The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.

[Aravell]

Or perhaps BLM is rated that highly because it has the design philosophy that everyone wants for their own main job?

- Easy to understand and execute at the basic level (standard rotation)
- Has a high ceiling for optimisation (transpose lines)
- Forgiving enough to not have their entire rotation crumble on death or when they don't get full uptime for 2 minutes
- Has ways to overcome their weakness
- Rewards job and fight knowledge

[Sebazy]

HARDcore were. Midcore wasn't. PUG wasn't. Even the lighter end of the hardcore weren't (mostly due to burnout). Recruiting was difficult, getting people to even try Savage once the horror stories came out was difficult. Raid groups disbanded and had to merge, etc. It was pretty bad at the time for much of the raiding community and did almost break the game a second time. Healers were hard to come by. Tanks were near impossible to come by. And several Jobs weren't just undertuned but were borderline non-viable.

Yes, the ultra 1% was flourishing, but no one else was.

Dude...

I was literally there progging and clearing A3S/A4S with a midcore group within a fairly casual FC at the time.

We were 1 of 2 or 3 teams within the FC, I'm fairly sure all managed to clear A4S, I'm also fairly sure my team was the last.

Look at the the changes in membership between my group's first A3S and A4S clears.... We replaced 3 people from memory and I don't remember us ever having trouble doing so. Recruiting was no better or worse than it is now, the challenge was finding people that were good and reliable enough.

Again. I was literally there in the middle of it and have the logs to prove it, you don't even have an A1S clear listed, nor did you get the A4S achievement until last year, so I can only assume that you're going off conjecture and after the fact here say with no actual first hand experience to speak of. Don't you make a big deal trying to debunk people in other threads about this exact thing? The lighter end of hardcores were absolutely not burning out en mass, that's absolute BS. The lighter end of midcore hit a wall for sure. But not Hardcore. It was the pugs and casuals that gave up with it.

Trying to claim the ultra 1% were the only people dealing with it is just plain wrong. I'm not even close to that, neither was my group

[Irenia]

static classifications

Okay, I think I get you now, because when you said you were in a casual to midcore static and you were replacing people, I was confused, because replacing people is a midcore/hardcore move. But if your FC was casual with a more intense raid static, then yeah, it's cool.

These terms are all vague anyway, maybe you do believe a casual-midcore group replaces people, but when I think casual, I think groups like mine, where it's a coin flip whether or not we clear a tier on content because enjoying the content is more important than progressing it. In my mind, if you're kicking someone due to performance, you aren't casual.

The "1%", though, I see as more of a representation rather than an actual percent. The hardcore aspirants that actually have the skills to back up their ambitions are the "1%". I have no idea if the percentage is higher or lower, but it is clear that these people are/were a minority of a minority, especially back In HW when we, the player base as a whole, weren't as skilled at the game as we are now.

[ForsakenRoe]

Who cares if the only people voting on it are black mage mains? It’s not like every job has to be for everyone. That’s exactly what the complainant about homogenisation is.

I filled out the healer sections because I play healers. I did not fill out the Caster/Tank/Melee/Ranged, because I do not play those. Is it 'fair' for me, someone who DESPISES BLM gameplay, hate it with a passion, to fill out the BLM form, say 'its bad and trash completely start over' when others who main the class, enjoy the class for what it is? No, I don't think it is fair. I think that it's 'okay' to fill out the forms for your role, and if you really want, roles you previously mained (so as to indicate why you quit them).

Imagine if enough people who hate BLM gameplay because 'its too hard' or whatever cried about it so hard, that SE did a SMN on it, and made it super unrecognizable to the devoted mains of the job. Maybe that's ok in Ren's world but I think it'd be awful for everyone (mostly because the people who wanted it 'to be changed' would likely try it for a bit, then swap back to something else anyway, just look at healer churn)

1) Cleric Stance almost tore the community apart, and Gordias/Midas almost ended the game a second time by destroying the raiding community. Yeah, casuals weren't using Cleric. And they were bitched at endlessly over it. Meanwhile, hardcores that used Cleric at a bad time and got their parties killed in casual content (which did happen) were also excoriated over it. HW was arguably the worst time in the game to be a Healer other than being a WHM in SB.
.

I know I'm just one idiot in a sea of players, but I levelled every class to 60 in HW. NOT A SINGLE TIME, whether it was me or a rando as the healer, did I see any mention that 'you're not using cleric stance, fix it', or anything to that effect. I don't know where you're getting this picture that everyone was demanding full 100% sweaty CLEAR COMMS gameplay in the EX roulettes, but it sure as hell didn't happen to me. I think maybe your server is just toxic as hell? Or maybe it's an NA thing.

Saw a few 'you forgot to use Protect' instances though, or 'you forgot tank stance' because 'haha you level synced, time to clear all your buffs'

[WaxSw]

And that's just a start, as it doesn't solve the other issues such as selection bias (the people who frequent forums vs the community at large) and so on.

As to the polls, they were posted here. And I think cross posted on Reddit, unless Ty posted them in other places. Neither are likely representative of the game's playerbase overall. And even with such a negative bias, Healers still got an "average" rating of around 5. Getting a resounding "average" from a hostile demographic isn't "pretty damning".

