White Mage: Always Second Choice - The Challenges that FF14's Purest Healer Faces
The particular dominance of two healers within the healing role in Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) at higher levels of player has been apparent for quite some time now, the two healers being: Astrologian and Scholar. And it turns out, there are a few reasons as to why they’ve been having their eternal time in the sun.
In the past expansion, Endwalker, the healing role was split into two distinct categories: Pure (Regen) Healer & Shield healer. The White Mage and Astrologian were assigned the label of Pure Healer, and the Scholar and Sage were deemed to be the Shield healers. The Pure healers would specialize in providing larger and more potent heals to the party, being able to do so with relative ease. The Shield healers would focus on mitigation, preventing the party from dying suddenly from any large bouts of incoming damage. However, despite this categorization, the healers have struggled to fall neatly into one camp or the other, as both types of healers have access to tools that either mitigate damage or aid in restoring large amounts of health, rendering the distinction somewhat moot.
Now that isn’t to say that the various healing jobs do not have their differing strengths and weaknesses. White Mages are the most capable of restoring the largest chunks of health to the party consistently while Scholars are infamous for being able to distribute the largest shields available in the game throughout the party. But at the end of the day, all healers are capable of performing the same tasks of restoring health to the party and mitigating damage dealth, the only difference being in the varying degrees that they can perform those tasks. So if all healers are capable of doing similar things, how are these healers and their performances judged competitively between each other?
At higher levels of play, each party is encouraged to bring with them one Pure Healer and one Shield Healer. This is enforced by the game’s systems as well, as shields provided by Scholars and Sages cannot stack with one another, preventing team compositions from including both of them. And this seems in part to be influenced by the fact that shield healers are quite effective at addressing the main challenges thrown at party healers in current fight design. Raids in FFXIV have largely tested healers via “healing” checks that could more aptly be referred to as mitigation checks. For the uninitiated, this is due to the fact that much of the outgoing damage from the boss or the fight that is dealt to the entirety of the party aims to kill every party member with a single instance of damage. If the damage being dealt is not reduced by a healer or other party members through the use of mitigations, the party will face certain death. And as mentioned before, damage mitigation is not solely the job of the shield healer. Mitigations are a shared responsibility between both healers and other roles as well, and so jobs that have access to mitigating tools become a great boon to the party they belong to.
And in the case of the Pure Healing role, the Astrologian greatly outclasses the White Mage when it comes to its suite of mitigation tools, placing it at an advantage when it comes to playability and popularity. And when considering that the Astrologian has access to unique tools unavailable to the other healing jobs, we reach the actual problem that White Mage currently faces. The distribution of important and powerful tools is not equitable across the board for the Pure Healers, and White Mage has been dealt the losing hand. And with White Mage being the healer with the smallest number of mitigation tools in conjunction with having neither equivalents of unique tools that the Astrologian brings to the party, nor truly outstanding unique tools of its own, it’s no surprise that the White Mage has fallen to the bottom of the barrel in regard and in comparative strength, setting the state for its current predicament as always second choice unless factoring in personal preference. It’s about time that Yoshi-P and his team of developers take a look at the most iconic healer of Final Fantasy and to start rolling out a planned rework of its tools and kit. In the next installment of my series on White Mage, I’ll be taking a look at what ways White Mage falls short specifically, and what potential changes could immediately give it the second wind that it very much needs.