Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[SeverianLyonesse]

They can stick with it all they want but they need to face these facts:

They can technically bring out a TB more often in Dungeon Content, specifically Expert as well as AOE.

We have many oGCDs and we're going to burn through them before we even TOUCH our GCDs (...except WHM, sorry). This design is a problem, however, because we're never pushed enough to USE our GCDs when everyone plays well (strictly speaking of bosses not trash mobs) and thus we have few mana problems (which makes piety useless, again sorry WHMs) and an overbloated kit.

Even if they don't want to bring Expert Dungeons in line with leveling dungeons, the same can still be said for Raids, EX and Savage. And EX and Savage have 0 excuse for not testing 2 tanks and 2 healers.

So, if they want healing to be lax, fine. BUT we need a skill pruning then. They cannot have low healing and too much healing abilities. One or the other has to give.

Again, this idea of "bloat" doesn't take into account why the redundancies exist: to help compensate for outright bad players.

I have absolutely needed to dip into my GCDs as a SGE to keep bad tanks alive. And granted some of that comes down to me being new to healing and greedy for those adderstings, but even still that is a situation that the ability bloat accounts for: when you have a bad healer AND a bad tank, you can still clear.

I think even in the live letter YoshiP made some intimations that he prefers to err on the side of content being clearable rather than difficult.

Again, this makes a lot more sense when you view FF as a social MMO as its first priority, and a combat MMO second. It makes its money from having an extremely low barrier of entry to most of its busywork content.

[ASkellington]

Again, this idea of "bloat" doesn't take into account why the redundancies exist: to help compensate for outright bad players.

I have absolutely needed to dip into my GCDs as a SGE to keep bad tanks alive. And granted some of that comes down to me being new to healing and greedy for those adderstings, but even still that is a situation that the ability bloat accounts for: when you have a bad healer AND a bad tank, you can still clear.

I think even in the live letter YoshiP made some intimations that he prefers to err on the side of content being clearable rather than difficult.

Again, this makes a lot more sense when you view FF as a social MMO as its first priority, and a combat MMO second. It makes its money from having an extremely low barrier of entry to most of its busywork content.

Not really? Perhaps it is my experience but even with bad tanks and dps I still don't use everything. Collective Unconciousness can 100% be removed and with some moving of skills I can guarentee most healers will not feel it. CI can also be removed by either trait upgrading it to Exalt or just flat removed. Neutral Sect'd A.Bene can fill it's spot for when I need to shield a DPS or my tank.

That is where we differ on our opinions for redundancies. Where you see it as less tools, I see it as more chances to creatively use what tools I have left to salvage a situation. THAT is what healing imo is lacking for engagement and WHY I want unnecessary skills or just some skills period gone.

Does that make sense?

[SieyaM]

Not really? Perhaps it is my experience but even with bad tanks and dps I still don't use everything. Collective Unconciousness can 100% be removed and with some moving of skills I can guarentee most healers will not feel it. CI can also be removed by either trait upgrading it to Exalt or just flat removed. Neutral Sect'd A.Bene can fill it's spot for when I need to shield a DPS or my tank.

That is where we differ on our opinions for redundancies. Where you see it as less tools, I see it as more chances to creatively use what tools I have left to salvage a situation. THAT is what healing imo is lacking for engagement and WHY I want unnecessary skills or just some skills period gone.

Does that make sense?

The problem I see with removing CI and just using Neutral A. Bene is that if you are in a dungeon situation and your tank is pulling, you don't want a regen effect on them since it's so easy during that time to grab aggro from them. Neutral is also on a pretty long cool down so it probably would not be available again before the next pull. Sure this would probably work for Savage or ultimate content, but that is not where these jobs are going to be used most of the time and so having tools that work better for dungeons is also important.

[MintnHoney]

Perhaps it is my experience but even with bad tanks and dps I still don't use everything.

I think they meant bad healer players.

[SeverianLyonesse]

I think they meant bad healer players.

I meant both sides, yeah.

