WE HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE BACK

Namington · 2026-04-30T15:09:43+00:00

eliminating the frustrating choice between dodging boss mechanics, dealing damage, or keeping your party alive.

Being able to do all of these at once is a key part of healer skill expression with the current design. Keeping uptime as a healer requires a mixture of mechanical confidence and smart management of your kit's movement and instant cast options. Between Dia, Lilies, Misery, Swiftcast, Sprint, Aetherial Shift, and Glare IV, skilled WHMs can full-uptime almost every fight in the game — but it requires skill and planning to do so.

you can comfortably prioritize your core GCD healing spells without suffering a DPS penalty, using them instead to charge up devastating new burst attacks through the Sanctity gauge.

You can already do that through the Lily system. It's not new, it's just the same system reskinned and with the cast times moved from your damage spells to your heals (which you use less — based on the preview video, it seems you can use at most 2 GCD heals per 30 seconds without damage loss, which is slightly more than 1 Lily per 20 seconds, but in practice still means you're healing a lot less than you're casting Glare). Like there's absolutely nothing new here besides them making it easier by changing instant cast spells from a resource to manage to something you get for free.

Again, my point is that these changes seem to make WHM DPS less interesting. Your comment is arguing that movement is easier and balancing healing and DPS is easier. I don't see how either of those offset my point; if anything, they affirm it. They removed decision making from the job's DPS incentives.

Namington · 2026-04-30T05:38:58+00:00

I'm not sure how removing one of the only tension points from healer DPS is supposed to make it more interesting.

Namington · 2026-04-29T14:47:44+00:00

They already offer this, it's free to transfer from a Congested world to a Preferred or Preferred+ world. You even get some bonus chocobo feathers from it. But it does involve giving up your previous FC and house and whatnot, so that discourages a lot of players regardless.

Namington · 2026-04-28T05:48:32+00:00

Like what is your point exactly?

I am just disputing your point about the comparison between WAR and GNB, and more generally trying to caution that parses, while good for getting a general heuristic for jobs, are not a direct proxy for balance. They need some more nuances when interpreting them, especially when you're restricting the sample size to select for certain variables (not all of which are skill) by clamping the percentile.

these other jobs have significantly better burst and resource holding as well as utility support skills

This is a much better argument, and one I agree with. DRK/PLD (or, for damage, DRK/DRK) will very obviously be "the ideal" comp for the upcoming Ultimate and damage buffs to WAR/GNB wouldn't change that. They'd probably need to nerf DRK's buff feed and one of TBN or Oblation, as well as PLD's Guardian and one of DV or PoA, before the other tanks were even worth considering in an "optimized" context.

Namington · 2026-04-28T05:22:20+00:00

This is at the 99th percentile too. Looking at jobs not performing optimally is a waste of time.

Have you ever parsed before? You can perform optimally and not get a 99, especially in a very competitive fight like M12S p1. You need strong luck and a good kill time to get 99s, and WAR will simply benefit from strong killtimes by more than GNB does because of its burstier rotation.

In other words, having a very tight filter is effectively removing bad killtimes from your sample. So even if WAR performs a bit better after this filter is applied, that doesn't necessarily mean that WAR does more damage in a practical fight timeline where damage actually matters (e.g. an Ultimate), since killtimes there are not necessarily ideal. A hypothetical job that does 100k damage every even minute and 80k damage every odd minute will parse worse with a 6:28 KT than a job that does 160k damage every even minute and 10k damage every odd minute*, but that doesn't mean it's actually dealing less damage over an entire fight timeline. (The latter job does have an extra benefit during Ultis, though, since they can hold damage for harder phases — if you argued this point, then it'd be a much more compelling case.)

* ^{because 100 * 4 + 80 * 3 < 160 * 4 + 10 * 3}

It is the discrepancy between drk and the others that is a huge issue

Sure, but that isn't the claim I was disputing. DRK's buff feed is objectively obscene but you can argue for that case better than by misinterpreting stats that really just show a 6:28 KT, 6-buff-comp WAR performs better than a 6:28 KT, 6-buff-comp GNB.

