Evening Everyone. The Shadowbringers video is basically done but we needed this one to go out today so that video will be up on Sunday for y'all. In other news, Preachcon tickets go on sale tomorrow evening at 7pm BST so make sure to drop by the stream if you fancy hanging out with the team and the community. Finally we also have a PVP tournament coming to FF14 on 25th June - I hope you all enjoyed the silly little animation I made for it; a nice little homage to the Overwatch league/world cup visually. The tournament is only for the Crawlers this first time around, but we welcome you all to come and watch the craziness.
@@rolder50 It used to be fun thou, back when healers had more options. It was mostly changed to what we have now because alot of people struggled too much... honestly at times even i pref. the new system, but that's only really while progressing savage/ultimate bosses. If there's enought stuff to do I don't mind the two-button dps rotation, however 80% of the content have suffered alot after they pruned the damage spells.
@@magnuscarlsson9969 Oh I'm aware, I used to main healers. I cut back in Shadowbringers and these days don't touch them with a ten foot pole. Mind numbingly boring in any content below Savage, and even in Savage / Ultimate, still pretty dull.
One of the cool things about FF is that its insanely easy to just play another class, so eventually most players will play all classes at least a little bit. That makes it a lot easier for ppl to branch off into play styles they wouldn't otherwise have tried, because of the investment needed.
Yeah all for one ☺️ you don't need to make new character to try new class ,It reminded me of a ftp anime game I played back when that is Eden Eternal ☺️
I've been playing since 2014...and I only tank. The stupid quest to unlock mount in shb and ew...I just boosted the roles I needed...and had a friend do it for me.
Yep! By the descriptions I thought I would hate SCH and love WHM but being able to play both it turns out things were the opposite. I never would have tried it and learned how much I enjoyed it without that freedom.
It's interesting hearing Mike talk about healers as a veteran healer. Cause yea, when you first learn to heal, its super fun. Unfortunately, I feel like healing just gets more boring the better you get at it, and every fight devolves into "1 button spam with the occasional OGCD." Hearing a new healer's perspective makes me want to somehow recapture that feeling.
The only time you get to experience that again is when a new encounter drops and you enter it fresh or blind. That's when healers are FUN because the design of 14 healing, when players play well, healers don't have much to do besides 1-2 dps spam.
That is my exact feeling. Mike has not done any repeating hard content so everything is still fresh. Once you learn mechanics of fights you realize how dull healing sadly is in this game.
It's a balance and why I'm still a healer main. Learning fights blind on healer is the most fun I've ever had in a game. Savage reclears for everyone's BiS is a slog because the dps rotations are so boring. I don't get the highs of perfectly mapping a fight to keep gcd heals between the two healers as close to possible as zero aside from a downtime deploy tactics or medica 2 without being a bit bored after the puzzle is solved. A trade I'm willing to make, but I'd sell my left testicle for even a basic 1, 2, 3 damage combo like Machinist's filler.
I've been a healer main for 20 years, and I've been making White Mage in FFXIV for the 4 months I've been playing, and at this point I am having the most fun when things go off the rails. When everyone is doing things correctly I'm a Glare Mage, but when someone screws up the the frustration is instantly quelled by the joy of thinking on what I have in me toolkit at this sync level.
I've been shocked discovering his talent for voicing characters. I wonder if he's been shocked at how good he is at it. He genuinely improves the experience even watching him play the older FF games purely through his vocalization and bringing life and sometime humor to the characters. I will probably never be able to read moogle dialogue without hearing the accent and extra "mate"s added to the end of every sentence.
@@Reldan On the one hand, I wholeheartedly agree, on the other hand, I feel bad for Tataru's real VA cause now it feels weird that she's not actually a chain smoking drunk.
Damn, the PVP tournament is sponsored and everything? I didn't think it would be so grand! I'm excited to see it, I love FF14's pvp, that was a really well designed intro graphic that gets me excited!
I rolled CNJ leading into WHM for my levelling experience in FF14, primarily so I got instant queues for dungeons and trials. Did that all the way to 90 and loved it. I've levelled a few more jobs since then and, while I may go with something else for future MSQ levelling, I'm still dead keen on WHM. There's nothing quite like running into the middle of a huge trash pull with the tank and popping Holy. It's frikkin awesome in pvp, too! I'd advise anyone with healer anxiety to try it, because I can pretty much guarantee your anxiety will vanish.
I want to reiterate a comment I made on a previous video: it is so enjoyable watching you experience and analyze the different facets of FF. You're always fair about it, which I respect. If something is bad, you say it. If something is good, you say it. But they you give your very well deeply observed analysis to explain why, and it has been SO accurate every time. Thanks for all your content, Mike.
Unless you do it blind/week 1 everyone is carried through p1s and p2s just by the fact that strats are out. P3S P4S, he can't really be carried unless he at least can execute the strat correctly. But at that point is it really being carried anymore
@@niklasstahl98 He's done every EX blind and the folks that know it don't tell him shit and let him flounder trying to figure it out - hence why some took them a whole stream to do like Ifrit. I have faith that he's gonna struggle bus his way through it, at least until the Gordias wall.
@@Aaron.Arcanum I mean it is fine if he doesn't know the fights but for the people who do, what do they do? Just wall when he dies? Otherwise it is just ress and continue as per usual. And for full clarity I have not seen any of his extreme clears.
Loved hearing an actual comparison of how healers play differently between the two games! Also role specific mechanics really start up in savage, P3S and P4S play very differently if you swap between healing and not. Hope we get more in the future instead of "apples to oranges my guy".
Yeah, healing in this game is so bad, the raiding in general is pretty good but they really messed up the healing role, after you know the mechanics it's super boring
Still it seems he has not healed since wotlk or something, that healing comparison is completly out of date regarding WoW. For a moment when he was talking about healing I though it is about WoW, but it was about FF, which shows how bad the comparison was overall IMO.
how specifically did he make wow look bad? he said it matters more at the high level but for the general player at base difficulty mana is not a factor in decision making, and that was always my experience thru shadowlands unless i was purposefully trying to spam my high cost spells and drain it quickly (which there was never a purpose to do.) that's the most "negative" thing he said as wow in the entire video. he literally said he was excited for dragonflight changes and often repeats that in many of his videos. it's like because he doesn't cover wow 24/7 he hates it now. he's one of the few ffxiv players who came from wow who doesn't actively badmouth it besides engaging with his community and the memes they present. like, seriously, don't scare away one of the few people still in your corner lmao
Yo Preach you should give PLD a try, very supportive tank. Line up Divine Veil, a health shield, with healer buffs like physis, timing and lining up your passage of arms, and the ability to provide intervene or cover to save specific raid members. Plus the DPS rotation of PLD is genuinely fun with constant engagement
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 You can actually pop CDs and you still mitigate the damage. The only thing that doesn’t work is Hallowed Ground. PLDs would Cover their cotank all the time for busters you would normally have to swap for in order to keep being the current OT while still taking the hit. Big example would be Titan’s second Buster in UWU, where you would normally have to swap, but instead a PLD can just Cover and kitchen-sink instead.
Love healing for these reasons too yes ^^ I've mained heals my entire ff life :p This is why mentor roulette can be fun too, more challenging as a healer. You'll learn how to actually adjust and save people. A test of your reflexes :3
I've had the opposite experience with FFXIV Tanking/Healing. I healed in WoW for 10+ years (Holy/Disc priest) and loved it. Tried healing in FFXIV and it felt different. Harder or more clunky. Recently, I started my first Tank, Paladin, with no intention of ever actually tanking a dungeon, leveling via squadrons, sidequests, and leves. But I recently dipped my toe into party tanking around 68, and I enjoy it. Never thought I'd be a Tank; it scared the hell out of me in WoW.
You are not alone, just go look at the ff14 forums or the ff14 veteran raiders. The healing design is utter garbage. its around 90-95% just spamming your dmg. You never spot heal like mike says, using GCD healing is playing healers wrong in ff14. You dps with glare/broil/dosis/malefic and sometimes toss a few oGCD heals.
I had a similar experience to Mike here. I hated healing in WoW for the most part (holy paladin in Cata clicked with me for some reason), and when I moved to FF as my main MMO, I expected more of the same. My main is unquestionably Sage now, I love playing it so much!
I really like your perspective on both. With 14, you're doing a dance and if done correctly, not much goes on and it all seams easy. But when shit hits the fan, it REALLY hits the fan and you se the good players from the bad players REAL quickly
I have to say, as a SCH playing well, and knowing the fights, really allows your toolkit to shine. Personally, SGE, while still a shield healer, really does allow you to maintain shields and react more as opposed to SCH where your playstyle is more predicated on knowing when to use what. I find that design philosophy fantastic with the healers in FF XIV. AST is a treat!
you dont really need to so anything of that, just spam dosis and when raid wide dmg comes use 2-3 ogcd aoe heals, thats why around 90-95% of casts of SGE in savage is dosis and euk dosis.
@@jesperjohansson9857 For anyone reading after the fact: both are right. During progress you'll probably have to shield the raid as people won't be geared, will be taking vulnerability stacks from messing up mechanics etc. When pushing for parses where everyone is geared and using mitigation properly, you won't. In those scenarios Sage can heal a tonne with it's oGCDs. When you've got to shield though, Scholar feels like a slower Sage, a 1.5 second cast for AoE shields versus a 1 second instant (though 2 button presses). Sage's shields are weaker though, especially compared to Scholar's big 90s CD Deployment tactics. Scholar's shields are usually enough though. But to anyone looking to try out both, try Scholar first, get used to that style of playing, it doesn't feel so great if you try Sage first.
I have beaten every extreme and savage raids in FF14 since 2014. The best way to describe the raid is when things go right, it's like synchronized swimming. Everyone has their own thing to do that may overlap you. But you know exactly when that happens so you can act accordingly. My friend jokingly said the FFXIV could use metronome. But we realized that it may actually help you raid better in FFXIV.
Hey mike, nice to see you talking about healers! Been playing as a healer main in FFXIV since 2.X, and it's definitely my favorite aspect of playing the game as well. For the most part, I think you've described the general feel of playing a healer pretty well. Ultimately, the role in FFXIV comes down to resource and crisis management. What do you use at what times, and how do you deal with strenuous circumstances. However, I did want to leave a post going into a bit of some of the specifics about how I personally think of healers in FFXIV. As someone who's never played WoW, it might give you a bit more of a perspective un-affected by the influence of WoW. The main aspect I wanted to talk about is resource management. You placed a lot of emphasis on MP in this video, and while I won't claim that MP doesn't matter at all in FFXIV, it's often not much of a concern for most healers operating at higher end content, I find. Healers these days tend to have enough tools to keep their MP up so long as you hit the "give me my MP" button (Lucid Dreaming) whenever you're at 50-75% MP. Of course, raises and things going *really* bad changes this, but that's really in the worst-case scenario, and even then, if you're playing half-decently (IE, doing damage instead of spamming GCD heals) you'll probably be fine. I think that the most valuable resources, and really the only one's worth being concerned about, for healers in FFXIV are their GCD, and oGCD spells and abilities. Like you said, Healers in FFXIV are more like sub-DPS that make sure the party doesn't die. Doesn't matter how low the party goes, if they have 1 HP, the healer's going their job. Since healer's role in a party is sorta binary (live or die, nothing in between), the difference between a good and bad healer in FFXIV is pretty much decided by DPS numbers alone. As such, a healer's theoretical max performance is if a healer has 100% DPS GCD uptime (SCH technically also needs to spend all their aetherflow on Energy drain for max performance but... well... there's a reason I'm not a fan of SCH, lol). This essentially means that the fewer GCD heals that a healer performs, the better, which then puts much more of an emphasis on a healer's oGCD abilities. That's the gist of it anyway, and you can probably already see some of the issues with this just by reading the explanation I've given, such as "well then why do I have all these SCH shields if being the best SCH means I never use them except as a last resort or to save a GCD for later?" This is the problem with a lot of healer design that I think the FF team needs to solve, because it's a really common issue for healers. Except in down-time with nothing to attack, I very rarely ever need to use a GCD heal as any healer. Savage and Ultimate is more likely to get you to press those buttons but dungeons in particular don't require any. I always have tanks double-pull, and I often never need to GCD heal unless someone messes up bad as long as I'm on my A game. I also think that the FFXIV devs still don't quite understand how to intergrate damage into the healer playstyle. For years they refused to make DPS an expected part of a DPS's kit in content, and now that they are starting to embrace it, results have been... mixed. Toxicon, for example, is pretty much useless outside of the time between dungeon pulls, and they've had a really hard time making Energy Drain (which they tried to remove at one point) fit well into SCH. I'm also a bit salty about the buff to Afflatus Misery as a WHM main. It's made WHM way too easy, and taken a lot of the fun out of the lily system. Sure, the job is better in terms of numbers, but it's much more boring to play. Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on healers. Agree or disagree with them, I hope they give you something to think about. Regardless, glad to see you hop aboard the green DPS train.
