Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Rungle]

I disagree on a few points. TBN's low CD is contrast to the fact it actively hampers your damage if it doesn't break and using it on CD is not effective vs most things, outside of wall to wall pulls where Warrior is better because Nascent Flash is busted with good use of Chaotic Cyclone and far out performs TBN. So its low CD is misleading, outside of wall to walls, because you can't consistently break TBN with boss autos and thus it isn't free like just about every other tank CD in this game.

Second shields vs DR mitigation depend on how much damage you take within that short duration of time. If RI reduces more than around 42,500~ damage as a 16%ish DR(due to multiplicative stacking with tank trait), as TBN is roughly that strong with current tank hp, then RI is as good as TBN and doesn't potentially cost anything to use. If the boss has something like buster into big cleave (Alexander Prime is an example of this), 42.5k~ isn't that hard to reach or at least get very close that they're at least comparable CDs. Nascent on your co tank/party member is similar as you can restore a decent chunk of hp and reduce damage by 10% for the duration and with Inner Chaos it isn't hard to heal a good portion of that 42.5k~. Unlike TBN you can just press these CDs whenever because they actually do cost nothing to use. Now finally Equilibirum by itself heals for around 40kish~ I believe with current max ilvl gear and that is a 60 second CD.

Boss tank busters aren't that hard to not die to (unless you just forget to use defensives entirely) due to how much mitigation and healing exists in this game without touching anything that notably lowers damage (like spamming gcd heals), very few of them hard one shot you and those that could you can invuln on other tanks fairly easily, so self sustain is comparable most the time because you can just heal up your damage instead of blocking it with a bubble. So if Equilbirum can more or less keep at pace with TBN every 60 seconds without any questions of "will my shield actually block this much damage anyway?" and Warrrior's other CDs are close or comparable, then Drk with TBN isn't really all that special. TBN is at its best in early prog because everyone's hp is relatively low and thus using it often is generally not that much of an issue as it'll break easily, but as your hp gets higher TBN becomes harder and harder to just use without gimping your damage.

Also LD has been the same ability since Drk's release in 2015 and has had the same problems for 6 years (though they arguably got worse due to how huge tank hp numbers are), Living Dead sucked before TBN even existed. If LD was just a lower CD it'd probably have some usefu niche value due to its duration being longer than Holmgang, especially if WHM became more popular again as with Bene LD isn't really that bad at all.

puzzle pieces to the bottom right pls

Thank god im a fucking casual player because as a mmo player myself i'd have to request you get a life.
All i want to do is play a big man with a big sword who's shadow is sentient.

 

[Zeke Von Genbu]

Thank god im a fucking casual player because as a mmo player myself i'd have to request you get a life.
All i want to do is play a big man with a big sword who's shadow is sentient.

You and I are both playing an MMO with cat girls, bunny girls, and furry men. An MMO with cutscenes that are literally dozens of hours long combined not even counting the quest text. We are also talking about it on this site of all places. We both need a life.

Also big sword man is fine, I just think its magic bubble shield is overrated.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

TBN is at its best in early prog because everyone's hp is relatively low and thus using it often is generally not that much of an issue as it'll break easily

This is the crux: the designers seem to have a very different idea of how the game is played than what really exists, and build / force things around that. It's why they took away Scholar's ogcd damage/mp restore ability and then had to give it back: they thought healers should genuinely spend most of their time healing, ignoring that most of the time they're sitting around spamming their nuke. It's why they pruned away other things healers had to maintain or be busy with, and it's probably why they leave freecure / benefic i causing ii to crit in.

Even if in practice TBN isn't really much different from other mitigation tools, it theoretically could be. If you really needed to, you could tone down your damage for a shitton of defensive ability that the other tanks just aren't capable of. That theoretical capability is ultimately pretty pointless, but it seems like the kind of thing they'd fixate on given that they seem to believe that they design encounters with lots of steady damage that necessitates constant healing.
It's true that LD predates TBN, but that was also a period in the game where they didn't homogenize everything. I'd honestly prefer the differences to be more pronounced, really. LD is just a bad holmgang and bolide is a bad hallowed ground. I'd rather each get their own special juice, but I don't think design is going in that direction for blues or greens.

 

[Gravemind]

Living Dead requiring 100% hp healed, even though you still take damage during the walking dead buff, is stupid because it costs too many resources or gcds to fulfill this condition.

