The Healer Double Standard

[MintnHoney]

What kills me the most about those massive response threads is how an SE rep never even shows up to say, "Hey, we see you have some concerns and here's what we're planning to do" or "Here's is our thought process on why we did that"

Just doing that would help alleviate a lot of problems.

The problem with this is that they're a proud Japanese company, Square Enix. I don't really remember the development team ever apologizing for having to revert any changes or going against what they'd previously stated what was going to happen, and, instead, I do remember them reverting changes and proudly proclaiming they were doing us a favor because of some issue they had just figured out over a period of time (during which, they tell the players they/we need more time with what they'd taken away/given us already to make sure that the design philosophy was alright in the content that they'd designed it for (implying that the design was only ever supposed to work for a specific content and none other, but they want us to suffer for their lack of actual playtesting), they tell the players to "get good," or they say absolutely nothing at all except "please look forward to it."). To be honest, I don't expect we'll ever see them make a public statement outside of the clearly-rehearsed live letters now, least especially outside of the far-too-apologetic Japanese forums.

In fact, with the e3 live letter coming up, apparently our last bit of news prior to Shadowbringers; if he even talk about the current dismay of healers, he's very much likely going to say something along the lines of "we see and hear you, but we urge you all to wait and see how it feels before you make a decision, look forward to it" like they have been.
And when it fails and blows up spectacularly in their face, because lazy healers won't be able to survive the content and competent healers are deathly bored, they'll try and claim that we're "working together" as a "community" to fix the problem, so that at least parts of the community will be pacified because they'll be made to feel that they're being listened to, and they'll return Miasma II, they'll bump up the power of Balance, and they'll add more overall potency to Assize, and call it good for the expansion.
Look forward to it.

Meanwhile, I'm talking like you haven't experienced this before, yourself, but let's let this sit and be a prophetic warning to those who haven't gone through this. I would enjoy being proven wrong, though.