Not really? Perhaps it is my experience but even with bad tanks and dps I still don't use everything. Collective Unconciousness can 100% be removed and with some moving of skills I can guarentee most healers will not feel it. CI can also be removed by either trait upgrading it to Exalt or just flat removed. Neutral Sect'd A.Bene can fill it's spot for when I need to shield a DPS or my tank.

That is where we differ on our opinions for redundancies. Where you see it as less tools, I see it as more chances to creatively use what tools I have left to salvage a situation. THAT is what healing imo is lacking for engagement and WHY I want unnecessary skills or just some skills period gone.

Does that make sense?

I understand you, and I don't disagree with that perspective. I think I *could* probably have more fun healing if I had to be choosier--and, in reality, I already am kind of choosy and ignore several spells almost entirely, if only because I forget they exist.

What I am saying is that you are also a good healer, and I am not. The game is designed so that players who are new to healing or bad at healing still have a good chance at keeping even a bad tank alive. The game is designed to be clearable even if both your healer and your tank are terrible. Put another way, the game is designed to be clearable by an extremely low skill threshold to accommodate an increasingly unskilled playerbase. Or, put even a third way, the players' ignorance already creates so much artificial difficulty that all the skill bloat is the developers' way of compensative for that artificial difficulty.

And does that work? To an extent, yes. Usually at least one of either the healer or the tank can limp the group to the end within one or two wipes, because they are never far from where a slight adjustment could help them clear. It's not efficient or very high-skill, but the system gives the party extremely good odds to clear, and that in turn reduces friction over player skill. With tighter kits, we would have much more rage because players wouldn't be able to compensate for each other as much.

why are they designing jobs around people who just dont press buttons? you CANNOT add anything to help make healing easier for these players, other than a tutorial or literal invincibility buffs. i see this shit every time i queue for a roulette, and is the reason i just exclusively heal: bad players just dont use skills. i rather be redundant in dps thats always useful and leads to fun gameplay when healing is covered than redundant in healing ill never ever need while spamming 1 endlessly

Exactly this. I have to reiterate that I don't exactly *like* that this is FF XIV's design philosophy. Just that it quite self-evidently prioritizes accessibility, and the healer/tank design reflects that implementing that philosophy just amounts to mitigation/healing bloat to compensate for, exactly as you said, people who don't press buttons. But again, I think there is a distinction to be had, because they have a two-prong approach to dealing with players who don't push buttons:

1) Shift the challenge difficulty to more "intuitive" things that do not involve button pushing like scripting AoE-avoidance dances.
2) Shift the responsibility for pushing buttons onto other players. The button bloat is *partly* to throw a bunch of things at the inept player and hope they will stick (faulty logic, I know), but moreso it exists so other players have more tools to *compensate* for the inept player. Again, in theory this bloat keeps the party balanced in favor of clearing, because at this point in XIV's design (and ignoring the occasional DPS check), as long as the tank stays alive then clearing isn't a matter of skill but of patience. Having so much redundancy between tanks and healers literally halves failure rates because now you have two roles whose primary concern is a single health bar and each has a very reasonable ability to single-handedly maintain it.

[StriderShinryu]

What I am saying is that you are also a good healer, and I am not. The game is designed so that players who are new to healing or bad at healing still have a good chance at keeping even a bad tank alive

Exactly this. As I said earlier in this thread, Healer is the job with the most responsibility in a group. In MSQ content, tanks can basically just turn on their stance and hit random buttons and will hold aggro and be okay.. as long as the healer keeps them alive. DPS can essentially hit random buttons and the fight will just take longer.. as long as the healer fixes their mistakes. Healers need to keep everyone alive for the expected damage as well as the unexpected damage, keeping an eye on the Vuln Stack collectors and the few things that actually do still need to be cleansed, while still trying to put out whatever DPS they can... or the entire group dies (and they probably get the blame for it). There just isn't much of a chance that healing in MSQ content will get much harder overall otherwise, well, pretty much no one would opt to be a healer.

Now, should "Expert" dungeons be at least a little harder for healers than MSQ dungeons? Sure. Should 8 mans actually require at least some healing attention from both healers? Sure. Should EX's (and potentially Savages in some cases) be harder still? Sure.
Should 8 mans be soloable by an on level player of any job? Absolutely not.