Your health doesn't have to hit 100% to clear Walking Dead, you just need to receive heals equivalent to 100% of your health. The extra damage you take in the meantime doesn't count against that 100% threshold – it actually helps, truth be told. However, the issue is that the game doesn't factor in any overhealing amount to that 100% threshold, so if a healer DOES throw one of their panic button, big heals on a Dark Knight with Walking Dead, the Dark Knight has to take additional damage in order for the heals to start counting towards that threshold once again. The reason, by game logic, why the big, panic one button heal doesn't automatically fulfill that 100% threshold is because the Dark Knight always hangs on to 1 HP, and that 1 HP prevents the 100% criteria from being hit due to Walking Dead not counting overheals.

I think the reason why people hate Living Dead as much as they do is because they don't actually know how it works and they overthink the requirement to clear Walking Dead. In actuality, it doesn't take that much more resources – it just necessitates that the Dark Knight takes some extra damage after a panic button heal, and just about any healing effect after that should clear Walking Dead.

If one extra heal or even a regen is "too many resources", I think you might be having bigger issues.

 

[Zeke Von Genbu]

I think the reason why people hate Living Dead as much as they do is because they don't actually know how it works and they overthink the requirement to clear Walking Dead. In actuality, it doesn't take that much more resources – it just necessitates that the Dark Knight takes some extra damage after a panic button heal, and just about any healing effect after that should clear Walking Dead.

If one extra heal or even a regen is "too many resources", I think you might be having bigger issues.

I'll just make sure to say I understand what LD required, I just wasn't clear enough with how I said it and can see how it comes off as confusing.

That doesn't fix the problem though. LD's problem is it takes a bunch of extra resources just to do the basic function most people use it for beyond emergencies, while Holmgang, and Superbolide put their tanks in similar dangerous positions hp wise you can effectively just use one or two off gcds heals and you're pretty good now especially if you intend to force a tank swap anyway. Meanwhile Hallowed Ground takes absolutely nothing pretty much, and due to fight length LD doesn't usually get more than one cast off anyway compared to Bolide and HG unless you use it extremely early in a fight. LD is ideally fixed with Bene + a regen/fairy heal which is actually perfectly fine in terms of resources used and gives it general parity with how much the other invules use (except HG, but HG has what feels like a year long CD so it balances out), but with no WHM it becomes a blackhole because even Ast spamming double ED only gives you around 60% or so unless you crit them and they're designed to burst heal low hp tanks.

This is the crux: the designers seem to have a very different idea of how the game is played than what really exists, and build / force things around that. It's why they took away Scholar's ogcd damage/mp restore ability and then had to give it back: they thought healers should genuinely spend most of their time healing, ignoring that most of the time they're sitting around spamming their nuke. It's why they pruned away other things healers had to maintain or be busy with, and it's probably why they leave freecure / benefic i causing ii to crit in.

See I don't think SE is that unaware of how healers (or any sort of experienced player) play this game if they're at least above average players, they know quite well what is going on as they've attempted across two expansions now to fix various problems the previous expansion showed up within the upper end of play and made generally reasonable changes in response. They fixed original TBN in SB, as it could sometimes be a dps loss or gain even when it breaks based on a bunch of weird conversions I refuse to figure out again. They made tanks just blue dps and dropped aggro management from the picture, because it incentivized people to run Ninja all the time (especially in HW) and a bunch of other shitty habits a lot of bad tanks had. Removing Scholar energy drain was probably just a general mistake (or intentional design choice because energy drain is kind of a messy ability that creates a conflict of interest), along with not giving them an aoe damage spell either until they hot fixed in Art of War because they wanted to just slam Scholar to the ground after 6 years of dealing with its shit.

Healers were pruned in ShB because SE wanted to make healer dps easier for timid casuals and make it so they can actually design around healer dps better without making dps checks in fights too easy for skilled players with high dps healers and not too hard for more timid healers who are afraid to throw more then their dot on the boss every 30 seconds. They know advanced healers just spam dps spells. They made the hellhole that was release Gordias to respond to how much dps experienced healers did, which is why a3s broke the raid scene with its hell enrage and a4s had nisi require constant healing (before people ignored it) to encourage healers to actually. Also SE supposedly has an above average raid team amongst the developers that they use to internally test all the fights at min ilvl (or bis with Ultimate) so they have actually good players who know what fight design caters towards and what healers are actually doing to some extent. Maybe not the full blown 99 percentile autismo healers, but they know what the above average raid healer is capable of.

