It's time to kill the argument that DPS abilities keep healers from healing.

[Sebazy]

All the interviews I watched of Yoshida from Mr. Happy, Zepla, Work2Game, even Mioni who is a healer main all seemed to have kissed Yoshi's feet and tread carefully with their questions as to not offend the man or something. If he is surrounded by yes-men, then how will the message ever get across? I wonder how or if you would act differently if allowed to interview Yoshida. Would you be as stern as you are here? Would you tell him his team deserves to be fired?

I'm pretty sure at least Mr Happy has clarified that the questions get vetted beforehand and frankly, if he was to ask the questions that some of us would want him to ask, he simply wouldn't get the interview in the first place.

Personally, I do agree that they've been massively successful and even if I don't agree with all the choices they've made, simply firing them isn't the right way to go. As I've said repeatedly for the past few years, either the beancounters upstairs need to loosen the purse strings a little or Yoshida needs to swallow his pride and accept that he needs to write some cheques to hire some talent to help with the overall job direction in this game. A JP game studio is never going to do a Blizzard and start hiring opinionated figureheads out of a rival game's community anytime soon, but even something a simple as taking someone like Mythic on in a consultancy style arrangement to simply feed them with drafts and ideas to pick and choose from would be a huge boon to the game given how thinly stretched the battle system team has always been in this game.

I'd absolutely jump at the chance to interview Yoshida.

I'd ask him if he is aware of the ratio of actions used by healers in typical content as well as seeing what his thoughts are about the gameplay loop healers have in solo and MSQ content.

From there I'd ask him for his thoughts about ARR's content difficulty curve relative to what we have now.

Lastly I'd ask him if he has reconsidered his views on keeping the development team small vs expanding to cope with both the larger number of classes as well as elevated expectations and demands from the player base.

What about the other skills that were deemed too niche or impractical and were removed?
What about the old AST card system? Was it unreliable in the truest sense of the word? Yes. Was it satisfying to play your cards right (pun very much intended, sorry lol)? You bet. But no. Not enough DPS, so it gets shafted.

I'm probably the wrong person to ask this one. I was a huge fan of the old card system and frankly, I loathe the new one. It's stale and boring by comparison IMHO. I loved trying to get value out of niche cards and whilst sure, Balance was indeed king, most of the other cards had plenty of situations in which they offered value too.

Also, I'm not a SCH main so maybe I'm wrong but what happened to Selene? Wasn't she deemed inferior and then removed?

Selene was a strange one. She was comically overvalued for much of ARR due to SE's rather misleading tooltips (I started preaching the worth of Whispering Dawn as a way to create extra dot and nuke windows and pretty much got laughed off reddit for it at the time). As SE steadily corrected the tooltips, people started to realise that her haste buffs really weren't all that. However even beyond then you'd still see the best SCH's using her as part of a dissipation opener at the very least. She certainly had her uses and brought value, just not as consistently as Eos.

What about Fluid Aura? Yes, a very lacking spell but at least the bind effect was sometimes useful in the overworld (in the rare instances where you actually feel threatened).

Fluid Aura's downfall rests 100% in the hands of SE's treatment of it. Remember that it was originally a DPS oGCD for WHM and a considerate player would either try to target push immune mobs with it or simply shove something into a wall to get the DPS without splitting the pack up, it was also useful for shoving a stray caster into the stack when needed. Stormblood saw fit to remove the damage whilst also making the majority of dungeon mobs push immune leaving it pretty much useless in PvE. Shadowbringers was the final nail in its coffin turning it into a Bind only effect that was entirely worthless since the bind broke at the slightest hint of damage and frankly, overworld mobs just aren't of any concern to a WHM. If it hits hard enough to be a threat that a mere Regen can't deal with, it's probably a Fate boss that you can't Bind anyway.

I get why stuff gets removed but don't you think the game becomes more and more shallow as a result? I certainly think so. I actually like talent trees, different skill sets and the like. XIV isn't like that and that's alright. But ever since 5.0 the game resembles more a spread sheet to map out damage. And IMHO the community only has themselves to blame.

Heck, 6.0 brings back a modicum of diversity, like Lord and Lady for AST and people immediately moan about it here. A typical careful what you wish scenario. I'd rather have the illusion of choice than no choice. But that's just me.

Eh, the issue with that statement is that you've got to remember that most challenging fights in this game are tightly scripted dances with an enrage check. This game doesn't do battles of attrition, nor does it do RNG. Savage is a damage spreadsheet because SE design it to be precisely that. The community are simply playing SE's game.

I do agree that removing stuff isn't the way to go, especially on a role that's as gameplay starved as Healers currently. Fluid Aura should have been reworked into something useful and interesting. The same goes with Selene.

Instead SE took the quick and lazy way out, something they've done all too consistently over the past years.

[Gemina]

I'm pretty sure at least Mr Happy has clarified that the questions get vetted beforehand and frankly, if he was to ask the questions that some of us would want him to ask, he simply wouldn't get the interview in the first place.

That is exactly why I brought up the yes-man analogy. This in a nutshell basically says there is a disconnect between Yoshida and the community. Those interviews are his best opportunity to hear what the community is saying, and who knows how much of it gets filtered. You say that you would jump at the chance to interview Yoshida, whereas I would say I would jump at the chance to be interviewed if I were him, and would probably turn it into a questionnaire on my end 'unintentionally', but totally intentionally if you know what I mean.

That does not mean he should be subject to questions and treatment along the lines of the aforementioned, and it really is up to the interviewer to arrange questions that best capture the feelings and thoughts of the community. Not an easy task, I admit, but I do have to point out the likelihood that not everything gets through.