SE FINALLY ANSWERED THE HEALERS COMMUNITY LONG ANSWERED QUESTION

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Enmity was the one thing I hated with a passion, i had to worry about doing too much damage???

[Sebazy]

That's pretty fair reasoning and I can't really argue with it. At this stage I'm slightly jealous of your optimism in Yoshida's team tbh

As you pointed out in the portion of your post I omitted, there were a lot of problems back in the days of Gordias, Midas, even into Deltascape. It really was a cluster of nonsense, and the leap frogging of healers from patch to patch was among the most cumbersome. Those days are gone now though for the most part now, so why wouldn't they think it's fine? They don't think it's "fine" though. That's a bad business motto to have. Nevertheless that giant storm that was present back then has dissipated.

I will interject here though.

I think it's actually the opposite. They absolutely think the current status quo is fine and at least from where I'm sitting, it looks like they intend to continue treading water with the same overall grand formula that they've had since the end of Creator because it's still successful.

Dumbing down the overall game doesn't please us as the vocal minority but it seems to be doing wonders for the overall player base especially as we are supposed to be in the pre patch blues stage yet it's routine to see server queues.

As for his own opinions, it's frustrating that he has been proven wrong and has had to back down on his own statements right from 2.0 with Warriors. But they still strike me as having an air of arrogance to their views on the healer roles that seems to be blinding them to the core of the issue that's causing all of this. He might have mildly touched on healer DPS vs healing, but he still doesn't seem to understand that those aren't actually the problem here.

It's the fact that so much of our gameplay time is all piled up on a single button. Until he understands and acknowledges that, I can't see anything changing.

[Sebazy]

Enmity was the one thing I hated with a passion, i had to worry about doing too much damage???

Bait that's fit for the bin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5TDzbqfEAo

Clearly I held agro on titan with my massive deeeeps

[Gemina]

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?

What I'm saying is what message do you want to send that hasn't already been heard? Not giving you what you want doesn't mean your message has not got across. Other than that, my last post goes into great detail about why you also shouldn't feel ignored.

Now don't take that mean that I think, or the team thinks everything is "fine". I think that is a HUGE misconception being tossed around. But I also think that a lot of frustration stems from a problem some players have that are not shared by the dev team, or the dev team has made the decision to go another direction much to the chagrin of some of the playerbase.

I am optimistic about healer changes in the future, but in a way that lines up with the direction the team has decided to go. This is what allowed me to foresee just about everything that has changed about AST going into EW, and I am very excited to play that job. That is coming from someone who outright HATED it and everything about it in late HW into SB. I am not going to create hope and expectation based on principles the dev team has abandoned, and I bring up AST because it was a job that I very much wanted to enjoy since its inception. While I still have to actually play it in EW, it's adaptation and reasonable expectation has lead to this point in time.

IOW, if you keep asking for something like more DoTs to return to SCH; I won't say it will never happen, but you've kind of set yourself up for disappointment when it doesn't. I would also say that it makes it more difficult for issues that they will be willing to look at to be heard while the ones that they won't are echoed so loudly. I'm not spouting that as fact, just saying that for me personally from a management perspective, it can be difficult to become aware there's an issue with the copy machine when everyone is complaining that the vending machine keeps ripping people off.

[Gemina]

It's the fact that so much of our gameplay time is all piled up on a single button. Until he understands and acknowledges that, I can't see anything changing.

And you would be very perceptive in this regard; as far as anything changing, and that's because this expectation isn't reasonable. Even back in HW, healers still arrived at ST spam when there was nothing else to do. So are you suggesting that it should take longer to arrive there? If so, that is where more complexity is added.

The complexity is approached from more angles than just player skill, and I am not sure if this is realized. However, player skill is always a factor and variance in player skill levels is going to fluctuate the numbers all over the place. Now this is just guesswork, but I would think that the more stable these numbers are (talking about encounter design), the easier it becomes for this team to create encounters in a timely manner. Over time from early raiding to now, this team has had to learn how to be more efficient as demand has also increased along with the amount of subscribers, and simplification is one of those methods to achieve that. They do this for the same exact same reason why you use a vacuum to clean your carpet.

So yeah, he completely understands that your damage has been consolidated into a single button. It was deliberate to make things easier for both them and you, and I would also wager that this was done in order to churn out more content where our healing requirements do go up. However, I will also point out again that looking in the same direction the devs are going is a safer way to create expectation opposed to looking back over your shoulder. As an example they are rewarding jobs with more and more finishers for executing their buttons correctly, and I think this is something they can do for healers as well. They already kind of do this with Misery, and it looks like AST new card mech is all about that as well. When I see things like this, it makes me hopeful that they will start to look at SCHs gauge too.

