Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

Diamondback, mighty guard, chelonian gate if poa counts, avail, dragon force.

I don't think BLU counts. If it did, we'd also be talking about BLU Healers and no one here would be complaining because BLU Healers have basically everything they're asking for. They have DoTs, they have a lot of access to damage spells, though their heals are GCD, they're pretty "side content" "to do when you aren't doing your more important and more primary job: Damaging the boss"; the front and center focus is on "Green DPS". Well...BLU DPS, if you will. If BLU Healers were allowed in general content, the people that don't like current healers would presumably be pretty happy with it.

Except tanks DID have a GCD that would cost them damage. It was called 'tank stance'.

It has been a while, but was Tank Stance EVER a GCD?

That said, that's for Agro, not for mitigation. I guess people could try to "flash" it for mitigation, but that was stupid since it had the CD before you could swap out of it. Basically like Cleric Stance. Which is why it, too, was removed. But no, that isn't a valid comparison; because there isn't one. Again, the closest thing is Passage of Arms, IF you actually hold it. Because those Tank stances don't exist anymore, so how can you use that as a comparison in the modern game, exactly?

I didn't say it was people "forcing healers to do dps".

Cleric was removed because some people were harassing Healers for not DPSing, not because "healers were meant to DPS", and because the Devs thought Healing was too taxing of a role driving people away from it and needed to be made more friendly to attract and retain a stable Healer population.

Please read my posts you reply to before replying to them. I tend to state my positions in them, so you don't need to tell me what I said (incorrectly) when what I actually said isn't that. It was the harassment the Dev team sought to end. Unsuccessfully, but it was their intention.

Agro is binary, but when games are based around it, it's actually important. It's not Tank has 5000 agro and next person up has 2500. It's Tank has 5000 agro and the balls to the wall BLM has 4995 and is about to use Flare. WoW had that kind of gameplay (as did FFXIV), and Tank players tend to actually like the threat management aspect of Tanking. The three mainstays of Tanking in MMOs (or games in general) are "maintaining an agro lead", "positioning the boss", and "using mitigation properly to survive heavy hitting attacks". When games start dropping those, Tank players tend to get frustrated. Tanks in HW and SB would use their threat combo if they had someone catching up to them in threat, and would use Tank Stance when in lower gear (because of the added 20% defense) as well as to keep an agro lead on DPS, since most Statics funnel their drops to their highest DPS members early on so they can push prog. It was once they were fully geared and gear started filtering to the Tanks that they could spend more and more time in damage stance, using their threat combo only when needed to keep their agro lead. A lot of Tanks found that interplay somewhat fun, and those that didn't simply spent more time in Tank stance.

If you haven't looked at Tank discussions lately, FFXIV Tanks are almost as annoyed at Tanking in FFXIV as you guys are with Healing. They feel like they've had two of their legs stripped away, since boss teleporting and massive hitboxes - or worse, wall bosses - render positioning the boss pretty meaningless in modern FFXIV encounters, and Threat is a non-issue if you simply press stance before entering the encounter. The only thing they have left is mitigation and damage ("Blue DPS"), and it turns out a lot of Tank players are as mad about being "Blue DPS" as Healer players about being "Green DPS". Mitigation has mostly become a "use oGCD/mitigation plan", and they've been shoehorned into being "DPS lite", and they don't like it, either. Someone even added up the number of wall bosses and "teleport to re-center" bosses and found they are something like 4 out of 5 EW bosses across all content (including 4 mans and 24 mans)

And when they do, the devs have to consider that

Which is also partly why they removed Tank/Damage stances and (much less so) Cleric stance.

I'm sure you heard about how Yoshi and the devs were surprised groups cleared UCOB,

The irony is, P8S turned out the opposite way. They really ought to be tuning the Ultimates like they tuned P8S on launch and not the other way around.

To me, 'I don't want to DPS as healer, and SE should make it so healers are focused on healing' reads the same as 'I don't want to improve, and everyone else should be dragged down to my level so I'm not made to look bad'.

And I think this is why you don't get it.

Think of something you don't like doing. Maybe you don't like basketball but like football. Maybe you don't like shooting guns but like archery, or don't like either but like martial arts, or don't like that either but like cooking or yoga. So say you signed up for a yoga class and people start demanding you shoot guns and play basketball in it. You might reply, "I signed up for a yoga class, not a shooting class or basketball class, because I don't like basketball and I hate guns".

