Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[HyoMinPark]

This is likely more of a hodge-podge of thoughts, but just some things running through my mind on reading the opening post. I haven’t read the rest of the thread, so some of these might have already been said. But since it’s roughly one hour before my alarm for work was supposed to go off and I can’t fall back asleep, here’s something to pass the time.


I’ve played healers almost since I started this game. I started back in late 2015 as a DPS main (BRD), but AST was the third job I leveled because I loved the aesthetic. Throughout the years, I have steadily become far more of a healer main than a DPS main—and while I haven’t healed every piece of content this game has to offer yet, I’ve healed quite a lot of it. I’ve at least done most of the content outside of some of the Bozja stuff and PvP, so I think I have a fairly decent grasp on how a wide variety of content in this game is designed.

The main issue I have with the opening post—and it isn’t even something that I disagree with—is that it falls back on the “skill level” of the players in your party as to whether or not playing a healer becomes engaging or a snooze fest; not if the job is well-designed or if the encounter is well-designed but “how good/bad is my party”.

Like I said, I don’t disagree with this statement. I actually agree heavily with it—part of the reason I like healing stuff on Day 1 is because repeated deaths and wipes and getting hit by even the avoidable stuff gives me a reason to put my immense healing toolkit to use. It’s fun. It’s exciting. I actually feel like I’m performing my role versus just being a green DPS. But within it also lies the issue with this game, encounter design, and even job design: the developers cater to the lowest common denominator versus those who are actually passionate about the job/role.

I’m not saying that making things more accessible is bad, so don’t misinterpret here—but constantly ignoring the criticisms and suggestions from players that actively play a job/role so that you can cater to those who aren’t healer mains or who only casually play the role is. At that point, you are ignoring those who have passion for what they do; and that is why there is so much contention amongst healers regarding encounter design and job design.

This is a complaint I’ve had even outside of the healer role when it comes to DPS job changes. So many were made to close this skill floor and skill ceiling gap—but nothing was given to the jobs to really give back what was taken, or at least add some other layer of something to the job. The best example I have was the simplification of BRD from SB to ShB. The skill gap was closed with the changes to Repertoire—but at the same time, optimization was removed and replaced with…nothing. Iron Jaws became a boring ability, and BRD itself lost the nuance that made it fun for those who mained it, and sought to push the job to its limits. Partly in favor to address the power creep and crit-scaling, but also partly because there were aspects people thought “too hard”. And there in is another problem I have.
Well, and let’s face it: they also neutered BRD’s utility because DNC came to town as the new Support DPS—and apparently we can’t have two of those kinds of DPS???? Idek…

It’s very common on these forums for some players to cry about difficulty of this piece of content or playing that job role, etc.; and the issue with this is that, by making everything so easy that you could drool on your keyboard and win isn’t helping anyone. It isn’t teaching players to grow. It isn’t teaching them to become more skilled. It’s teaching them that, if they cry loud enough, things will get nerfed and they won’t have to actually try. Positive reinforcement of negative behavior.

In another thread I was in yesterday, I actually saw a response regarding EW trials that echos that: complaining that they were too hard, and someone chimed in that “Hey, eventually Royal Menagerie was nerfed so…” (it wasn’t nerfed, by the way; just outgeared since it had no item level sync during SB). The response? Basically, “Well, maybe if we keep crying loud enough, [Endwalker trial] will get nerfed, too.” I see this happen in healer discussions A LOT: “X content is too hard to heal, please nerf it”. And it’s bad. It’s wrong. Nerfing the content will not do anything positive for encounter designs or for player skill.