It seems weird that you don't like the Afflatus Misery buff when your other major complaint was no incentive to use GCD heals. People like damage neutral lilies precisely because when they were a DPS loss, you'd do anything to avoid using them. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they flipped the mana situation on it's head, making oGCDs cost mana, and GCD heals replenish. Right now, GCD heals cost you damage AND mana so of course you avoid them at all costs.
@@NabsterHax The reason I don't really like the new lilies is that I think it removes a lot of choice from the job. Ignoring the special things you could do regarding wasting lilies between pulls to build misery ('cause you can still do that), it created a sort of system where you had 3 sort of tiers of heals: - oGCDs, which were free in every way other than their CD, which could be fairly long - Afflatus heals, which cost a bit of damage but had a decently short CD and 3 charges - and normal GCD heals, which cost all of that GCD's damge but could be used on-demand While, yes, it was always optimal to use oGCDs, it at least provided a WHM options that meant something. Of course, I would have liked to see that system improved to make those choices more meaningful and less linear (i.e. not use oGCD then Afflatus, then normal GCD), but it was *something* But now that's gone. Solace and Rapture are now so brain-dead and have such low CDs that playing the job is just way to simple. There's a lot less struggle to playing the job now with free GCD heals at my disposal. I don't have to use my oGCDs in smart ways, because lilies are a crutch now. What SE should have done was expanded the lily system to create more interesting decision making. Now they've done the opposite.
"SCH technically also needs to spend all their aetherflow on Energy drain for max performance" See the rub about that, which is what makes Aetherflow arguably the most interesting (at least) healer resource imo, which too many people forget is that 3-ED (or 6-ED with Dissipation) is technically the ideal of what you should be doing bc of damage, yes...but that's only in situations where you didn't need those heals anyway. There's a reason that's only actually done by bleeding edge speedkill groups and the like; unless you've perfectly optimized your defensive plan with your other healer and tanks and DPS utility, and have some degree of overgear as well in some situations, you *will* need to use things that aren't fairy heals or Recitation (or now Expedient for mit). And in those situations, if you do the 'ideal' thing of spending on ED...you haven't actually optimized damage bc that's another succor or adlo or, heaven forbid, physick you now need to do instead. Bc last time I checked, losing 100 potency is a bunch less than losing 295 potency. Inso much as aetherflow is 'solved' in healing situations as 'just' extra damage, its only when you successfully, intelligently co-ordinate everything else, and correctly bank on no substantial human error so they were unnecessary anyway. And that sort of planning/situational decisionmaking is literally the point/appeal of Green in this game in the first place! That sort of nuance being missing from Lillies on WHM is why I think claiming them being dps-neutral now is a 'simplification' is imo misguided, or at least misdiagnoses the fundamental problem at play. Frankly, within the current system, making them/Misery dps neutral just efficiently formalizes the fact that they're already necessary/dps 'gain' in a lot of situations anyway (like movement, the unavoidable realities of healing like i described above, co-ordinating Miseries to line up with bursts, etc.), and also because the core resource of a healer being a DPS loss goes against how they're approaching every other healer; the tension with core resources like that isn't supposed to be the conflict between healing and damage, its how well you can prevent there from being a conflict in the first place. What I just described with scholar. All of AST's illegal amount of oGCDs. Sage's entire kit (which is sometimes *so* free that you sometimes need to dump resources just for the sake of not overcapping and/or mana econ). Hell, AST and SGE both have a cooldown GCD healing move at 90 that is also explicitly damage neutral for this reason! Damage efficiency as apposite to the role is something that only matters in key, specific areas. Otherwise, it was never really meant to be a choice at all, its just a glorified math problem, as most concerns based on pure numerical factors in these kinds of games basically always actually are. Now, I still feel one can (and kinda should) argue that WHM's current design/resources absolutely do need changes, but that mostly comes down to 'GCD/throughput healer' being kind of an outmoded concept in context of everything else they do with player health/fight design, so WHM not getting a significant oGCD toolkit by comparison only serves to make decisionmaking less interesting in a lot of ways, ways which aren't incongruous with how Lillies *are* interesting, since they're still a limited resource you need to correctly save if you want to heal ideally, or move damage-optimally, or *ideally* both.
If you haven't already, check out playing on legacy controls. if you swap to that and put turn left and right on your strafe buttons it controls *about* the same on legacy as it does standard, but you also gain being able to "backpedal" at full speed while facing the camera in any direction, in that your character will actually turn to move in the direction you're inputting, relative to the camera's direction. Only big catch to playing on legacy is that holding just right mouse won't turn your character in addition to the camera so if you're used to doing that for avoiding gaze attacks without moving you have to adjust a bit, but I generally prefer the control style for playing on casters/healers due to the more "unlocked" feeling movement.
Well shit, I wasn't expecting ol' "I chose mage because it doesn't have a healing offspec" Preach to actually love healing in FF, what a pleasant surprise!
Being able to be the party's course-corrector as a Red Mage who manages their mana correctly and raises anyone who dies is so satisfying. Sometimes I even raise players who aren't even in my party in Alliance Raids. As someone who prefers to DPS I love the hyrbid DPS/healer design of classes like Red Mage and Balance Druid because it lets me be useful. I've been wondering lately if Devastation Evokers will be in the same niche due to the new talent trees although I still haven't decided if I'll go back to WoW at all yet.
When you discussed your priest healing and how you enjoyed predicting damage made me realise that’s what I love about Sage in ffxiv. Definitely recommend learning that role as you branch out in ff jobs ✨😊
I completely agree! After trying out healing in Stormblood, I started maining it and never looked back. There are just much more interesting decicions to be made when you're a healer in ffxiv!
4:52 This diversion away from WoW's raiding style into something unique to FFXIV really started in Stormblood, and that's why I'm stoked to see Asmon finally experience it soon. He's only seen raiding content up to Heavensward, which was when they were just starting to change their dungeon and raid design.
If you want a fun tank experience, Gunbreaker is a blast. It's basically a melee DPS rotation with all of the Off GCD abilities you use for damage during your burst window every 60 seconds. Along with having to use all of your tank cooldowns either personally or throwing on the other tank / using raid wide defensives.
One of my favorite things was solo healing DR. Knowing when the damage spikes came, and how to deal with them, was so much fun. Especially considering the whole Doom mechanic in that place.
Glad to see Mike is also enjoying the raids and healing experience. I know some people complain about healer's simple dps rotation and maybe that is a valid criticism for when you've learnt the content and all that's left is to optimise (i.e. spam glare/broil). BUT, for the life of me when progging new fights healing is EASILY the most engaging role for me. You are engaging with the dance of the fights mechanics while also taking care of your party, improvising and hopefully helping to fix any of their mistakes, learning which mitigation work best in relation to the boss's mechanics, and hopefully enabling the team to prog just that little bit further into the fight to see a new mechanic; it just seems super impactful and is the most fun way for me to learn a new fight. It's not just for high end content either, some of my favourite healing experiences in FF are when a new alliance raid comes out and trying to heal through the chaos of a 24 man raid where no one knows the mechanics, rezzing that red mage so they can help out with rez's, etc, it's sublime chaos. Great vid as always - cheers.
I think one thing it's important to consider in FFXIV raiding is that there really are two very, very different ways to go about it. If you approach raid content purely through the lens of it being blind prog, then healing is an absolutely blast, and if the dps rotation was any more complicated I think it would make things an utter mess. Doing blind prog you're trying to figure out optimal rotations, when and where you need to be and who needs to be healed. When you need to mitigate, when you need to spend cds. There are a ton of moving parts and it's a massive puzzle to work out how to keep yourself and the team alive, or even just how to keep the tank alive long enough to see more mechanics. While ultimately it will be a dance fight, during blind prog you don't know the dance - you're choreographing the thing as you go. It's usually less obvious to work out the rotations than what Tanks and DPS need to do. The second kind of raiding is the mechanical challenge. It's not choreographing the dance, it's simply performing the steps to something already solved. Healing is... less exciting here. It's all been worked out, and you're most likely doing nothing but oGCDs heals at fixed times weaved between a boring DPS rotation. Remember that Mike is approaching raiding purely from the lens of blind prog. He's not going back and farming anything. He's not using guides to "learn the steps" beforehand. He's working out the fight as it's happening, and once he gets the clear he's moving onto the next one. The majority of players do not blind prog the hardest content. They watch a guide, or have an experienced player (who probably watched a guide) walk them through it. So when he is talking about how amazing healing is in FFXIV raiding, he's absolutely correct from where he's sitting doing blind progs - there's a lot going on, a lot to work out, and a ton of personal responsibility - for most fights it's more than the Tanks or DPS roles in terms of how clutch you can be for making the difference between a clear and wipe which is what I feel Mike enjoys.
Every time a new Raid (especially Alliance) is released. Healing is just so much fun. You are overwhelmed by the new mechanics, everyone is eating them, you have to rez, you want to make sure you stay alive, and you have those ultimate LB3 moments where you save your Alliance by being the last person alive of your team. I wouldn't trade this for anything else.
Has Preach ever gone back to his "guess what's happening" videos to see how wrong/right he was in them now that he has actual game experience under his belt? If he hasn't, it would be interesting to see him go back to those videos and watch them again for the contrast.
He did go back and watch the video of him trying to figure out Titania like last week or the week before? I can't remember when exactly, but it did happen on stream.
Two big differences between WoW and FF14 healing 1) in FF14 health regens during combat while it does not in WoW 2) in WoW there more small, constant raid wide damage going out. This leads to a situation in WoW where there is more damage going out and mostly only healers can deal with it.
I believe the constant unavoidable damage in wow from almost every fight stemmed from healer players saying they were bored and had nothing to do during the fight(dpsing as a healer in wow is not a thing you see outside the equivalent of ultimate)
When it comes to healing, how you explained it, might be the same exact reason I love to heal too. Hadn't really thought about why I liked doing it so much, lol.
I got really into healing during Shadowbringers. I've also been doing a lot of Tanking. I decided to main Paladin for Endwalker and it's been a really good experience. I've lost a lot of my Tanxiety. and I actually like both. White Mage is a Pure healer. Very much big heals, and heal over time, Astro is also in a very good place right now. It's more mobile than White Mage at the very least. Scholar is the preventative measures, same goes for Sage which is literally made to be a combat healer. As far as DPS jobs go, I main Bard for ranged, Red Mage for Magic and though it isn't capped yet, I am really loving Ninja. All of the mobs I enjoy most share a common thread: Utility and versatility. Bard will keep your fingers busy like no other job I know. MCH has a much more strict rotation. DNC also has a fair bit of button play, and can be flourishy - darting in and out of melee range for AOE spam. It's also supportive as all get out. Honestly, the reason I don't prefer this over Bard is I've been playing Bard longer and it's finally in a good place.
The fun fact about healing, you can feel the difference from extreme to savage to ultimate. Whereas for DPS, they are generally the same, just harder mechs (which every role need to deal with). In ultimate raid, healer are usually the role which decide the mitigation plan of the whole party.
8:57 I find it perplexing that preach says he doesn't like wow healing because you just learn the script and plan your cooldowns without much room to maximize. That's literally what happens in high end healing in FF14 - The fights follow a rigid script and you end up mapping out where you use each mitigation and heal, and as a result, you spend 80%+ of your global cooldown spamming your one singular damage button.
Healing wall-to-wall pulls in expert roulette and some of the lesser-traveled alliance raids (Orbonne Monastery, Tower at Paradigm’s Breach, etc.) are great ways to really understand how your toolkit works and hone your triaging skills. That’s actually where most of the fun in healing for FF14 is. When everyone knows what they’re doing, it tends to get extremely boring because you essentially just spam your one DPS spell and keep your DoT up and occasionally throw the tank an oGCD heal.
