Its no secret that Mike has been playing MMOs for a long time and has a storied history of raiding in WoW. So when it comes to FF14âs raiding, people often ask what is like, what do you enjoy about it. Today Mike talks about it.
IN ADDITION. Preachcon 2022 is happening and tickets will be on sale tomorrow evening at 7pm BST, so stop by the stream.
ALSO. On 25th June, we are throwing a PVP Tournament in FF14, its gonna be awesome.
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Gear: https://preachgaming.com/shop/
Twitter: @Preachgaming
Live Stream â twitch.tv/preachlfw
Website: https://preachgaming.com/
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Evening Everyone. The Shadowbringers video is basically done but we needed this one to go out today so that video will be up on Sunday for y'all.
In other news, Preachcon tickets go on sale tomorrow evening at 7pm BST so make sure to drop by the stream if you fancy hanging out with the team and the community.
Finally we also have a PVP tournament coming to FF14 on 25th June – I hope you all enjoyed the silly little animation I made for it; a nice little homage to the Overwatch league/world cup visually. The tournament is only for the Crawlers this first time around, but we welcome you all to come and watch the craziness.
Loved the PvP intro with the statues. Well done
bruh are you kidding? the intro with the statues looks fucking amazing
A lot of players whine about healers in 14, saying its 1-2 button dps and boring dps rotations. They fail to appreciate the challenge of healers in 14, is keeping party alive with all those tools WHILE keeping the GCD rolling on dps. You are simple dps that's also a healer. If devs make healer dps rotation complex, now you've got two active things that require more attention, as compared to other roles. There would be far less players wanting to be a healer.
It's interesting hearing Mike talk about healers as a veteran healer. Cause yea, when you first learn to heal, its super fun. Unfortunately, I feel like healing just gets more boring the better you get at it, and every fight devolves into "1 button spam with the occasional OGCD." Hearing a new healer's perspective makes me want to somehow recapture that feeling.
As a healer in wow I have always gauged my performance on how much dps Iâm doing. Like as long as no one dies then Iâve done my job right, and I think that mindset is why I absolutely love healing in FF. I started as a scholar and after maxing that I did AST to try out regain healing⊠gotta say shield healing is my preferred choice and I am currently loving Sage
I play a Druid in WoW and have since TBC, before was a Tauren Shaman. I never liked Healing in WoW and honestly did it for the first time in Legion for the Mage Tower to get the achievement for all specs. I have healed more in FFXIV than WoW and actually enjoy it.
Are you coming back to wow for dragonflight
I personally prefer tanking in FF as healing makes me stressed out and i make mistakes and i do not like that feeling but glad yu like it m8 GG
I feel like you're enjoying healing BECAUSE you're playing SCH. AST/WHM are super boring and watered down from what they once were, and SGE just feels weak compared to SCH.
Mike. Try warrior tank please. When you get to level 82-90 you can actually try doing dungeons without a healer because bloodwhetting is hilariously good. Its really fun.
I'm sure he'll find out but ff14 end game healing is just dpsing with off gcds healing, you only break that when people fail
I really hope the next healer in ff will have a more intricate dps rotation. It doesnt need to be super engaging but right now every healer is the same in terms of single target damage. Its really boring. Sure you have your moment where you actually push your buttons but besides that its just meh. Im not talking about dungeon situations where you use aoe abilities
It's weird because I do not like healing in dungeons. Nothing about it is fun to me. I'd much rather brain off dps as like Summoner or something there. But anything bigger than a 4 man instance and I only want to heal. It's either a Sage day or a White Mage day and that is all that matters to me. Really enjoyable stuff.
I'll be tuning into that PvP contest for sure. You guys doing custom matches? If so, it would be cool to know who's competing.
Very interesting, your take on healers is great, but skewed more towards shield healers (sch/sage) I feel Regen healers (especially whm) actually mitigate a lot of what you said about when things go wrong (i.e whitemage being able to cast a rezz for 0 mana if they know what they're doing) but are a bit worse at doing the stuff you like , the setup and all that. Probably natrual you gravitated towards SCH tbh, in a good way.
YEEESSSS!!
I'd say that tanking becomes really interesting/tight when you go up to Savage level difficulties. You'll be needing to plan out your defensive cooldowns even more importantly, and timing things out with your co-tank on who should tank and mitigate what because of your individual cooldowns and such. It's a totally different experience from dungeon and even extreme trials healing, and I hope you get to try it out too sometimes.
Glad to see Mike is also enjoying the raids and healing experience.
I know some people complain about healer's simple dps rotation and maybe that is a valid criticism for when you've learnt the content and all that's left is to optimise (i.e. spam glare/broil). BUT, for the life of me when progging new fights healing is EASILY the most engaging role for me. You are engaging with the dance of the fights mechanics while also taking care of your party, improvising and hopefully helping to fix any of their mistakes, learning which mitigation work best in relation to the boss's mechanics, and hopefully enabling the team to prog just that little bit further into the fight to see a new mechanic; it just seems super impactful and is the most fun way for me to learn a new fight.
