Openly admitting to ignoring the players

[Saefinn]

Listen bud. I'm on your side, and I'm trying to help. My attempts at being pragmatic are not attacks on the ideas being tossed around, or my refusal to read/listen to other posts. I am aware that most of the people here are not game designers, and that's fine. I don't believe this prohibits the exchange of ideas and debates on how to improve gameplay. However, my own frustration stems from the impression I get that players will voice the 'I want my cake and eat it too' mentality. You even bolded all of it:
"none of us are advocating against casual play"
"Let healing be accessible and forgiving"
"design healing to be fun for all levels of skill at all levels of difficulty from dungeon to ultimate"

Actually I guess on this note. I know I can keep on making my own arguments on what I think would improve and make things fun and probably argue it to ad infinitum. I think (and hope) I've made what my complaint is clear (I know this was not addressed at me) but in trying to move forward, do you think there are ways my complaints can be addressed and how? I mean, aside from how I think they can be addressed.

I don't mean it as a snarky thing, but constructively, as we obviously have different perspectives on this but ultimately recognise the healer experience isn't fulfilling and want it to be because I am happy to embrace other ideas, but the below is the conclusion I've come to. But ultimately I want to enjoy something I am currently not enjoying.

In summary: my view is that embracing the healer/DPS hybrid is the way to go because the vast majority of content does not require DPS, it keeps it accessible (we're not making healing harder), it gives something skilled healers to strive for and feel like they're doing something and that it respects the current encounter design and the design principles of the game. And my current forward thinking has been "how do we work this into current design?"

I also come at the angle of a semi-casual, so I might do EX or Savage once in a while, but most of the time it's Normal raids, Alliance raids, MSQ, beast tribes, roulettes and stuff like Bozja.

[ty_taurus]

And if I had a dollar for the answer to healer boredom being to revert to antiquated gameplay, or to just add a couple of DPS skills, I could hire my own design team. I never said you're attempting to berate casual play, and the fact that you feel you have to defend yourself in such a manner tells me you're the one not reading posts, and responding emotionally. Don't think you can weigh me out because I don't concede. Is that what you do? If someone doesn't agree and conform, you try to make them feel like they don't belong in the conversation? Seriously WTF, dude?

If your goal was to express specific criticism of specific suggestions, then I’d have to say that from my perspective, your previous posts came off as an argument that those who want more involvement are largely disregarding casual play, which was the point I was trying to counter. I’m sure there’s someone out there who wants to disregard casual players, but my point was that almost no one is suggesting that. It wasn’t about defending my own actions, but the community here as a whole.
Naturally there will always be outliers, but that’s a given with literally any group and any discussion anywhere and not my focal point.

And then you say this in another response...


Why on Earth are you grieving me about not listening and reading the posts here when you acknowledge this?

What I was trying to get at is, as a community where most of us do not have professional game design experience, nor the tools to actually test anything in a functioning build of FFXIV, a lot of specific suggestions that are made cannot actually be contrasted against existing content or against the other healers. All we can realistically do is put ideas into paper, and what’s important about that is the goal someone sets out to achieve, not necessarily the nuances that may or may not break or complicate gameplay.

For example, if you ask someone to critique art who is not an artist, you can’t expect them to just paint the entire picture they want to see. They give vague approximations of what they are looking for as examples, and it’s the artist’s job to take that information and use their own expertise to make decisions based off of that feedback. That’s what I’m talking about.

What really makes it difficult to have a civil conversation with a healthy exchange of ideas and debates are contradictory statements like this one. You say it's not the new player's fault, right after pointing the finger right at them. And then you resort to defeatism. How am I supposed to respond to that?

