Worse than I could have imagined

No, my worst fears were not confirmed with DT release. Instead, I found nightmares worse than I could have imagined.

I cannot help but think that the job designs for Healers are meant for us to hate them, meant for us to dislike playing the jobs so much that we don't just quit healer but quit the game.

I've been playing 2.0 EA. I feel like this game isn't "for" me anymore. The devs are showing me & players like me (players who have supported the game for a decade, who are the REASON there was even a "comeback success") the door & telling us, "Thanks for all the money but we got the subscribers we ACTUALLY want now, we don't need you now."

I don't feel like my wants are unreasonable b/c they used to be standard parts of the game that have been ripped out.

What I want:
Distinct Job Identity. YES, I KNOW that it is apparently coming in 8.0. But Healers have been asking for this since 5.0. This is the 2nd time we've been promised "next expac" only to be told, once the next expac arrives, to wait another 2.5 years. If we get the return of job identity in 8.0, we will have been waiting for 7 YEARS.

At least 1 shield & 1 pure healer w/ a higher skill ceiling. Low skill floors are fine, but some of us WANT a challenge & WANT to take the time to learn optimizations. "Go play savage." I do; I do blind prog. But they keep lowering both the skill floor & the skill ceiling to the point of absurdity.

"Go play dps if you want a rotation." But I don't want that. I want the challenge of managing heals while doing damage. I want something more complex than spamming Malefic when not healing.

I've been called elitist for these requests. I don't think it's elitist to want something that used to be a given in the game. I just want what was stolen from us healers returned. I'm not asking for anything more than that.

I'm sorry, it just feels like outright maltreatment. It feels like constructive dismissal; making the environment so intolerable that the people have no choice but to quit.

My total playtime is thousands of days. 1027 days, 23 hours, 35 minutes. I love this game; I've met friends, loved ones, and comrades in this game. This game was my escape during some of the hardest periods of my life. This game has brought the best people into my life. I love this game. I've defended & supported the devs the entire time. I didn't get upset or angry about the delay of EW. Didn't get cranky when they stopped adding 3 new dungeons per patch. Didn't get huffy when there was no deep dungeon in SHB. I just said, "The devs have a lot on their plate & are doing their best."

I love this game. I just don't think it loves me anymore. This might be the end of road. I have an obligation to fulfill with a group already, but I do not know if I will stay past fulfilling that promise. I want to leave before the good memories become infected.

It does seem to be in very bad taste to me to remove AST decision making from random cards, add a faux-DoT to Scholar that requires no upkeep when players have been asking for some of their old DoTs back for years, and give Sage a taste of that management back in the media tour only to take it away in the final build. One does have to question if the job design team has experienced playing healer in content they've already cleared; are they aware of how sleep-inducing it is to have next to no decision-making in their gameplay beyond maintaining a single DoT?

I desperately hope more is added to these classes. And that this is not the final version of Astrologian's cards...

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Originally Posted by velswen

I desperately hope more is added to these classes. And that this is not the final version of Astrologian's cards...

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Wouldn't count on it. When Summoner was butchered last expansion, posters were saying the same thing, that more would be added to give it depth. All they got was a bahamut skin.

I'm having a lot of fun with SCH so far! Maybe you should play another role if healing isn't fun for you?

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Originally Posted by Wilford111

I'm having a lot of fun with SCH so far! Maybe you should play another role if healing isn't fun for you?

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Even you acknowledge every healer plays the same.

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Originally Posted by ThorneDynasty

Even you acknowledge every healer plays the same.

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I mean that's the general consensus of people who are upset with the healer role, right?

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Originally Posted by Wilford111

I mean that's the general consensus of people who are upset with the healer role, right?

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Apparently it's the consensus with people who love this slop too.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

Wouldn't count on it. When Summoner was butchered last expansion, posters were saying the same thing, that more would be added to give it depth. All they got was a bahamut skin.

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CBU3 stands for Creatively Bankrupt Unit 3. Change my mind.

I've had the same feeling of being tossed aside by the dev team for quite a while now and I don't even main healer. I can't even begin to imagine what it would feel playing support, especially healer, in this game those days.

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Originally Posted by Wilford111

I'm having a lot of fun with SCH so far! Maybe you should play another role if healing isn't fun for you?

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I still enjoy playing Scholar but that doesn't mean the job couldn't use some more interesting additions!

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Originally Posted by velswen

I still enjoy playing Scholar but that doesn't mean the job couldn't use some more interesting additions!

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Like a stupid dress and plastic gold wings

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Originally Posted by Wilford111

I'm having a lot of fun with SCH so far! Maybe you should play another role if healing isn't fun for you?

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But that's the thing So what if they made all the tanks braindead and unfun and useless and kept snidely making comments that made you think, "They don't care about tanks or our enjoyment anymore"? Would you just happily hop onto DPS or healing? How is that fair? It's really not fair to tell people that the ROLE they loved and enjoyed from 2013 until 2019 is dead and they should just try something else. I have! I have done other things! My static lost it's WAR during FCOB and it was easier for us to find a healer back then so for the last few weeks, I hopped onto Warrior. During part of Stormblood, I hopped on RDM when there was a big shift up in static members. I've tried doing other roles in higher end content and I didn't have fun. I didn't like the mechanics of it. There's just nothing in this game anymore. And I did address the "maybe you should play another role" thing directly in my original post.

