Quote Originally Posted by linayar View Post
That's a fair opinion, but do you think that the game's direction agrees with you? And to be fair, fun is subjective, while there is some objective measure toward making things easier to reduce potential conflict between different types of player. That said, I'm not saying that simplifying tank/healer has to be because of this one specific reason. There could be others or even a combination of factors. Nevertheless, there seems to be an overarching theme from making it easier to complete solo quest to simplifying crafting/gathering, etc.

So when you say that it's worked in the past, the devs might not agree because they probably saw a problem to fix.
I mean the devs aren't infallible, sure it may or may not follow the direction they want to take it. The general feeling has been there seems to be a disparity between how the devs think healers should be played and how healers actually play them. I feel Yoshi P's reading of the patch notes I think illustrates some of their misunderstanding when it comes to addressing healer issues.

He said that the nerf to SCH's Energy Drain was because they want healers to reserve their Aetherflow stacks for healing spells and not for DPS. The reason people asked for Energy Drain back after they removed it in 5.0 is because they have too many stacks to spend. But in reality, people will still use Energy Drain, it'll just means their DPS output will be lower, but is still better DPS than not using it. So it doesn't actually address the problem they've set out to do. I've put earlier in this thread how they can make adjustments that'd achieve what they set out to do.

I have found from their comments on healing and the changes they've made to healing shows they are focusing on the wrong numbers. Because they seemingly want healers to well, heal more. Which is absolutely fine, I mean if the balance is 70% DPS and 30% healing, you might find that's a bad balance for a healer role. Their way of addressing it has been to add more healing spells and reduce or dis-incentivise the DPS aspect. But that's not how it works because healing becomes /more/ efficient and exacerbates that problems and DPS just becomes more frequent and even duller (which is what has happened).


And I think a part of this comes out of the perception that this balance is because healers try to focus on their DPS too much. When in reality, the way to make people heal more and DPS less is to either increase the healing requirement or reduce healing efficiency. The problem with doing it that way is that it'd raise the skill floor, therefore make healing less accessible, which I don't think they want to do either. Which comes back to "maybe we should do more in our downtime" instead. Changes nothing about the healing, but breaks up any monotony, respects existing game design and we already know it works, because it's how the game was already designed.

But the devs do listen to player feedback on job changes and job direction and accept that they don't always get it right either and the forums is one place they look to for this feedback, because we have seen changes come out of it.

The same has applied to other jobs where they find a change or direction doesn't go down too well and they change it. For example, in Heavensward the direction they took for Bard was to make it a "bow mage", but found people didn't like it and reworked it in Stormblood. In Stormblood MCH was incredibly unsatisfying to play and was completely redesigned for Shadowbringers and people tend to find it a lot more fun to play now. MNK have been complaining forever about how their job plays (a lot of it doesn't fit together, has redundant abilities etc) and they've just got a patch with the aim to fix some of those issues MNK's complain about. They thought they fixed it for Shadowbringers (as per Yoshi P's comments on the Shadowbringers media tour) and found they hadn't and have made additional changes in patch 5.4.

Whist yes, fun is subjective. And in fairness, when I make suggestions/feedback, I am trying to consider the direction they've taken it. Hence my DPS suggestion here actually changes nothing about how the healing jobs have to heal.And really, those who like how healers play ATM, could technically still play it that way. But you can make changes to appeal to more people. And it's one of the big advantages of having a system where there's multiple jobs for each role, you don't have to think "how do all healers play?" you can look at how AST plays, how SCH plays and WHM plays all as separate entities. And really all those who like the pruned downtime of healers could have been given a 4th healer with a pruned downtime and kept any existing WHM, AST and SCH happy.