Many people sign up for Healers because they like supporting other people. Where you say you don't want to be a healing and buffing "b---h", many people actually enjoy being a support character helping their team overcome challenges. Some people want to use the power tools and others are entirely content being the go-fer that brings parts to them to do the job. And it takes all kinds to make the world function. An Army of only soldiers is a poor army - what do the eat? Where do they get their ammunition? Who plans the objectives for them to take? Without logistic and operational support and direction, all their "dps" in the world won't win a war.

To use the above example, you "don't want to improve" at shooting, because you hate guns. But you DO want to improve at yoga, because you love yoga. So saying they don't want to deal with a complex DPS rotation isn't them saying they don't want to improve. It's them saying they don't like shooting guns/complex DPS rotations. They WANT to improve, they just want to improve in other areas. For example, back in SB, I mainly played WHM still (despite having SCH/SMN to level cap in every expansion starting with when I started the game, in ARR), and I finally sat down and decided I wanted to learn SCH as well. I watched videos, I learned the difference between oGCD and GCD and between Spell/Weaponskill and Ability, Potency vs Pet Potency, and how to make some macros. I put a lot of skills I hadn't been using in more active places on my hotbar and got out of the WoW mentality of "If it has a CD greater than 30 seconds, it's for emergencies", shifting to "If it has a CD of less than 90 seconds, use all the time, and if it has a CD of 90 or more, try to use on CD with only a few rare exceptions (Benediction and Tank ultimates, basically)"

I worked hard to improve my HEALING to where I never had people dying unless they just kept standing in bad beyond the ability to heal them, and I pushed to using more and more oGCDs to heal to the point I could free up GCDs for other things like damage if I wanted to.

This wasn't me trying to get better at a DPS rotation (to this day, I still suck at trying to refresh DoTs before they fall off, despite trying all kinds of things to make it easier to see and trying to note boss mechanics used about the time they need refreshing so I can remember them), but it WAS me trying to improve.

I was trying to improve at yoga, not shooting. Which is why I picked the yoga (Healing) Role not the gunnery (DPS) Role.

Additionally: You also are stuck on the strawman/canard, no matter how many times it's shot down.

Who, exactly, has argued to remove Healer damage spells?
Who, exactly, has argued that a Healer player should be barred from ever doing damage?

Not I.

So who?

And while there could be healers that make their healing efficient to push damage, I think that's why the Devs have Healers traditionally doing so little damage (even now, AST's personal damage, for example, is pretty low compared to literally any DPS in the game - they aren't "half a DPS", they're more like 1/5th to 1/4th of one; you don't count their buffs for that, since that's not them dealing damage themselves). If Healers did little enough damage, then it wouldn't matter since that would only change clear rates on the margins with parties that have an average skill high enough to clear anyway. The balance point for the Devs is ensuring Healer damage potential is still high enough for them to effectively clear solo content.

.

At the end of the day, I suppose it doesn't matter, though.

Chances are they miraculously 'dont count' because BLU isn't really a tank. Or that they don't count because BLU isn't really a job full stop.

Nothing "miraculous" about it. BLUs aren't considered Tanks by the Devs and you can't use them in any current content. Again, if we could, you guys wouldn't be complaining about Healer damage kits since you could play on BLU and have a more robust one (while healing) than most DPS in the game.

.

Aside:

I think I rather like playing AST in PvP. It's basically a pure healing/buffing Job in there and I love it. And unlike WHM, it doesn't require you to stupidly run into melee range for REASONS as a squishy clothy. I find where the action is and heal and buff the hell out of my party. First time playing it I was 5th in heals (after a WHM and 3 Tanks), second time I was second (behind only a Tank); seriously, Tanks do absurd healing in Frontlines, lol

Lots of assists, too, and even the odd knockout somehow (probably from Gravity...)

I think I may have found my new Frontlines main...

[ForsakenRoe]

And while there could be healers that make their healing efficient to push damage, I think that's why the Devs have Healers traditionally doing so little damage (even now, AST's personal damage, for example, is pretty low compared to literally any DPS in the game - they aren't "half a DPS", they're more like 1/5th to 1/4th of one; you don't count their buffs for that, since that's not them dealing damage themselves). If Healers did little enough damage, then it wouldn't matter since that would only change clear rates on the margins with parties that have an average skill high enough to clear anyway. The balance point for the Devs is ensuring Healer damage potential is still high enough for them to effectively clear solo content.

