Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Grimoire-M]

jesus 12 - 20 mins o.O is it actually so bad there with people or whats the reason we have these massive que time diffrences ?. Did actually people from america stop playing healer. Must resist bad healthcare joke........ But yeah thats pretty scary , are the healer you have atleast not pure cure afk bots ? or are they like my healers i had (pure afk cure 2 spamming).

I struggle to find healing enjoyable so sometimes I'll bite the queue time as a DPS just so I get to play a job with an actual rotation in braindead content. It also lets me do dailies as I wait the extra hour it takes to get into them. I wouldn't call this reflective of 'normal' content though. At the moment everyone's doing Bozja and high end content for funsies, or are rushing their way to Endwalker.

The only exception regarding healers, lately, is when I know my sister's about to enter content she's not prepared for. I'll go on healer in those spots so I can guarantee her haphazard group a clear. The tank literally can't hit tab to even select an add to start establishing aggro on kind of haphazard. It's certainly not braindead when you can count on half the people you're with screwing up even as you're doing callouts and fixing mistakes no one should reasonably be expected to fix by Shadowbringers. It's fun, in the same way 'The Room' is a fun movie to watch.

I don't consider that a good state for healers to be in either. Here's a quote from a better thread that posted a "What kind of player are you?" quiz tailored to all the people posting retorts here. It sums up my feelings on the current state fairly well:

3) Do you find healing too boring, too hectic, or just right?

I find healing depends way too much on other players screwing up and how much they're allowed to screw up before the fight forces you to wipe, instead of on the fight itself pressuring your resources at a base level and using those mistakes to add stress over time. In casual content I can solo-heal garbage situations but I wouldn't call it hectic as much as I'd call it a sobering experience for the sprouts involved. Extremes and Savage can be hectic, but to some extent that's limited to progression. You can see the effect that skill gap has in Alliance raids as much as levelling content. People learn at different rates and as long as you're willing to learn or share what you know you can clear every bit of content in this game, eventually.

I think the problem is SE's approach to fight design in and of itself. Ever since Gordias they've really hunkered down and settled into one niche that they are unwilling to break out of in harder content. The majority of what everyone is actually doing in each fight learning how to move their respective avatars according to the correct dance. I can't recall a time when they actually had you micromanage a mob or an encounter specific resource for more than 15 seconds since A2S. And, sure, that's okay as a DPS, they have enough to pay attention to already, but I find myself wishing there'd be more of that irrespective of the role I'm playing. On a healer in particular that's especially painful given the lack of a rotation to engage with when the party -is- competent, and SE's unwillingness to allow for recovery in harder content. If, as a designer, you have to resort to binary outcomes like Doom stacks and instant-kill AoEs to make a phase matter, you are kind of admitting the mechanics you're presenting within that phase aren't interesting in of themselves anymore.


4) Based off question 3, which content are you referring to.

All of it. Engagement and Difficulty are two seperate vectors that make up gameplay, and my concerns are primarily with the former. I don't mind content being hard. It's how that difficulty is presented that matters. We're variety starved at the moment. Dancing and DPS checks aren't the only option. That will always be a part of fights to some degree, but the better part of the MMORPG genre doesn't lean on it as heavily as XIV has. And giving players more ways to actively control an encounter also allows for more a granular difficulty spectrum to be implemented within an encounter. It also requires that you design more dynamic class kits on the player side of things, because you can expect that a greater amount of flexibility will be needed to deal with fights properly. Not everything has to be about the 1m-2m raid buff window, after all.