The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.

[Nizzi]

You can go on YouTube right now and find a thousand videos of healers in casual content back in ARR, HW or even Stormblood ignoring their "extra" DPS buttons. In fact, a lot of them would just stand around doing literally nothing at all when they weren't using GCD heals like Physick, Cure, Adlo, etc and content was cleared just fine. We can go back to how the game was before and the world won't end, nor will the vast amount of healers be pissed off.

The large majority of people who play the game will never play any job optimally in casual content, and that's OK. There's a reason the casual content is designed for all levels of skill in mind. Changing job design to accommodate these people does nothing but hurt the longevity, replayability and the desire to improve as a player. Unfortunately for SE, there's no amount of healing difficulty increases they can do that will make Glare/Broil spamming fun... so the easiest conclusion is to make the DPS kits have a bit more depth. The biggest failing of the healer role is that all 4 healers play like this and having no escape for anyone who doesn't find it fun.

[ForsakenRoe]

Percentage of voters who want to see more healing actions (as of 4.22.2023):
WHM - 7.7%
SCH - 9.1%
AST - 4.4%
SGE - 8.9%

Percentage of voters who want to see more attack actions (as of 4.22.2023):
WHM - 83.2%
SCH - 84.8%
AST - 66.5%
SGE - 86.3%

Damn, I could see there was 'a fairly large amount' based on eyeballing it but I didn't bother finding the actual percentage. Pretty irrefutable, I'd say

"As we can see from these numbers, what people want isn't actually more attacking actions. See, when they say 'more attacking actions' what they're clearly referring to is 'attacking the lack of HP the allies have'!" /s

It is interesting but unsurprising to me that AST has a higher focus on 'offensive support' than direct attack actions, people evidently value it's identity as the 'buff your allies damage' healer. Now, if only SE could make that design actually feel good to play in current year (and preferably in a way that doesn't cause me RSI)

[ty_taurus]

Damn, I could see there was 'a fairly large amount' based on eyeballing it but I didn't bother finding the actual percentage. Pretty irrefutable, I'd say

"As we can see from these numbers, what people want isn't actually more attacking actions. See, when they say 'more attacking actions' what they're clearly referring to is 'attacking the lack of HP the allies have'!" /s

It is interesting but unsurprising to me that AST has a higher focus on 'offensive support' than direct attack actions, people evidently value it's identity as the 'buff your allies damage' healer. Now, if only SE could make that design actually feel good to play in current year (and preferably in a way that doesn't cause me RSI)

If you go back to the form and click "see previous results" you can scroll down to the bottom and see percentages as well as each individual "other" form filled out (kinda).

[Semirhage]

This isn't saying as much as you think it is. Many of those points - as I noted before - are things even Healer mains disagree on. As I said before, part of the problem is Healers don't even agree AMONGST OURSELVES what our issues are and the solutions to them. The Devs aren't ignoring us, they just legitimately don't have a solution that will satisfy a lot of people. All the solutions from the pro-DPS or pro-complexity faction would piss off a lot of Healer players, and possibly a majority (given how casual the overall playerbase is), and the Devs likely know this. But on the other side of the scale, those are also the people who do most of the higher end content, which they also don't want to piss off and lose Healer players in that content.

The OP of that thread has 240 upvotes, which is a massive outlier on these boards. Japanese forums tend to make fewer posts and silently upvote the ones they agree with; it stands to reason that Japanese devs would be more impressed by a heavily liked post than a lot of chatter. I was refuting the idea that having a well-explained post with a ton of likes doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. Practically nothing in that post reflects the direction the role has taken. The forums admittedly are only a portion of the playerbase, but it's kind of pointless to talk about the effect the non-forums have on the game when the subject is...how much influence the forums have on the game.

Even when there's a glaring counterexample, it's still "no, no. Hyperbole! Not useful! Keep WHM boring, it's the perfect solution! Everyone agrees!"

[Renathras]

The biggest failing of the healer role is that all 4 healers play like this and having no escape for anyone who doesn't find it fun.

I disagree with most of your post but 100% agree with this statement; it's the crux of my "4 Healers" argument that we HAVE four of them, so they should all play differently rather than have functionally identical gameplay just with different visual effects.

Everyone is pissed about the current state of the game for different reasons

Abso-flute-in'-lutley. 100% agreed.

There are a lot of problems with the game currently. I personally think EW has been the worst expansion, bar none. The other expansions had their issues to be sure, but job engagement was not one of them.

Eh, I don't agree with this, though. SB is still arguably the worst expansion in quite a few ways (if we're ignoring 1.0 ever existed). EW has issues, but then it's also got a lot of things going for it. Melee are largely happy with things in EW, most people who AREN'T on the forums loved the story, as noted in the past, WHM is the best it's ever been (or, at worst, best it's been since HW), etc.