Re: increasing unavoidable damage—

I have to disagree that this has any bearing on any other role outside of healing in most content. As they won’t design unavoidable damage in most content (I’m not talking EX+ or Savage/Ultimate here) with stacking raidwide mitigations (e.g., Samba/Troubadour/Tactician, Magicked Barrier, Dark Missonary/Heart of Light/Shake it Off/Divine Veil) in mind, it will still fall back on only healer design and healer engagement. The reason why I want them to give us more unavoidable things to heal is because, well, we’re supposed to actually be doing that anyways. But, right now, I can go into level 90 endgame content (not much right now, I know), and heal ONLY with my oGCDs on SGE. At most, maybe I throw in a Zoe+Pneuma in there if I’m feeling particularly feisty—but otherwise, I’m using Addersgall. I’m not touching Eukrasia Prognosis or even Eukrasia Diagnosis outside of downtime (and that’s only because I want to proc Toxikon that I’m touching E.Diagnosis), and this is a problem. Obviously, other healers have to GCD heal if they don’t have the oGCD arsenal (e.g., WHM and to a lesser extent AST), but the base premise still stands: they aren’t doing that much of it.

The developers have LOVED giving us all these pretty healer tools. So now, give me stuff where I can actually make use of them without them being complete overkill. I’m not a SCH main—I’m the weakest at SCH out of the four healers, to be honest—but my main complaint about Seraph (outside of ability ghosting and her summoning delay) was that she isn’t even needed for most content (excluding high-end content here). She’s complete overkill that I pop because I’m, well, bored, and want to mitigate the crap out of a mechanic and laugh when we take zero damage. Not because it felt satisfying, but because I’m making fun of it. Occasionally you get that bad 24-man where using her isn’t an overkill because people have 2 to 3 vuln stacks each and your co-healer has died to X mechanic 5 times, is OOM, and you’re basically solo healing—but that is an extreme example. And why should I be searching for shite to hit the fan so that I’m feeling engaged on my role? Why can’t I feel engaged without shite hitting the fan?

So healers turn to asking for more complex rotations. If incoming damage isn’t going to be increased, then they want to feel engaged in doing what they’re doing 70-90% of the content anyways: DPSing. Now, personally, I’m not asking for even a full-blown 1-2-3 = oGCDs rotation a la a DPS job. I would be happy with just things to upkeep: more DoTs, a debuff, or a buff. One of the main reasons I play AST is because the cards at least give me something to do amongst the mindless 1-1-1-1-1 spam of Malefic—but that’s just AST. The other three…don’t really have that. I miss having 2 or more DoTs to manage on a boss (RIP Aero III, you will be forever missed). I miss having other things to manage. I’d be happy just getting some of that back if they aren’t going to up healing requirements because at least now I’m doing something more than 1-1-1-1-1 ad nauseam.

If they ever were to add in more DPS options, then it falls to other healers to learn these just as it would fall to any other role to learn theirs while also learning an encounter. In my opinion, there isn’t a difference between asking a healer to learn how to manage their DPS alongside managing their healing and responding to mechanics versus asking a DPS to learn their rotation while also responding to mechanics and being aware to use any sort of raidwide mitigation tools they may have when it is necessary.

I don’t understand why the healing role seems to be the only one that gets a free pass at things. And a great many things at that. No one tells a DPS “it’s okay to not learn how to use your mitigations or properly learn your rotation” or a tank “it’s okay to not learn how to time your invulns or other CDs”. No other roles is pardoned for only using 50% of their kit (or less). Why are healers so special? Why should those who don’t want to heal or learn to improve or who only want to cry about nerfing this or that so special? Why do they get a pass from so many?
Not that nowadays other things that shouldn’t get a free pass don’t get one…I’ve actually seen posts on Reddit where players have told DPS “it’s okay” not to AOE trash packs and tanks “it’s okay” to not use cooldowns (???) because this is a video game and blah blah blah…

I don’t think that a skill gap is a bad thing. If anything, the existence of said gap between a skill floor and a skill ceiling is healthy because you can have a middle ground of various ranges of acceptable play; and the upper levels are purely for those who want that additional something I mentioned earlier: that optimization and min-maxing they can squeeze out of their job for even more satisfaction if that is what they so desire. If there’s no disparity and everyone is forced to being on “the same level”, that’s boring design. And it’s unrewarding. And it leads to a lot of passioned players leaving said role/job due to disenchantment.