95%, Hegemone (since it's 100% uptime), NDPS so it doesn't factor in any buffs. AST's more than half of a DPS. Yes it's BRD and DNC, but it's a DPS nonetheless. This is all very easy to find if you bother to go look. And I think you missed the important point: It doesn't matter if the devs make healers do 50% or 5% of a DPS class's damage output, we'll keep on throwing rocks. I'm not the only one, other high end players will too. And that means the devs will have to tune encounters around that fact. They can't stop us, it's too ingrained in the playerbase.

And yeh, Shield Oath and Grit were both GCDs (spells, in fact, they'd aggro sprites in eureka) up until SHB. I'd have thought you'd know that, since you played since 2.3. But please don't try the whole 'idk if you saw tank threads recently'. I'd expect it to feel pretty condescending to anyone, but it's doubly so to me. I was a tank main when I first started doing higher-end content in SB. I've seen 4.1 WAR replaced by current ungabunga. I've seen 4.3-4.5 DRK removed and turned into this WAR-esque copy because people couldn't handle pressing Dark Arts. I know all too well about the 'boss teleports to middle' issue, the 'wall boss' issue, the removal of threat as a mechanic, the removal of the risk/reward gameplay stances brought. Do you know WHY those tanks, are annoyed at being Blue DPS? I'll tell you my reason, and likely the reason most others feel that way. It's because we were always Blue DPS. Always. But that was hidden, masked, obscured, by the extra responsibilities we had. We didn't JUST 'do damage', we positioned the boss, we managed aggro more closely beyond just 'provoke', we managed our mitigation plan more tightly rather than just 'kitchen sink the TB' because autoattacks were more of a threat back when we didn't selfheal hard enough to render healers redundant in dungeons.

Now our bonus defense is passive so the risk-reward is gone. Now aggro management is gone because tankstance threat multiplier is insanely high. Now positioning the boss isn't a thing, because the boss positions itself. All the layers of the 'complexity gobstopper' have been removed, and we're left with the center: do damage.

But this thread isn't about tanks. It's about healers, and how people are quitting en masse. Something needs to change, the current trajectory for healer complexity is not sustainable. And I'll say it again: The devs can try to make it so 'theres no opportunity to do damage', we will make opportunities. The only way to stop us is to jack the HPS required so high, most of the playerbase can't keep up. Very counterproductive. That's why I'm on the side of 'damage complexity'.

Yoshi said 'I don't get it, we gave you guys what you asked for, what do you actually want' because some people, who have no foresight or consideration for the longterm ramifications and consequences of such a change, asked for 'more healing required'. I've said before, I'd be fine with 'more healing required' as a change to the game. I have the skill to keep up. But massive swathes of the playerbase has been whiplash'd into the realization that they can't keep up, even with a bump as small as the one we got. Yoshi's issue is that either he doesn't realize there's multiple 'schools of thought' on what the best direction for healers is, or that he does realize that, and just followed the side that is loudest, not necessarily the one that is 'correct'. Now, I don't think there is a 'correct' in all of this. But there's definitely an 'incorrect', and we saw it this tier.

[Renathras]

95%

How is a little over 5,000 95% of a little over 8,500? DNC being the lowest DPSer. That's 59%. Of the LOWEST DPSer. It's "more than half" only in a really strict sense. It's less than half of anything below NIN. DNC, BRD, RDM, and SMN (barely; it's almost less than half SMN and RDM). It's about 45% of BLM. WHM is about 58% of BLM.

This is also a chart without context; what percentile is this?

But as you say, it's somewhat irrelevant.

Oh, I'm sure you'll keep throwing rocks. After all:

Who, exactly, has argued to remove Healer damage spells?
Who, exactly, has argued that a Healer player should be barred from ever doing damage?

Not I.

So who?

(spells, in fact, they'd aggro sprites in eureka)

...that's...actually mildly hilarious. Regardless, irrelevant to the present, as I said.

I've played Tanks, yes. I actually have had PLD since around 2.5, but Tanking has ever been a side project with me and the only stuff I tanked was "stay in Tank stance the whole time" content anyway. I Tanked most of Omega normal for my FC (which at the time had only one other person that at all Tanked, and was a RDM main). But in most content, I was on either WHM or SCH outside of leveling PLD to 50, 60, and then 70. I started seriously tanking (Extremes and stuff) in ShB, other than a Susano run or three in late SB.

