stunning mobs that attempt to run away towards another trash pack. Healers have to focus on healing, mana is very much an issue and using up that mana on damaging spells can mean you oom at a bad time. In several ways the tanks and healers in 14 are antithetical to what the roles originally were. Personally I also miss having a class/job that focused on support instead of dps, or dps with occasional mitigating, or dps with set ogcd usage.
……I’ve reached to where….I’m a healer main, I see the same ol’ complaints. If I was Yoshi-p and the team. I would ignore it at this point. Didn’t use healing tools, well got the fights where you can, complaint. Made it to where the ogcds was too strong, fights have constant dot dmg land high dmg w/o mits, complaints. It’s getting dumb at this point. It’s why I didn’t took the strike seriously months ago. This is where ppl needs to take a break from the game.
I find it surprising how many people actually like the 1-2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-1-1-1-1-… Spam. It is suddenly clear to me why SE thinks it's okay to dumb down and remove all interesting mechanics from jobs, there are actually people that like it? Whenever you see some crayon eater in your dungeon that's level 100 on all jobs and still just presses cure I the entire encounter? That one guy that just spams ruin 3 with no summons? The dude not using any tank cooldowns in your dungeon? These people were there all along I just zoned them out. Holy shit, what an epiphany, the 1-1-1-1-1 enjoyers of the world were right before my eyes and I didn't see them because I choose to believe they didn't – couldn't be real people. I just assumed they were bots.
Really good video. I started FF14 as a Scholar at the tail end of Shadowbringers so I never got to experience what many SCH see as its golden age in Stormblood, but I did get to experience the 2.5 cast time era. I started doing Savage and Ultimate in Endwalker and it was pretty fun for awhile. I was just starting to really learn the ins and outs of SCH and the Healer role at the high end so it didn't get boring for awhile. Then I did UWU around 6.4, and maybe it was the level 70 kit restraining me, but I really started to notice how little I did and how boring it was. I was in a static and I started resenting my fellow players for making mistakes because everything was so simple and boring as a healer since I only had to focus on the boss and mechanics. I understood it was irrational since the DPS still had rotations and stuff to think about aside from mechs during the fight, but I still resented it. It made me realize the gulf between me and the DPS, I hardly dig deep into any other DPS jobs aside from leveling them to 90.
When I finished UWU and later went onto Pandaemonium tier 3 and UCoB/TEA I couldn't help but notice how bored I constantly was with the job. It made me sad because Healer was so new and fun when I first started. I wish they brought back some form of engagement. SCH with the level 100 kit feels so much more jank with 3 layers of kit incompatibility. At least in EW it was just Dissipation not synergizing with the fairy. It's such a shame because, according to every SCH main I've ever talked to, Stormblood SCH was amazing. They didn't care that Stormblood had jank because it was so fun.
And I feel like Square Enix is in a very difficult position on what to do because the problem won't be solved by job reworks in 8.0. It has to be an entire role rework. Because I think you're right that 8.0 is CBU3's last chance with healers. If nothing changes then I don't see the future of the game being very healthy. We were promised that the fights themselves will be different enough for healers to feel engaged. But aside from Valigarmanda with its many raidwides and phase long DoT, we haven't seen any of that. FRU has some cool healer stuff with that spicy DoT in phase 1 as well as other cool stuff but I think its unfair to point to ultimate. 99% of players won't ever do that content.
So yeah it's a tough issue and I feel like Yoshi P really needs to make a hard decision. No matter what decision he makes someone won't be satisfied. But I think for the health of the game Healer as a role needs a rework. At least for me I have a happy ending because I planned to swap to Pictomancer from the very start of DT after seeing its reveal and I'm having a blast with it. I really hope I can return to the role and to SCH particularly in the future though.
so you don't play healers…how are you able to give a good opinion on healers?
So this is an issue which unfortunately has 1 solitary answer, and that's don't play healer. Now before anyone reading this gets all hissy fitty, understand this, I say this as someone who has played healer in more MMOs than I can remember, but most notably, SWTOR, WoW, XIV and ESO as the big ones. That said, Sage is constantly used as one of the benchmarks in this vid and how it functions as a healer that can deal damage to heal so I'm going to explain a very real issue that happened in WoW with this.
At one point, Discipline Priest in WoW, from either MoP or WoD through Shadowlands, had become a healer that applies a buff for a time period called Atonement, and when the healer deals damage, it heals for a portion of that damage. This was very much a fun in execution deal HOWEVER it came with the caveat of it couldn't do jack shit without a target. If there was nothing to dps, its heal kit was DEAD because all of its heals were such a small fraction, that the 40% damage off of its DoT healed for more. This made Disc priest an amazing healer that had HUGE faults in phases of no target. In WoW there are dungeon difficulties called Mythic and Mythic Plus, in these you do pretty much the same as heroic just scaled up. During Shadowlands, there was a dungeon in which a boss would start doing a big of negligible DoT, and in most cases could be ignored HOWEVER you had to also grab an item, and catapult it at the boss (by actually aiming) and she moved, so you could miss, and had to wait for the item again. This meant the more shots you missed, the worse it got, and now this 'healer' isn't a healer anymore and is just as useless as a corpse. And this is just one example, there are plenty of bosses like this, not enough to make up the majority, but enough for it to be more than just a glaring issue.
ESO is probably the most 'different' healer MMO if you want something different as there's a variety of tools where you have dps healers and pure healers, and the game plays more ARPG in a sense with combat being very action based. This is going to be your absolute best bet at a different take on healers, but overall, you're not going to see differences in healers in games in general because like tanking, healing doesn't have a variety of ways to perform it. You can think of a million different ways to kill something, but the best way to deal with being sick is to take the pill and rest up, and that's the issue. If you don't like the idea of having a variety of tools to heal with and execute content with, then healing isn't for you. This is a blanket issue (for those that do have issue with it) across RPGs. Hell if you look at the Hero Shooter genre, it largely is the same with like 3-5 different ways of being a healer but at the end its all different shades of green.