I love how someone mentioned mental gymnastics a few posts ago and here's the prime example.

1st- You do not have solid data that supports your hypothesis that the population that answered is biased because not only people from the forum answered the poll and you lack information about the percentage of population that come from other sources or even if the opinion of the forum is that different from the majority.

2nd- The average score is 6.51, healers got 4.85 they are WAY below average, so much in fact that the difference between healers (5th) and the 4th spot is 2.24 times bigger than the difference between the 4th spot and the 1st

3rd- The poll goes from 1 to 10 so if anything to get to the middle point a role would need a 5.5, healers do not even reach that, they fail.

4th- The negative bias should happen for every job however healers stand out for having 4 out of the 5 lowest rated jobs in the game, that is an indication that even if that bias existed there is something really wrong in the healer design that increase its negative impact much further than any other role in the game

BLM

Playerbase=/=quality or enjoyment. BLM has a niche, plays strongly into it, its tools are rarely redundant, rewards the players for job knowledge and knows that not every job has to be for everyone, thats why it gets so many good results because people who like BLM REALLY like it and its design is so on point that even people that know the job is not for them can appreciate how well those tools are crafted.

Indeed, the SMN/BLM disconnect in the poll vs what all I THINK about the community at large is pretty stark

FTFY

[ForsakenRoe]

Consider, BLU is arguably THE most divisive topic. While SMN and it's rework, or PLD and it's rework more recently, are also 'divisive', BLU is a job that cannot even enter the current endgame content, nor some of the older stuff like ultimates, Eureka, Bozja, Deep Dungeons. And still, BLU beats every healer's average. If THAT can beat healers, by two whole points of 'average rating-ness', that says a lot about healers.

Ironically, I've seen a fair few people across these forums, on reddit, etc. making mention of how fun BLU is as a healer. And consider what HealBLU actually is: very few 'healing skills' (pom cure, exuviation, gobskin, maybe strotram, angelsnack, a res with a CD), and like 16+ 'damage and support' actions like Offguard or Peculiar Light, your actual damage skill, Song of Torment, Bristle and Whistle for buffing the next GCD (wow Kaiten much?), the Primal actions for your 2min burst, access to other utilities of varying importance like a blind, bind, heavy, stun, sleep, slow, silence, all of which are usually distributed amongst the whole team, defensives that have opportunity costs (diamondback makes you unable to move or attack for 10s and costs 30% of your entire MP), a super strong heal skill that has an opportunity cost (of 15% of your MP, and if you're low HP it becomes worse), combination skills that work together to become greater than the sum of their parts (Tingle > Whistle > Triple Trident is worth more than 3x any 220p spam skill, Bristle > Matra Magic is more than 2x the spam skill, etc)

And ironically, it fulfills the 'make healing be GCD' parameter some are asking for. It just has way less healing skills in total, so the whole 'rescale the OGCD potencys now that they are GCD' step can be skipped. That's good for dev time! Damn the more I think on it, the more it feels like the class is situated pretty close to 'what healer should look like' that's crazy

[Sebazy]

Okay, I think I get you now, because when you said you were in a casual to midcore static and you were replacing people, I was confused, because replacing people is a midcore/hardcore move. But if your FC was casual with a more intense raid static, then yeah, it's cool.

In ARR and early Gordias I raided for Solitude, Exordium and Angered. You were expected to prepare, you were expected to bring pots, we raided 3 to 4 days a week at a minimum and the FC decided teams, not the groups themselves. If someone was unable to play for a week, someone else would be drafted in immediately. These were what I would define as hardcore teams even before speed runs were popular.

After I stood down from Angered part way through Gordias, I joined a team in a much more casual FC called DiZ. There was no trial to join the FC, and unlike my previous hardcore FCs, the groups handled their affairs themselves and weren't required to keep to members within the FC. We raided 2 to 3 days a week for maybe a lockout and a half. We didn't spend out of raid hours optimising and planning things and pots weren't enforced. As for our replacements, we had more people simply outgrow the group and move on to more hardcore teams than we ever kicked over under performing.

This is me helping the spiritual successor to that group in Eden Savage, do we really look hardcore to you?

[Renathras]

...

The counter post with...32 likes?

The second one doesn't seem to have any strong counters, just people saying "I don't care" or "I don't go to them".

The third one is people calling out (the same guy as the first one?) for using Steam numbers as if they're the whole game. Something that's objectively wrong, not a matter of opinion, and the counter post has 12 more likes. But again, this is a matter of factual reporting, not a matter of opinion, so doesn't quite work the same way. Moreover, posts 3 and 4 just kind of go back and forth. It seems more like two factions warring with each other and liking their side's post, but then everyone lost interest after that. XD

...

7 vs 25 6 years ago? I'm not sure that says "this thing can happen now".

Collectively, these examples don't really give a strong indication of this happening much. In fact, it's not even clear they'd be great examples of this happening at all.

But it's not a hill worth dying on. General Discussion isn't the Healer subforum. Though I'm kind of curious about something now...going to test it out.