It's not just for high end content either, some of my favourite healing experiences in FF are when a new alliance raid comes out and trying to heal through the chaos of a 24 man raid where no one knows the mechanics, rezzing that red mage so they can help out with rez's, etc, it's sublime chaos.
Great vid as always – cheers.
Hey mike, nice to see you talking about healers! Been playing as a healer main in FFXIV since 2.X, and it's definitely my favorite aspect of playing the game as well. For the most part, I think you've described the general feel of playing a healer pretty well. Ultimately, the role in FFXIV comes down to resource and crisis management. What do you use at what times, and how do you deal with strenuous circumstances.
However, I did want to leave a post going into a bit of some of the specifics about how I personally think of healers in FFXIV. As someone who's never played WoW, it might give you a bit more of a perspective un-affected by the influence of WoW.
The main aspect I wanted to talk about is resource management. You placed a lot of emphasis on MP in this video, and while I won't claim that MP doesn't matter at all in FFXIV, it's often not much of a concern for most healers operating at higher end content, I find. Healers these days tend to have enough tools to keep their MP up so long as you hit the "give me my MP" button (Lucid Dreaming) whenever you're at 50-75% MP. Of course, raises and things going really bad changes this, but that's really in the worst-case scenario, and even then, if you're playing half-decently (IE, doing damage instead of spamming GCD heals) you'll probably be fine.
I think that the most valuable resources, and really the only one's worth being concerned about, for healers in FFXIV are their GCD, and oGCD spells and abilities. Like you said, Healers in FFXIV are more like sub-DPS that make sure the party doesn't die. Doesn't matter how low the party goes, if they have 1 HP, the healer's going their job. Since healer's role in a party is sorta binary (live or die, nothing in between), the difference between a good and bad healer in FFXIV is pretty much decided by DPS numbers alone. As such, a healer's theoretical max performance is if a healer has 100% DPS GCD uptime (SCH technically also needs to spend all their aetherflow on Energy drain for max performance but… well… there's a reason I'm not a fan of SCH, lol). This essentially means that the fewer GCD heals that a healer performs, the better, which then puts much more of an emphasis on a healer's oGCD abilities.
That's the gist of it anyway, and you can probably already see some of the issues with this just by reading the explanation I've given, such as "well then why do I have all these SCH shields if being the best SCH means I never use them except as a last resort or to save a GCD for later?" This is the problem with a lot of healer design that I think the FF team needs to solve, because it's a really common issue for healers. Except in down-time with nothing to attack, I very rarely ever need to use a GCD heal as any healer. Savage and Ultimate is more likely to get you to press those buttons but dungeons in particular don't require any. I always have tanks double-pull, and I often never need to GCD heal unless someone messes up bad as long as I'm on my A game.
I also think that the FFXIV devs still don't quite understand how to intergrate damage into the healer playstyle. For years they refused to make DPS an expected part of a DPS's kit in content, and now that they are starting to embrace it, results have been… mixed. Toxicon, for example, is pretty much useless outside of the time between dungeon pulls, and they've had a really hard time making Energy Drain (which they tried to remove at one point) fit well into SCH. I'm also a bit salty about the buff to Afflatus Misery as a WHM main. It's made WHM way too easy, and taken a lot of the fun out of the lily system. Sure, the job is better in terms of numbers, but it's much more boring to play.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on healers. Agree or disagree with them, I hope they give you something to think about. Regardless, glad to see you hop aboard the green DPS train.
You might really enjoy playing Sage if you like the proactive healing playstyle. Flashy and fun
ASTRO is my love. It's one of my favorite classes. I love gunbreaker too but ASTRO is just so fun
I love healing in FD, but I wish there was more to do other than "keep dot up and spam single target" during most non- savage fights.
If they cut down the number of buttons (skills) to half of nowadays', then I would play a healer. I am lazy in gaming. I think every jobs and roles should have their no. of skills cut down in half.
Playing a little bit of WotLK on private servers to prepare for classic wrath for a bit makes me realize how much of a meme FFXIV PvP is. Yes, it's way better than retail WoW but doesn't hold a candle to old Wrath PvP.
I have to say, as a SCH playing well, and knowing the fights, really allows your toolkit to shine. Personally, SGE, while still a shield healer, really does allow you to maintain shields and react more as opposed to SCH where your playstyle is more predicated on knowing when to use what. I find that design philosophy fantastic with the healers in FF XIV. AST is a treat!
