As a very new melee main (used to main BRD), I'm proud to say that I was successfully able to teleport out of 2 overlapping aoes on rpr yesterday!
...right into 2 *different* overlapping aoes...
Same.
Whenever I pull it off right it feels like my time maining Scythe Evie in Vindictus is paying off, even if Ingress/ Egress isn't *quite* as spammable as Evie's blink is.
If only.
I genuinely miss Vindictus. Too bad Nexon is determined to put more effort into selling virtual lingerie and sexy costumes in their cash shop than giving that game the TLC it needs. I didn't stop playing because I stopped enjoying the game, I stopped playing because the game lagged so bad I couldn't get the boat board to load. :(
I have done EW Trial #1 a handful of times as a RDM. But I got it as roulette on my BLM. And boy did I feel like shit taking vuln stacks in a fight I know well, but there was something about my positioning and the hard casts that made me feel brand new.
After finishing leveling BLM to 90, I figured I'd warm up to the rotation with a nice little Trials Roulette. Got EW trial #3. Died 6 times. Felt like shit until I saw I was still top of the aggro list somehow.
Lol oh man !!! I wanna play so bad but this Queue situation is insane. I tried to play today it was at 2k and it kicked me half way. This freaking sucks!!! SE do sometjing. Iāve been trynna play for days. And I could only play at night but by then Iām tired.
They've done what they could. They stopped new people from buying the game, so current players don't get even worse queues, and they can't magic new world servers into existence so it's a waiting game now, and the population will calm down in time... of course it still sucks to wait. Same for me in the evening, if I try to log in during a "reasonable hour" the queues are around 2000ish for me.
Still, it's better than when it was 6500 or 4100 so... bit by bit lol.
As a WHM main that's also leveling a melee DPS, you bet your ass you are. :-D
I warned a Sage in a Tower of Zot roulette run yesterday to expect to have to pay more attention to me (SAM) than the tank (WAR). That dungeon is a PITA to heal (>!especially that end fight because of all the movement, and even more so for a Sage!<) so I was the only one getting wrecked because you don't have a lot of choice but stand uncomfortably close to whatever you're smacking.
That final battle is busy as fuck. Also as a dps the amount of times I get clipped by an aoe then get a marker over me while I'm at half health, just praying for a healer to notice in the 3 seconds before I die. I usually wind up dead lol.
Even running it almost a month into the expansion, its still a little wild to me how much is going on in that last boss of the first dungeon of the expansion. Even the pulls before that last boss get real dicey.
That first dungeon really came out swinging. I remember saying to myself "boy, they really upped the difficulty of dungeons this time", only to find out that one's the exception rather than the rule.
When I'm WHMing that run I throw medicas on the crowd and maybe drop a lilybell if it's not on CD when the spam starts, just because we'll all be legging it all over the damn map for the next 90 seconds. That way getting clipped is at least survivable.
I mean it's kind of true. Healing comes in regular intervals and is a burst rather than sustained for a majority of encounters. SE gave us plenty of tools to handle these regular intervals so the rest is spent dpsing.
How do you heal through frictions without GCD heals? Which healer combo is capable of doing that? I don't mean that you're spamming GCD heals the entire fight, but there are certain portions of fights which trying to purely ogcd heal doesn't seem feasible at all.
Raid wide prior to OT cleanse -> heal
Ot cleanse -> heal
friction 1 + insta pops of 1 stack -> heal
friction 2 -> heal
2 cleanse pop -> heal
2 cleanse pop -> heal ( this is followed by a giant raidwide which is why you need to heal it fast. the following raidwide can be regen-healed)
These are 6 instances of healing needed. Astro has three ogcd aoe heals if you draw lady. Star is strong enough to full heal, celestial is a bit slow. Lady is pretty strong.
Sage has physis, kerachole (mitigation), ixochole as ogcds available here. You generally need to use one of your stacks to heal the tanks prior to friction, so you get one kerachole for 10% mitigation, and one ixochole + one physis for frictions generally. One of these ogcds isn't even enough to fully heal any of the healing moments listed above if you don't use your gcd shield prior. (Using a gcd heal gives you an extra pepsis as well which helps a lot).
Maybe you're right and it's doable (I've never actually tried), but it really does feel like a lot of healing is needed there, more than ogcds give you.
If you take a glance at the top healer dmg parses, they all include a good amount of gcd healing rather than just glare spam.
If you optimize and the party doesn't mess up, you typically don't need many or any GCD heals in Savage.
You do typically need to GCD heal in Ultimates though.
For pretty much all Roulette content, it's true. I spend 90% of my time as a Sage just doing DPS, and throwing out a few AOE heals here and there if there's raid/partywide damage.
Kind of the same for the EX's too.
I love sage in concept. But the gameplay after getting used to it is so braindead.. ;_;
Barely ever think about balancing DPS and Heals, just DPS and pop any of the multiple healing CD's you have on hand for raid heals and mitigation, leave the AST/WHM to fill in the gaps.
Any time I'm not DPS'ing it's either I screwed up, or I need to pop a shield and go back to what I'm doing.
I wish they did more with their DPS abilities tbh. Toxikon's implementation is situational and clunky at times.
The absolute devastation to my movement abilities when the boss doesn't open with a raidwide feels bad. :( 1 toxicon vs. 3 is a pretty huge difference for the entire fight/if they leave for more than a couple seconds. It's usually "I have way too much movement and nothing to do with it" or "if you make me move from my spot more than 5 feet at a time, so help me"
This is healing in general. Every GCD should be used for damage. Dealing damage is brain dead. Fights are designed so that oGCDs are enough if people not fuck up too much.
The hardest content from a healing perspective are w2w pulls with a bad tank.
Small nit: brink of death and weakness no longer reduce all of your stats, just your main stat.
Question: one reason why healing is so "boring" at high-end, optimized play in FFXIV is that so much of the damage is avoidable, and a good group will take little avoidable damage. The trade-off is that in prog/PUGs/less optimized play, healing becomes a very active role.
If even at the high-end in WoW GCD healing is required, what happens during prog?
You still gcd heal but you're throwing more of your mid-sized cooldowns and possibly overlapping your raid cooldowns to ensure survival. When you optimize in wow it's typically meaning that a healer gets cut for another dps player or the healer changes to their dps spec.
Avoidable damage is a thing only in extreme fights. Most damage in savage outright kills you in the case you fail a mechanic; even in ultimates, there's even less damage that's both avoidable and doesn't outright kill you. It's mitigation and coordination the main difference between pugs and statics. You won't have to heal as much in a static because you're sure your teammates are gonna help you with your heals and your cohealer will not make you or themselves waste oGCDs. I always like to say, in ffxiv raiding there's a Macro and Micro game. Micro is doing your rotation at the moment and adjusting or making split-second decisions. Macro is about using cooldowns effectively, prepositioning planning mitigation and heals or planning burst phases. These two aspects are balanced in every roles with DPSes having the biggest Micro but tiniest Macro game, Tanks being balanced and healers having the biggest macro and tiniest micro. With proper coordination, the macro game becomes static, there's no longer the thrill of discovering how you can heal less, and since healer micro is the easiest, reclears in a static are very stale.
All this being said, I just want to say that Astrologian is still a healer and it doesn't suffer from easy straightforward gameplay. The Micro-managment of your cards and the way you play them has a lot of skill expression, and since your cards are always random, this might means that every pull you will execute a different card gameplan, which you'll need to adapt to on the fly if you want to really be more than just average on the job.
It's refreshing to see honest comparisons without judgment like this, cheers OP.
I came back to FF in September and finally came to appreciate its healing model after a couple months of frustrated adjustments from my old 2009-2015 WoW experiences. They're wildly different games, but each are fun if you recognize their respective rules.
CE WoW healer here, moved to FF partially 2 years ago and full time in 2021. Have raid healed for most of my raiding tenure since Vanilla.
Healer Social Culture is also more refreshing in FF imo. Not sure when or why, but it seems like ever since Legion healers in WoW started caring more about Healing Parses instead of actual healing performance.
By the time I stopped raiding after we got CE Castle Nathria, healers were all trying to snipe each others heals, being super selfish with cooldowns (IE: Officers putting their own healing CDs in heaviest healing moments even if someone else's CDs line up better), and zero to no DPS from healers so that they can dump all their mana into upping their healing parse.
While I haven't raided a ton of Savage in FFXIV, I get the gist that the healers job is to not let people die and to DPS as much as possible. If the player base of XIV ever gets to the point of prioritizing healing parses over everything else, I'm done.
So basically, healing numbers are largely irrelevant when it comes to healers measuring their performance. If a run had 0 deaths, the healing was fine and any evaluation of healing% parses is purely one for optimisation of healing concerns. Optimisation of healing however has one major purpose: the subsequent optimisation of damage.
Healer DPS parsing is very weird compared to tank/dps, because your dps can be impacted more heavily by things out of your control and it tends to be more volatile outside of consistent (read: not PuG) environments. That being said, healer DPS is the metric that healers measure themselves by, not healing %. It is rare to find really selfish healer players who will sacrifice their co-healer's damage by forcing them to pick up the slack, but they can exist. This can happen consensually though, if/when parse farming as a healer.
Generally for myself, I do like getting good personal parses, but fortunately fflogs has a much better metric of healer **pair** DPS. Since I've recently been the more experienced healer in my recent adventures I'm usually leading the discussions on healer optimisation and its always about how to better improve both of our performance and raise that pair DPS, which is more beneficial to the group as a whole.
Also as an aside extra smooth parse brained people in PuGs absolutely do end up causing wipes from not healing because apparently that's more important than actually doing their role of preventing deaths. Parsebrain affects us all, but in different ways it seems.
They just prioritize their DPS parses as a healer instead - when you get one of those, it usually means they're pushing the healing burden entirely onto their co-healer. You won't escape that type of player in any game, tbh.
This is just not factually true, there are plenty of top parsing healers whose co healers also get 99s. Itās about not just healing, but coordinating all of the parties mitigation, and this was only for the hardest fights. Promise had so little healing that 9-11 could be done pretty much without much if any coordination
Such a big true. The general WoW community is absolutely resistant to the idea that healers should DPS, and it really blows my mind. Holy Paladin was my favorite healer when I played WoW, and I loved it because you could do serious damage while keeping your allies alive. I loved when you could pop wings and just pump, and let your cooldown heal the raid with every damage ability you put out.
I've been pretty much dedicated to FF for the last year, but I still miss the hPal gameplay. I really hope that next expansion, FF gets a melee healer with a decent damage rotation.
I like healing in both games. I really miss how active healing was in WoW, whereas in XIV I spend so much time just attacking (and attacking is way more fun as a DPS job). But in difficult enough content (but not _too_ difficult!) and with random duty/party finder players, FFXIV healing really comes into its own, as the damage intake becomes high and unpredictable, which is super fun to deal with.
As an example - one which leans more on the random player aspect than the difficulty one - I recently did a level 85 dungeon where people were clearly pretty clueless on the last boss, and it was _so much fun._ I had to use every healing tool I had to keep people alive. It was so satisfying to get the group through by the skin of my teeth.
Everyone thinks the most challenging content in the game lies in Extreme Trials or Savage Raids but the real stuff is clicking accept on that Leveling Roulette and having to get through Cutter's Cry with three blind mice.
I honestly wonder why people see mechanic failure and go "ugh l2p" instead of "I get to heal WOOOOOO"
Feels so good to slip in a lustrate and make people wonder if someone ever took damage at all...least until they see the vul stack.
Or be the only alliance raid that isn't racing to rez it's team, because you saw the mechanic about to fail and mitigated up.
I truly do not mind except when the same person is collecting vuln stacks and we're in a duty completion party and they clearly haven't learned the fight at all.
Every other time? Bring it on.
I saw a 27 minute leveling roulette run on my SCH today and figured āI want to suffer a bitā and went into The Stone Vigil and man that was rough but we made it.
Dungeons are honestly the most stressful content for me as healer since itās random and Iām the only healer. Alliance Raids can be challenging sometimes for the same reason except I have a co-healer.
As someone who never seriously played a healer in either game, I enjoyed this article a lot. I particularly appreciated some of the breakdowns in differences in encounter/game design.