I was a tank main when...

And I would know this...how? It was a general statement, not a condescending one. I wasn't sure how into the Tank community you are, but they aren't particularly thrilled with the "Blue DPS" paradigm, either.

The extra responsibilities are why we were never "Blue DPS".

You guys collectively have this weird paradigm that anything that does damage is a DPS. By that token, almost every Job in this game is a Healer. Every Job has either a heal or mitigation ability, or both. So maybe we shouldn't be talking about "Blue DPS" or "Green DPS" and should be talking about "Red Healers" and "Red Tanks". There's a point where the definitions become so broad that they lose all meaning.

I think the way Tanks feel that way is because they WEREN'T "Blue DPS". Even looking back at old raid numbers, Tanks used to have lower DPS than Healers. Aggro management was actually a team effort, but Tanks had agency besides "Stance + Provoke". You could swap to a Threat combo specifically to generate more Threat, and if you really wanted to go ham, hit Flash a couple times since that generated stupidly ridiculous aggro. Boss positioning mattered a lot more due to cleaves and not re-centering/re-aligning mechanics. Having a boss cock-eyed in the arena could lead to expected safe spots for mechanics not being safe, and a boss turned the wrong way could lead to insta-KO cleaves on unsuspecting party members.

When these things were removed is when Tanks became "Blue DPS", and why players that enjoyed those other things hate it. Not everyone has a big boner for DPS, and I'm not sure why that's hard to grasp.

It's about healers, and how people are quitting en masse.

Do we actually have any hard data that this is happening? And comparative data to the past (e.g. HW era, SB era, ShB era) to see if it's outsized vs historical trend or not?

The only way to stop us is to jack the HPS required so high, most of the playerbase can't keep up.

Nah, they could also simply nerf Healer DPS to the point it's irrelevant. Encounters aren't designed to NOT be cleared, generally speaking; they're only designed to require some level of team effort to do so. If Healer DPS is so much an issue, they could just lower it to the point it no longer is. You throwing 500 stones won't matter if they only do 100 DPS and you're given some kind of ability like BLU Basic Instinct to use when outside of group content. They can also make Healer DPS one button spam and make all their abilities do the same damage to the target (even GCD heals) so there's no DPS gap between low and high skilled Healers.

I highly doubt they'll do either of these, mind you, and I'm not saying any of these are good solutions. But yours is hardly the ONLY one.

because some people, who have no foresight or consideration for the longterm ramifications and consequences of such a change, asked for 'more healing required'

And? Some people, who have no foresight or consideration for the longterm ramifications and consequences of such a change, ask for "more damage required". Hell, we got that with P8S and people hated that, too. More healing required is much more stable in the long-term than more damage requirements on healers. People just have to understand that's the paradigm and adjust to it if it happens, and that is where the breakdown was. People were still trying to clear P5-8S the way they cleared P1-4S. If everyone was told "This is where the game is going, this is how we expect healing to be done", clearly and unambibuously, there wouldn't be as much an issue. Or, again, if they made GCD healing damage neutral. If WHM's got a 1/3rd Blood Lily casting Regen and Medica 2, they wouldn't be as loathe to use those options.

The playerbase wasn't "whiplash'd into the realization that they can't keep up"; people were able to keep up, they just weren't expecting the paradigm shift and so were slow to react to it. The more damage model would produce the exact same result, and 'damage complexity' would likely drive off more Healers in the short term. In the long term, it would be made up for by the DPS players.

...granted, taxing the DPS players more (for once) might not be a bad thing...but we don't need complex Healer rotations (or complex rotations on ALL the Healers - the point I've noted many times before) for any of this.

Something needs to change.

Well, we agree on this. I've even proposed a two (or three) pronged change. As I recall, you shoot it down every time I mention it. We agree that change needs to happen, but not what change.

