Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

Oh 100% it's because of the fight design. The issue with their flavor of fights is it focuses on healers doing DPS than healing. When looking at it from an outside perspective, it'd be a nightmare to redesign old & current fights to make healers require more healing. It's much easier to give healers more oGCD heals so they can focus on making that DPS check.

It's just unfortunate that it's setup that way and I'd really love to see an attempt at making heal checks more active. But at the same time I'm not holding my breath.

I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it.

...why would they have to redesign old fights?

ARR fights all required more consistent healing (bosses could even crit randomly), and it was largely GCD healing since the only oGCD heals in the game were Benediction, Lustrate, and...Embrace/Whispering Dawn?

They changed the fight design over the course of HW to the point that SB was the modern design we have now, but they didn't go back and change the ARR fights. They still exist as they have. Most dungeons still are the same (the redesigns are almost exclusively a few layouts from the 1.0 dungeons like Thousand Maws, and adding the Trust system, which they already did with Squadrons they just wanted better AI and less "brute force" just making the NPCs absolute units so they could face tank their way through...)

That is, they didn't redesign old and current fights when they moved from the "more healing" to the current "less healing, mostly done with oGCDs" model. Why would they need to backdate changes going back?

Now, I would say it's definitely an expansion-level change. You wouldn't want to change mid-tier or part-way through a given expansion since the kits and the fights would be at odds with current content. But when going to 7.0, 8.0, X.0, that's when you'd make the change, largely like they did with 4.0 and, really, 5.0.

I think the issue is there are always Healer shortages, which is what prompted the "dumbing down" in the first place. A lot of Healer players don't like DPS gameplay and don't want to engage with it anymore than they have to, while others prefer the DPS gameplay and like being a balance/plate juggling/Support-Healer hybrid. If the game HAD a proper Support role, that might make things better by covering more bases (and some DPS players like Support roles as well, they just don't like Healer). In most of the polling for Pantheon of the playerbase - granted, a biased sample, but I think it's still somewhat instructive - on average, around 20% of the players want to be Tanks, around 20% Healers, around 30% Support, and around 30% DPS. But most games don't have a Support role, so Support players are shoehorned into playing either Tanks, Healers, or whatever DPS have Support abilities like RDM or DNC.

But as it is in FFXIV, if they lean towards either camp, they alienate the other and make the Healer shortage worse. So they're kind of stuck.

See how weird this sounds when it's flipped?

Not weird at all if your argument is "the spice is just a thing on the side and shouldn't influence people's ability to play as they want and clear content". If that's not your argument...then you're misusing the metric being discussed. That's my problem with your argument, I think. On the one hand, you say you just want the change so people can enjoy the role more and don't want to take away from people that enjoy it as it is today. But your prescription would take away access to content from them (if they play as they do today), and you don't have a problem with that, while pretending that you aren't trying to do it. That is, you're pitching your argument as "this won't affect people who don't want to up their game", but then you say "...and those people who won't up their game can't clear the content they can right now". Well, that's affecting them, so...

If this game were to have 'specs' I'd do a lot more with it than just 'different rotation for the same job', I'd use it for like, giving a different role to each job.

Maybe, but honestly I don't even think that's needed. Considering players can level all Jobs, and many Final Fantasy Jobs don't work that way. For example, Black Mage tanks...aren't a thing. Though Red Mage healers...sometimes are. A lot of that just comes down to design. Like FF11's Job/SubJob system allowed for some crazy stuff. NIN and DNC Tanks, SMN and RDM Healers, etc. Honestly, it's a game I really should get into sometime, but...maybe if they ever make a combination 11/14 sub and/or 11 update...

So, rather than the 'meats' (healers) being served in a sauce, maybe it's better to explain my mental image as like, serving the customer their 'meat' (in this example, wings) and a selection of sauces of varying spice levels.

lol, honestly? I think we should drop the meat/sauce/dish metaphor. We're all using it in different ways, so it isn't really that useful for trying to make sense of things. XD

So I don't understand why I'm the one who's being limiting in this situation.

Really and truly?

Hm...let me put it this way:

Suppose we went to play WoW and we had two designs presented to us. In one design, you're being told that 2 classes in the game play like you enjoy. You might not like the aesthetics, but you can play the game in a way you find fun enough. Maybe you don't like edgy, but Death Knight and Demon Hunter are the two that play the way you want. The other design, though, has no class at all that plays the way you want. Aesthetic or no, you literally have no place in the game and people tell you to quit because you're not welcome and that what you want to play is some other game.

Which of those is more limiting to you?

.

BTW: That's me, I don't like edgy. But in that case, I'd pick the one I like best of the two and roll with it.

It's like now, if the only Healer that got to keep a decent (and by decent, I mean current) system was AST (and they actually fixed the stupid card hyperweaving to lower it to present WHM difficulty and APM overall), I'd swap to it. A bit grudgingly, since it is literally the one I like least in terms of both aesthetics and how it functions, but I'd go with it if it played like WHM does today (so no oGCD cards, things like Earthly Star changed to Assize, etc etc). /shrug

Of course, given that many people LIKE those things about AST, that would just upset far more people than leaving WHM and/or SGE alone as they are today would, since in those cases, the people are used to the present playstyles.