Time to expand a little on my comments about SE needing to hire a healer designer.

Plenty of people have probably noticed my repeated quips about SE needing to actually hire a healer designer in the first place. Some of the commentary going around at the moment makes me think that this is something worth putting a little more context to.

Please note that the following credits are for combat and class design teams. These are NOT dungeon or raid designers.

Jiliang Kim, Hyukjun Choi, Minho Kim, Juyoung Min, Sungjae Park, Jangwon Park, Shinkyu Lee, Junghwan Lee, Junehee Lee, Youngha Jeon.

The above is the battle system design team for Aion.

Floyd Grubb, Lee Ridout, Maria Aliprando, Doug Carroll, Philip Draven, Michael Schroeder, Eric Wrobel.

TESO.

Georg Zoeller, Jason Attard, Austin Peckenpaugh, Reece Thornton, William Wallace, Pete Warner, Cameron Winston

Here's SWOTR.

Kei Sato, Takashi Kawamoto, Hikaru Tamaki, Tsuyoshi Yokozawa

And last but most certainly not least. FFXIV's battle system design team.

Please don't take this as me bashing Sato and his team. I will always stand by my opinion that they did an incredible job with ARR.

However, the number of jobs has increased, the complexity per job has increased, the community's understanding of the game has increased and with that, the demands and expectations of the player base have increased exponentially.

Meanwhile, Sato has had the same 3 people behind him since ARR and I've not seen anything to suggest that anything has changed for Shadowbringers. It's quite apparent now that this team is overworked, understaffed and starved for fresh creative ideas in many aspects of the gameplay that they oversee.

When I pitch into a thread with my lol SE needs to hire a healer designer I quite literally do mean that. Yoshida didn't deny us a 4th healer because of some disdain for the green team. Rather, at this stage there isn't really anyone with their hands on the wheel of the healer role. The team are simply too thinly stretched to give it the attention and time that it needs. Thus we end up with the last minute knee jerk changes that are riddled with flaws and shortcomings. This isn't even a new thing. Every single expansion has landed with glaring problems afflicting at least one of the healer jobs.

There is neither the manpower or the willpower to correct this problem within Yoshida's team at the moment and this will continue to be a problem until either he stops being stubborn and accepts that this is an issue or SE's beancounters open their wallets and let him get hiring.

TLDR: There's not much point complaining about SE's healer designers, they basically don't have any. :rolleyes:

*edit* - Update for Endwalker

Battle Director
Kei Sato

Battle System Designers
Takashi Kawamoto
Hikaru Tamaki
Hironori Isami

We're now at literally double the number of jobs coupled with far more abilities per job and the team still hasn't been expanded.

Small
Indie
Company

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Kei Sato, Takashi Kawamoto, Hikaru Tamaki, Tsuyoshi Yokozawa

And last but most certainly not least. FFXIV's battle system design team.

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That moment you realize they don't have at least one developer per job role (Tank, Heal, Melee DPS, Caster DPS, Ranged Physical DPS)

Thanks for climbing back to what could indeed be the core of the issue, i didn't think of checking that.

I don't necessarily agree with the idea that there's much wrong with healers going into ShB but I very much agree with the idea that that roster isn't long enough. I hope they can dedicate a bit more effort to job design in general, it's one of the parts of the game that impacts player experience the most and deserves attention.

Good call out!

This is actually a fantastic point.

I realized while watching a bunch of different videos from the media event that people who don't main healer were generally saying, "Yeah, they got this and this and this...looks like they all got cool stuff! Healing will be awesome!" Then when it came time to talk about tank or MNK abilities, they got super technical and critical. The healer questions I saw asked were super general and softball.

We really need some "influencer" healer representation, and obviously an actual healer dev would be great.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

That moment you realize they don't have at least one developer per job role (Tank, Heal, Melee DPS, Caster DPS, Ranged Physical DPS)

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Implying that Tank and Melee DPS are different.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Meanwhile, Sato has had the same 3 people behind him since ARR and I've not seen anything to suggest that anything has changed for Shadowbringers. It's quite apparent now that this team is overworked, understaffed and starved for fresh creative ideas in many aspects of the gameplay that they oversee.

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This actually really makes sense - there's some glaring issues with the SCH rework, but I was especially shocked to see the whole "Eos and Selene are the same now" thing. Just felt like such an incomplete and dismissive thing to implement - like something they'd do if they ran out of time to develop a better solution.

Increasing Damage output from enemies to make Healing more of a time investment really doesn't change the fact that all 3 Healers we're given identical DPS skills and had much of the flavor removed from their toolkits. You can really tell they didn't know quite know how to go about balancing the Healers in a substantial way. They took a safe route by dumbing everything down across the board and seem to have focused more on making the animations more distinct for each Healer which side steps all the major issues. It really does seems like a lack of man power was to blame. Astro having all Balance Cards and Scholar getting Selene changed into a palette swap really say a lot about how little creativity was put into the Healer rework. Dissapation could at least summon the opposite fairy if they both do the same thing. Seraph should swap your fairies too for that matter. At least the fact you have two aspects would be more ingrained in the new design.

I just want to bump this to try and keep this on the front page of the dumpster fire that is currently the healer roles forums. I think it makes some great points, and I'd love for it to get more feedback and for the devs to see it and understand the message. As this game is growing we need more than 4 people to handle the growing number of jobs we have. AND IT WOULD BE AMAZING IF ONE OF THEM ACTUALLY MAINED A HEALER!

Well said to the OP.