AST (and DRG) had their improvements pushed to 7.0 PLD are getting theirs in 6.3

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I'm curious if this is a "good" thing or not.

Some people may love this, but if it ends up where parties aren't able to make because no one can find healers and the raid scene gets relegated to a small % of of the player base again, is that a good thing? I'm not so sure

Yet people did clear, a decent amount that is! W/ all 4 healers, which is more than enough of a tell that it's not overtuned for the difficulty it implies, healing wise. There are even unorthodox comps arising such as dupe healers that can still clear just fine. But moving on..

Here's what never sits right to me from that bolded part:

• First of all. No matter how easy they make the job/role/duty, there's always the outliers from the top and the bottom percentile. By continuously pleasing the latter, before long we'll be at the rock bottom with nothing left to mutilate but somehow still seeing folks failing. On the flip side, this also often hurts the players who invested the most amount of time learning and loving the ins & outs of their chosen job. Why do I waste my time trying to learn my job/role or the duty if the correct answer to this is to just complain endlessly until they take away that nuance? I am never a fan of dumbing down for this reason unless said contents are vastly overtuned for the difficulty they implied.
  
• Then second. That's EX/Savage+ content we're talking about; player should at least understand what exactly to expect out of it. I.e. knowing how to play adequately w/ their chosen job/role, hours of learning be it figuring out the mechanics, figuring out what's the best action to counter said mechanic, dying -many- times, etc. It's all part of the package. I think that's totally fine and they should keep it that way. It's a content where people will get f***ed up real bad many times, not every content is made to please everybody. Those mechanics, deaths, hours invested, all acts as indicators to let players figure out whether said content is for them or not. That is why it's so weird that they're trying to lower that barrier of entry, the very thing that lets their player figure out what content they're likely suited for. There are multitude other content outside these high ends to tinker about; they can even unsync those later on! They're not missing out on anything.

Regarding the bleedbusters.. honestly? I relish it. Partly because:

[...]We had all these fancy skills like[...]

This goes back to "why you give me all these fancy buttons if the tanks can just shrug it off with their own tools for the most of part"?

A mini example I remembered in Asphodelos tier, not once I ever considered to use 'Recitcogitation' in first two floors; not even normal Excog outside screw ups. It was largely reserved for 'Recitability' or Spreadlo.

P5S finally warrants some use of it. Granted it won't be too long until I'll cut back those out but man it feels ecstatic to finally have a different use for Recitation without needing to clear first two floors. Heck, even trying to catch the bleedbuster with Soil also feels great. My stacks no longer (at least for now..) went into mindless "hahalol 6 energy drains go brr brr".... and both of my previous and current statics aren't even mid-hardcore to begin with -.-

[Renathras]

Yet people did clear, a decent amount that is!

I think my concern is always "dev cost vs population use". Some content that everyone (or pretty much everyone) uses is worth a lot of development time and effort from the Devs. After all, everyone is using it. Things with high engagement, and especially high engagement + repetition. So MSQ getting a lot of dev time makes sense - everyone (pretty much) does it and it's one of the big draws of the game. 4 mans should PROBABLY get more than they do because, again, everyone does those AND (unlike MSQ), they tend to repeat them a lot in roulettes, especially Experts. 24 mans arguably fit into this as well, since a lot of people tend to do those, do them weekly, do them many times over the course of the expansion (since the armor upgrade materials can be bought with the coins), and they get a lot of currency in roulettes being one of the better roulettes to level or farm tomes with in terms of raw amounts.

CONVERSELY, there are some pieces of content that get very little engagement. The less they get, the harder it is to justify dev time being spent on them. Consider what all could be added to the game if the devs took the time they devote to Ultimates and did literally anything else with that time.

It's probably hard for Yoshi P to justify content that has only a small and niche audience that requires a lot of time to create to his bosses that write the paychecks. I get he's got a pretty high position and a lot of clout, but he seems reasonable about understanding this and adjusting.

EDIT (for space):

I feel like that's the reason for a lot of the healer and Savage changes, because the audience that was being provided by them was considered too small, and Ultimates exist supposedly for the hardest of the hardcore. I have no idea what their target is, but I'd wager they want something in the 20-40% clear rate of players (that is, all max level players, not players that try the content) to justify continuing to budge and make Savages. It's not an entitlement or dumbing down issue so much as it is an efficiency one. There's no reason to spend limited money (SE isn't a small indy, but they still don't have infinite cash) on stuff like that. So I suspect they're trying to appeal to a general audience and reserve Ultimates for the elite of players. It's hard to justify a game with both Ultimates AND Savage that only 5% clears. One or the other makes sense, but not both.

