[Petition] Have Naoki Yoshida Play Healer and take off the DPS Gloves for a year.

[CrimsonGunner]

I'm not complaining about any of those other points. Simply the idea that having Yoshida play healer would somehow fix any of that. That's my only qualm. Throwing other things I agree with at me is irrelevant to the point of this thread which is: Somehow if we make Yoshida play healer everything will be fine. Which is a ridiculous, nonsensical premise that I wholeheartedly disagree with.

If you want to suggest better representation of healer mains on the balance team or the testing team, definitely on board. If you want them to have multiple raid teams of different skill levels to ensure a broader testing base, sure. That's reasonable. If you want them to do a better job of at least responding to healer feedback explaining why they don't feel our changes would work, again... on board.

The only thing I am against is the premise of this thread: Make Yoshida play a healer - it'll fix everything.

Fix no, make him slightly aware yes, understand some of the suffering yes.

You never hrard the phrase "you can't understand someone until u walked a mile in their shoes"

All the time yoshi ask us ,the players, to understand him and his team so how about he start trying to understand us and walk around as a earless cat healer.
Saying it wont help to force someone as big of influence as yoshi p to at least understand and tell a team that he is their boss(owner) to improve their design( cooking) is stupid cause even if the owner hates salmon, there is a certain degree of how the salmon tastes and looks that the owner can say dont make it like that or do better

[Semirhage]

Why should the focus be on downtime only but not both aspects? Should you just have 1 single target heal and 1 aoe heal then 30 buttons devoted to DPS then? I'm advocating for both a fun downtime phase when healing isn't need but more thoughtful healing to make it not feel like a chore. The reason I don't play a healer is because both aspects are dull as bricks. What good is a fun downtime phase if the healing phase is dull as hell, even if it makes up a minority of actions done in a fight? It again sounds like you want to be a healer but never have to heal period vs having a meaningful healing and dps phase. Why not make it so its fun to heal AND you get some fun dps to throw into the mix? Again, I am in pure agreement that dps options should be expanded for healers, but fight design should be made so a healer should feel happy that they did some sick interaction with the healing toolkit that ALLOWED you to have your damage phase. It builds a better game rather than "ACT number get big" type of loop. DPS suffers from this in the same sense providing little to no utility and fight design boiled down to "don't stand in bad and make number big".

Where are you getting this from? I'm not saying it should be not fun to heal. You are the one who's said that "ideally" we should be healing nearly constantly without any room for a break in between. That scenario is -very- unrealistic. It flies in the face of stated design goals. It flies in the face of the skill gap between skilled and unskilled healers. It flies in the face of how healing works in most RPGs. Healing could definitely be required more often in this game, don't get me wrong. You could double its frequency. Hell, you could triple it. Quadruple it. Point is, skilled healers are currently comfortably clearing Savage fights with oGCDs, while less skilled healers are barely scraping by keeping Medica 2 running, and even less skilled healers aren't even touching Extreme trials. Even so, you could do this. All it would really accomplish is making skilled healers hit their lossy GCDs during a fight and unskilled healers would either quit or need to git gud.

I'd also want the healing kits to be more than the boring, noninteractive snoozefests they are now. That's an ideal scenario for me.

But getting more realistic here, downtime is still going to happen. It's still going to be a large part of a skilled healer's focus. Not some tiny niche thing where they get a minute or so of breathing room out of a 12 minute fight; you'd need to dramatically increase outgoing damage frequency in Savage to make that happen, and that's still only some of the hardest content in the game, not even talking dungeons. I *never* said I didn't want healers to have a meaningful healing phase. In fact, I literally said in my last post

I want to mul ti task -snip- Outside a healthy threshold where we don't feel totally pointless (the state FFXIV is in now)

which implies healing is PART of that. The only one who's said we should "barely have time" to touch an important part of our kit is

Ideally, I would want incoming raid wide damage to be so high and constant in the game you are almost unable to do anything but heal or shield.

So what's a healer going to do in a solo instance? Heal the enemy to death? I don't want solo instances to be just a smidge more than Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare. I want a -lot- more in my non-healing kit for something like that.

Disregarding the stereotyping you're doing, which may or may not apply to the ffxiv team and may or may not be borderline racist...

What in the hell are you talking about? People in a work environment who don't have a vested interest in a project might not do the best work on that project? Clearly he's making fun of how specifically Japanese people approach their work!

I'm not complaining about any of those other points. Simply the idea that having Yoshida play healer would somehow fix any of that.

I took the thread title as facetious. A riff on the idea that jobs only seem to get actual attention when someone with a prominent position mains them.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I'm not complaining about any of those other points. Simply the idea that having Yoshida play healer would somehow fix any of that. That's my only qualm. Throwing other things I agree with at me is irrelevant to the point of this thread which is: Somehow if we make Yoshida play healer everything will be fine. Which is a ridiculous, nonsensical premise that I wholeheartedly disagree with.