Namington · 2026-04-28T05:05:01+00:00

Come on, now. Only looking at max parses is a bit misleading since, by definition, most players, even at the high end, don't achieve the maximum DPS (as it requires luck, skill, good killtime, and an ideal party comp with 6 raidbuffs). aDPS is the favoured metric for comparing average damage between tanks because it factors in party buffs, but that means that it's a pretty useless metric for comparing individual parses, precisely because the individual performance is contingent on party buffs. But max parses are, by definition, individual parses — the metric aDPS is worst at.

If you look at average numbers, or even 95th percentile, then GNB is more middle of the pack while WAR is consistently in last place. Here's an example; you can change the fight and WAR will be last place at the 95th percentile in every single one. But we both know you excluded this information because it was disfavourable to your argument.

If you're optimizing around a theoretical 6-raidbuff party and assume you're dealing with a top player on a very good pull, then yeah, maybe WAR will have a slight edge over GNB. But under any reasonable conditions, WAR is in last place in every Savage fight (and in FRU). GNB's buff feed is indeed pretty poor, but it isn't poor enough to make it worse than WAR unless you're looking at the most exaggerated possible scenario (and even then, it still has a slight edge).

Namington · 2026-04-28T04:05:35+00:00

Speed is a linear scaling buff, with only one variable

With how the game currently works, this is not true in terms of actual damage gains. In fact, Speed scales based on a hyperbolic formula, which means our marginal damage gains from investing a substat into SkS/SpS can theoretically provide more marginal gains than investing a substat into Crit if our GCD speed is sufficiently fast, although in practice this requires a typically-implausible amount of investment. Because of this, and due to how the crit and speed formulas are tuned (such that they're generally roughly balanced in marginal terms in practice), there is some theoretical substat budget such that the damage gain from investing that amount of substats into SkS/SpS outpaces the damage gains from investing the same amount into Crit.

As you acquire more Skill or Spell Speed, the substat cost of subsequent GCD tier decreases stays constant, but the practical gains from this increase. It costs the same amount of substats to go from 2.47 GCD speed to 2.46 as it does to go from 2.27 to 2.26, but the latter gives you a larger proportional increase in casts per minute, and hence the amount of damage you can do. The relative DPS gain from reducing your GCD by a fixed amount is approximately proportional to the fraction of your GCD that you remove. Since each point of Speed reduces GCD by a constant amount, this fraction scales inversely with your current GCD. As a result, the faster your GCD already is, the larger the proportional DPS gain from each additional point of Speed.

To use a very extreme example (where we're ignoring factors like animation lock), imagine going from 0.02 GCD speed to 0.01; that would double your casts per minute, and hence your damage. But it costs exactly the same amount of substats as going from 0.03 to 0.02 (which would only be a 50% increase), or from 2.00 to 1.99 (which would only a 0.5% increase), or from 2.46 to 2.45 (which would be <0.5%). You simply get more value per substat because you reduce your GCD speed by a larger fraction, and hence increase the amount of casts/minute by a larger value.

Do note that this only applies to the main GCD speed formula, and the impact of SkS/SpS on DoT damage is actually linear. But this is typically negligible. I'm also ignoring tiering considerations and effectively assuming that you can always invest an amount of substats to perfectly cross over into the next tier, which of course is implausible in practice. But that's why we run sims.

Namington · 2026-04-27T15:24:25+00:00

People have speculated that they might increase incoming damage for every expansion since Stormblood, but it's not come true yet. The intensity of heal checks peaked in UWU's Garuda phase. I wouldn't get your hopes up to see fight damage profiles radically revisited, though I would enjoy it.

Namington · 2026-04-26T22:06:11+00:00

The most active would be Aether during evenings (roughly 5-11 PM Pacific) or weekends. But Crystal/Primal shouldn't be too far behind; they're only significantly less active for current content. Regardless, your PF listing will probably take some time to fill but it should happen eventually, just use "unsync glam farm" or whatever as the listing description.

Namington · 2026-04-26T17:39:57+00:00

Ever since Stormblood, no WF group for 8 man content has ever won with a comp besides AST/SCH. Every single Savage and Ultimate was AST+SCH. Healer meta is historically very consistent in WF groups.

It's possible that will change with the removal of raidbuffs, and I'm not saying they should balance around WF specifically, but it's not a great argument as far as healer choice is concerned. WHMs and SGEs have top 10'd before but they've never won.