The problem EW has is that its problem is the most difficult to ignore. A lacking story can kind of mute excitement about the game, but the combat system being disappointing for a majority of roles and many players is something you're hit with every time you zone into an instance.

It's also REALLY showing why stuff like Eureka/Bozja are good for the game in that not having them, coupled with the 2 week longer patch cycles, is really creating a "content drought" feeling among players that we haven't really felt before in FFXIV, even during the pandemic.

This is a fallacy because any DPS options they had could be entirely ignored by the casual playerbase just like the ignore anything else remotely complicated. The excuse that adding DPS buttons would prompt people to demand healers press them is just that, an excuse. People demand healers DPS and you don't see the dev team doing anything to prevent that despite them repeatedly whinging about it being "optional" and "not expected". Which is a blatant lie when several Savage fights have released that are mathematically impossible to clear without healer DPS. Furthermore, healers are the least played role in the game. The bar is so damn low they couldn't possibly screw it up. It's absurd to think they can't do better than spam your nuke 150+ times.

If that is the case, then hire new job designers with some creativity because who you have working on healers clearly lost theirs.

It's not an excuse, it's literally history. I lived through the Cleric Stance era, thank you very much, and would rather NOT repeat it a second time. If that hadn't happened then, I wouldn't be worried about it happening now.

Moreover, higher end content (Extremes/Savages) are played by far more of the playerbase now than they were then, so that isn't an option. It's also not objectively clear Healers are "the least played role". We don't have good metrics for that, but typically in MMOs, Tanks poll as being played less than Healers. I believe this was true as recently as ShB, but I'd have to go digging to verify that. The anecdotal evidence we have is AIN, which is almost always Tank across a lot of the categories, or "which role fills last in PF", which is a horribly un-useful metric because it depends on things like Datacenter and even time of day.

I don't entirely disagree on the last bit, though. Apparently, there aren't any dedicated Healer Job designers. They could really do with a couple. Maybe bring in the PvP guys for some ideas.

When I hear "healers disagree, there are NO solutions that would work" I get this image of chicken little in my head- 'the sky is falling !!! the sky is falling!!".

I just find that unrealistic. It's just the normal course of business to have to deal with multiple and sometime diverging opinions and /or priorities for features and no matter what you do, you will not make everyone happy. What you try to do is think about a design that achieves some goals, you communicate them, and listen to whomever your target segment(s) is/are - in this case healers but also anyone else affected by those changes - likely DPS and tanks. If your design gets positive feedback - great- if not- you may well need to adjust.

This is how I would hope the dev team works, and I may be wildly unrealistic.

That's the thing: It does. You aren't part of the target segment.

And I don't mean this to be snippy or mean. It's pretty clear by now the Devs target segment for Healers are lower-midcore players who do some hard content like Extremes and dip a toe in Savages or are kind of dragged into/through them by friends, and players who genuinely want to help out but do not enjoy DPSing, but will do some of it if it isn't onerous.

That seems to be their target audience for Healer design. Not casuals, but casual raiders or low-midcore raiders. This also, incidentally, is their target audience for other changes, like the 2 min meta (even if it's actually not good for low-midcore raiders, either and most low-midcore raiders dislike it). A lot of the game changes in ShB and really into EW seem to be targeted at low-midcore raiders, not casuals nor hardcores. And for Healers, specifically, for those who enjoy healing buttons and don't enjoy DPS buttons and want minimal engagement with said buttons they do have.

Note I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing. Just that it is a thing, and is what's going on.

The OP of that thread has 240 upvotes, which is a massive outlier on these boards.

Ah, yes.

In a game of something like 2,000,000+ players, at least 400,000 of which are Healers, 240 have spoken. CLEARLY the majority. /sarcasm

My point is, they could very well be reading it, onboarding it, realizing via their other metrics that it is a minority opinion, and not implementing it across the board. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it, it means that it's only one input they use to decide the direction of the game.

[AnotherPerson]

Ah, yes.

In a game of something like 2,000,000+ players, at least 400,000 of which are Healers, 240 have spoken. CLEARLY the majority. /sarcasm

My point is, they could very well be reading it, onboarding it, realizing via their other metrics that it is a minority opinion, and not implementing it across the board. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it, it means that it's only one input they use to decide the direction of the game.

Ah yes, in a forum where the company highly recommends their players come to gather and give feedback, and where the opinion is thus duly rejected if there isn't over 200,000 players giving their opinion because it is not the majority opinion even though there are usually not that many people visiting the forums at any given moment.

Why do we even have the forums at this rate if that's the argument you want to make? I guess that's why people became trolls in the General Discussion threads.

[Sebazy]

My point is, they could very well be reading it, onboarding it, realizing via their other metrics that it is a minority opinion, and not implementing it across the board. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it, it means that it's only one input they use to decide the direction of the game.

And yet, if your opinion is 'the mainstream', why do so few seem to agree with it?

Even the remove rescue threads get more support than you do.

