Worthless Live Letter

[Recon1o6]

This is something that I keep hearing, but I don't understand how this could be.
At the end of the day... for each expac they still have to rigorously playtest 12 raids, about 7 trials, many dungeons, any deep dungeon, exploration content, any public dungeon(s), and (since Stormblood) at least 1 Ultimate.
And then rigorously playtest it 2 (now 3) more times on the other healers.

And we know the battle team only has single digit members. So there isn't a way to pass the buck around enough that no one really gets time to understand healing. They should be experienced enough to know what's up.
What's happening?
How does it seem like they're staffed with such (pardon the awkward expression) green healers when they've been running their own content so much and for so long?

I really wish the dev team posted videos of them doing content together because I'd love to see how they playtest stuff, what their approach is like, how they communicate, etc.
And I wanna see what their healers are doing.

1. Because a lot of their testing likely involves computer modelling rather than actual playing for numerical data. This is standard industry practice and due to the job team being invisible, we have no indicators this is different for SE.
2. They spend most of their time on dps jobs in terms of adjustments due to bias. Neither of them mains a healer or a tank. The one that mained a tank left in hw-sb. We know one of them main's dragoon and yoshida makes sure blm gets the love he wants it as its his main.
3. The battle design team and job design team are two separate teams. They communicate on balancing primarily so all comps are viable.
4. Most of the job team spend time on pvp balancing since the chaos in there makes it a damn nightmare to balance due to the unpredictable nature so it takes time.
5. The devs have shown repeatedly through statements and design that they haven't a clue how the jobs play in practice, only on paper. You only need to look at energy drain for this.
6. They always look at a new player's prospective for marketing reasons rather than someone who actually plays the jobs.

[ItMe]

1 - 4

This is very illuminating, thanks for the info and the breakdown~

The devs have shown repeatedly through statements and design that they haven't a clue how the jobs play in practice, only on paper. You only need to look at energy drain for this.

Hahah, yeah... I forget how much of a jobs identity is emergent through community optimizations, like MNKs spamming tornado kick (or whatever it's called).

6. They always look at a new player's prospective for marketing reasons rather than someone who actually plays the jobs.

Wait, do they?
How do we know this?

[Semirhage]

I don't have the citation handy, but I remember back when they were apologizing for how overtuned Gordias was. Yoshida admitted that they weren't actually playing the raids as they were intended for testing purposes, they were going in with godmode on and ignoring mechanics while doing their rotations as if the boss were a training dummy, then reducing the HP threshold by 10% or whatever and calling it a day. While I can't imagine they still do this exactly, it's definitely telling that once upon a time they tested raids by removing the healing requirements entirely alongside the mechanics. Belittling their healing knowledge down to "eeeeeeeh whatever they just spam Medica 2 or something that's what healers like right?" has some fair points in its favor, exaggeration though it may be.

[ItMe]

I don't have the citation handy, but I remember back when they were apologizing for how overtuned Gordias was. Yoshida admitted that they weren't actually playing the raids as they were intended for testing purposes, they were going in with godmode on and ignoring mechanics while doing their rotations as if the boss were a training dummy, then reducing the HP threshold by 10% or whatever and calling it a day. While I can't imagine they still do this exactly, it's definitely telling that once upon a time they tested raids by removing the healing requirements entirely alongside the mechanics. Belittling their healing knowledge down to "eeeeeeeh whatever they just spam Medica 2 or something that's what healers like right?" has some fair points in its favor, exaggeration though it may be.

Yo, Wild!
That gives us some interesting insight, that's for sure.

[Recon1o6]

Yo, Wild!
That gives us some interesting insight, that's for sure.

case in point, at minimum ilvl, the manipulators final mortal revolution was LITERALLY UNSURVIVABLE as a sch at minimum ilvl without a potion of vitality. Even then you had to time a heal so it happened after the damage but before the next nisi tick otherwise that would finish you off even with the pot.

[Saimeren]

I mean, you know how the role plays. You either go into it knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime, or you play something else. You're not a dps, you don't need an overly complex damage rotation that'll punish you for stopping to heal.

It's bad enough that healers are expected to heal as little as possible in order to pump out as much damage as possible.

It's the "go go go, rush rush rush" problem that WoWs M+ has that keeps a lot of tanks and healers away.

If you want to have a full interesting dps rotation, then maybe you should play a dps job.

[Reiryuu]

I mean, you know how the role plays. You either go into it knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime, or you play something else. You're not a dps, you don't need an overly complex damage rotation that'll punish you for stopping to heal.

It's bad enough that healers are expected to heal as little as possible in order to pump out as much damage as possible.

It's the "go go go, rush rush rush" problem that WoWs M+ has that keeps a lot of tanks and healers away.

If you want to have a full interesting dps rotation, then maybe you should play a dps job.

Why should we expect to be bored? It's a game. Isn't it supposed to be fun for everyone? The role is boring because of the pigeon holes the devs have shoved it into and the way the battle team has designed the encounters. Since the ball is totally in their court, should we not expect them to... y'know... talk to each other and make sure that all jobs (last I checked healers are included in that) should be fun to play in all content and have more to do than spam a button or two? Why should tanks not expect to be bored and get 1 single target damage button, 1 AoE damage button and a single target DoT then? Why do all the DPS jobs get all the buffs and debuffs when the healing role has so much down time?

[Garnix]

I mean, you know how the role plays. You either go into it knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime, or you play something else. You're not a dps, you don't need an overly complex damage rotation that'll punish you for stopping to heal.

It's bad enough that healers are expected to heal as little as possible in order to pump out as much damage as possible.

It's the "go go go, rush rush rush" problem that WoWs M+ has that keeps a lot of tanks and healers away.

If you want to have a full interesting dps rotation, then maybe you should play a dps job.

I am absolutely with you in the 'healers should heal more than they deal damage' camp.
But even then, XIV is designed for healers to be able to deal some damage. And that's not only true for raids, it's also true in single player content.
Even in the single player instances the glare spam is not something I would call fun.
It doesn't need to be incredibly complex. It doesn't even need to be half as complex as a tank rotation. It just needs to be a bit more involved.
More buffs, more procs on your DPS skills, things like that.

[Semirhage]

If you want to have a full interesting dps rotation, then maybe you should play a dps job.

Yeaaaaaah I'm gonna stop you right there. "Healers should be bored 90% of the time" is an ice cold take.

Then again, I just about rolled my eyes out of my head yesterday at a thread in General whining about healers wanting to pull multiple packs in dungeons because it's "too toxic" and "too hard" and "rushing is bad everyone should play at the tank's pace" as if fighting two dungeon mobs at once that could barely manage to kill you if you never healed and autoattacked the entire time was somehow arguably anyone's peak potential difficulty.

As I said in that other thread, this community is wild sometimes.

[AikenDrum]

"Don't play a healer if you don't want to be bored"
"Oh the queue is too long, maybe you should play a healer yourself then"
So which is it? Cuz it cant be both.

Honestly, if they make something like 5 min after queue with no healer => trust bot joins in all 4/8 DF content, I'll stop talking about healers completely.