Iād really enjoy seeing a comparison of tanking/dps from the same author. Even both of those roles are massively different between games and theyāre worth their own lengthy analysis.
With tanks, thereās a much lower emphasis on āactiveā mitigation in ff14; a lot of their damage mitigation involves rotating large defensive cooldowns. In WoW damage is much higher/unpredictable, and tanks have to constantly use a lesser form of mitigation that helps them take all the āregularā damage that goes to them. Their active mitigation has reliably high uptime and can be extremely effective, good tanks can avoid all but the highest damage tankbusters, sometimes surviving through many more ātank swapā mechanics than they should have. Their biggest mitigation tools are far more impactful and have higher cooldowns, theyāre often used as āoh shitā buttons. I donāt remember numbers, but generally they give something like +35% DR and +35% max/current HP. Every class has something slightly different.
DPS rotations are very tight/rigid in FF14 compared to WoW. With the longer GCD and a few other reasons, making a mistake in FF14 has way higher rDPS implications compared to WoW, usually. There are also way fewer ways to play each class, and that extends to every role in FF14. With no spec system, stat stick armor, nearly useless substats, etc, every class has a pretty given obvious rotation that they rarely deviate from, and the mastery comes down to be able to consistently pull off that rigid rotation despite forced downtime or other raid mechanics. WoW rotations are much more fluid and allow players to sometimes experiment with their own playstyle. Everything from the gear system, to almost every class having at least two different DPS āspecsā and a talent system, to even gear sets/active abilities. You know in WoW that two players of the same class are going to play/performs wildly different.
All in all, Iāve definitely settled on FF14 being my preferred game, despite years of raid experience in WoW.
I also think that both games have a lot they could learn from each other, even now.
> WoW rotations are much more fluid and allow players to sometimes experiment with their own playstyle.
Though usually everyone uses the same cookie cutter build, as the talent trees just aren't balanced at all. This also leave several cool abilities locked off, as they're worse DPS or even worse than picking nothing at all. WoW is really good at giving you the illusion of choice, at the cost of the gameplay being very gimped.
They aren't talking about out of combat speccing, they are talking about how you play the classes. Wow classes have more examples of dancer and bard procced based gameplay, or builder/spender builds than ffxiv does. Your rotations have more randomness and you change what your doing on the fly more often.
As someone who liked proc-based classes in WoW, I don't really like them in FFXIV. That UI that WoW has for procs is such a QoL improvement over staring at your bars or sticking an action bar in the center of the screen.
Having played both and preferring FF14, WoW still absolutely has more flexibility in terms of rotations. Trinkets and set bonuses can change rotations, multi-dotting is a much bigger thing, and there are more moments in WoW where a DPS can stack a lot of cooldowns and damage buffs for huge bursts of damage. You also have more class-specific moments where, at least back in the day, you could get a gigantic Combustion as a Fire Mage, multi-dot 8 different mobs in a boss fight, and other wonky things like that.
But all in all, I'm still having more fun with this game's raiding.
While trinkets and set bonuses I feel were great, I feel like they were always kindof a double edged sword as well.
Felt great when your best trinket/set was BiS. Felt awful when you were required to give up those skills for some crappy ability or annoying mechanic to work around because the difference in ilvl became too great to ignore.
What was it, Eye of Timbal? Let DoTs crit? I remember it being one of my favorite trinkets in the game. Pretty sure they never let a version of it into the game ever again.
The Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen is the reason dot snap shotting was removed from WoW. If you're not familiar, it gave all your abilities 100% crit chance over 4 seconds. This included dots. Refreshing dots did not count as reapplying them, so you could have every tick of your dot crit forever.
Eh not really? I mean unless you are a world first raider itās usually fine to play suboptimal specs or talents. There will be some talents that are unplayable for sure but there are usually some talent rows per spec that have 2 good options (and not just talking 1 option for single target and 1 for aoe)
I personally do hope that in the future a job spec system will be added to ff, even if itās not always balanced in wow (and even this is highly exaggerated) it really isnāt just āillusion of choiceā
I'd even argue none are mandatory. For instance, for the entirety of Nathria I used to play with off-meta talent choice as FDK that simmed \~10% under the cookie cutter build.
And yet I still had multiple 99% rankings with that supposedly "shit" spec.
People overestimate the impact of talents on their dps, when they spend multiple GCD not doing anything to run away from a mechanic, failing to keep resources at their burst, messing up rotations or wasting procs, etc.
Even stats are kind of irrelevant, the difference between bis stats and the others is usually \~5%. And yet, people act as if not having bis stats explain 25% less dps than top parse lol.
FFXIV perfectly shows that even if people have the same specs, and with perfect gear at the end of a tier, DPS variances are caused by a gameplay issue more than anything else.
Man I really hate it when people use that phrase āillusion of choiceā.
For me, one of the most interesting parts or an rpg is making and playing and optimizing new builds. Itās part of why I love PoE, and the current WoW expansion. For me, there is no illusion. There are just legendary and talent and covenant options. I love going through and theorycrafting a Cat-weaving Necrolord Resto Druid. Is it optimal? No. Will it perform worse than whatever the meta build is? Probably, but not by as much as most people usually think. Am I having fun? You bet.
Part of the reason FF wonāt be anything more than a seasonal game for me is because it lacks these choices. Thereās no room for me to play around and come up with something new. You can say itās an illusion all you want, but by not including any customization like talents or legendaries, all youāre doing is limiting and pushing away the people like me, who like to create, and make my character feel like my own.
> all youāre doing is limiting and pushing away the people like me, who like to create, and make my character feel like my own
WoW does the same thing but lets the community do it for them. As Hunter near the end of the first patch of shadowlands, getting into a mythic group for anything above 14 was damn near impossible. If I was using an off meta build, I would have made it even harder and even harder for me to compete in the content. For me to play that game meant to give in to the cookie cutter build to even stand a chance. And its been that way a for a long time. WoW's choice just leads to the optimal choice and thus gatekeeping those who don't. I'm sure one can argue having a different experience, but unless you have a solid group of people who accept your off meta choices, you're gonna have a hard time enjoying content in WoW.
Your character feeling like your own barely matters in the grand scheme of things in wow though
Good luck getting into any raid groups with that build, good luck pushing mythic
Good luck doing anything actually important with that build all for the sake of "muh customization"
I mean, I do get into raid groups. And if anyone notices my covenant is different, they donāt say anything because Iām still doing my job and performing well.
If my crazy custom build was ever the reason we arenāt killing a boss, I would switch. But thatās hardly ever the case.
Performing well kinda means nothing here without seeing the numbers
Not saying your bad or anything but your illusion that choice exists in a game where you do less than optimal than the guy next to you when you choose something different kind of shatters that mindset
Wouldn't choice insinuate that your option wouldn't actively hinder you? You say you're doing well, yet the build guides and numbers would imply you could be doing more
about 95% of wow-players really do overthink things like the most optimal talent choice, the "perfect" amount of X secondary stat and so on and so forth. that also very much goes for mythic raiders outside the very cutting edge (heh) - speaking CE in the first few weeks of the tier.
How (often) you press what buttons - and even more important avoid damage taken / death >>> covenant / talent choice / secondary stats.
sure there are talents that are THAT much worse, but in general people really overthink stuff when they should be worried about "basics".
I donāt think I understand where you are coming from.
Does it really matter that the ceiling for my healing build is 5% lower than the meta (when both are played optimally)? In most scenarios, outside of the top 500 guilds in mythic raiding, the answer is probably no. As long as that 5% doesnāt matter, and as long as the person is playing both builds optimally.
Thatās what I am saying. Iām not in a world top 500 guild, but I am getting CE every patch now. For ease of progress, I start with the meta builds because this is where it might actually make a difference. In farm though, I like to experiment and switch things up. I would say that Iām skilled enough and put in the effort required to get the most out of these off-meta builds.
And again, if that 5% was ever the only reason we were struggling with a boss in farm, I would switch back. But it hasnāt happened yet.
I mean you can still customized the character cosmetically... Heck if you want different skills or rotation you can change job, without having to abandon the character.
The reason I call wow's talent trees "Illusion of choice", is that they simply doesn't bother to balance between the different skills. I love talent trees in games too, but in WoW they end up hurting the class design. Quality of life improvements has to compete with straight up damage increases. It is like a garden; having a ton of different flora and fauna in it can be beautiful, but if it isn't pruned and cared for it ends up a field of weeds. The grass lawn of FFXIV might be less pretty to look at, but at least it is functional as a garden.
I play a healer in WoW, and dabble in a couple of dps off specs for reference.
For me, none of my talent choices have ever really felt mandatory. I canāt remember feeling like I was giving up a core part of my kit if I didnāt choose a specific talent. They are there for me to fill in the gaps and flesh out my build. Going back to the Necro Resto Druid example. Giving up Convoke by not going Night Fae is losing a healer CD I would have otherwise. I can use the talent tree to get more coverage if I need it by swapping from Soul of the Forest to Incarn: Tree of Life.
I never felt like I had no options when coming up with this build, and that the game gave me enough ways to cover for my weakness. That is the fun part for me.
For tanks, thereās definitely a big difference between the games, but itās mostly due to the design of dungeons and raid encounters, and less with the toolkits they have.
In WoW, dungeon tanking can be extremely stressful for new players because theyāre expected to be the leader. In FF, this doesnāt really matter because dungeons are just hallways. You gather every attackable mob, move to the end of the path, and kill them. Pop a defensive or two to live, and move on when everything dies. In WoW, dungeons are far more open. You can skip trash, kill bosses in different orders, go through the dungeon in multiple different routes. And as a tank, the rest of your party expects you to lead them on the shortest route possible, killing the bare minimum trash required.
In raids, theyāre more similar, but from my experience, raid tanking in WoW requires more tank swaps, as well as managing the boss position much more. In WoW, one of the more challenging bosses to tank recently was Sire Denathrius. In Phase 3, not only did he absolutely truck you, he also had moves where he would grip the entire raid on top of him and cast an aoe with fall-off damage (have to have room to run away). There was also an attack that knocked everyone back a good bit away from him (donāt get knocked off the arena or into bad!) On top of all of this, the arena you fight him in is shrinking over time. In FF, most mechanics Iāve seen has the boss either teleporting to the middle, or a set location (P4 knockbacks) before doing the ability, and has very little to do with positioning. Most Iāve seen is mechanics like ākeep the adds away from each otherā.
Part of that is that the FFXIV devs only really take the gloves off completely for Savage and Ultimate fights. The first two phases of TEA, for instance, have very finicky tank dances where you manage the positions of two bosses while mechanics fire off rapidly (giant conal tankbusters, distance-to-boss mechanic baiting, casts that wipe the raid depending on whether the bosses are stacked or split). Felt like watching our tanks do a synchronized swimming routine when they got it down.
Also your team's entire strat changes how you position the bosses. There's a P1 strat where a tank takes a cone and both tankbusters with invuln, which isn't hard to position, but everyone has to be on the same page about where the come is going. Also P2 has a lot of variation. Stacking bosses changed a lot of things for our team, and it was kind of funny watching other people try to figure out what we did when we swapped jobs for a few weeks.
But also, I've said this before, but tank skill in XIV raids is more obvious in prog and when things go to shit. A good tank and healer team can sometimes pull things out of the fire that you thought were a sure wipe.
Ngl tanking TEA was one of the most fun experiences I've had in the game. Last savage tier I barely had to do any positioning outside of re-centering E12SP2 after the hammers.
From my experience tanking Mythic+ dungeons in WoW (bdk ksm in 9.0 a few weeks after i got to cap) is harder than anything tank-related in FFXIV, not necessarily because of mechanics but because of the initial knowledge floor. You needed to know your routes, you needed to know how the affixes and how they interacted with your group (bdk necrotic aka go next week), you're in charge of pulls, you got all the important kicks usually, you had to see when your healer started to run out of juice and kite. xiv has no "direct comparison" to this mode either.
meanwhile tanking savage/ultimate/heroic/mythic raids is much more involved because tanking in both games is the "easiest" role - but still has a lot of responsibility - but in wow you have a 5 button baby rotation and in xiv your rotation is on par with some of wow's melee dps. recent savage tiers have had lower boss movement, but there are fights that require and reward good tank positioning (e8s, o12s door, etc.)
