A summary of healer issues

[Recon1o6]

Late night musings: though my question was butchered in the 6.1 live letter to be about lack of healing to do, we did still get something to heal at least this patch in the regular trial, the ex and savage. possibly some bits of criterion too but i aint seen enough yet
We know yoshida has heard about the lack of participation of healers, but also heard from 2 healers that they did like the increased healing requirements

I'm seeing 2 possibilities here the devs will take forward
1. they lower healing requirements to beg back sylphies but not to the degree it was in the last tier
2. they sustain the increased healing requirements but reduce savage loot to be less grindy to gear. maybe even role locked loot if lucky

perhaps next time there's a q&a from the forum I will have to make my question purely "Can healers get damage buttons and cards returned? The removal made healers boring since shadowbringers and turned off many veteran healers"

after all, they did give more healing this patch

[ty_taurus]

Late night musings: though my question was butchered in the 6.1 live letter to be about lack of healing to do, we did still get something to heal at least this patch in the regular trial, the ex and savage. possibly some bits of criterion too but i aint seen enough yet
We know yoshida has heard about the lack of participation of healers, but also heard from 2 healers that they did like the increased healing requirements

I'm seeing 2 possibilities here the devs will take forward
1. they lower healing requirements to beg back sylphies but not to the degree it was in the last tier
2. they sustain the increased healing requirements but reduce savage loot to be less grindy to gear. maybe even role locked loot if lucky

perhaps next time there's a q&a from the forum I will have to make my question purely "Can healers get damage buttons and cards returned? The removal made healers boring since shadowbringers and turned off many veteran healers"

after all, they did give more healing this patch

I think the wording is going to be incredibly important. No shade on your question because I'm glad it ultimately got seen, but I think in hindsight, it could have been more clear and concise about the problems. Then the misunderstanding got exacerbated by having a non-native English speaker translate and paraphrase the question live.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think the wording is going to be incredibly important.

unfortunately, and i wish i wasnt this pessimistic, but i think you could literally say 'here is a problem, here is the solution, will you implement it' about some things in this game and yoshi-p will go off on one about some completely unrelated thing and not address the actual question. we could directly say 'healers are quitting en masse because the rotation we have to fill downtime with is boring. we naturally trend towards more dps during downtime, as a result of getting better at a fight. the better we get, the more downtime there is, the more damage opportunities arise. this is an unavoidable inevitability due to the design of the game. no amount of 'we have added more healing required in the fights' is going to solve this, as gear causes players to heal for more per action and take less damage from enemies due to the defense stat increasing. will you embrace this inevitable outcome, and add more dps actions for healers during this downtime?' and he'll go on about the hypothetical 'new healer who is going to be stressed about these buttons', which means tl;dr no you can't have a rotation vaguely resembling a tank, because what if Johnny Nothumbs can't keep up with having Fluid Aura back on the hotbars?

no yoshi-p those buttons are not going to matter in any content you'd find a 'new healer' in so that point just does not fly. noone is going to notice if Johnny isn't using a fully optimised rotation in Dusk Vigil, Holminster Switch, or indeed any dungeon that isn't in the EX roulette. and even then, if someone DOES notice in EX roulette, they cant do anything except grumble to themselves that it is taking an extra 7 mins, because Johnny is protected by the TOS

sorry if this seems especially terse but i was doing criterion today (normal, not savage) and while it feels fun to be a healer there now, i can already see the writing on the wall in it's design, it's fun because we dont know the mechanics and we're constantly in 'oh fk' mode. once we have the mechanics down it is going to be just like any other savage fight where we end up at 80%+ of our actions being dps actions. we got more 'healing required' this savage tier too, and look at it: its not even more 'healing required' it's more MIT required. and since healers have a certain amount of mit they provide, that 'requirement' has just spilled over to meaning the dps have to use their mit tools too (and sometimes they dont because why would they? they didnt need it before!). more 'healing required' would be having raidwides more often, not 'instead of 120% of your hp before mit, they do 150%'. regardless, while i appreciate having more to do for week 1 healing, it's just that: week 1. it's painfully apparent how quickly that 'extra healing required' evaporates due to gear difference.

if we keep the healing required as it is, then we keep on this same downward spiral of healers leaving. we revert it a bit back towards asphodelos, maybe you get the more casual healers to stay/come back, but this is a bandaid on the bullet wound. the solution is, in my opinion, to stop trying to change the 20% of our time spent as 'healing time' to 30% or 40%, and instead focus on making that 80% 'dpsing time' actually engaging and fun.