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

[HyoMinPark]

Like seriously, I've experienced wipes in a trial or an alliance when all the healers are down and no rezzes or people who have a rez didnt survive long enough during a fight to get it off. The same with dungeons content. And again I feel stupid for having to repeat myself that I'm not saying that people have ran certain content without a healer and managed to do fine. But what Im seeing there happen is that everyone on that team is on their game, knows how to play their class and is coordinated enough to pull something like that off. Which I dont see it happen that smoothly whenever I play this game as normal everyday player. Sometimes I make a mistake in focusing too much on dps as a healer and I cause a wipe, Sometimes I see tanks not doing their job too well. There's all these different factors that I see that happen daily that I cant consistently rely on what people say here. But I acknowledge that it happens. Just dont acknowledge that this is the case 100% of the time without fail.

Again: your argument centers on parties being absolute disasters for healers to even be a necessity. For healers to even do more than deal damage. This is poor design. This means that runs that are normal do not normally require a role to perform how they are supposed to, and instead become a different role entirely.

[ForteNightshade]

Like seriously, I've experienced wipes in a trial or an alliance when all the healers are down and no rezzes or people who have a rez didnt survive long enough during a fight to get it off. The same with dungeons content. And again I feel stupid for having to repeat myself that I'm not saying that people have ran certain content without a healer and managed to do fine. But what Im seeing there happen is that everyone on that team is on their game, knows how to play their class and is coordinated enough to pull something like that off. Which I dont see it happen that smoothly whenever I play this game as normal everyday player. Sometimes I make a mistake in focusing too much on dps as a healer and I cause a wipe, Sometimes I see tanks not doing their job too well. There's all these different factors that I see that happen daily that I cant consistently rely on what people say here. But I acknowledge that it happens. Just dont acknowledge that this is the case 100% of the time without fail.

Like HyoMin said, a healer's engagement should not be reliant on disastrous party or players "not doing their job too well" because it means when things do go well, they have nothing to fall back on. For example sake, let's compare healers with tanks. In a good run, tanks will still have the same gameplay they always do: a simplified but still engaging DPS suite. What do Healers have? Dosis/Glare/Malefic/Broil spam.

Therein lies the problem. When a tank doesn't have to perform their base role, they have something to keep them occupied even if it's a simplified combo ala Warrior. Healers, on the other hand, have absolutely nothing. A good run for a tank is actively pressing several buttons, syncing with raid buffs, potentially manipulating their rotation for better burst windows/killtimes and etc. A good run for healers is a boring run where they barely touch any button besides an occasional DoT refresh and spamming their nuke. When I go into Copied Factory or Tower and have 500+ casts of Dosis II—more than three times all my healing combined. It's hard to argue this isn't a terrible design philosophy.

[Kyrj]

The only time I've ever had fun playing a healer was in Bozja and Zadnor when I was getting insane glare damage. Sad that the only time I have fun on healers is on content where it breaks the mold for healers.

Bottom line, either hire someone who knows wtf they're doing with healers or admit that you're incapable/incompetent at fixing the healer problem.

[Beddict]

Yeah this is what I think we should instead encourage the devs for. Have somebody in the job design department actually main healing to see where most of these complaints are coming from

...which is weird since seriously how would they neglect a part of the main core game like that?

Unfortunately, that's what players have been doing for years by this point. Take a look at the Healer subforum and you can go back years and years and find many topics on the state of Healers, whether it's the butchered lore of AST, the terrible Job mechanics of WHM, the lack of player engagement when there's no healing to be done, and a whole heap of other topics. At a certain point though, what else can you do? Yoshi-P either ignores Healers outright, twists their words and gives non-answers, or falls back on his old "wait and see, trust us." He is either incapable or unwilling to actually sit down and talk to Healers so it isn't surprising that some people are beginning to call for him to leave, thinking that maybe if Yoshi-P is the problem then players can get someone in charge that actually gives a shit about the role. Realistically, I think we'd just get someone else that continues to fail to listen to player feedback on the Forums and XIV as a whole would suffer without his managerial style.

