Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[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."

[Hyperia]

To fix healing and have healers lean more into a more focused role on healing rather than DPS, they will have to totally change their mentality on encounter design. Right now its all about memorization and repetition. Most content is predictable, in some cases, laughably so. I cant do it as I have a horrible memory but if I could memorize 15 minutes worth of content, it would be fairly low impact. I would like to see rezzing be made instantly and then a 60 second CD timer, more AOEs but not too harsh. Near removal of all one shot kill mechanics and replace them with DPS reduction mechanics or slows, a long ticking dot, etc. As it stands now, the encounters move so fast, its just not practical to use a GCD heal because I'll get caught in some AOE or other mechanic and die, same with rezzing. There overuse of instant kill mechanics, falling off, ROUND platforms, etc. Its time to change things up and square platforms are not a solution either. Every time I see a raid or trail boss now, it feels like the developer is saying "hey look at this cool raid I made, can I go do the next Ultimate now?"

So really... I don't think healing is the problem, the jobs are good and pretty fun... its the ENCOUNTER design that's the problem. They have forgotten the most important thing in encounter design... FUN. Start with fun and then make it challenging, instead they make it challenging and hope its fun. Well... its not. Story mode raids and trials should be easy and fun for the casuals, hard (Yes add a new difficulty mode, call it hard) and savage for people who want a challenge with ultimate being around for people who want to cry tears of blood.

[Semirhage]

I'd suspect it's partially because they don't know how to incentivize healing. They think stripping damage spells will do it; the problem is more meta than that. It's because they understand how damage dealing works on a basic level, but not healing. Healing has a shelf life. The first benchmark is making sure everyone's topped off, then you start gaining skill by shaving that down. After all, it theoretically doesn't matter if the fight ends with everyone at 1 HP as long as they're alive. On either end of the skill spectrum, there's a point where healing more is just a waste of time.

This is a massive difference from DPS. With few exceptions (such as pushing phases too early and causing party wipes with some sort of early push punishment), doing more damage is always a good thing. You're finished with damage when the entire encounter ends. The problem here is that the job designers are treating healing as if it were functionally identical to damage; doing ever more and more is a "good" thing. This is wrong. We keep telling them this. They aren't listening.

So really... I don't think healing is the problem, the jobs are good and pretty fun... its the ENCOUNTER design that's the problem.

Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is not encounter design.

[BlitzAceRush]

It kind of is though, there are several ways they could tackle this problem, if they even see it as a problem. They could keep healers with only one main DPS spell but if encounters had you healing 80% of the time and DPS 20% suddenly "Glare Glare Glare" isn't as big of an issue. Of course they could also give them more DSP tools, and keep fights as they are, but seems pretty clear that's not something they want to do.

[Saefinn]

Whilst yes changing encounter design would be a way of making healing more interesting if you're having to heal more, say, 80% of the time, because those glares/malefics/broils are broken up.

There are however, a few issues:
- If they only do it for future encounters, your content in ARR, HW, SB and ShB would still suffer from existing healing issues. With people having to level, people running 50/60/70, Levelling, Trials, Alliance Raid and Normal Raid roulettes, you're going to get this content. This is daily content you do for exp or tomestones. So for a lot of people, that can be a chunk of the content you're playing.
- If they retroactively update all encounters, you're talking about a laborious and long winded and heavy solution.
- If they manage it, we still have solo content and solo duties. As a SCH it'd be mitigated with the option for SMN, but if you're a WHM or AST and that's the job you're progressing through, you've still got a dull take.
- You'll have varying levels of skill of players still, if you want it at a level the higher end of players can still enjoy, you end up compromising those on the entry level of skill, which could make the role less accessible. The knock on effect here is, you may also find yourself doing runs with less experienced healers who struggle.

[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.