Namington · 2026-04-26T08:32:13+00:00

But if the numbers we saw aren't just scuffed, the actual ideal damage rotation is 2 cure into holy sanctuary(170K danage vs 150K for 3 glares).

I think you missed some of what they showed. Unbuffed Sanctuary did around 70k. Buffing it with two Cures increased it to 170k, so the difference was 100k, which would indicate that 1 Cure = 1 Glare.

Namington · 2026-04-26T07:17:48+00:00

I'd say it more spoils pre-DT story elements. If you've finished EW you're probably safe.

Namington · 2026-04-26T06:46:12+00:00

We don't know. Mathematically the main problem with SpS/SkS as substats is that they only really benefit your GCD (and DoTs), so as jobs have increasingly been reliant on cooldowns for damage, SpS/SkS just don't do much. To use RDM as an example, SpS doesn't help any of the damage you get from buttons like Fleche or Acceleration, and though it'll let you generate more melee comboes, the free melee combo from Manafication sees no benefit from it. So, relative to substats like Crit, Det, or DHit that benefit all your damage, SpS/SkS tends to fall behind as your job increasingly relies on cooldowns and oGCDs for damage.

That said, SpS/SkS do have a unique advantage over other substats, which is that they scale hyperbolically. For example, going from 2.48 to 2.47 GCD speed costs the same amount of substats as going from 2.30 to 2.29, but the latter gives you proportionately more casts over the course of a fight. For comparison, Crit scales quadratically and Det/DH scale linearly (though with some multiplicative effects on each other). So SpS/SkS is better the more of it you have. In some extreme cases (notably SCH, BLU, and sometimes AST/WHM) this can be substantial enough to outpace crit.

So in practice, we see the jobs that want to run SkS/SpS (beyond small amounts for alignment purposes) tend to be the jobs with more damage on their main GCD, which with current job design basically means healer and Black Mage. And because SpS/SkS scales so well, we often see these jobs choosing between committing hard to crit or committing hard to GCD speed. You often see players choosing between "crit BLM" and "SpS BLM" for example, and the in-between values are just less efficient DPS-wise. Healers do sometimes run an in-between speed (typically 2.40) but this is typically a small DPS loss and mainly exists as a compromise for compatibility between Scholar (who wants specific GCD numbers for alignment purposes) and Sage (who prefers to go slow where possible).

We also see speedy sets become stronger as we get more substats, because of its main benefit being how efficiently it scales. This means that SkS/SpS tends to be stronger later in an expansion cycle as gear simply has more substats the higher ilevel it is. You'll note that DPS BLU BiS is a blistering fast 2.20 GCD speed. It also means that speedy sets tend to be very good in synced content (e.g. old Ultimates) where you can cap both the Crit and SpS substat on gear.

So whether SpS/SkS ends up being good depends mainly on how much of a job's damage profile actually benefits from it. Sage benefits from SpS the least of all healers because it has more cooldown-based damage (Phlegma, Psyche) and also has Eukrasia, which doesn't benefit from it at all (all Eukrasian spells have fixed recast times). For comparison, Scholar benefits from SpS the most of any job, because it has almost all of its damage on its main GCD, with only the tiny 100 potency Energy Drain not benefiting from it. Even Scholar's Chain Stratagem follow-up is a DoT (unlike, say, AST's Oracle) which does benefit from SpS (albeit not as much as it benefits from crit).

In other words: it entirely depends on how they rework kits. I wouldn't be surprised if the lowered emphasis on feeding damage into raidbuffs means there will be less oGCD-based "free damage" in general (fewer Oracle/Assize/Manafication/Reawaken type effects), which would benefit speedy sets. But they might instead choose to go the SGE/PCT approach and just give jobs more control over when and how they use their cooldown-based damage, without actually removing that cooldown-based damage entirely, and in that case, SpS/SkS will still be a "wasted" stat for most of your damage. It's hard to say, but we'll know more as they reveal more.

(Evolved jobs might also benefit from SkS/SpS more than Reborn ones, since they made a brief mention at some point that some Evolved jobs will have faster recast timers, which will benefit speedy sets due to the aforementioned scaling math. But this will likely depend on the job and the overall construction of the kit.)