I would love to see Yoshi-P and the dev team actually put out a big Lodestone blog post talking about the Healer role, what they expect, and how they plan to move forward given player feedback, but I can't actually think of a time where they've done that. The vast bulk of information we get on Job changes is Yoshi-P giving small snippets during Live Letters and it really isn't good enough. It's even more infuriating since Yoshi-P once gave a speech at the Game Developer's Conference where he talked about how engaging with the community through open and honest communication is the key to developing a great MMO, but here we are eight years later, with Yoshi-P as the sole mouthpiece for a dev team that never explains what the hell their goals are for a Job. It's a shit situation, and while I don't agree with replacing Yoshi-P, I sure as hell think he needs to try talking to the masses rather than half-assing answers for another two years.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Unfortunately, that's what players have been doing for years by this point. Take a look at the Healer subforum and you can go back years and years and find many topics on the state of Healers, whether it's the butchered lore of AST, the terrible Job mechanics of WHM, the lack of player engagement when there's no healing to be done, and a whole heap of other topics. At a certain point though, what else can you do? Yoshi-P either ignores Healers outright, twists their words and gives non-answers, or falls back on his old "wait and see, trust us." He is either incapable or unwilling to actually sit down and talk to Healers so it isn't surprising that some people are beginning to call for him to leave, thinking that maybe if Yoshi-P is the problem then players can get someone in charge that actually gives a shit about the role. Realistically, I think we'd just get someone else that continues to fail to listen to player feedback on the Forums and XIV as a whole would suffer without his managerial style.

I would love to see Yoshi-P and the dev team actually put out a big Lodestone blog post talking about the Healer role, what they expect, and how they plan to move forward given player feedback, but I can't actually think of a time where they've done that. The vast bulk of information we get on Job changes is Yoshi-P giving small snippets during Live Letters and it really isn't good enough. It's even more infuriating since Yoshi-P once gave a speech at the Game Developer's Conference where he talked about how engaging with the community through open and honest communication is the key to developing a great MMO, but here we are eight years later, with Yoshi-P as the sole mouthpiece for a dev team that never explains what the hell their goals are for a Job. It's a shit situation, and while I don't agree with replacing Yoshi-P, I sure as hell think he needs to try talking to the masses rather than half-assing answers for another two years.

do you mean this?




AKA the billboard of lies lmao at least in relation to healers

[Beddict]

do you mean this?




AKA the billboard of lies lmao at least in relation to healers

Oh it gets even better. That hilarious image is point three in Yoshi-P's segment on how running and MMO is like running a country. Here's the slide the goes over all four points:



Healer mains disapprove of his policies, his dev team isn't communicating their vision, player feedback definitely feels ignored, and he's admitted that the team in charge of Job design doesn't have any Healer mains. It blows my mind that he could give that presentation at the GDC back in 2014 and here we are with him going "lmao, just play Ultimate."

Here's the full slideshow, and here's the full video in case anyone is interested.

[Deceptus]

Additionally, the EW media tour was extremely disappointing in that none of the career healer mains that make optimization guides and job guides about each healer were invited to provide their feedback on EW changes. I believe it was the ShB media tour (but it could have been the SB one), where the developers did the same thing, and instead asked DPS mains their opinions on the state of the healers and the upcoming changes to the jobs. Which, a DPS main isn’t going to be able to provide the same kind of insight and feedback that a healer main could.

From the ShB Media Tour:

I spent a bit scouring the four major interviews with YoshiP following the media tour and release of role-action information, and out of roughly 223 questions there were 92 question related to roles/classes.

Of those 92 questions, only 3 were focused on healers. And they all came from a single interview.

Now, this may be somewhat set off balance by the introduction of a new tanking/DPS job. But having an entire role that's undergoing some hefty changes and was already in something of an uproar/fervor over the lack of information following the Fan-Fests and previous live letters, having only 3.26% of your role questions being healer oriented is insufficient. In fact, some interviews went out of their way to avoid addressing healers ("As for the job balance, setting aside healers...") in favour of other roles.
Simply put, we've been left largely in the dark to stew over the changes with little official statements on our concerns, and that's not something you want to have happen with your consumers.

