Patch 5.2 Feedback

[Sebazy]

That's hard to say really. My first guess is that they are still stuck in the mentality of how healers were played in ARR.

But perhaps a more likely banana skin could be with how testing, balancing and QA is handled. My suspicion is that SE simply have a large pool of testers shared between multiple projects with people getting assigned through fairly random tickets. So there's a pretty good chance that alterations and balancing choices are getting validated by people that potentially don't have a particularly deep understanding of the game beyond 'can I keep my group alive?' and 'is my character's head attached on the right way?'. They don't look at SCH landing in a new expansion with no AoE yet again and go 'hey yeah, this is bad right?' as they likely don't know any better.

[KDSilver]

That's hard to say really. My first guess is that they are still stuck in the mentality of how healers were played in ARR.

I remember at the end of the 4.0 area, when Yoshi P stated that they'd give scholar more raw healing capacity because "whm heals everything while scholar dps", totally ignoring how powerful skills like indom/excog/fey union/critlo were in the healing contribution.
So sometimes, yeah, I wonder... I'd even say you're probably right.

[ForteNightshade]

That's hard to say really. My first guess is that they are still stuck in the mentality of how healers were played in ARR.

But perhaps a more likely banana skin could be with how testing, balancing and QA is handled. My suspicion is that SE simply have a large pool of testers shared between multiple projects with people getting assigned through fairly random tickets. So there's a pretty good chance that alterations and balancing choices are getting validated by people that potentially don't have a particularly deep understanding of the game beyond 'can I keep my group alive?' and 'is my character's head attached on the right way?'. They don't look at SCH landing in a new expansion with no AoE yet again and go 'hey yeah, this is bad right?' as they likely don't know any better.

I think this is precisely where their problems lie. The dev team focuses too much on players who think Cure III is an upgrade on Cure II and "accessibility" instead of trying to develop a middle ground. That, and they seem utterly terrified of making content require more dedicated healing. It's strange because we see them make efforts towards the latter hence why heals are actually weaker than they were in Stormblood. Yet they tune fights lower or don't consider healers have so many tools nowadays that small reductions, especially to GCD heals, won't make a dent beyond large dungeon pulls. It just feels like the whole design philosophy for healers is a confusing mess.