I never pointed the finger at them. They are a natural consequence of FFXIV’s constant exponential growth of the player-base. New players don’t have preconceived notions of what jobs should or shouldn’t be because they’re new. There don’t have the same point of reference that veterans have, and that’s neither a good nor a bad thing. It just is.
It’s SE of whom I’m pointing the finger at. While they do a fantastic job with this game in many ways, it’s become very apparent that they just don’t understand how healers play and aren’t interested in spending the resources on hiring an additional design who does or take the time to learn it themselves. Since there are far more new players without preconceived knowledge of healers joining than there are veterans abandoning the role, there’s no reason for them care either. I believe you should want all aspects of your game to be as fun as they possibly can, but maybe that’s just a “me” thing.

Listen bud. I'm on your side, and I'm trying to help. My attempts at being pragmatic are not attacks on the ideas being tossed around, or my refusal to read/listen to other posts. I am aware that most of the people here are not game designers, and that's fine. I don't believe this prohibits the exchange of ideas and debates on how to improve gameplay. However, my own frustration stems from the impression I get that players will voice the 'I want my cake and eat it too' mentality. You even bolded all of it:
"none of us are advocating against casual play"
"Let healing be accessible and forgiving"
"design healing to be fun for all levels of skill at all levels of difficulty from dungeon to ultimate"

How dare I want a game that I love to be as fun as it can possibly be? I really don’t understand what you’re getting at. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, but attributes like accessibility, forgiveness, complexity… These are all standard expectations of modern gaming, and you come across as if you find that to be some kind of gamer entitlement. Expecting good game design is not entitlement. Demanding it and saying you deserve it is. (Not that I’m saying you’re doing that, just an example of what entitlement is). If that’s not what you’re trying to portray, then please correct me.
Sure there are a few people who definitely come across that way, but I just assume they’re trolls and try to ignore them.

Yet, you somehow think this is "easy"? You have to got to be kidding. Especially when your idea of making healing more fun is to immediately have healers multitask even more by adding more DPS responsibility. Additional frustration comes from a lot of refusal to accept this. Understand that you ARE placing additional responsibility by giving healers more ways to be offensive. I don't really think that can be disputed.

Yes it absolutely can. You’re equating optimization with responsibility when they are two different things. This game does not demand optimization outside of progging the hardest content the game can throw at you, and even then, fight knowledge is vastly superior to healer DPS optimization. If you’re a casual player, just do your best and enjoy the game.
As long as you’re putting in a basic effort, I’m willing to bet most players aren’t going to care if you’re not optimizing properly. Even if you want to do savage content, our ability to outgear content over time means you’ll be able to do that to, you just probably won’t be getting world’s first. In other words, if you don’t want to press extra DPS buttons, then just keep spamming Glare/Broil/Malefic. You’ll do enough.

We are really talking about two different things at that point. Because giving healers additional DPS responsibility entails a change to current content design. This will not be fun for everyone.

In what way? Because healers will do too much damage then? Lower the potencies. Many DPS have actions with far less potency than healers because their additional actions make up for that. There’s no reason to change how content works because healers suddenly have more DPS actions. They certainly didn’t go back and change old fights despite having gutted healer DPS actions.

If you feel like raising the skill floor is the way to go. That is fine. Just understand that is what it is, and it's an uphill battle because you and I both know the devs do not feel this way.

Can I just take a moment to point out that this post made a big deal about reading what people have to say in their posts, and you even quoted where I said that we explicitly do not want to raise the skill floor, and yet here you are claiming that somehow that was our nefarious plot all along. Listen, I not here to attack you, but please don’t throw words in my mouth or anyone’s mouth for that matter.

When I respond this way, is that me not listening? Not reading? Misinterpreting what's being said? By all means tell me if that's the case, and if I am reading into things incorrectly. In any case, it goes without saying that making healing fun for everyone AND across all content isn't possible.

I hate your last sentence here. Earlier you claimed I was playing the defeatist, but there’s no greater example of defeatism than that line right there. NOTHING is impossible in game design. The only limitations are your own creativity and time. I have no where near the same experience in game design as the team at SE, but regardless of that, the lack of healer development is clearly not a result of impossibility, but lack of care.
I don’t think the developers don’t care about the game—far from that. I just don’t think the job design team cares about playing healer enough to understand how to make it fun, and don’t see the need to hire anyone that does understand it.

