The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Shurrikhan]

Random aside: Suppose for the sake of argument it was possible to do something like ARR where we split healing as a role into two parts that were...actually functional (unlike the Pure/Barrier split which seems to basically be meaningless outside of WHM/WHM comps since everyone else has barriers anyway...)

Where we had one that was a healing focused set of healers, and the other a support/damage focused set.

The former are designed to have powerful and efficient heals with a slimmed down damage kit while the latter are designed to have a more expansive damage suite and dynamic gameplay shifting between support healing and buffing the party vs optimizing their damage potential.

If there was a way to do this where it wouldn't devolve into a meta of 2x supports (let's pretend this is possible), would that not be an interesting and possibly useful change to satisfy everyone?

I get there are a lot of "That's impossible..." what-ifs. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend. As I noted above, on at least some level, this was how healing in ARR worked, and players were (at the time) largely satisfied with this, with many loving both healers despite their individual focuses. Set aside the "impossible" and "ARR wasn't REALLY like that by 2.4 and on..." and so on, just a thought experiment.

Just my $0.02:

To me... probably not, but it depends (on whether there were already established thematic grounds players were attached to and would have aspects trimmed from to suit those categories, and/or whether there'd be cohesive designs possible likewise blocked off by that adherence to sub-roles).

I feel like we get far more bang for the buck, up to a pretty high threshold, from competing choices in gameplay rather than just competing choices in menu-play alone (just picking job A or job B, or build A or B, etc., before entering the given activity). While I like class/job/build to have their own unique advantages and features (atop their unique playflows and aesthetics), I don't feel like there's ever been a whole delineation in who's been allowed to do what that ever increased the total depth available to players; instead, those delineations just more quickly let devs be content with less on each choice they provide. In that case, good mechanics are, for the worse, purposely held hostage to/by certain builds, rather than each build competing to make the most interesting/attractive/fun cohesion and synergies they can out of whatever they like / find fitting.

Or, to put it another way, take any thematic kit you can imagine: Time-Space, Druidism, Elemental, Alchemical, Life-Death, Onmyou, Blood, Incarnation, etc. There's almost always some element of that kit, whatever it may be, would want to be allowed access into more "advanced" (deep, interestingly set up, etc.) healing or into "support" options. Some may, in the course of grabbing what seems to fit best around their iconic tools, end up with especially high value or intricacy or button counts of aspects A, B, C, or D, etc., but there's no point in dividing those jobs into any sort of halves or taxonomies just to say what can or can't be given to a particular theme/aesthetic.

I wouldn't mind a slightly more deeply heal-focused healer, but it shouldn't be "heal-focused" just because it lacks anything else (see, traditionally and still largely today, XIV WHM). And no theme or job concept ought to be constrained just to fit an arbitrary sub-role.


Full related disclosure: I dislike any sort of template-based design. I prefer a job happening to end up with some unique arrangement of various capacities as might suit a pentagonal strengths graph rather than being designed around any hard constraints other than "Make this theme as fun as possible."