If you want to suggest better representation of healer mains on the balance team or the testing team, definitely on board. If you want them to have multiple raid teams of different skill levels to ensure a broader testing base, sure. That's reasonable. If you want them to do a better job of at least responding to healer feedback explaining why they don't feel our changes would work, again... on board.

The only thing I am against is the premise of this thread: Make Yoshida play a healer - it'll fix everything.

It's not quite as that straightforward. It's more that if we can get Yoshi to play a healer for an extended period of time, he might be able to see how lacking the gameplay for healers can be. And when he is aware of that issue, he can possibly get the devs working towards fixing those problems.

[Allegor]

So what's a healer going to do in a solo instance? Heal the enemy to death? I don't want solo instances to be just a smidge more than Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare. I want a -lot- more in my non-healing kit for something like that.

Honestly, this is something that always annoyed me and is brought up rather often. That notion that comes hand by hand with "healers only heal" - that they literally don't exist outside the vacuum of a raid/ultimate fight. Leveling, solo instances, FATEs, hunts, treasure hunting, dungeons, alliance raids, not even normal-mode trials/raids, all the stuff that any tank or dps player can still enjoy, none of it apparently matters in the case of healers. We spend more time Glaring than healing even in our role quests ffs - quests specifically and exclusively designed for healers

At this point, actual players might as well be replaced by Alphy and Urianger and nobody would notice.

[Avoidy]

Man, I don't know what's going on but if there're different teams dedicated to handling different jobs and making sure they're enjoyable and flow well with other jobs, then those people all need to sit down and playtest these things some more. So many endwalker changes make me wonder how it even got the greenlight, honestly.

For example, AST. You guys removed AST's entire divination mechanic, so cards feel even emptier than they did in shadowbringers. You cited not wanting RNG, as a reason. Yet Astrodyne, that self buff, is somehow more rng dependent than the old Divination. And then you got rid of one of our strongest single target card buffs, in favor of an rng chance to attack like a limp noodle, or heal the whole group -- both of which, being rng, mean you can't even plan how to use them. These changes were obvious to most AST players upon simply hearing about the changes. How did the AST team sit down and play this and go "yeah it's fine."

And that's just one job! Like, look at SMN. What the heck, man. SMN and BLM don't even feel like they're from the same game. BLM has thought and nuance and mastery and getting good at it in fights feels like a journey in itself. There's room for variation. There are multiple openers. There's actual skill expression. Meanwhile, SMN is on rails, for better or worse. The only variation you have is "should I use ifrit now, or will I have to move soon?" How is it possible to work on this job for years and not realize how repetitive and dull the loop has become, especially when you're probably talking closely with the RDM/BLM teams? I don't understand.

And it's the same with tanks. When Endwalker launched, every tank got insane mitigation and even some cool self healing, but DRK's kit looked almost exactly the same, with some minor additions like Oblation. Did the DRK team never speak to the other groups? What happened here? Did they test their dungeons by solo pulling everything? Like, I don't get it.

I could go on but I won't. It's frustrating. Some jobs really nail it! And then others fall flat. I don't understand why. Aren't you all working together on this? Like, one more example to end on a positive note. Reaper's shield ability, is probably the most satisfying shield in the entire game. When it breaks, it makes this really NICE glass-shattering sound. There's an explosive animation. And then your whole team gets a regen. Why aren't healer shields like this? Why didn't the guy who designed the RPR shield ever look at the limp feeling healer shields and go "oh, we should do something about that" like jeez man. Yoshi aint the only guy at square, but I wish the dudes working there would talk to each other more 'cause some jobs get a lot of cool stuff while other jobs feel forgotten.

[MintnHoney]

Man, I don't know what's going on but if there're different teams dedicated to handling different jobs and making sure they're enjoyable and flow well with other jobs, then those people all need to sit down and playtest these things some more.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

[Yeastyloins]

All it would really accomplish is making skilled healers hit their lossy GCDs during a fight and unskilled healers would either quit or need to git gud.

I mean, the game shouldn't be designed around the lowest common denominator. That's why we are at the current in ALL job design, not just healer design. And I stated that it should be the norm, not the absolute only thing you should be doing is healing. If you optimize it enough, then you should have the tools to do an interesting damage rotation. WoW has this despite being an attrition model of healing, not only in Mythic raids but it's a near necessity for high M+ keys where you optimize healing, tank mitigation, and dps utility so you can have everyone including the healer crank damage to ensure fast trash clears in order to get better times. Nothing was more fun topping off my party as a Resto druid and calling for my tank to shore up some mit so I could drop in Moonkin form, pop heart of the wild, and wombo combo a group with Convoke.