Man telling me all the classes can battle res must be nice Iâm just waiting in wow for all healers being able to silence
This makes me feel super conflicted. On one hand, I love FF (have been playing for years and raiding savage, warrior main baby) and I'm super happy that Mike is enjoying it. On the other hand, man has played some old extremes and seems to have rather pre-emptively made up his mind on the entire healing affair.
Personally, I think healing in FF is actually super boring compared to WoW's endgame, with the complexity of "dot every 30s, spam glare / broil / whatever". I think for healing to be more interesting, either damage needs to be ramped up in savage content, or the dps rotation needs to be fleshed out more, as the amount of time spent spamming glare isn't exactly interesting. Healers in my static feel the same way
Honestly this feels like yet another "WoW bad, ffxiv good" video, which I don't disagree with in some aspects, but I feel missed the mark here
Always played DPS in games and was nervous to play healer. I finally got the nerve a few years ago and made a white mage and what do ya know I've been a white mage main ever since! Love healing in FFXIV!
Glad you're liking healer! Sage should be really fun for you as well .Scholar was my first class and is still one of my favorites.
I think one thing it's important to consider in FFXIV raiding is that there really are two very, very different ways to go about it. If you approach raid content purely through the lens of it being blind prog, then healing is an absolutely blast, and if the dps rotation was any more complicated I think it would make things an utter mess. Doing blind prog you're trying to figure out optimal rotations, when and where you need to be and who needs to be healed. When you need to mitigate, when you need to spend cds. There are a ton of moving parts and it's a massive puzzle to work out how to keep yourself and the team alive, or even just how to keep the tank alive long enough to see more mechanics. While ultimately it will be a dance fight, during blind prog you don't know the dance – you're choreographing the thing as you go. It's usually less obvious to work out the rotations than what Tanks and DPS need to do.
The second kind of raiding is the mechanical challenge. It's not choreographing the dance, it's simply performing the steps to something already solved. Healing is… less exciting here. It's all been worked out, and you're most likely doing nothing but oGCDs heals at fixed times weaved between a boring DPS rotation.
Remember that Mike is approaching raiding purely from the lens of blind prog. He's not going back and farming anything. He's not using guides to "learn the steps" beforehand. He's working out the fight as it's happening, and once he gets the clear he's moving onto the next one. The majority of players do not blind prog the hardest content. They watch a guide, or have an experienced player (who probably watched a guide) walk them through it. So when he is talking about how amazing healing is in FFXIV raiding, he's absolutely correct from where he's sitting doing blind progs – there's a lot going on, a lot to work out, and a ton of personal responsibility – for most fights it's more than the Tanks or DPS roles in terms of how clutch you can be for making the difference between a clear and wipe which is what I feel Mike enjoys.
Hmmm I'm expecting Brian or maybe sfia? To be one of the tournament caster ? Since theyre like veterans raid/pvp ?
I love healing and tanking. I have a hard time having fun as dps. I'm going through msq as a ninja and I do all the duties and roulettes as White mage and warrior. I originally did this because of queue times, but now I prefer healing and tanking over dps…well mostly healing. I'm currently at the end of heavensward.
Healing only good your first year or so healing, not even expansion. After that, you will know true despair of one-button spamming dps rotation and being unable to breakaway for the static healer moniker. Seriously tho, healing is dogshit in this game, and that's coming from a healer main who plays all 4.
Good insights into the differing playstyles between WoW healing and FFXIV healing. One valid criticism of FFXIV healing is that it actually becomes too easy once you map out your cooldowns to the fight's mechanics, and as a result, you spend 90% or more of your GCDs playing an over-simplified DPS character. There is some truth to that, especially when it comes to highly skilled players in EX and Savage fights, but as Yoshi-P said when confronted with this criticism: if you want healing to be more engaging and more focused on healing, go play Ultimate fights where the amount of incoming raid damage is dramatically higher.
I enjoy playing all 3 roles, although I personally find DPS the most engaging due to the relatively deep and complex rotations in FFXIV compared to WoW. There is a whole world of optimization you can go for to improve your damage output, and it really benefits the group to push that extra damage in early Savage clears and Ultimate fights. TBH, tanking can be a bit boring in Extreme fights, but give it another try in Savage and you'll see how it almost feels similar to a healer in terms of protecting the group by using your utility spells appropriately, combined with more complex rotations than healers have access to.
I hope you get around to sage, some time. I started playing ff14 mid SHB and did MSQ as white mage. Was super fun but I took to sage super quickly and it's been straight addicting to play. Especially as you said you loved disc priest (I know sch is the same kinda idea, but yea).
this turned from raiding to healing comparison between WoW and FFXIV. Not complaining but ironic nonetheless.