It's much better to look at ways for Healing jobs to be made more engaging outside of the healing component of their role. This will not only positively impact playing a healer in all content in the game, easy or otherwise, but it's much, much, much more likely to actually be considered by the developers than "Just make everything harder so healers have to heal more."

[IDontPetLalas]

Exactly this. As I said earlier in this thread, Healer is the job with the most responsibility in a group. In MSQ content, tanks can basically just turn on their stance and hit random buttons and will hold aggro and be okay.. as long as the healer keeps them alive. DPS can essentially hit random buttons and the fight will just take longer.. as long as the healer fixes their mistakes. Healers need to keep everyone alive for the expected damage as well as the unexpected damage, keeping an eye on the Vuln Stack collectors and the few things that actually do still need to be cleansed, while still trying to put out whatever DPS they can... or the entire group dies (and they probably get the blame for it). There just isn't much of a chance that healing in MSQ content will get much harder overall otherwise, well, pretty much no one would opt to be a healer.

Now, should "Expert" dungeons be at least a little harder for healers than MSQ dungeons? Sure. Should 8 mans actually require at least some healing attention from both healers? Sure. Should EX's (and potentially Savages in some cases) be harder still? Sure.
Should 8 mans be soloable by an on level player of any job? Absolutely not.

It's much better to look at ways for Healing jobs to be made more engaging outside of the healing component of their role. This will not only positively impact playing a healer in all content in the game, easy or otherwise, but it's much, much, much more likely to actually be considered by the developers than "Just make everything harder so healers have to heal more."

Few points - this concept of healers is the job with the most responsibility? No, this is what got us into this situation in the first place, along with this attitude of the "DPS can essentially hit random buttons and the fight will just take longer.. as long as the healer fixes their mistakes".

All, roles have responsibility. If you start to dissect them and labelling them as , well, this role has more , or that role has more, then you start have issues such has healing anxiety, tanxiety, etc. You start saying that can't find a healer or a tank. you start having developers talking about "well we need to make this role accessible"

However that is completely different from the discussion around difficulty/challenge, and yes, I don't think anyone disagree that as someone progresses from normal content to expert , savage and ultimate each job and role is expected to have more knowledge and be able to optimize. Irrespective of the degree of difficulty, the role should be engaging.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Few points - this concept of healers is the job with the most responsibility? No, this is what got us into this situation in the first place, along with this attitude of the "DPS can essentially hit random buttons and the fight will just take longer.. as long as the healer fixes their mistakes".

All, roles have responsibility. If you start to dissect them and labelling them as , well, this role has more , or that role has more, then you start have issues such has healing anxiety, tanxiety, etc. You start saying that can't find a healer or a tank. you start having developers talking about "well we need to make this role accessible"

However that is completely different from the discussion around difficulty/challenge, and yes, I don't think anyone disagree that as someone progresses from normal content to expert , savage and ultimate each job and role is expected to have more knowledge and be able to optimize. Irrespective of the degree of difficulty, the role should be engaging.

I agree with this, but I also don't think StriderShinryu is necessarily wrong...just that they are described the paradigm that, as you said, got us into this mess.

It's just really difficult to fairly and transparently allocate party responsibility when you have, on one side of the spectrum, something with a strict and obvious pass/fail indicator like keeping players alive, and on the other side of a spectrum, something where players are heavily discouraged from discussing any measure of DPS numbers. I don't think it is fair at all, but it is also just easier to blame healers because players are inherently given more data to point fingers at than bad DPS players (this is also why even mediocre tanks can fly under the radar without popping mitigation, because most DPS don't pay attention to the preventative measures, they just pay attention to whether the group wipes).

And I don't really know how to make it better, because the healers are just kind of the de facto scapegoat that allows the game to be so casual-friendly and "non-toxic." We overcompensate so that players can do practically no damage. And in many cases a lot of those players don't even know they aren't doing enough damage. And they can't know because then we would have DPS-shaming. But boy do I wish I at least had a personal DPS meter so I could at least keep track of my own performance, because I still am never very certain of my tank DPS, at least using the game's native tools.