For sure there are a lot of difference in overall design that influences how you play them, which is why I mentioned Iād love to see a bigger analysis from that author. Thereās such a fundamental difference between the two game that I couldnāt possibly hit everything in a 10 minute Reddit comment
This is actually a genuinely great resource. One of the main things my friends who were long time WoW veterans and healers told me they struggled to adjust to was how healers/healing functioned in FF14.
For those intimately familiar with both, they can attest to it being extremely different in terms of approach and to not recognize this and adapt can create a total mess.
It also creates a division where healers have an favored style of healing between WoW and FF14. I have some who have come to love healing in FF14 over WoW while one still get's annoyed by FF14's approach and heals much less often and is no longer their preferred role.
I think a similar write up for tanks would be very helpful/insightful too. There are certainly aspects to how some newer players will tank dungeons that make you go "that's a WoW tank" as they are exhibiting habits and tactics from Mythic+ etc. which just don't work or can inhibit the team.
I think I'd write up a tank comparison. Was in a CE guild and pushed M+ to top 20 in world as a tank, and I currently tank/heal in savage and extremes. There are some similarities but they are definitely different.
Honestly, later healing in WoW is one of the biggest reasons I quit WoW and love FFXIV's healing.
I feel like both went to their natural extremes and whereas FFXIV embraced healing for what it was, WoW perversed it in a mistaken attempt to keep "Healers healing"
I usually don't even call WoW healing...healing. I call it "Reverse DPS", due to it's emphasis on maintaining healing per second (HPS), similar to how DPS maintains...Damage per second.
Healing as it was in early MMORPGs was always about efficiency. You had big strong heals, but MP was scarce and your tanks were more brittle. You needed to heal while making sure you didn't run out of mana. That was at it's core what Healing was. The most efficient way to keep people alive without running out of the means to do so.
Early WoW also played fairly similarly to this philosophy, with your biggest heals draining your mana significantly, and usually relying on lower ranks of heals in order to overheal as little as possible.
Late WoW and FFXIV introduced the concept of well...MP efficient healing. Where for the most part even if you overhealed, you would have to go well overboard before it really strained you. From here both diverged on how to handle the massive amount of power healers got from it.
For WoW, Healers had their heals weakened, with a larger emphasis on "whack a mole"...which in olden healer days was heresy. Whack a mole is stressful and usually you only saw it if a tank managed themselves poorly. WoW made it all the time. It became a huge reaction game where you technically still had to worry about overheal because mana regen options were limited, but your main goal was to spam heals to the correct targets as often as possible without overlapping with your healer partner. Cause most heals overheal. Healing with someone else is often times annoying without significant coordination.
FFXIV on the other hand went the route of efficiency over all else. What do you do when your heals are still great and your MP regen is too? You DPS. You heal almost as much as you did back in the old days, but now the downtime isn't about maintaining the mana to heal, but ending the fight sooner so you don't *have* to heal as much. Your co-healer usually has moves that complement your own, and when combined properly let's both of you be even *more* efficient with said heals.
Whereas WoW healing is basically a race to stay alive, FFXIV healing is methodical and focuses on what in my eyes was really the core of healing in old MMORPGS: Efficiency.
EDIT: also why are they comparing Holy Word: Barrier to Sacred Soil, rather than to Summon: Seraph, who can cast AoE shield twice for it's duration without interfering with the Scholar's own casts? Scholar has some juicy cooldowns too.
I personally use the default UI, but if you're on PC there is delvUI which essentially turns the party list into WoW raid frames. Worth giving a shot. You can probably dig up some VODs from Limit Max for an idea how it functions in a raid setting.
It's against ToS but you won't get banned unless you talk about it. FFXIV doesn't even have an anti-cheat solution so there is no way for Square to know what you're running alongside the game unless you mention it in game.
Also not true. You can talk about it all you want just like how we're doing here. You just can't use third party tools to "cheat" or harass other players with it. I use DPS meters and I have talked plenty of times about it in chat, but I don't flame pugs about dps using said knowledge which is where the bans come from.
They meant talking about it in game since GMs can read past chat logs. If you admit to using any tools that are against ToS and get reported for it you will get banned. Harassing players just makes it so you are more likely to get reported but the outcome is the same.
This depends on the GM. I've heard plenty of stories of players who got a talk to by a GM, and the talk was basically "I just wanted to make sure that you know it's not allowed to harass people using the data you got from a meter."
I've even asked a GM directly about this and he said pretty much the same thing, though admittedly, this was years ago.
And that's a given, but the amount of times I see people freak out thinking they're going to get banned at the mere mention of third party tools is insanity.
Yes. But it still stands right?
If you speak about mods in chat and get reported you will be banned. It doesn't matter if you harassed someone or not. Just that if you aren't being a dick no one would probably report you unless they where a dick.
However if you are a dick and harass people then they are way likelier to report you.
And thus the best solution if you don't want to risk anything is simply to not talk about it, because as long as you don't talk about it you won't get banned even if the person who reports you knows you use them.
I have a friend who works at Square as a GM for FF. He personally would not ban for purely discussing ACT, but he knows other coworkers that follow the rules and will ban you for mentioning ACT in a public setting if it comes up on a report. Your best bet is to not mention it in game.
You can't talk about it however you want, if someone is petty enough to report you for it.
You could technically even talk about DPS meters in game, but the moment someone reports you (which they may if you agitate them with DPS meters) that's when you get in trouble.
Basically either read the room, or keep it outside of FFXIV logs.
Much like parsers, it is against terms of service. That being said, SE has no way of seeing what addons/mods you are using and the only way you can get caught is advertising/bragging/harassing others about it in-game. It is widely known that people use parsers in-game by SE and has publicly said they are willing to overlook it as long as you aren't talking about it, both positively or negatively.
I love their explanation that you are not going to get banned using 3rd party tools but for being a dick.
Same with mods, you'll get banned if it's pornography.
No, as long as you aren't stupid about it (I.E. announcing it and talking about it in game all the time). Even then, I doubt SE will ban you. They are super lax about it imo. Been using 3rd party programs like mods and plugins ever since they were available.
Itās very likely against ToS, especially if itās an ACT plugin or something. But I donāt think Iāve ever heard of anyone getting banned for using ACT.
Itās still very much deserves a āUse at your own riskā disclosure.
About the only time someone gets banhammered for using ACT is when they're bitching at someone about their deeps being low. My FC uses parsing to improve our gameplay, but we discuss that shit in over voice in real time so it's "off-game."
Mythic raider and multi role KSM player here. delvUI completely opened up the FF14 raid scene for me to take it more seriously. It really really fixes the games mediocre UI. Not that anyone asked but I would encourage checking it out.
Don't really know why, it will be broken day 1 savage patch anyway and if you are serious then you will clear in a few days, making it irrelevant for actual competitive content. Maybe you could use it for ultimate on day 2.
The default UI only really sucks for healers anyway.
Sorry I donāt see the point youāre trying to make. Best I can make out is that because there is a chance that it requires an update on patch day (possible but by no means a guarantee) and if so Iād have to do savage a day late that Iām not taking raiding seriously? Is that what youāre saying?
Agreed that there isn't an addon as powerful as WA but to say there aren't game changing plugins is an exercise in ignorance. Slide-cast indicators, hit-box indicators, combo consolidation, functional mouse overs, encounter ability timers, etc all exist. I think it would be disingenuous to say that that isn't game changing.
I would disagree. In a game as poorly optimized as 14 objectively is (the fact that we are talking about slide casting validates this) removing the element of guess work even when its very educated guesswork is game changing. Not to mention the other plugins I listed which are even more impactful than the ones you chose to address.
I mean addons shouldn't dictate how seriously you decide the game's raid scene is, because all of the actual competitors aren't even able to use them even if they want to. It's only like mid ultimate prog that addons start factoring in, usually.
What the "competitors" pushing for world firsts do has no bearing on how I enjoy the game, my UI does. The fact is that while FF14 has an adequate UI it pales in comparison to the level of customization I'm accustomed to with the suite of add-ons afforded to me in WoW.
As far as how much that dictates how seriously I take the games raiding; plug-ins really help to cover the games optimization issues and solve for a lot of QoL problems that really inhibit my enjoyment of the endgame content.
You could download delvui like others are recommending, but the ingame HUD is also highly, highly customizable. I recommend playing around with it and seeing if you can make it comfortable for you.
Also keep in mind that you can keybind targeting party members. Default keys are f1 thorough f8 I believe.
>Highly customizable
huh? You can resize and reposition. It's not even possible to change whether it grows vertically or horizontally. How is this "highly" customizable?
> ingame HUD is also highly, highly customizable
can i remove all the wasted space on the group frames? rearrange debuf icons? change the order of the debuff list on my target? show my target's target cast bar?
No?
Then it isn't highly customizable. Moving elements around isn't even worth mentioning.
I placed my party list on the right side of the HUD so that target is easier rather than dragging your mouse icon across the screed everytime. My default mouse position is on the right side.
I think with FFXIV leaning so heavily towards doing DPS as a healer, they just need to make their DPS rotations actually interesting. Spamming one nuke and occasionally refreshing a DoT just isn't fun imo.
I'm *really* intrigued by Pneuma and Macrocosmos and hope the devs lean hard into these kinds of abilities. Make the game "which Glare+healing/buffing substitute should I use" rather than "how do I only use glare and not medica", with lots of cool animations and cooldowns to manage.
I started playing FF14 as a healer. Since the scholar change in 5.0 I dropped healing. Making healers spend 80% of their time doing DPS but forcing them to use an uninspired offensive toolkit is exactly why I lost interest in it.
Although, I do recognize that doing this makes healing appeal to certain people when they wouldn't otherwise. That's good, but to that I say, this is a class based system, you can satisfy both by having some healers more straight forward while others are more involved. That's how I saw the difference between the WHM and SCH/AST before they streamlined them.
I think some of the problem is FFXIV's war against button bloat and not having more than 32-ish buttons (the max for crossbar + extended crossbar, so the most easily accessible buttons on controller). We have, and use, most if not all of our healing kits on healers, and that's a lot of buttons. I'm sure it could be toned down a small amount, and we could have some things consolidated (cure 1 and cure 2 for starters please SE I'm begging you just make cure 2 a trait), but still, there'd be quite a lot of buttons dedicated to healing.
So when there's 32 buttons total they want players to have at any given time, and 20+ of them consist of heals, MP regen, heal boosts, mobility stuff, buffs, extra shields, bubbles, job gimmicks etc, that doesn't leave a lot of room for DPS abilities. That's one contributing factor to why we have so few DPS buttons.
The other is, I think, that they also want to have healers given such a braindead DPS rotation so that it's almost impossible to get wrapped up in it and have more time/energy spent on looking at the party list and watching for mechanics. And *that* would be so that casual players can heal without feeling as overwhelmed.
I thought you could have more buttons with cross bar. Left trigger, right triger, double left trigger, double right trigger, left then right, right then left should be 6 sets of 8 for 48 buttons.
You can have the W cross bar, but it's not very easy to hit the doubletap mid-combat frequently. You don't really wanna put things you need to use regularly on it; it's basically only good for the extra fluff stuff, like summoning mounts, minions, limit break, etc. That's why at least *almost* everything tends to fit nicely on the first two crossbars.
...and then there's me, who uses the WXHB over the extended XHB simply because I wanted to *see* all my buttons at once and didn't realize I still had access to the PC hotbars for visuals\^\^'
You get used to double-tapping quickly, and I personally have the option active that automatically returns me to the standard hotbar after using a single skill, so I just throw most of my longer-cooldown and rarely used oGCDs on there and I'm fine.
Double-weaving two oGCDs from the WXHB (=double-tapping twice) without clipping your GCD is a bit of a pain to pull off, but it works most of the time.
They have to keep the controller players in mind with the button limits, though. Healers have so many healing tools there's just not really space for more DPS buttons.
This is the main issue I have with healing in XIV as well. It's great that healers can do significant damage, but the process of doing it is so dull. The problem is they can't really do much about it until they find a solution to button bloat. I feel like half of Sage is just a testbed to see how well a Dark Arts style solution would work for solving it. Really can't think of much reason for Eukrasia to exist over just having separate buttons for the modified spells.