It is just a complicated problem that they sort of can't win with as they know this is a very casual relatively low grind friendly game but they also want a reasonable raid scene with classes that have depth to them. Though I think they can improve and compromise better with time if they want to fix this issue at all. Pruning down Scholar to the degree it is in was more a punishment for Scholar's absolute apex dominance since they buffed it the first time back in early ARR and until SB's release and because Scholar has made balancing Summoner a pain in the ass because Arcanist splitting off between the two was a mistake. Freecure and benefic 2 crits are probably made for really timid casuals, and I hope they just remove them to stop creating trap options for newer players and just meld cure 1/benefic 1 to their later versions and replace those buttons with something actually useful.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

See I don't think SE is that unaware of how healers (or any sort of experienced player) play this game if they're at least above average players,

Check the official site's healer forums: people ain't happy. Now, I know that's not exactly the best gauge for these things, but when everyone is saying the same thing at once: I have nothing to do, I'm going to start playing something that actually has a skill ceiling and a semblance of something to do - that might be a good indication that you went a little overboard. Their suggestion that healers should be spending most of their time healing was a common refrain to pruning much of their damage or utility abilities - so how would that fit with their realizing that healers mostly use glare, broil, malefic? There's a disconnect.

Healers were pruned in ShB because SE wanted to make healer dps easier for timid casuals

The ones that weren't doing damage when you had 2 DoTs to maintain aren't suddenly going to go 'thank god, now I only have 1 DoT to maintain' and start hitting buttons: they're going to stand still, doing nothing. So in exchange for ripping out the ability for better players to try to reach an actual skill ceiling across the entire role, a bunch of curebots continue to do exactly what they did before and a lot of good players picked up other roles. That's why I don't think they've really got a great handle on how this shit actually plays out, and are instead working on a pretty skewed vision of how the game itself plays.

I get that there was an issue where parse trannies were ignoring healing a group to be assholes and get themselves a shiny parsie, thus forcing the work entirely onto the other healer. Problem is, they still do that - except it's even easier now, and the solution remains to call them out and kick them. Just now everyone else -also- has to be bored out of their mind.

Pruning down Scholar to the degree it is in was more a punishment for Scholar's absolute apex dominance

They pruned everything down, not just the Sch. The upswings for some of the pruning you can see in the Ast - MP on card draw is good, and some of the cards were pretty useless. The downswing? Well, now there's really not a lot to do on the one healer that at least had an actual minigame to keep them busy, where the big challenge is now remembering 'ranged' or 'melee' and that's it. You could argue it always sortof went that way in that you'd fish or convert cards as necessary to bring it there, but those extra steps were the kind of wiggle room players looking for a challenge could get into.

This is a separate issue, but there's a reason why halving the potency on Summoner's tri-disaster is a better change towards balance than saying 'ok summoner, we have simplified your rotation to the point that a retard can play it while undergoing a seizure'.

 

[Focken Kiwi]

I took about a weeklong break after hitting and playing a small portion of Shadowbringers. It's been a solid 1-1.5 months but I needed a breather. So originally, I had my three action bars to the bottom of the screen but I have this issue where I want to watch my cooldowns like a hawk. If I'm watching the bottom of the screen, I'm not watching the fight at all. So my solution? Move my action bars closer to the center. The issue with that though is that outside of combat, the action bars are just in the way. So my solution to that? I made a macro that hides my action bars and I keep an extra one on the bottom at all times for abilities or actions I wouldn't typically need a keybinding for.

Spoiler

Hidden:

Not Hidden:

In combat with enemy castbar:

Macro:

I've hotkeyed the macro to the weapon draw/sheathe button. Everything is nice, centralized and nonintrusive. It's a shame I can't hide my job mechanic bar though outside of combat.

Also, NA servers seems to have had issues. I'm not used to seeing queues this long. Usually 40 at most.

 

[Gravemind]

I took about a weeklong break after hitting and playing a small portion of Shadowbringers. It's been a solid 1-1.5 months but I needed a breather. So originally, I had my three action bars to the bottom of the screen but I have this issue where I want to watch my cooldowns like a hawk. If I'm watching the bottom of the screen, I'm not watching the fight at all. So my solution? Move my action bars closer to the center. The issue with that though is that outside of combat, the action bars are just in the way. So my solution to that? I made a macro that hides my action bars and I keep an extra one on the bottom at all times for abilities or actions I wouldn't typically need a keybinding for.

