SE FINALLY ANSWERED THE HEALERS COMMUNITY LONG ANSWERED QUESTION

[Imora]

We're never getting more complex rotations guys. Not that I see a difference in 1,2,1,1,1,1 VS 1,2,3 1, 1,1,1 ad nauseum.

I want to spend more time not dpsing. I don't care if it's doing mechanics or healing or running like a chicken without a head.

[CrimsonGunner]

We're never getting more complex rotations guys. Not that I see a difference in 1,2,1,1,1,1 VS 1,2,3 1, 1,1,1 ad nauseum.

I want to spend more time not dpsing. I don't care if it's doing mechanics or healing or running like a chicken without a head.

not going to happen cause they dont want others being pushed to heal in runs. they wont change how content difficulty will be made and you wont have stuff to do during downtime and no i dont mean more dps i mean every option known to man during downtime cause the reward should be u get to press that 1 dps so your stuck pressing 1 dps for nearly the entire run especially now that every job dont need your cure cause they have their own heals now and paladin exists as well.

[Deceptus]

So honestly, I'd keep pushing the feedback. Constructively. We aren't going to be listened to if we make it a "good players vs bad" war or accuse the devs of not listening (and I'll admit perhaps I can be guilty of this too). Sure they're really slow on the uptake and we've been at this for years which is frustrating. But if we continue to make it clear we'd enjoy more engaging gameplay, there's still hope.

We've been providing constructive feedback for 4+ years now. The FFXIV Devs are stubborn on the topic of healers and aren't going to change, that much is obvious now.

Perhaps Uriangier was an early clue regarding healers:
"We may accept this fate or deny it, but we cannot defy it"

[CrimsonGunner]

I'm not going to raise a pitchfork on this one.

The interview response was very disappointing, but at the same time they do hear feedback (they're even considering hard 4 man content now because of the push for it). Yoshida mentioned that he's a hard gamer himself and if he were to design the game to his own preferences, it would be hardcore, so he tries to take the casual player and different playstyles into account.

This is great, I just think he's overthinking it. He's so afraid of being influenced by hardcore preferences that he's leaning as far from that direction as possible and underestimating even the casual players. Even casuals can handle more than 3 buttons in lv30 dungeons and they can certainly handle a little more healing and more than one button for dps at endgame. Making a game that's accessible to casuals is important and should be maintained, so classes should be easy to learn, but even new players are eventually going to learn their class and yearn for more. The devs have made healers into a journey, where the road reaches a gate before you get half way and you aren't allowed further because they're worried you'll get hurt.

So honestly, I'd keep pushing the feedback. Constructively. We aren't going to be listened to if we make it a "good players vs bad" war or accuse the devs of not listening (and I'll admit perhaps I can be guilty of this too). Sure they're really slow on the uptake and we've been at this for years which is frustrating. But if we continue to make it clear we'd enjoy more engaging gameplay, there's still hope.

you have a thread called why you quit being a healer that is 80+ pages long, you have a summery of healer issues that is 50+ pages long and Yoshi just said they read and ignore every comment meaning they ignored probably years worth of notes ,criticism and comment what is good with healers, whats wrong with healers and overall bugs and issues ppl found with current expansion kits and said "nope ,we dont care" so kudos on staying positive and i really mean it cause i am done being optimistic especially seeing whm and sch capstone skills entering EW cause it clear when u check the skills that someone didnt think at all on how to advance the jobs

[Deceptus]

you have a thread called why you quit being a healer that is 80+ pages long, you have a summery of healer issues that is 50+ pages long and Yoshi just said they read and ignore every comment meaning they ignored probably years worth of notes ,criticism and comment what is good with healers, whats wrong with healers and overall bugs and issues ppl found with current expansion kits and said "nope ,we dont care" so kudos on staying positive and i really mean it cause i am done being optimistic especially seeing whm and sch capstone skills entering EW cause it clear when u check the skills that someone didnt think at all on how to advance the jobs

I think it's pretty obvious that whoever designed the healers in Endwalker F*ed up because Addersgall can be acquired out of combat but the barrier counterpart SCH can't acquire Aetherflow stacks out of combat.

