Open letter to our beloved Yoshi-P. As main healer, the burden of the new difficulty

Edit 1 - 24/07/2024 - 18h00 GMT+2 :
After reading comments from here and beyond, I come to a clarification of what confuse me with the new changes.

Until the start of Dawntrail jobs were "simple", DPS are DPS, Tanks are DPS with tanking abilities and Healers are DPS with healing abilities. I have always hated this way of doing things but I have abdicted and came along. What do the game want from healers ?

What is crushing me right now is that I am brainwashed by this DPS first thing. Should we keep the "high" DPS standard from before and push our healing standard ? Are we finally became healers and shift the "high" DPS to "High" healing ?

If the later is the answer, I will be one of the most happy healer.


Original post :
Desola Vael
Light
Zodiark

Objet : Open letter to Naoki Yoshida, regarding the increase in difficulty.

Dear Naoki Yoshida,

Allow me to pass a message on to you, from a white mage in distress.
The increase in difficulty we got with Dawntrail is not a bad thing. I personally like the effort made on this matter. Unfortunately… there’s a ‘but’. The difference between players is a lot more visible these days. Having most of the party not being hardcore players, or not having deep knowledge of the game (like which job has a reviving spell, that the invincibility frame at revival doesn’t prevent being pushed…), is enough to make the fight a living hell for healers.

I’ve gone through my worst times as a healer in raids « AAC Light-Heavyweight M2 » and « AAC Light-Heavyweight M3 ». Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to lower the difficulty or to split players in groups according to their skill level.
From my experience on both these fights, it seems to me that a healer is not equipped to keep a whole 8 people team alive on its own, in « normal mode ».
When players continuously die because they can’t keey up, causing a snowball effect, I’m pushed to my limits… Limits that only E12S, which is the sole forth fight of a savage tier I did, pushed me to.

In these fights, a healer needs to keep an eye on mechanics and dodge/mitigate them, on his skills to always have in mind what’s available, on party members’ HPs and check they don’t have a malus, take their jobs into account when reviving to help in case of multiple deaths… When a player gets a vulnerability, beyond the one player affected, healers must be extra careful to avoid snowball effect.
When a healer gets a co-healer who doesn’t really know the fight, his mental burden increase almost exponentially.

I am sad to see that the increase in difficulty, and the learning curve coming with it, end up resting on the healers shoulders.
I am sad to reach a state close to burn out on my favourite video game and job.
I am sad to miss the skills to make everyone understand that it’s not an issue about players, but a complex one with multiple factors.

A great powers come with great responsibilities but today, as a healer, I am crushed by this very responsibility.

Regards,
Desola Vael

So, you’re saying healers need to be more competent or you don’t think they can be more competent and its stressing you out?

Don't make every single dead player your responsibility.

It's not on you to save the raid if people are dying too much. Do what you can, but don't stress yourself over it.

It's not on the healer to prevent a wipe if people keep dying. Sure, do a swiftcast revive whenever you can and if you see a spot to do a full cast go for it. But you're allowed (and supposed) to prioritize your own survival first, and doing mechanics is part of that. A dead player is his own responsibility, not yours. And if it leads to a wipe, the party gets a fresh attempt to do better this time.

It's okay for the party to fail and wipe. Winning a battle is a group effort, and not solely the healer's burden. And if someone blames you for not reviving enough, tell them to die less :D

It's new content, people will fail mechanics and die. Give it a week or two and things will even out again.

This sounds like a long winded way of saying, content is too hard, when it really isn't.

When you compared M2 and M3 to be as demanding as E12S, I simultaneously rolled my eyes and laughed at the absurdity of the comparison. What snowball is there in M2 and M3? I had an M4 run just this past weekend in which the SCH and 3 DPS were perpetually dead and we still cleared it, so where's the snowball exactly? I could compare that to a run of Cloud Deck normal I had back in ShB where the offtank's gear was totally broken and they died to auto attacks, I used healer LB3 3 times in that entire fight because of how many people would die constantly due to them getting picked off one by one via the double tank buster and auto attacks with the offtank dead the majority of the fight. That was the most fun I had in a normal trial in YEARS of playing as a healer. So WHY are you making that type of scenario seem like a burden when it's the only time that healers actually get to have fun playing their damn role?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

This sounds like a long winded way of saying, content is too hard, when it really isn't.

When you compared M2 and M3 to be as demanding as E12S, I simultaneously rolled my eyes and laughed at the absurdity of the comparison. What snowball is there in M2 and M3? I had an M4 run just this past weekend in which the SCH and 3 DPS were perpetually dead and we still cleared it, so where's the snowball exactly? I could compare that to a run of Cloud Deck normal I had back in ShB where the offtank's gear was totally broken and they died to auto attacks, I used healer LB3 3 times in that entire fight because of how many people would die constantly due to them getting picked off one by one via the double tank buster and auto attacks with the offtank dead the majority of the fight. That was the most fun I had in a normal trial in YEARS of playing as a healer. So WHY are you making that type of scenario seem like a burden when it's the only time that healers actually get to have fun playing their damn role?

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I had situations where everything was falling in pieces and asked me as much as a savage would ask. The mecanics are not that hard. But multiple people continuously failing is a pain and really hard to manage.

In my point of view, M2 and M3 are way more asking than M1 and M4.

as a white mage main, I have to say I like the current difficulty and wish it would outlast people learning the fights. but it will not. I wish would persist with better gear.. but it will not.

this is a step in the right direction Mr Yoshi P.

M3 isn't even particularly demanding, the boss does have a Healer check in the attack where he's pounding the ground, especially after his doping. It is near impossible to recover HP during it so healers have to make sure everyone enters that mechanic with enough HP.
M2 is mostly just an issue of excessive moment being required. Which isn't good for anything with cast times.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MrVavadidi

I had situations where everything was falling in pieces and asked me as much as a savage would ask. The mecanics are not that hard. But multiple people continuously failing is a pain and really hard to manage.

In my point of view, M2 and M3 are way more asking than M1 and M4.

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I count M3 to be on par with P1, both terribly easy fights that amount to all of dodge the AoE. There is nothing at all demanding about the fight that you can't just hit an oGCD and get back into it with no real struggle. The multi-hit mechanic isn't any more threatening than any other multi-hit. Harrowing Hell hits much harder than anything that fight throws out. M2 is just a lot of movement but that's it though. Neither fight is particularly memorable or difficult.

If I run out of MP reviving people who die to repeated and telegraphed mechanics, it is no longer my fault as a healer if we wipe.
It is the fault of people dying too much for the combined resources of myself and my cohealer to keep up with.

And that's 100% fine.