Healers are actually kinda in a bit of an unfortunate state in FFXIV's design. What Mike described of the gameplay in this video is true… of lower difficulty content and low-to-mid level play. But once you get up into the harder Savage fights and Ultimate, the entire fight starts to get so tightly scripted that that outlook falls apart a bit. There's frequently not room for the type of "I used the wrong cooldown/someone took damage they weren't supposed to, now I'm in triage mode" gameplay Mike mentioned, because if that happens things are generally already starting to snowball out of control and the pull is already a lost cause. You either play it perfectly according to your script, or you try again, with very few opportunities for anything in-between.,
I think Jeathebelle put it best while chatting in a recent stream, but the core problem with healers is that when you play correctly, they're boring. You can design fights such that most healing happens in bursts, with extended downtime in between, where the gameplay is about maximizing your cooldown usage. And you can design healer jobs to have very simple DPS kits, to not distract from doing the whole "keeping the party alive" thing. But when you do both, like we've had for the last couple expansions, you're left with a situation where playing healers correctly means 80% of your button presses are the same button, because the only thing you have available to you to do between heals is just… spam Broil/Glare/Maelific/Dosis more. The easy point of contrast is how SCH worked back in HW, when we had 5-6 DoTs on different timers to manage: not a strict rotation that would distract from healing duties, but enough maintenance of the desynced timers that the only time you ever fell back to "spam Broil more" was when you were really bored.
Being able to be the party's course-corrector as a Red Mage who manages their mana correctly and raises anyone who dies is so satisfying. Sometimes I even raise players who aren't even in my party in Alliance Raids. As someone who prefers to DPS I love the hyrbid DPS/healer design of classes like Red Mage and Balance Druid because it lets me be useful. I've been wondering lately if Devastation Evokers will be in the same niche due to the new talent trees although I still haven't decided if I'll go back to WoW at all yet.
I wonder if Mike's opinion about healing will change as he gets more experience with it and learns to optimize a bit more. Even though I enjoy healing, outside of ultimates and early progression the gameplay can definitely get dull when you realize almost all damage in the game in Savage and below (on farm anyway) never pushes you to GCD heal or shield anything (discounting WHM Lilies since they're either DPS neutral or a gain depending on raid buffs), and you're rarely under threat of running out of the free or almost free tools in any given fight across all the healers. The role feels a lot more fun to play if you respond to every instance of damage with a shield, a spot heal, or whatever, but it can lose some luster when you realize almost all of it is entirely unnecessary and just a DPS loss. The most recent tier has a few moments of fun damage output but the new 90 skills tend to instantly resolve most of them, which worries me a bit for the future of the role.
He seems to be aware of some of this but just watching the gameplay he looks quite fresh to the role so I hope he still enjoys it as time goes on since I think it's unique and fun in its own way, it just might not be exactly what it seems like to him at the moment.
But Mike… Have you tried… Blue Mage? You'll never go back once you try Savage BLU raiding/
If you like Scholar you'll probably also like Sage! Astrologian as well. Perfectly timing Earthly Star is the best thing in the game
THE KWEHSTALINE CONFLICT!? đ€Łđ€Łđ€Ł
Thank you! I've been saying that forever to people who shy away…healing is fun in 14. I've been a WHM ever since I beta tested the game back in the day and I've learned there are different ways you can have your own kind of healing style the way you play. If you find a way you think it's fun AND you can keep people alive cause you know you're a healer, go for it! đđ€Ł
Yo Preach you should give PLD a try, very supportive tank. Line up Divine Veil, a health shield, with healer buffs like physis, timing and lining up your passage of arms, and the ability to provide intervene or cover to save specific raid members. Plus the DPS rotation of PLD is genuinely fun with constant engagement
Love the PvP ad! That was great! Sucks I'm on NA not EU lol. I always main'd a healer all trough WoW (also played since Vanilla) and that carried to FFXIV, I enjoy healing in both games! But my biggest upside with FFXIV is changing jobs so easily on one char. I had one of every class max level in WoW when I left, but with all the problems with alts, I never really got to try many of them out. I got into a static in FFXIV that was full on healers, so I tried SUM and I've loved it! People like to bash on SUM because it's "too easy" but that's exactly why I love it, so I can learn mechanics and pay attention to the room/boss without stressing my rotation. DPS was always way too stressful/gatekept in WoW and so I never did it in end game content, therefore wasn't worth going through the 20 hoops to get your character "viable" to do it.
I felt the same, never really liked healing in WoW, it felt messy, but in FFXIV it feels like you're in perfect rhythm with the fight.
So interested to see preach pick up the other healers as out of all them SCH was my least favourite.
You really should give Sage a try. I think you will really love it!
He hit the nail on the head. Healing in savage/extreme raids is like juggling, and when it all goes right, its bliss.
It's actually refreshing to hear this. White Mage main – lately I've been hearing lot of people talk bad about healers but much like as you said it's the play style I gravitate towards most.