The TL;DR is if you don't like healing in XIV you won't like healing in other games because at the end of the day they're all the same, even if the SLIGHTEST bit different, it's still the same. You're best moving on to another role, or another game.
"How do you heal less and DPS more" has been the only challenge to healing since 2.0. Arguably, that's kind of the optimization that all healers want to work toward. Finishing an encounter faster is never a bad thing, and optimization involves using your kit as efficiently as possible, which will always boil down to healing less and dpsing more.
Healing in FF14 is better or at least amongst the best in all mmo, don't pretend otherwise. What "kills" the healer class is the lack of meaningful support skils like astro had back in the day. The dev teams absolutely dreads something that gives you attack speed or more % dps.
All the healing support abilities are more potent shields, clutch healing, and, minor mitigation. ALL OF THEM have the exact same pattern plus the only offensive abilities are just a 1 button single target attack, another for AoE , and a DoT ability 😂.
Astro still feels like the only kind of "unique" healing class with the minor buffs, but even so is fairly similar.
Nevertheless the healing job IS NOT a dps job, but the only thing they can do is to add at least a true 1-2-3 so they have more offensive options OR change their supportive abilities to something more unique.
The main issue 14 has with its content design is that it's too dps centric. The fact that you're mainly just a green or blue dps is a major problem of 14's health, this doesn't mean to not dps when there's downtime, but the dps kit is too limited to sustain the content design of 14. If the devs would make specific mechanics for both healers and tanks made specifically for them, this could help by actually making you use parts of your kit that normally sit there waiting to be used.
For the job designs, they're alright, but it'd better if they could be better utilized in the content they made. One of the first things I would recomend is limit non healer healing abilities. There can be some self-sustain, but the amount of heals that's in the dps and tank roles need to be reigned back significantly. Stuff like mantra is fine, but curing waltz, phoenix, and arcane crest should be looked at for a redesign. This doesn't get to the problem that're the tanks, especially warrior.
That said the healer kits are pretty similar for damage with some small uniqueness, but they're all sitting around the same number of offensive spells and abilities. With how dot design is right now, a 2nd dot won't help, and any ability that has a lengthy recast has a similar issue with adding another 30s dot. The reason why multiple dots worked in earlier expansions was because of their shorter dot length.
As the healers are, scholar and sage are increadibly similarly designed, that I really think it just comes down to personal preference to what you want to play. I personally find white mage and astro to be the more engaging healers to play. Some nice things I can say about each healer, I like how the lilies work with how the turn healing into damage. I just want to know where the community's minds were when misery came out if it was dps negative all this time since it came into the game in shadowbringers. It does reduce some of the skill identity for me with the number change. I love the card system and intricate nature of astro's healing abilities. It's also nice that it's the one healer that doesn't run on a resource system like the other 3 healers. Scholar has increadible burst healing that's guaranteed every minute if used with emergency tactics and recitation. It's pretty much a benediction every minute or 15s if you're lucky with your crits. I just think making the faerie guage work in reverse would be more interesting than how it does right now. Sage has some nice skill expression with how you can use kardia, and both haima and panhaima are very interesting and useful abilities. Almost every spell being the same potency as dosis is disappointing imo. It doesn't make them as interesting as they could be.
the kardia auto swapping idea would be hilarious because the fart sniffers would still complain about keeping kardia on the tank despite it have being out of the user's control
change to WHM i would make to ruin it further, make all liilly actions OCGDs , people will waste the lilly solely to proc as many blood lillies as possible for extra damage, thus by proxy, WHM can't heal (except bene and tetra) if you are parsing damage
As someone who used to main healers back in ARR and HW, I despise healers now. I find them so braindead boring. I also have experienced healing FFXI and WoW as well (casual and hardcore both), I get SO BORED when I try to play a healer here, whether it's harder content or casual content. Cleric stance and additional dps buttons we used to have are sorely missing. In my perfect world I'd want both back, but I'll settle for at least a couple more rotational damage gcds. Tanks to me have a very similar issue as well. I used to enjoy stance dancing and keeping hate on everything with enmity combos and cycling the buff/debuff combos, it was a minigame unto itself like you said when you gave the DNC example. They've slowly given tanks at least SOME fun back, but only DPS have any real sticking power for me now.
Man it must be amazing not to have been around for heavenward and stormblood before shadow bringers…a lot of you blame the dev for over simplifying classes…… naw bro that's the player base fault for crying that healing and tanking were way too hard. Healers use to have more attacks, and stance change to affect heals and damage. Healers use to be unique…..then shadow bringers happened to add insult to the already wounded horse. You have ppl still complaining that healing is too easy….you don't and probably won't understand how the game was before shadow bringers and mind you this is the same community that got dancer nerfed we haven't seen dancer anywhere near as fun as shadow bringers dancer…..
If you're going to comment that you actually like the 111111111111112 11111111111 gameplay of healers, I'd like to say something honest and true that I can't say in game:
You are a lesser form of life, and should seek to improve yourself.
A common argument I see for healers is that you need to play ""harder content" to get more enjoyment out of playing them but the casual player base is not doing that harder content like savage or ultimate. Healer needs to be fun at whatever you are doing, including easier content like dungeons or msq. Healers have way too many buttons to solve the problem of healing where in casual content you can get by fine without ever really making full use of your healing kit and the only thing left to do is hit the same button over and over. Tanks are a good middle ground between dps and support where they have a robust rotation as well as a multitude of skills for tanking to perform both dps and tanking responsibilities.