I don't know what else to say. I guess, hang in there? I can't make any promises, and I don't have a crystal ball. I have been semi accurate with some predictions, and what my gut tells me is that those DPS glory days of SCH are gone for good, but this doesn't mean doom. Healers can be made to be very fun and exhilarating, but all minds have to be open on how to get there on a wider spectrum. This include dev and player both.

[Anxin]

I'm a healer main who avoids Ex, Savage, and Ultimate content. Namely, I can't do the Dance Dance Final Fantasy mechanics required. My reflexes are slow and combine that with my Internet/Network latency, I end up getting hit most of the time, even when on my screen I am out of the danger zone. I have little desire to memorize a script and follow it. This isn't work; it's play.

While I would like more DPS or, preferably, more support options, I can understand why the devs don't want to complicate healers considering my difficulties with positional mechanics. I would prefer less dancing and memorizing and more strategy-tactical level challenges like older Final Fantasy games presented. Even if you are under-leveled, you could beat encounters with the right strategies and defense layers. From my perspective, the encounter design remains the largest problem: the AOE dancing feels stale and doesn't allow for many mistakes. I would like to see FF14 encounters structured more like the old Guild Wars 1, where the AI targets healers often and coordinate their skills as a team. They also had more random attacks and less AOE dodging. But this isn't the trend of FF14's design, so I don't expect anything like this.

[Semirhage]

What I'm saying is what message do you want to send that hasn't already been heard? Not giving you what you want doesn't mean your message has not got across. Other than that, my last post goes into great detail about why you also shouldn't feel ignored.

It's not frequent, but every single time Yoshi talks about healers? The way he talks about them is the way some of my friends who have vaguely heard there's a role named healer somewhere out there, but have never leveled one do. Healers, uh, like casting really big heals right? So if you wanna have fun healing then just cast big heals! And maybe if you can find time to do it, occasionally do damage.

The Yoshi in the interviews isn't someone I'd say gets the idea that we spend well over 50% of our time spamming one button over and over again in harder content. He talks about healers like someone who's never played one and doesn't really care about their gameplay loop. I have never gotten the impression the devs "understand" our concerns.

[CrimsonGunner]

IOW, if you keep asking for something like more DoTs to return to SCH; I won't say it will never happen, but you've kind of set yourself up for disappointment when it doesn't. I would also say that it makes it more difficult for issues that they will be willing to look at to be heard while the ones that they won't are echoed so loudly. I'm not spouting that as fact, just saying that for me personally from a management perspective, it can be difficult to become aware there's an issue with the copy machine when everyone is complaining that the vending machine keeps ripping people off.

i personally dont care about dots, i dont care about more dps all i care about is having a fun and interesting healer and doing more then just 1 span or be able to push my job beyond just 1 button to do stuff.
i dont have any hopes with the dev teams and yoshi pi ,especially after that LL with sch because:

1) they had more then enough years to actually review healers comments and pick good and bad stuff from them to address issues or answer said issues which they did not.
2)small QoL that were supposed to help were not given and in fact the same kind of mechanic in different classes got different treatments(smn bahamut was responsive immidietly while sch seraph got an extra 2 seconds doing nothing)
3) the LL that introduced job changes, the biggest change sch got was movement speed buff which they said a few words and then "remembered"(more like realized they made it sound super lame) that it has an additional mitigation buff cause you know its...there....
4)you see the skills capstones each healer got and you tell me they actually gave it thought? you know what they sure did for like 2 seconds cause it seems like they forgot the role even exists.

i dont want more dps,i want more synergy and actual connections in the kit to make it fun and interactive ,to make choices you do mean something. after all of this, i doubt and i mean it that unlike dps they give a damn 2 cent about the other roles that exist in the game

[Sebazy]

And you would be very perceptive in this regard; as far as anything changing, and that's because this expectation isn't reasonable. Even back in HW, healers still arrived at ST spam when there was nothing else to do. So are you suggesting that it should take longer to arrive there? If so, that is where more complexity is added.

That's not a fair or valid statement in my humble opinion, sorry =(

It was surprisingly rare for healers to hit a point where they had nothing to do but Stone/Ruin spam back in HW. And that wasn't just a Savage thing, trials saw a good spread of ability usage. Even 24 man wasn't anything like as bad as what we have now.

