Famitsu Interview: Tuning encounters for healing

[Gemina]

Having more than one button to press 75+% of the time is "gatekeeping"?

Having one button to press 75+% of the time "gatekept" me out of the role. Oh but thank god I made way for a hundred Medica 2 spammers; that's what was really missing from the role.

This overreaction and taking what I'm saying out of context is exactly what I would expect from the typical 'bored' healer whom is so easily offended that they immediately go on the defensive instead of seeing where the other person is coming from. I recommend this video if you're lost:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZewXLUwEjXo

Not only is having only one button to spam not the problem, adding DPS skills isn't the solution. If this is your thought process, have fun chasing your tail.

They didn't work - how exactly? Were those more complex healer kits and MP making it impossible to clear content? Nah, every tier before SHB has been cleared just fine so that certainly worked. Were they unattractive for majority of the healer playerbase? Don't think so, given how many people are asking for them to be back, I also don't recall any requests to "remove healer dps spells" in Stormblood. There have always been people complaining about being expected to dps while healing, but that's caused by traditional healer mentality, not the complexity of rotations and is in fact "worse" with the simplified damage kits, as people are even less forgiving to "pure healers" now that dps is so easy to do - and so these people are still unhappy about being pressured to dps.

Ah, you're operating under the mindset that if the content can be cleared, then there is no problem. So if as a BLM, I choose to remain in umbral, but the content can be cleared, there is no problem? And you don't have the majority asking for these skills back. You have a loud minority that exists in a forum crying to have them back. This is exactly what I mean by gatekeeping. You are so entrapped in the meta, that you don't even realize the exclusion you are creating. If you want to know how they didn't work, you can search up topics of old pertaining to Cleric Stance, MP issues for WHM, early implementation of AST, the healer DPS debates, leap frogging of healers in highend content; the list goes on.

It's not exclusivity at all though. Increasing the healing requirements drastically to reduce the downtime would be gate keeping, since you'd need to actually get better at healing to continue participating in content at all. If the damage rotations were made more complex again, then the less skilled healers could still clear encounters like they do now, they would just do less dps which is not their primary role - and even they could eventually simply get better with practice.

I find it funny how their primary role in a party changes depending on the agenda. I have always stood by their primary role in a party is a healer, and heals come first - damage second. Now it is somehow acceptable for them to do less damage because it's not their primary role? That's not the impression I get from the game's optimizers. The impression I get is damage first, heals second, and GCDs used on heals is bad, bad, oh so very bad. I mean going by this logic, content can be cleared as is, so why change anything?

Adding complexity to the healer dps is the only way to increase the skill ceiling - and thus enjoyment for the masses of disgruntled veteran healers - without making the healing itself more difficult and actually hurting the role's accessibility.

If the concern is not meeting dps checks due to lowering the average healer's output, then the devs could just lower the requirements to account for that(insert the outdated "we don't take healer dps into account in dps checks" quote), and it would actually make the "pure healers" happier at the same time since they wouldn't be expected to deal high dps, so it'd cater to more than one type of player simultaneously.

I doubt that. I don't consider myself someone of high skill, and even I can pick up just about any optimal DPS rotation and get it down on a dummy with enough practice. I can also take those rotations and apply them to combat quite easily as well. All it takes is practice and getting to know the encounter. All it is memorization. The skill ceiling, at least for me comes in when things go wrong, or I make a mistake and now I have to improvise in order to get the accelerator going again. This is what separates good healers from bad healers, and great healers from good healers. The issue is the good and great ones want a style of gameplay that excludes a lot of healers of lower skill. That's the gatekeeping.

Think of it this way, do you increase accessibility for a roller coaster by increasing the height requirement, or lowering it? The devs have a whole lot more to think about than a group of healers who want and think optimal and high skill ceilings = fun.