Next new job better be heals

[Liam_Harper]

Still with how they’ve done Healers thus far do we trust them with a 4th?

GNB isn't bad to be fair.

They went with the whole "we didn't release a new tank so we can balance the other 3" excuse for Stormblood and DRK ended up in an absolute mess of a state, while War grew to be bonkers OP. This expansion tanks are boring to play, but balanced performance-wise and the new tank is decent.

It's clear they did NOT hold back a healer in order to put all their focus into healer design. That's nonsense, they simply didn't bother with healer at all.

[Billythepancake]

I am thrilled to see that I am not the only one utterly dissatisfied with the current state of our healer roles.

Where have you been? people have been upset with healer design since 5.0 dropped.

[Morningstar1337]

Where have you been? people have been upset with healer design since 5.0 dropped.

And Tank design, apprently.

[Saefinn]

Maybe it’s just cynicism but does anyone else worry that they actually are just going to ignore all the healer feedback they’ve been given?
Then they’ll release a new healer next expansion with all the same problems as the ones we have now (1 DoT, one DPS filler, and a whole bunch of healing GCDs/spells that don’t see much use) and the cycle will just repeat?

Maybe it’s just their refusal to at least acknowledge the feedback that makes me find it hard to believe they’re taking it on board. I mean, regardless of what you want for healers, whether it’s green dps or pure healers, I don’t feel like they’ve really tried to think about what people are saying in regards to any kind of healing feedback, at least since Shadowbringers began.

I’d love to see a new healer with the next expansion of course; even if it was something I wasn’t interested in personally I like the idea of a new job bringing something new to the role, even if it’s just in terms of working with them rather than playing as one. But then it’s like, with all the problems healers have, and the fact that we’ve not really had any sort of acceptance of these problems, makes me worry for the future of the role both long-term and short-term

I am very much concerned that this might happen, the lack of well, acknowledgement doesn’t help at all. Thing is they can satisfy more than 1 camp of people if different healers were better suited to appealing to different things people get out of the role, like we used to. Those who sre singing praises for the design could have the 4th healer cater to their needs, which is what they should have done in the first place. Because if they retroactively do it, there will be people who will complain their job got changed regardless of whether the design principles they liked are moved into a new job whilst the existing ones evolve from their older design principles.

My other concern is seeing a recent reddit poll where after tallying casual and hardcore players the biggest issue people feel they have with their job is...their position in relation to meta. I know balance has always been a big complaint and I hate to think that SE is putting balance on a pedestal and letting it ruin job design because of it.

Balance only needs to be “good enough” for the content. It makes me wonder how many people who answered the poll are pulling off numbers for meta to be important. Because as I’ve understood it, it’s a small percentage of people able to hit those margins. So I don’t get why people care about something that really isn’t going to affect them, at most they’ll have to be better at their job than the next guy to give an equivalent output...which is to be expected because classes and jobs in an MMORPG will vary in difficulty...which is a good thing. Because some people want something easier, some people want something more challenging.

[Truen]

I am very much concerned that this might happen, the lack of well, acknowledgement doesn’t help at all. Thing is they can satisfy more than 1 camp of people if different healers were better suited to appealing to different things people get out of the role, like we used to. Those who sre singing praises for the design could have the 4th healer cater to their needs, which is what they should have done in the first place. Because if they retroactively do it, there will be people who will complain their job got changed regardless of whether the design principles they liked are moved into a new job whilst the existing ones evolve from their older design principles.

My other concern is seeing a recent reddit poll where after tallying casual and hardcore players the biggest issue people feel they have with their job is...their position in relation to meta. I know balance has always been a big complaint and I hate to think that SE is putting balance on a pedestal and letting it ruin job design because of it.

Balance only needs to be “good enough” for the content. It makes me wonder how many people who answered the poll are pulling off numbers for meta to be important. Because as I’ve understood it, it’s a small percentage of people able to hit those margins. So I don’t get why people care about something that really isn’t going to affect them, at most they’ll have to be better at their job than the next guy to give an equivalent output...which is to be expected because classes and jobs in an MMORPG will vary in difficulty...which is a good thing. Because some people want something easier, some people want something more challenging.

Until streamers and high profile individuals recognize, and sympathize, with our position they'll absolutely continue to ignore us. Why wouldn't they? I mean, this expansion is arguably more than 1/2 way over and they've done nothing.

[Liam_Harper]

Maybe it’s just cynicism but does anyone else worry that they actually are just going to ignore all the healer feedback they’ve been given?
Then they’ll release a new healer next expansion with all the same problems as the ones we have now (1 DoT, one DPS filler, and a whole bunch of healing GCDs/spells that don’t see much use) and the cycle will just repeat?

Definitely.

They're fine making things easier, nerfing them or pruning them and their new mentality seems to be accessibility, but it's extremely rare they make something that already exists more difficult. It's like they tried it in HW with things like Alex Savage, EX or Crafting, lost some players from over-doing it and went full-on panic mode from that point onwards and are terrified of asking anything too challenging from us anymore. It's just been getting steadily easier and easier with every whine or complaint.

There's a good chance they'll take the drop in healer numbers to signify "it's still too difficult", reducing responsibility and complexity even further. We've already been refused Savage 4 mans because it'd be "too hard on the healer" when we're here begging for things to heal and they've been pouring Piety all over everything like they think we just can't spam heals enough. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

[MPNZ]

Where have you been? people have been upset with healer design since 5.0 dropped.