If rat casual players (the kind that don't AoE or pop their mitigation when they're at 10% health) aren't able to get through an MSQ dungeon without having to focus 100% of time healing and therefore don't get to do DPS, well that's their punishment for not properly playing. As for you, when you optimize your healing, you should be able to do damage in an interesting fashion WHILE monitoring buffs, HoT, and shields. It shouldn't just be only doing that interesting DPS rotation and then clicking Medica 2/Afflatus Rapture every now and then.

If you just throw in a damage rotation and leave the healing design where it is, then all your complaints go now towards healing design. Guess what this talentless hack of a dev team then hears: well lets take their damage away so they can heal more since they're healers. Round and round the circle goes.

[Deceptus]

And that's just one job! Like, look at SMN. What the heck, man. SMN and BLM don't even feel like they're from the same game. BLM has thought and nuance and mastery and getting good at it in fights feels like a journey in itself. There's room for variation. There are multiple openers. There's actual skill expression. Meanwhile, SMN is on rails, for better or worse. The only variation you have is "should I use ifrit now, or will I have to move soon?" How is it possible to work on this job for years and not realize how repetitive and dull the loop has become, especially when you're probably talking closely with the RDM/BLM teams? I don't understand.

And it's the same with tanks. When Endwalker launched, every tank got insane mitigation and even some cool self healing, but DRK's kit looked almost exactly the same, with some minor additions like Oblation. Did the DRK team never speak to the other groups? What happened here? Did they test their dungeons by solo pulling everything? Like, I don't get it.

Sorry to be the one to tell you this but the Battle Job design team consists of 4 people:

A Supervisor
2 Designers
An Intern (possibly at the Junior Designer level by now)

The fact that the jobs are in the mess of a state they're in right now is a direct result of having so many jobs with so little design thought process.

It really seems like DPS are the priority and tanks and healers are the afterthought designed right before the expansion rolls out.

Why I think that?
Improved Unleash existing.
Medica 2 being a stronger single target heal than Cure 2.
The fact they couldn't do basic math and Aero 2 (lvl 42) had a higher total potency than Dia (72).
Energy Drain being removed and SCH's not compensated with an Aetherflow dump in Shadowbringer.
A myriad of other issues too long to keep going.

Hell, we know why the healers are so bad. Yoshi removed the healer QA tester because they "got too good".

[Elesh]

In most high end restaurants the head chef is also the owner, but this metaphor is starting to get away from the point. He's in charge of the game and has the most influence.

Except... he doesn't. He is in charge of the game's high-end direction - things like 'what are we prioritizing engine work on?' or 'how many gameplay hours are we expecting x content to have?' or 'what order are we prioritizing these specific features in?'

He's not directly in charge of the day to day running. He's not as influential to the balance as you think, and the fact that you think he's heavily involved in the day to day balance decisions - beyond possibly a sign off on how many hours devs can spend on balance and maybe a part of in-house committee/focus group discussions on direction.... shows you know nothing about large-scale game design.

[Semirhage]

I mean, the game shouldn't be designed around the lowest common denominator. That's why we are at the current in ALL job design, not just healer design. And I stated that it should be the norm, not the absolute only thing you should be doing is healing. If you optimize it enough, then you should have the tools to do an interesting damage rotation. WoW has this despite being an attrition model of healing, not only in Mythic raids but it's a near necessity for high M+ keys where you optimize healing, tank mitigation, and dps utility so you can have everyone including the healer crank damage to ensure fast trash clears in order to get better times. Nothing was more fun topping off my party as a Resto druid and calling for my tank to shore up some mit so I could drop in Moonkin form, pop heart of the wild, and wombo combo a group with Convoke.

If rat casual players (the kind that don't AoE or pop their mitigation when they're at 10% health) aren't able to get through an MSQ dungeon without having to focus 100% of time healing and therefore don't get to do DPS, well that's their punishment for not properly playing. As for you, when you optimize your healing, you should be able to do damage in an interesting fashion WHILE monitoring buffs, HoT, and shields. It shouldn't just be only doing that interesting DPS rotation and then clicking Medica 2/Afflatus Rapture every now and then.

If you just throw in a damage rotation and leave the healing design where it is, then all your complaints go now towards healing design. Guess what this talentless hack of a dev team then hears: well lets take their damage away so they can heal more since they're healers. Round and round the circle goes.

You won't find me arguing with that. I'm in the camp that thinks healer design gets effectively everything wrong, and needs an overhaul from the ground up. BLU is a more fun healer than the current crop. They have the tools to get the job done sure. I'd want a more interesting healing kit than a set of healing spells that don't interact, but at least they don't have a bunch of redundant ones. Plus they have buffs and debuffs! An actual damage rotation! Sure it's not a dynamic one, but the fact that a barebones healing kit coupled with a large damage kit is more engaging than current healers are is a testament to how godawful they are.