I feel like I’m just rambling/somewhat venting, and this post is very long—so I’ll wrap it up with a few last-minute things:

Statements like "they don't know what they are doing", "they don't get how healers are played".. it takes a level of ego to say that to devs who have proven to care about their game & playerbase.

I feel like part of this has some merit. It’s known that no one on the development team actually mains healers—they “main” either tanks or a DPS job. Not having someone with deep insight to a role is problematic for design; how are they to address issues if they have no insight on them. It’s also been a frequent complaint that, for their expansion media tours, healer mains—and really good healer mains—are not usually present/invited to the events, so they are unable to give the developers honest feedback about the role. It’s been severely neglected, and the disenchantment surrounding healers only increases as the years go by. I can say that with the utmost certainty after being on this forums since my join date of Feb 2016. I have a lot of criticism for EW’s Media Tour, as some of those invited were prominent Twitch streamers that don’t have a lot of experience in this game. One of them had only been playing for a short period of time, and didn’t even know of the toolkits of the other roles. Now, I’m not saying that you should know EVERY job inside and out—but when you ask “is Inner Release” a new ability, that’s…kind of bad.

Momo Sama is an astounding healer main. Always one of the best to seek advice from, and he has proven himself to be super helpful. I’ve sat in on streams he’s done where he will go through a log or analysis of a player if they link them to him, and give constructive criticism on what was a poor decision, what was a good one, and what they can do to improve their gameplay. He isn’t mean about it. He isn’t toxic. He’s honest and polite. This is phenomenal; and he wasn’t invited to the EW media tour. He wasn’t at the ShB one. And this is a problem. You have a very vocal, very skilled, and very passionate healer main—and you don’t seek out his advice? His feedback?

There’s just also been some really questionable things the development team has done in the past regarding healers and their design. SB Lilies are always a favorite of mine to bring up: the SB media tour already had healer mains saying “No, this is bad; please don’t do this”. And the response? “Just wait and try them out.” After SB released: “No, this is still bad; please change it”. “Wait until Savage”. Savage releases: “THIS IS STILL BAD PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF THE TWELVE CHANGE IT”. While they did ultimately make the Lilies more interesting (after two years of players outright ignoring the core job mechanic), it’s still not great. And with EW, there needs to be some adjustments to the reward for using your lilies now that the 1.5s cast times have removed using them for weave windows. Misery shouldn’t be a DPS loss to use. At least make it a DPS refund of some kind…

Anyways…my point is: the developers may care about the game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they know what they are doing when it comes to designing a specific job or role. They really need to seriously consider how the playerbase plays and handles healers—and I don’t think they should use the lowest common denominator for this. I think they need to look higher.

Ultimately, the role of healer can be easy, and boring, or vary to extreme challenge, and its entirely dependent on the players in your party, not you. Just keep this in mind, as it's some that the dev team clearly has in their minds.

I said this earlier, but I’ll just reiterate: I don’t think it’s good healer design to have engagement be so reliant upon “how bad is my random DF party today”. I do disagree with the assertion that this is what the develop team considers. I don’t think they consider the skill level of the party so much as they consider the skill level of the healer themselves, and cater to that more.

Anyways, my hour has passed, and it’s time to start getting ready to clock in for work. I may pop back in on breaks/my lunch or whenever our work VPN is being trash because not a day goes by that it doesn’t act up to read the rest—but here’s my two gil.

Apologies against for this massive wall of text. You don’t have to read it all—but it is most appreciated if people do. Also sorry again if it’s a bit rambly.

[Liam_Harper]

We're treated as babysitters and a necessity, not a role that we're meant to have fun with. Dps are all about engagement and fun, healers are there to correct mistakes. The devs are so afraid of making that job of handling mistakes "stressful" but if healing was actually designed to be fun, why should it be stress? The more we get to engage with the role we chose to play, the more fun it would be. We wanted to be healers.

The mindset is so backwards to me. It would be like changing auto attacks to be 80% of a dps classes output so they don't have to "stress too much" over their job of killing the boss. They'd obviously hate it. They want their job. Dps would end up attracting players who don't actually like playing dps, similar to how healers have attracted many players who enjoy a free easy-mode in content.