Why is that?

[ForteNightshade]

It's not an excuse, it's literally history. I lived through the Cleric Stance era, thank you very much, and would rather NOT repeat it a second time. If that hadn't happened then, I wouldn't be worried about it happening now.

Moreover, higher end content (Extremes/Savages) are played by far more of the playerbase now than they were then, so that isn't an option. It's also not objectively clear Healers are "the least played role". We don't have good metrics for that, but typically in MMOs, Tanks poll as being played less than Healers. I believe this was true as recently as ShB, but I'd have to go digging to verify that. The anecdotal evidence we have is AIN, which is almost always Tank across a lot of the categories, or "which role fills last in PF", which is a horribly un-useful metric because it depends on things like Datacenter and even time of day.

I don't entirely disagree on the last bit, though. Apparently, there aren't any dedicated Healer Job designers. They could really do with a couple. Maybe bring in the PvP guys for some ideas.

You do realize... casual players did precisely as I described when Cleric Stance existed, yes? They completely ignored it. In fact, healer DPS wasn't even demanded back in the days of Heavensward unless you were attempting Savage. Ironically, it's both Gordias and Midas which contributed to the increased necessity of healer DPS. When the difficulty lowered from Creator onward, players quickly discovered how little healing was actually necessary. It's by the devs own design DPS became both the standard and expectation even if it were wholly unintentional on their part.

Moving forward with the history you're disregarding is Stormblood saw Cleric Stance reduced to a 5% damage button. There was no longer any clunky stance dancing or accidentally using oGCDs with only 10% efficiency. Scholar and Astro were both at the absolute height of their popularity, especially the latter. Meanwhile, White Mage did languish is what may have been the worst job iteration we've ever seen with the comically poor Lilies. Bit ironic that the healing aspect of the supposed dedicated "pure healer" is what they screwed up and not the DPS aspects of Scholar and Astro, which were highly favored. To emphasise this point, Alphascape remains the only tier in this game's history where Astro actually surpassed White Mage in Savage usage. Granted, it was already creeping up behind it during late Sigma and throughout UwU.

AIN is always tank due to how the system prioritize roles in order. This was brought up on the discussion reddit after digging around with third party tools. It begins with tanks and will only switch to healers if tanks are no longer in need even if healer have less numbers. Which is why you'll see Tank in need yet get insta-queues with healers. Furthermore, tank's low popularity can be attributed to multiple factors like them being glorified DPS nowadays who take less damage.

Ah, yes.

In a game of something like 2,000,000+ players, at least 400,000 of which are Healers, 240 have spoken. CLEARLY the majority. /sarcasm

My point is, they could very well be reading it, onboarding it, realizing via their other metrics that it is a minority opinion, and not implementing it across the board. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it, it means that it's only one input they use to decide the direction of the game.

This called statistical averaging. You only need enough of a sample size to make an assessment on the probability of a majority opinion. Surveys around the world, for example, aren't pulling hundreds of thousands or millions of people by a few fraction to get a generalized average.

Sticking to FFXIV itself. We know there are significantly more than 8,299 people playing Bard yet that number is still high enough to assert Bard is extremely unpopular at the Savage level. Especially when compared to previous iterations, specifically Stormblood, where that number was more than double despite a much lower overall playerbase.

In the case of online opinions, if the overall sentiment remains vastly one-sided, it suggests mass indifference at best or those opinions are, indeed, widespread even amongst the average playerbase. We've seen this play out with content like Lords of Vermillion, Diadem, Blue Mage, Eureka (specifically, Pagos) and even in job design itself. Whenever the online portion of the community, be it here, reddit, discord or whatever, voiced near universal negativity towards a piece of content, the devs usually make adjustments or abandon it altogether. Of course, there are exceptions like the aforementioned Lilies but they eventually relented.

[Semirhage]

Ah, yes.

In a game of something like 2,000,000+ players, at least 400,000 of which are Healers, 240 have spoken. CLEARLY the majority. /sarcasm

My point is, they could very well be reading it, onboarding it, realizing via their other metrics that it is a minority opinion, and not implementing it across the board. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it, it means that it's only one input they use to decide the direction of the game.

Oh I get it. Statistics are irrelevant with a sample size too small if they disagree with you, but if you put out a survey and the results agree with you, it's representative. You'll note that I quite clearly said this thread was representative OF THE FORUMS, which is a small portion of the population. This is normal Renathras, nothing to see here.

[ForsakenRoe]

Ah, yes.

In a game of something like 2,000,000+ players, at least 400,000 of which are Healers, 240 have spoken. CLEARLY the majority. /sarcasm

My point is, they could very well be reading it, onboarding it, realizing via their other metrics that it is a minority opinion, and not implementing it across the board. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it, it means that it's only one input they use to decide the direction of the game.

It's like the old saying goes,

there are two kinds of people in this world, those who can extrapolate a conclusion from incomplete data