I hate to, but I think I put down healing for now. Please make it engaging again, SE.

[Rilifane]

Go heal TEA you'll be engaged again

That's complete bullshit and sounds incredibly arrogant.
If a game is designed so you can only be engaged and have in the absolute highest endgame content, it's poorly designed indeed. Escpecially when it tries so hard to reel in players of all kinds, including casual and midcore.

[Saefinn]

Basic healing was accessible enough. New healers could always fall back on relying on their basic hardcast toolkit and would've been fine.
Cleric Stance, managing dots, managing dpsing vs healing etc was a bonus you started utilizing after you got comfortable and not something you needed to get right frmo the start.

Thinking on the making healing more accessible and my earlier comments commending how the game by design teaches you, I get maybe since ARR it has not necessarily be the case, given my experience was with the original progression for the game.

So instead of making them accessible through making the jobs easier to play, instead offer new ways for people to learn and gain the confidence of playing a healer role.

Hall of the novice was a good kickstart, but an upgrade on that, particularly easing people into actual content with actual groups and situations to help teach the role might be a good approach. Even helping people realise they don't have to focus DPS, especially when learning and promote good practice and ways for people to practice.

Because they could start it simple, get the basics down require them to queue as a healer for a specific dungeon to put into practice what they've learned.

I realise it's a hand-holding approach, but I think it's a more meaningful way of making healing more approachable (and could be applied to other roles), and it's a way to clear misconceptions too and built confidence in less confident healers. Because "they're too complex" is not the only reason why people struggle and killing the complexity could also make it dull for them once they have that confidence and experience behind them.

[Crushnight]

Go heal TEA you'll be engaged again

I have and i'll tell you i'm more engaged by the mechanics than i am from anything in my kit, not to say everything eventually loses it luster after awhile but nothing really flows well on any healer and that is where the monotony kicks in.

Also i shouldn't have to be in content designed for the 1-2% to get any level of engagement from a job let alone an entire role >_>

[Rasikko]

Trying to figure out what SE was thinking with AST. Played this today and..all cards do the same thing..

[althenawhm]

YoshiP sure responded quick about the Ishgard issue, but still no real communication about us healers.

[Punslinger]

Go heal TEA you'll be engaged again

Not even then. During SB, there were healers who solo-healed UCoB and UwU. The absolute hardest fights in the game were doable with only one healer. In ShB, E4S has been solo-healed by Noct AST, universally acknowledged as the weakest healer in the game.

That's how absurdly powerful healer kits are, relative to boss damage. The hardest fights in the game, designed and intended for two-healer parties, can be completed with only one healer, even when that healer is the worst healer job in the game.

TBPH, I'm a bit surprised the healing meta hasn't yet shifted to X/RDM, replacing the second healer with a rez-mage whose job is to deal damage and rez the healer if they go down. RDM might be lacking in DPS compared to other casters, but it's still way ahead of healers.

Additionally, people who go, "bUt Ur A hEaLeR u DoNt NeEd DaMaGe SkIlLz," forget that the MSQ exists. Back in SB, I leveled SAM specifically because by the time I reached L62 on my AST, Malefic-spamming my way through the MSQ had gotten so boring that my brain was trying to escape through my ears. You can't heal enemies to death, and you have no party members to heal, so 95% of your skills go unused when playing solo. In a game where solo story content is one of its biggest selling points, this is not good design.

As healers stand right now, your DPS rotation at level 80 is the same as it is at level 4. And this is how I know nobody on the dev team actually plays a healer. If Yoshi-P forced them to sit down and Stone/Ruin/Malefic-spam a healer from L1 all the way through ARR, through the 7AE quests, through all of HW and all of SB and all of ShB, the dev team would very quickly fix this problem. But that'll never happen, because nobody on the dev team plays a healer, and even Yoshi-P seems to treat the role as an afterthought, a second-class-citizen "Baby's First MMO" role that exists only so peoples' non-gaming friends/spouses/grandpas can play with them.

The bottom line is, it's not enough for healing to only be engaging if you play the absolute top-difficulty content in the game. There's no excuse for healing to be boring in 99% of the game, not when DPS and Tank roles are engaging at any difficulty level.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

YoshiP sure responded quick about the Ishgard issue, but still no real communication about us healers.

As far as Yoshi/SE is concerned, healers are a lost cause that only gets seriously touched on at the beginning of the expansion.
Don't you see his reaction everytime someone brings up a healer? He either laughs or jokingly sighs. But when a DPS is brought up, woo boy redesigned asap.

I think the issue is no one at SE really understands healers and what we want from them. They really do need to hire fresh class designers. They obviously have some talent in designing DPS roles, but they make a huge nosedive in quality when it comes to healers.

[Mesarthim]

YoshiP sure responded quick about the Ishgard issue, but still no real communication about us healers.

I wouldn't expect anything until 6.0.

And that's assuming we don't get screwed over for an additional 2 years after that.

[vtndll]

I wouldn't expect anything until 6.0.

And that's assuming we don't get screwed over for an additional 2 years after that.

When 6.0 rolls around I'll be waiting for the " no new healers this expansion so we can balance the ones we have excuse". . .

[Sloprano]

Go heal TEA you'll be engaged again

I can definitly see where you're coming from, learning to heal an Extreme or up blind is fun, but I think this exapserates the problem we've had by being told to "wait until you try it/first dungeon/last dungeon/Extreme/Savage/Ultimate/Diadem/Next expansion." I waited whole of Stormblood for them to wake up to or the very least talk about what they did to Scholar and Healers in general, instead I got Broil III.

We're currently in 5.1, after the base game and three expansions in six years the game is currently having two hundred-and-twenty-five (number might be off, but still god damn) wherein less than ten are High-End duties, many are being reported here as already solo-healed, that leaves us rougly zero-point-five percent of the current combat scenarios as one Ultimate being where my favorite job comes alive. Of course, far from all those end up in Roulettes and see daily visit, but you also have fights/fates in the world, Deep Dungeon, Eureka and MSQ solo duties. I find it a too massive a number of scenarios where I only have a 2.5s cast and 30s dot to use regurarly.

That I also could toggle a well-known and boring Brayflox into an exciting one with by just pressing Cleric Stance and go to town with Bane while putting more pressure on my healing is something I find is further testament that SE is wearing sideblinders on top of watching jobs through a microscopic lens with one eye, tweaking with a tiny instrument and a Ultimate timeline guide glued to the other eye while every other combat scenario deteriorates around them.

As far as Yoshi/SE is concerned, healers are a lost cause that only gets seriously touched on at the beginning of the expansion.
Don't you see his reaction everytime someone brings up a healer? He either laughs or jokingly sighs. But when a DPS is brought up, woo boy redesigned asap.

I want to believe SE knows how to design a healer as a job fit for everything the game throws at you, thats from experiencing Scholar in Heavensward.

Went through interviews and found one after HW released they gave a well and long explanations of how ast was designed to be generally weaker healer, but made up for it with random but strong buffs. It was insightful and gave ideas on how they wanted the job to work and the challenges that brought with it. I've never seen them talk about any of the healers in the same capacity ever since.

So I keep posting here, in hopes one day a Community Manager mistakenly presses "Healer Roles" instead of "DPS Roles", sees the concerns, then goes back to their intended destination mumbling "I ain't payed enough to go there." Hyperbole of course, I still don't know if they read or acknowledge anything here as they never seem to tell us anything.