The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.

[Renathras]

One thing I’ve learned about politacos, ppl will double down on this crazy idea that this path will work for everyone and this 1 guy/gal warn them that it doesn’t work. It goes through anyway because it FEELS GOOD and it immediately falls apart, ruining a good system.

At some point you just throw your hands up and give them what they want. Here overhaul everything for healers. Have all the DPS buttons, go back to ARR days and see all the subscriptions just collapsed. The ppl who asked for this……….crickets. Won’t admit that what they ask for ruined that system.

Yeah, you're 100% right.

Maybe they should do this for an expansion. The mass exodus of Healers that follows, the dungeon runs taking 2x as long because the casual Healers don't know what they're doing and Healer DPS tanks, everyone complaining about how regular Healers have stopped DPSing in dungeons, 24 mans, and so on. All the casual Healers quit the role and start doing something else like playing DPS or just quitting the game entirely. People who are "If I wanted a dps rotation, I'd play a DPS Job" going extra heels in the sand and just not hitting ANY DPS buttons at all. Ques taking ages because all the "high end players" tend to run dailies/roulettes with their friends and all the casual Healers quit quing - what the hardcores said would happen in ShB and EW would actually happen.

Then the Devs make a rare mid-expansion reversal of it all because of how there's no one Healing in casual content and even TANKS have 30+ minute ques now because there aren't enough elitist players to fill the gap and keep the ques running for normal content.

I doubt the people wanting it wouldd even admit then that they had been wrong. And then, not only would it all be reverted, but they wouldn't even get a SINGLE damage focused Healer Job, and they would never get one again, either, due to their own stubbornness.

There would be a certain poetic irony to that, but it'd suck to have to go through it.

So give every healer more DPS actions and introduce the auto-combo system. This makes all 4 healers accessible to both camps. Pro-DPS healers get 4 healers, and Anti-DPS healers get 4 healers.

Maybe. If the auto system was smart enough to always do the right thing so that using it would actually produce more DPS than not using it outside of someone not using it executing exactly perfect play - in which case they'd merely do "just as well". But I doubt that'd be what you want.

Especially since the actual easy fix would be...to leave one single Healer Job alone.

Genuinely curious, do you honestly think that healers getting DPS buttons would cause all the subscriptions to collapse?

"all"? No.

What it would do is cause a shortage of Healers in casual content - roulettes - which is something the Devs DO care about. There aren't enough of you hardcore types to fill in roulettes for all the people who would quit healing. Not only are there just not enough of you, many hardcore raider types don't do casual roulettes. They do Experts or the like with their fellow Static members. We've seen similar problems in the past when there were Tank shortages. The high end Tank players who loved it weren't filling in the roulettes. They'd do enough to get BiS, then they wouldn't que for them anymore. I suspect the same would happen to healing.

You know there's one thing that will get the Devs to act faster than anything to "fix" the problem - if DPS have to wait more than 15 minutes for a 4 man dungeon que.

Nope. Read it again, if you must:

Yes, let's "Read it again":

If I ask you if you want, for example, more money and you answer no, does this mean you would be upset if given more money?

If I ask you, among a small set of possible pathways to improve your quality of life at work, whether a dedicated parking space, fewer on-call hours, improvements to the break room, etc., would be a significant boon for you, are you therefore outright opposed to each pathway you didn't specifically say 'Yes' to?


So we have two ways to interpret the intersection between a bimodal question (More Offensive Actions? [Yes/No]) and its 5 actual sourcing opinions...

1. I want more actions,
2. I want an equal or greater number of actions,
3. I want the same number of actions (no more and no fewer),
4. I want an equal or lesser number of actions, and
5. I want fewer actions

And in the end we cannot quite know which is the most accurate. One perhaps overstates the majority by 21%. The other perhaps overstates the minority by 900%.



I can't say I'm surprised, though, that the latter interpretation is used to subject a job to being cut/kept to a barebone version, per your long-running project, Ren, on the basis of --at absolute most-- an opinion held by only 20% of respondents.

