Character

Quick Intro

This is a story of how the release of Endwalker made me quit this game that I had come to love, followed by my eventual return toward the end of the expansion. In hindsight, while I did (and still do) dislike a major addition that will forever ruin the game for me, it was mainly a case of interacting with the wrong crowd that made things infinitely worse. The 2021/12 sections are from my first entry on Lodestone.





01 - 2021/04/18 - New Game

Started FFXIV around the post-Shadowbringers content drought, not that I knew what the term meant at the time. After a few close calls of not really liking the game early on, I made it to Heavensward and fell in love with it. As a Japanese Canadian linguist though, the English rewriting "localisation" often felt like an alternate narrative, whose inconsistencies only become more jarring over time. Subscribed in July after exactly 700 hours of maining healer on the free trial, entering Stormblood and Shadowbringers with endgame optimisation while still technically being a sprout. Then Endwalker happened.

Edited to add:
GCD and oGCD are the two categories of combat actions that make up FFXIV gameplay. GCD (global cooldown) are the spammable "weaponskills/spells" that all go on a shared 2.5 sec cooldown, and are used continuously as if they were manual auto-attacks. oGCD (off-global cooldown) are the remaining "abilities" that are not affected by the 2.5 sec cooldown, but have longer individual cooldowns. Tanks have all their defensive tools under oGCD, so they "weave" them between GCD attacks. Healers start with only GCD supportive tools, but eventually stop using them once they learn their oGCD ones to "weave" between GCD attacks. On that note, the "shield healer" and "pure/regen healer" distinction only really refers to their spammable low-level GCD tools, but good healers rarely use those. When played properly, "shield healers" actually regen more, "regen healers" actually shield more, and all healers are actually "pure healers" who optimise for DPS just like everyone else.





02 - 2021/12/08 - The Reddit Ordeal (1/3)

In response to the amount of non-healer players causing endless wipes with their new instant Lv. 70 Sages, I wrote a few friendly beginner's tips on the FFXIV Subreddit. Was bombarded with arguments highlighting their collective inability to do basic algebra, or even read their tooltips—namely, their refusal to understand that spamming Eukrasian Diagnosis (weak GCD heal+shield) to charge Toxikon (weak GCD attack) is both poor healing and a massive DPS loss. Also discovered the Subreddit's popular "Sage rotation" nonsense that likely explain all the wipes. Is it really so controversial to learn how, unlike DPS jobs that want to use their damage tools as soon as they're off cooldown, healers and tanks have toolkits of highly situational abilities that would only be wasted if facerolled arbitrarily?





03 - 2021/12/10 - The Reddit Ordeal (2/3)

Made a visual guide outlining the basic concepts of oGCD healing and priority (vs "rotation"), and how Sage played properly (without the reward-trap of Toxikon) is practically identical to Scholar. Guide was downvoted to oblivion, followed by harassment from butthurt non-healer players through the platform's private messaging system. Later that day, deleted my entire Reddit account.





04 - 2021/12/11 - The Reddit Ordeal (3/3)

Decided that the early access and release crowds should have calmed enough to start Endwalker content, except now I have to play it with such an unbelievably toxic ordeal on my mind. What happened to FFXIV's signature healthy community? I mean, even that Subreddit seems fine on a normal day, so how can friendly beginner's advice from an experienced healer main escalate into this? Do these new self-proclaimed "Sage mains" actually want to learn how to heal? Or do they genuinely think that spamming Eukrasian Diagnosis for Toxikon (while facerolling or even ignoring their entire kits past Lv. 35) is the one definitive way to play the job?

I am almost exclusively a healer main.
Healing is what I enjoy most, so I heal.
Never understood the big deal about it.
Now I do.





05 - 2022/01/11 - Why I Quit FFXIV

Wrote a second Lodestone blog entry that went into detail on the whole Reddit ordeal. Wasn't able to enjoy Endwalker at all because of it. Also came to the realisation that Square had just made a lazy 99% clone of my main job Scholar, with identical spells and abilities and even job mechanics, whose only real difference is merging all the fairy abilities into the character. Oh, and how Sage is actually less of a so-called "attack healer" without the option to spend job gauge on oGCD attacks, while also having less than half of Scholar's burst heal of 9+1 consecutive job gauge abilities. But it has pretty lasers, I guess.

