Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

[Dogempire]

I never realized how difficult it must be for people new to the game to extrapolate what the play experience must have been like before based on just logs and ability descriptions. Roeshel is trying their best to argue about why changes were made and necessary but it really falls flat when you talk to people who were there and used the kits and found the loopholes. Speaking for myself my enjoyment with healers has gone down since Heavensward. Even WHM with its new Lillies and Misery is less fun to me now than when I had Aero 3 on command. The visual was great and I didnt need to wait 90 seconds for Misery to be available. Fluid Aura could cancel aoes from mobs with its push and didnt build a stun immunity. The current Temperance buff was available much lower and made me "feel" powerful in earlier content becuase I could choose to use it when needed. I never cared for who was the top dps healer or had strongest healing tools. I cared about how many decisions I can make moment to moment and Shadowbringers has given healers the least in terms of meaningful decisions. Stormblood had a 30 second recast on Surecast which meant you could avoid a push or pull mechanic every time they happened. That is a meaningful choice we had access to quite often. Scholar had quickened aetherflow trait which means Aetherflow was 45 second cool down. It was basically just more Energy Drains for being aggressive but it was more choice and apm which got shattered completely when Energy Drain and the Quicked Trait got removed at ShB launch. The pace of the job went from blazing fast to a dead halt. The fact we heal and dps with more potency than ever before DOES NOT make these ridiculous kits enjoyable.

I think the lack of enjoyability pretty much boils down to lack of complexity and the absence of any meaningful decision making. Healing basically plays like a caster but with less mobility and you have to stare at health bars and hit an OGCD whenever you need to heal, oh and you only spam 1 button the rest of the time. Now instead of being the control center of the party you're just a health babysitter who's bored

Tanking also suffers to a degree because threat management is nonexistent since tank stance doesn't decrease your damage, and you also take the same amount of damage regardless of if stance is on or off, so there's less risk factor involved in turning off stance. The role has basically devolved into a blue DPS that pulls and presses buttons to take less damage.

SE really needs to do something about keeping each role's experience unique, tanking shouldn't feel the same as DPSing, and healing shouldn't be boring because you're doing nothing 90% of the time except spamming 1 button

[KizuyaKatogami]

I think the lack of enjoyability pretty much boils down to lack of complexity and the absence of any meaningful decision making. Healing basically plays like a caster but with less mobility and you have to stare at health bars and hit an OGCD whenever you need to heal, oh and you only spam 1 button the rest of the time. Now instead of being the control center of the party you're just a health babysitter who's bored

Tanking also suffers to a degree because threat management is nonexistent since tank stance doesn't decrease your damage, and you also take the same amount of damage regardless of if stance is on or off, so there's less risk factor involved in turning off stance. The role has basically devolved into a blue DPS that pulls and presses buttons to take less damage.

SE really needs to do something about keeping each role's experience unique, tanking shouldn't feel the same as DPSing, and healing shouldn't be boring because you're doing nothing 90% of the time except spamming 1 button

What’s sad too is that, it most likely isn’t going to change. SE has shown they want to pander to the hyper casual people who don’t spend 5 mins to read their tool tips and instead go into level 80 dungeons spamming cure 1 and no aoe spells. They’ve shown they just want to simplify every little thing now to the point where there’s 0 complexity. It’s sad and you can literally see the downfall of a lot of jobs from previous expansions to now, and tanks/healers got the worst of it. I think SE just doesn’t care because they’re less played and popular than dps jobs which yknow, you’d think that would make them wonder if there’s a reason for that :^)

[Dogempire]

What’s sad too is that, it most likely isn’t going to change. SE has shown they want to pander to the hyper casual people who don’t spend 5 mins to read their tool tips and instead go into level 80 dungeons spamming cure 1 and no aoe spells. They’ve shown they just want to simplify every little thing now to the point where there’s 0 complexity. It’s sad and you can literally see the downfall of a lot of jobs from previous expansions to now, and tanks/healers got the worst of it. I think SE just doesn’t care because they’re less played and popular than dps jobs which yknow, you’d think that would make them wonder if there’s a reason for that :^)

DPS will always be the most popular role in a game with party roles, it's just that tanks and healers don't really play much differently from DPS, there's no prestige to being a good tank or healer because it's all so easy to hit the skill ceiling now.

[Lyth]

Sure. DPS will always be the most popular role, because it's less hassle and caters more to a single player experience where you can just jump into a group and do your thing. But that's why the tank/healer/DPS ratios are set up the way that they are.

You'll always a number of players who come into an MMO looking specifically to play a particular job aesthetic or role. Some people are 'career' healers or tanks. But put them aside for a minute, because those numbers will never change. Most people tend to be slightly more flexible in their thinking.

Maybe you tend to pick a healer because you like the feeling when you pull off a clutch save and keep your team alive when things go awry. Maybe you tend to pick a tank because you like intricate boss movement and positioning for your team, or because you like having a thorough knowledge of fight mechanics and when to defend against an attack or establish snap enmity on a mob. The problem is that we're seeing a movement of players who actually could potentially enjoy playing these roles say 'forget it, I'll just play DPS' simply because those gameplay elements aren't there and because you just have a much, much bigger impact while on DPS.

