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]

They clearly don't even understand how the community plays them either.

What does that even mean? Baring some kind of exploit, how are healers playing the jobs outside of their intention?

Does this actually mean that the devs don't understand what the community wants? What does the community want? More complexity, more healing requirements; return to 3.x gameplay? They heard you, and they said no to all of that. What's clear to me is not that the devs don't understand healers; it's that they have a clear design choice that a portion of the community does not agree with. However, there is also a portion of the community that is a-ok with it.

It is indeed a sucky predicament to have to make design choices wherein a portion of the community benefits, and the other suffers. If they did go with adding complexity to healers, the chagrin expressed on these forums will undoubtedly shift the other direction. So I dunno. tl;dr? your guess is as good as mine I suppose.

[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.

[Sebazy]

What does that even mean? Baring some kind of exploit, how are healers playing the jobs outside of their intention?

I assume this is touching on the occasions where SE's vision for how a class was supposed to be played or simply fit within the meta just didn't pan out.

It means that SE, or at least Yoshida himself doesn't always understand their own game as well as the community does. A strange concept but it's genuinely come true on multiple occasions.

A few notable examples that spring immediately to mind:

Him going on record claiming that players didn't understand how to play Warrior, in early 2.0 at a point where warrior was routinely excluded from Titan HM upwards.

AST getting 20% balance for patch 3.4. I'm of the opinion that they simply looked at the clear rates, saw it was still behind WHM and launched the nukes.

4.0 SCH. You know how AST was kind of lame in dungeons pre Gravity which they got rather late? Let's make inflict that gameplay on SCH. At level 70. Oh and let's make it nigh defunct in Savage too. Whomever signed off the CVS with those changes had no clue what they were doing, neither did the test team that week clearly.

I forget which class it was, maybe Ninja or Monk? SE's official rotation for the job was factually and mathematically wrong which prompted a bit of a knee jerk fix after some egg on face over that one.

*edit* Oh and the classic when Yoshida claimed that high end SCHs were doing nothing but DPSing whilst WHMs were carrying all the healing load, despite logs quite clearly showing that said SCHs were actually doing more healing than the WHM.

I'm pretty sure there's a bunch more but those are the ones that I can remember on a dime.

[ThorneDynasty]

It just seems pretty ridiculous to me that we will have soon 4 distinct jobs all with the same non-rotation.

Like okay, say every argument about your average healer not being able to handle any DPS rotation and the community suddenly turning around and yelling at healers who don't keep their DPS up during prog fiascos is true. Even then, why even have a class system outside of roles if the different jobs don't appeal to different types of players? Is it so horrible if just one of the healers doesn't appeal to the "average" player? Monk, Black Mage and whatever are allowed to exist despite having the same "problem", why is it different for healers?

[FoxCh40s]

What does that even mean? Baring some kind of exploit, how are healers playing the jobs outside of their intention?

Does this actually mean that the devs don't understand what the community wants? What does the community want? More complexity, more healing requirements; return to 3.x gameplay? They heard you, and they said no to all of that. What's clear to me is not that the devs don't understand healers; it's that they have a clear design choice that a portion of the community does not agree with. However, there is also a portion of the community that is a-ok with it.

It is indeed a sucky predicament to have to make design choices wherein a portion of the community benefits, and the other suffers. If they did go with adding complexity to healers, the chagrin expressed on these forums will undoubtedly shift the other direction. So I dunno. tl;dr? your guess is as good as mine I suppose.

They said in an interview that White Mage struggled with healing over Scholar. That was the only clue we needed there.

I'm not going to State evidence, because it's all over the forum, for years, showing they have no idea how the healing jobs or played or how they function.

They took away Energy Drain from Scholar, removed Miasma 2, decreased fairy potency again, and made Adloquim cost a rediculous amount of mp at the beginning of Stormblood. It was absolutely horrendous and awful, and genuinely shows they didn't test it, and neither understood how Scholar really works with players wielding it.

Scholars really shouldn't have even recieved Indom, but here we are.

[IDontPetLalas]

snipped due to length



What I am uncertain of, is if healers pushing for more complexity in healer gameplay are aware of encounters outside their own. So far this week, my raid roulettes threw me into Iconoclasm and Anamorphis. The healers in each of these encounters could not stay on their feet, making these clears extremely difficult to obtain. Our own feelings about how difficult these NM encounters are is entirely irrelevant, all that matters is that instances like this can and do happen; and so long as they do, I don't see complexity being added to healer gameplay. Not in the form of causing more damage anyway.