@14:00 Geez, you actually reminded me of MOP when I and my raid leader would coordinate Spirit Shell and the like. He actually rerolled Disc Priest because I was one of the first in the world to exploit it in Mogu'Shan Vaults. We got SO good at coordinating it and finding ways to take advantage of MOP's tendency toward "Do bonus damage" encounters, it was a very rewarding experience. Funny thing was I was set up as Shadow for us, I flexed into it when we were falling a bit shy of both the healing needed and dps needed on the quillin. When I cheese the heck out of Elegon, that's when we realized this was a potent tool for us. Aaaand then Acti-Blizz ruined all Caster and Healer design from WOD onward. :(
You know it's very exciting to see you do Titania EX after all this time. I remember seeing you watch this fight having to guess the mechanics in a video a while back.
As a healer in wow I have always gauged my performance on how much dps I’m doing. Like as long as no one dies then I’ve done my job right, and I think that mindset is why I absolutely love healing in FF. I started as a scholar and after maxing that I did AST to try out regain healing… gotta say shield healing is my preferred choice and I am currently loving Sage
Not sure if you know, but Spriggan once had a pvp tournament before. It was run by STORM when it was still headed by Cat Lover, and it was a collab between several FCs who each had a chosen representative. It was a 1v1 tournament held at Wolves Den pier. It was live streamed, but it had a few issues; there was such a large audience that the pop-in meant people couldnt actually see the combatants. :D Your idea of using the crystalline conflict seems like it'd be much better, not sure how you'd get people able to view it though.
I always had the long term goal of getting all jobs to max level but my anxiety held me back from actually playing tanks or healers in dungeons so I leveled them mainly with fates, quests and leves. Then Bozja came around and I thought to myself "why not level my healer there".... Castrum and Delubrum, man. I went in with zero practice as a healer in group content and afterwards I was never afraid again to do dungeons as a healer. xD
i dont understand how people have anxiety playing these games. what are you afraid of? getting yelled at? thats what the blacklist is for. as long as you try and dont afk people wont get upset. we all just gamers tryna have a good time lol.
I have mixed feelings about ffxiv healing. I had been healing for years in mythic wow. When I tried ffxiv savage i had a feeling of having a super healing machine on my hands but couldn't use it to its full potential because I had to press the same button over and over to dps. Also, the 2 shield healers and the 2 regen healers are super the same. There is no real job uniqueness to them.
I love that Preach has done more variety but I feel like the channel is just never the same since he left WOW. All his WoD and Legion beta videos were my lifeblood that got me through the work day for years qq
I'd say that tanking becomes really interesting/tight when you go up to Savage level difficulties. You'll be needing to plan out your defensive cooldowns even more importantly, and timing things out with your co-tank on who should tank and mitigate what because of your individual cooldowns and such. It's a totally different experience from dungeon and even extreme trials healing, and I hope you get to try it out too sometimes.
For a tank it really depends on the fight. Even at the high end sometimes you get fights that forget the OT exists or all they have to do is a tank swap twice. Other times you get a fight that's entirely built around both tanks' toolkits (e.g. the 5.1 Ex). Something like O12S is interesting to tank but E7S/E9S and most of the recent extremes, not so much. Healers can also be impacted by fights being too simple that they have nothing to do, but in general I think it's easier for them to give healers stuff to do than it is tanks.
Only went towards healing when aspho released, because i was like "let's have faster queues here." Welp, now here i stand, a sage main, having the basolut best synergy with my old wow guildmate, mister whitemage main
Healing is fun during prog because everything goes wrong. But during farm it's boring af cuz you just press 1 button for 70% of the time. Even for ultimates it's the same. After progging for a while, every CD becomes set in stone & people start dying less & less, you'll turn back into a 1-button dps eventually. As Jeathe said, you either make the encounter forcing you to heal more, or you make the healer's dps rotation more interesting. XIV is a combination of both the encounter requiring little to no GCD heals at all AND 1 single button for dps-ing. It's extremely easy to fix but unfortunately SE just cater too much to the casuals that they don't want to do anything about it.
One of the weird things about FF14, is that outside of a few specific fights (and generally, even in those fights, only specific parts), a good group is essentially 8 DPS characters, due to the design of the game. This is often counterintuitive to a lot of players, and is one of the biggest reasons some people actively dislike it when they run into healers that don't DPS at all. A lot of people think that healer DPS doesn't matter, but when you look at things, they can generally be hovering around 10-20% of the total DPS for the group (depending on if you're in an 8-man or 4-man party, respectively). That's a LOT of damage to miss out on, if the healer isn't attacking at all. Back in the days when we had the toggleable Cleric Stance on healers, a good healer basically *was* a third (or fifth/sixth) DPS job in the party, if the rest of the party wasn't standing in fire all the time. Particularly Scholars, since pet potency wasn't really affected at all, so you still had a pretty large amount of passive healing potential compared to the other healer jobs. Even now, in dungeon runs, most of the healer jobs can do similar (or even more) DPS on trash packs, due to how strong their AoE skills are. Things even out a bit for the whole run due to the boss fights, but I know for myself, it's not uncommon to have my average DPS on a full dungeon run be equal to what the actual DPS jobs do. Tanks are somewhat similar, but as actively doing damage is necessary for keeping agro (less so now than it used to be, sure, but still important) they never had as much of a reason to *not* be DPSing. Currently, things are actually a bit lopsided for tanks (in my opinion), as some of their burst damage is actually on-par with or even exceeds that of some DPS jobs, which is kind of silly. Yes, I realize there are exceptions, and that's assuming a group of relatively equally-skilled players. But it's definitely one of the more strange aspects of FF14 as compared to almost every other MMO out there.
Would be interesting to see you talk to Jeath about Healing, because afaik he thinks its really boring, mostly because like a lot of endgame raiders he feels like the dps rotation of a healer does not account for the amount of time you press your dps buttons, like when you press dps buttons 90%+ of the time having one dot a spammable and like 1 off global isnt really exciting. Never really played wow so I dont know how it feels there, but he seems to enjoy healing a lot more in wow.
Very interesting, your take on healers is great, but skewed more towards shield healers (sch/sage) I feel Regen healers (especially whm) actually mitigate a lot of what you said about when things go wrong (i.e whitemage being able to cast a rezz for 0 mana if they know what they're doing) but are a bit worse at doing the stuff you like , the setup and all that. Probably natrual you gravitated towards SCH tbh, in a good way.
White mage is fairly reactive as far as healing goes but, good astro play in the endgame requires you to manage cds and timelines like you would with shield healers in order to maximize efficiency and minimize the need to use of any gcd healing, simply because of how many ogcd tools you have- imo
Healing is indeed really fun. FFXIV have made it really interesting. That being said, I still prefer tanking, I've done it for 15+ years in all MMO's I've ever played, it's what I'm good at and enjoy doing the most.
On a less grim note for a comment, I'm the complete opposite on healing. Was a healer main in Legion, loved resto shaman in particular, but XIV healing feels flat and monotone to me. The kits are linear rather than multiplicative and mana is relegated to the role of battle rez counter, meaning there's almost no modulation of output to fit emergent situations. Not to mention that the XIV healer DPS kits are somehow less complex than WoW's healer DPS kits despite being far more important. I enjoyed healing extremes, which are more forgiving and offer opportunities for recovery, but very quickly got tired of the role in savage.
As an avid fan of disc priest for a few expacs now, I have to agree here. The toolkit that healers in wow bring (especially the shaman who's probably got as many spells as the 14 community and they all do something different) is far and beyond more entertaining than the 3 dps buttons you get in 14. And I play a decent amount of 14. I'm subbed to both 14 and wow at the moment. But I just don't get into 14 healing as much as I do for wow healing. I just find it stale comparatively.
@@mightbedalmeric667 XIV's healing is ultimately what drove me to quit the game. Everything wrong with it (classes being strictly better than other classes, stale combat rotations, Debuffs being phased out, unwillingness to engage with crowd control in a series that's full of crowd control spells) has been creeping into every role and eroding the aspects that I found fun about the combat. The root cause is really simple: XIV needs more design staff. They have four people for all of the classes, none of which are healer mains, and many of which had NEVER played an MMO prior to developing for XIV. It also applies to their encounter design team (which is why dungeons have gone from 3 per patch to 1 per patch). They're also borrowing people across multiple teams to get things done (it applies to their writing and art teams too, believe it or not), and it's worsened by the best half of their company is currently on XV right now. But I also had the distinct pleasure of starting my Savage career with Gordias so I was 100% spoiled by how Arcanist worked in the first two fights. The vets of the group only agreed to do those two for the purposes of reclears because they were fed up with Pepsiman and didn't want to attempt it twice, which, ya know, fair. That tier nearly killed the raid scene because it was numerically overtuned and in turn basically killed SE's willingness to be mechanically varied in fights period. That didn't stop them from doing their set pieces, but it did suddenly force them into digging further into a hole that WoW has gone through way back in WotLK and I'm expecting history to repeat itself because of it.
This is the common and established outlook on healers in FF14. This sentiment is all over the healer forums and i agree a 100%. I think mikes outlook on ff14 healers is based on freshness of it, the inexperience and also some for of theoretical PoV instead of how it actually plays in game.
I’m one of those rare players who love support roles and wow healing was what I loved to do, I haven’t got there yet but I’m hoping ff14 end game healing is fun for me.
Do you like casting heals? cause if you do endgame healing isnt really that. You mostly cast your ST spammable dmg cast. And use the instant aoe heals sometimes. Most savage logs healers casts are around 90-95& your ST spammable heal.
I play a Druid in WoW and have since TBC, before was a Tauren Shaman. I never liked Healing in WoW and honestly did it for the first time in Legion for the Mage Tower to get the achievement for all specs. I have healed more in FFXIV than WoW and actually enjoy it.
I honestly think Sage is the best designed healer atm, even considering my issues with Toxicon... I would have said WHM before, but I think they really messed up Afflatus Misery. WHM is brain-dead easy now, and I'm saying that as a WHM main since 2.X To be fair though, I haven't played AST in a while. Need to put more hours into that sometime soon. Probably will when 6.2 rolls around.
@@Bistai949 I started on WHM and I always wished I had a way to put my knowledge of the boss mechanics to use. The most I could do about raidwide damage at earlier levels was to time Medica 2 to go off right after it hit, and then at late levels I could pop Temperance. But after trying Sage I was like omg this is what I always wanted lol. Now I can always shield and mitigate before a cast goes off and it feels much more satisfying than reactive healing.
@@danielj6897 Honestly, SGE shields aren't really what I'm talking about. You get a really good single target and AoE sheild every 2 minutes, but that's about it. Honestly, in most situations you want to avoid SGE shields as much as you can. It just eats into DPS uptime (same goes for SCH mostly. There's some weird Energy drain math, but honestly it encapsulates what I hate about SCH) The main thing that makes SGE so fun for me is that the oGCD abilities have some really interesting interactions and uses. the 10% DMG invulns in particular flow together very well once you understand how the job works. As for WHM, there *used* to be a lot of interplay between using abilities at the right time. In a lot of cases Shield vs Pure healer is a distinction without much of a difference once you get good enough at healing. The main problem with WHM atm is that it's too easy. getting an absolutely free cure II/medica that lets you do full DPS every 20s is lame as hell.
It's actually refreshing to hear this. White Mage main - lately I've been hearing lot of people talk bad about healers but much like as you said it's the play style I gravitate towards most.
i mean the healer design has been bad since they reworked healers after HW. Its generally accepted that its the worst part of ff14s pve design. Its def not something new. It was the hot topic when i left in early SB and was still the hot topic when i came back in EW lul :P The exact same complaints aswell so they did not improve anything from early SB to EW.
@@jesperjohansson9857 Well having played through out. I haven't had an issue with it at all. Since I've played from HW to EW. It's probably some rose tinted goggles. Whitemages kit has remained relatively the same but the kit is used differently almost every expansion. The things I've lost that I miss. Aero 3. The things I lost I don't miss are stone skin, protect and cleric stance. They were just redundant and were rightfully cut. Buffs I'd automatically apply because why wouldn't I? (redundant) A DPS switch to DPS why wouldn't I? (redundant) oh and Aqua... whatever it was called a knock back spell that no one ever used.