Spoiler

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Not Hidden:
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In combat with enemy castbar:
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Macro:
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I've hotkeyed the macro to the weapon draw/sheathe button. Everything is nice, centralized and nonintrusive. It's a shame I can't hide my job mechanic bar though outside of combat.

Also, NA servers seems to have had issues. I'm not used to seeing queues this long. Usually 40 at most.
Ver archivo adjunto 2497270

Most people tend to make one super large hotbar (size 200%) and add copies of their major use CDs to keep track of them while keeping it off to one side so it's not too in the way, but it's visually distinct enough for the person to more easily keep their eye on it to know when the CD's off cooldown.

Also, you accidentally slacked on your censors and your character name is still visible on the screenshot of your login screen, Selwyn Rowyn of the Adamantoise server on the Aether data center. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for you in the DF.

 

[Zeke Von Genbu]

Spoiler: Autistic discussion about healers and other tangential shit

Check the official site's healer forums: people ain't happy. Now, I know that's not exactly the best gauge for these things, but when everyone is saying the same thing at once: I have nothing to do, I'm going to start playing something that actually has a skill ceiling and a semblance of something to do - that might be a good indication that you went a little overboard. Their suggestion that healers should be spending most of their time healing was a common refrain to pruning much of their damage or utility abilities - so how would that fit with their realizing that healers mostly use glare, broil, malefic? There's a disconnect.

Because they feel the need to appeal to hardcore casuals who probably do just spam healing abilities so they don't get yelled at by parsing neckbeards or the voices in their own head. This focus is why Monk has gotten a million different "don't drop Greased Lightning" buttons over the last 4 years, because it was to appeal to casuals who don't know how to maintain melee uptime before just axing the system entirely. It is why Blood of the Dragon's timer is basically worthless because you'd have to take a nap mid fight to drop Blood of the Dragon in actual combat in ShB. This paired with early HW where Savage was a meat grinder for anyone below at least moderately hardcore parsing neckbeards, creates this timidness towards really pushing the player base outside of Ultimate because when they did it nearly killed the raiding scene. Ultimates were originally slated to be 3 times per expansion, but they dropped that because they were concerned about pushing the community too hard.

Now those sorts of hardcore casuals probably do need to spend time using healing actions, because they're too timid to read into what the fight is actually doing, especially if their tanks are shit and think Sheltron by itself is an acceptable CD for a tank buster and think Reprisal on raid wide damage is an optional concern for them. But iirc when I had a raider friend check the minimum enrage requirements if you took out healer dps entirely from the later savage fights since around Omega, most groups would just barely clear them before the odd numbered patch if their healers didn't dps at all, they clearly balance the raids around healer dps to some extent even if they'd never fully admit it in an interview,

I think the disconnect is more so how often they try to enable or encourage better play patterns across the community vs what the community defaults to anyway, which might also be a cultural thing as I don't believe JPN has this degree of absolute shitter heal bots. Its why SE has made systems (Bozja duels are an example of this or Baldesion Arsenal) that from what I've asked work better in the more openly polite and better organized JP communities, vs NA where while yes a lot of people are fairly polite for an MMO community you also have greedy griefing shits and other various retards who don't give an absolute fuck about anything you do or say.

The ones that weren't doing damage when you had 2 DoTs to maintain aren't suddenly going to go 'thank god, now I only have 1 DoT to maintain' and start hitting buttons: they're going to stand still, doing nothing. So in exchange for ripping out the ability for better players to try to reach an actual skill ceiling across the entire role, a bunch of curebots continue to do exactly what they did before and a lot of good players picked up other roles. That's why I don't think they've really got a great handle on how this shit actually plays out, and are instead working on a pretty skewed vision of how the game itself plays.

I get that there was an issue where parse trannies were ignoring healing a group to be assholes and get themselves a shiny parsie, thus forcing the work entirely onto the other healer. Problem is, they still do that - except it's even easier now, and the solution remains to call them out and kick them. Just now everyone else -also- has to be bored out of their mind.

If I were in charge I'd have ARR-HW Cleric stance still be an ability and just make it not as stupidly clunky to use, but I am not and SE is. I like Yoshi-P for the most part as a director and generally respect him at minimum, but he is a massive pussy when it comes to healers. He outright refuses to ever state that healers should be using dps outside as a soft suggestion at best, because he knows this community would shit absolutely bricks if the director himself acknowledge green dps is a role and not a suggestion. Their entire issue regarding healers is just backwards because they refuse to just state what they want healers to do, so they do this mega half assed shit because they want to appeal to casuals who unironically quote the Cnj npc who goes "I am good at healing you can't make me do those other things!" and various other "You don't pay my sub" antics.