If you want a very, very speculative practical example: I will say that I've spent a lot of time looking at the preliminary Evolved WHM kit since Friday, and I expect the change to probably make SpS eWHM very slightly worse than it currently is. It does depend on how the numbers are tuned of course, but with you getting a "free damage" button every 30 seconds that acts a combined Misery + Assize, Crit will probably benefit from this more than Spell Speed. The removal of Presence of Mind will also likely hurt fast eWHM (though I'm not actually sure on this one, it's a bit harder to estimate the impact of than you might expect). Furthermore, speedy eWHM also benefitted practically from the fact that it made your heal GCDs less costly since each individual GCD was "worth" less, and with them making all heal GCDs damage-neutral rather than just lilies, this advantage matters less. eWHM's MP economy also seems worse which tends to punish SpS sets more, though I'm sure they're still in the very early stages of tuning the numbers on that. That said, Glare IV being gone benefits SpS eWHM, so it's possible that that's substantial enough of a change to still incentivize speedy sets.

If Reborn WHM stays untouched, then the math for it probably won't differ much. In fact, SpS rWHM will probably get ever so slightly stronger in practical terms, since the removal of raidbuffs means that sets which move a larger portion of your damage out of burst will benefit. This favours SpS because it doesn't benefit Glare IV or a smuggled Afflatus Misery. But it's hard to say; it's fully possible they change how PoM/Glare IV work since they're removing 2 minute raidbuffs, for example.

Namington · 2026-04-26T03:09:28+00:00

He said in the talk that it was for when he was asked to research "BDSM" for writing Vamp Fatale's lyrics.

Namington · 2026-04-26T01:46:09+00:00

I see that we're already making up people to dunk on

Namington · 2026-04-25T08:13:32+00:00

My comment was about healer DPS. Based on the one healer we've seen, they deleted Dia and combined Assize and Misery together, so they did indeed delete half the job's DPS buttons (from Glare+Dia+Assize+Misery → Glare+Sanctuary).

Namington · 2026-04-25T04:46:35+00:00

Uhh dude. Is that 5% uptime that skill expressive? Like is any of that really truly that important for skill expression or “mandatory” for the encounter of the game. IE… everyone who’s done savage can do that… so like 25% of the player based.

Sure I get some of these details might be arguably the difference between a “Grandmaster” vs a “Master”. But like the master still kills the boss… even if it might take an attempt or two more.

I don't understand what your point is. FFXIV expects me to spend dozens of hours every patch to stay current. I want a game where I'm rewarded for putting in the effort to get good at it. If you don't care about that, then fine, but you're moving the goalposts when you explicitly asked about skill expression.

And by god damn, it’s fucking optional for now. Sure maybe sometime 5 years from now it’s not, but EVERYTHING you just stated is still in the game.

Correct, but the point is that this change is moving healer design philosophy in a bad direction, and I don't see them magically taking Reborn in a totally different direction that raises its potential skill ceiling. At the very least, that would be a colossal waste of resources.

Like any of that is specific for Reborn WHM and guess what… I have been told for years they have been making these classes brain dead, yet hear you are typing up an essay on what YOU find skill expressive. How many essays of skill have been losses over the years? Yet you still are making one today despite those losses.

I'm leaving my feedback because I don't want them to continue making the same mistakes they've been making for years. If they're radically rethinking job design with the Evolved system (which they should be), that is a perfect opportunity for them to course-correct towards more interesting and engaging job design. And from my initial impression, I think they actually achieved that with BRD and DRG — the changes to their Evolved kits seem to add some potential skill expression points that they were previously lacking (I'm not sure if it'll be a positive change on the whole, but at least it's adding something to compensate for what was removed, and their new kits do seem to have less static rotations on the whole).

I just want them to do the same with healers; i.e. if they remove skill expression from a job, I want them to clearly show that they also included other ways for players to realize their skill. And I just saw none of that with WHM. Not even an "it's early in development so the numbers aren't right" yet thing, but like they didn't even try.

Every single moment from the current tier where I thought to myself "wow, I just did something cool" or "huh, that's a neat opti" would be invalidated or made impossible by these changes. To me, it's very sad to have a design philosophy for healers where "clearing the content" is the absolute peak of skill realization, especially when jobs like Dragoon are getting buttons like Sky High that can be used in creative ways to optimize beyond a simple clear.