17:45 I'm assuming we're referring to "abilities" as opposed to "spells" here (spells are GCDs). In which case, they're not free because they cost no mana. they're "free" because they cost no GCDs (and thus do not lower the damage output). The goal is to maximize DPS, not mana efficiency. Mana efficiency comes naturally as a byproduct of optimizing DPS, since that requires adequate use of OGCD heals and mitigations (and not just by the healers, but the party as a whole). To put it into perspective, you could clear the whole current Savage tier right now without casting a single GCD heal during boss uptime (meaning all healer uptime GCDs are damage spells). That's what "efficient" healing looks like in FFXIV. It's also ironically why healing is generally considered "boring" in this game. When you're just pressing the same button for several GCDs, with nothing to weave in between on top of that, it can sometimes get pretty dull, yeah...
I absolutely HATED healing in wow; I even started the game as priest because I had intended to be a healer but just ended up being shadow forever. But I play xiv now and I main sch for savage and ultimate content and it is my absolute favorite, pretty much for all the same reasons you gave!
I'll be very interested to see the video where Preach tries out Sage now that he's fairly experienced on Scholar, especially with his predilection towards Discipline Priest from WoW. Scholar has, of course, asserted its dominance in the meta once again this expansion but Sage is still really fun to play and my go to healer this expansion thus far even though I've leveled them all twice now.
i am having an absolute blast on sage XD i seriously low how sage seems focused on big healing cds and having quite a few of them i dont know if all healers are like that but i do enjoy it as im leveling
I feel llke something important to differ between WoW and XIV is that WoW designs encounters around raid damage to give healers something to do. At least that's how it felt for me switching from WoW to XIV.
I was a Disc Priest main in Cata and MoP and still have fond memories of it. I main AST in FF14 and while Noct Sect used to be kinda similarish, its still different. I honestly only like healing high tier content any more though because dungeons re stupid easy and spamming one button for 90% of content is boring as hell even with all the extra buttons AST has; I really wish SE would add more unavoidable dmg, or savage four man content Edit: my favorite thing about healing in FF14 is that it is the only role that you can truely carry a group of scrubs in, but as far as casual content like treasure maps, hunts, or roulettes it is DRK or DNC for me any more
I healed mythic in wow for a time now and then last year went into ffxiv as a healer too. After doing a some savage before endwalker and then the whole EW savage tier i then went back and tried wow again... But something was missing when i healed again, like it was not as fun. I really didn't understand why dps in wow was more fun than healing all of a sudden...Until now when u nailed it in this video!
What I find in WoW is that the design of the healing specs makes the experience very different from one healer to another. Holy and discipline priest for example feel so different to one another that I could easily imagine someone having fun with one of those specs and absolutely hating the other and viceversa. The mana expenditure and the dps opportunities can also vary greatly from one healer class to another. I've only played DPS jobs in FFXIV so I wouldn't know how healing feels, but knowing that the specs are so "fine-tuned" according to Preach makes it sound like they're all broadly similar.
Good insights into the differing playstyles between WoW healing and FFXIV healing. One valid criticism of FFXIV healing is that it actually becomes too easy once you map out your cooldowns to the fight's mechanics, and as a result, you spend 90% or more of your GCDs playing an over-simplified DPS character. There is some truth to that, especially when it comes to highly skilled players in EX and Savage fights, but as Yoshi-P said when confronted with this criticism: if you want healing to be more engaging and more focused on healing, go play Ultimate fights where the amount of incoming raid damage is dramatically higher. I enjoy playing all 3 roles, although I personally find DPS the most engaging due to the relatively deep and complex rotations in FFXIV compared to WoW. There is a whole world of optimization you can go for to improve your damage output, and it really benefits the group to push that extra damage in early Savage clears and Ultimate fights. TBH, tanking can be a bit boring in Extreme fights, but give it another try in Savage and you'll see how it almost feels similar to a healer in terms of protecting the group by using your utility spells appropriately, combined with more complex rotations than healers have access to.
Ya know what's so strange is that I'm the reverse of Preach in raiding role preference by MMO. I love healing in wow and dislike tanking there (though I've done it plenty), but I love tanking in XIV and dislike healing.
I 100% agree about healing, i never managed to enjoy healing in wow, whereas in FF14 i switched to Astro on Shb and i haven't looked back. And same things with Tanks and Dps, i hate combo classes, so most tanks/dps are a nono on FF14.
Hit the nail on the head about Tank and Healing, you're doing the dps job but just get extra stuff to do so it's more involving. It's why I'll never main a DPS.
10/10 on the infographic. Hopefully the FFXIV Andys and the WoW andys get along as gamers, because thats what we all are at the end of the day...If you have any WoW Andys left watching that is, :D
I take umbrage with something Preach said in this. The bit about healers being built from the ground up to do DPS. This was true once, but hasn't been for a long time. They do not have a multitude of DPS spells, and in fact, many people wish they had more, because the healer DPS situation is so dire. One single-target, one AoE, and one DoT does not equal a multitude. WHM gets one extra, AST gets an extra but it depends on RNG, and Scholar doesn't get anything extra, I think. No idea about Sage, haven't played it yet. Healers are expected to do DPS, but they are absolutely braindead whenever that's the only thing they do in a fight. Just endless spamming of one ability, while refreshing a DoT every 30 seconds.
@@Orphan_of_Kos_or_some_say_Kosm Oh yeah. Still, at a 100 potency and very infrequent use in a fight, it's not much of a DPS button. Last I checked, dissipating your fairy isn't something you really ever want to do either, but it's been a while since I played SCH.
Mike. Try warrior tank please. When you get to level 82-90 you can actually try doing dungeons without a healer because bloodwhetting is hilariously good. Its really fun.
7:55 once upon a time mistweaver was like this and fun... then they decided to let a moron kill not just the spec but the entire class still to this day by changing it's mastery, and then further more taking away mobility because it was supposed to be a light heal, light dps with spike heal and dps with you the player managing what you need to do alongside the healer comp and fight but changing their mastery from overheal to just more raw output while nerfing, removing spells, passives. whoever took over monks in WoD had no business making class designs when they've clearly not played them or even understand them at a basic level.
I really wish you revisit these opinions later on once you get a more experienced view on roles/classes - a lot of what you say is what i think most new players will view on any one subject, but i do wonder how much it'll be warped once you're doing savages/ults, and doing it with good players around you, its a night and day situation
I was a tank main in WoW since BC. Yet in FFXIV I cannot stand Tank because it has the crappy super long GCD with only barely sometimes an OGCD ability. I actually main healing in FFXIV and it is a delight. I could play Scholar all day every day, and I never feel bad over wipes either. I just love it.
Were you a low level warrior? Not sure about higher level warrior or paladin, but dark knight and Gunbreaker have a lot of ogcds. Gunbreaker has some like 20+ ogcds presses per minute, not counting dps and tanking CDs
Dark Knight and Gun Breaker have hella oGCDs tho, have you tried leveling them? Gun Breaker legit has to fit so much shit in during its burst window it is not even funny, cause its GCDs have a "continuation" that is an oGCD, so you would do GCD > continuation, GCD > continuation > GCD > continuation alongside with weaving CDs and other oGCDs it also has (a high potency dps and a dot). This leads to your burst windows, which are 1 minute, looking like GCD > burst button > GCD > continuation > GCD dot > oGCD dot/oGCD dps > GCD > continuation/gap closer > GCD > Continuation/gap closer > big GCD > GCD > continuation > GCD > continuation Every 3 minutes you also get a super spicy extended burst with more weaves. This is also fairly strict and boss positioning during it and also popping CDs during this can be intense. This is usually a turn off for people playing Gunbreaker but it could be a turn on for you. Dark Knight also has a lot of oGCDs to weave during its burst, salted earth, carve and spit, edge of shadow, salted earth 2, any excess plunges, 2x shadowbringers and the clone. Genuinely try it out.
(This comment is long, TL;DR, sage is very smooth and fun to play and playing it in savage feels amazing both when things go right or wrong) I'm a uk player in xiv playing on a us server because my friends are all on there and so its hard to find a raid group that can fit my timezone, which led to me learning to play more roles in savage out of necessity, being the jack of all trades that fills whatever is needed. I started out as a dancer main then when I had to tank I would play gunbreaker because that and paladin are the only tanks I really enjoy playing because of the more involved dps rotations meaning I have to think outside of just the moments big damage is going out. Throughout all I played of shadowbringers though I was terrified of healing hard content, I enjoyed healing normal content and did it often partly for the fast queues, but when I played sage for the first time in endwalker I resolved to try to heal extreme with it. It's so fun with how smooth it feels, every part of the toolkit fits together perfectly and I feel like I'm always in control, always having a tool for every situation. I was still nervous to heal savage, until a friend from an old static asked me if I could fill in for their astrologian who had to leave their group, this only lasted a week as suddenly they lost the scholar and I asked to be on sage as I was more comfortable with that job, it doesnt have quite as much going on with the overwhelming card system meaning you basically cannot heal at 2 min windows because you are so busy. Swapping to sage and better learning how to walk that line of casting as few heals as possible without making my cohealer have to cover for me was so interesting, yes when optimised healers do tend to devolve into mashing one button a lot which is a common criticism, but I feel like that doesn't take away from what ffxiv gets right with healer design. If sage had a rotation even something super simple like warrior I feel it'd be perfect.
I love healing and tanking. I have a hard time having fun as dps. I'm going through msq as a ninja and I do all the duties and roulettes as White mage and warrior. I originally did this because of queue times, but now I prefer healing and tanking over dps...well mostly healing. I'm currently at the end of heavensward.
I really hope the next healer in ff will have a more intricate dps rotation. It doesnt need to be super engaging but right now every healer is the same in terms of single target damage. Its really boring. Sure you have your moment where you actually push your buttons but besides that its just meh. Im not talking about dungeon situations where you use aoe abilities
Highly doubt since current healer Job basically is the result of what the healer wanted to have. I don't think they want to have to manage the case where a healer will have to decide between completing rotation or heal.
Evening Everyone. The Shadowbringers video is basically done but we needed this one to go out today so that video will be up on Sunday for y'all.
In other news, Preachcon tickets go on sale tomorrow evening at 7pm BST so make sure to drop by the stream if you fancy hanging out with the team and the community.
Finally we also have a PVP tournament coming to FF14 on 25th June - I hope you all enjoyed the silly little animation I made for it; a nice little homage to the Overwatch league/world cup visually. The tournament is only for the Crawlers this first time around, but we welcome you all to come and watch the craziness.
Nice!
Sunday Copium
Thanks for the update. I came to the comments just to ask about your FF14 review videos (if you were still making them). Can’t wait!
I am on Light DC sadly - Cant wait for DC traval so I can get involved!
Looking forward to the shadowbringer video with how it cemented itself as preach's Nr. 1 RPG
can't help but feel I've seen part of this before...
I wonder, where could have it been, hmm......
His "I'm streaming this, aren't I" wasn't quite the Darkside Phil "Oh, Hello" but watching his face turn red when he saw chat was great.
Heh
@@25xxfrostxx When is it in the vid?
@@silversflow4469 I think they edited it out of this one but they put out a clip earlier. He talked for 5 minutes before he noticed he was live.
It's interesting how part of improving as a healer in FF is figuring out how much not-healing you can get away with.
Frankly, it makes playing a healer kinda lame. Since the "not healing" part is straight up mashing your one dps button + maintain a dot.
@@rolder50 It used to be fun thou, back when healers had more options. It was mostly changed to what we have now because alot of people struggled too much... honestly at times even i pref. the new system, but that's only really while progressing savage/ultimate bosses. If there's enought stuff to do I don't mind the two-button dps rotation, however 80% of the content have suffered alot after they pruned the damage spells.
@@magnuscarlsson9969 Oh I'm aware, I used to main healers. I cut back in Shadowbringers and these days don't touch them with a ten foot pole. Mind numbingly boring in any content below Savage, and even in Savage / Ultimate, still pretty dull.
One of the cool things about FF is that its insanely easy to just play another class, so eventually most players will play all classes at least a little bit. That makes it a lot easier for ppl to branch off into play styles they wouldn't otherwise have tried, because of the investment needed.
Yeah all for one ☺️ you don't need to make new character to try new class
,It reminded me of a ftp anime game I played back when that is Eden Eternal ☺️
@@JLOGIAC I played that as well, was pretty interesting since you could cros-class and stuff.
I've been playing since 2014...and I only tank. The stupid quest to unlock mount in shb and ew...I just boosted the roles I needed...and had a friend do it for me.