The forums are not exclusively a place people seek out to complain.

Agreed. I came here to discuss things with people about a game I love before I got dragged into this morass of semi-defending it and being disparaged for doing so all the time.

However, that doesn't negate that the people who come here and have THESE discussions largely are doing so BECAUSE they don't like the way things are and want a change. The motive is irrelevant - I'm not saying you folks don't care or the like - I'm saying it taints the results of polling, as you your self noted before. Yes, lurkers are a thing, but it doesn't seem nay engage with the posts here.

Who cares if the only people voting on it are black mage mains? It’s not like every job has to be for everyone. That’s exactly what the complainant about homogenisation is.

That's...literally my point.

Well, one of them, anyway.

Or perhaps BLM is rated that highly because it has the design philosophy that everyone wants for their own main job?

Doubtful, since not everyone likes all those things. It's rated highly because the kind of people who DO want those things play BLM and are the only people who seemed to have participated in the BLM survey. People who didn't like BLM seem not to have been many of the respondents. They simply don't like it, so they don't play it, so they didn't respond to its section.

Dude...

I was literally there progging and clearing A3S/A4S with a midcore group within a fairly casual FC at the time.

I don't think casual means what you think it means. Other people also doing the content at the time have weighed in on it, and the general position seems to be that it did, in fact, nearly kill the raiding community, if not the game. "We replaced 3 people"; that's kind of the point. Statics and raid teams WERE SHUTTING DOWN. You didn't have trouble replacing people because THEIR static had broken and they were looking for a home. And, as you note, "the challenge was finding people that were good...enough", because a lot WEREN'T clearing the content.

"It was the pugs and casuals that gave up with it" - but you just said you were "fairly casual". So did casuals give up, or were you not really casual?

Okay, I think I get you now, because when you said you were in a casual to midcore static and you were replacing people, I was confused, because replacing people is a midcore/hardcore move. But if your FC was casual with a more intense raid static, then yeah, it's cool.

These terms are all vague anyway, maybe you do believe a casual-midcore group replaces people, but when I think casual, I think groups like mine, where it's a coin flip whether or not we clear a tier on content because enjoying the content is more important than progressing it. In my mind, if you're kicking someone due to performance, you aren't casual.

The "1%", though, I see as more of a representation rather than an actual percent. The hardcore aspirants that actually have the skills to back up their ambitions are the "1%". I have no idea if the percentage is higher or lower, but it is clear that these people are/were a minority of a minority, especially back In HW when we, the player base as a whole, weren't as skilled at the game as we are now.

This.

NOT A SINGLE TIME

I saw it as a DPS, a Tank, and sometimes a Healer. AS A TANK I once stopped a run briefly to tell off a DPS that was being an absolute dick to the Healer who wasn't using Cleric. We continued on and the DPS tried to pull a dick move drop as I started a pull, but we managed it, got another DPS, then went through the rest of the encounter (I also taught the Healer and both DPSers, since one was a SMN and the other a BRD about how DoTs worked and how they could use them more effectively and some other stuff; got 3 comms for that run, still remember it). YES, this DID happen. And it happened fairly frequently.

It happened enough that Square removed Cleric Stance. If it wasn't happening, they wouldn't have removed it. Clearly your experience was the outlier.

I love how someone mentioned mental gymnastics a few posts ago and here's not an example, but I'm going to say it is because I lack any good faith.

FTFY

ONE thing I will comment on, though:

BLM - yup, has a niche and plays to it. The people who love it, love it, and the people who hate it, don't touch it and seem to not respond to the poll on it, leaving it with an artificially high score.

This is why the Four Healers Model should be done, so that Healers have the same types of situation that Casters have with BLM existing.

...

I don't care much for BLU healing.

I didn't vote on BLU.

So BLU has a higher rating because I didn't give it 1s across the board.

Thank you for kind of proving my point.

[Aravell]

Doubtful, since not everyone likes all those things. It's rated highly because the kind of people who DO want those things play BLM and are the only people who seemed to have participated in the BLM survey. People who didn't like BLM seem not to have been many of the respondents. They simply don't like it, so they don't play it, so they didn't respond to its section.

You claim that not everyone likes those things, that's fair, it's not for everyone. You also assert that the healer role polls and the SMN poll are being attacked by people here who are hostile towards the game, this is unprovable, but let's take it at face value. You also assert that the majority of the BLM survey is done by people who love BLM.

Now, we can see that the BLM poll numbers are quite high, but if you go into the breakdown, you can see some votes of 1-4 across the 3 options. You can also see some votes that are a perfectly average score. So what's happening here? Is the BLM poll fully positively-biased or are there people who hate-vote on it like the healer polls? You can't have it both ways. If the BLM poll is as positively-biased as you say, then the average score would be a 9 because no one who loves a job would vote below an 8.

[fulminating]

This is why the Four Healers Model should be done, so that Healers have the same types of situation that Casters have with BLM existing.

One loathed, one incompatible with raid design, one the top dev’s favourite child and the last both accessible and coherent but unable to do level cap content? Sounds about right.

Why don’t you care for blu healing? It has a focus on strong gcd heals and a variety of damage options.