(emphasis mine)

[ASkellington]

Like seriously, I've experienced wipes in a trial or an alliance when all the healers are down and no rezzes or people who have a rez didnt survive long enough during a fight to get it off. The same with dungeons content. And again I feel stupid for having to repeat myself that I'm not saying that people have ran certain content without a healer and managed to do fine. But what Im seeing there happen is that everyone on that team is on their game, knows how to play their class and is coordinated enough to pull something like that off. Which I dont see it happen that smoothly whenever I play this game as normal everyday player. Sometimes I make a mistake in focusing too much on dps as a healer and I cause a wipe, Sometimes I see tanks not doing their job too well. There's all these different factors that I see that happen daily that I cant consistently rely on what people say here. But I acknowledge that it happens. Just dont acknowledge that this is the case 100% of the time without fail.

No one has ever claimed that they never encounter parties where tanks/dps/cohealer mess up. I will be the first to tell you I had 4 Orbonne Runs back to back where I, my cohealer and another alliance had to carry the last alliance and their healers. The thing is, stuff like that is rare.

On the less extreme side, I have plenty of tanks who don't know how to mitigate. Dps or tanks or healers that are new to an instance and mess up taking unnecessary damage. That isn't what we're discussing here.

We are saying that: when we have nothing to heal, so no dps messing up, no tanks who don't properly mitigate, no deaths, no wipes or anything of that sort. When we all play perfectly or close enough to not care we. are. bored. There isn't enough to heal in those instances and we would like to fill that boring time with something.

[Soge01]

From what I've read so far here, healers need:

1. Certain spells and abilities that do close to around the same thing to be combined together for less healing button bloat.

2. Healers need diversity in playstyle instead of being a cookie cutter copy of one another with a slight different flavor.

3. All healers need to be able to do more than just press one button for attacking inbetween healing dry spells.

4. Yoshi-P needs to hire developers with experience in designing healing classes, as it is clear he and his current team are struggling to do more with their current crop of Healer classes.

I wholeheartedly agree with all of this and have consistently complained to myself about these problems for years.

Though my memories are vague now, unfortunately, I can still at least barely remember how it felt to play ARR's White Mage and Scholar for the first time all the way up to end game and then into HW. It felt so fun and interactive. Scary, truthfully, because of the fear of screwing up, but nonetheless, always exciting and fun to play! Especially once you got everything down with said classes, basically you have almost nothing to fear besides the occasional misclick of a button or forgetting to turn off a certain Infamous Healer stance that wound up wiping your party. Back then, healers truly felt like a part of any party you joined and really truly felt like you were contributing something more than just heal spamming.

And while I know we'll never get those days back, I still wish and hope the FFXIV dev team realizes what they are doing so wrong with the Healer jobs and tries to take a few steps back by taking pointers from the way these jobs used to function in previous expansions and try to make them more interactive and cohesive with the players behind them, along with the party members they are supposed to be supporting.

My eyes shouldn't be glazing over on new or even old content due to how easy it is to heal and keep up others. As a healer, I should always be vigilant and ready to cover someone when things are about to get a little too hairy for the tank and the rest of my party.

I completely agree with another person here who had said that Yoshi-P is far to concerned over new and casual players not being able to keep up with content to the point where he's accidentally alienating the rest of the player base. Someone really needs to grab him by the shoulders, tell him to take a few steps back, take a breather and to reevaluate what it means to make content accessible to not just the new and casual players, but all players that play his game.

It's okay have some job classes that are more complicated than others. That's specially what I loved about HW Astrologian over White Mage and Scholar. Its card system was so much fun, along with its ability to switch between Regan and Shield Healer on a dime between battles, despite its overall healing being weaker than the mentioned former two. No job needs to be perfect or completely accessible to everyone. Everybody will eventually find that one job they love to play the most among the others and stick with that mostly.

To myself, at least, that's how Yoshi-P needs to see not just the Healer jobs, but all the jobs in his game. Because the more he worries about accessibility for the little guy, the more he'll unintentially drive off older players. And that in the long run will leave long lasting damage to his game, as the casual player base will never be able to keep a game like this alive for long without its veteran players support and keeping it relevant. Otherwise the game will potentially be dumb down even further than it already is.

[nighttimebunny]

I agree. It's perfectly fine for casuals how it is now.