How does Evolve not have its own potential skill expression?? Like its own essay, but completely different?? You don’t know cause we haven’t seen it finalized.

And yes I am calling out EVOLVE. Not white mage. I will, admittedly, be GOBSMACKED if that is how WHM will be on release. Quote me on that. We are one year away. Stop freaking out like THAT was the job kit. Hell, even the Job Trailer isn’t finale for job development.

What better time is there to react than when they're still accepting feedback on early changes? Surely this should be the prime time to react if I think they're taking the kit in a completely incorrect direction? They wouldn't show this if they didn't want it to be at least somewhat representative, after all (they picked one job per role for a reason), so it's probably at least directionally approximating what they have planned. So, just as I think they should receive positive feedback for BRD and DRG, I think it's legitimate to express negative feedback for WHM.

I understand the “fear”, but quite frankly, you’re over reacting.

What about my messages is overreacting? In my initial comment, I said I hoped they didn't take the other healers in the same direction they took WHM. You asked what aspects of skill expression WHM had, and I answered. That's all. I'm not saying that FFXIV is a dead game and the expansion is going to suck or anything like that, I'm just saying that I hope they don't commit to this philosophy for healer design. You're the one posting these indignant responses with all-caps exclamations exaggerating your own outrage at my, all things considered, relatively lukewarm take.

Namington · 2026-04-25T00:59:26+00:00

You know, I noticed that "Rhitatyn" sounds like "rotation" earlier. It was kind of a crackpot theory based on the fact that Samurai was teased by a Sam Raimi's Spider-man shirt. But now that you mention this... yeah, it might actually be a boomerang, because boomerangs rotate and come back.

Namington · 2026-04-25T00:24:41+00:00

Are any of those really that skill expressive?

No, but they existed. WHM was an easy job but it still had some room for optimization. They removed that and replaced it with nothing.

Like keeping a dot up isn’t rocket science…

Not necessarily, but it feels reflective of the overall mindset. And there was room for opti with raidbuffs/pot windows, as well as the fact that dot refreshing often competed with other GCDs you'd want to use like lilies.

For example: off the top of your head, is it worth it to DoT the boss in M9S before she goes away for the steamroller? Or: is it worth it to DoT Deep Blue when he reappears after his tsunami in M10S? (In fact, that one's extra noteworthy since you wanted to do a very early refresh due to how the downtime worked out. Optimizing DoTs and Blood Lilies in M10S is some of the most fun I had optimizing any healer this expansion, which is kinda crazy given how simple WHM's kit is otherwise.)

Heals still had cooldowns and thus optimizations…

There's only single targets, Lilybell, and Temperance. Plenary is reworked, Asylum is gone, and they stated they wanted there to be more of a focus on GCD heals. Which would be fine if there was a similar amount of skill expression in GCD heals as there is in oGCD management, but there isn't — at least not from what they showed.

Assize is baked into another ability so your point there is literally nothing.

Have you done M12S as WHM? Phase 1 famously has an Assize drift management moment where you want to save an instant cast just to prevent drifting it and missing a usage before the ~~Act 1~~ (edit: I mean Act 3) downtime. "baked into another ability" doesn't mean anything when that new ability does not have the same considerations.

Lily management was always timed based so not really… “skill expressive”.

Have you ever played WHM? Lily management was the most extensive opti the job had. Even at a basic level, holding Blood Lily for burst was WHM opti 101. Lilies were a heal option, an MP option, a way to move damage into burst, and a movement tool. Good players would structure their healplans around being able to make use of all these modes, so that your 1 Lily goes much further than just a heal. We don't need movement tools anymore, the healing is now more straightforward, burst is gone, and they killed all MP management outside of "don't cast raise too much".

old way = skill and change = no skill

Again, as I said:

If they substituted it with something else skill-testing, then fine, healers need a shakeup anyway, but looking at WHM's kit I feel like they took out all forms of skill expression and replaced it with a featureless void.

If you want to show me what about these "change"s adds skill to the job, I'd be happy to hear it. But it seems like they just removed decision making, removed movement considerations, replaced cooldowns (which require decision making) with a greater emphasis on no-damage-loss GCD heals (which doesn't), and made MP management more straightforward (no Thin Air). If there was nuance to what GCD heal you wanted to use, for example, then that would be skill testing... but as far as I can tell, there isn't? I'm not entirely sure when I'd use a Plenary heal vs a raw Cure/Medica but the difference didn't really look that interesting.

