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

[Avoidy]

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".

Oh my god this is so depressing but so illuminating at the same time.
How is it a skeleton crew when the game is basically a giant cash cow?? When is square going to take the money XIV generates and put it back into XIV? lmao
Christ, I just took it for granted that they wouldn't run the game like it's a dying f2p title that just got sold to Gamigo, but I guess I Was wrong.

[Nethereal]

Oh my god this is so depressing but so illuminating at the same time.
How is it a skeleton crew when the game is basically a giant cash cow?? When is square going to take the money XIV generates and put it back into XIV? lmao
Christ, I just took it for granted that they wouldn't run the game like it's a dying f2p title that just got sold to Gamigo, but I guess I Was wrong.

They refuse to hire people to get the job done across the board.

Small Indie Dev Company.

[Zer0ofTime]

I understand that a lot of the Battle Team and Dev Team have been working on our systems for years in terms of battle content, but the Healer community on these forums is still not happy with their gameplay. You say "Go play Ultimate", then perhaps you need to take the DPS wheels off and learn to play a healer.

Here's a fun fact: When I was playing DPS at first, I didn't understand the Healer Role or Tank Role and what they do very well in regards to utilities, abilities, and systems. Once I spent significant amounts of time(at least the span of 3-4 months) learning both from the community and the Job Guides, I started to understand what each job did, how it played, and what things I can do as said job. Given that the development team has been out of touch with Healer Balance and feel for at least 6 years to the point we only have one button to DPS and one button to DoT I want Naoki Yoshida to pick up a Healer(more than likely White Mage) and play it for a year.

While he is hands-on, an interview brought us some insight as to why healers are in the current state they are now. As much as I respect the man, it's important as both a player of FFXIV and a Developer to understand how their systems work, rather than push it on to a new person who doesn't know what to do with the job. It'd be nice if we knew in a Live Letter or something how they decide to balance dungeons behind the scenes during testing, and give us reasons as to why.

Offer to pay his sub and see if he switches, or you know, just keep up the Q_Q

[Nethereal]

Medica 2 being a stronger single target heal than Cure 2.

Thanks for making my whm gameplay better. Sometimes I just trust these devs too much with being able to do simple things correctly.

[P0W3RK1D]

Offer to pay his sub and see if he switches, or you know, just keep up the Q_Q

Ya know, Id be willing to do that just to see the healer role get fixed, or at the very least get some attention.

YES, YOU HEARD ME CORRECTLY, I WOULD LITTERALLY PAY MORE MONEY THAN IM ALREADY PAYING JUST SUBBING TO THE GAME JUST TO SEE OUR LONG ABANDONED CLASSES GET IMPROVEMENTS THAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED YEARS AGO.

[Ravor]

They refuse to hire people to get the job done across the board.

Small Indie Dev Company.

This statement is a very hard accusastion, i agree that they should hire more people for job design but it didnt mean they REFUSE to add more member for the job design, that is two different thing, also, I think they need more quality assurance or someone to give feedback internally rather than more designer, more designer meant more opinion meaning longer time spent arquing instead of working on the design

[Sebazy]

This statement is a very hard accusastion, i agree that they should hire more people for job design but it didnt mean they REFUSE to add more member for the job design, that is two different thing, also, I think they need more quality assurance or someone to give feedback internally rather than more designer, more designer meant more opinion meaning longer time spent arquing instead of working on the design

The exact reasoning behind FFXIV's team size has been touched a few times in interviews. Yoshida's stance is generally that he prefers to keep a compact team for the sake of efficiency (And likely costs are also a significant factor, SE have historically always been big on this as was seen throughout FFXI). It's also well documented that hiring experienced MMO designers in Japan is highly challenging, likely because the majority of them end up in far more lucrative and easier mobile development divisions.

More designers resulting in more opinions is absolutely not a bad thing though, especially in how long term game development projects are handled. Remember that a large amount of time is often spent literally doing nothing more than filling up whiteboards with ideas to evaluate. Having more ideas is always good and given how bland a lot of FFXIV's design decisions have been of late, this is pretty clearly a weak spot which is reflected in how little the Battle System design team has changed since 2.0.

Arguing over things whilst implementing and creating features isn't a designer issue, that's a direction and production problem, an area where Yoshida's team is actually very strong so that honestly isn't a concern IMO. If you look at historic games where this has been an issue, it's always been where the project management has either outright lost control or has been contributing to the problem themselves (Sorry Molyneux! ).

Given the roadblock SE appear to be facing with recruiting proven designers, my favourite solution is for SE to approach someone with a proven track record like Mythic to act in a consultancy role, quite literally paying them to fill up a 'whiteboards' with entire new job concepts as well as refinements and improvements for existing classes for Yoshida's own internal team to then pull ideas from.

As far as improving QA goes, this isn't quite as easy as it seems and I'm pretty confident in my opinion that Yoshida doesn't have access to a dedicated testing team but rather simply has access to a large pool of testers that is shared across the company. As such they will often be playing the game at a much more basic level than a lot of the player base and as such, fundamental flaws can easily slip through (SCH's lack of AoE with Stormblood is a great example). Naturally the solution here is for SE to have their own specific testing division for FFXIV alone to allow them to control the variety and skill level of the team to spot more issues, but that's an expense that I genuinely can't see them allowing.

[Deceptus]

Thanks for making my whm gameplay better. Sometimes I just trust these devs too much with being able to do simple things correctly.

Problem is people who have no idea about healers will see you hitting Medica 2 and criticize you for it not knowing the potency difference because meta.

[Teno]

I've been doing a ton of frontlines on sage recently (and pretty much every healer) and I'll keep reiterating how awesome they are to play. Burst damage, shields, impactful buffs, unique interactions in the kits. I can't help but feel like the few combat gameplay devs are being severely reined in on the PVE front.

[Martynek]

I think part of the problem is that the average player just doesn't realise how bad the healing situation is. Bring it to their attention. Play a conjurer in lategame content. You know, that might actually be kind of fun, since you'll be pressing GCDs other than glare...