Which healer is actually the hardest to learn, play and master, in Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker? Let’s talk about exactly that!
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:27 White Mage
06:21 Sage
11:15 Scholar
15:27 Astrologian
18:51 Different Players find Different Things Difficult
20:35 Outro
21:11 Fun Fact
source
If you voted White Mage, I pray to Hydaelyn that you don't play Healer
I'll be honest I always thought of Scholar and Astro as the easiest 0_0
White mage just seems suuuper intimidating with such a big focus on just healing
Only thing that's "difficult" or rather "tricky' about Sage is Eukrasia.
It's a weave, but it works counter to how everything else in the game has taught you to weave.
Until you get used to it, you'll often miss shielding your tank and inadvertently apply a DoT to an enemy.
As for AST, it's not really hard in and of itself. The hard part is learning to play it optimally i.e. efficiently getting 3 seals and distributing cards for maximum effect.
astro main here. it's always weird hearing people say that astro is hard, but because i've only tried white mage and astro, i just see it as the more interesting option.
Astrologian definitely has the most things to keep track of, the most extensive set of tools, and the most frustrating peculiarities (being so busy with the card targeting and still having to go back and re-center your target for Gravity in a pack of enemies will always annoy me), but something about it just clicks for me and makes it easy for me to understand. Comparatively I can't wrap my head around Scholar no matter what, so that got my vote.
Though if I can doompost for a bit, Astrologian doesn't seem like it's going to get much of a fix in Dawntrail. I like the card changes and new abilities on paper, but the way they implemented everything just seems… incomplete. To go over a few things that catch my attention:
-Loss of one draw every minute and Astrodyne leaves it with a 1250 MP per minute deficit after factoring in the draws we get and Lucid Dreaming. With slight variance depending on spell speed and piety, an Astrologian will run out of mana in 8 minutes, assuming optimal MP regeneration and doing nothing more MP-intensive than Malefic/Combust every GCD.
-The new draw patterns encourage either dumping your entire starting four cards ASAP (which doesn't make its already busy opener any less busy) or just outright ignoring The Arrow and The Spire to use Lord of Crowns and The Balance for the damage, switch to Umbral Draw quicker, and get to The Spear during raid buffs. The latter can become an issue if you're mid-cast when Astral/Umbral Draw comes off cooldown, since any delay to those is going to start drifting The Spear out of buff windows.
-To add onto the last point, the fact that the opener/burst is still so busy means that Lightspeed is still required for double-weaving in buff windows. The 90-second cooldown is still superfluous since you will always want to wait the extra 30 seconds; single-weaving during Astrologian's burst just isn't an option.
-Malefic got a damage buff but Macrocosmos didn't, meaning Macrocosmos is now a DPS loss.
-Losing two damage buff cards (one on the odd minute, one on the even minute) and Astrodyne hurts pretty bad when Astrologian is already the worst healer for personal DPS. All it got to replace them are a buff to Lord of Crowns (150 extra potency), the extra hit after Divination (600 potency), and a few more seconds on Divination to bring it up to 20 seconds like they're doing to lots of raid buffs. I think overall it'll struggle to break even with its old rDPS, while other jobs are getting more damage tools and overall increases to their own DPS.
-Sun Sign is locked behind Neutral Sect, which, while Neutral Sect is very powerful on paper, is something that a good Astrologian really never needs to use outside of high-end content. Since you ideally want to never use Aspected Helios or Aspected Benefic if you can get by with your oGCD options and Macrocosmos, that means that if you want to use Sun Sign you'll either be burning Neutral Sect mid-fight just to get access to it without actually making use of Neutral Sect itself, or just popping Neutral Sect pre-pull to get the shield on the tank with Aspected Benefic and get the Suntouched proc for Sun Sign for mid-fight.
-This one's more of a personal nitpick, but The Spear going from a melee-focused damage buff to a ranged-focused damage buff is going to confuse the hell out of me for a while. No clue why they couldn't keep the two damage buff cards consistent with ones they already had in Endwalker.
A lot of these issues seem like oversights (the MP issue and Macrocosmos's lack of potency increase especially) that can be easily fixed, but it doesn't fill me with confidence that we got this close to release and through the media tour with all of these glaring issues, especially considering that the changes… really didn't make the job any easier, just slightly different. I'd hardly even call it a rework, all that really changed is that you traded two damage cards and RNG for four non-damage cards and lack of RNG.
Nothing shocking about Sage being easy lol, it's definitely much more simple than Scholar, which isn't that hard if you know how to play it, in other words read toolkit.
Astrologian isn't hard, it's RNG it's got some serious flaws that is completely out of the players control.
I don’t enjoy SGE aesthetic enough to try it beyond leveling. Maximizing AST’s damage is hardest for me (controller player), but HP-wise SCH is hardest simply because I am not always great at anticipating which attacks shields are necessary for and which it would be better to DPS through since teammates will be fine.
first of all, great video! I main Astrologian and recently picked up Sage for criterion/savage content. I don't play Scholar and White Mage enough, but I can provide some perspective as an AST/SGE main in savage, criterion and ultimate content.