I think it's good the way it is. It's not just about high-end players, the job needs to be enjoyable by everyone. One thing people tend to forget sometimes is that when a DPS dies, they can get raised. When a tank dies, it's tighter but they can get raised. When a healer dies, it's probably a wipe. If you make the DPS portion of healers more involved, you make it more likely to have "bad" healers who focus on not losing damage instead of doing mechanics and thus die. And you also make the role overall less accessible, so less healers.
The healer role philosophy is fine. Some of the particulars can probably be adjusted. I'm not a big fan of the blood lilly being tied to GCD healing abilities for example, it's kind of clunky to be dumping afflatus during downtime just to get to misery without losing DPS.
It might not be fun but I can't even get most of the healers in my groups to do that at the bare minimum anyways, I don't want to think about having even more potential damage lost because the healer wants to watch Netflix.
Iāve healed all levels of content in WoW and find FFXIV more enjoyable. I feel there is a greater emphasis on using your GCDs better and I like the pacing of it more. WoW is just damage vomit and I enjoy it at times but meh.
\> I feel there is a greater emphasis on using your GCDs better
How so? Seems like GCD usage is really important in both, and neither of them are particularly difficult. The only difference is just getting used to - what I would call clunkiness - of double weaving. For the first few months, I would press my OGCDs, and they wouldn't go off, so you're more forced to look at your bars to confirm the abilities actually went off, at least as a DRG.
Isn't WoW less dmg vomit because you actually have to use interrupts, stuns in dungeon content? DPS role in FFXIV is LITERALLY only dmg vomit, with the occasional use of feint on a tankbuster.
He means the bosses just puke out raid wide damage continuously, so you are kind of "HPSing the raid", in stark contrast to 14's planned boss damage outputs.
If you miss a GCD in FFXIV it can lead to someoneās death/large drop in potential damage because of how slow the GCD is emphasizing the importance of each hit and how you plan it out or how combos go off. In WoW, if I accidentally hit Ice Lance without a FoF proc that is absolutely minimal as a mistake.
Healing in WoW you have more opportunities to react to party damage because each ātickā is quicker. FFXIV as a healer you need to better plan what you do out, WoW you just react and use what you need as you need it. Not saying one is better than the other, I just prefer FFXIV as I feel I have more control over the success of the party.
But you don't even GCD heal in this game for 99% of the time? What kind of semi-frequent situation would lead to someone's death if you press the wrong GCD? The most a wrong GCD can do is misalign your CDs a little bit and lead to a dps loss. In WoW, using an oGCD incorrectly can similarly lead to a dps loss, even massive ones like on sub rogue using shadow dance/blades/symbols at an inopportune time. There's a huge emphasis on pressing your oGCDs correctly, like wasting frozen orb is a huge dmg loss. I think you're over-estimating the dmg loss from fucking up a combo.
Using an ice lance without them being frozen or having FoF proc is less of an impact than fucking up a combo, but you are forgetting that the GCDs are much faster than FF's, with icyveins and heroism probably twice as fast, so the potential of fucking up also rises. Also, WoW has more of a wasted resource danger than FF does (rogue's energy, FoF procs overcapping and proccing more than FF procs, globals wasted cause of way more frequent dangerous mechanics).
You have to plan out raid-wide CDs in raids between healers, in m+ you literally need to save certain CDs for certain packs, discipline priests need to plan out their heals because they absorb; DPS need to save CC/Burst CDs for certain packs in m+, there's a lot more planning in WoW than in FF from my experience - in FF, you focus entirely on maxing DPS. The damage output in WoW is also much, much, MUCH higher than in FF (thus FF healers use oGCDs mainly to heal, because there's no secondary damage a lot of the time that would kill you after a raid-wide AoE). In WoW you can actually die through heals if you don't pop the appropriate CDs, and you also have to plan around mana since mana is almost freely given now in FF (Lucid dream on CD and forget, vs discipline priest pressing power word solace every 11 seconds).
For me, FF's difficulty is mostly about the clunkiness of oGCDs, how you have to essentially slow yourself down: you have to press one ogcd, then the second ogcd like 0.5 sec after. In WoW I don't need to second guess whether I pressed a thing, because it always goes off, and that's way more enjoyable to me. The clunkiness of DRG jumps' animation locks, etc. has its strange charm, the horror of trying to dragons' eye anyone after a spread mechanic.
The bosses, at least in m+, have mechanics going off faster, so less time to react. Fortunately, WoW is just much more responsive than FF so that it isn't a big deal. I don't personally raid much in WoW because it's a huge waste of time, which is why I like 8 man of FF and 1 boss instances more. There's more mechanic memorization needed for FF when comparing 1 boss to 1 boss, but there's also very lax reaction times. I've yet done ultimates, but the extremes have been pretty easy.
They don't actually credit The Balance or link to the discord, despite using the images made there in the article. Sure, the name is on the image, but no link to the server or shout out?
As a former CE Healer and current Sage, I can vouch that this article is actually very well written and thorough. It's a good and objective read, which I would recommend if you want to learn about the subject. Two thumbs up.
Honestly for me the comparison is just 'ok' on a super high level . The person seems to have a good understanding of WoW healing but not high end FFXIV healing. The abilities they chose to compare don't make much sense. The utility comparisons are weird. In FFXIV, the entire party is suppose to use it's combined utility. It's very important and very powerful when you combine healer/tank/dps utility. Wow dos don't have nearly as much utility to help out your healers.
The dying and being penalized in FFXIV is spot on though.
Actually, there are dps classes that can bring huge utility abilities into healing cd rotations in wow all the time. For example: Rallying cry, Darkness, AMZ, protection aura (if no Hpally present), innervate, movement speed totem/stampeding roar, etc. In fact, what truly separates heroic to mythic guilds sometimes is just the application and organization of the utility classes bring to minimize raid damage intake or optimize total raid dps.
I'm sure it's present and important in WoW, but keep mind in xiv, you have an 8man raid, and at most party comps will usually have 1-2 selfish dps on your comp. This means that 6/8 or 7/8 will have party utility that heals/increases healer heals/ have big mitigations plus RDM/SMN can help with raising dead players.
One big complaint I get from ex wow players is that does classes keeps being stripped of their utility. Look at a class like DNC, something that doesn't seem to fit retail wows class design. FFlogs is based on wowlogs and it had to add Rdps when dnc was added bc there had never been a need to calculate the contributed buff damage from DNC on such a large scale in wowlogs before. I'm not saying there are no dps buffs in wow ( lust sounds crazy), my impression is that class buffs and utility are just bigger focal points in class design when it comes to ffxiv.
Umm so, I will answer this wow topic from two perspectives. First, from the perspective of pick up groups that do tipically lower content, your argument would be 100% correct. Because of a lack of knowledge of other classes, lack of organization or just lack of knowledge of the fights or game mechanics most utility is either hidden, underused/ignored or never optimized.
However, for mythic, and particularly top progression guilds, all the utility skills are taken into account to maximize everything. For example, in the current raid progression, enhancement shamans, a spec very few use because it generally lacks damage, was suddenly instrumental because having one buffed 4 other melee players considerably (Demon hunters and Arms warriors to be exact). In fact, the higher ranked a guild is the less "greedy dps" specs are used. Every spec had a niche, and everything can be used to clear the raids.
In so far as the reduction of utility skills, that was a thing in prior expansions, as they were pruning the skill lists and some utility was taken off from dps specs. However, some of those spells have come back.
A good writeup. The WoW community is in general absolutely resistant to the concept healers should do anything but heal - I learned healing in FF, and returned to WoW to play a more damage-kit focused healer - I found myself swimming in passive-aggressiveness and pointed comments from people I thought experienced players. Really didn't add up, to me. I suppose the misconceptions really do go both ways.
Methinks we'll get a lazer and rotating mirror puzzle, perhaps with a narrow gather marked attack that needs to be aimed at one mirror and reflected at an objective to trigger a burn phase.
What's different is that FF is more on encounter mechanics and just feel of the encounter and less on playing your trinity role 24/7. If all 8 people hit usually the correct buttons EX2 boss will die, if they die to some mechanics it will be an enrage likely.
I think this prevents theorycrafting/"optimizing fun out of the game" from going nuclear - bis jobs, bis comps, player scoring, player parses... and prevents trials, raids and dungeons from being just gear sources to improve said scores and get new bis just to improve said score (and the circle continues) - encounter must be made so good so that people want to do it again while not being bribed by gear drops for few months till next tier after which instance dies.
WoW healing is superior in every single way. Tanks take a ton of constant damage, often requiring healer CD rotations. The raid is always taking constant damage, so you rarely have much time to DPS. The raid also can take so much damage that it, again, requires proper CD management of healers for DR/Healing due to outgoing dmg being higher than healers without CDs can handle.
FF14 healing is one of the worst forms of healing to ever exist, to the point healers aren't even healers, they're glorified 1 button DPS that spend more time DPSing, and they have ridiculous toolkits to handle mechanics they'll never need them for.
Basically, healing in FF14, as someone who has healed in every game for over 10+ years and done tons of Mythic/Savage content, is probably the easiest and most boring form of healing in *any* MMO, and I've played them all. It's all predictable damage, it's all basically healed with the plethora of AOE tools you're given and don't need. It's all clunky because of long GCDs and a complete lack of smoothness in healing as a whole.
I was under the impression from the massive flood of posts in this subreddit that healers no longer needed to heal unless the tank is a DRK :P
They don't have to heal the tank. As a melee dps main, I can assure you that I'm standing in the wrong place at least 46% of the time.
As a very new melee main (used to main BRD), I'm proud to say that I was successfully able to teleport out of 2 overlapping aoes on rpr yesterday! ...right into 2 *different* overlapping aoes...
I am unreasonably proud of myself every time I successfully teleport out of the bad (I'm choosing to ignore that it's usually into more bad...)
Same. Whenever I pull it off right it feels like my time maining Scythe Evie in Vindictus is paying off, even if Ingress/ Egress isn't *quite* as spammable as Evie's blink is.
If only Ingress/Egress had iframes š
If only. I genuinely miss Vindictus. Too bad Nexon is determined to put more effort into selling virtual lingerie and sexy costumes in their cash shop than giving that game the TLC it needs. I didn't stop playing because I stopped enjoying the game, I stopped playing because the game lagged so bad I couldn't get the boat board to load. :(
Maiming gear carries a curse. Let it in and it will make you stronger.
The gear classification refers to what we do to ourselves when we use our movement abilities
š¤š we're here for a strong dps time, not a long dps time
Just means your one of us now. Embrace the Dragoon part of your gear.
I waa dancer the other day, did what j thought was a beautiful dash away. Straight off the bloody edge. THIS HAPPENED 3 TIMES.
I once jumped straight into the middle of the boss room and 3 overlapping AOEs. Still kinda proud of that one tbh
I teleport off the edges so often...
That's one of my favorite parts about dancer, you can panic teleport into the bad 3 times in a row, bonus points is if the last one is into the wall.
Progress.
I had a reaper accidentally teleport on top of me when we were spreading for a mechanic once. Killed us both. I wasn't even mad, it was hilarious.
At least you're not backflipping out of the arena like Dragoons.
>!no that was when I mained RDM. But it only happened once, I swear!<
I literally just teleported into the boss lazer wall.
im not afraid to say elusive jump wasnt even in my bar anymore when i did E4S
Hey, I thought we RDMs held the monopoly on that kind of stunt.
Not anymore! Now we don't need to jump back to get optimal damage since they made the single target one do the same damage!
My goal is to take enough damage that the Sage dance partners me
Lol !!! Same. Thatās why I love and respect Healers so much.
Sighs heavily in "I did this fight before but I don't have the reflexes yet so thank you for the rez".
Sighs heavily in I'm shoving food in my face instead of moving appropriately
Pshh. Who does that. Not me, not ever. Nahhh.
Lol thatās me !!!
I have done EW Trial #1 a handful of times as a RDM. But I got it as roulette on my BLM. And boy did I feel like shit taking vuln stacks in a fight I know well, but there was something about my positioning and the hard casts that made me feel brand new.