They are essentially clones of each other and one has a clear advantage.

[Gemina]

My interpretation about that response was he realized that the SCH’s section of the job actions trailer was poorly executed. Even if not much changes, they still want the job to look cool. An example would be something like MCH where very little is changing, but they still show off things like the Automaton Queen, Flamethrower, Auto Crossbow, Ricochet… i.e. things that look cool. SCH admittedly have very little interesting looking actions these days, but they could’ve at least used things like Fey Union, Scared Soil, or Summon Seraph. It also just didn’t even showcase the sprint buff well at all.

He seemed to be apologizing more that he didn’t oversee the trailer more meticulously to ensure that the SCH looked better and displayed their new capstone more effectively, but followed up by saying that SCH will still be fun to play, or at least that’s what they say.

It's water under the bridge at this point. We will have to wait until 7.0 to truly see how Yoshi decides to redeem this error for SCH. It's really far off, but I will be watching the SCH trailer VERY closely in 7.0, as will a lot of other people.

So what? It’s clear that there’s a fairly significant chunk of the player base that is upset. It’s bubbled to the surface so much so that influencers who don’t care at all about healing asked legitimate questions on behalf of their fans who do play healer. We’ve had back and forths before and you keep taking this stance of “us vs them” in regards to casual players and experienced players. We are not your enemy. We are not trying to ruin your casual experience.

The versus is actually the players who are upset, and the devs. The casuals get caught up in this crossfire. But as much as you want to express that you are not an enemy to the casual players, the devs are not your enemy. They are not trying to ruin your experience.

We need to break this down a little because there’s an important distinction between healers that try and struggle vs the section of healers that were demanding the role change so that healers never DPSed and would outright refuse to DPS in any content no matter the circumstances. The later were basically selfish players who wanted to play a different game with FFXIV’s aesthetic, because that’s not how FFIXIV is designed, and it will never be that way.

For the healers that would try and have a difficult time, I get that. There are changes that I think were really good in Stormblood to make their experience easier, such as removing Cleric Stance. I firmly believe Cleric Stance was terrible because it was a system based on punishment. If you don’t use it, your punished because you can’t DPS. When you do use it, if you mess up your timing, then your healing is punished and you could have the team killed because you forgot to press a button, or because your latency prevented it from being turned off.

I am well aware of the many 'types' of healers. Again, when it comes to encounter and job design, the devs have to indiscriminately take the whole playerbase into account.

I don’t understand how we’ve specifically talked about this before, yet you keep bringing up this skill floor debate. How can I make it any clearer that…

WE. DON’T. WANT. TO. RAISE. THE. SKILL. FLOOR.

At this point, I’m inclined to believe one of three things: either you don’t understand the difference between a skill floor and a skill ceiling, you’re misunderstanding the difference between then, or you’re just intentionally ignoring what we’ve been saying in order to paint a narrative. If it’s the former two, please tell me. I will be more than happy to find you a number of examples and explain in greater detail what they are to help you understand what we’re talking about.

If you feel I am not getting the point, you are free to elaborate. However, I am not saying you are trying to raise the skill floor. I am saying this is what happens by giving healers additional responsibility; and you are giving healers additional responsibility by adding more offensive skills. I am not sure how I can make that any more clear for you. Do you think the devs don't give healers more offensive skills out of pure spite? That they literally just want to punish healers for playing the job optimally, and pamper the casuals? Is that what you think? Before you answer that...

You’ll do more good for SCH leaving it alone and showing the team in numbers that SCH players are leaving the job than you will digging your heels in the sand and pouting about it. That said, I can’t tell you what to play as that’s each person’s individual decisions, but know that actions speak louder than words, especially when money is involved. And if Sage isn’t enough, continue to bring that up.

And there's that defeatist attitude again. You need to take a look around and see who is actually pouting here. You can bench your SCH or whichever healer you're not satisfied with, but understand the position it puts you in. It's not one of power. It isn't one where you're free to express your discontentment anymore, because you're not actually putting any time into playing the job in EW. All you can do is hope others jump off the cliff with you in protest. How confident are you in all these 'upset' healers joining in your boycott?