As to your second point, I guess it depends on the people. I don't think Extremes are designed to be unclearable or "f**" people up, per se. Savages a bit moreso, but they're again not Ultimates. Again, we have Ultimates in this game, and that is the content that's supposed to consist of spending weeks and weeks of head vs wall to clear. "hours invested" and so on. Savages to a point and absolutely Extremes are supposed to be pugable. They aren't supposed to fall over, mind you, but they shouldn't take days or weeks for the general person to be able to beat if they're giving it a genuine effort.

From my perspective, we have Ultimates as the "small % do it, large dev time investment" content in this game. That's kind of the point of having that as separate content, isn't it? Unless we go back to the days of Coils. Which could be hilarious in its own way.

And btw, I'm not really saying this from my perspective - I kinda don't care, I can clear Extremes just fine and never bothered with Savage until 6.0 anyway - but I'm thinking more this is the concern of Yoshi P and his team. If content gets "exclusive" enough, players that like having exclusive content for themselves love it...but it becomes harder to justify spending limited development resources (not just money, but also time) on. And in a game where Ultimates already exist for that hardest of the hardcore, cream of the crop elite skill playerbase, it's hard to argue that Savage should ALSO be designed for that same group when they already have content exclusive to them that is hogging a lot of dev time as it is.

It's very bizarre, the relationship between GCD heals and OGCD heals.

It really is just...strange, innit?

Like the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.

I dunno if FFXIV is ever going to pull a 2.0 again, but it's pretty clear a lot of the systems are dated to what the game was. CNJ/WHM and SCH's levels they learn skills and stuff makes sense...if you're playing ARR or HW paradigm content. Lilies weren't even added to the game (in their current form) until ShB, but they're central to WHM's design. The game doesn't give you oGCDs at the start, and like you say, it more or less trains players not to use them. WHM's first oGCDs are a speed buff almost exclusively used for damage and not (to a new player) obviously useful as a healing tool, and its second is a super long CD massive heal, which SCREAMS "in case of emergency, break glass and use me", not "weave me in here and there within your damage rotation for patching up people". WHM doesn't get THAT until Tetra at level 60 or something like that.

And before EW, it didn't get any Lily heal until passed 70, I think? They lowered one down, but you still don't get it until HW levels, I don't think.

The game frontloads healers with (other than their nuke and dot and raise) abilities that they will try not to touch in high end content instead of the other way around. And the later abilities aren't JUST more used, they become the core of the kits. It's like playing PLD at level 90 or PLD at level 50 where the rotation's completely different, contrasted with playing WAR at level 90 vs WAR at level 50 where the basic rotation and mechanics of the Job (WAR, that is, are basically established by level 50 and the abilities just upgrade or have new functionality added to them (that doesn't completely change how they're used) later.

I think they've gotten better at this over time, since newer designed/redesigned Jobs seem to be a BIT better at establishing the core of the Job early and then adding the fluff, but there are some pretty obvious outliers. Post rework SMN, for all its faults, establishes the core early. To the point people complain leveling it is boring because it's just the same thing for all 90 levels. But the benefit of that is, you have far fewer people trained in bad habits that they're then confused about having to break later.

On that one, if endgame raids having serious healing checks that challenge healers is driving people off the role, isn't that proving my point of the role having become the one of low expectations?

Not necessarily. It could be that it's become one of CONFUSED expectations - as noted above where people genuinely have trained themselves never to use a GCD heal, so even when they're needed, they...don't. A lot of party - non-healers, so tanks and DPS - have gotten used to not needing to align and use mitigation and self-healing tools that they have. So it's not just "healer" being a role of low expectations, it may be that tanks and DPSers have become roles of "low expectations" when it comes to anything that isn't straight DPS. A lot of the healing issues in current can be dealt with by healers, true, but they can also be made easier if the tanks and DPSers are actually using those tools.

So I think you're too quick to attack the healer role here, specifically, when this might just be EVERY role has gotten used to low expectations when it comes to anything outside of just dealing damage and not using any other tools.

Then maybe the game shouldn't allow players to get away with so many mistakes. Like, just restrict all battle rezz in all encounters. Instead of punishing dps for failing mechanics, in most content death is an inconvenience to healers first and foremost. In WoW this problem in my opinion is less pronounced because the game doesn't pushes healers to fix the mistakes of others indefinetely. If you are lucky, you have a class with brezz and that one is highly limited by cd. If somebody failed mechanics, they failed. Though WoW in higher end dungeon content also pushes more responsibilities to tanks and dps, like cc and interrupts.