Likewise, we want to play our job. We want raidwides, bleeds, boss autos and such to put our heal toolkit to the test. We want engaging damage to make downtime interesting. We don't want the developers to constantly try to design encounters so that we're asked to do our job as little as possible.

[Lauront]

So healers turn to asking for more complex rotations. If incoming damage isn’t going to be increased, then they want to feel engaged in doing what they’re doing 70-90% of the content anyways: DPSing. Now, personally, I’m not asking for even a full-blown 1-2-3 = oGCDs rotation a la a DPS job. I would be happy with just things to upkeep: more DoTs, a debuff, or a buff. One of the main reasons I play AST is because the cards at least give me something to do amongst the mindless 1-1-1-1-1 spam of Malefic—but that’s just AST. The other three…don’t really have that. I miss having 2 or more DoTs to manage on a boss (RIP Aero III, you will be forever missed). I miss having other things to manage. I’d be happy just getting some of that back if they aren’t going to up healing requirements because at least now I’m doing something more than 1-1-1-1-1 ad nauseam.

Speaking as someone who does not main a healer (outside of picking up one for PVP) and what puts me off about them, this is one of those things. Not only are you capable of putting out massive amounts of healing fairly easily, with a lot of content not even requiring it, but the other part of it, the dps rotation, is essentially 1 dot 1 nuke 1 gcd or some slight variation on that theme. Looking at it from a learning ladder perspective, content outside of the sort you mention (ex, savage etc) is trivially easy to heal through. You barely need to make use of much of your toolkit barring a few instants/OGCDs here and there. If you're not nurturing a base level of competence in your playerbase, this will seep through into harder modes as well over time, particularly if there is a threshold of clearing expected to consider them worthwhile to add as content (I realise Yoshi does not hold ultimate to this requirement.) If/when I decide to do raiding in EW, I think I'll probably stick to a dps.

As a point of story immersion (and this game prides itself on its story), it's gotten to the point where a lot of story fights can't really do a good job of conveying the boss's power - the Endsinger one, for all she was hyped up to be, felt like a total joke, and with some of the prior ones they needed contrivances besides mechanics to help make the boss feel dangerous. I almost want them to just implement trusts for trials and dungeons across the board, so that you can do a DF version as an alternative that isn't so utterly braindead in normal mode.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Speaking as someone who does not main a healer (outside of picking up one for PVP) and what puts me off about them, this is one of those things. Not only are you capable of putting out massive amounts of healing fairly easily, with a lot of content not even requiring it, but the other part of it, the dps rotation, is essentially 1 dot 1 nuke 1 gcd or some slight variation on that theme. Looking at it from a learning ladder perspective, content outside of the sort you mention (ex, savage etc) is trivially easy to heal through. You barely need to make use of much of your toolkit barring a few instants/OGCDs here and there. If you're not nurturing a base level of competence in your playerbase, this will seep through into harder modes as well over time, particularly if there is a threshold of clearing expected to consider them worthwhile to add as content (I realise Yoshi does not hold ultimate to this requirement.) If/when I decide to do raiding in EW, I think I'll probably stick to a dps.

As a point of story immersion (and this game prides itself on its story), it's gotten to the point where a lot of story fights can't really do a good job of conveying the boss's power - the Endsinger one, for all she was hyped up to be, felt like a total joke, and with some of the prior ones they needed contrivances besides mechanics to help make the boss feel dangerous. I almost want them to just implement trusts for trials and dungeons across the board, so that you can do a DF version as an alternative that isn't so utterly braindead in normal mode.

Speak for yourself, that boss my trial wiped on multiple times before we cleared it. It was EXTREMELY hard for a boss fight, that and zodiark.

[Ironthorne]

Speak for yourself, that boss my trial wiped on multiple times before we cleared it. It was EXTREMELY hard for a boss fight, that and zodiark.

Normal trials hard? No, your parties were just terrible.