– Sage: on the surface, SGE seems easy to play, great mobility while not losing on DPS (Toxicon/Phlegma my beloved). until things start going south, recovery is hard, there are tools that can quickly get everyone back up ASAP, but when you've already used Pneuma, Ixochole, Pepsis on earlier mechanics, or if you don't have a solid heal plan, recovery is pretty tough as Sage. one thing I love about them is their mitigation tools. there's just so many options, and it's very flexible.
– Astrologian: my favourite job, but it has a very unique way of progging or figuring out heal plans in my opinion. if we exclude the card system, AST has a lot of tools that rewards you for well-planned heals. Horoscope is good but it requires a GCD to prime it and make it's potency stronger. Macrocosmos literally undos damage done to everyone, but has an issue that isn't mentioned a lot, it has a range limit. in P12S, there are certain instances where MC isn't able to 'undo' damage dealt to some players, just because they're too far from the caster.
I always assumed that Star is equivalent to Assize, until I've done UCOB. there's moments where delaying Star casts (in other words, using Star before CERTAIN mechanics) to instantly heal everyone back up that makes it satisfying, but really requires a lot of trial and error.
the card system isn't really a big deal, during recovery situations, you kinda have to pause whatever you're doing and focus on getting everyone back up, Neutral Sect + Asp. Helios is INCREDIBLY powerful. in Dawntrail, I'd assume it'll be easier during recovery situations where 4/5 of the cards are mits, shields or regens.
I must be doing something wrong with Sage, because in dungeon pulls I feel like no matter what I do the tank always drops low, and then I've spent all my cooldowns so if anything actually goes wrong I have to spam GCD healing and it takes a while to stabilize again. On the flipside, I play both Scholar and Astrologian, and with both of them I rarely struggle to keep up with tanks unless I'm making mistakes. I've only gotten Sage to level 76, but do higher levels make that much of a difference?
I’m a tank main, but when I heal, I prefer to play astrologian. I love the difficulty
Okay so. I'm gonna throw in my healer expert 2 cents here.
What healer tends to be the easiest, depends on what you're used to, and a few other factors. White mage is considered the easiest, because it is just no-nonsense burst healing, but the people who find difficulty with it are usually ones who started as scholar mains, or a non-healer class.
Another factor is if you are used to healing/support in other games, White Mage is the easiest to click to because it literally is just a culmination of every other healer in any RPG you've probably played prior to FFXIV.
But the biggest factor is what I mentioned before, if you're used to shield healers (a predictive mitigation type), then you will struggle to adapt to regen healers (reactive burst types). You train yourself to mitigate before the damage happens, only to swap to healing after the fact, and you will have some trouble if it's not what you're used to.
That's not even to mention if you are a DPS main first and foremost, you aren't even trained to watch your party's health in the first place, and Tank is in a similar boat to an extent (since some tanks train themselves to be able to better protect others).
which healer is the hardest? Its either all or none of them because they all play completely identically.
From strictly the endgame standpoint of a veteran omnihealer:
SCH is the hardest to do optimal damage with since you need to balance using aetherflow only on E. Drain while keeping the group alive with just faerie heals and recitation. SCH has by far the worst healing toolkit if you don’t want to lose damage.
AST is the hardest to actually heal with. Lady of the Crowns being RNG (until dawntrail, praise Yoshi-P) and every good healing tool being HOTs or requiring setup makes it awkward to… actually heal. Especially during 2-min burst.
hands down astro, not even a contest lol.
Yeah Astro: super duper awesome and fun to play, but u also have to frantically fiddle with random cards.
I honestly can't see whm being easier than sage (but maybe i'm biased and haven't played whm enough), and yes i started with sage as my first healer and for the first few runs it quite rough to get used to having quite a few buttons and "everything looks the same color/design" but it clicked for me quite quickly because how with sage you can quite literally turn your brain off and get away with nearly every combination of buttons in any order you can think of.
When comes to whm, though it's easy like sage, to me it's noticeably harder than sage.
Many of the whm spells are super mana hungry, mana management is significantly harder as you have more buttons to press, whm is much less mobile than sage at almost any level range, and i like i said before, sage can get away with mostly any combination/order of spells while whm (and even more true for sch and ast) cannot.
Kinda crazy that people consider sage easier to play than Scholar. Scholar fairies literally heal constantly and will be able to pick their targets based on priority. Sage gets ONE target for their bonus heal, and they need to use a skill to swap it. They also lack the sheer healing potential of a Scholar, given that Scholar can stick regens / AoE heals and combine them with guaranteed crits and emergency tactics for swapping shields with heals – which is seriously NEEDED in some content where you need to top a character off to remove doom.