Yep! By the descriptions I thought I would hate SCH and love WHM but being able to play both it turns out things were the opposite. I never would have tried it and learned how much I enjoyed it without that freedom.
It's interesting hearing Mike talk about healers as a veteran healer. Cause yea, when you first learn to heal, its super fun. Unfortunately, I feel like healing just gets more boring the better you get at it, and every fight devolves into "1 button spam with the occasional OGCD." Hearing a new healer's perspective makes me want to somehow recapture that feeling.
The only time you get to experience that again is when a new encounter drops and you enter it fresh or blind. That's when healers are FUN because the design of 14 healing, when players play well, healers don't have much to do besides 1-2 dps spam.
That is my exact feeling. Mike has not done any repeating hard content so everything is still fresh. Once you learn mechanics of fights you realize how dull healing sadly is in this game.
It's a balance and why I'm still a healer main. Learning fights blind on healer is the most fun I've ever had in a game. Savage reclears for everyone's BiS is a slog because the dps rotations are so boring. I don't get the highs of perfectly mapping a fight to keep gcd heals between the two healers as close to possible as zero aside from a downtime deploy tactics or medica 2 without being a bit bored after the puzzle is solved. A trade I'm willing to make, but I'd sell my left testicle for even a basic 1, 2, 3 damage combo like Machinist's filler.
I love getting rewarded for being good at my job with... Doing less things. :^)
I've been a healer main for 20 years, and I've been making White Mage in FFXIV for the 4 months I've been playing, and at this point I am having the most fun when things go off the rails. When everyone is doing things correctly I'm a Glare Mage, but when someone screws up the the frustration is instantly quelled by the joy of thinking on what I have in me toolkit at this sync level.
Mike the MSQ watching RP healer. This is a weird timeline
it's like the one bright star in this age of darkness
I've been shocked discovering his talent for voicing characters. I wonder if he's been shocked at how good he is at it. He genuinely improves the experience even watching him play the older FF games purely through his vocalization and bringing life and sometime humor to the characters. I will probably never be able to read moogle dialogue without hearing the accent and extra "mate"s added to the end of every sentence.
@@marajango Strong are thou, mortal.
@@Reldan On the one hand, I wholeheartedly agree, on the other hand, I feel bad for Tataru's real VA cause now it feels weird that she's not actually a chain smoking drunk.
Damn, the PVP tournament is sponsored and everything? I didn't think it would be so grand! I'm excited to see it, I love FF14's pvp, that was a really well designed intro graphic that gets me excited!
I rolled CNJ leading into WHM for my levelling experience in FF14, primarily so I got instant queues for dungeons and trials. Did that all the way to 90 and loved it.
I've levelled a few more jobs since then and, while I may go with something else for future MSQ levelling, I'm still dead keen on WHM. There's nothing quite like running into the middle of a huge trash pull with the tank and popping Holy.
It's frikkin awesome in pvp, too!
I'd advise anyone with healer anxiety to try it, because I can pretty much guarantee your anxiety will vanish.
I want to reiterate a comment I made on a previous video: it is so enjoyable watching you experience and analyze the different facets of FF. You're always fair about it, which I respect. If something is bad, you say it. If something is good, you say it. But they you give your very well deeply observed analysis to explain why, and it has been SO accurate every time. Thanks for all your content, Mike.
The kwestalline conflict graphics were so good! I’m actually excited to watch it!
I hope Mike will stream his savage raids. It would be awesome watch
I mainly hope he won't get carried by raiders in his FC, taking other noobs through them would be a lot more interesting
Unless you do it blind/week 1 everyone is carried through p1s and p2s just by the fact that strats are out.
P3S P4S, he can't really be carried unless he at least can execute the strat correctly. But at that point is it really being carried anymore
@@nekogami87 yeah, still get plenty of p3s trap parties even today. Mistakes in P3S and P4S can cascade pretty wildly.
@@niklasstahl98 He's done every EX blind and the folks that know it don't tell him shit and let him flounder trying to figure it out - hence why some took them a whole stream to do like Ifrit. I have faith that he's gonna struggle bus his way through it, at least until the Gordias wall.
@@Aaron.Arcanum I mean it is fine if he doesn't know the fights but for the people who do, what do they do? Just wall when he dies? Otherwise it is just ress and continue as per usual. And for full clarity I have not seen any of his extreme clears.
loved it Mike! great video!
Loved hearing an actual comparison of how healers play differently between the two games! Also role specific mechanics really start up in savage, P3S and P4S play very differently if you swap between healing and not. Hope we get more in the future instead of "apples to oranges my guy".
Yeah, healing in this game is so bad, the raiding in general is pretty good but they really messed up the healing role, after you know the mechanics it's super boring
Still it seems he has not healed since wotlk or something, that healing comparison is completly out of date regarding WoW. For a moment when he was talking about healing I though it is about WoW, but it was about FF, which shows how bad the comparison was overall IMO.
Just RDM + 1 healer on P3S. More DPS, only 1 new mechanic for FoF, and some location changes on FoA.
@@bartoszrabiej3241 Mike will do anything to make WoW look bad and FF14 good in his videos, like it or not, that's just where the money is now
how specifically did he make wow look bad? he said it matters more at the high level but for the general player at base difficulty mana is not a factor in decision making, and that was always my experience thru shadowlands unless i was purposefully trying to spam my high cost spells and drain it quickly (which there was never a purpose to do.) that's the most "negative" thing he said as wow in the entire video. he literally said he was excited for dragonflight changes and often repeats that in many of his videos. it's like because he doesn't cover wow 24/7 he hates it now. he's one of the few ffxiv players who came from wow who doesn't actively badmouth it besides engaging with his community and the memes they present. like, seriously, don't scare away one of the few people still in your corner lmao
Yo Preach you should give PLD a try, very supportive tank. Line up Divine Veil, a health shield, with healer buffs like physis, timing and lining up your passage of arms, and the ability to provide intervene or cover to save specific raid members. Plus the DPS rotation of PLD is genuinely fun with constant engagement
Warning: Cover damage goes through Divine Veil and your defensive cooldowns. It takes the target's defenses, not yours, into account!
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 Yup, however still mad worth to save a run with cover + healer LB3
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 You can actually pop CDs and you still mitigate the damage. The only thing that doesn’t work is Hallowed Ground. PLDs would Cover their cotank all the time for busters you would normally have to swap for in order to keep being the current OT while still taking the hit. Big example would be Titan’s second Buster in UWU, where you would normally have to swap, but instead a PLD can just Cover and kitchen-sink instead.
PvP tournament despite me not enjoying FF's PvP style sounds amazing. Everyone who snags a ticket to PreachCon enjoy yourselves.
Love healing for these reasons too yes ^^ I've mained heals my entire ff life :p
This is why mentor roulette can be fun too, more challenging as a healer. You'll learn how to actually adjust and save people. A test of your reflexes :3
I've had the opposite experience with FFXIV Tanking/Healing. I healed in WoW for 10+ years (Holy/Disc priest) and loved it. Tried healing in FFXIV and it felt different. Harder or more clunky. Recently, I started my first Tank, Paladin, with no intention of ever actually tanking a dungeon, leveling via squadrons, sidequests, and leves. But I recently dipped my toe into party tanking around 68, and I enjoy it. Never thought I'd be a Tank; it scared the hell out of me in WoW.
You are not alone, just go look at the ff14 forums or the ff14 veteran raiders. The healing design is utter garbage. its around 90-95% just spamming your dmg. You never spot heal like mike says, using GCD healing is playing healers wrong in ff14. You dps with glare/broil/dosis/malefic and sometimes toss a few oGCD heals.
Will Brian Ricardo be helping to Cast the Pvp Tournament? hes one of the top pvp players and Pretty much been one of the major faces of FF14 Pvp
Seconding this recommendation!
100% worth reaching out to Brian Ricardo and the Revival PvP Community if you haven't yet Preach!
Getting a guy who promotes PvP boosting and has actively boosted his friends that are heavily into RMT? No thank you
I had a similar experience to Mike here. I hated healing in WoW for the most part (holy paladin in Cata clicked with me for some reason), and when I moved to FF as my main MMO, I expected more of the same.
My main is unquestionably Sage now, I love playing it so much!
I really like your perspective on both. With 14, you're doing a dance and if done correctly, not much goes on and it all seams easy. But when shit hits the fan, it REALLY hits the fan and you se the good players from the bad players REAL quickly
I have to say, as a SCH playing well, and knowing the fights, really allows your toolkit to shine. Personally, SGE, while still a shield healer, really does allow you to maintain shields and react more as opposed to SCH where your playstyle is more predicated on knowing when to use what. I find that design philosophy fantastic with the healers in FF XIV. AST is a treat!
you dont really need to so anything of that, just spam dosis and when raid wide dmg comes use 2-3 ogcd aoe heals, thats why around 90-95% of casts of SGE in savage is dosis and euk dosis.
@@jesperjohansson9857 For anyone reading after the fact: both are right. During progress you'll probably have to shield the raid as people won't be geared, will be taking vulnerability stacks from messing up mechanics etc. When pushing for parses where everyone is geared and using mitigation properly, you won't. In those scenarios Sage can heal a tonne with it's oGCDs. When you've got to shield though, Scholar feels like a slower Sage, a 1.5 second cast for AoE shields versus a 1 second instant (though 2 button presses). Sage's shields are weaker though, especially compared to Scholar's big 90s CD Deployment tactics. Scholar's shields are usually enough though. But to anyone looking to try out both, try Scholar first, get used to that style of playing, it doesn't feel so great if you try Sage first.
That announcement animation makes me want to see JoCat and Pint form a team together XD
I have beaten every extreme and savage raids in FF14 since 2014. The best way to describe the raid is when things go right, it's like synchronized swimming. Everyone has their own thing to do that may overlap you. But you know exactly when that happens so you can act accordingly. My friend jokingly said the FFXIV could use metronome. But we realized that it may actually help you raid better in FFXIV.
Oh no, I don't want to have to program my doctor beat for raid encounters, I finished music school a decade ago I thought I was done with that.
Some black mage players actually do use a metronome they set to help them with the MP ticks so they can do a skip blizzard rotation.
Hey mike, nice to see you talking about healers! Been playing as a healer main in FFXIV since 2.X, and it's definitely my favorite aspect of playing the game as well. For the most part, I think you've described the general feel of playing a healer pretty well. Ultimately, the role in FFXIV comes down to resource and crisis management. What do you use at what times, and how do you deal with strenuous circumstances.
However, I did want to leave a post going into a bit of some of the specifics about how I personally think of healers in FFXIV. As someone who's never played WoW, it might give you a bit more of a perspective un-affected by the influence of WoW.
The main aspect I wanted to talk about is resource management. You placed a lot of emphasis on MP in this video, and while I won't claim that MP doesn't matter at all in FFXIV, it's often not much of a concern for most healers operating at higher end content, I find. Healers these days tend to have enough tools to keep their MP up so long as you hit the "give me my MP" button (Lucid Dreaming) whenever you're at 50-75% MP. Of course, raises and things going *really* bad changes this, but that's really in the worst-case scenario, and even then, if you're playing half-decently (IE, doing damage instead of spamming GCD heals) you'll probably be fine.
I think that the most valuable resources, and really the only one's worth being concerned about, for healers in FFXIV are their GCD, and oGCD spells and abilities. Like you said, Healers in FFXIV are more like sub-DPS that make sure the party doesn't die. Doesn't matter how low the party goes, if they have 1 HP, the healer's going their job. Since healer's role in a party is sorta binary (live or die, nothing in between), the difference between a good and bad healer in FFXIV is pretty much decided by DPS numbers alone. As such, a healer's theoretical max performance is if a healer has 100% DPS GCD uptime (SCH technically also needs to spend all their aetherflow on Energy drain for max performance but... well... there's a reason I'm not a fan of SCH, lol). This essentially means that the fewer GCD heals that a healer performs, the better, which then puts much more of an emphasis on a healer's oGCD abilities.
That's the gist of it anyway, and you can probably already see some of the issues with this just by reading the explanation I've given, such as "well then why do I have all these SCH shields if being the best SCH means I never use them except as a last resort or to save a GCD for later?" This is the problem with a lot of healer design that I think the FF team needs to solve, because it's a really common issue for healers. Except in down-time with nothing to attack, I very rarely ever need to use a GCD heal as any healer. Savage and Ultimate is more likely to get you to press those buttons but dungeons in particular don't require any. I always have tanks double-pull, and I often never need to GCD heal unless someone messes up bad as long as I'm on my A game.