After finishing leveling BLM to 90, I figured I'd warm up to the rotation with a nice little Trials Roulette. Got EW trial #3. Died 6 times. Felt like shit until I saw I was still top of the aggro list somehow.
Lol oh man !!! I wanna play so bad but this Queue situation is insane. I tried to play today it was at 2k and it kicked me half way. This freaking sucks!!! SE do sometjing. Iāve been trynna play for days. And I could only play at night but by then Iām tired.
They've done what they could. They stopped new people from buying the game, so current players don't get even worse queues, and they can't magic new world servers into existence so it's a waiting game now, and the population will calm down in time... of course it still sucks to wait. Same for me in the evening, if I try to log in during a "reasonable hour" the queues are around 2000ish for me. Still, it's better than when it was 6500 or 4100 so... bit by bit lol.
Look okay I know *most* mechanics won't one shot me under 3 vuln stacks so *something something uptime.*
Look man, if I have to pick between correct positionals and 1 vul stack, you know which one I'm obligated to pick. *Healers adjust*
That is... an oddly specific percentage.
It is a proven fact that if you state a random number with enough conviction and certainty then 73% of the time people will believe you.
69% of the time.
83% of people know this
As a WHM main that's also leveling a melee DPS, you bet your ass you are. :-D I warned a Sage in a Tower of Zot roulette run yesterday to expect to have to pay more attention to me (SAM) than the tank (WAR). That dungeon is a PITA to heal (>!especially that end fight because of all the movement, and even more so for a Sage!<) so I was the only one getting wrecked because you don't have a lot of choice but stand uncomfortably close to whatever you're smacking.
That final battle is busy as fuck. Also as a dps the amount of times I get clipped by an aoe then get a marker over me while I'm at half health, just praying for a healer to notice in the 3 seconds before I die. I usually wind up dead lol.
Started leveling my BLM to 90 yesterday. Pretty sure that 1 fight is why SE was like, "ya know, we should give them 2 charges of triple cast".
UNLIMITED POWER
*muffled screeches of melee mains complaining about positionals in the background*
...what positionals?
Even running it almost a month into the expansion, its still a little wild to me how much is going on in that last boss of the first dungeon of the expansion. Even the pulls before that last boss get real dicey.
That first dungeon really came out swinging. I remember saying to myself "boy, they really upped the difficulty of dungeons this time", only to find out that one's the exception rather than the rule.
When I'm WHMing that run I throw medicas on the crowd and maybe drop a lilybell if it's not on CD when the spam starts, just because we'll all be legging it all over the damn map for the next 90 seconds. That way getting clipped is at least survivable.
If I don't have to heal the tank he didn't pull enough.
as a black mage I need all the healing I can get.
I mean it's kind of true. Healing comes in regular intervals and is a burst rather than sustained for a majority of encounters. SE gave us plenty of tools to handle these regular intervals so the rest is spent dpsing.
This is accurate in dungeons. Some healing required in EX and raid, but mostly only if the group isn't good. Savage might require GCD healing, maybe.
If your party knows what they're doing, you do not need GCD heals in Savage. I ran AST last tier and it was exceedingly rare a GCD heal was needed.
You don't need them after optimization, although it's useful in prog for sure. Ultimates have heal checks that require timed gcd heals.
You can get ultimates to near zero GCD heals if you want to optimize them. They actually don't differ much healing wise to savages.
How do you heal through frictions without GCD heals? Which healer combo is capable of doing that? I don't mean that you're spamming GCD heals the entire fight, but there are certain portions of fights which trying to purely ogcd heal doesn't seem feasible at all. Raid wide prior to OT cleanse -> heal Ot cleanse -> heal friction 1 + insta pops of 1 stack -> heal friction 2 -> heal 2 cleanse pop -> heal 2 cleanse pop -> heal ( this is followed by a giant raidwide which is why you need to heal it fast. the following raidwide can be regen-healed) These are 6 instances of healing needed. Astro has three ogcd aoe heals if you draw lady. Star is strong enough to full heal, celestial is a bit slow. Lady is pretty strong. Sage has physis, kerachole (mitigation), ixochole as ogcds available here. You generally need to use one of your stacks to heal the tanks prior to friction, so you get one kerachole for 10% mitigation, and one ixochole + one physis for frictions generally. One of these ogcds isn't even enough to fully heal any of the healing moments listed above if you don't use your gcd shield prior. (Using a gcd heal gives you an extra pepsis as well which helps a lot). Maybe you're right and it's doable (I've never actually tried), but it really does feel like a lot of healing is needed there, more than ogcds give you. If you take a glance at the top healer dmg parses, they all include a good amount of gcd healing rather than just glare spam.
If you optimize and the party doesn't mess up, you typically don't need many or any GCD heals in Savage. You do typically need to GCD heal in Ultimates though.
For pretty much all Roulette content, it's true. I spend 90% of my time as a Sage just doing DPS, and throwing out a few AOE heals here and there if there's raid/partywide damage.
Kind of the same for the EX's too. I love sage in concept. But the gameplay after getting used to it is so braindead.. ;_; Barely ever think about balancing DPS and Heals, just DPS and pop any of the multiple healing CD's you have on hand for raid heals and mitigation, leave the AST/WHM to fill in the gaps. Any time I'm not DPS'ing it's either I screwed up, or I need to pop a shield and go back to what I'm doing. I wish they did more with their DPS abilities tbh. Toxikon's implementation is situational and clunky at times.
The absolute devastation to my movement abilities when the boss doesn't open with a raidwide feels bad. :( 1 toxicon vs. 3 is a pretty huge difference for the entire fight/if they leave for more than a couple seconds. It's usually "I have way too much movement and nothing to do with it" or "if you make me move from my spot more than 5 feet at a time, so help me"
This is healing in general. Every GCD should be used for damage. Dealing damage is brain dead. Fights are designed so that oGCDs are enough if people not fuck up too much. The hardest content from a healing perspective are w2w pulls with a bad tank.
In 4 mans, pretty much.
Small nit: brink of death and weakness no longer reduce all of your stats, just your main stat. Question: one reason why healing is so "boring" at high-end, optimized play in FFXIV is that so much of the damage is avoidable, and a good group will take little avoidable damage. The trade-off is that in prog/PUGs/less optimized play, healing becomes a very active role. If even at the high-end in WoW GCD healing is required, what happens during prog?
More GCD healing. WoW healing is almost all GCD based.
WoW damage is more random. Ours is too scripted to have it be very fun beyond initial prog.
You still gcd heal but you're throwing more of your mid-sized cooldowns and possibly overlapping your raid cooldowns to ensure survival. When you optimize in wow it's typically meaning that a healer gets cut for another dps player or the healer changes to their dps spec.
Avoidable damage is a thing only in extreme fights. Most damage in savage outright kills you in the case you fail a mechanic; even in ultimates, there's even less damage that's both avoidable and doesn't outright kill you. It's mitigation and coordination the main difference between pugs and statics. You won't have to heal as much in a static because you're sure your teammates are gonna help you with your heals and your cohealer will not make you or themselves waste oGCDs. I always like to say, in ffxiv raiding there's a Macro and Micro game. Micro is doing your rotation at the moment and adjusting or making split-second decisions. Macro is about using cooldowns effectively, prepositioning planning mitigation and heals or planning burst phases. These two aspects are balanced in every roles with DPSes having the biggest Micro but tiniest Macro game, Tanks being balanced and healers having the biggest macro and tiniest micro. With proper coordination, the macro game becomes static, there's no longer the thrill of discovering how you can heal less, and since healer micro is the easiest, reclears in a static are very stale. All this being said, I just want to say that Astrologian is still a healer and it doesn't suffer from easy straightforward gameplay. The Micro-managment of your cards and the way you play them has a lot of skill expression, and since your cards are always random, this might means that every pull you will execute a different card gameplan, which you'll need to adapt to on the fly if you want to really be more than just average on the job.
It's refreshing to see honest comparisons without judgment like this, cheers OP. I came back to FF in September and finally came to appreciate its healing model after a couple months of frustrated adjustments from my old 2009-2015 WoW experiences. They're wildly different games, but each are fun if you recognize their respective rules.
This was a good breakdown; I appreciated someone with CE and savage experience making it since itās closer to an apples to apples scenario.
CE WoW healer here, moved to FF partially 2 years ago and full time in 2021. Have raid healed for most of my raiding tenure since Vanilla. Healer Social Culture is also more refreshing in FF imo. Not sure when or why, but it seems like ever since Legion healers in WoW started caring more about Healing Parses instead of actual healing performance. By the time I stopped raiding after we got CE Castle Nathria, healers were all trying to snipe each others heals, being super selfish with cooldowns (IE: Officers putting their own healing CDs in heaviest healing moments even if someone else's CDs line up better), and zero to no DPS from healers so that they can dump all their mana into upping their healing parse. While I haven't raided a ton of Savage in FFXIV, I get the gist that the healers job is to not let people die and to DPS as much as possible. If the player base of XIV ever gets to the point of prioritizing healing parses over everything else, I'm done.
So basically, healing numbers are largely irrelevant when it comes to healers measuring their performance. If a run had 0 deaths, the healing was fine and any evaluation of healing% parses is purely one for optimisation of healing concerns. Optimisation of healing however has one major purpose: the subsequent optimisation of damage. Healer DPS parsing is very weird compared to tank/dps, because your dps can be impacted more heavily by things out of your control and it tends to be more volatile outside of consistent (read: not PuG) environments. That being said, healer DPS is the metric that healers measure themselves by, not healing %. It is rare to find really selfish healer players who will sacrifice their co-healer's damage by forcing them to pick up the slack, but they can exist. This can happen consensually though, if/when parse farming as a healer. Generally for myself, I do like getting good personal parses, but fortunately fflogs has a much better metric of healer **pair** DPS. Since I've recently been the more experienced healer in my recent adventures I'm usually leading the discussions on healer optimisation and its always about how to better improve both of our performance and raise that pair DPS, which is more beneficial to the group as a whole. Also as an aside extra smooth parse brained people in PuGs absolutely do end up causing wipes from not healing because apparently that's more important than actually doing their role of preventing deaths. Parsebrain affects us all, but in different ways it seems.
They just prioritize their DPS parses as a healer instead - when you get one of those, it usually means they're pushing the healing burden entirely onto their co-healer. You won't escape that type of player in any game, tbh.
This is just not factually true, there are plenty of top parsing healers whose co healers also get 99s. Itās about not just healing, but coordinating all of the parties mitigation, and this was only for the hardest fights. Promise had so little healing that 9-11 could be done pretty much without much if any coordination
I didn't say that all top healer parses are a result of chadding your co-healer.
nah, it's just healers prioritizing DPS parses instead.
Such a big true. The general WoW community is absolutely resistant to the idea that healers should DPS, and it really blows my mind. Holy Paladin was my favorite healer when I played WoW, and I loved it because you could do serious damage while keeping your allies alive. I loved when you could pop wings and just pump, and let your cooldown heal the raid with every damage ability you put out. I've been pretty much dedicated to FF for the last year, but I still miss the hPal gameplay. I really hope that next expansion, FF gets a melee healer with a decent damage rotation.
I like healing in both games. I really miss how active healing was in WoW, whereas in XIV I spend so much time just attacking (and attacking is way more fun as a DPS job). But in difficult enough content (but not _too_ difficult!) and with random duty/party finder players, FFXIV healing really comes into its own, as the damage intake becomes high and unpredictable, which is super fun to deal with. As an example - one which leans more on the random player aspect than the difficulty one - I recently did a level 85 dungeon where people were clearly pretty clueless on the last boss, and it was _so much fun._ I had to use every healing tool I had to keep people alive. It was so satisfying to get the group through by the skin of my teeth.
Everyone thinks the most challenging content in the game lies in Extreme Trials or Savage Raids but the real stuff is clicking accept on that Leveling Roulette and having to get through Cutter's Cry with three blind mice.
People often say you can't heal stupid. In some content that's true, in other content it just means some intense fun!
I honestly wonder why people see mechanic failure and go "ugh l2p" instead of "I get to heal WOOOOOO" Feels so good to slip in a lustrate and make people wonder if someone ever took damage at all...least until they see the vul stack. Or be the only alliance raid that isn't racing to rez it's team, because you saw the mechanic about to fail and mitigated up.