Maybe. But I've heard the opposed argument that FFXIV's combat raises are one of the things people love about it vs other games. WoW's pushes responsibility on more people, but healers still (often) get blamed when people die, and WoW also has people far quicker to kick group/leave party and generally be toxic. It's a chicken or the egg as to if one causes the other and which is causing the other if so, but I'd wager FFXIV's combat raise helps keep things less toxic in a more general sense. Which is to say, I think it's entirely possible things COULD be far worse than they are today if FFXIV's mechanics WEREN'T so forgiving and easy going. And I'd rather not see FFXIV become like WoW...ever, honestly.

[T-Owl]

So I think you're too quick to attack the healer role here, specifically, when this might just be EVERY role has gotten used to low expectations when it comes to anything outside of just dealing damage and not using any other tools.

I attack the healer role because its the one where I can wholeheartedly say, that it is just plain worse than competing MMOs outside of nice and flashy animations. For Tanks, while I would love for FF14 to just plain copy active mitigation, I can at least say their dps rotation can be fun and appealing. Can't say the same about healers. Healers are hit the hardest and have become the role of lowest expectations, because SE never replaced the challenges of high healing uptime and high healing requirements with something to substitute it. Mitigation became easier and aggro management became a non-issue, but at least tanks get flashy new dps tools to make the rotation more busy each expansion. Healers get an upgrade to their one st filler, aoe filler and dot to creat the illusion they get something.

Maybe. But I've heard the opposed argument that FFXIV's combat raises are one of the things people love about it vs other games. WoW's pushes responsibility on more people, but healers still (often) get blamed when people die, and WoW also has people far quicker to kick group/leave party and generally be toxic. It's a chicken or the egg as to if one causes the other and which is causing the other if so, but I'd wager FFXIV's combat raise helps keep things less toxic in a more general sense. Which is to say, I think it's entirely possible things COULD be far worse than they are today if FFXIV's mechanics WEREN'T so forgiving and easy going. And I'd rather not see FFXIV become like WoW...ever, honestly.

to be honest, I don't feel it. 99% of Wow dungeon runs, even while leveling, are fairly simple, enough to learn your role, and just socially distanced. You will have Drama in M+ situations, but M+ is already high end content akin to extremes and on higher keys savage, with a hugh pressure to mitigate incoming damage and deal sufficent damage on dps and tanks alike. Not to forget that performance pressure exists in this case for all roles, if a Tank does pull more than he can handle and doesn't mitigate properly, you can see that and you have legal dps meters to see when a DPS is not pulling their weight and far behind the rest of the pack. These meters also make it fairly easy to log combat data and just link it in the group chat, if the dps who stood in the fire wants to act out of line. There is also the problem that DPS are just afforded ton of personal errors they don't have to carry. The game is disproportionally designed to push party failure on the healer while having basically no responsibility for dps players in casual content.

[Renathras]

I attack the healer role because its the one where I can wholeheartedly say, that it is just plain worse than competing MMOs

That's fine, but it is likely leading you to bad conclusions.

FFXIV players have gotten lazy when it comes to anything that isn't maximizing DPS. This is true of ALL ROLES, not just healers. Every DPSer in this game has mitigation and self-healing tools. Tanks have more. But you rarely see anyone (who isn't a healer main playing an off-Job) that uses them. I can't recall the last time I saw a NIN use Shade Shift that wasn't me playing NIN. I also rarely see DPSers use Bloodbath, even though it's free healing. Stuff like those are buffs, so they are visible on their bars. Second Wind is harder to see (because it's an instant-cast and done button that doesn't have any indication other than health bar filling), but I'd wager it also isn't used often.

Tanks tend to be better about this, since it's more the focus on their mind, but as a whole, I think FFXIV's unhealthy obsession with DPS > all has lead to every role becoming lazy and low expectation when it comes to mitigation. That's not a healer role issue, that's an overall all roles issue. I get you love DPS rotations (see the problem I JUST NOW MENTIONED), but that's not the problem here. The problem here is a mitigation one.

EDIT (for space):

to be honest, I don't feel it.

