Adding Stances

[Duskane]

And tanks barely have anything more to level compared to healers, only one class that's already lvl 60. It's been three months, why is it not back to only tanks in demand yet?
.

this is not even a real estimate on "healer drought"
especially when it changes so frequently between healer,tank and even DPS in need for alliance and expert
all my roulette right now are Tank besides ones i mentioned which are dps

[GrimGale]

There is a 26 pages thread on the topic of healers quitting the job. It's not 26 pages worth of negative feedback, but it is still a big thread about players who are tired of the current situation.

What you're telling me is like claiming there's no 21 pages RDM issues thread ( http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...is-the-outrage ) because not everybody agrees with the OP.

And again, where is the thread about tanks quitting because all tanks are identical? Where is the thread about dps quitting because all dps are identical? Nowhere, because no other role had it as rough as healers.


As for queues...
"You just see what you want to see"
"I see a lot of quick queues on every role"

Allow me to mmmmmmh for a moment, would you?

And tanks barely have anything more to level compared to healers, only one class that's already lvl 60. It's been three months, why is it not back to only tanks in demand yet?


You can't deny that the demand largely shifted from pretty much only tanks, to tanks and healers depending on the time of the day.

Players are a lot less interested in healers due to overly simplified kits (and straight up downgrades in certain cases) and no new healers for at least 6 years. And quitters all share the same thoughts: healers are boring.

If proportionally less players play healers, and they all cite the same reasons... maybe it means that their complaints are justified.

You just need to take a look at parsers for objective data (Granted they will only tell you what players do and not what they enjoy) . You can see how many healing spells and how many damaging spells we use.
Exhorbitant amounts of damage single-target spells in Savage and AoE spells in roulettes in comparison to healing, almost three times as much.

It can't be denied that when it comes to button pressing, healers use their damage spells much more often than healing.

So then, if players use a part of their kit much more often (and still clear bosses and dungeons), why would you not expand on that part of the kit? Why would you deliberately shrink it, making it less interesting.

I assume SE simplified the damage spells as to not have them interfere with healing but they forgot to make healing more of a requirement. This we could see even before ShB release. Lot's of healers raised the alarm when they saw the removal of so many damaging spells.
They thought that healing requierements would then be increased to compensate for that.

But then we saw Titania's fight from the demo and it was clear the devs didn't actually reduce healing downtime.

[Lodi]

this is not even a real estimate on "healer drought"
especially when it changes so frequently between healer,tank and even DPS in need for alliance and expert
all my roulette right now are Tank besides ones i mentioned which are dps

I'm not saying there is a healer drought , I am saying healers are a lot more often in demand than they used to. I remember back in SB, it was tanks all day, with alliance raid always being the exception. Now? It goes back and forth between healers and tanks. It doesn't mean there are no more healers, it means the proportion of healers is lower than it used to be.

Perhaps it has something to do with the lack of a new healer, very controversial changes, obvious lack of communication, and countless threads asking to restore SB skills? I dunno.

You just need to take a look at parsers for objective data (Granted they will only tell you what players do and not what they enjoy) . You can see how many healing spells and how many damaging spells we use.
Exhorbitant amounts of damage single-target spells in Savage and AoE spells in roulettes in comparison to healing, almost three times as much.

It can't be denied that when it comes to button pressing, healers use their damage spells much more often than healing.

So then, if players use a part of their kit much more often (and still clear bosses and dungeons), why would you not expand on that part of the kit? Why would you deliberately shrink it, making it less interesting.

I assume SE simplified the damage spells as to not have them interfere with healing but they forgot to make healing more of a requirement. This we could see even before ShB release. Lot's of healers raised the alarm when they saw the removal of so many damaging spells.
They thought that healing requierements would then be increased to compensate for that.

But then we saw Titania's fight from the demo and it was clear the devs didn't actually reduce healing downtime.

Ah yes, I remember when people justified the pruning by "you won't even have the time to dps, duh!". Yeah no, I never spent to much time pressing 1.
I mean, we can even outdamage tanks on sunny days.

Hell, even the role quests are 75% about doing nothing but spam 1. And pretending Repose is useful.


To return to the original topic, I'd love a milder version of Cleric stance or something like SB Darkside. A toggleable stance that increases damage but reduces healing or MP regen. Just a small thing like this would make healers a bit more interesting without skill-gating more casual players.

[LariaKirin]

There is a 26 pages thread on the topic of healers quitting the job. It's not 26 pages worth of negative feedback, but it is still a big thread about players who are tired of the current situation.

What you're telling me is like claiming there's no 21 pages RDM issues thread ( http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...is-the-outrage ) because not everybody agrees with the OP.

Has nothing to do with the RDM thread. I'm not telling you it doesn't exist. I'm calling out your portrayal of what that thread really is. It's not "healers who quit", so thanks for correcting your statement.

As for queues...
"You just see what you want to see"
"I see a lot of quick queues on every role"

Allow me to mmmmmmh for a moment, would you?

It seems you're unable to comprehend my point and chose to simply take two statements out of context because reasons. The only point of listing several things I see is to tell you that queues fluctuate. Yet you choose to only observe the instant healer queues, because of bias. I will never use queues to make an argument in regards to role numbers, because this is my stance on the duty finder: "The duty finder does not and can not give you an accurate picture of what is happening in general"

And tanks barely have anything more to level compared to healers, only one class that's already lvl 60. It's been three months, why is it not back to only tanks in demand yet?