[Renathras]

So I compiled some data for numbers. I find it honestly too suspect to be useful, but the Wayback Machine's crawls of FFXIV Census. The issue I have is I can't tell enough from the numbers if FFXIV's census is trying to capture mains or not. It seems to be more "Job at level 90 on a player that has completed the current expansion's MSQ", but that's a pretty low bar. It MAY be counting only one Job per player, but I'm not certain enough to be sure. It is still interesting that you can see some trends, like DPS getting a spike in SB and again in EW (especially Melee in Meleewalker), and that Tanks got a bit of a spike in ShB and Healers got a small one in EW; but it's hard to draw concrete conclusions from this since that could all be artifacts of the data (another Job being leveled alongside existing ones for someone that's a dual/tri/omni-main of a given role will inflate its percent unless the data only counts one per player). The FFXIV Census data also had an error for two years, though this only affected "all characters" not the endgame "active characters" count - it missed/counted as deleted characters who didn't have at least 1 mount and at least 1 minion...but that's mainly going to be less than level 20 characters, so it's pretty safe to exclude them from the count. But that said, the data DOES help to draw conclusions in the sense of telling us what arguments are likely NOT accurate. For example, if we expect a massive decline in Healers but the percent goes up, even if we factor part of that as people leveling multiple Healers and so counting a second, third, or even fourth time, if the decline was massive, we'd expect to see a hint of that in the data. We do not.

The Lucky Bancho numbers are harder to get via the Wayback Machine, and I can't read the original Japanese anyway to really understand the older datasets. Translations on Reddit and the Official Forums tend not to be made by the same posters or with the same topic/thread titles, and aren't a static address to have been archived by the WM's crawler, anyway. I wish they were, because I find that data's more reliable (judging Job count by "Person was logged out on it" is a bit dubious, but it is by "Has current patch Extreme weapon or better" is a good measure for "the person actively plays this Job...probably; or at least considers gearing it important enough to spend Tomes/Totems on doing so"), but it is what it is.

The FFXIV Census data, given those caveats, is still the best data I could get my hands on, and it shows Healers as holding approximately steady. Here's the Healer % vs All Jobs over time:

HEALER %
2017: 0.25047
2018: 0.215359
2019: 0.191224
2020: 0.172927
2022: 0.19941
2023: 0.205038

What we can see from this is that Healer Jobs at level cap with MSQ completion declined as a percentage of the whole from HW through ShB, but then started increasing into EW. PART OF THIS is for people maining multiple Healer Jobs, they now had another one to main, but that only really explains the people (like me) that level all of them. While that's likely a portion of the data, it doesn't tell the whole story. But the super short version is: "The Healer population declined in middle-to-late HW going into SB, then declined further going into ShB, before somewhat reversing and increasing to about the SB level in EW."

More data would be required to be certain of this, and I'm going to see if I can find the last three years Lucky Bancho numbers as well to compare against, but at least on first examination, it appears that the claim:

It's about healers, and how people are quitting en masse. Something needs to change, the current trajectory for healer complexity is not sustainable.

...does not seem to have a factual or data basis. At least, not a conclusive one or one so massive it jumps out in the data. Healer complexity is likely not a solution (the time Healers were most complex is also the time Healers were the smallest percentage of the population, meaning the time they were the least popular/leveled/played), and the data DOES, preliminary, show that. Not to mention no amount of Healer complexity will stop you from "making opportunities" or "throwing rocks" anyway. As you say, they can't stop you, and the most complex rotation in the world wouldn't. So clearly, that can't be a solution to the problem.

[ForsakenRoe]

How is a little over 5,000 95% of a little over 8,500? DNC being the lowest DPSer. That's 59%. Of the LOWEST DPSer. It's "more than half" only in a really strict sense. It's less than half of anything below NIN. DNC, BRD, RDM, and SMN (barely; it's almost less than half SMN and RDM). It's about 45% of BLM. WHM is about 58% of BLM.

This is also a chart without context; what percentile is this?

But as you say, it's somewhat irrelevant.

I said 'AST is over half of the damage of a DNC and BRD' because you claimed AST does 20-25% of ANY DPS. Therefore, I'd have thought it'd be obvious that saying '95%' at the start would refer to the percentile the chart shows. Guess not.

And I would know this...how? It was a general statement, not a condescending one. I wasn't sure how into the Tank community you are, but they aren't particularly thrilled with the "Blue DPS" paradigm, either.

The extra responsibilities are why we were never "Blue DPS".

You guys collectively have this weird paradigm that anything that does damage is a DPS. By that token, almost every Job in this game is a Healer. Every Job has either a heal or mitigation ability, or both. So maybe we shouldn't be talking about "Blue DPS" or "Green DPS" and should be talking about "Red Healers" and "Red Tanks". There's a point where the definitions become so broad that they lose all meaning.