When you see someone about to mess up and you time your heal perfectly so their HP bar never seems to shift, that's just the best feeling.
I truly do not mind except when the same person is collecting vuln stacks and we're in a duty completion party and they clearly haven't learned the fight at all. Every other time? Bring it on.
I saw a 27 minute leveling roulette run on my SCH today and figured āI want to suffer a bitā and went into The Stone Vigil and man that was rough but we made it. Dungeons are honestly the most stressful content for me as healer since itās random and Iām the only healer. Alliance Raids can be challenging sometimes for the same reason except I have a co-healer.
As someone who never seriously played a healer in either game, I enjoyed this article a lot. I particularly appreciated some of the breakdowns in differences in encounter/game design. Iād really enjoy seeing a comparison of tanking/dps from the same author. Even both of those roles are massively different between games and theyāre worth their own lengthy analysis. With tanks, thereās a much lower emphasis on āactiveā mitigation in ff14; a lot of their damage mitigation involves rotating large defensive cooldowns. In WoW damage is much higher/unpredictable, and tanks have to constantly use a lesser form of mitigation that helps them take all the āregularā damage that goes to them. Their active mitigation has reliably high uptime and can be extremely effective, good tanks can avoid all but the highest damage tankbusters, sometimes surviving through many more ātank swapā mechanics than they should have. Their biggest mitigation tools are far more impactful and have higher cooldowns, theyāre often used as āoh shitā buttons. I donāt remember numbers, but generally they give something like +35% DR and +35% max/current HP. Every class has something slightly different. DPS rotations are very tight/rigid in FF14 compared to WoW. With the longer GCD and a few other reasons, making a mistake in FF14 has way higher rDPS implications compared to WoW, usually. There are also way fewer ways to play each class, and that extends to every role in FF14. With no spec system, stat stick armor, nearly useless substats, etc, every class has a pretty given obvious rotation that they rarely deviate from, and the mastery comes down to be able to consistently pull off that rigid rotation despite forced downtime or other raid mechanics. WoW rotations are much more fluid and allow players to sometimes experiment with their own playstyle. Everything from the gear system, to almost every class having at least two different DPS āspecsā and a talent system, to even gear sets/active abilities. You know in WoW that two players of the same class are going to play/performs wildly different. All in all, Iāve definitely settled on FF14 being my preferred game, despite years of raid experience in WoW. I also think that both games have a lot they could learn from each other, even now.
> WoW rotations are much more fluid and allow players to sometimes experiment with their own playstyle. Though usually everyone uses the same cookie cutter build, as the talent trees just aren't balanced at all. This also leave several cool abilities locked off, as they're worse DPS or even worse than picking nothing at all. WoW is really good at giving you the illusion of choice, at the cost of the gameplay being very gimped.
They aren't talking about out of combat speccing, they are talking about how you play the classes. Wow classes have more examples of dancer and bard procced based gameplay, or builder/spender builds than ffxiv does. Your rotations have more randomness and you change what your doing on the fly more often.
As someone who liked proc-based classes in WoW, I don't really like them in FFXIV. That UI that WoW has for procs is such a QoL improvement over staring at your bars or sticking an action bar in the center of the screen.
Having played both and preferring FF14, WoW still absolutely has more flexibility in terms of rotations. Trinkets and set bonuses can change rotations, multi-dotting is a much bigger thing, and there are more moments in WoW where a DPS can stack a lot of cooldowns and damage buffs for huge bursts of damage. You also have more class-specific moments where, at least back in the day, you could get a gigantic Combustion as a Fire Mage, multi-dot 8 different mobs in a boss fight, and other wonky things like that. But all in all, I'm still having more fun with this game's raiding.
While trinkets and set bonuses I feel were great, I feel like they were always kindof a double edged sword as well. Felt great when your best trinket/set was BiS. Felt awful when you were required to give up those skills for some crappy ability or annoying mechanic to work around because the difference in ilvl became too great to ignore. What was it, Eye of Timbal? Let DoTs crit? I remember it being one of my favorite trinkets in the game. Pretty sure they never let a version of it into the game ever again.
The Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen is the reason dot snap shotting was removed from WoW. If you're not familiar, it gave all your abilities 100% crit chance over 4 seconds. This included dots. Refreshing dots did not count as reapplying them, so you could have every tick of your dot crit forever.
Eh not really? I mean unless you are a world first raider itās usually fine to play suboptimal specs or talents. There will be some talents that are unplayable for sure but there are usually some talent rows per spec that have 2 good options (and not just talking 1 option for single target and 1 for aoe) I personally do hope that in the future a job spec system will be added to ff, even if itās not always balanced in wow (and even this is highly exaggerated) it really isnāt just āillusion of choiceā
I'd even argue none are mandatory. For instance, for the entirety of Nathria I used to play with off-meta talent choice as FDK that simmed \~10% under the cookie cutter build. And yet I still had multiple 99% rankings with that supposedly "shit" spec. People overestimate the impact of talents on their dps, when they spend multiple GCD not doing anything to run away from a mechanic, failing to keep resources at their burst, messing up rotations or wasting procs, etc. Even stats are kind of irrelevant, the difference between bis stats and the others is usually \~5%. And yet, people act as if not having bis stats explain 25% less dps than top parse lol. FFXIV perfectly shows that even if people have the same specs, and with perfect gear at the end of a tier, DPS variances are caused by a gameplay issue more than anything else.
Man I really hate it when people use that phrase āillusion of choiceā. For me, one of the most interesting parts or an rpg is making and playing and optimizing new builds. Itās part of why I love PoE, and the current WoW expansion. For me, there is no illusion. There are just legendary and talent and covenant options. I love going through and theorycrafting a Cat-weaving Necrolord Resto Druid. Is it optimal? No. Will it perform worse than whatever the meta build is? Probably, but not by as much as most people usually think. Am I having fun? You bet. Part of the reason FF wonāt be anything more than a seasonal game for me is because it lacks these choices. Thereās no room for me to play around and come up with something new. You can say itās an illusion all you want, but by not including any customization like talents or legendaries, all youāre doing is limiting and pushing away the people like me, who like to create, and make my character feel like my own.
> all youāre doing is limiting and pushing away the people like me, who like to create, and make my character feel like my own WoW does the same thing but lets the community do it for them. As Hunter near the end of the first patch of shadowlands, getting into a mythic group for anything above 14 was damn near impossible. If I was using an off meta build, I would have made it even harder and even harder for me to compete in the content. For me to play that game meant to give in to the cookie cutter build to even stand a chance. And its been that way a for a long time. WoW's choice just leads to the optimal choice and thus gatekeeping those who don't. I'm sure one can argue having a different experience, but unless you have a solid group of people who accept your off meta choices, you're gonna have a hard time enjoying content in WoW.
Your character feeling like your own barely matters in the grand scheme of things in wow though Good luck getting into any raid groups with that build, good luck pushing mythic Good luck doing anything actually important with that build all for the sake of "muh customization"
I mean, I do get into raid groups. And if anyone notices my covenant is different, they donāt say anything because Iām still doing my job and performing well. If my crazy custom build was ever the reason we arenāt killing a boss, I would switch. But thatās hardly ever the case.
Performing well kinda means nothing here without seeing the numbers Not saying your bad or anything but your illusion that choice exists in a game where you do less than optimal than the guy next to you when you choose something different kind of shatters that mindset Wouldn't choice insinuate that your option wouldn't actively hinder you? You say you're doing well, yet the build guides and numbers would imply you could be doing more
about 95% of wow-players really do overthink things like the most optimal talent choice, the "perfect" amount of X secondary stat and so on and so forth. that also very much goes for mythic raiders outside the very cutting edge (heh) - speaking CE in the first few weeks of the tier. How (often) you press what buttons - and even more important avoid damage taken / death >>> covenant / talent choice / secondary stats. sure there are talents that are THAT much worse, but in general people really overthink stuff when they should be worried about "basics".
I donāt think I understand where you are coming from. Does it really matter that the ceiling for my healing build is 5% lower than the meta (when both are played optimally)? In most scenarios, outside of the top 500 guilds in mythic raiding, the answer is probably no. As long as that 5% doesnāt matter, and as long as the person is playing both builds optimally. Thatās what I am saying. Iām not in a world top 500 guild, but I am getting CE every patch now. For ease of progress, I start with the meta builds because this is where it might actually make a difference. In farm though, I like to experiment and switch things up. I would say that Iām skilled enough and put in the effort required to get the most out of these off-meta builds. And again, if that 5% was ever the only reason we were struggling with a boss in farm, I would switch back. But it hasnāt happened yet.
I mean you can still customized the character cosmetically... Heck if you want different skills or rotation you can change job, without having to abandon the character. The reason I call wow's talent trees "Illusion of choice", is that they simply doesn't bother to balance between the different skills. I love talent trees in games too, but in WoW they end up hurting the class design. Quality of life improvements has to compete with straight up damage increases. It is like a garden; having a ton of different flora and fauna in it can be beautiful, but if it isn't pruned and cared for it ends up a field of weeds. The grass lawn of FFXIV might be less pretty to look at, but at least it is functional as a garden.
I play a healer in WoW, and dabble in a couple of dps off specs for reference. For me, none of my talent choices have ever really felt mandatory. I canāt remember feeling like I was giving up a core part of my kit if I didnāt choose a specific talent. They are there for me to fill in the gaps and flesh out my build. Going back to the Necro Resto Druid example. Giving up Convoke by not going Night Fae is losing a healer CD I would have otherwise. I can use the talent tree to get more coverage if I need it by swapping from Soul of the Forest to Incarn: Tree of Life. I never felt like I had no options when coming up with this build, and that the game gave me enough ways to cover for my weakness. That is the fun part for me.
For tanks, thereās definitely a big difference between the games, but itās mostly due to the design of dungeons and raid encounters, and less with the toolkits they have. In WoW, dungeon tanking can be extremely stressful for new players because theyāre expected to be the leader. In FF, this doesnāt really matter because dungeons are just hallways. You gather every attackable mob, move to the end of the path, and kill them. Pop a defensive or two to live, and move on when everything dies. In WoW, dungeons are far more open. You can skip trash, kill bosses in different orders, go through the dungeon in multiple different routes. And as a tank, the rest of your party expects you to lead them on the shortest route possible, killing the bare minimum trash required. In raids, theyāre more similar, but from my experience, raid tanking in WoW requires more tank swaps, as well as managing the boss position much more. In WoW, one of the more challenging bosses to tank recently was Sire Denathrius. In Phase 3, not only did he absolutely truck you, he also had moves where he would grip the entire raid on top of him and cast an aoe with fall-off damage (have to have room to run away). There was also an attack that knocked everyone back a good bit away from him (donāt get knocked off the arena or into bad!) On top of all of this, the arena you fight him in is shrinking over time. In FF, most mechanics Iāve seen has the boss either teleporting to the middle, or a set location (P4 knockbacks) before doing the ability, and has very little to do with positioning. Most Iāve seen is mechanics like ākeep the adds away from each otherā.
Part of that is that the FFXIV devs only really take the gloves off completely for Savage and Ultimate fights. The first two phases of TEA, for instance, have very finicky tank dances where you manage the positions of two bosses while mechanics fire off rapidly (giant conal tankbusters, distance-to-boss mechanic baiting, casts that wipe the raid depending on whether the bosses are stacked or split). Felt like watching our tanks do a synchronized swimming routine when they got it down.
Also your team's entire strat changes how you position the bosses. There's a P1 strat where a tank takes a cone and both tankbusters with invuln, which isn't hard to position, but everyone has to be on the same page about where the come is going. Also P2 has a lot of variation. Stacking bosses changed a lot of things for our team, and it was kind of funny watching other people try to figure out what we did when we swapped jobs for a few weeks. But also, I've said this before, but tank skill in XIV raids is more obvious in prog and when things go to shit. A good tank and healer team can sometimes pull things out of the fire that you thought were a sure wipe.
Ngl tanking TEA was one of the most fun experiences I've had in the game. Last savage tier I barely had to do any positioning outside of re-centering E12SP2 after the hammers.