Actually, it's been since the numbers and potencies were released (officially, and unofficially)...

[Lastelli]

My other concern is seeing a recent reddit poll where after tallying casual and hardcore players the biggest issue people feel they have with their job is...their position in relation to meta. I know balance has always been a big complaint and I hate to think that SE is putting balance on a pedestal and letting it ruin job design because of it.

Job design is ruined not because they want all jobs to be perfectly balanced. It's ruined because they want to make all jobs easy and accessible. Accessibility is why the healers' dps kit was simplified. Balance is easily achievable even with very diverse jobs and toolkits, you just have to tweak potencies and keep arbitrary synergies like the old disembowel and crit stacking to a minimum. There's no point arguing about balance, that's not the problem here. The devs simply lack imagination, they don't know how they can make healers more interesting given the current structure of the game, especially when it comes to end game content. They keep giving them more and more oGCD heals and obviously they had to nerf their potencies so that healing savage content isn't a total joke and removed some dps skills to limit button bloat.

[Saefinn]

Job design is ruined not because they want all jobs to be perfectly balanced. It's ruined because they want to make all jobs easy and accessible. Accessibility is why the healers' dps kit was simplified. Balance is easily achievable even with very diverse jobs and toolkits, you just have to tweak potencies and keep arbitrary synergies like the old disembowel and crit stacking to a minimum. There's no point arguing about balance, that's not the problem here. The devs simply lack imagination, they don't know how they can make healers more interesting given the current structure of the game, especially when it comes to end game content. They keep giving them more and more oGCD heals and obviously they had to nerf their potencies so that healing savage content isn't a total joke and removed some dps skills to limit button bloat.

The impression I've got is that it's not tied to one issue. The balance is involved still, given the huge emphasis on it, perhaps their way of addressing balance is not imaginative either, but homogenisation is not a symptom of trying to simplify a role, because they could still have a complicated healer role and still homogenise. Homogenisation is one of the easier methods for balance. Balance has been a good part of job feedback I've heard of the years and people are seemingly obsessed with how well their job performs versus the next.

Whilst balance is achievable in other ways, I do not agree that it is "easily" done, because it's not just adjusting potencies and synergies. If you're fighting against something like a striking dummy, that might be enough. But when you throw in game mechanics, how jobs are able to handle them and how jobs functionally work and so on that can throw balance out.

When it comes to accessibility, my argument has been that healers were already accessible, especially WHM, WHM IMO was always a great healer for beginners. The game has always loosely accommodated the idea of varied difficulty in jobs and DPS jobs still have it, but seemingly healers have lose it.

To summarise, homogenisation makes it easier to balance whilst simplification makes it more accessible. But I agree, maybe their handling of these issues hasn't been the most imaginative or the best way of handling them.Should we blame the idea of balance? Definitely not, but I feel it gets overemphasised as an issue when there's other things that make jobs great that're being diluted. While balance is achievable without diluting them, I'd rather sacrifice a level of balance if it means the devs find it easier/more achievable to give me fun and engaging jobs.


With regards to button bloat, also something they could have worked around:
WHM: More dual purpose spells, like how Assize has a dual purpose
SCH: More spells get enhanced by Emergency & Deployment Tactics to give them wider functionality, perhaps for DPS and utility, EG. Emergency Tactics + Biolysis = all of Biolysis' damage hits at once (like Thunder procs on BLM). Bring back Selene and give her more useful abilities. SMN already has a system where skills change depending on what pet you have.
AST: there's space for the old card system still. To fix the problems of the old card system, use the current Minor Arcana system. Because this is how we now deal with cards we don't want and it works.

[SamRF]

Job design is ruined not because they want all jobs to be perfectly balanced. It's ruined because they want to make all jobs easy and accessible. Accessibility is why the healers' dps kit was simplified. Balance is easily achievable even with very diverse jobs and toolkits, you just have to tweak potencies and keep arbitrary synergies like the old disembowel and crit stacking to a minimum. There's no point arguing about balance, that's not the problem here. The devs simply lack imagination, they don't know how they can make healers more interesting given the current structure of the game, especially when it comes to end game content. They keep giving them more and more oGCD heals and obviously they had to nerf their potencies so that healing savage content isn't a total joke and removed some dps skills to limit button bloat.

While it's true what you're saying about accessibility, I think you're underestimating how difficult it is to balance jobs. Just look at other games, balance is all over the place usually, especially if you compare it to FFXIV where balance seems really good comparibly to the point it looks like an obsession from the devs.

It likely takes a good amount of rescources (time) to make sure all classes are balanced (you have to consider different kind of content and group composition), this is why there are always job adjustments in later patches ( the case in every MMO).

Balance also doesn't seem like something you can just throw more developers at for it to increase. Can get in too many cooks in the kitchen situation there it seems to me, which is why balance always seems to be a difficulty in such games.

If you were to homogenize jobs, it would likely be much easier for them to balance the jobs without too much testing and tweaking so I think it does contribute to the "ruination" of the role.

edit: Imo adding a little more complexity to healer dps rotation seems like the easiest way to make the role more interesting while keeping the balance (and accessibility as well for content with soft or no dps checks).