I think the way Tanks feel that way is because they WEREN'T "Blue DPS". Even looking back at old raid numbers, Tanks used to have lower DPS than Healers. Aggro management was actually a team effort, but Tanks had agency besides "Stance + Provoke". You could swap to a Threat combo specifically to generate more Threat, and if you really wanted to go ham, hit Flash a couple times since that generated stupidly ridiculous aggro. Boss positioning mattered a lot more due to cleaves and not re-centering/re-aligning mechanics. Having a boss cock-eyed in the arena could lead to expected safe spots for mechanics not being safe, and a boss turned the wrong way could lead to insta-KO cleaves on unsuspecting party members.

When these things were removed is when Tanks became "Blue DPS", and why players that enjoyed those other things hate it. Not everyone has a big boner for DPS, and I'm not sure why that's hard to grasp.

Seems YOU are the one that doesn't read people's responses before replying, since I said 'the reason I don't like Tank anymore' was because the responsibilities beyond 'do damage' were removed. You say 'When these things were removed is when Tanks became "Blue DPS", and why players that enjoyed those other things hate it' and that's what I said for why I no longer enjoy Tank as much,I WAS one of those players. You're wrong on the part where you claim that 'Tanks became Blue DPS'. They didn't have the damage rotation added at the same time as those responsibilities were removed, it was always there. So they didn't 'become', they 'always were', just that without the focus split on the other responsibilities, all of that focus instead is now thrown onto the one responsibility we have left, damage. If I wanted to just 'do damage' then I'd play the role that does that, I played Tank and Healer because there's more to do on top of 'do damage'. When that gets removed, and the role is peeled back to just another flavor of 'do damage', that's when my interest dies. I don't play Healer just to 'do damage', I play it because I have to heal and mit at times too. But if it was just reduced to 'heal and mit' as your later idea poses, I'd lose interest in the role.

Do we actually have any hard data that this is happening? And comparative data to the past (e.g. HW era, SB era, ShB era) to see if it's outsized vs historical trend or not?

Does Yoshi-P responding to two Q+A questions about 'hey there's so many PF groups that can't find a healer this tier', saying they need to look at the data for the tier, but can see there is indeed a lack of healers, to the point where he says 'please give healer a try' count? question 1, question 2

It's probably started to bounce back a bit, now that we're 20 item levels higher than the Savage is tuned for. The issue of 'It's too hard to heal this fight' isn't an issue now that you don't need to heal as much, with extra Defense and HP from gear. But that doesn't change the fact that if the balance of next tier meant the healing required was the same as this tier, the waves of people quitting would flare up again.

Nah, they could also simply nerf Healer DPS to the point it's irrelevant. Encounters aren't designed to NOT be cleared, generally speaking; they're only designed to require some level of team effort to do so. If Healer DPS is so much an issue, they could just lower it to the point it no longer is. You throwing 500 stones won't matter if they only do 100 DPS and you're given some kind of ability like BLU Basic Instinct to use when outside of group content. They can also make Healer DPS one button spam and make all their abilities do the same damage to the target (even GCD heals) so there's no DPS gap between low and high skilled Healers.

'Remove any kind of critical thinking requirement from the role, make it so I can be carried even when I don't do any damage, and make cure spamming not only functional, but technically optimal gameplay'. Jesus Christ. I've seen some bad ideas for changes for the game but this one might actually be the worst possible suggestion I've ever seen. It's so bad, I'd even side with FireMage in calling it a bad take, if they came in here. It would kill raiding harder than Gordias, and that's not even hyperbole.

And you're still missing the point. Crit variance in burst windows already means that some pulls end at 0.1% instead of a clear. So if the difference is 'don't do damage as healer' vs 'do only 100dps as healer by going full send', that 100dps is STILL potentially going to be the difference between a clear and not. So we're STILL going to have to full-send damage as healer, but now you've made it so low, that if the DPS slack at all, the healer is completely unable to adjust their healing rotation, to get out more damage and potentially scrape together a little bit more damage to make up the difference. This idea takes agency and carry-potential away from the healer, and turns them into a 'damsel in distress' role, forced to sit on the sidelines and hope the big strong hero (DPS classes) can beat the bad guys.

I highly doubt they'll do either of these, mind you, and I'm not saying any of these are good solutions. But yours is hardly the ONLY one.

No, you're right, mine isn't the only solution. But if what you just suggested is supposed to be an 'alternative solution', to say 'guys wait, there's another way!', it's not exactly strong competition.