I don't think enmity has anything to do with this discussion, to be honest. Aggro systems exist because tanks generally do less damage than their DPS counterparts. That's it. DPS hate being capped by 'wait for three sunders before attacking' gameplay. The key place where aggro management systems challenge your tank are when adds spawn and you have to pick them up smoothly before they make a beeline for your healers. But that hasn't interesting since ARR, as the introduction of abilities like Equilibrium in Heavensward meant that you can just grab aggro wherever a mob is in a room, just like healers inadvertently do, without needing to know to where to go to pick it up. But that's a whole other tangent.

I think it's really important to think of design decisions in terms of how they provide value to you as a player. If you're a newer player wanting to invest time into this game, what role do you pick? Again, some players will always pick a role regardless of what the gameplay is like and either stick around or not depending on whether it meets their expectations, so let's set them aside. What about the player who's open to swapping around, but still prefers a particular gameplay style over the others? Personally, I absolutely love that positioning aspect of tanking where you have to safely move the boss around an arena while maximizing your teammates uptime. But the last time that really mattered was in Heavensward. Bosses increasingly position themselves. So there's actually no difference between what I get to do now and playing a melee DPS. And I'd be content to stay on the role in the hopes that there might be one fight in a blue moon that lets me do some interesting tank stuff, so long as the 'fake melee DPS' gameplay was good and I could provide a reasonable amount of value for my team in terms of raid dps contribution. But I've gotten progressively less value out of this, especially in over past two expansions. It's just an all around weaker version of existing melee DPS jobs, and there's no actual tank upsides to offset this. It actually doesn't make any sense to stay on the role, when I can get more value and get more interesting gameplay by swapping to an actual melee DPS. So while I'll keep my options open and will level a tank on the side, I'll likely swap my main role next expansion if things stay the way that they are. Especially since they seem to have finally created a melee job that tanks can make their exodus off to.

The reason why there's so much focus on increasing healer damage output and making more elaborate damage rotations is because there are plenty of healers who are willing to stick on the role if there was some way that they can provide additional value to their team by being good at their job. Look, we know your fight designers struggle with developing interesting healer mechanics. Healers aren't even hoping for opportunities to making those clutch saves because most damage consists of predictable raidwides or instant death/wipe mechanics. People are willing to play 'pretend caster DPS' on healer while waiting for you to get it right in content design as long as they can do reasonable damage and have reasonably interesting rotations. They definitely could be having more consistent enjoyment right now on caster, but they're hoping that the actual healing side of things can pick up. The problem is that the healing is consistently uninteresting, while the devs are doing everything in their power to make the damage side of healer gameplay decidedly inferior to that of playing a caster dps. So eventually, people just reach a point where they swap, because there's just so much more value they can get out of doing so.

We'll all reach a point where everyone is just playing DPS anyways, and the bosses just tank themselves while a trust NPC heals you. And that's fine, because everyone will actually get better value for time investment that way.

I think one of the simplest metrics for player value is in looking at where the gear goes to. I know that the obvious counterargument to this is that everyone does day one world prog clears of harder content with a uniformly skilled group and a crafting team backing them, so gear is irrelevant and everyone rolls on everything and is deliriously happy with this. But let's say, for the sake of the argument, a healer piece drops during your series of first pull 1-shot clears. Does your team feel like their clear potential is bolstered, or is it more of a 'meh' response? Do you want your first weapon drop to go to a healer? Probably not (although you did preferentially gear them in older MMOs where tanking and healing were considered relatively high-value roles). And while you're never going to see players say 'oh, we need to gear up our tanks and healers first so that we can survive the next encounter more effectively' in this game given its massive dps focus, when tank and healers had a more 'equitable' share of the raid dps pie, you were definitely higher priority than you are now.

I think what you're seeing across Stormblood and Shadowbringers is an increasing awareness that healers and tanks are just not valuable roles to play, and players who have some degree of willingness to swap are moving off to greener pastures. That's why the ratios are becoming increasingly skewed. They'll come back if you can either provide the baseline gameplay that they're looking for, or 'faux' dps gameplay that allows them to function like a hybrid of both. But if the dev team consistently fails at both these things, well, it's not like we're without options. We can all wait in queue together.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Sad thing too is this seems to be a common thing in mmo’s nowadays. Healers becoming obsolete. Eso for example, healers aren’t really that necessary outside of raids. Since everyone can dodge around and self heal. The difference though, between Eso healers and 14 healers, is that Eso healers have farrrr more unique forms of healing and dpsing, and many more dps options to choose from than in 14. It’s where 14 really falls flat imo. Because they design raids in such a similar and boring way, you can just learn the pattern of every fight and you’re done. It would be nice if they’d have some raids have actual unpredictability, but i guess that would require more effort on their part which they don’t seem to be able to give. I have low hopes for 6.0 healers, as they’ve said they want to streamline dungeons even further, which i don’t even know how that’s possible given how easy the latest dungeons have been, but if that’s true the jobs are most likely going to be streamlined further as well. In which case i probably won’t be interested in any jobs, including dps.

