Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Vickii]

That MCH dps who jumps into savage is equally able to ruin a pull as a badly as a healer can. So they repeatedly fail mechanics causing the healers to have to raise constantly, losing MP and losing party dps. Or the MCH repeatedly wipes the group due to punishing one shot mechanics (like failing to pick up orbs or hitting their spike on E5s, for example), or the MCH has no clue about their rotation and can barely produce the DPS to beat enrage, which is particularly tight at minimum ilevel.

Dumbing down healer rotations isn’t a solution to the problem. It’s about practice and knowing your job.

The MCH is going to stop the group beating an enrage and it might make it harder on other people. But it doesn’t just kill the run in the way bad healers do. You can let him die and keep progressing as 7.

Where as if 2 healers die at the first mechanic and it’s game over. There’s no real comparison here, healers are more integral to the game and need to be at a higher standard. And too many of them are not good enough now, let alone with more complicated rotations.

[Semirhage]

And too many of them are not good enough now, let alone with more complicated rotations.

Making the healer role so boring you want to gouge your eyes out only encourages people who know what they're doing to bail. It also attracts the sort of player who will eat mechanics and die. It's a cycle that feeds itself.

[Vahlnir]

Making the healer role so boring you want to gouge your eyes out only encourages people who know what they're doing to bail. It also attracts the sort of player who will eat mechanics and die. It's a cycle that feeds itself.

Yeah, since Shadowbringers launched I have noticed an overall decline in quality healers. There's still plenty out there, don't get me wrong, but this "ease of access" really took its toll on the role. Tanks? Not so much. If anything they are thriving right now. But I know someone who mained a healer for years and switched to MCH with Shadowbringers. They loved AST, but with the complexity gone, the game has lost another quality healer. Sadly, they are far from alone.

[Saefinn]

Yeah, since Shadowbringers launched I have noticed an overall decline in quality healers. There's still plenty out there, don't get me wrong, but this "ease of access" really took its toll on the role. Tanks? Not so much. If anything they are thriving right now. But I know someone who mained a healer for years and switched to MCH with Shadowbringers. They loved AST, but with the complexity gone, the game has lost another quality healer. Sadly, they are far from alone.

I mean, I've been disincentivised from healing and I'm a career healer. I've mained a healer in every MMO I've played. I love healing. But my joy for it in this game has dwindled. So rather than punish myself playing the role I love, for the most part, I end up playing a different role. I want to go back to maining a healer and have tried enjoying it and there's only very limited content where I can. And I know there's people who feel the same way. I've had a WHM co-healer since ARR, she mains MCH now.

And really it just boils down to, once you're an experienced enough of a healer, it becomes dull to play, unless you're somebody who doesn't mind spamming 1 or 2 buttons.

The MCH is going to stop the group beating an enrage and it might make it harder on other people. But it doesn’t just kill the run in the way bad healers do. You can let him die and keep progressing as 7.

Where as if 2 healers die at the first mechanic and it’s game over. There’s no real comparison here, healers are more integral to the game and need to be at a higher standard. And too many of them are not good enough now, let alone with more complicated rotations.

With our super dull basic DPS rotations now what you're describing is still an issue. I still see rant threads on these forums appear about healers who DPS. Spamming Broil or Glare and having lots of oGCD heals is about as dumbed down as you're going to get.

Maybe complexity isn't the issue.

But let's break it down. This game measures performance based on how much DPS contribution you offer to the group. This is because of DPS checks, this is because of zerg mechanics, this is because of enrage timers, this is because of the ability to skip certain mechanics or to move to the next phase to avoid repeat mechanics.
This means it is better for each job, regardless of role, that they learn to contribute as much DPS as they can.

What does this mean for healer players? Of course it means they'll try to contribute DPS.
Any new healer will likely be told they need to DPS.
Healers in dungeons who aren't DPSing will be told they need to DPS.
Those healers will try to learn to juggle healing and DPS.
This mean the healer might:
- Misjudge how quickly somebody's health is dropped before they heal them
- They tunnel vision into what they're doing and miss their cue to heal
- They're not quick enough to react to their cue.
- They overthink it

This also applies to well experienced healers, because those healers will be trying to keep their DPS up as high as possible as good practice. This means they will let your health drop low on purpose to optimise their healing. That means they too might make mistakes, because they might misjudge a mechanic, or again how quickly somebody's health is dropping or that person standing in an AoE (heck I watch to see if people stand in AoE's, especially BLM's, some BLM's will each AoE's responsibly too to maximize their DPS).
Furthermore to add to that, each healer job has an ability that is more efficient the lower a person's health drops. For SCH it's Excogitation, which is triggered when health drops below a certain threshold. For WHM it's Benediction, which heals 100% of a person's HP. For AST it's Essential Dignity, which is more potent the lower the target's health is. In addition to this, if I have Earthly Star up I will let my party's health drop on purpose because it's a really potent AoE heal.


