Ask Naoki Yoshida Your Questions for the PAX East 2023 Panel

[ty_taurus]

Throughout Endwalker, the healer role continues to receive heavy criticism by many dedicated healer players who are dissatisfied with all of the healers. More and more healer players are leaving the role as a result of the direction of healer design since the beginning of Shadowbringers. These issues can be best summarized into two main issues:

1. There isn't enough damage to warrant the vast selection of potent healing actions each healer has access to in normal, non-savage content. There are many really cool or interesting healing abilities that often are ignored in normal content because they're too excessive for the content.
2. Healers are not fun to play when no one needs healing, which ends up being most of the time. Even in savage content, once a fight is learned, a skilled healer often needs to heal less as the party makes less mistakes and they learn to manage their cooldowns better. The reward for this is more time to spend on unfun DPS.

My Question:

What many of us want is for healers to always be fun, not just fun in savage or ultimate by expanding on DPS tools and/or other supportive tools that are always engaging regardless of whether or not the party needs healing. Additionally, since FFXIV is becoming more and more friendly toward a single-player experience, ensuring the healers promote a fun gameplay experience for solo players is also very important. Are there any plans to address these concerns in the upcoming expansion?

[ty_taurus]

Many healer players continue to be unhappy with the healer role, and more healers have been switching to tank or DPS as a result. This is because of two main issues:

1. Healers don't heal enough in most content. Our abilities are way too powerful most of the time, and even in savage content, as the fight is learned, good healers reduce how often they need to heal.
2. Healers are not fun to play when no one needs healing. Healing should still be fun in solo content and normal content like dungeons, but every healer has boring DPS gameplay, even Sage.

My Question:

Are there any plans to address these problems in the next expansion? When can we expect healers to get more things to do outside of healing?