...All while ignoring, as usual, that a job having a decent ceiling does not prevent it from having an enjoyable floor and decent ease of use to the extent necessary to clear nearly all content and fulfill one's unique duties as healer. A job that runs a full gamut (A to Z, so to speak) of gameplay factors, instead of being cropped short at N, still has access to gameplay factors A to M.

Huh. THAT'S odd, isn't it?

THIS:

We know that 80% clicked the button to ask for more damage buttons, and 20% did not. That is all.

There was not button for No. There was no button for indifferent. One simply clicked off any among the 5 options per "Which of the following [one] would like to see in the future for White Mage? (Check all that apply.)" Those options, by the way, were shared almost identically across all jobs regardless of role.

What you're concluding is an interpretation (more than likely biased) of the data's findings, but not the findings themselves. Ironic, given your complaints and your agreement otherwise that more response options would be required to reach more specific conclusions.

Doesn't appear anywhere in THAT, now does it?

Maybe because you said it later, AFTER I had already said it first?

What we DO know is that only 79.X% of the survey respondents asked for more attacking options, even though everyone had the option to ask for more if they wanted them. We also know that some people answering that option didn't want MORE attack abilities, they just wanted them at earlier levels (Misery was often cited as something people want WHM to get earlier than it does). And we know that ~20% do not want more attack actions, with 2-4% wanting less.

Meaning either you changed your story after I said what was correct, or you didn't read my post before replying to it (a trend, it seems) and thought you were making a novel point when I had literally said the same thing above you. You can possibly argue that I need to add one word ("explicitly" after "20% do not" and before "want more" - "~20% do not explicitly want more attack actions"), but otherwise, I said the exact same thing, and before you did, while noting that was my specific issue with your reply above. Replying to me AFTER that saying the same thing I'm saying doesn't make you right and me wrong or some such.

Indeed, your implication with the money was that anyone not adamantly against it would probably not mind it - as irl most people don't mind more money. I was giving you a rebuttal saying we don't know that, because the poll didn't ask that. All we know is 80% said they want more damage actions - an explicit choice the survey offered - and 20% did not say they want more damage actions. You can't read into their minds to know if the WOULD mind or not, we only know that they did not say they want more damage actions. Meaning 20% did not say they want more damage actions. 1 in 5; which is an ample percentage to base a decision and a Job around.

FAR FEWER people play BLM, and we have a Job for them.

.

As for Combos: I actually DO somewhat agree with you. The time where it makes sense to have the separate buttons is in a case like MNK where you can use any of the pairs of actions (based on stance), and you actually cycle between them in varied ways. But that wouldn't work for a non-DPS Job since that's a lot of focus on buttons and muscle memory that doesn't make sense to impose on other Roles. That is, where you're not always going to follow the exact same pattern no matter what. PLD, for example, will always use Riot Blade after Fast Blade, and always use Royal Authority after Riot Blade. There's never any variance, so the other buttons might as well be Glare-Glare-Glare. This is true of all the non-branching combos in the game, such as RDM's melee combo. At least SMN figured this out with its 1-2 being the same button, and GNB half-figured this out with Gnashing Fang, though it took an expansion.

Again, for a DPS Job, it makes some sense so they have other buttons to hit with their fingers and something to occupy some of their mental energy since it's all devoted to DPSing, but it doesn't make sense for other Roles and is arguably an inferior system even for DPS Jobs.

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To give you a sense of scale, btw: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...nd_raid_mount/

Add up the total number of Healers. Note these are just people with high (at the time) ilevel weapons, meaning they were doing Savages or at least Extremes (Barb Ex weapon; I had it on WHM at the time) and before Relics were released to give everyone highish ilevel weapons.

There are a total of 86,365 Healers.
There are 14,883 BLMs.

If you divide the second by the first, you'd find that's only 17% as many BLMs as there are Healers. Which is approximately the portion of the Healer population that doesn't want new DPS actions.

If BLMs liking BLM is enough reason for BLM to exist as a Job, even though it bucks the general trend of DPS and the 2 min meta...

...then about that same percentage of Healers/number of players wanting a Healer with no new damage actions seems ample to be worth them having a Job for them.

So that part of the conversation is done, just as done as SCHs wanting more damage or ASTs wanting more buffs.
(And note BLM isn't the least played Job, either...)