I don't agree with their shitty solutions, I merely am trying to communicate them because I think they know more then they let on because they generally know the issues for every single other role and can generally compromise and fix issues, but healer is just impossible for them to get fully right for some reason. Healers aren't that hard to figure out, they might not like it but they do know what healers do in this game and have since Final Coil. The refusal to act is not the same as the inability.

They pruned everything down, not just the Sch. The upswings for some of the pruning you can see in the Ast - MP on card draw is good, and some of the cards were pretty useless. The downswing? Well, now there's really not a lot to do on the one healer that at least had an actual minigame to keep them busy, where the big challenge is now remembering 'ranged' or 'melee' and that's it. You could argue it always sortof went that way in that you'd fish or convert cards as necessary to bring it there, but those extra steps were the kind of wiggle room players looking for a challenge could get into.

This is a separate issue, but there's a reason why halving the potency on Summoner's tri-disaster is a better change towards balance than saying 'ok summoner, we have simplified your rotation to the point that a retard can play it while undergoing a seizure'.

They have pruned every job down ever since Stormblood's release. That is how they justify adding new actions next expansion to avoid too much button bloat (a fair enough concern tbh, have you seen Paladin's hot bars?). Samurai lost Hagakure before they re-added it because they didn't fully realize how important it'd be especially for Tsubama Gaeshi timing. Dragoon/Monk/Ninja has been missing a dot for 4 years now among other things those jobs lost. Tanks got their entire enmity combos removed because it was a very easy way to add 3 buttons to tanks. SE always prunes things and sometimes they hit somewhat important or at least fun stuff like Selene's entire original kit, Machinist's aoe turret Bishop, Dark Knight's Blood Price which gave them mana upon taking damage, or Summoner having two pet buffs. Healers in ShB just got probably some of the worst pruning and it shows, Scholar being probably the most noticeable and destructive to its original identity.

Also AST's minigame in HW-SB was worthless imo, you literally fished for balance after you got spread RR that was pretty much the best answer because everything else was super situational or even cucked your dps because arrow had a tendency to fuck up rotations especially on Monk, Samurai, and Ninja due to their faster gcd. I don't think it ever added anything and only served to confuse and frustrate players. This isn't even going to the infamous "fish for two balances for 5 minutes" shit in the pre-pull. Today Ast gets a hell opener to mess with today and gives you enough room to care if you are on voice and can align your cards with dps windows or something. Ast is imo pretty close to being what I think the ideal healer, if they can't get a real dps rotation, should be and it has a decent amount of room to optimize if you want to time your cards with someone's burst window as almost all dps have slightly different burst timings. Ast is like the closest to feeling complete, Scholar is just missing things, and White Mage is just badly designed as a whole imo.

Autism aside, I'm genuinely interested to see where they take stuff in EW when we get a glimpse at the media tour build. I personally felt Stormblood was so bad that I nearly quit the game entirely, until my favorite job at the time got to be the poster boy in Shadowbringers, because I hated how the jobs played when they did their first ability cull and most dps also suffered notable losses in my eyes. Bard was probably the biggest exception as the direction they went with it was generally positive and fit. ShB for the most part added a lot of good changes and re-adjustments to most the jobs that most of them generally feel like they've improved instead of regressed. If they can fix healers in EW, I think they "can" but if they "will" is a different thing entirely.

 

[Focken Kiwi]

Most people tend to make one super large hotbar (size 200%) and add copies of their major use CDs to keep track of them while keeping it off to one side so it's not too in the way, but it's visually distinct enough for the person to more easily keep their eye on it to know when the CD's off cooldown.

Also, you accidentally slacked on your censors and your character name is still visible on the screenshot of your login screen, Selwyn Rowyn of the Adamantoise server on the Aether data center. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for you in the DF.

Fuck. Ahh well. It won't stay that forever. If you see me before Endwalker, wave to me and call me faggot or something else silly over a whisper. Well, assuming you can whisper to others in duty finder parties.

 

[Fcret]

Also, NA servers seems to have had issues. I'm not used to seeing queues this long. Usually 40 at most.

