Dengeki Interview

[Liam_Harper]

So, from Patch 5.4, we’ve planned for the more difficult content to put out a lot more damage more often.

While it's great they're finally addressing feedback, keep in mind the result of the above statement was simply to have Cycles and the occasional need of a GCD heal in e11s and a few raidwides in e12s that require a shield. E9s and e10s are very easy to heal. Emerald EX was being solo healed week one. Normal is as light on healing as ever outside of the messiest runs and recent dungeons can almost be ran without a healer.
E12s is the only encounter in the entire patch to come close to their intended goal and you still have a fair bit of pressing 1, 1, 1, 1. But it's a good start. However, in exchange, the healing required for everything below e11 has decreased. I don't see why players aren't allowed to be engaged while healing unless they're playing the final boss of the Savage tier.

The problem is the same as its always been. Yoshi is not a healer main. The class design team are not healer mains. They don't have a dedicated heal designer so even if they hear our feedback they're running on theory and impressions alone. What they feel is "a lot of damage" is nothing to someone who actually mains healer.

In short, increased/more frequent damage should be applied to more content and the 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, during downtime still needs to be addressed.

Also the shield/regen divide is just a joke and going down the wrong track entirely. It's very likely to end badly. All they're doing is reducing healer toolkit and splitting it between the healers.

It's more a disconnect between the healer playerbase. A portion of the healer playerbase wants to be green dps and another portion the opposite.

I imagine another portion of the playerbase think they want the opposite. But if damage taken was ramped up significantly and healing done reduced so that a healer always needed to be healing to keep the party alive, they'd fall to pieces. Most of those players have no idea how their toolkit works or care to learn and we'd be swamped with complaints of how impossible the game has become.

What most actually want is healing to be as easy as it is now, but no one to expect them to contribute in other ways, so they can spam their one aoe heal with 30% uptime, clear content and be praised without requiring effort.

[ForteNightshade]

I imagine another portion of the playerbase think they want the opposite. But if damage taken was ramped up significantly and healing done reduced so that a healer always needed to be healing to keep the party alive, they'd fall to pieces. Most of those players have no idea how their toolkit works or care to learn and we'd be swamped with complaints of how impossible the game has become.

What most actually want is healing to be as easy as it is now, but no one to expect them to contribute in other ways, so they can spam their one aoe heal with 30% uptime, clear content and be praised without requiring effort.

I can attest to this. Way back in Heavensward, I decided to play a little game to "test" these "pure healers". If I didn't see Cleric Stance turned on within 25 seconds of the boss being pulled, I let them solo heal. Exceptions were made for new players, and I would try to save a run if we'd otherwise wipe. Emphasis on try.

It was staggering to see how utterly clueless so many supposedly pure healers were. I'll never forget an A12N where the WHM ran out of MP because they spammed Medica II and prioritized raising over healing the DPS for Prey. We wiped to adds despite me having to come in a heal because I simply couldn't make up for their mistakes. The hilarity is they had Accuracy melds yet never once touched Cleric. Naturally, they blamed me. "Cassandra doesn't want to help in her PvP gear." Funny enough, the tank was a WHM main and balked at the idea they could run out of MP that fast.

Another gem is a Dun Scaith run where the WHM used Medica II some 70 times (we wiped to the... third boss twice, I think?).

Yes, people are better nowadays. But it really highlights how a good chunk of "pure healers" have very little idea how to actually heal and are carried by either their co-healer or the fact we now have practically bottomless MP.