It's a very tall order because the community is diverse. And you know what? That's totally fine. Awesome actually. So long as the exchange of ideas and debates can be done in a civil manner.

Ultimately I feel adaptation is the key to enjoying healing in FFXIV, and it's difficult to say you're not enjoying healing if you're still doing it. This says you have a strong ability to adapt, and go out there and find things you enjoy. But even if you want to ignore that, the devs are the ones who make the final say and there really is no choice but to adapt to their job designs. And don't take that to mean to be complacent. It is perfectly fine to voice how you would like to improve the game. Just know that not everyone will agree with you.

It's ultimately fine to disagree. I’ve said before in a different post somewhere that you can like the healers as they are, but it’s a different story when someone comes in and says that their criticism is wrong or entitled that I lash back against. Criticism is not entitlement. It is not an attack against the casual player base. What many of us what would ultimately have no impact on casual play when done correctly, which it would be SE’s responsibility to do so. Considering how much they value casual play already, I highly doubt that would ever be an issue.

[Aword3213]

Yes, I know they're a different role and that's why I gave an actual rotation in my example because I think if they gave a DPS the same treatment, it'd not be a single button spam. It was intentional to use another role because what I was illustrating was what it'd be like if they applied the same "strip down" approach to other roles, they would become unfulfilling and people would complain and on a healer there's a huge chunk of the role that feels stripped down because it's what we're doing most of the time.

I find it hard to believe it's same treatment though . DPS roles unlock more offensive abilities as they level up, so do healers more healing abilities. If you remove those offensive abilities for the sake of comparison, then you should remove lots of healing abilities from healers. Healers then will be forced to use more GCD heals than before due to lack of abilities, resulting a totally different playstyle from we currently have now.

Current healers don't play this way, or at least, optimized ones. This dreadful 1 button spam comes partially from the extensive tools we have for healing. If we strip abilities away from healers in the same scale as you do from that of Dragoon, healers will have to juggle between healing GCD and offensive GCD, which somehow lessens this 1 button spam issue to an extent.

[Calysto]

And if I had a dollar for the answer to healer boredom being to revert to antiquated gameplay, or to just add a couple of DPS skills, I could hire my own design team.

And if SE had these players pay a monthly sub they could too !

But seriously; there are thousands of ways to LAZILY make healers more interesting.
We're at a point they could add theses as role actions/mechanics because job identity is probably never going to be more than what we currently have.
So no balance issue and it doesn't even have to be DPS : it could be buffs/debuffs or whatever if it's usefull ; but DPS is what make the most sense since buffs/debuffs are something they tend to minimize theses days.

So what's next ?
Are we going to accept that the real enemy is your team ? It's them that take or don't take damage and it's them that may judge you if you don't play your job "well enough" for them.
That the role is concieved for PVP (healers vs other players perception) and the difficulty/complexity cap is how poorly you can play with them not noticing or caring enough to complain ?

[Saefinn]

I find it hard to believe it's same treatment though . DPS roles unlock more offensive abilities as they level up, so do healers more healing abilities. If you remove those offensive abilities for the sake of comparison, then you should remove lots of healing abilities from healers. Healers then will be forced to use more GCD heals than before due to lack of abilities, resulting a totally different playstyle from we currently have now.

Current healers don't play this way, or at least, optimized ones. This dreadful 1 button spam comes partially from the extensive tools we have for healing. If we strip abilities away from healers in the same scale as you do from that of Dragoon, healers will have to juggle between healing GCD and offensive GCD, which somehow lessens this 1 button spam issue to an extent.

I mean, in practice, if we're talking about that 30% and 70% balance (and any variations) between healing and DPSing then you're not making full use of your healing toolkit.