Regardless of your view, Yoshi is asking you to play the jobs, so why would you think doing the opposite is the best way to get to him?

[Sebazy]

You can bench your SCH or whichever healer you're not satisfied with, but understand the position it puts you in. It's not one of power. It isn't one where you're free to express your discontentment anymore, because you're not actually putting any time into playing the job in EW. All you can do is hope others jump off the cliff with you in protest. How confident are you in all these 'upset' healers joining in your boycott?

Regardless of your view, Yoshi is asking you to play the jobs, so why would you think doing the opposite is the best way to get to him?

The unfortunate fact is that it's been visibly demonstrated time and time again that at least as far as healers go, SE only really seem to pay attention to clear rates of various levels of content.

I've stated this before but incase it's been missed:

AST was absolutely nowhere in Gordias and rightfully got extensively buffed and adjusted to make it competitive. Any proper QA should have highlighted that it was just not equipped to deal with Gordias Savage.

It was handily the equal of WHM for Midas but Noct wasn't competitive with SCH. SE didn't seem to understand this, merely seeing that it's usage was still down resulting in a completely misguided series of buffs that saw it relegate WHM to the bench for Creator.

Meanwhile concerns had been raised over WHM's long term competitiveness vs SCH and AST throughout Heavensward. These were completely ignored. When patch 3.4 came along and AST made WHM functionally obsolete in Savage WHM still saw good usage in more casual content and thus nothing was changed despite all the complaining here and elsewhere. Patch 3.5 rolled out and people literally started excluding WHMs from PFs for extremes and sometimes even lower tier content. SE finally reacted by plugging some of WHM's issues with the SB kit.

Deltascape saw SCH have it's first turn on the bench, it promptly got a wide range of buffs, fixes and abilities. Again, any experienced healers on the QA team should have highlighted that this iteration of SCH was going to be dead on arrival (and should have flagged up AST's hefty QoL regression as well).

I wonder if a part of Yoshida's reasoning that healer's are currently 'fine' is that these days, healer clear rates are all fairly well balanced now. I don't think they are invested enough in the healer role to actually sit down and look first hand at how dire the gameplay is especially in casual content. Rather they are just getting random test teams from SE's pool, potentially with little experience of the game and going with them for feedback.

There's no denying that in the eyes of a sprout, healing in this game is exhilarating before you've started down that haunted optimisation path.

[CrimsonGunner]

Regardless of your view, Yoshi is asking you to play the jobs, so why would you think doing the opposite is the best way to get to him?

cause doing that stuff got healers nothing? cause he basically said he heard the complains and will do nothing ?

those are pretty good reasons not to listen at this point tbh from an individual view point. you are trying to sound optimistic but in reality that method has been tried and tried again has it not?
healers asked that on higher content, stuff will get better and hit more frequently to use more heals, it was not heard.
they asked that the kit will be simple but with depth and meaning, no respond and now it was said no.
healers asked small QoL fixes for current expansion at least so the jobs wont be as cluncky, sch mains never got their wish, Ast mains needed to wait until 5.1/5.2 to get mana filler in draw when it was a simple hotfix.

can you really say that is the best way to make a message and it will be heard at this point?

[BooPoo]

EZ solution: everyone go play Sage in EW. Use numbers to show which healer playstyle is preferred so that they either change healers to be more in line with SGE in the future or come up with more offensive healers.

[Reiryuu]

EZ solution: everyone go play Sage in EW. Use numbers to show which healer playstyle is preferred so that they either change healers to be more in line with SGE in the future or come up with more offensive healers.

But does Sage really have that different of a playstyle? Are you not going to be spamming Dosis III or whatever ad nauseum because there's little to no healing to do once people learn how to avoid the bad? People claim it does... and maybe it's true. I won't really know till I play it myself, but at the moment... once you take the shiny laser lights away, it doesn't seem to be anything too different.