I also think that the FFXIV devs still don't quite understand how to intergrate damage into the healer playstyle. For years they refused to make DPS an expected part of a DPS's kit in content, and now that they are starting to embrace it, results have been... mixed. Toxicon, for example, is pretty much useless outside of the time between dungeon pulls, and they've had a really hard time making Energy Drain (which they tried to remove at one point) fit well into SCH. I'm also a bit salty about the buff to Afflatus Misery as a WHM main. It's made WHM way too easy, and taken a lot of the fun out of the lily system. Sure, the job is better in terms of numbers, but it's much more boring to play.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on healers. Agree or disagree with them, I hope they give you something to think about. Regardless, glad to see you hop aboard the green DPS train.
It seems weird that you don't like the Afflatus Misery buff when your other major complaint was no incentive to use GCD heals. People like damage neutral lilies precisely because when they were a DPS loss, you'd do anything to avoid using them.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if they flipped the mana situation on it's head, making oGCDs cost mana, and GCD heals replenish. Right now, GCD heals cost you damage AND mana so of course you avoid them at all costs.
@@NabsterHax The reason I don't really like the new lilies is that I think it removes a lot of choice from the job. Ignoring the special things you could do regarding wasting lilies between pulls to build misery ('cause you can still do that), it created a sort of system where you had 3 sort of tiers of heals:
- oGCDs, which were free in every way other than their CD, which could be fairly long
- Afflatus heals, which cost a bit of damage but had a decently short CD and 3 charges
- and normal GCD heals, which cost all of that GCD's damge but could be used on-demand
While, yes, it was always optimal to use oGCDs, it at least provided a WHM options that meant something. Of course, I would have liked to see that system improved to make those choices more meaningful and less linear (i.e. not use oGCD then Afflatus, then normal GCD), but it was *something*
But now that's gone. Solace and Rapture are now so brain-dead and have such low CDs that playing the job is just way to simple. There's a lot less struggle to playing the job now with free GCD heals at my disposal. I don't have to use my oGCDs in smart ways, because lilies are a crutch now.
What SE should have done was expanded the lily system to create more interesting decision making. Now they've done the opposite.
"SCH technically also needs to spend all their aetherflow on Energy drain for max performance"
See the rub about that, which is what makes Aetherflow arguably the most interesting (at least) healer resource imo, which too many people forget is that 3-ED (or 6-ED with Dissipation) is technically the ideal of what you should be doing bc of damage, yes...but that's only in situations where you didn't need those heals anyway. There's a reason that's only actually done by bleeding edge speedkill groups and the like; unless you've perfectly optimized your defensive plan with your other healer and tanks and DPS utility, and have some degree of overgear as well in some situations, you *will* need to use things that aren't fairy heals or Recitation (or now Expedient for mit). And in those situations, if you do the 'ideal' thing of spending on ED...you haven't actually optimized damage bc that's another succor or adlo or, heaven forbid, physick you now need to do instead. Bc last time I checked, losing 100 potency is a bunch less than losing 295 potency. Inso much as aetherflow is 'solved' in healing situations as 'just' extra damage, its only when you successfully, intelligently co-ordinate everything else, and correctly bank on no substantial human error so they were unnecessary anyway. And that sort of planning/situational decisionmaking is literally the point/appeal of Green in this game in the first place!
That sort of nuance being missing from Lillies on WHM is why I think claiming them being dps-neutral now is a 'simplification' is imo misguided, or at least misdiagnoses the fundamental problem at play. Frankly, within the current system, making them/Misery dps neutral just efficiently formalizes the fact that they're already necessary/dps 'gain' in a lot of situations anyway (like movement, the unavoidable realities of healing like i described above, co-ordinating Miseries to line up with bursts, etc.), and also because the core resource of a healer being a DPS loss goes against how they're approaching every other healer; the tension with core resources like that isn't supposed to be the conflict between healing and damage, its how well you can prevent there from being a conflict in the first place. What I just described with scholar. All of AST's illegal amount of oGCDs. Sage's entire kit (which is sometimes *so* free that you sometimes need to dump resources just for the sake of not overcapping and/or mana econ). Hell, AST and SGE both have a cooldown GCD healing move at 90 that is also explicitly damage neutral for this reason! Damage efficiency as apposite to the role is something that only matters in key, specific areas. Otherwise, it was never really meant to be a choice at all, its just a glorified math problem, as most concerns based on pure numerical factors in these kinds of games basically always actually are.
Now, I still feel one can (and kinda should) argue that WHM's current design/resources absolutely do need changes, but that mostly comes down to 'GCD/throughput healer' being kind of an outmoded concept in context of everything else they do with player health/fight design, so WHM not getting a significant oGCD toolkit by comparison only serves to make decisionmaking less interesting in a lot of ways, ways which aren't incongruous with how Lillies *are* interesting, since they're still a limited resource you need to correctly save if you want to heal ideally, or move damage-optimally, or *ideally* both.
If you haven't already, check out playing on legacy controls. if you swap to that and put turn left and right on your strafe buttons it controls *about* the same on legacy as it does standard, but you also gain being able to "backpedal" at full speed while facing the camera in any direction, in that your character will actually turn to move in the direction you're inputting, relative to the camera's direction. Only big catch to playing on legacy is that holding just right mouse won't turn your character in addition to the camera so if you're used to doing that for avoiding gaze attacks without moving you have to adjust a bit, but I generally prefer the control style for playing on casters/healers due to the more "unlocked" feeling movement.
Preach Con, where babies are made
Well shit, I wasn't expecting ol' "I chose mage because it doesn't have a healing offspec" Preach to actually love healing in FF, what a pleasant surprise!
Being able to be the party's course-corrector as a Red Mage who manages their mana correctly and raises anyone who dies is so satisfying. Sometimes I even raise players who aren't even in my party in Alliance Raids. As someone who prefers to DPS I love the hyrbid DPS/healer design of classes like Red Mage and Balance Druid because it lets me be useful. I've been wondering lately if Devastation Evokers will be in the same niche due to the new talent trees although I still haven't decided if I'll go back to WoW at all yet.
When you discussed your priest healing and how you enjoyed predicting damage made me realise that’s what I love about Sage in ffxiv. Definitely recommend learning that role as you branch out in ff jobs ✨😊
I completely agree! After trying out healing in Stormblood, I started maining it and never looked back. There are just much more interesting decicions to be made when you're a healer in ffxiv!
4:52
This diversion away from WoW's raiding style into something unique to FFXIV really started in Stormblood, and that's why I'm stoked to see Asmon finally experience it soon. He's only seen raiding content up to Heavensward, which was when they were just starting to change their dungeon and raid design.
That ad for the tournament looked SO GOOD!!
If you want a fun tank experience, Gunbreaker is a blast. It's basically a melee DPS rotation with all of the Off GCD abilities you use for damage during your burst window every 60 seconds. Along with having to use all of your tank cooldowns either personally or throwing on the other tank / using raid wide defensives.
Loved the PvP intro with the statues. Well done
One of my favorite things was solo healing DR. Knowing when the damage spikes came, and how to deal with them, was so much fun. Especially considering the whole Doom mechanic in that place.
Yes healing in DR!!! Easily some of the most fun I've had with this game. Especially back before you could get the extra permanent mettle buffs!
Glad to see Mike is also enjoying the raids and healing experience.
I know some people complain about healer's simple dps rotation and maybe that is a valid criticism for when you've learnt the content and all that's left is to optimise (i.e. spam glare/broil). BUT, for the life of me when progging new fights healing is EASILY the most engaging role for me. You are engaging with the dance of the fights mechanics while also taking care of your party, improvising and hopefully helping to fix any of their mistakes, learning which mitigation work best in relation to the boss's mechanics, and hopefully enabling the team to prog just that little bit further into the fight to see a new mechanic; it just seems super impactful and is the most fun way for me to learn a new fight.
It's not just for high end content either, some of my favourite healing experiences in FF are when a new alliance raid comes out and trying to heal through the chaos of a 24 man raid where no one knows the mechanics, rezzing that red mage so they can help out with rez's, etc, it's sublime chaos.
Great vid as always - cheers.
I think one thing it's important to consider in FFXIV raiding is that there really are two very, very different ways to go about it. If you approach raid content purely through the lens of it being blind prog, then healing is an absolutely blast, and if the dps rotation was any more complicated I think it would make things an utter mess. Doing blind prog you're trying to figure out optimal rotations, when and where you need to be and who needs to be healed. When you need to mitigate, when you need to spend cds. There are a ton of moving parts and it's a massive puzzle to work out how to keep yourself and the team alive, or even just how to keep the tank alive long enough to see more mechanics. While ultimately it will be a dance fight, during blind prog you don't know the dance - you're choreographing the thing as you go. It's usually less obvious to work out the rotations than what Tanks and DPS need to do.
The second kind of raiding is the mechanical challenge. It's not choreographing the dance, it's simply performing the steps to something already solved. Healing is... less exciting here. It's all been worked out, and you're most likely doing nothing but oGCDs heals at fixed times weaved between a boring DPS rotation.
Remember that Mike is approaching raiding purely from the lens of blind prog. He's not going back and farming anything. He's not using guides to "learn the steps" beforehand. He's working out the fight as it's happening, and once he gets the clear he's moving onto the next one. The majority of players do not blind prog the hardest content. They watch a guide, or have an experienced player (who probably watched a guide) walk them through it. So when he is talking about how amazing healing is in FFXIV raiding, he's absolutely correct from where he's sitting doing blind progs - there's a lot going on, a lot to work out, and a ton of personal responsibility - for most fights it's more than the Tanks or DPS roles in terms of how clutch you can be for making the difference between a clear and wipe which is what I feel Mike enjoys.
Every time a new Raid (especially Alliance) is released. Healing is just so much fun. You are overwhelmed by the new mechanics, everyone is eating them, you have to rez, you want to make sure you stay alive, and you have those ultimate LB3 moments where you save your Alliance by being the last person alive of your team. I wouldn't trade this for anything else.
Has Preach ever gone back to his "guess what's happening" videos to see how wrong/right he was in them now that he has actual game experience under his belt? If he hasn't, it would be interesting to see him go back to those videos and watch them again for the contrast.
He did go back and watch the video of him trying to figure out Titania like last week or the week before? I can't remember when exactly, but it did happen on stream.
He has. It should be in the vod with the titania ex kill, a short time after it. I'm not sure which vod has the titania kill though, sorry.
I believe that video of him going over his past self on the Titania fight can be found on his PG Highlights channel if I'm not mistaken.
Seems lit I’ll tune in to watch
Two big differences between WoW and FF14 healing
1) in FF14 health regens during combat while it does not in WoW
2) in WoW there more small, constant raid wide damage going out.
This leads to a situation in WoW where there is more damage going out and mostly only healers can deal with it.
I believe the constant unavoidable damage in wow from almost every fight stemmed from healer players saying they were bored and had nothing to do during the fight(dpsing as a healer in wow is not a thing you see outside the equivalent of ultimate)
When it comes to healing, how you explained it, might be the same exact reason I love to heal too. Hadn't really thought about why I liked doing it so much, lol.
I got really into healing during Shadowbringers. I've also been doing a lot of Tanking. I decided to main Paladin for Endwalker and it's been a really good experience. I've lost a lot of my Tanxiety. and I actually like both. White Mage is a Pure healer. Very much big heals, and heal over time, Astro is also in a very good place right now. It's more mobile than White Mage at the very least. Scholar is the preventative measures, same goes for Sage which is literally made to be a combat healer.
As far as DPS jobs go, I main Bard for ranged, Red Mage for Magic and though it isn't capped yet, I am really loving Ninja. All of the mobs I enjoy most share a common thread: Utility and versatility.
Bard will keep your fingers busy like no other job I know.
MCH has a much more strict rotation.
DNC also has a fair bit of button play, and can be flourishy - darting in and out of melee range for AOE spam. It's also supportive as all get out. Honestly, the reason I don't prefer this over Bard is I've been playing Bard longer and it's finally in a good place.
The fun fact about healing, you can feel the difference from extreme to savage to ultimate.
Whereas for DPS, they are generally the same, just harder mechs (which every role need to deal with).
In ultimate raid, healer are usually the role which decide the mitigation plan of the whole party.