[Mortex]

Sad thing too is this seems to be a common thing in mmo’s nowadays. Healers becoming obsolete. Eso for example, healers aren’t really that necessary outside of raids. Since everyone can dodge around and self heal. The difference though, between Eso healers and 14 healers, is that Eso healers have farrrr more unique forms of healing and dpsing, and many more dps options to choose from than in 14. It’s where 14 really falls flat imo. Because they design raids in such a similar and boring way, you can just learn the pattern of every fight and you’re done. It would be nice if they’d have some raids have actual unpredictability, but i guess that would require more effort on their part which they don’t seem to be able to give. I have low hopes for 6.0 healers, as they’ve said they want to streamline dungeons even further, which i don’t even know how that’s possible given how easy the latest dungeons have been, but if that’s true the jobs are most likely going to be streamlined further as well. In which case i probably won’t be interested in any jobs, including dps.

It’s ironic that the so called expert dungeons are way more easy then all of the lvl dungeon you do from 71 too 80. Also mount gulg having the 2 big wall too wall pulls were it really gets the difficulty going.

[Liam_Harper]

It's definitely more common in MMO's nowadays. Big clutch saves used to be the moments you lived for as a healer or tank in MMO gaming and the driving motivation to really master your class. Just the vision alone of saving an entire raid with your skill and your group cheering you on would push you forward. But game designers are more and more often designing for the lowest factor. The players who can't be bothered to put in the effort, but will get jealous of the ones who did and achieved anything impressive. The guy doing half of his potential in bad gear saying "what's the point of dps if tank/healers can do more than me or solo the boss?" because of that one time out of a thousand that an exceptional player pulled off a save.

FF14 in particular has carefully designed a game around no one feeling bad. There's very little visual impact from being a great player compared to a mediocre one. Raidwides are predictable, tanks aren't that self-sufficient and many mechanics are instant death or wipe-if-enough-people-aren't-alive so you don't get as much opportunity to save the run. Heal lb3 is designed so any sprout healer who got lucky by not being hit can get that feeling of having saved a run effortless with one button.

What I really miss from tank/healing was the times when if I died as a tank, or my group died when I was healer, I had such an in-depth toolkit I could nearly always look back at that situation and see something I could have done better that would have changed the outcome. I enjoyed that. There was always room to improve and learn. So often nowadays I die as a tank or the party wipes when I'm healing and it was completely unavoidable. Someone else messed up and it wasn't a mechanic you could recover from, so I just had to accept fate. Which really isn't as fun. For healer, it so quickly becomes things like "maybe I could push 3% more uptime" or "I forget to Play one card over a fight, maybe I could focus on that" or "maybe if I redo my entire mapping I can get 3-4 noodle-Broils in" and that's it. It makes very little noticeable different and it's all you have to work on.

[ForteNightshade]

I think SE just doesn’t care because they’re less played and popular than dps jobs which yknow, you’d think that would make them wonder if there’s a reason for that :^)

Actually, I suspect it's the exact opposite. The dev team assumed the lack of interest in tanks and healers was due to players being intimated. So they've reduced every ounce of complexity or player expression possible all in the name of accessibility! We won't really know until the LL or possibly EW itself if that decision backfired. There certainly have been no small amount of complaints online but does it outweigh the new players trying these roles?

[FoxCh40s]

Actually, I suspect it's the exact opposite. The dev team assumed the lack of interest in tanks and healers was due to players being intimated. So they've reduced every ounce of complexity or player expression possible all in the name of accessibility! We won't really know until the LL or possibly EW itself if that decision backfired. There certainly have been no small amount of complaints online but does it outweigh the new players trying these roles?

The sad thing is, I doubt it. All over Facebook and Reddit people say that healing and tanking is fine while maining a DPS. People who have recently just come in and it's their first mmo think it's fine. I feel like the original player base is the minority at this point. We've either moved on to another game, or just quit the role entirely. I've checked several original posters whom I know to be previous Healer mains, and they are just that now. They are DPS; at this point, the game will merely continue to become brain dead until it hits a bursting point.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Actually, I suspect it's the exact opposite. The dev team assumed the lack of interest in tanks and healers was due to players being intimated. So they've reduced every ounce of complexity or player expression possible all in the name of accessibility! We won't really know until the LL or possibly EW itself if that decision backfired. There certainly have been no small amount of complaints online but does it outweigh the new players trying these roles?

This is true probably tbh. I think that’s how out of touch they are with the playerbase though. Idk of anyone that hated the enmity in SB, or at least anyone that wanted to dumb it down. Yeah that’s my big problem with 14. No complexity or choice in jobs. No uniqueness. As for the complaints, at this point idk. Unfortunately SE uses twitter and reddit for feedback, and those are the social media sites that have the loudest portion of the playerbase that is fine with whatever SE does.