The thing is, it's not a problem that will go away whilst the game's design relies so much on good rDPS and that optimised play means higher rDPS and optimising your play being beneficial for clearing content. Because people are always going to try and get better and better at what they do. And it's going to affect both experienced and inexperienced healers. Heck, /I/ still make these mistakes, because I've misjudged a tank's equipment before, I might have a string of having good tanks and then find one that's not using their cooldowns as well and that breaks my rhythm.

So maybe, let's not punish healers by making their job dull as hell because sometimes you might die. Because as we've found, that happens regardless of whether the role has a little complexity in its down time, or is dull as heck.

[Thoosa]

Have you ever tried savage? There’s plenty of mechanics where if any one job makes a mistake, it’s a wipe and the run is ruined. Also you won’t beat enrage if one dps dies and stays dead, unless the rest of the party can cover that dps, which is possible but isn’t that frequent, because everyone else has to be bang on their rotation and (to a certain extent have the gear) to cover the dps loss.

If the tanks die on first mechanic it’s a wipe to, so it’s not exclusive to healers, the dps simply can’t pick up the tanking and carry on the fight.

You forget there are plenty of bad tanks who don’t use CDS correctly, die to tank busters. don’t position the boss correctly (confusing the party positions and causing wipes this way) and don’t have the dps to beat enrages when dps is lacking from the dps job side. Extra dps from the tank can be the difference between enrage and a clear.

And from the dps side? If they can’t do their rotation and optimise, the party will struggle to beat enrage. If they stand in aoes and are always dying, the group won’t beat enrage, etc etc.

If the healers are expected to have a higher standard, then why not the other roles to? Healers are only one part of the machine.

Bad players are not just exclusive to healers.

[MorionQ]

I may be crazy, but I’ve not witnessed this drop in the healer population that seems to be the main concern here. Roulettes still primarily give out tank bonuses, as always. I still adore my SCH.

One detail that jumped out to me from this thread was the idea that if everything is perfect, healers don’t have to heal and in ShB’s that means healers, in general, are bored since our DPS is so simple. From my understanding, this was always the intention from the get go; healer DPS is a bonus addition in group content, never required. I always thought there was a break between dev vision and player vision regarding this since all of us who heal are trained to weave exponential amounts of DPS over our actual purpose because everyone runs off of being as time efficient as possible with ALL content.

[Vahlnir]

I may be crazy, but I’ve not witnessed this drop in the healer population that seems to be the main concern here. Roulettes still primarily give out tank bonuses, as always. I still adore my SCH.

One detail that jumped out to me from this thread was the idea that if everything is perfect, healers don’t have to heal and in ShB’s that means healers, in general, are bored since our DPS is so simple. From my understanding, this was always the intention from the get go; healer DPS is a bonus addition in group content, never required. I always thought there was a break between dev vision and player vision regarding this since all of us who heal are trained to weave exponential amounts of DPS over our actual purpose because everyone runs off of being as time efficient as possible with ALL content.

Oh, there's not a lack of healers. It has been my observation, however, that there has been a bit of a drop in GOOD healers. Not enough to make a catastrophic impact but it's noticeable, at least to me. Getting into healing has never been easier, but a fair number of veteran healers are either unsatisfied but keep playing, or they have moved on to other jobs/roles entirely. We've probably got more healers now, but we have also lost a good bit of talent as a result of the streamlining.

[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).

[Gobio]

Just saying the most well known job to die, even for non FF14 players is dragoon and this is not a healing job.

[Laphicet]

I may be crazy, but I’ve not witnessed this drop in the healer population that seems to be the main concern here. Roulettes still primarily give out tank bonuses, as always. I still adore my SCH.

My stupidly long queue times on anything but healer say otherwise.

Adventurer in need is a bit broken, it looks for tanks before everything else and thus you will see Tank AIN more in spite of the fact that healers are noticeably rarer and most often the last role to fill when queueing for most things, or that's the case on crystal at least (it checks TANK then HEALER then DPS when it comes to filling slots, and thus gets stuck on filling the tank slot more in spite of healer taking longer to fill, and with how it gets locked into a role for a set period of time regardless of what fills, it ends up giving the illusion that tanks are rarer while actually trying to queue for stuff tells a very different message, as I have come to learn while trying to level DPS classes over the last month).