You can't deny that the demand largely shifted from pretty much only tanks, to tanks and healers depending on the time of the day.

Players are a lot less interested in healers due to overly simplified kits (and straight up downgrades in certain cases) and no new healers for at least 6 years. And quitters all share the same thoughts: healers are boring.

If proportionally less players play healers, and they all cite the same reasons... maybe it means that their complaints are justified.

I can absolutely deny it and I do not accept your premise that it's ever been only tanks in demand. If you want to make the case that there are proportionally less healers now as compared to SB, then you'll have to provide some numbers. Your memory of how it was in SB and what your bias observes about the queues is not good enough.

[Samsta]

What is wrong with keeping the job floor the same and raising the ceiling? Some people here are scared shitless of adding more complexity and nuance to whm. I liked old cleric stance, I wish we would still have it, on the contrary of making the job "more complex" I feel in lot of cases it made it actually easier, since people understood that if you weren't in cleric stance, there was simply no point in doing dps, it was just waste of mana, so in an intensive healing periods, you couldn't really dps at all, unlike now where that extra glare is the new way optimizing your damage and on the opposite side, being on cleric stance made your heals super weak, so you didn't have to "combine" healing and dealing dps at all times like you do now. I dunno if others feel the same. Despite all this, adding it back would definitely raise the ceiling of playing the job optimally, and I don't understand how that affects players who don't wanna do that.

[AphraelAmarantha]

So what I am reading from people’s responses is that clearing a dungeon requires a certain level of competence.

So isn’t it just common sense that if you want to clear a dungeon in a reasonable amount of time that the healer also needs to be outputting dps?

[Billythepancake]

So what I am reading from people’s responses is that clearing a dungeon requires a certain level of competence.

So isn’t it just common sense that if you want to clear a dungeon in a reasonable amount of time that the healer also needs to be outputting dps?

DPS, yes, they do not, however, need to be playing optimally. So long as the healer is not sitting with their thumb up their bums, then there isn't anything to complain about.

[Saefinn]

So what I am reading from people’s responses is that clearing a dungeon requires a certain level of competence.

So isn’t it just common sense that if you want to clear a dungeon in a reasonable amount of time that the healer also needs to be outputting dps?

Not always. Healer DPS is preferred, but the loss of DPS from a healer wouldn't put it into the realms of unreasonable amount of time.

Some hold the view that healers should not DPS in dungeons, those people rejoiced at healer changes before realising they didn't mean less DPSing. We had a thread here not that long ago arguing it. But I have come across some who don't like doing it or are not confident in their abilities to pull it off, some of these people aren't healer mains too and aren't as used to it.

[Wawachume]

To add, one of the things that put me off when trying a number of dungeons in WoW, it felt there was no pacing and people would rush through so quickly I didn’t know what was going on. So it could go completely the other way where too fast is dull.

I had kind of a similar experience with WoW dungeons. It was like there weren't any mechanics or anything; it was just:

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
<pokes head above rubble cautiously>
"...did we win?"

I liked old cleric stance, I wish we would still have it, on the contrary of making the job "more complex" I feel in lot of cases it made it actually easier, since people understood that if you weren't in cleric stance, there was simply no point in doing dps, it was just waste of mana, so in an intensive healing periods, you couldn't really dps at all

This is actually another reason I disliked cleric stance---when you weren't using it, it made things too simple.

Fights were all, "Heal...wait...wait...twiddle thumbs...heal...wait...wait...Are you bored? Then press this button to risk disaster!" D:

Cleric stance was good at satisfying the people who wanted a complex rotation as well as those who wanted a simple one. But it didn't necessarily do much for the people who wanted a complex rotation, but weren't quite sure how to get there. The gap between simple and complex was just a little too intimidating.

you didn't have to "combine" healing and dealing dps at all times like you do now.

This is interesting to me, because I actually find it more burdensome that way. In addition to healing and DPSing, you have to worry about separating them.

[Samsta]

This is actually another reason I disliked cleric stance---when you weren't using it, it made things too simple.

Fights were all, "Heal...wait...wait...twiddle thumbs...heal...wait...wait...Are you bored? Then press this button to risk disaster!" D:

Cleric stance was good at satisfying the people who wanted a complex rotation as well as those who wanted a simple one. But it didn't necessarily do much for the people who wanted a complex rotation, but weren't quite sure how to get there. The gap between simple and complex was just a little too intimidating.

Well when you knew the fights there were little that could go wrong when you knew when to use it. Separating healing and doing damage was certainly different, I wouldn't necessarily call it burdensome but it was definitely more risky and allowed better healers to to stand out from others. All in all it made the role feel more "clear", as your default state (not in cleric stance) was only for healing, when you knew the fights you gradually began to do more and more damage. Now it's just spam glare and when you have to heal you heal, like I said it has the element of avoiding gcd healing as much as possible now to get that extra glare in at all times and it's a different kind of optimization, the kind that brought the ceiling down and brought bad and good players closer together. However the old cleric stance also made it so that amidst rough healing phases you weren't expected to dps at all, so when you healed you only healed and when you dealt damage you only dealt damage, there wasn't this pressure to spam damage all the time and I gotta say I enjoyed it more.