The last thing that I will bring up is that in those encounters, what also made them difficult to clear was the impatience from the other players. A good portion of the time it took to clear was outside of combat while waiting for replacements to the players who left. Hell, one replacement left immediately when he/she saw that the fight was being explained. That's not a guess either; the player deliberately said, "I don't have time for sucky players." and then bounced. When I zoom out, I don't see much reason to add complexity to healer gameplay because a portion of them are bored and hate the design choice. Not in terms of the overall health to the game. However, the role not being enjoyable for everyone who wants to play it should be a large concern, and I really don't know how much of it is.

I appreciate your taking the time to go into some detail, however those additional DPS buttons? If someone genuinely has issues hitting 1222222212222222222122222 and then gets asked (for example) to go 12222222222222231222222223122222222223 I honestly don't think that would be much of a strain. Maybe , for additional excitement maybe a proc to do 122222222322222242222222222122222223? Do you honestly think that is going to wipe a group, under normal conditions , once everyone is familiar with that fight?

Let's look at the different scenarios you bring up:

1- healers can't stay on their feet: OK, they're learning. Fine. So they don't hit "3" or "4" Once they learn, gee- they can then hit the 3 or 4 button
2- Impatient players left your group because of (1) - what does that even have to do with this discussion? Are you trying to imply that we can't touch healer design because now you're afraid that healers will just fail and people will leave groups? Because I don't see what that has to do with this subject otherwise - and like any other job or role, it gets changes and we all adjust. If people get impatient then that's on them.

[Icecylee]

What I am uncertain of, is if healers pushing for more complexity in healer gameplay are aware of encounters outside their own. So far this week, my raid roulettes threw me into Iconoclasm and Anamorphis. The healers in each of these encounters could not stay on their feet, making these clears extremely difficult to obtain. Our own feelings about how difficult these NM encounters are is entirely irrelevant, all that matters is that instances like this can and do happen; and so long as they do, I don't see complexity being added to healer gameplay. Not in the form of causing more damage anyway.

I don't think you can really blame this entirely on healing being too hard to grasp, especially not at the moment. We've have a huge influx of new people who've rapidly been leveling up without any ingame systems really well designed to teach those new players how to perform well. And on top of that, many of the *good* healers probably aren't doing their lower level roulettes on healers because they're so boring to play. So you're a lot more likely to either be running into highly inexperienced newbies that aren't familiar with the fights at all, or impatient main DPS players who want to skip the DPS queue. Putting better systems in place to teach newbie healers what they should actually do doesn't really have an easy fix and would require a fair bit of time and resources to address properly, but if they gave healers some downtime tools back so the experienced ones aren't falling asleep on the job some of them might go back to doing easier content on them.

[Nizzi]

What's clear to me is not that the devs don't understand healers; it's that they have a clear design choice that a portion of the community does not agree with. However, there is also a portion of the community that is a-ok with it.

I dunno, they reduced the potency of Succor a few times over the course of Shadowbringers as if they saw that Scholars almost never use Succor and they were trying to encourage the usage of it despite the mana cost not being the issue with Succor at all. They also nerfed ED's potency because they presumably didn't like Scholars using Aetherflow solely for Energy Drain, only to reduce cast times in EW which makes using ED even more of a potency gain than it is now, ensuring that Scholars will keep using Aetherflow on ED. I don't think saying that they don't understand how the community plays them is such a stretch.

[Kraniel]

That's exactly what Lord/Lady were before. What they did was revert their change to minor arcana, not come up with boom and heal. People were asking for the old Lord and Lady back and that is what they got. Well, at least AST got something back as neither WHM or SCH did in asking for things like Bane and Aero III back.

I know, i started playing AST at that time.
Sorry, i realize maybe the terms i used were a bit unclear. I didn't mean that is was a recent idea specifically. What i meant was : i wish they came up with something better than that, especially now that our kit is already bloated with heals anyway.
The new Lord and Lady are going to be unreliable, so in that case why not give them some more original effects ?
Like, i don't know ? 3s knockback immunity for the whole party ? Literally just throwing this out as an example. Something that gives it "flavor".

Having them be a heal and a DPS skill was "justifiable" when the max lvl was 70 and AST had MP management issues, a more varied kit, and less healing spells. Not being able to come up with something better as we're now hitting max lvl 90, have too much MP, and a kit full of OGCD heals, is pure laziness imo. As someone else said in another thread of this type, it just feels like healers exist in the game so that DPS can queue for content.