But I was not doing an exact like-for-like because I don't think you can, because a DPS's core mechanic is persistent and a healer's core mechanic is situational. So the scope here is a common scenario of the healer experience and what it is like having your toolkit gutted, because in that 30/70 (or similar) scenario that's what the experience is. And if any other role had this experience then they would be complaining too.

[ItMe]

I've read most of the posts in here.

Most of the ideas are awful, don't do what they aim to do, or are in the realm of "Just make it fun at all skill levels in all content." which might as well be saying nothing, for all the help that is. There are a few topics that merit discussion but they rarely get as much attention as the whine threads.

And, by the way, mind sharing that design for healing to be fun in all levels of content played by players of all skill levels?

A common idea is to give healers "something to do during downtime."
Especially since good healers will have minutes of downtime, that's something that sounds sensible and jives with me more than most of the other ideas thrown around.
However...
I have no idea what that would look like.
I have no idea what kind of activity they could add that could possibly be downtime only.

Like, unless the game says "you haven't cast heals in a bit, must be downtime now" and unlocks some stuff for you until you use a GCD heal... any activity you add that's worth engaging with will be milked every possible chance, so it can't just be a downtime activity, it's gonna complicate uptime too.
But I also don't believe they would lock the activity away until you haven't been healing for a bit, because that is a terrible idea.

So I'm really at a loss here and have very little I feel I can contribute.

[Ayche]

Well since downtime is the price for healing good, I would love to see an action, you only really need to make one extra action, where you place a bet you can pull of a long cast time for a big payoff. You have your Glare and then a Glare Flare with 4-5 second cast time. So if you know you don't need to heal for a long time relatively, you can bet your downtime for a big cast that then goes off or not. You are punished for betting wrong by just being forced to cancel the casting if you need to move, someone needs to get patched up right now, etc. Well, just make it not work with swiftcast or lightspeed etc.

[EthanMoonkin]

Wait what??

Did u all forget that they legit said all healers is getting a holy treatment with their AoE skills ....

That means Art of War 2 now does more then just "damage" and that all healers can provide buffs to the party

At this current time we DO NOT have the new tool tips for the current healers, the only healer we have tool tips on is sage and that's it

We don't even know if glare/broil/malefic does new things, we do not know what the new gravity/holy/art of war does either

At this current time scholars are throwing their hands in the air AGAIN before even knowing anything at all

Sigh this is just a repeat history of 3.X where scholar legit panicked over AST......Now it's panicking over SAGE, scholars always panic over any new healing job that gets put into the game

Been here for 8 years in total and history repeats it self .....sigh

surprise. Art of War/Gravity just does damage. Tooltips released today. Glare/broil/malefic also don't do anything extra.

You wanna tell us again how history repeats itself? I mean it sure does with loyal defenders telling everyone to wait and blindly hope in unlikely changes... sigh

[ItMe]

Well since downtime is the price for healing good, I would love to see an action, you only really need to make one extra action, where you place a bet you can pull of a long cast time for a big payoff. You have your Glare and then a Glare Flare with 4-5 second cast time. So if you know you don't need to heal for a long time relatively, you can bet your downtime for a big cast that then goes off or not. You are punished for betting wrong by just being forced to cancel the casting if you need to move, someone needs to get patched up right now, etc. Well, just make it not work with swiftcast or lightspeed etc.

And they could give it charges so it's not something you're compelled to use right away so it can start cooling down.
Though, this kinda sounds like in practice it would be real similar to Cleric Stance, so who knows how the devs would feel about it.

[Rosa_Frandlia]

surprise. Art of War/Gravity just does damage. Tooltips released today. Glare/broil/malefic also don't do anything extra.

You wanna tell us again how history repeats itself? I mean it sure does with loyal defenders telling everyone to wait and blindly hope in unlikely changes... sigh

And add onto what you said, WHM's buff ability is.... a trait which only effects the WHM and not the party.