Considering what happened to Summoner, I figured that Scholar would be next in line to die and become another over-simplified job in the next expansion—that is, the new and unique job that Sage should have been in the first place, instead of some unoriginal Scholar clone. Not likely for them to immediately rework their freshly cloned job, right? Thanks to the toxic Reddit crowd, I had already lost hope for the FFXIV community either way, so I just quit the game altogether.





06 - 2023/04/10 - Unexpected Return

Decided that I missed this game after all. Gave the returnee free week campaign a shot, and ended up resubscribing. Slowly regained hope for the FFXIV community through all the little things, such as S-rank spawn etiquette, but...

Somehow, even after a year since the job came out, almost all Sage players I encountered were still GCD shield spammers and oGCD wasters, who couldn't understand how their "shield-Toxikon-and-then-blow-everything-else-on-cooldown" rotation literally cuts DPS in half while doing nothing but overhealing. And when I dared to check whether that Subreddit had smartened up... They were still preaching nonsense like "uptime" for GCD shields and Kerachole (oGCD mitigation that costs job gauge) even if nothing is actually mitigated.

I mean, even brand new instant Lv. 60 Dancers know that their Shield Samba is situational, and they don't even need to worry about it sharing a resource with Curing Waltz. Lest you forget, Dancer is a DPS job.





07 - 2024/03/05 - Year In Review?

Wrote a third Lodestone blog entry on my year since returning. Still hadn't progressed MSQ past the end of 6.0 thanks to all the stuff there was to enjoy, though the mere existence of Sage (or, to be more precise, the non-existence of any decent Sages who could oGCD heal) remained a constant eyesore. Concluded that the question of whether or not I stuck around for Dawntrail rested on whether or not my prediction came to pass—about Scholar being killed off by its 99% doppelganger.





08 - 2024/06/06 - Live Letters, Media Tour

And so came the verdict. Hardly any changes at all for Dawntrail, meaning another expansion of this sad Scholar clone situation. Do people seriously believe that having two more attacks on long cooldown is enough to differentiate the otherwise identical job actions, mechanics, and even job gauge? Oh, but it has lasers. Lol.





The State of FFXIV

Finally decided to continue MSQ from 6.1 onward, unlocking all the endgame patch content in the process. And, well... I think I understand now. That beginner's playstyle of reflexively spamming low-level GCD heals, while simultaneously facerolling their entire arsenals of oGCD tools above Lv. 35/42/50, has simply become the norm across all healers. It's just especially bad with Sages—not because they lack the basic algebra skills to know that their shield-Toxikon "rotation" literally cuts DPS in half, but because their GCD shields are instant-cast. In other words, the toxicity of that Reddit crowd was just a reflection of how far the playerbase has fallen.

Call me elitist if you have to, but I'd say the game itself is to blame, for being too easy. I was once a beginner too—one who tried to improve. I don't expect everyone to have figured out the optimal DPS rotation for their job, but am I wrong to expect people to at least know how their jobs work?

I like this game. The story, the aesthetic, the gameplay. But as I mentioned at the very beginning, the release of this lazy clone of Scholar has forever ruined the game for me. What's worse, the fact that they are remaining functionally identical for Dawntrail means it wasn't just a matter of rushing something "new" for Endwalker. I mean, sure, all the tanks have similar mitigation. But notice how Shadowbringers didn't come with an unoriginal clone called Void Knight, that has the exact same actions and mechanics and job gauge as Dark Knight (but with lasers!). Even the upcoming Viper only vaguely resembles Ninja. But if Sage being a 99% clone of Scholar was by design, then, well, perhaps healing really is just an afterthought in FFXIV. Hardly even necessary anymore in current max-level dungeons, so... Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, people simply don't care that most Sages still can't use their 99% Scholar kits properly after an entire expansion.

Might still stick around for Dawntrail. Might not.
If only Endwalker came with an actual new healer.