What exactly is the design philosophy underlying the healer role?

[Marxam]

if 90% of the content did 20% more damage overall I'm sure healers will complain less, but still complain nonetheless. Currently, healers have tons of powerful ogcd heals but nowhere to use it.

[Sebazy]

I’m currently on the theory that they’re designed for a game that no longer exists and yet they never saw, but it’s not like people complained about the stormblood healers that much, is it?

IMHO They are designed for a game that never existed in the first place.

ARR struck the balance about right. When pushed to the limit, SCH had a higher ceiling than WHM, but WHM was easier to brute force and still had plenty of it's own tricks up it's sleeve. The key however was that both jobs complimented each other perfectly, covering for each others weaknesses.

HW was a refinement of the formula but SE's lack of understanding in high end healer play was starting to show. SCH was a powerhouse and it's prior weakness in ARR were entirely eliminated by it's new kit, meanwhile WHM was hobbled by a lack of MP, and AST started the expansion severely undertuned and ended it being far too strong relative to WHM but still unable to rival SCH.

I'm actually kind of surprised that you say that people didn't complain about Stormblood healers though. The expansion's launch was actually a bit of a disaster for healers and these forums were absolutely ablaze from the media preview onwards.

Initially WHM looked to be in a dire state but actually played ok on launch solely thanks to Thin Air being the ability it should have gotten years ago.

SCH was a complete disaster on launch, it wasn't viable in raids, it wasn't even effective in dungeons any more. It's kit being so drastically undertuned in an effort to make Noct AST finally seem appealing is one thing, but outright forgetting to even give it a spammable AoE is unforgivable. Whomever signed off SCH in that state should have been fired. No discussion. If you want an example of how little effort SE have put into healers over the years, this is a highlight.

AST was a little more complex, on one hand, it kind of got the HW SCH treatment with new abilities like Earthy Star that were seemingly so strong I actually thought they were a typo. But nope, they really were just that powerful and game changing. But on the other hand, the changes to the card system were horrible. Splitting Draw and Play into 2 separate hotkeys whilst also forcing ASTs to add a 3rd for Undraw since you couldn't click off cards any more, plus there was minor arcana to boot. It took HW's streamlined system and dialled the button bloat to 11 for seemingly no reason or gain.

IMHO Shadowbringer's murdered healer complexity and diversity to make the already overwhelmed class design team's work easier. It could be argued that it was the response to SB's failure on healers TBH.

[fulminating]

Do you think they are in a completely irreprable state? It seems they've only made questionable choices with each passing expansion, with shadowbringers introducing the most dubious. I'm also not sure if this is a reflection of the combat design as a whole - beyond the healers, certainly new summoner, but also arguably reaper, bard, warrior, dark knight, machinist, possibly samurai and monk depending on who you ask have all had the core of their gameplay and job identity severely eroded (or in reaper's case they forgot to put a leveling rotation in).

That's probably nostalgia then, sorry about that.

[Sebazy]

Do you think they are in a completely irreprable state?

No not at all. However, I think that nothing is going to improve until Yoshida's team put the arrogance of their success aside for a moment and accept that the whole class design process has gone off the rails for quite some time now.

If I was tasked with course correcting things, I'd make one simple change over night. Allow Extreme and Savage bosses to continue auto attacking mid cast and up their melee damage significantly. Going forward, I'd also push for the return of short cooldown non telegraphed mini busters on bosses as well as allowing both auto attacks and these mini busters to crit.

From there, things get a lot more complex though as beyond that the healer jobs themselves need a pretty fundamental re evaluation at this stage. Personally I'd lean towards pruning and merging with the goal of replacing fluff oGCDs with abilities that have actual purpose and utility whilst shortening the cooldowns on bread and butter tools to compensate if needed.

I'm under no illusion that it would be a simple task at this point though and the biggest issue is that I don't think SE's class design and QA teams have the depth of knowledge and understanding to do it well.

[fulminating]

Arrogance is an unpleasant word, but it does seem to be the right one. Hubris could be another apt one. Sometimes I get the feeling that every job but black mage and fisher could slide into dullness and they'd still not really care. I know it's not a particularly charitable interpretation, but it feels true enough that it's hard to shake.

Regarding the auto attacks, I've felt a lot more concerned about tanking ultima unreal than any of the savage fights this tier because of the largely untelegraphed tankbusters and the constant stream of damage. I'm not going to pretend I'm great at tanking so it's likely I'm missing something fundamental about mitigating ultima (been using a mitigation when I get a stack, seems to precede a tankbuster), but it's a lot more satisfying to do correctly in some ways than certainly hesperos. Maybe all it'd do is reencourage the upkeep of regens, but that's something at least.

I wonder if part of the reason they like homogeneity is an attempt to not enforce healer compositions in the ultimates? Then again I can't really see this being the case - or really any justification for it at all unless the job devs have significantly more work than they can handle. And even then the logical course of action would be either hiring more staff or not adding new jobs. Sage is just a bad joke.

Perhaps if they swallowed their pride, they could rework healers into a state that fit the game more, but given some comments about their healer becoming "too good" I can't see it being fixed without outside help.

[Corbeau]

Healer design philosophy in this game is to get as many healers into all levels of content as possible so that the DPS players can have fun.

[OtakuSempai]

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[LeonKeyh]

Healer design philosophy in this game is to get as many healers into all levels of content as possible so that the DPS players can have fun.

This seems to be the case.

If I were to take a swing at the philosophy of healers today, it could be wrapped up in a single word, "Accessibility."

Simple DPS kit makes it accessible for healers to be able to DPS (if they want to).
Making it so a majority of the time you're doing something that is largely optional makes it accessible for people who may not be good at healing (i.e. "pure" healing players sit around most of the time)
Predictable, spread out, and negligible damage make it so that reaction time is much less of a factor making it more accessible

And, most importantly, making healers accessible means that more people play healers which means that DPS queues are quicker.

[Mesarthim]

Healer's have a design philosophy?

[IDontPetLalas]

This seems to be the case.

If I were to take a swing at the philosophy of healers today, it could be wrapped up in a single word, "Accessibility."

Simple DPS kit makes it accessible for healers to be able to DPS (if they want to).
Making it so a majority of the time you're doing something that is largely optional makes it accessible for people who may not be good at healing (i.e. "pure" healing players sit around most of the time)
Predictable, spread out, and negligible damage make it so that reaction time is much less of a factor making it more accessible

And, most importantly, making healers accessible means that more people play healers which means that DPS queues are quicker.

Accessible is being extremely charitable. Also, your last statement is a conclusion "by being accessible (your word, not mine) more people will play healers" - maybe, maybe not. Which thereby threatens your desired outcome- i.e. DPS queues are quicker.

Why should a job be designed for people who are not good at it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for bad job design in any way. However, while there are people who are are good at every job, in many cases a person will tend to play a job they like, which is generally one that they are good at. So why would a job designer look at those people who really can barely function at a job and make decisions that limit everyone else ?