I'd argue Sage is probably the hardest to use effectively while WHM and AST are the easiest. In my humble opinion.
I feel like AST is the only one that actually has a somewhat higher learning curve due to needing to learn optimal timings for Earthly Star placement while managing cards on top of the usual cooldown planning every other healer is subject to.
Really interesting results. As a sprout who mains tank, I was using a scholar on the side (the 2in1 dps/heal concept was nice). Thought I'd look at sage, and even after watching a few guides, I just found it soooo overwhelming. I've admittedly not really played much of sage as I can't wrap my head around it, but from a strictly newbie point of view, scholar seems far easier at the 70 range because each move seems to be pretty clear on when to use it (aka 1 button for big heal with aether flow, one button for shielding 1 person, 1 button for shielding group etc.) where as sage reads as having many buttons for essentially the same thing so I just dk when to use anything and in what siutation. I dunno. Even after practicing, Sage feels like word salad, while scholar seems to have super clear abilities.
I do really wanna try astrologian, will be interesting to see if that one clicks better for me than sage, lol.
It's clearly warrior, since it's the only healer with a dps rotation
This is precisely the order I'd put them in. With the AST changes coming in DT I'm hoping it'll drop in difficulty significantly, as the card system is definitely The Hard Part – I find the actual healing with AST incredibly easy, but the cards are so annoying.
As a SCH main, I personally find SCH super easy, but I know my kit extremely well, and I'm very good at memorising fights to know which Aetherflow need to be used for healing and when, and which can be used for Energy Drain. A lot of SCHs are… less than mediocre. I cannot tell you how many times I've been in a duty and gone "Did I just hear Deployment" when nobody had a shield, so I start paying attention and… yeah, they're just using Deployment Tactics on cooldown, regardless of whether or not their target has a shield to deploy. They never seem to use Emergency Tactics unless I specifically let them know that's a button they have (something I sometimes have to do in, say, Orbonne for the Thunder God heal check, or P11 for Harrowing Hell, when I'm not the one healing). Exclusively using Ruin II at level 90 because it's instant-cast. Stuff like that. All my friends who've tried SCH after playing SGE get extremely tripped up by the Aetherflow, not knowing how many to "save for healing" – which is what knowing entire fights is for. You save exactly as many as that fight needs, and only when you need to. Meanwhile I notice that even SGEs and WHMs who aren't necessarily That Good are still Fine. But maybe this is the same hyper-awareness effect that you noticed in that Mentor Roulette video when you went "Oh no, am I a healer main?" because that was the moment I realised "Oh no, am I a SCH main?" 😂
I did once meet a WHM who was standing off in Narnia during dungeon pulls casting Holy, and when I let them know that it was a point-blank AOE and they weren't hitting anything, they responded "You're not my dad". Not even "You don't pay my sub". Absolutely bizarre.
I find sage easier than whitemage for all the cons of white mage you pointed out.
I play a lot of SCH and maybe I’m just bad but there is no longer really any “pet management”
I really dont get Sage and Scholar x.x
I have mained all healers since the beginning of time. Im almost an 11 year vet.
White Mage is… boring. I actually call it braindead. So out of all the healers, I just personally avoid playing that one. I could care less for its Raw healing, an Astro when you know what you are doing is superior. I agree this is the easiest healer.
Sage is also very easy. The fact you can just lego in whatever shit you need at any time without pre planning, minus the shields you gotta put on at the right times, the class is stupid easy. So yeah, definitely second easiest. Its super hard to fuck this one up.
I agree Scholar is the 3rd hardest because of the aetherflow management and needing to understand mechs to pre plan, but lets be honest, its still a neutered class. You've got these great options as a shield healer, but still I miss the old system where fairy management was much harder. I loved having to swap between Eos and Selene. I loved the whole "needing to REALLY know your shit to play this class effectively" challenge to it. Now to me, its watered down. Still a strong shield healer, still more difficult to manage than Sage, but I miss the old stuff. It was at its best in stormblood overall imo.
Astro, that is what I main the most. That class is also neutered. People thinking this shit with the cards is difficult blows my mind. Its not… back then when cards were specific was more difficult and I honestly think they need to bring the former cards back. All they gotta do is fix Spire since that was originally for TP regen.
Astro tho is a beast. With lightspeed, macrocosmos and card buffs that pump your MP back up when you draw, dude the recovery on that class is dumb as shit. Its very strong. You in a team full of morons? Raising the party is no problem with that class. Sure, you are gonna it enrage, but my God Astro is a beast. Sure, WM is SE's favorite in terms of raw healing, but that shit is made up by MP recovery, the fact you can buff your team, and if you know what you are doing, preplanning can make it to where you carry that WM. Every time I have a WM, Sage, or Scholar with me, my Astro carries them all in healing and damage.
Just give me my old cards back and im gtg.
DT needs to make these healer classes HARDER to play. Not easier. They are already white bread.