This isn't rose tinted glasses speaking, and to confirm that, here's some cold hard charts:

Thordan EX - SCH
Zurvan EX - AST
Caliofisteri Weeping City 24 - AST
Here's a Gordias Faust run where I DPS enough to go purple - WHM
Brute Justice Savage - WHM

The worst case back then really was Manipulator for WHM - I'll put equal parts blame for this on me being super HPS centric coupled with a SCH who was very very DPS minded and WHM's rather sketchy MP economy not really doing to well in this fight, especially with the whole suicide Strat thing forcing us to time Shroud.

Even so, compare that to the most healing intensive Savage turn for years. E12S pt1. It's just depressing =/

And this is before we factor in some of HW's gimmicks such as the A5S Elixirs or the Gobwalkers in A2S. This was perfect work to offload onto the healers especially once the content was on farm. Lastly, lets also not forget Virus and Eye for an Eye, another facet of healers that's gone AWOL.

Over time from early raiding to now, this team has had to learn how to be more efficient as demand has also increased along with the amount of subscribers, and simplification is one of those methods to achieve that. They do this for the same exact same reason why you use a vacuum to clean your carpet.

Eh, the schedule has remained more or less the same. Yoshida's team aren't pumping out encounters any faster than they ever have and I'm not really sure it's fair to say that they are harder either. The dances have certainly gotten more elaborate and longer but they just lack that spark that made Savage live up to it's name in the past. Sudo tuned these fights to a different level, one that SE's team just hasn't managed to repeat since. Even if you put the perceived difficulty aside in the mind that progression raiders have gotten better, I'd argue that fights were frequently more inventive with offering up distractions that were ideally suited for the healers to cover once content was on farm. I've got so many fond memories, like near enough solo healing A5S whilst also handling elixir and bomb duty etc, good times were had even if my active rate suffered for it.

So yeah, he completely understands that your damage has been consolidated into a single button. It was deliberate to make things easier for both them and you, and I would also wager that this was done in order to churn out more content where our healing requirements do go up.

I just don't get the link between a single dot/nuke damage kit and enabling the designers to churn out content that pushes our healing kit harder. The problem has nothing to do with Glare/Dia and everything to do with the fact that SE just can't figure out how to throw more damage at us. E12S pt1, already throws back to back AoEs that are individually one shotting healers during prog without mitigation. They've designed themselves into a corner with our (heavily overpowered relative to our HP pool) kits that allow us to erase incoming AoE damage like it never happened up until a certain point before we have to fall back to GCD healing and very rapidly run out of MP. Do you think they envisioned me being able to solo heal through E4S Almagests with no pre mitigation on WHM with Thin Air/DS/Cure III bombs?

They already kind of do this with Misery, and it looks like AST new card mech is all about that as well. When I see things like this, it makes me hopeful that they will start to look at SCHs gauge too.

If Misery was a deliberate and methodical refund, why has it been allowed to lose value vs Glare III? As far as AST goes, you mean Astrodyne? That's just a by product of losing Sleeve Draw. Keeping the old Divination with the Endwalker sign generation rate would have been pretty rough. Offloading the signs onto a self only buff that's going to be a pain to align in raid was the lazy route IMHO.

I don't know what else to say. I guess, hang in there? I can't make any promises, and I don't have a crystal ball. I have been semi accurate with some predictions, and what my gut tells me is that those DPS glory days of SCH are gone for good, but this doesn't mean doom. Healers can be made to be very fun and exhilarating, but all minds have to be open on how to get there on a wider spectrum. This include dev and player both.

Apologies if it sounds like I'm cutting down some of your arguments, it's a fun debate and it's nice to be able to do as such in a though provoking and reasonable manner++

I too think that healer's can indeed be made to function in a manner that's both more entertaining and intellectually taxing. But I'm firmly of the opinion that SE are going to need some help getting there, hopefully by way of recruiting a battle system designer that's got a keen interest in healing!

[Mortex]

It's not frequent, but every single time Yoshi talks about healers? The way he talks about them is the way some of my friends who have vaguely heard there's a role named healer somewhere out there, but have never leveled one do. Healers, uh, like casting really big heals right? So if you wanna have fun healing then just cast big heals! And maybe if you can find time to do it, occasionally do damage.

The Yoshi in the interviews isn't someone I'd say gets the idea that we spend well over 50% of our time spamming one button over and over again in harder content. He talks about healers like someone who's never played one and doesn't really care about their gameplay loop. I have never gotten the impression the devs "understand" our concerns.

He’s a dps player and a blm main and the job designer team are also dps mains. When some one asks them if they even play the game and they says yes, we should realize they play the most interesting role in the game. I mean it’s pretty obvious by the way when they talk about healer being some kind of magical unicorn that can’t be understood. Feels actually like they design healer like this because they had a dungeon run or savage fight back then we’re the healer didn’t heal because he used dmg spells.