8:57 I find it perplexing that preach says he doesn't like wow healing because you just learn the script and plan your cooldowns without much room to maximize. That's literally what happens in high end healing in FF14 - The fights follow a rigid script and you end up mapping out where you use each mitigation and heal, and as a result, you spend 80%+ of your global cooldown spamming your one singular damage button.
Healing wall-to-wall pulls in expert roulette and some of the lesser-traveled alliance raids (Orbonne Monastery, Tower at Paradigm’s Breach, etc.) are great ways to really understand how your toolkit works and hone your triaging skills. That’s actually where most of the fun in healing for FF14 is. When everyone knows what they’re doing, it tends to get extremely boring because you essentially just spam your one DPS spell and keep your DoT up and occasionally throw the tank an oGCD heal.
@14:00 Geez, you actually reminded me of MOP when I and my raid leader would coordinate Spirit Shell and the like. He actually rerolled Disc Priest because I was one of the first in the world to exploit it in Mogu'Shan Vaults. We got SO good at coordinating it and finding ways to take advantage of MOP's tendency toward "Do bonus damage" encounters, it was a very rewarding experience. Funny thing was I was set up as Shadow for us, I flexed into it when we were falling a bit shy of both the healing needed and dps needed on the quillin. When I cheese the heck out of Elegon, that's when we realized this was a potent tool for us. Aaaand then Acti-Blizz ruined all Caster and Healer design from WOD onward. :(
You know it's very exciting to see you do Titania EX after all this time. I remember seeing you watch this fight having to guess the mechanics in a video a while back.
Thats the first video of his I watched, lol.
POOOOOOOG PREACH OUR PREACHER DOOOOOOOD
holy shit, the intro-trailer for the tournament is cooool.
As a healer in wow I have always gauged my performance on how much dps I’m doing. Like as long as no one dies then I’ve done my job right, and I think that mindset is why I absolutely love healing in FF. I started as a scholar and after maxing that I did AST to try out regain healing… gotta say shield healing is my preferred choice and I am currently loving Sage
As a healer in wow I'm just watching healer bot ui all the time and listening to dbm call outs
Not sure if you know, but Spriggan once had a pvp tournament before. It was run by STORM when it was still headed by Cat Lover, and it was a collab between several FCs who each had a chosen representative. It was a 1v1 tournament held at Wolves Den pier.
It was live streamed, but it had a few issues; there was such a large audience that the pop-in meant people couldnt actually see the combatants. :D
Your idea of using the crystalline conflict seems like it'd be much better, not sure how you'd get people able to view it though.
I always had the long term goal of getting all jobs to max level but my anxiety held me back from actually playing tanks or healers in dungeons so I leveled them mainly with fates, quests and leves. Then Bozja came around and I thought to myself "why not level my healer there"....
Castrum and Delubrum, man. I went in with zero practice as a healer in group content and afterwards I was never afraid again to do dungeons as a healer. xD
i dont understand how people have anxiety playing these games. what are you afraid of? getting yelled at? thats what the blacklist is for. as long as you try and dont afk people wont get upset. we all just gamers tryna have a good time lol.
I have mixed feelings about ffxiv healing. I had been healing for years in mythic wow. When I tried ffxiv savage i had a feeling of having a super healing machine on my hands but couldn't use it to its full potential because I had to press the same button over and over to dps. Also, the 2 shield healers and the 2 regen healers are super the same. There is no real job uniqueness to them.
Scholar is my favorite healer to play! It’s really such a fun and rewarding class when you are in the zone with it.
Preach is going to LOVE sage
I had the exact same experience. Been a tank my whole life, couldn't get into it in ff, now a healer.
In which Preach turns to RP, housing and now healing this is a mad timeline
I love that Preach has done more variety but I feel like the channel is just never the same since he left WOW. All his WoD and Legion beta videos were my lifeblood that got me through the work day for years qq
I'd say that tanking becomes really interesting/tight when you go up to Savage level difficulties. You'll be needing to plan out your defensive cooldowns even more importantly, and timing things out with your co-tank on who should tank and mitigate what because of your individual cooldowns and such. It's a totally different experience from dungeon and even extreme trials healing, and I hope you get to try it out too sometimes.
For a tank it really depends on the fight. Even at the high end sometimes you get fights that forget the OT exists or all they have to do is a tank swap twice. Other times you get a fight that's entirely built around both tanks' toolkits (e.g. the 5.1 Ex). Something like O12S is interesting to tank but E7S/E9S and most of the recent extremes, not so much.
Healers can also be impacted by fights being too simple that they have nothing to do, but in general I think it's easier for them to give healers stuff to do than it is tanks.
Thanks for the 5 minute preview of this video on twitch, even though it wasn't intentional lmao
Only went towards healing when aspho released, because i was like "let's have faster queues here."
Welp, now here i stand, a sage main, having the basolut best synergy with my old wow guildmate, mister whitemage main
Healing is fun during prog because everything goes wrong. But during farm it's boring af cuz you just press 1 button for 70% of the time. Even for ultimates it's the same. After progging for a while, every CD becomes set in stone & people start dying less & less, you'll turn back into a 1-button dps eventually.
As Jeathe said, you either make the encounter forcing you to heal more, or you make the healer's dps rotation more interesting. XIV is a combination of both the encounter requiring little to no GCD heals at all AND 1 single button for dps-ing. It's extremely easy to fix but unfortunately SE just cater too much to the casuals that they don't want to do anything about it.
Glad you're liking healer! Sage should be really fun for you as well .Scholar was my first class and is still one of my favorites.
One of the weird things about FF14, is that outside of a few specific fights (and generally, even in those fights, only specific parts), a good group is essentially 8 DPS characters, due to the design of the game. This is often counterintuitive to a lot of players, and is one of the biggest reasons some people actively dislike it when they run into healers that don't DPS at all.
A lot of people think that healer DPS doesn't matter, but when you look at things, they can generally be hovering around 10-20% of the total DPS for the group (depending on if you're in an 8-man or 4-man party, respectively). That's a LOT of damage to miss out on, if the healer isn't attacking at all.
Back in the days when we had the toggleable Cleric Stance on healers, a good healer basically *was* a third (or fifth/sixth) DPS job in the party, if the rest of the party wasn't standing in fire all the time. Particularly Scholars, since pet potency wasn't really affected at all, so you still had a pretty large amount of passive healing potential compared to the other healer jobs. Even now, in dungeon runs, most of the healer jobs can do similar (or even more) DPS on trash packs, due to how strong their AoE skills are. Things even out a bit for the whole run due to the boss fights, but I know for myself, it's not uncommon to have my average DPS on a full dungeon run be equal to what the actual DPS jobs do.
Tanks are somewhat similar, but as actively doing damage is necessary for keeping agro (less so now than it used to be, sure, but still important) they never had as much of a reason to *not* be DPSing. Currently, things are actually a bit lopsided for tanks (in my opinion), as some of their burst damage is actually on-par with or even exceeds that of some DPS jobs, which is kind of silly.
Yes, I realize there are exceptions, and that's assuming a group of relatively equally-skilled players. But it's definitely one of the more strange aspects of FF14 as compared to almost every other MMO out there.
Would be interesting to see you talk to Jeath about Healing, because afaik he thinks its really boring, mostly because like a lot of endgame raiders he feels like the dps rotation of a healer does not account for the amount of time you press your dps buttons, like when you press dps buttons 90%+ of the time having one dot a spammable and like 1 off global isnt really exciting. Never really played wow so I dont know how it feels there, but he seems to enjoy healing a lot more in wow.
That Titania EX video was really satisfying to watch.
Very interesting, your take on healers is great, but skewed more towards shield healers (sch/sage) I feel Regen healers (especially whm) actually mitigate a lot of what you said about when things go wrong (i.e whitemage being able to cast a rezz for 0 mana if they know what they're doing) but are a bit worse at doing the stuff you like , the setup and all that. Probably natrual you gravitated towards SCH tbh, in a good way.
White mage is fairly reactive as far as healing goes but, good astro play in the endgame requires you to manage cds and timelines like you would with shield healers in order to maximize efficiency and minimize the need to use of any gcd healing, simply because of how many ogcd tools you have- imo
Healing is indeed really fun. FFXIV have made it really interesting.
That being said, I still prefer tanking, I've done it for 15+ years in all MMO's I've ever played, it's what I'm good at and enjoy doing the most.
On a less grim note for a comment, I'm the complete opposite on healing. Was a healer main in Legion, loved resto shaman in particular, but XIV healing feels flat and monotone to me. The kits are linear rather than multiplicative and mana is relegated to the role of battle rez counter, meaning there's almost no modulation of output to fit emergent situations. Not to mention that the XIV healer DPS kits are somehow less complex than WoW's healer DPS kits despite being far more important.
I enjoyed healing extremes, which are more forgiving and offer opportunities for recovery, but very quickly got tired of the role in savage.
As an avid fan of disc priest for a few expacs now, I have to agree here. The toolkit that healers in wow bring (especially the shaman who's probably got as many spells as the 14 community and they all do something different) is far and beyond more entertaining than the 3 dps buttons you get in 14. And I play a decent amount of 14. I'm subbed to both 14 and wow at the moment. But I just don't get into 14 healing as much as I do for wow healing. I just find it stale comparatively.
@@mightbedalmeric667 XIV's healing is ultimately what drove me to quit the game. Everything wrong with it (classes being strictly better than other classes, stale combat rotations, Debuffs being phased out, unwillingness to engage with crowd control in a series that's full of crowd control spells) has been creeping into every role and eroding the aspects that I found fun about the combat. The root cause is really simple: XIV needs more design staff. They have four people for all of the classes, none of which are healer mains, and many of which had NEVER played an MMO prior to developing for XIV. It also applies to their encounter design team (which is why dungeons have gone from 3 per patch to 1 per patch). They're also borrowing people across multiple teams to get things done (it applies to their writing and art teams too, believe it or not), and it's worsened by the best half of their company is currently on XV right now.
But I also had the distinct pleasure of starting my Savage career with Gordias so I was 100% spoiled by how Arcanist worked in the first two fights. The vets of the group only agreed to do those two for the purposes of reclears because they were fed up with Pepsiman and didn't want to attempt it twice, which, ya know, fair. That tier nearly killed the raid scene because it was numerically overtuned and in turn basically killed SE's willingness to be mechanically varied in fights period. That didn't stop them from doing their set pieces, but it did suddenly force them into digging further into a hole that WoW has gone through way back in WotLK and I'm expecting history to repeat itself because of it.
This is the common and established outlook on healers in FF14. This sentiment is all over the healer forums and i agree a 100%.
I think mikes outlook on ff14 healers is based on freshness of it, the inexperience and also some for of theoretical PoV instead of how it actually plays in game.
I’m one of those rare players who love support roles and wow healing was what I loved to do, I haven’t got there yet but I’m hoping ff14 end game healing is fun for me.
Do you like casting heals? cause if you do endgame healing isnt really that. You mostly cast your ST spammable dmg cast. And use the instant aoe heals sometimes. Most savage logs healers casts are around 90-95& your ST spammable heal.
I'm definitely biased but I feel like healing really shines in ultimate. DSR was definitely a test of healing prowess.
I play a Druid in WoW and have since TBC, before was a Tauren Shaman. I never liked Healing in WoW and honestly did it for the first time in Legion for the Mage Tower to get the achievement for all specs. I have healed more in FFXIV than WoW and actually enjoy it.
I love healing in FFXIV. I've mained a White Mage since I started.
I love healing in FD, but I wish there was more to do other than "keep dot up and spam single target" during most non- savage fights.
You might really enjoy playing Sage if you like the proactive healing playstyle. Flashy and fun
I honestly think Sage is the best designed healer atm, even considering my issues with Toxicon... I would have said WHM before, but I think they really messed up Afflatus Misery. WHM is brain-dead easy now, and I'm saying that as a WHM main since 2.X
To be fair though, I haven't played AST in a while. Need to put more hours into that sometime soon. Probably will when 6.2 rolls around.
@@Bistai949 I started on WHM and I always wished I had a way to put my knowledge of the boss mechanics to use. The most I could do about raidwide damage at earlier levels was to time Medica 2 to go off right after it hit, and then at late levels I could pop Temperance. But after trying Sage I was like omg this is what I always wanted lol. Now I can always shield and mitigate before a cast goes off and it feels much more satisfying than reactive healing.