And? Some people, who have no foresight or consideration for the longterm ramifications and consequences of such a change, ask for "more damage required". Hell, we got that with P8S and people hated that, too. More healing required is much more stable in the long-term than more damage requirements on healers. People just have to understand that's the paradigm and adjust to it if it happens, and that is where the breakdown was. People were still trying to clear P5-8S the way they cleared P1-4S. If everyone was told "This is where the game is going, this is how we expect healing to be done", clearly and unambibuously, there wouldn't be as much an issue. Or, again, if they made GCD healing damage neutral. If WHM's got a 1/3rd Blood Lily casting Regen and Medica 2, they wouldn't be as loathe to use those options.

It's not 'no foresight or consideration for longterm ramifications' to ask for 'something similar to Stormblood', since that's already happened. We're working off of what we used to have, and have evidence of how it functioned, what shortcomings the system had, how to address them, etc. Randomly ramping HPS required has no previous basis, and is a complete shot in the dark on whether it would work or not.

Now, Regen and Medica2 giving Blood Lily is a little bit better of an idea. We can work with that, potentially. But I disagree with the rest of this chunk. We did try to clear P5-8 like we did P1-4, yes. That is, Mit what we need to Mit, and heal what we need to heal, and then do damage when we can. Just so happens, there was a little bit more damage to heal this time. That didn't change 'how we tried to clear'. Also, we're not asking for 'more damage required', we're asking for 'the way we do our damage to not be solvable by a RuneScape autoclicker'. We can't increase damage required more, because week 1 clears ask the healers to go full-send on damage anyway. We're asking for things that break up the Glare spam with other buttons, because it can get hard to focus at times when I'm pressing 13 Glares in a row. Other classes can time when mechanics are going to happen, down to the GCD. They know 'ok the boss is going to jump in 3 seconds, because after this Vorpal is my Full Thrust, and he jumps right after that'. We don't get that kind of intuition, because the Glares blend together.

If they come out and outright say 'healing required is going to be much higher from now on' at FanFest, I'll say two things. One, 'I'll believe it when I see it', because of the amount of times people have said it in response to seeing how many new healing tools we keep getting each expansion. 'Oh Lilybell does 2000 potency of healing? Just wait, EX roulettes are gonna hit so hard you won't even have time to spell Holy, let alone cast it!'. And Two, 'Bring it on' cos I'm confident enough in my skill at the role to keep up. But I don't think others are. They'll fall and fail and wipe their parties, and what will they do? They won't improve, they won't practice. They'll loudly complain until it gets changed back.

The playerbase wasn't "whiplash'd into the realization that they can't keep up"; people were able to keep up, they just weren't expecting the paradigm shift and so were slow to react to it. The more damage model would produce the exact same result, and 'damage complexity' would likely drive off more Healers in the short term. In the long term, it would be made up for by the DPS players.

...granted, taxing the DPS players more (for once) might not be a bad thing...but we don't need complex Healer rotations (or complex rotations on ALL the Healers - the point I've noted many times before) for any of this.

Nah, we'd just have Stormblood 2. People who don't engage in highend content at all can ignore the extra buttons to their hearts content. SCHs don't have to put up all of their DOTs in the EX roulette, ASTs don't have to fish Balance, WHM don't have to... actually WHM had the least worry back then, just Aero 3 before the Holy spam. Again, I'm not asking for us to have 'more damage required', like an enrage going from demanding 6k healer DPS to 8k. I want to go from 6k (by spamming Broil and pressing Bio once per 30s) to 6k (by having 3 DOTs to juggle, and less Broil spam as a result). You don't like that, you don't have to do it. Unless you're in high end content, at the time gearing-wise where 'playing 100% correct' is necessary. In which case, the player has the skill to learn how to play around this extra complexity. If they can't, why would anyone trust them to handle mechanics correctly?

Well, we agree on this. I've even proposed a two (or three) pronged change. As I recall, you shoot it down every time I mention it. We agree that change needs to happen, but not what change.

Because the proposal is very visibly flawed, as you claim with mine.

Not to mention no amount of Healer complexity will stop you from "making opportunities" or "throwing rocks" anyway. As you say, they can't stop you, and the most complex rotation in the world wouldn't. So clearly, that can't be a solution to the problem.