Aether is the unofficial raider DC and it's also where a lot of new streamers like Asmongold went. It's apparently been running overcapacity for the past month or so and character creation was closed on all worlds on Aether last week. If you don't have any particular attachment to the world you're playing on atm, you can probably get a free world transfer to Primal or Crystal.

If they can fix healers in EW, I think they "can" but if they "will" is a different thing entirely.

I think, if nothing else, we're getting a major overhaul to healing in EW (whether or not this is a 'fix' will be subject to personal opinion). The fact that they've almost outright admitted that trying to balance the shield and regen healers against each other was a mistake and that they're splitting them into two separate roles for balance purposes is a pretty good indication that we should expect some big changes for healers in general in 6.0.

 

[Gravemind]

Aether is the unofficial raider DC and it's also where a lot of new streamers like Asmongold went. It's apparently been running overcapacity for the past month or so and character creation was closed on all worlds on Aether last week. If you don't have any particular attachment to the world you're playing on atm, you can probably get a free world transfer to Primal or Crystal.

Get ye gone, Crystal shill.

Also I'm pretty sure the consensus on Primal is generally "Fuck off, we're full" as well.

 

[Fcret]

Get ye gone, Crystal shill.

He's not even at endgame yet and by the time he gets there it won't really matter because 1) current ShB endgame is EZ thanks to echo buff + generous catch-up gear, and 2) by the time he will care about raiding, DC travel will be available and it won't matter.

 

[Focken Kiwi]

Aether is the unofficial raider DC and it's also where a lot of new streamers like Asmongold went. It's apparently been running overcapacity for the past month or so and character creation was closed on all worlds on Aether last week. If you don't have any particular attachment to the world you're playing on atm, you can probably get a free world transfer to Primal or Crystal.

He's not even at endgame yet and by the time he gets there it won't really matter because 1) current ShB endgame is EZ thanks to echo buff + generous catch-up gear, and 2) by the time he will care about raiding, DC travel will be available and it won't matter.

Yeeeaaaaaah, I'm fine where I am. Queue times haven't bothered me at all. The most I wait on any given day is 30 seconds or so. Tonight just had a weird moment where a bunch of people were kicked offline just before I logged in.

 

[Fcret]

Yeeeaaaaaah, I'm fine where I am. Queue times haven't bothered me at all. The most I wait on any given day is 30 seconds or so.

Oh, that's just login server batching. If your queue is <100, then you're usually just waiting for the next batch window (I think it's every 30 seconds) to be let in. They introduced that early in ShB as an anti-DDoS measure.

 

[John Titor]

I took about a weeklong break after hitting and playing a small portion of Shadowbringers. It's been a solid 1-1.5 months but I needed a breather. So originally, I had my three action bars to the bottom of the screen but I have this issue where I want to watch my cooldowns like a hawk. If I'm watching the bottom of the screen, I'm not watching the fight at all. So my solution? Move my action bars closer to the center. The issue with that though is that outside of combat, the action bars are just in the way. So my solution to that? I made a macro that hides my action bars and I keep an extra one on the bottom at all times for abilities or actions I wouldn't typically need a keybinding for.

Spoiler

Hidden:Ver archivo adjunto 2497324
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In combat with enemy castbar:
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Macro:
Ver archivo adjunto 2497325

I've hotkeyed the macro to the weapon draw/sheathe button. Everything is nice, centralized and nonintrusive. It's a shame I can't hide my job mechanic bar though outside of combat.

Also, NA servers seems to have had issues. I'm not used to seeing queues this long. Usually 40 at most.
Ver archivo adjunto 2497476

You know about HUD Layout right? It's pretty handy so you don't have to include every UI element in your macro. Just make a blank HUD and use /hudlayout (number).

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Spoiler: healing is the boringest role

Because they feel the need to appeal to hardcore casuals who probably do just spam healing abilities so they don't get yelled at by parsing neckbeards or the voices in their own head.

Barring that they should be yelled at if they're standing around and doing absolutely nothing for the majority of a fight, which is currently how it plays out. Giving them only two buttons to push instead of 4 or 5 towards that end hasn't made these retards any less skittish, and it's just driven off the kinds of people who might enjoy the idea of hybrid damage-healing that aren't parsetrannies.
I'm so glad so many more people are playing astro now and exclusively giving cards to the tank without concern for the seals because it's too haaaaaaard to click on anyone else and stop the benefic 1 spam.

This focus is why Monk has gotten a million different "don't drop Greased Lightning" buttons over the last 4 years, because it was to appeal to casuals who don't know how to maintain melee uptime before just axing the system entirely.