Imagine if they made ALL DPS classes just 1 button. Would you tell DPS who were upset to just go play tank if they are so unhappy?

It's not fair at all to say that. Healing used to be fun. It used to be engaging, enjoyable, and especially playing Astrologian, I had a blast. I don't get that thrill from other jobs. And now I don't get it from healer, either.

I've been thinking.

They decided that work on both "encounters" and "job identity" would be too much for the playerbase, even though I don't quite agree with that... But If there must be just one of those per expansion, I firmly believe they picked the wrong one. Jobs is how people interact with the world, and that should be a first priority.

I don't think Endwalker encounters were really inspiring or good sans a couple, even normal content were bad (<cough> AR <cough>) but I surely could bear a whole 7.0 of the same encounters if job design was addressed 1st.

Also, coming to think about it... Isn't that really counterproductive? They reworked 2 old jobs, added 2 brand new ones... just to be overhauled again in 8.0?

I also do not agree that it would be "too much" for the player base to both work on encounters and job identity. Players have been complaining about both and want both fixed--fixing them both at the same time would, in my opinion, make a lot of sense. But if I had a fun job, I could deal with another expansion of less-than-inspiring encounters. If I felt like my beloved Astrologian were once again the job that excited me, I could deal with mediocre encounter designs.

This is the reason why I stopped playing WAR in 5.0. and I been playing WAR Since EA-2.0. They homogenized tanks and WAR did not feel special no more. You had more HP than tanks with defiance but less CDs because you were suppose to tank the TBs head on, etc. Astro was my second main and loved the rng of the cards cause you had to think during battles, which I loved.

I mained SCH from ARR to SHB. I used to love the class. When they gutted the class in SHB I decided to try it anyway. Power through. Instead I got burned out and tired of it. So I swapped healers in Endwalker and halfway through said screw it and went SMN. And SMN, even with it dubbed down to hell, was more fun then any healer. I used to LOVE playing SCH, I even loved AST as well. In SB I had a really conflict between my main being SCH or AST. Now? Nothing. And I'm by far not the only one as people can clearly see.

It really really says something when a whole lot of people who used to love healing for years suddenly find the job a shadow of it's former self. And it's saying a bad thing.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I've been thinking.

They decided that work on both "encounters" and "job identity" would be too much for the playerbase, even though I don't quite agree with that... But If there must be just one of those per expansion, I firmly believe they picked the wrong one. Jobs is how people interact with the world, and that should be a first priority.

I don't think Endwalker encounters were really inspiring or good sans a couple, even normal content were bad (<cough> AR <cough>) but I surely could bear a whole 7.0 of the same encounters if job design was addressed 1st.

Also, coming to think about it... Isn't that really counterproductive? They reworked 2 old jobs, added 2 brand new ones... just to be overhauled again in 8.0?

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I agree. A metaphor for this would be to think of this game's battle content selection as an art museum. The different paintings and sculptures are the encounters. The Job you choose to play is the pair of glasses you're wearing. It doesn't matter how beautiful the Mona Lisa is, or the Statue of David, or Van Gogh's Sunflowers, if you are wearing a pair of glasses that are blurry (wrong prescription, need cleaning, etc). It'd make much more sense to adjust the job design direction first, rather than the content direction, because there's no guarantee that the new direction wouldn't suffer from the occasional stinker of a fight. A sensible job design for healers would 'carry' a bad fight (cough P6S), but a good encounter design can't always carry a bad job design (especially once you have it on farm)

Honestly the ppl that call those wanting more depth and things to do outside of healing elites are such hypocrites.

Either A. They don't healer at all and are bad tanks/dps wanting healers to pocket them with just healing and nothing else.

B. Ppl who refuse to believe that healers can fight instead of being just healbots. Healing in this game will never be engaging if I can predict when it is coming, it's all scripted. And even if I had to heal, their kits are so bloated with redundant heal abilities, that taking damage is trivial.

C. Ppl just think the devs can do no wrong. They have been wrong since the beginning of the game and still do not understand healer design. I hate that ppl will just defend the neglect from the dev team. They've been so-called "fixing" for years and yet we've reached the point that we have a whole strike about it. To make things worse, the strike isn't even going to change their options. Yoshi-P really meant it when he said that you should play Ultimate if you want harder healing.

No, what we need is for healers to be fun again. Homogenizing them and forcing a strict baseline with the bare minimum for a complex dps rotation is honestly so baffling. If the game is indeed for casual players mostly, shouldn't they want for the jobs to be fun to play and unique to one another? Yet all we get is "we don't know how to design more healing jobs when they've been regurgitating dps jobs left and right.

I have zero sympathy for the devs in regards to healers. They make zero effort in acknowledging their lack of anything healing related. This is the hill they will die on and it's truly something.