Which is why they should embrace it, lean into it, and open up so many doors for new design paths, instead of shying away from it. For example, WHM throw rocks, WHM build new gauge. WHM hit 50 Gauge, can now use new damage-neutral healing tool. Wow, now WHM has a way to get healing from being efficient with damage, to tie in with it's way to get damage from being efficient with healing (Misery). People who don't do damage might complain that they're forced to do damage to get access to a healing tool, but they can just use Medica in it's place. If they don't want to use damage skills, they won't care about the fact Medica is a damage loss. Maybe that's the real issue. Insisting that 'healers shouldn't have to DPS' just closes so many design paths, it paints the design of the classes into a corner. It might well be the reason SGE is such a safe design compared to what it could have been.

Lastly, you posted some numbers you scraped up via Wayback Machine. We cannot use them as 'accurate data', yeh. I see the part where HW numbers were much higher than SB onward. But the '(the time Healers were most complex is also the time Healers were the smallest percentage of the population, meaning the time they were the least popular/leveled/played)', that's not quite accurate either. Since Cleric Stance-Dance was in the game in HW, and it was not in SB, it's HW, the part of the numbers where it's way HIGHER, is the 'most complex' time for healers. Now I'd argue the real reason the HW number is higher, is not actually because it's 'higher'. I think that's the baseline value, and everything since has been 'below average'. SB released two very anticipated, fan favorite jobs, SAM and RDM. These likely sucked away many healer and tank mains, and they never went back. By the time a new healer had come in with EW, the changes to healer damage complexity had already been implemented with SHB, and so I don't think it's a massive stretch to say that those changes had a dampening effect on the bump that SGE should have brought. We can see the numbers increased in 2022, but not enough to undo the massive dip caused when SB hit. But yeh, it's all speculation, and the numbers aren't exactly reliable for a number of reasons.

Census data is always going to be slightly scuffed, due to it using workarounds on how to collate the data. For example, that census would claim I'm a monk main. or a DRG main. I don't main either, but I won the savage weapons for both via greed rolls. I assume a fair amount of players would have had a similar experience occur with healer weapons, doubly so in something as farmable as an EX trial. Up until a couple of weeks ago, the 'EX weapon or better' would have also included relics too. How many of those 'healer mains' threw 1500 tomes at a WHM staff, I wonder?

[Recon1o6]

Yoshi said 'I don't get it, we gave you guys what you asked for, what do you actually want' because some people, who have no foresight or consideration for the longterm ramifications and consequences of such a change, asked for 'more healing required'. I've said before, I'd be fine with 'more healing required' as a change to the game. I have the skill to keep up. But massive swathes of the playerbase has been whiplash'd into the realization that they can't keep up, even with a bump as small as the one we got. Yoshi's issue is that either he doesn't realize there's multiple 'schools of thought' on what the best direction for healers is, or that he does realize that, and just followed the side that is loudest, not necessarily the one that is 'correct'. Now, I don't think there is a 'correct' in all of this. But there's definitely an 'incorrect', and we saw it this tier.

Hello, I have returned after quitting the game after 6.2, friend of mine paid my sub for a month since he hasn't finished shb story let alone ew and wanted a friend

Let me clarify: my question in the 6.1 live letter was part mistranslated and part ignored (it was the highest upvoted question across both english and japanese)
Yoshida only focused on the fact tanks didn't need healers anymore. He completely ignored the part about asking for more dps options.

Next time there's a LL q&a, I'm going to attempt again on more dps actions.

The good news is that its getting healer attention on the dev team. Yoshida was asked again recently by two jpn players and both said they liked the increased healing requirements. Sadly neither of them mentioned anything about ast cards and dps buttons


Edit: the current situation is, yoshida knows that a lot of Ast's left because of the cards and healer dps removal (see shb launch interviews)
He genuinely didn't think healing is so easy (Eden interview and EW q&as)
On some level he knows there's widespread dissatisfaction in the role (lowest player count and falling. Feedback he's received states players like the increased healings contradicting his thinking that its too hard)

If one was to be charitable, then he's just not connecting the dots. If one is not, then he's being stubborn or ignorant about the actual causes of healer shortages

[ForsakenRoe]

Hello, I have returned after quitting the game after 6.2, friend of mine paid my sub for a month since he hasn't finished shb story let alone ew and wanted a friend

Thank you for your attempt to get Yoshi-P to explain what they're planning to do for healer role. At least you got him to give us a new meme (go play ultimate). Hope you can wrangle an answer out of him next time!