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

[Punslinger]

I'd love more involvement on healers period.

In the run up to Shadowbringers across all the stupid "influencer" interviews there were a total of ~96 questions asked. Three. . . THREE of them concerned healers and they were all brushed off.

I hate to be an alarmist but it really does seem like either

A) The development team simply doesn't care about healers, or

B) They don't know how to properly balance them.

Either of which is equally concerning.

¿Por que no los dos?

Nobody on the dev team plays a healer. All communication about healers from Square seems to be from the POV of the healed, not the healer.

At the same time, they genuinely don't seem to understand how their approach to encounter design paints them into a corner when it comes to healer design. They don't know how to properly balance healers because they're working from knowledge of WoW-style healing and trying to apply it to FF14-style scripted fights, or because Square's left hand (the job design team) has no clue what the right hand (the encounter design team) is doing, or both.

This ties back to the fact that nobody on the team plays a healer, because if they did, they'd quickly recognize that tanks had some of the exact same boredom/homogenization issues before Square caved in and made them Blue DPS in ShB. At a minimum, you'd think that if somebody on the dev team did play a healer, they'd report how boring it is to play the MSQ that way. They don't know how to design healers because they don't play healers in their own game, so they don't understand what the role needs, in order to be engaging given the encounter design in the game.

[LariaKirin]

I hate to be an alarmist but it really does seem like either

A) The development team simply doesn't care about healers, or

B) They don't know how to properly balance them.

This is one of the best examples I've seen that illustrate the concept of a false dichotomy.

The extreme lack of healers in content (healer in need bonus constantly) should give them a good idea that people are dropping or have dropped the job.

I'd love to see the set of data you used to draw this conclusion. It will be extremely interesting.

[MOZZYSTAR]

100% Agree with the original post. Same exact mindset. I ended up unintentionally taking a break from the game itself and still feel even less attachment for it than I ever have before. Once the MSQ was over, I really didn't feel compelled to play at all, which is pretty unusual for me. I play SCH on my alt, and AST as my main. I can't even get myself to AST at all because I find the new draw/play as separate buttons way too clunky and inefficient. On top of an unrewarding card system? Yeah... Not my cuppa tea. I also found that I actually heal less. In regular content, I really don't need to use Benefic or Benefic II, rarely ever need Helios. All I need to do is spam combust/malefic then pop one of my healing cooldowns once tank or other gets less than 75%HP and bam. Good to go. AST never even had a great DPS skillset (unlike SCH). It had more support skills which made the class more engaging. Like, for example, our stun that is now yet another cool down heal. I used that whenever we had a big mob with lots of AoEs. If anything, I would've liked that to have a shorter cooldown to be more effective gameplay-wise. Not be turned into another cooldown heal (we don't need more of those. Really.).

And it's not just healing, either. My other class, Bard, has so many empty slots (I pre-assigned all of its skills to hotbar) that it feels unrewarding to play. I liked the juggling and strategy - however small - to both my AST and BRD classes. I liked the support skills. They stimulated my brain, kept my hands dancing on the gamepad, kept me from getting bored, and made me feel like I was contributing something to the group that not every class could contribute to.

For games or any hobby, I think it's important to have that satisfaction that you're actually contributing something, that you're good at it or feel good doing it at least. Overcoming challenges and getting good at XYZ is rewarding. But if something is too easy and isn't fulfilling like that, then... it's really not worth doing.

[Rasikko]

As for interview questions.. seems we dont get the opportunity to ask Yoshida questiond directly anymore.. but sure we can talk to other members like the sound director :/.

I wont say they dont play healers. You cant come up with a well working heal formula all willy nilly untested, at least this is what I learned from my RPG maker days. You gotta know a bunch of crap about the damage of mobs and actually take damage to know how strong you want the heals to be. They cant godmode through heal testing.

[Connor]

The thing that gets me, is that the designer of trusts must have designed the ability set for Alphinaud/Urianger, saw that they barely needed to heal and just spammed the same ability over and over for most of the fight, and though ‘Ok this how an ffxiv healer plays, perfect.’

Like, at some point someone must have realized that healing is such a poorly designed ‘mechanic’ in ffxiv.

I don’t get how someone looked at them and said ‘yes, this is quality work, ship it immediately’. Like, you’re laden with super powered oGCDs for healing, if you’re not an Astrologian you have nigh-infinite MP, you aren’t allowed to actively support the party with spells, and you’re only allowed one attack spell and one damage over time spell.

I know it’s cynical but I think they don’t care because it doesn’t really affect subscriptions if people aren’t playing healer long-term. New players who don’t know what the role is like will still subscribe expecting it to be some kind of healer, and by the time they realise and unsubscribe, two other new healers have just begun their subscription. So the healer population at the end of the game (max level) is extremely low, and healer retention is extremely low, but they’re still making their money in the long run, so it’s a non-issue to them. So basically they can just ignore the healing role for as long as they’re getting more subs than they’re dropping

That’s probably why they refuse to acknowledge it and try to explain how it got to this stage. Because if they do, it’ll put potential healer players off subscribing to the game (‘id rather just play an game where I can heal people’). But since they aren’t interested in keeping those players once they‘ve subscribed and bought the game, they don’t intend to actually resolve the issues they’ve been sweeping under the rug.

