Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Saefinn]

Wait, why are you framing it that way?

If you go by what you put for tanks and DPS, then more accurately:

Healers can dps/dot/hot/cc/shield/buff/cure/raise/troll people with rescue (or save them)

Well then you'd more accurately have for tanks:
dps/buff/cure/dots/mitigation/hot/etc.

But if we laboured on that then we'd miss the point.

The attitude seems to be:
Healers should heal not do anything else. The devs have made comments multiple times to reflect they'd rather healers to have more healing focus and have stripped our non-healing capabilities and added to our healing capabilities. And there is some level of community attitude that healers shouldn't DPS they should only heal, that's their job.

But the reality is, it's a team effort and jobs can contribute in different ways. As a Paladin, when a healer has struggled, I've helped with Clemency. In one particular case where the healer had connection issues, he offered to drop, I told him to carry on because I could help with the healing.
As an off-tank, if my main tank is struggling I can help mitigate damage.
As a tank if a DPS is taking incoming damage I can help mitigate their damage and also heal them.
As a RDM, if people are dying, I can help out the healers with raises. If it's really bad I can help with the Cures.
As a DNC/MCH/BRD I have skills that mitigate damage, not just the tank, which applies to the whole party.
As a SMN, I can also mitigate damage with the right pet.
Heck, if you sustain aggro, in an emergency you could technically off tank on MNK, which I've seen happen.
There's lots of ways people can contribute outside of the scope of their role and it's good to have, because it's more dynamic.

With healers it seems the attitude is for them not to?

Yet, they have the tools to do so, even though those tools are gradually being stripped, despite the fact we have this big gap where we can be using them and it's really unengaging to.

Whereas technically all a tank needs to do to be a good tank is take damage and keep others from being damaged. They could do have a simple "1, 2" DPS rotation and still achieve their duties. Yet, they get a more engaging set of DPS skills to work with, not as engaged as a full DPS, but tanks have focuses normally DPS's don't and I feel this is where we should be with healers. In fact, we /used/ to be there with healers.

[linayar]

dps? a single spell, fortunatly for solo stuff
dot/hot/cc(lol)/shield/buff/cure/raise/rescue = healer gameplay

Have we got dps/magic rotations? nope
Have we got some tanks skills? nope

But dps and tanks have some healers's gameplay, that's just what i wanted to put forward.

Tank and DPS don't really have healer rotations either and (self) sustain is just as much tank gameplay as it is healer's (to a greater extent). If anything, healer has more DPS rotation than DPS/tank has healer rotation.

Red Mage and Paladin are the closest to being healer, but I don't think either are expected to heal in most circumstances (unless there is a weird thing going on in their rotation that I don't know about which would raise their DPS/whatever by incorporating those healing spells more frequently). And even then, for paladin, healing would still be true to that version of a tank.

The attitude seems to be:
Healers should heal not do anything else. The devs have made comments multiple times to reflect they'd rather healers to have more healing focus and have stripped our non-healing capabilities and added to our healing capabilities. And there is some level of community attitude that healers shouldn't DPS they should only heal, that's their job.

I think that's just the same attitude that some people have over DPS not using their non-DPS abilities. Simply put, if the devs didn't want you to use them, they wouldn't make those abilities available. Even with the latest change to Scholar, they still buffed part of its DPS to compensate for the nerf of one ability that shares resources with healing abilities.

If anything, the fact that they gave healers so much DPS with so "few" abilities just shows that the devs want healers to deal damage (while still not losing focus on healing being the main thing).

[tdb]

Tank and DPS don't really have healer rotations either and (self) sustain is just as much tank gameplay as it is healer's (to a greater extent). If anything, healer has more DPS rotation than DPS/tank has healer rotation.

Tanks and dps get to keep a 100% uptime on their dps rotation though. Healers spend maybe 20% of their time on heals and 80% on the very barebones dps rotation.

If anything, the fact that they gave healers so much DPS with so "few" abilities just shows that the devs want healers to deal damage (while still not losing focus on healing being the main thing).

Then why do they design content with so little need to actually heal? Why can I solo heal Puppets' Bunker, a duty with two healers per party, and still spend half my time spamming glare?

[Ultimatecalibur]

Then why do they design content with so little need to actually heal? Why can I solo heal Puppets' Bunker, a duty with two healers per party, and still spend half my time spamming glare?

Because fight design and job design are so disconnected. The designers seems to be checking if content can be cleared and not how content feels to clear. Content seems to be designed for dps enjoyment rather than tank and healer enjoyment.

Look at Puppets Bunker: only boss 2 needs 3 tanks, bosses 3 and 4 need only 1 tank and the first boss only has tank busters to enforce tank inclusion.

The natural healing distribution of one healer watches the tank while the other healer focuses on the dps doesn't really work if 2 of the parties are participating in the fight as 0 tank: 2 healer: 6 dps comps.

[tdb]

Because fight design and job design are so disconnected. The designers seems to be checking if content can be cleared and not how content feels to clear. Content seems to be designed for dps enjoyment rather than tank and healer enjoyment.

I honestly don't know what they're thinking with content design. On the one hand it feels like they're designing it so that even healers with really low skill (think cure spam) can heal enough and successfully clear it. But then they also make the fights chock full of AoEs which require decent situational awareness to avoid and will easily get you killed if you fail to avoid them. It's hard to believe someone with enough skill to avoid the AoEs is simultaneously so inept at healing that they'd be required to heal on most GCDs. And if the entire party is bad then the result is usually a raisefest rather than a healing spree.

I do like the AoE avoidance part because being a heal turret is boring too. But it feels that they're leaning a bit too much that way.

Look at Puppets Bunker: only boss 2 needs 3 tanks, bosses 3 and 4 need only 1 tank and the first boss only has tank busters to enforce tank inclusion.