Greased Lightning also had a bad habit of falling off between pulls in dungeons. More importantly, while removing maintaining greased lightning and similar status effects did lower the overall skill ceiling for monk, you at least have an actual ceiling to aspire to and lots of ways to push yourself to improve while playing.

The DPS all work this way. The tanks are simpler to that effect, but there are clearly different skill ceilings and optimizations you can see yourself doing with them. You 'optimize' a healer in that you learn the names of the tankbusters and mandatory raidwides. You are genuinely left with nothing to do for an enormous majority of the time except to push one button. It isn't fun.

but healer is just impossible for them to get fully right for some reason.

Their encounter design trivializes most spot healing, as fucking up a lot of mechanics will just straight-up kill someone. Lots of encounters don't really have the kinds of steady outgoing damage on tanks that would necessitate you needing to ever chain two GCD heals back to back. So what is it? Do they want greens to play like healers in FF games, where you do damage until someone needs healing? Or should they be like WoW's old holy paladins, spamming one button infinitely?

Simple solutions would be to increase the number of healing options / benefits when dealing damage, or even to give damage benefits from healing (but not overhealing), something the aborted Warhammer MMO experimented with eons ago. Parsetrannies will of course still prefer to spam the nuke while doing nothing else useful, but the goal should be to deprive curebots of their excuses to stand around for 70% of the newest alliance raid doing nothing while everyone else carries their ass. I'll take a glarebot over a curebot any day.

Today Ast gets a hell opener to mess with today and gives you enough room to care if you are on voice and can align your cards with dps windows or something.

Since the sleeve draw change, it's not really that difficult: https://saltedxiv.com/ast/ast-opener. You weave 2 OGCDs between some instant GCDs. Yes, sometimes lady luck doesn't like you and will force you to drift through some redraws to find a second seal that's different from the first one, but it's still pretty simple.

The old system of having a zillion different cards and fishing for the optimal one wasn't perfect, but it did at least offer a challenge you could work towards. How do you optimize the new astro? You can throw the card buff you have on someone during their burst window, like you said, and that's about it. Then how do you optimize a WHM or a SCH? In all three cases you have very, very little to do except to push your nuke button.

I don't really have any faith they'll fix the role's glaring issues come Endwalker. I'd recommend everyone make friends with the kinds of people that somehow find the role enjoyable now, 'lest you come across the inevitable scourge of DF sages. Or roll warrior / paladin because healers are optional half of the time for those guys anyways.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

It's a shame I can't hide my job mechanic bar though outside of combat.

Can't hide it, but there is a "simplified" bar that can be toggled. It's not as pretty but it takes up a ton less space.

I don't really have any faith they'll fix the role's glaring issues come Endwalker.

It's probably just me coping, but I do have some hope that they'll make healing better in Endwalker. Frankly, they can't make it much worse.

 

[Agarathium1066]

Also, NA servers seems to have had issues. I'm not used to seeing queues this long. Usually 40 at most.
Ver archivo adjunto 2497476

Generally when there's a huge queue like that its because a server somewhere took a shit, someone in my FC also reported this last night as being a big rash of mass DCs. Their queue was also in the 600s and that's the only time you're going to see that (barring Housing Extreme situations).

 

[Zeke Von Genbu]

Spoiler: Square Enix can surely fix this role :copium:

Greased Lightning also had a bad habit of falling off between pulls in dungeons. More importantly, while removing maintaining greased lightning and similar status effects did lower the overall skill ceiling for monk, you at least have an actual ceiling to aspire to and lots of ways to push yourself to improve while playing.

The Greased Lightning help abilities don't really help you in dungeons even barring wall to wall pull being the norm. Riddle of Earth was designed for phase transition aoes where you must take damage to refresh GL, Anatman demanded you literally stand still and channel which doesn't help you when the tank is pulling half the dungeon or just going to the next pack as you likely lose more dps via missing gcds to put your thumb up your ass for a few seconds. The only thing close was Riddle of Wind I believe back in SB where it was a Shoulder Tackle that gave you a GL stack when you hit something with it, but that was more infamously used for the Tornado Kick rotation before they gutted that to hell.

They were 100% designed for raids, and while you might be able to justify one why did they make two entirely different GL management skills? It just makes button fluff and doesn't add anything to Monk. Monk is arguably the least evolved job from ARR to ShB compared to its other melee counterparts because SE keeps trying to design it to appeal to people who are bad it and not for players who actually can play the job.