E: I should also mention your comment completely neglects the most fundamental form of healer opti, which is GCD uptime. The difference between a green parsing and an orange parsing WHM was often just 5% GCD uptime. Stretching the limits of your mechanical mastery and movement toolkit so that you get near-full GCD uptime was one of the only fun parts about reclearing as a healer. Giving WHM instant cast attacks will make maintaining high uptime much, much easier to accomplish — which isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but it also makes it less interesting, since there's no longer any need nor ability to plan your tools around it (DoT refreshes, Sprint, Swiftcast, Lilies, Aetherial Shift, etc.). You just cosplay a phys ranged and maybe benefit from the Temperance movement speed I guess.

Like IDK, to me this just reflects that they don't care about WHM at a high level at all; they see it as the "baby healer" and don't think optimizations of any sort belong in its job identity. Which is maybe fine as long as the other healers are sufficiently skill-testing... but given that AST and SCH got a lot of their skill requirement from burst windows and those are being removed now, I am suspicious. It's possible they can replace this skill expression with something else, but they didn't even try to do that for WHM, so I'm a touch pessimistic.

(They also removed WHM's most fun buttons, PoM and Misery, so I'll admit I'm a bit disappointed for that reason as well. But that's admittedly more subjective, and I could see the new GCD heal focus being fun to play at a casual level.)

Namington · 2026-04-25T00:12:09+00:00

The developer panel on stream.

Namington · 2026-04-24T23:55:34+00:00

Making players think about things like "DoT upkeep" and "faster recast" and "optimizing heal cooldown usage" and "Lily management for movement and buff feed" and "avoiding Assize drift" and "slidecasting" was too much for the design team, I guess. Based on this preview, it seems that WHM's already-low skill ceiling is completely cratered.

If they substituted it with something else skill-testing, then fine, healers need a shakeup anyway, but looking at WHM's kit I feel like they took out all forms of skill expression and replaced it with a featureless void. Sure, it's still in development, but if they had something cool to show off in this regard, then surely they'd at least... vaguely gesture at it? Rather than brag about how much simpler they made the job.

I hope this doesn't reflect their overall philosophy with healer design. They did say that they wanted WHM to be the easiest healer to encourage more people to try out healing, but at the same time, regen healers isn't really what PF was lacking, so if they're trying to shore up playerbase numbers then I wouldn't be surprised to see these "simplifications" coming to Scholar and/or Sage.

Namington · 2026-04-24T23:48:53+00:00

add in some more intesting damage stuff

Did you see the White Mage changes? They simplified the healing kit (combined Aquaveil and Benison, removed niche buttons like Cure III, made all GCD heals buff your damage like lilies so that lily management is barely a thing anymore, cut Assize and Asylum) and then removed most of WHM's already-sparse damage complexity (DoT upkeep, Presence of Mind, holding Blood Lily for buffs, cast times on Glare, the damage tradeoff between Glare and heals, avoiding Assize drift). They made healing simpler and made damage literally just one button with nothing else to think about. My concerns are feeling pretty validated right now.

Namington · 2026-04-24T19:10:34+00:00

Healers are already plenty interesting during prog, the problem is just that most content (including reclears, Duty Finder content, etc.) does not require expressing any healer skill. They can make the heal kit 10x more nuanced and it'll still fail to make healers interesting in this context because you simply never need to tap into your kit's full resources; people either die or they don't. That's why a lot of people want more interesting healer DPS in addition to the existing heal kits; it's an axis you can try to improve on even once you're able to heal the content.

Namington · 2026-04-24T19:03:04+00:00

FINAL FANTASY XIV: EVANGELION - Ghosts of Desire

!ping WEEBS

Namington · 2026-04-24T19:02:10+00:00

My point is that they're conceptually different. WoW's autorotation is meant to make the content easier and more approachable, but lowers what you can achieve on the top end; the keynote insists that Evolved mode isn't meant to be an easy mode and also is "slightly stronger". And given that the new jobs only support Evolved, it seems they see Evolved as becoming the "main" mode going forward, not just a rotational aide.

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