The natural healing distribution of one healer watches the tank while the other healer focuses on the dps doesn't really work if 2 of the parties are participating in the fight as 0 tank: 2 healer: 6 dps comps.

I thought the first boss also does autos against each tank? Anyway, even those fights with a separate boss per party can be solo healed easily if the party is not full of total idiots.

[linayar]

Tanks and dps get to keep a 100% uptime on their dps rotation though. Healers spend maybe 20% of their time on heals and 80% on the very barebones dps rotation.

That's just the nature of the role. Healing targets allies while dealing damage and tanking target enemies.

Then why do they design content with so little need to actually heal? Why can I solo heal Puppets' Bunker, a duty with two healers per party, and still spend half my time spamming glare?

Because dealing damage is the main point of any encounter. Healing being the main thing simply means, as a healer, you focus healing over dealing damage as needed.

[Saefinn]

That's just the nature of the role. Healing targets allies while dealing damage and tanking target enemies.

Because dealing damage is the main point of any encounter. Healing being the main thing simply means, as a healer, you focus healing over dealing damage as needed.

Then make that 80% more interesting. Spamming Glare or Broil or Malefic for the vast majority of it is dull-as-heck.

But people don't want that because they will just complain that the healer in their party is DPSing too much and should be healing especially if that healer makes a mistake. Hey, I'm all for ignoring those people, but the devs would need to as well. Judging by Yoshi P's comments this time around I don't think they are given the aim behind the SCH change was for people to rely on aetherflow more for healing and less on Energy Drain.

Either, healing needs to be frequent and engaging enough to be fun, or our DPS needs to be engaging enough, or a bit of both. Me? I'd rather a bit of both, because it's a game the favours DPS and it's a healer role.

Infrequent healing and dull & unengaging DPS is the worst of both worlds if you're a healer player. Hey, DPS and tanks might not mind so much, but they get to enjoy their preferred role.

What's frustrating is they had this balance right IMO. But they decided to change it.

[Semirhage]

What's frustrating is that had this balance right IMO. But they decided to change it.

I'm trying to figure out what the root cause of this was. It's likely a list of reasons. Heavensward design was the best for this (WHM needed something extra to manage, but that bridge has been crossed). And then out of seemingly nowhere, job design directly was like, "no wait, let's double the heals and halve the damage spells, they'll love that!"

Was there some invisible complaining Sylphie contingent in the Japanese forums that hated everything about Heavensward design?

[Saefinn]

I'm trying to figure out what the root cause of this was. It's likely a list of reasons. Heavensward design was the best for this (WHM needed something extra to manage, but that bridge has been crossed). And then out of seemingly nowhere, job design directly was like, "no wait, let's double the heals and halve the damage spells, they'll love that!"

Was there some invisible complaining Sylphie contingent in the Japanese forums that hated everything about Heavensward design?

When you think about it, Dark Knight's got a similar treatment, it was a Heavensward job, it was still fine in SB and they lowered its skill floor, but now, it's a shadow of its former self IMO, but at least I can still enjoy playing it.

But the impression I get is that they don't understand how this particular balance works when it comes to healing. Yoshi P's reading of the patch notes I think is telling of this:

On SCH's Energy drain adjustments for Patch 5.4
The dev team wants you to use Aetherflow more on healing. To compensate on the nerf they buffed the DoTs.

This helps confirm thoughts I've had in a previous thread before, where I've suggested that the devs are looking at the wrong numbers. It feels like they can see, for example, healers are DPSing for 70% of a run and healing for 30% and want to balance those percentages better. But they think this is resolved by reducing our DPS abilities and adding to our healing abilities. Maybe they thought it was because people were getting too hung up on their DPS rotations? By as we know, it just means we're more efficient and it's more boring, because we don't have anything much to break the monotony. And if anything means we DPS /more/.

But Yoshi's comments here are, well, backwards. It seems they think creating a disincentive to DPS means that you will save more abilities for healing. But if, say, we had 20 DPS skills, that 70%/30% balance would remain more or less the same. Because people are taking the same damage and the efficiency of our healing spells remains just as effective. I think people erroneously believe that it's people's DPS drive that means healers don't heal as much as people think they should. In addition to that, as we've seen from some complaint threads, people think somebody who lets you drop below 50% isn't healing enough, so these players tend to misunderstand how efficient healing works too. But maybe I can see how when looking at it from "these people are too driven by DPS" that you might see the logic in "we'll disincentivise their DPS aspect so they focus more on healing".


So I think it makes sense that people more erroneously think that healers are too driven by their DPS to focus on their healing, especially if that healer makes a mistake. But the question that doesn't seem to be considered is on why healers seem so focused on DPS? I mean, we've seen the comments like, "if you want to DPS so much, why don't you play a DPS job?"

Of course, most of us who hang out on the healer forum probably would say something along the lines of "it's because it's more efficient, we only need to heal you enough to keep you alive and this game is scripted meaning damage is predictable and as a result we have nothing else more to do than DPS."

[Dyvid]

I'm trying to figure out what the root cause of this was. It's likely a list of reasons. Heavensward design was the best for this (WHM needed something extra to manage, but that bridge has been crossed). And then out of seemingly nowhere, job design directly was like, "no wait, let's double the heals and halve the damage spells, they'll love that!"

Was there some invisible complaining Sylphie contingent in the Japanese forums that hated everything about Heavensward design?

It all comes back to Cleric stance and the group that didn't want to DPS. 3.0 saw the expectation and almost requirements from the community to stance dance and DPS, which alienated players to a degree. So in 4.0 SE removed stance dance in order to help with DPS stress but people still complained so in 5.0 SE removed DPSing. Fine, if people don't want to DPS then give healers mechanics based around raid utility abilities.