That's fine. It's entirely a subjective thing. But many people DO feel it, and it is one of the things a lot of people love about the game. Many players don't like games where one death means a probable wipe. I also contest that WoW dungeons are good for "learning your role", at least from when I last played in Legion, and I can't imagine they've been significantly changed since then. They were good for people being jerks to others, but not learning. I remember for a long while, they didn't even teach use of CC once AOEing down packs became the norm, to the point you'd be berated if you used something like Polymorph or other CC and weren't doing just damage. They flirted with making CC needed again in Cata, but it went over like a lead balloon at that point, so outside of Mythic, WoW dungeons don't teach you much of anything, no more than FFXIV ones do, anyway, and they tend to be toxic as all hells with people leaving party if there's even one wipe.

That's not an improvement, imo. As I said, as someone who DID play Vanilla WoW and BC, it was different back then. Having to put together parties in /trade and WALK to the dungeon entrances meant people were invested, so they'd stick with it. That doesn't exist in modern MMO gaming outside of Statics. And so few people have Statics as a percentage of the whole community that you can't reasonably use that metric.

Those self-same DPS meters have also contributed to WoW having one of the most, if not the most, toxic community among all MMOs that it's even become famous for. The people that rigidly worship them in FFXIV are also among the more toxic elements of our own community. People that use meters for self-improvement aren't a problem, but I don't think there's any argument at this point in MMO history with all that we know that they DON'T contribute to toxicity wherever they are used/come into being.

I do agree with the last sentence, though. It's entirely the reason for stuff like Twice/Thrice Come Ruin in Delubrium and Damage Downs in Savage, though I'd argue the latter are not the right kind of punishment because the only thing it punishes (for the DPS player) is their parse, which aren't even "legal" to begin with. It can cause a wipe to Enrage, but without using an add-on, there's no way for the party to know that. Twice/Thrice Come, on the other hand, has the player KO. While this still shunts the problem onto the healer, it makes it obvious the fault was with the DPSer, and in DR Savage, can't even be raised normally.

I do kinda wonder if something like that would make sense to use in harder content. Like make it where Raises have a miss chance or (since that's annoying) can only be used so often on some kind of CD. Like if in Savage you could only Raise with Swiftcast, limiting it to once a minute per Job with a Raise. While that's still frequent, it's LESS frequent. Flipside, of course, is that Raises in Savage can often cause Enrage anyway due to low DPS...

[T-Owl]

That's fine, but it is likely leading you to bad conclusions.

The issue is, that these tools are just not needed in every day to day play and even in savage outside of very early prog and even then its purely the mitigation tools and the anti-knockback, which is only really needed in savage. You can't fault players for not using tools which are just not necessary just for the pure fluff of doing it, especially if in most cases healers can deal with incoming damage mostly just fine with just using their ogcd tools themselves. With healers, their core feature of healing the party is rarely challenged but compared to Tanks they also lack an interesting dps rotation to make up for that.

Part 2

First to adress the elephant in the room, it is utterly stupid to ban parsing tools in a game that involves enrage timers in endgame content, because that one makes it a necessity to measure the dps the party in its entirety as well as individual players do. You could just as well make life bars invisible, so that bad players don't feel bad when everyone sees that they receive too much damage or that a bad tank didn't mitigates damage properly. Secondly, yeah, WoW dungeons are not the best learning tools before m+ because similarily to ff14, they are made to be just rushed. I feel like the higher levels of character customization at least encourage players more to seek outside ressources to optimize their game though, so there is that. I also kinda disagree with the supposed rampant toxicity of woW. In most cases everyday gameplay will be like FF14. People are quicker to point out flaws in ones play or when somebody plays badly, but I think the other extreme is this supposed stepford smiler forced positivity attitude in FF14 where people will rarely if ever tell you that you play shit out of fear of eating a ban, so as long as you don't enter high end content, there is little in terms of incentive to actually improve yourself in FF14. Its both not healthy and I think WoW and FF14 are kind of mirrors to each other in terms of community interactions. There is alot of toxic negativity surrounding WoW, did you know that the game is actually dead since 2008? and alot of toxic positivity in FF14, where people are quick to shut up legitimate criticism. MCH is actually objectively worse than any other rng dps? Doesn't matter, stop bringing it up because everyone can beat any content, as long as they have their Nakama and power of dreams and all that tried anime stuff. And just to be that person, yeah, somebody who flames people for not pulling optimal dps in content where it doesn't matter is a toxic arse. You know who else is toxic? Somebody who just doesn't cares about playing well and contributing to their team.

On the second one, I think restricting the possibility to heal would be really at least somebody. I mean, having to long cast a rezz on itself feels already shit as a healer.