Healer Q&A in PLL LXVIII

[Grimoire-M]

But that is fundamentally NOT how healers play in this game. You would quite literally need to foundationally overhaul encounter design for every fight in the game to kill healer DPS contributions. It's like sitting down to play Mario Kart and then complaining that the game's too silly and that the items are unfair. Well, that's what happens when you choose to play Mario Kart instead of playing Gran Turismo. You're playing the wrong game, and it's selfish and entitled to barge into a game and demand it plays antithetical to its design because you don't like one aspect of it. If you want to play a healer that only heals, go play a game that supports that playstyle, which the only MMO I can think of that actually does this is Everquest.

And even then you have so many better support classes to choose from in that MMO that don’t deal direct damage OR heal at all. Resource attrition, AI manipulation, and Crowd Control are the hallmarks of that era. And it was far slower and more methodical than current MMO combat. Mostly due to hardware, but the design choices that ultimately formed the genre evolved out of MUDs and D&D.

[ty_taurus]

And even then you have so many better support classes to choose from in that MMO that don’t deal direct damage OR heal at all. Resource attrition, AI manipulation, and Crowd Control are the hallmarks of that era. And it was far slower and more methodical than current MMO combat. Mostly due to hardware, but the design choices that ultimately formed the genre evolved out of MUDs and D&D.

The support role was actually considered for ARR--something like XI's Bard that almost exclusively used buffs and debuffs, but the driving concern was that the role would be so unpopular that it would make queue times a nightmare, and that's a very realistic concern. There's a big issue with exclusive buff/debuff classes as well as exclusive healers in that there are an extremely small number of RPG players who are content with that style of gameplay. Jobs or games that have those roles are often criticized for those roles being slow, repetitive, and boring. That's why RPGs have largely abandoned those passive gameplay styles over the last 10 years especially.

Ironically, I remember a thread that came up where someone who was advocating for a heal-only style of gameplay used Soraka from League of Legends as an example of how a passive healer could be fun, but failed to recognize that a huge aspect of her gameplay is about also using offense to restore the HP she loses healing the party and silencing enemies with an offensive AoE. This was later brought up in that thread, and it goes to show how League took a character that originally was very passive and changed her to juggle offense to create engagement with her character both on the side of those playing her and those playing against her.

I definitely feel that Crowd Control is a missed opportunity in XIV that could offer more interesting decision-based gameplay for healers to help offset the lack of necessary healing, but at the end of the day, healer DPS in concept is actually a very good thing for this game. In fact, I was around for ARR, and I remember the healers being heralded for being so much more than the healbots of WoW back in 2013. But the pressure of old Cleric Stance's punishment-based DPS system, and the influx of players joining in HW that were expecting WoW-style healbots created a rift that SE felt obligated to sterilize. It's impossible to know for sure, but I can't help but wonder if that issue didn't arise, that we could've had far more well-designed and interesting healer design by now, and I really wish SE responded by standing firm in the game's original design philosophy with healing rather than backpedal on what it had established. I do agree that old Cleric Stance wasn't a healthy way to continue healer engagement, but the neutering of healer DPS was so far beyond overkill that that the role has become a husk of what it used to be. Perhaps that's not the case and we were doomed to reach this point anyway, but it's hard to not feel frustrated when a niche handful of people continue to demand the game change into a different game just so they can be healers who don't DPS.