@@danielj6897 Honestly, SGE shields aren't really what I'm talking about. You get a really good single target and AoE sheild every 2 minutes, but that's about it. Honestly, in most situations you want to avoid SGE shields as much as you can. It just eats into DPS uptime (same goes for SCH mostly. There's some weird Energy drain math, but honestly it encapsulates what I hate about SCH)
The main thing that makes SGE so fun for me is that the oGCD abilities have some really interesting interactions and uses. the 10% DMG invulns in particular flow together very well once you understand how the job works.
As for WHM, there *used* to be a lot of interplay between using abilities at the right time. In a lot of cases Shield vs Pure healer is a distinction without much of a difference once you get good enough at healing. The main problem with WHM atm is that it's too easy. getting an absolutely free cure II/medica that lets you do full DPS every 20s is lame as hell.
hope you enjoy sage, so good imo
Scholar is probably the best job for playing healer in the big brain, planning moves ahead way that you talked about
Notice excog is not on cd....
ASTRO is my love. It's one of my favorite classes. I love gunbreaker too but ASTRO is just so fun
It's actually refreshing to hear this. White Mage main - lately I've been hearing lot of people talk bad about healers but much like as you said it's the play style I gravitate towards most.
i mean the healer design has been bad since they reworked healers after HW. Its generally accepted that its the worst part of ff14s pve design. Its def not something new. It was the hot topic when i left in early SB and was still the hot topic when i came back in EW lul :P The exact same complaints aswell so they did not improve anything from early SB to EW.
@@jesperjohansson9857 Well having played through out. I haven't had an issue with it at all. Since I've played from HW to EW. It's probably some rose tinted goggles. Whitemages kit has remained relatively the same but the kit is used differently almost every expansion. The things I've lost that I miss. Aero 3. The things I lost I don't miss are stone skin, protect and cleric stance. They were just redundant and were rightfully cut. Buffs I'd automatically apply because why wouldn't I? (redundant) A DPS switch to DPS why wouldn't I? (redundant) oh and Aqua... whatever it was called a knock back spell that no one ever used.
17:45 I'm assuming we're referring to "abilities" as opposed to "spells" here (spells are GCDs). In which case, they're not free because they cost no mana. they're "free" because they cost no GCDs (and thus do not lower the damage output). The goal is to maximize DPS, not mana efficiency. Mana efficiency comes naturally as a byproduct of optimizing DPS, since that requires adequate use of OGCD heals and mitigations (and not just by the healers, but the party as a whole).
To put it into perspective, you could clear the whole current Savage tier right now without casting a single GCD heal during boss uptime (meaning all healer uptime GCDs are damage spells). That's what "efficient" healing looks like in FFXIV. It's also ironically why healing is generally considered "boring" in this game. When you're just pressing the same button for several GCDs, with nothing to weave in between on top of that, it can sometimes get pretty dull, yeah...
I dont really think preach knows how the healing in ff14 works. It works exactly how you said :D
I absolutely HATED healing in wow; I even started the game as priest because I had intended to be a healer but just ended up being shadow forever. But I play xiv now and I main sch for savage and ultimate content and it is my absolute favorite, pretty much for all the same reasons you gave!
I'll be very interested to see the video where Preach tries out Sage now that he's fairly experienced on Scholar, especially with his predilection towards Discipline Priest from WoW. Scholar has, of course, asserted its dominance in the meta once again this expansion but Sage is still really fun to play and my go to healer this expansion thus far even though I've leveled them all twice now.
i am having an absolute blast on sage XD
i seriously low how sage seems focused on big healing cds and having quite a few of them i dont know if all healers are like that but i do enjoy it as im leveling
I feel llke something important to differ between WoW and XIV is that WoW designs encounters around raid damage to give healers something to do. At least that's how it felt for me switching from WoW to XIV.
ever get that feeling of deja vu?
I was a Disc Priest main in Cata and MoP and still have fond memories of it. I main AST in FF14 and while Noct Sect used to be kinda similarish, its still different. I honestly only like healing high tier content any more though because dungeons re stupid easy and spamming one button for 90% of content is boring as hell even with all the extra buttons AST has; I really wish SE would add more unavoidable dmg, or savage four man content
Edit: my favorite thing about healing in FF14 is that it is the only role that you can truely carry a group of scrubs in, but as far as casual content like treasure maps, hunts, or roulettes it is DRK or DNC for me any more
Healing Savage/EX is highkey the most zen way to play FFXIV. If everything's gone right, it's super duper chill.
I healed mythic in wow for a time now and then last year went into ffxiv as a healer too. After doing a some savage before endwalker and then the whole EW savage tier i then went back and tried wow again... But something was missing when i healed again, like it was not as fun. I really didn't understand why dps in wow was more fun than healing all of a sudden...Until now when u nailed it in this video!
What I find in WoW is that the design of the healing specs makes the experience very different from one healer to another. Holy and discipline priest for example feel so different to one another that I could easily imagine someone having fun with one of those specs and absolutely hating the other and viceversa. The mana expenditure and the dps opportunities can also vary greatly from one healer class to another. I've only played DPS jobs in FFXIV so I wouldn't know how healing feels, but knowing that the specs are so "fine-tuned" according to Preach makes it sound like they're all broadly similar.
Good insights into the differing playstyles between WoW healing and FFXIV healing. One valid criticism of FFXIV healing is that it actually becomes too easy once you map out your cooldowns to the fight's mechanics, and as a result, you spend 90% or more of your GCDs playing an over-simplified DPS character. There is some truth to that, especially when it comes to highly skilled players in EX and Savage fights, but as Yoshi-P said when confronted with this criticism: if you want healing to be more engaging and more focused on healing, go play Ultimate fights where the amount of incoming raid damage is dramatically higher.
I enjoy playing all 3 roles, although I personally find DPS the most engaging due to the relatively deep and complex rotations in FFXIV compared to WoW. There is a whole world of optimization you can go for to improve your damage output, and it really benefits the group to push that extra damage in early Savage clears and Ultimate fights. TBH, tanking can be a bit boring in Extreme fights, but give it another try in Savage and you'll see how it almost feels similar to a healer in terms of protecting the group by using your utility spells appropriately, combined with more complex rotations than healers have access to.
Ya know what's so strange is that I'm the reverse of Preach in raiding role preference by MMO. I love healing in wow and dislike tanking there (though I've done it plenty), but I love tanking in XIV and dislike healing.
I 100% agree about healing, i never managed to enjoy healing in wow, whereas in FF14 i switched to Astro on Shb and i haven't looked back. And same things with Tanks and Dps, i hate combo classes, so most tanks/dps are a nono on FF14.
Hit the nail on the head about Tank and Healing, you're doing the dps job but just get extra stuff to do so it's more involving. It's why I'll never main a DPS.
10/10 on the infographic. Hopefully the FFXIV Andys and the WoW andys get along as gamers, because thats what we all are at the end of the day...If you have any WoW Andys left watching that is, :D
I take umbrage with something Preach said in this. The bit about healers being built from the ground up to do DPS. This was true once, but hasn't been for a long time. They do not have a multitude of DPS spells, and in fact, many people wish they had more, because the healer DPS situation is so dire.
One single-target, one AoE, and one DoT does not equal a multitude. WHM gets one extra, AST gets an extra but it depends on RNG, and Scholar doesn't get anything extra, I think. No idea about Sage, haven't played it yet.
Healers are expected to do DPS, but they are absolutely braindead whenever that's the only thing they do in a fight. Just endless spamming of one ability, while refreshing a DoT every 30 seconds.
Scholars have Essence Drain, which they can manage by aetherflow and/or by sacrificing their fairy
@@Orphan_of_Kos_or_some_say_Kosm Oh yeah. Still, at a 100 potency and very infrequent use in a fight, it's not much of a DPS button. Last I checked, dissipating your fairy isn't something you really ever want to do either, but it's been a while since I played SCH.
Mike. Try warrior tank please. When you get to level 82-90 you can actually try doing dungeons without a healer because bloodwhetting is hilariously good. Its really fun.
7:55 once upon a time mistweaver was like this and fun... then they decided to let a moron kill not just the spec but the entire class still to this day by changing it's mastery, and then further more taking away mobility because it was supposed to be a light heal, light dps with spike heal and dps with you the player managing what you need to do alongside the healer comp and fight but changing their mastery from overheal to just more raw output while nerfing, removing spells, passives.
whoever took over monks in WoD had no business making class designs when they've clearly not played them or even understand them at a basic level.
I really wish you revisit these opinions later on once you get a more experienced view on roles/classes - a lot of what you say is what i think most new players will view on any one subject, but i do wonder how much it'll be warped once you're doing savages/ults, and doing it with good players around you, its a night and day situation
I was a tank main in WoW since BC. Yet in FFXIV I cannot stand Tank because it has the crappy super long GCD with only barely sometimes an OGCD ability. I actually main healing in FFXIV and it is a delight. I could play Scholar all day every day, and I never feel bad over wipes either. I just love it.
Were you a low level warrior? Not sure about higher level warrior or paladin, but dark knight and Gunbreaker have a lot of ogcds. Gunbreaker has some like 20+ ogcds presses per minute, not counting dps and tanking CDs
Dark Knight and Gun Breaker have hella oGCDs tho, have you tried leveling them?
Gun Breaker legit has to fit so much shit in during its burst window it is not even funny, cause its GCDs have a "continuation" that is an oGCD, so you would do GCD > continuation, GCD > continuation > GCD > continuation alongside with weaving CDs and other oGCDs it also has (a high potency dps and a dot). This leads to your burst windows, which are 1 minute, looking like
GCD > burst button > GCD > continuation > GCD dot > oGCD dot/oGCD dps > GCD > continuation/gap closer > GCD > Continuation/gap closer > big GCD > GCD > continuation > GCD > continuation
Every 3 minutes you also get a super spicy extended burst with more weaves.
This is also fairly strict and boss positioning during it and also popping CDs during this can be intense. This is usually a turn off for people playing Gunbreaker but it could be a turn on for you.
Dark Knight also has a lot of oGCDs to weave during its burst, salted earth, carve and spit, edge of shadow, salted earth 2, any excess plunges, 2x shadowbringers and the clone.
Genuinely try it out.
(This comment is long, TL;DR, sage is very smooth and fun to play and playing it in savage feels amazing both when things go right or wrong) I'm a uk player in xiv playing on a us server because my friends are all on there and so its hard to find a raid group that can fit my timezone, which led to me learning to play more roles in savage out of necessity, being the jack of all trades that fills whatever is needed. I started out as a dancer main then when I had to tank I would play gunbreaker because that and paladin are the only tanks I really enjoy playing because of the more involved dps rotations meaning I have to think outside of just the moments big damage is going out. Throughout all I played of shadowbringers though I was terrified of healing hard content, I enjoyed healing normal content and did it often partly for the fast queues, but when I played sage for the first time in endwalker I resolved to try to heal extreme with it. It's so fun with how smooth it feels, every part of the toolkit fits together perfectly and I feel like I'm always in control, always having a tool for every situation. I was still nervous to heal savage, until a friend from an old static asked me if I could fill in for their astrologian who had to leave their group, this only lasted a week as suddenly they lost the scholar and I asked to be on sage as I was more comfortable with that job, it doesnt have quite as much going on with the overwhelming card system meaning you basically cannot heal at 2 min windows because you are so busy. Swapping to sage and better learning how to walk that line of casting as few heals as possible without making my cohealer have to cover for me was so interesting, yes when optimised healers do tend to devolve into mashing one button a lot which is a common criticism, but I feel like that doesn't take away from what ffxiv gets right with healer design. If sage had a rotation even something super simple like warrior I feel it'd be perfect.
I love healing and tanking. I have a hard time having fun as dps. I'm going through msq as a ninja and I do all the duties and roulettes as White mage and warrior. I originally did this because of queue times, but now I prefer healing and tanking over dps...well mostly healing. I'm currently at the end of heavensward.
I really hope the next healer in ff will have a more intricate dps rotation. It doesnt need to be super engaging but right now every healer is the same in terms of single target damage. Its really boring. Sure you have your moment where you actually push your buttons but besides that its just meh. Im not talking about dungeon situations where you use aoe abilities
Highly doubt since current healer Job basically is the result of what the healer wanted to have. I don't think they want to have to manage the case where a healer will have to decide between completing rotation or heal.
all healers dps sets are copy pasted, the next one will be exactly the same.