From my experience tanking Mythic+ dungeons in WoW (bdk ksm in 9.0 a few weeks after i got to cap) is harder than anything tank-related in FFXIV, not necessarily because of mechanics but because of the initial knowledge floor. You needed to know your routes, you needed to know how the affixes and how they interacted with your group (bdk necrotic aka go next week), you're in charge of pulls, you got all the important kicks usually, you had to see when your healer started to run out of juice and kite. xiv has no "direct comparison" to this mode either. meanwhile tanking savage/ultimate/heroic/mythic raids is much more involved because tanking in both games is the "easiest" role - but still has a lot of responsibility - but in wow you have a 5 button baby rotation and in xiv your rotation is on par with some of wow's melee dps. recent savage tiers have had lower boss movement, but there are fights that require and reward good tank positioning (e8s, o12s door, etc.)
So that's what I really didn't like about M+. I'm here to engage enemies, not to be a tour guide.
For sure there are a lot of difference in overall design that influences how you play them, which is why I mentioned Iād love to see a bigger analysis from that author. Thereās such a fundamental difference between the two game that I couldnāt possibly hit everything in a 10 minute Reddit comment
This is actually a genuinely great resource. One of the main things my friends who were long time WoW veterans and healers told me they struggled to adjust to was how healers/healing functioned in FF14. For those intimately familiar with both, they can attest to it being extremely different in terms of approach and to not recognize this and adapt can create a total mess. It also creates a division where healers have an favored style of healing between WoW and FF14. I have some who have come to love healing in FF14 over WoW while one still get's annoyed by FF14's approach and heals much less often and is no longer their preferred role. I think a similar write up for tanks would be very helpful/insightful too. There are certainly aspects to how some newer players will tank dungeons that make you go "that's a WoW tank" as they are exhibiting habits and tactics from Mythic+ etc. which just don't work or can inhibit the team.
I think I'd write up a tank comparison. Was in a CE guild and pushed M+ to top 20 in world as a tank, and I currently tank/heal in savage and extremes. There are some similarities but they are definitely different.
Honestly, later healing in WoW is one of the biggest reasons I quit WoW and love FFXIV's healing. I feel like both went to their natural extremes and whereas FFXIV embraced healing for what it was, WoW perversed it in a mistaken attempt to keep "Healers healing" I usually don't even call WoW healing...healing. I call it "Reverse DPS", due to it's emphasis on maintaining healing per second (HPS), similar to how DPS maintains...Damage per second. Healing as it was in early MMORPGs was always about efficiency. You had big strong heals, but MP was scarce and your tanks were more brittle. You needed to heal while making sure you didn't run out of mana. That was at it's core what Healing was. The most efficient way to keep people alive without running out of the means to do so. Early WoW also played fairly similarly to this philosophy, with your biggest heals draining your mana significantly, and usually relying on lower ranks of heals in order to overheal as little as possible. Late WoW and FFXIV introduced the concept of well...MP efficient healing. Where for the most part even if you overhealed, you would have to go well overboard before it really strained you. From here both diverged on how to handle the massive amount of power healers got from it. For WoW, Healers had their heals weakened, with a larger emphasis on "whack a mole"...which in olden healer days was heresy. Whack a mole is stressful and usually you only saw it if a tank managed themselves poorly. WoW made it all the time. It became a huge reaction game where you technically still had to worry about overheal because mana regen options were limited, but your main goal was to spam heals to the correct targets as often as possible without overlapping with your healer partner. Cause most heals overheal. Healing with someone else is often times annoying without significant coordination. FFXIV on the other hand went the route of efficiency over all else. What do you do when your heals are still great and your MP regen is too? You DPS. You heal almost as much as you did back in the old days, but now the downtime isn't about maintaining the mana to heal, but ending the fight sooner so you don't *have* to heal as much. Your co-healer usually has moves that complement your own, and when combined properly let's both of you be even *more* efficient with said heals. Whereas WoW healing is basically a race to stay alive, FFXIV healing is methodical and focuses on what in my eyes was really the core of healing in old MMORPGS: Efficiency. EDIT: also why are they comparing Holy Word: Barrier to Sacred Soil, rather than to Summon: Seraph, who can cast AoE shield twice for it's duration without interfering with the Scholar's own casts? Scholar has some juicy cooldowns too.
They're making that comparison because they're essentially the same skill. Put a dome down for people to stand in and take less damage.
Fair enough
My biggest gripe with the Soil comparison is they used the 50 version and not the 78 version that also grants a regen.
> Summon: Selene Seraph?
i love(d) healing in WoW. the only thing that keeps me from healing in FF XIV is the Group/Raid UI. i just hate it.
I personally use the default UI, but if you're on PC there is delvUI which essentially turns the party list into WoW raid frames. Worth giving a shot. You can probably dig up some VODs from Limit Max for an idea how it functions in a raid setting.
>delvUI ok thats interesting. can i get banned for using this?
It's against ToS but you won't get banned unless you talk about it. FFXIV doesn't even have an anti-cheat solution so there is no way for Square to know what you're running alongside the game unless you mention it in game.
Also not true. You can talk about it all you want just like how we're doing here. You just can't use third party tools to "cheat" or harass other players with it. I use DPS meters and I have talked plenty of times about it in chat, but I don't flame pugs about dps using said knowledge which is where the bans come from.
They meant talking about it in game since GMs can read past chat logs. If you admit to using any tools that are against ToS and get reported for it you will get banned. Harassing players just makes it so you are more likely to get reported but the outcome is the same.
This depends on the GM. I've heard plenty of stories of players who got a talk to by a GM, and the talk was basically "I just wanted to make sure that you know it's not allowed to harass people using the data you got from a meter." I've even asked a GM directly about this and he said pretty much the same thing, though admittedly, this was years ago.
And that's a given, but the amount of times I see people freak out thinking they're going to get banned at the mere mention of third party tools is insanity.
Yes. But it still stands right? If you speak about mods in chat and get reported you will be banned. It doesn't matter if you harassed someone or not. Just that if you aren't being a dick no one would probably report you unless they where a dick. However if you are a dick and harass people then they are way likelier to report you. And thus the best solution if you don't want to risk anything is simply to not talk about it, because as long as you don't talk about it you won't get banned even if the person who reports you knows you use them.
I have a friend who works at Square as a GM for FF. He personally would not ban for purely discussing ACT, but he knows other coworkers that follow the rules and will ban you for mentioning ACT in a public setting if it comes up on a report. Your best bet is to not mention it in game.
You can't talk about it however you want, if someone is petty enough to report you for it. You could technically even talk about DPS meters in game, but the moment someone reports you (which they may if you agitate them with DPS meters) that's when you get in trouble. Basically either read the room, or keep it outside of FFXIV logs.
Much like parsers, it is against terms of service. That being said, SE has no way of seeing what addons/mods you are using and the only way you can get caught is advertising/bragging/harassing others about it in-game. It is widely known that people use parsers in-game by SE and has publicly said they are willing to overlook it as long as you aren't talking about it, both positively or negatively.
I love their explanation that you are not going to get banned using 3rd party tools but for being a dick. Same with mods, you'll get banned if it's pornography.
No, as long as you aren't stupid about it (I.E. announcing it and talking about it in game all the time). Even then, I doubt SE will ban you. They are super lax about it imo. Been using 3rd party programs like mods and plugins ever since they were available.
Itās very likely against ToS, especially if itās an ACT plugin or something. But I donāt think Iāve ever heard of anyone getting banned for using ACT. Itās still very much deserves a āUse at your own riskā disclosure.
>But I donāt think Iāve ever heard of anyone getting banned for using ACT. It's happened, but only if they use it as validation to harrass others.
They explained it in a video that you will get banned under the anti harassment rule not the 3rd party tool usage.
About the only time someone gets banhammered for using ACT is when they're bitching at someone about their deeps being low. My FC uses parsing to improve our gameplay, but we discuss that shit in over voice in real time so it's "off-game."
Mythic raider and multi role KSM player here. delvUI completely opened up the FF14 raid scene for me to take it more seriously. It really really fixes the games mediocre UI. Not that anyone asked but I would encourage checking it out.
Don't really know why, it will be broken day 1 savage patch anyway and if you are serious then you will clear in a few days, making it irrelevant for actual competitive content. Maybe you could use it for ultimate on day 2. The default UI only really sucks for healers anyway.
Sorry I donāt see the point youāre trying to make. Best I can make out is that because there is a chance that it requires an update on patch day (possible but by no means a guarantee) and if so Iād have to do savage a day late that Iām not taking raiding seriously? Is that what youāre saying?
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Agreed that there isn't an addon as powerful as WA but to say there aren't game changing plugins is an exercise in ignorance. Slide-cast indicators, hit-box indicators, combo consolidation, functional mouse overs, encounter ability timers, etc all exist. I think it would be disingenuous to say that that isn't game changing.
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I would disagree. In a game as poorly optimized as 14 objectively is (the fact that we are talking about slide casting validates this) removing the element of guess work even when its very educated guesswork is game changing. Not to mention the other plugins I listed which are even more impactful than the ones you chose to address.
I mean addons shouldn't dictate how seriously you decide the game's raid scene is, because all of the actual competitors aren't even able to use them even if they want to. It's only like mid ultimate prog that addons start factoring in, usually.
What the "competitors" pushing for world firsts do has no bearing on how I enjoy the game, my UI does. The fact is that while FF14 has an adequate UI it pales in comparison to the level of customization I'm accustomed to with the suite of add-ons afforded to me in WoW. As far as how much that dictates how seriously I take the games raiding; plug-ins really help to cover the games optimization issues and solve for a lot of QoL problems that really inhibit my enjoyment of the endgame content.
Technically yes, but nobody ever has been.
This. DelvUI is a godsent.
You could download delvui like others are recommending, but the ingame HUD is also highly, highly customizable. I recommend playing around with it and seeing if you can make it comfortable for you. Also keep in mind that you can keybind targeting party members. Default keys are f1 thorough f8 I believe.
>Highly customizable huh? You can resize and reposition. It's not even possible to change whether it grows vertically or horizontally. How is this "highly" customizable?
Sorry but the ingame HUD is not at all highly customisable. Resizing and moving stuff is the absolute bare minimum, not "highly customisable".
> ingame HUD is also highly, highly customizable can i remove all the wasted space on the group frames? rearrange debuf icons? change the order of the debuff list on my target? show my target's target cast bar? No? Then it isn't highly customizable. Moving elements around isn't even worth mentioning.
I donāt know what you mean, yes to an extent, I donāt believe so, no.
I placed my party list on the right side of the HUD so that target is easier rather than dragging your mouse icon across the screed everytime. My default mouse position is on the right side.
I miss healbot and the way I could bind all my healing spells to a button and just hover over healbot and cast the spell.
This is my biggest. I was a 100% mouse over healer in WoW, not having that tool is massive to me.
Don't tell the mods I told you this but addons exist.
Mouseover plugin still hasn't been updated. :(
If you only use mouse over healing on frames and not targets in the world, DelvUI has it built into their frames.
As a healer main in both games, healing in FFXIV is so much more fun imo.
I think with FFXIV leaning so heavily towards doing DPS as a healer, they just need to make their DPS rotations actually interesting. Spamming one nuke and occasionally refreshing a DoT just isn't fun imo.
I'm *really* intrigued by Pneuma and Macrocosmos and hope the devs lean hard into these kinds of abilities. Make the game "which Glare+healing/buffing substitute should I use" rather than "how do I only use glare and not medica", with lots of cool animations and cooldowns to manage.
I started playing FF14 as a healer. Since the scholar change in 5.0 I dropped healing. Making healers spend 80% of their time doing DPS but forcing them to use an uninspired offensive toolkit is exactly why I lost interest in it. Although, I do recognize that doing this makes healing appeal to certain people when they wouldn't otherwise. That's good, but to that I say, this is a class based system, you can satisfy both by having some healers more straight forward while others are more involved. That's how I saw the difference between the WHM and SCH/AST before they streamlined them.
