Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Nizzi]

I do not mean this with any sort of ill will, but as of my post of this, you don't have any healers at level 80, so please understand why some can see this post and think you're just coming in here to "combat toxicity" and whiteknight for the developers instead of actually engaging any of us in good faith. The developers are adults; they're mature enough to deal with comments from players, and they've made many mistakes in the past and admitted to them. They're not infallible, and they're not fragile; you don't need to defend them.

But beware when you ask for this. It will create another skill-gap for healers, that interact negatively with how well the other 3-7 players on the party plays. Because if the other players are lacking, and demand more healing to stay alive, it will cause many players to fail their new complex dps rotation.

This disparity of "skill-gap" within healers already exists.



Look at the jump in damage on White Mage, for example.
From the 25 to 50th percentile, it's a 15.5% jump in DPS.
From the 50th to 75th is another 16.3%.
75th to 99th is a 21.5% jump.
Meanwhile on DPS jobs that do have actual involved DPS rotations, you can see that the gap between 75th percentile to 99th percentile on Samurai is a 5.6% increase.

There is a much larger skill gap between percentiles on healers than there is on any other job. This is a issue for a few reasons - worse groups mitigate less and die more, worse healers heal more and are afraid to do damage, worse healers typically play in worse groups.

Healers are at the peak of their power and simplicity right now; there are no buttons to press for damage and tons of healing that is insanely strong, even if GCD heals cost you DPS you don't even need many of them because they heal so much.

Pressure to do more damage doesn't come from having more damage buttons, you can see this if you go back and look at old HW logs. It comes from how the fight is tuned and what it demands, and the fights now demand more damage from the healers than ever before. You can pull up BiS rank 1 speeds kills and take the players in those groups, and pretend they're in a party with 2 healers doing 0 DPS, and the DPS check on a fight like E8S with it's rdps requirement would still be tight.