Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
So everyone was badmouthing everyone, and new players looking at the whole mess stopped deciding to play Healer and went DPS instead, making ques get the worst they've ever been (people will tell you ShB is when Healer was the most in need, but that's not actually true; it WAS highly in need, but it wasn't as bad as it was in the Cleric era)
Say what? Since when?

It took a tank to get a guaranteed insta queue pop for most of ARR through HW. As bad as it was initially, AST was still mighty in leveling dungeons (as long as you didn't want to AoE dps) and was very popular right up until it hit a wall with Gordias Savage. People will tell you ShB was when healers were in the shortest supply because yeah, that's when healers were at an all time low. The casuals still had no new healer to play and the hardcores were burning out left right and centre.

Before you dismiss this as subjective because I wrote it, here's a couple of old posts from Reddit from around that era:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...lers_or_tanks/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._ques_usually/

And a few from the official forums here:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Roulette-Bonus

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...er-then-healer.

Meanwhile if you just do an open search for Reddit Healer Queues, there's an absolute tidal wave of comments mentioning around late 2019 onwards aka Shadowbringers.

You are at least correct about the whole warfare over healer DPS during that era though. That was pretty messy!