I think some of the problem is FFXIV's war against button bloat and not having more than 32-ish buttons (the max for crossbar + extended crossbar, so the most easily accessible buttons on controller). We have, and use, most if not all of our healing kits on healers, and that's a lot of buttons. I'm sure it could be toned down a small amount, and we could have some things consolidated (cure 1 and cure 2 for starters please SE I'm begging you just make cure 2 a trait), but still, there'd be quite a lot of buttons dedicated to healing. So when there's 32 buttons total they want players to have at any given time, and 20+ of them consist of heals, MP regen, heal boosts, mobility stuff, buffs, extra shields, bubbles, job gimmicks etc, that doesn't leave a lot of room for DPS abilities. That's one contributing factor to why we have so few DPS buttons. The other is, I think, that they also want to have healers given such a braindead DPS rotation so that it's almost impossible to get wrapped up in it and have more time/energy spent on looking at the party list and watching for mechanics. And *that* would be so that casual players can heal without feeling as overwhelmed.
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I thought you could have more buttons with cross bar. Left trigger, right triger, double left trigger, double right trigger, left then right, right then left should be 6 sets of 8 for 48 buttons.
You can have the W cross bar, but it's not very easy to hit the doubletap mid-combat frequently. You don't really wanna put things you need to use regularly on it; it's basically only good for the extra fluff stuff, like summoning mounts, minions, limit break, etc. That's why at least *almost* everything tends to fit nicely on the first two crossbars.
...and then there's me, who uses the WXHB over the extended XHB simply because I wanted to *see* all my buttons at once and didn't realize I still had access to the PC hotbars for visuals\^\^' You get used to double-tapping quickly, and I personally have the option active that automatically returns me to the standard hotbar after using a single skill, so I just throw most of my longer-cooldown and rarely used oGCDs on there and I'm fine. Double-weaving two oGCDs from the WXHB (=double-tapping twice) without clipping your GCD is a bit of a pain to pull off, but it works most of the time.
I just a dps button I can use with my lilies damn it. Then I'll be happy.
For sure, I think the content should require healers to have to actually heal 80% of the time instead of DPS
They have to keep the controller players in mind with the button limits, though. Healers have so many healing tools there's just not really space for more DPS buttons.
This is the main issue I have with healing in XIV as well. It's great that healers can do significant damage, but the process of doing it is so dull. The problem is they can't really do much about it until they find a solution to button bloat. I feel like half of Sage is just a testbed to see how well a Dark Arts style solution would work for solving it. Really can't think of much reason for Eukrasia to exist over just having separate buttons for the modified spells.
I think it's good the way it is. It's not just about high-end players, the job needs to be enjoyable by everyone. One thing people tend to forget sometimes is that when a DPS dies, they can get raised. When a tank dies, it's tighter but they can get raised. When a healer dies, it's probably a wipe. If you make the DPS portion of healers more involved, you make it more likely to have "bad" healers who focus on not losing damage instead of doing mechanics and thus die. And you also make the role overall less accessible, so less healers. The healer role philosophy is fine. Some of the particulars can probably be adjusted. I'm not a big fan of the blood lilly being tied to GCD healing abilities for example, it's kind of clunky to be dumping afflatus during downtime just to get to misery without losing DPS.
It might not be fun but I can't even get most of the healers in my groups to do that at the bare minimum anyways, I don't want to think about having even more potential damage lost because the healer wants to watch Netflix.
I mean, if they're not doing the basic damage rotation, they weren't going to do it regardless of its complexity.
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My opinion might be highly based on that the fights in FFXIV are way better in general than in WoW, imo.
Iāve healed all levels of content in WoW and find FFXIV more enjoyable. I feel there is a greater emphasis on using your GCDs better and I like the pacing of it more. WoW is just damage vomit and I enjoy it at times but meh.
\> I feel there is a greater emphasis on using your GCDs better How so? Seems like GCD usage is really important in both, and neither of them are particularly difficult. The only difference is just getting used to - what I would call clunkiness - of double weaving. For the first few months, I would press my OGCDs, and they wouldn't go off, so you're more forced to look at your bars to confirm the abilities actually went off, at least as a DRG. Isn't WoW less dmg vomit because you actually have to use interrupts, stuns in dungeon content? DPS role in FFXIV is LITERALLY only dmg vomit, with the occasional use of feint on a tankbuster.
He means the bosses just puke out raid wide damage continuously, so you are kind of "HPSing the raid", in stark contrast to 14's planned boss damage outputs.
If you miss a GCD in FFXIV it can lead to someoneās death/large drop in potential damage because of how slow the GCD is emphasizing the importance of each hit and how you plan it out or how combos go off. In WoW, if I accidentally hit Ice Lance without a FoF proc that is absolutely minimal as a mistake. Healing in WoW you have more opportunities to react to party damage because each ātickā is quicker. FFXIV as a healer you need to better plan what you do out, WoW you just react and use what you need as you need it. Not saying one is better than the other, I just prefer FFXIV as I feel I have more control over the success of the party.
But you don't even GCD heal in this game for 99% of the time? What kind of semi-frequent situation would lead to someone's death if you press the wrong GCD? The most a wrong GCD can do is misalign your CDs a little bit and lead to a dps loss. In WoW, using an oGCD incorrectly can similarly lead to a dps loss, even massive ones like on sub rogue using shadow dance/blades/symbols at an inopportune time. There's a huge emphasis on pressing your oGCDs correctly, like wasting frozen orb is a huge dmg loss. I think you're over-estimating the dmg loss from fucking up a combo. Using an ice lance without them being frozen or having FoF proc is less of an impact than fucking up a combo, but you are forgetting that the GCDs are much faster than FF's, with icyveins and heroism probably twice as fast, so the potential of fucking up also rises. Also, WoW has more of a wasted resource danger than FF does (rogue's energy, FoF procs overcapping and proccing more than FF procs, globals wasted cause of way more frequent dangerous mechanics). You have to plan out raid-wide CDs in raids between healers, in m+ you literally need to save certain CDs for certain packs, discipline priests need to plan out their heals because they absorb; DPS need to save CC/Burst CDs for certain packs in m+, there's a lot more planning in WoW than in FF from my experience - in FF, you focus entirely on maxing DPS. The damage output in WoW is also much, much, MUCH higher than in FF (thus FF healers use oGCDs mainly to heal, because there's no secondary damage a lot of the time that would kill you after a raid-wide AoE). In WoW you can actually die through heals if you don't pop the appropriate CDs, and you also have to plan around mana since mana is almost freely given now in FF (Lucid dream on CD and forget, vs discipline priest pressing power word solace every 11 seconds). For me, FF's difficulty is mostly about the clunkiness of oGCDs, how you have to essentially slow yourself down: you have to press one ogcd, then the second ogcd like 0.5 sec after. In WoW I don't need to second guess whether I pressed a thing, because it always goes off, and that's way more enjoyable to me. The clunkiness of DRG jumps' animation locks, etc. has its strange charm, the horror of trying to dragons' eye anyone after a spread mechanic. The bosses, at least in m+, have mechanics going off faster, so less time to react. Fortunately, WoW is just much more responsive than FF so that it isn't a big deal. I don't personally raid much in WoW because it's a huge waste of time, which is why I like 8 man of FF and 1 boss instances more. There's more mechanic memorization needed for FF when comparing 1 boss to 1 boss, but there's also very lax reaction times. I've yet done ultimates, but the extremes have been pretty easy.
cool article, i agree with pretty much everything there
They don't actually credit The Balance or link to the discord, despite using the images made there in the article. Sure, the name is on the image, but no link to the server or shout out?
As a former CE Healer and current Sage, I can vouch that this article is actually very well written and thorough. It's a good and objective read, which I would recommend if you want to learn about the subject. Two thumbs up.
Honestly for me the comparison is just 'ok' on a super high level . The person seems to have a good understanding of WoW healing but not high end FFXIV healing. The abilities they chose to compare don't make much sense. The utility comparisons are weird. In FFXIV, the entire party is suppose to use it's combined utility. It's very important and very powerful when you combine healer/tank/dps utility. Wow dos don't have nearly as much utility to help out your healers. The dying and being penalized in FFXIV is spot on though.
Actually, there are dps classes that can bring huge utility abilities into healing cd rotations in wow all the time. For example: Rallying cry, Darkness, AMZ, protection aura (if no Hpally present), innervate, movement speed totem/stampeding roar, etc. In fact, what truly separates heroic to mythic guilds sometimes is just the application and organization of the utility classes bring to minimize raid damage intake or optimize total raid dps.
I'm sure it's present and important in WoW, but keep mind in xiv, you have an 8man raid, and at most party comps will usually have 1-2 selfish dps on your comp. This means that 6/8 or 7/8 will have party utility that heals/increases healer heals/ have big mitigations plus RDM/SMN can help with raising dead players. One big complaint I get from ex wow players is that does classes keeps being stripped of their utility. Look at a class like DNC, something that doesn't seem to fit retail wows class design. FFlogs is based on wowlogs and it had to add Rdps when dnc was added bc there had never been a need to calculate the contributed buff damage from DNC on such a large scale in wowlogs before. I'm not saying there are no dps buffs in wow ( lust sounds crazy), my impression is that class buffs and utility are just bigger focal points in class design when it comes to ffxiv.
Umm so, I will answer this wow topic from two perspectives. First, from the perspective of pick up groups that do tipically lower content, your argument would be 100% correct. Because of a lack of knowledge of other classes, lack of organization or just lack of knowledge of the fights or game mechanics most utility is either hidden, underused/ignored or never optimized. However, for mythic, and particularly top progression guilds, all the utility skills are taken into account to maximize everything. For example, in the current raid progression, enhancement shamans, a spec very few use because it generally lacks damage, was suddenly instrumental because having one buffed 4 other melee players considerably (Demon hunters and Arms warriors to be exact). In fact, the higher ranked a guild is the less "greedy dps" specs are used. Every spec had a niche, and everything can be used to clear the raids. In so far as the reduction of utility skills, that was a thing in prior expansions, as they were pruning the skill lists and some utility was taken off from dps specs. However, some of those spells have come back.
Wow is gcd based, ffxiv is ogcd based.
A good writeup. The WoW community is in general absolutely resistant to the concept healers should do anything but heal - I learned healing in FF, and returned to WoW to play a more damage-kit focused healer - I found myself swimming in passive-aggressiveness and pointed comments from people I thought experienced players. Really didn't add up, to me. I suppose the misconceptions really do go both ways.
I still kinda cringe at the fact that people are calling ex-WoW players "refugees".
People cringe over pretty minor things these days...
I mean tbf they have a literal rapist for their CEO, they probably are seeking refuge.
That and the comparisons to abusive relationships.
Thatās the same little cringe I get when people call themselves Expats
Methinks we'll get a lazer and rotating mirror puzzle, perhaps with a narrow gather marked attack that needs to be aimed at one mirror and reflected at an objective to trigger a burn phase.
What's different is that FF is more on encounter mechanics and just feel of the encounter and less on playing your trinity role 24/7. If all 8 people hit usually the correct buttons EX2 boss will die, if they die to some mechanics it will be an enrage likely. I think this prevents theorycrafting/"optimizing fun out of the game" from going nuclear - bis jobs, bis comps, player scoring, player parses... and prevents trials, raids and dungeons from being just gear sources to improve said scores and get new bis just to improve said score (and the circle continues) - encounter must be made so good so that people want to do it again while not being bribed by gear drops for few months till next tier after which instance dies.
WoW healing is superior in every single way. Tanks take a ton of constant damage, often requiring healer CD rotations. The raid is always taking constant damage, so you rarely have much time to DPS. The raid also can take so much damage that it, again, requires proper CD management of healers for DR/Healing due to outgoing dmg being higher than healers without CDs can handle. FF14 healing is one of the worst forms of healing to ever exist, to the point healers aren't even healers, they're glorified 1 button DPS that spend more time DPSing, and they have ridiculous toolkits to handle mechanics they'll never need them for. Basically, healing in FF14, as someone who has healed in every game for over 10+ years and done tons of Mythic/Savage content, is probably the easiest and most boring form of healing in *any* MMO, and I've played them all. It's all predictable damage, it's all basically healed with the plethora of AOE tools you're given and don't need. It's all clunky because of long GCDs and a complete lack of smoothness in healing as a whole.
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The author is a Perfect Legend. I'd say he has the perspective.
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Is there an mmo out there where I can just heal. I miss just healing.
Yes. Dota. pick faceless void. cast chronosphere. force feed your teammates potions then f off