Healer Survey:

[Sebazy]

It makes sense, but only from the perspective of their financing department.

Right now the bulk of the game is exceptionally newbie and casual friendly for healers. Someone completely new to MMOs can come in and competently keep people alive through even Extreme content pretty much from the moment they can do the mechanics or follow the donut. This fits in with Shadowbringer's approach of 'we've got enough new players coming in that we don't need to care about long term retention at the top end'.

The other side of the coin is that to actually 'fix' high end play without crushing the approachability of healing is likely to be a pretty serious task at this point and it only gets worse as time goes on. FFXIV's job design team is tiny and has remained largely consistent from ARR despite how much the game has grown. Thus the move to homogenisation to make balancing more feasible at the expense of diversity. Turning this around would need significant hiring and time, two things that CBU3 have been pretty unwilling to commit to.

I made a thread examining FFXIV's job design team over the years here:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

[ForsakenRoe]

The other side of the coin is that to actually 'fix' high end play without crushing the approachability of healing is likely to be a pretty serious task at this point and it only gets worse as time goes on. FFXIV's job design team is tiny and has remained largely consistent from ARR despite how much the game has grown. Thus the move to homogenisation to make balancing more feasible at the expense of diversity. Turning this around would need significant hiring and time, two things that CBU3 have been pretty unwilling to commit to.

Part of me has wondered for a while: what if SE of America was the team in charge of FFXIV development, how different would the game's 'feel' be, would it be more or less similar to certain other MMOs, etc. It'd undoubtedly be easier for them to solve their main issue with hiring new devs (that they have to be competent at programming games AND be fluent in japanese), because the second condition wouldn't be a factor. Though I'm not sure if SE of America actually makes games at all, or if they just do localization, or what