The DPS all work this way. The tanks are simpler to that effect, but there are clearly different skill ceilings and optimizations you can see yourself doing with them. You 'optimize' a healer in that you learn the names of the tankbusters and mandatory raidwides. You are genuinely left with nothing to do for an enormous majority of the time except to push one button. It isn't fun.

Healer optimization is effectively a coordinated team effort across the tanks, the healers, and any dps who can reduce damage on a mechanic. Their is an optimization ceiling there, though it requires a group effort and is not solely a "you" thing but it does truly exist and that part of it can be fun if you have a group that aren't ape men. The issue is that optimized healer gameplay isn't fun to execute. It can be fun to plan, flowchart, and see actually prove to work but the actual execution is fucking boring as shit since ShB. The execution is crux of the issue and it isn't difficult to fix in-theory if they're willing to pull the trigger.

I've seen some interviews from Yoshi-P that supposedly Sage will be an "offensive" healer and they've used that term a couple different times, so this might be a Gunbreaker situation where Sage gets all a very well smoothed out modern gameplay loop (As Gunbreaker almost plays like a melee dps compared to the other 3 tanks, especially Warrior/Dark Knight) while the rest suffer due to trying to maintain an old job identity that will now be 6-8 years old now unless they pull a Machinist and just remake the other jobs.

Their encounter design trivializes most spot healing, as fucking up a lot of mechanics will just straight-up kill someone. Lots of encounters don't really have the kinds of steady outgoing damage on tanks that would necessitate you needing to ever chain two GCD heals back to back. So what is it? Do they want greens to play like healers in FF games, where you do damage until someone needs healing? Or should they be like WoW's old holy paladins, spamming one button infinitely?

Simple solutions would be to increase the number of healing options / benefits when dealing damage, or even to give damage benefits from healing (but not overhealing), something the aborted Warhammer MMO experimented with eons ago. Parsetrannies will of course still prefer to spam the nuke while doing nothing else useful, but the goal should be to deprive curebots of their excuses to stand around for 70% of the newest alliance raid doing nothing while everyone else carries their ass. I'll take a glarebot over a curebot any day.

I need to play more of it myself, but from what I've asked and seen Blue Mage is probably unironically the most fun healer right now and not just because of all of Blue Mage's janky wacky bullshit. It is because Blue Mage is like the exact opposite of all the other healers. It has relatively very few, but core, healing abilities that work and do what they're designed to do and they have a wide breadth of dps abilities and an actual rotation to execute between downtime.

I think SE needs to just reverse this ShB decision, consolidate the healer heals into a few set tools (like half their kit instead of like 70-80% of it, keep a few key gcd heals for fuck ups and casual shitters) and add whatever unique utility they want to exist (Chain Strat, Card shit, whatever) and add dps from there. I'd probably remove Energy Drain because resources that choose between offense and defense just devolve into choosing offense and encourage too much greed (see tank stances between ARR-SB), and find a different mechanic for Scholar to use to funnel into dps. I know people meme about Blue Mage being useless and shit, but Blue Mage might be unironically the best template they have for how a healer should work in modern day FF14.

The old system of having a zillion different cards and fishing for the optimal one wasn't perfect, but it did at least offer a challenge you could work towards. How do you optimize the new astro? You can throw the card buff you have on someone during their burst window, like you said, and that's about it. Then how do you optimize a WHM or a SCH? In all three cases you have very, very little to do except to push your nuke button.

I'll just agree to disagree regarding old AST vs new AST when it comes to the cards, because I think further discussion will just become circular at this point.

WHM optimization is like trying to optimize BLM, only you have even less movement because SE felt like WHM doesn't get anything like Ruin 2 or get to have faster cast times like AST they're just stuck glare botting for 30 seconds until they press Dia. WHM is just a clunky as shit job that I just stopped playing it because I hate how slow it feels due to having so few ways to weave without screwing yourself over. Scholar is in general more forgiving for pushing damage, the most you get is you're effectively playing "how low can you go" by figuring out how many Energy Drains you can spam without killing your party or forcing your co-healer to use GCD heals. Which this all circles back to how healer optimization is a coordinated effort, which is fun to test and experiment but it is boring as fuck to execute after you've found the answer.

Tl;dr: Blue Mage might unironically be the most fun healer to play in Shadowbringers, this is how far we have fallen.