New Healer Request Next Expansion

[Seraphor]

But... why should balancing those categories be more important than balancing the different roles in proportion to party requirements? DPS queues are bad enough as it is. Everyone would benefit from more people healing (except possibly existing healers, but they'd also benefit from new options) and adding an extra healing class would do that. Wanting to balance out those categories is just not a good excuse. (And neither is balancing the healers considering this is what we got out of it. The healers might be "balanced" but there are a lot of unhappy healers and there are signs of laziness all over the "balances").

(And while I'm on the topic, why is DRK not a magical tank? Why don't we need 2 more of those to even it out? If chemist is the next healer, by their logic we'd need another two non-magical healers, but I can't see that happening)

There’s no right answer.
Which party requirements? Light Party? Full Party? Alliance Raids?
Which roles? Do we have 2 melee and 2 ranged? Do we have 2 physical and 2 magical? 1 of each and a wildcard? (the latter is JP’s preferred option)

Fact is more people prefer to play DPS, and it’s apparently easier to make more varied DPS job mechanics, as tanks and healers have a baseline they need to be capable of first.

Personally, I think ‘balancing the roles’ is and should just be a ‘rough guide’ for determining what jobs get added when, but what those jobs actually are, should be purely flavour and aesthetic.

I think based on what we have, and classic FF jobs not represented, and factoring in the need for each job to have a unique weapon… the roles we’re currently missing are:

Heavy melee DPS, wielding a hammer or mace, potential scope for it to have a magical slant. E.g. a Mystic Knight wielding a mace.
Healer, obviously. Chemist or Geomancer are obvious bets.
Caster DPS. Yoshi P has said he wants an eastern or ‘mystical’ caster, Geomancer as a caster DPS could fill this role.

Choose two of those three options, with one of them being one of the healer options, that’s what we’re getting in 6.0, I bet.

[Hatstand]

There’s no right answer.
Which party requirements? Light Party? Full Party? Alliance Raids?
Which roles? Do we have 2 melee and 2 ranged? Do we have 2 physical and 2 magical? 1 of each and a wildcard? (the latter is JP’s preferred option)

Fact is more people prefer to play DPS, and it’s apparently easier to make more varied DPS job mechanics, as tanks and healers have a baseline they need to be capable of first.

Is there some content where the queues don't require a party in the ratio of 1:1:2 tank:healer:dps? I'm referring to those. The number of jobs should be in that proportion, too, imo.

As for it being easier... I honestly think they're just not thinking hard enough. About this, anyway. I'm sure they're thinking hard about some things but they haven't prioritised thinking hard about varied and interesting healers.

I'd love a true pet based healer, with a short range, that relied on managing the pets locations for range.

I'd love a damage transfer healer, that had self-HoTs and shields, and could transfer damage from other party members to themselves (you'd have to be careful with this one, though, to make the risk reward playstyle worth it without it being OP). For that one I'd also give them the ability to transfer damage from themselves to enemies (neither of these damage transfers being 1:1 hp to hp, ofc. A healer could never heal a tank like that), that way a) it's optimal to constantly keep yourself not quite topped off, an interesting dynamic, and b) it would integrate healing and damage, as healing yourself would be faster when dealing damage, which would in turn let you heal your party more.

I'd love a HoT based healer where the HoTs interacted with each other, making each other stronger, or maybe the application of the third turns the first into a shield over time, and the fourth turns the third into a small damage buff, etc. You could use a bane-like mechanic to build up a super DoT (perhaps with the appropriate combination of heal/shield/buff for the specific mechanic) on the tank by combining them in the correct way then deploying it to the rest of the team.

I'd love a healer with super-strong burst heals that also applied DoTs to their targets (not for the full amount, obviously), so that you'd have to be careful not to overheal to make the most of your heals, and make sure not to use those when there was big damage coming. (Obviously they'd need regular heals, too, but I picture these as being weaker).

I'm not sure any of those are great ideas. I'm spitballing off the top of my head, but at least they're interesting. I respect SE enough to think that if they actually dedicated themselves to making more varied healers they could manage it.

[Billythepancake]

snip

You're absolutely correct, they could 100% give us not only 3, but 4, balanced, unique, and most importantly, fun, healers, but they won't. Not for lack of resources,but because healers aren't worth the effort. We're the drama club, while DPS is the varsity football team. They can pack a stadium,and we're lucky to sell a handful of tickets, and as such, SE doesn't believe we're worth the time, money, or effort. I have 0 faith that there's anything to look forward to in healing in this expansion, or even the next. I would LOVE if SE proved me wrong and made SCH and the other 2 healers amazing, but I know they won't.

[Brandedblade]

You're absolutely correct, they could 100% give us not only 3, but 4, balanced, unique, and most importantly, fun, healers, but they won't. Not for lack of resources,but because healers aren't worth the effort. We're the drama club, while DPS is the varsity football team. They can pack a stadium,and we're lucky to sell a handful of tickets, and as such, SE doesn't believe we're worth the time, money, or effort. I have 0 faith that there's anything to look forward to in healing in this expansion, or even the next. I would LOVE if SE proved me wrong and made SCH and the other 2 healers amazing, but I know they won't.

...bruh, just...take a break at this point.

[Billythepancake]

...bruh, just...take a break at this point.

Could say the same to you.

[Seraphor]

Is there some content where the queues don't require a party in the ratio of 1:1:2 tank:healer:dps? I'm referring to those. The number of jobs should be in that proportion, too, imo.

What? 5 Tanks, 5 Tealers and 10 DPS?
Or... 4 Tanks, 4 Healers, and... lose 2 DPS?

What about Alliance Raids?

[Seraphor]

Could say the same to you.

What did they say that indicated they need a break from the game?
They didn't have a tantrum or anything.

[Hatstand]

What? 5 Tanks, 5 Tealers and 10 DPS?
Or... 4 Tanks, 4 Healers, and... lose 2 DPS?

What about Alliance Raids?

Fair point on the alliance raids. But it’s still a 1:3 ratio of healers to non-healers.

And yes, I think 5 heals 5 tanks 10 dps would be an appropriate ratio. Of course, this isn’t really viable anymore since, that would mean dps classes never getting new toys again (or at least not for a good long while), and I don’t think they deserve that. But I do think that going forward they should have at most one new dps class per expansion to help even it out. If it were up to me the next two expansions would be tank healer and dps healer respectively. After that we’d be at 5:5:11. At that point the ratio would be good enough that they could alternate dps/healer and dps/tank from then on.

[Hatstand]

What did they say that indicated they need a break from the game?
They didn't have a tantrum or anything.

Besides anything else, you can take a break from the game without stopping caring about it. I’m planning on letting my subscription lapse at the end of the month and hang around WoW or SWTOR for a while. I don’t intent to leave the healer forums, though, because apart from the current state of healers ffxiv is still by far my favourite mmo and if they fix healers I’ll re-sub in a heartbeat.

Even that’s going to be hard, because I have friends I don’t live near, who I only connect to through this game. I imagine there are plenty of other people facing the same circumstance: they have something other than job satisfaction tying them to ffxiv.

(And by fix I rather subjectively mean either change current healers or add a new one such that there’s one I actually enjoy playing to the degree that I used to enjoy AST and SCH before, or even something close. I’ll re-sub next time there are substantial changes to try them out. I hope that I will soon have reason to make my sub regular again)

[Billythepancake]

What did they say that indicated they need a break from the game?
They didn't have a tantrum or anything.

And what indicated I needed one? Because I'm frustrated at the current state of healers and disagree with people who say healers are fine because "balance"? It wasn't a tantrum, it was sharing my thoughts on how SE will continue to treat healers.