Has anyone quit healing?

[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?