My post got a bit ‘tinfoil hat’ but with the radio silence from devs since the start of the expansion, conspiracy theories and general speculation are pretty much all we have lol

[GrimGale]

Clearly, healers are designed with a burst model in mind. Meaning they only truly have to use GCD heals when heavy damage comes (which happens at very specific points in an encounter) and they usually use them in tandem with oGCDs. (Meaning that at some point, your oGCDs get powerful enough to not require the use of a GCD for healing without causing overheal)

So during those long stretches of healing downtime, what are healers supposed to do? In the past, they would use cleric stance and deal damage. That was their only way to contribute to the party when healing was not needed.

Now, with most of their damaging abilities being cut, healers still have long periods of healing downtime. To contribute, they cast damaging spells.

Healing downtime has been part of the healer gameplay since the beginning (In more or less mesure, though it began being prominent in 3.0) And yet, the part of our healing kits that allows us to contribute to party progression has been simplified for no reason. Each healing job has an identity regarding their non-healing contribution: WHM is a nuker. Lacks support skills but deals massive personal DPS. SCH is a debuffer. Had a bunch of weakening CDs, like virus, EfaE, Miasma and Shadowflare and now has only CS. And AST has cards which now have lost most of their interesring mechanics.

Encounters still have prominent moments of healing downtime yet our kits lost the complexity ( and arguably the fun) that came from contributing to party progression from taking advantage of those moments.

[Deceptus]

It is a possibility that they think the players' response is not reasonable too. They said they wanted to balance healers before adding a job, so maybe they will only look at (or prioritize) this data. I think this is the case since 5.1, AST numbers have raised and all healers are close to each other (althoug the lower number of AST clears might make the data unreliable).

AST still hasn't recovered from their extreme shortages.


E4S Parses:

Astrologian 11,707
White Mage 36,033
Scholar 30,555

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/29/#class=Any

Hades EX

Astrologian 5,483
White Mage 14,534
Scholar 9,691

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...1049&class=Any

They're still nowhere near the other two.

[Crushnight]

Ast also has a lot of Stigma to get past as well

-Healer stigma in general of being dull 1 nuke 1 DoT for downtime when heals aren't needed.
-New card system is underwhelming
-The reward is not worth the effort over the competition
-Controller issues especially when optimising
-Gameplay doesn't reflect lore

The devs have only addressed one of these, that being the reward/effort with Ast now being the strongest healer but the biggest one keeping Ast numbers so low is the controller issues, this problem needs to be addressed asap yet they will not even acknowledge it and thus the stigma will remain for most of the expansion alienating people before touching it.

[Deceptus]

Ast also has a lot of Stigma to get past as well

-Healer stigma in general of being dull 1 nuke 1 DoT for downtime when heals aren't needed.
-New card system is underwhelming
-The reward is not worth the effort over the competition
-Controller issues especially when optimising
-Gameplay doesn't reflect lore

The devs have only addressed one of these, that being the reward/effort with Ast now being the strongest healer but the biggest one keeping Ast numbers so low is the controller issues, this problem needs to be addressed asap yet they will not even acknowledge it and thus the stigma will remain for most of the expansion alienating people before touching it.

Funny because AST damage rotation was pretty much the framework for the Shadowbringers damage re-work and no AST would have wished their pre-ShB rotation on anyone.

Regarding their lore, I find it funny that basically that their lore is essentially useless now with the current changes.

[Crushnight]

Funny because AST damage rotation was pretty much the framework for the Shadowbringers damage re-work and no AST would have wished their pre-ShB rotation on anyone.

Regarding their lore, I find it funny that basically that their lore is essentially useless now with the current changes.

Yep it is just the combination of it all that really really stinks about current Ast.

Heck our dps rotation in HW(most complex Ast was) was only combust, combust II and malefic II not exactly much but its card system very much mitigated this something the current card system cannot do, it is too simplified and so the current dps rotation sticks out way more.

If SE wanted to simplify dps on healers they needed to have offshoot this with something else that is engaging, yet they didn't do this, they instead decided to simplify everything else as well, lilies are now on timer so no more managing whm cds (really the only positive due to how lilies were generated before but still a simplification), the best the pet system had been and deciding heals or damage for sch was removed(only energy drain back so it has that only), Ast lost old card system and the time manipulation tied to it. All healers lost something in tandem with simplified dps rotations, this shouldn't have happened, the thought process should have been ok we are simplifying dps on healers how can we improve engagement elsewhere on each healer this is where the devs have gone wrong and where they need to see what they have done to the healer role.