Why is the Healer Subforum so Toxic?

[IDontPetLalas]

Let's just forget the huge ammount of players who dont visit forums,let alone write their opinions
So bold of you guys to assume your opinions/experience are what the "player base" think/wants..

So your idea is that those players who are sufficiently motivated to interact on the forums, should just stop, because some don't?

Well, that certainly is bold of you.

[Tigore]

Funny thing for me is that I was actually scolded by a WoW DPS for using my free Shaman healing time for damage 2 expansions ago during Legion in that game. I was "caught owning" the enemies with Lava Bursts and Flame Shock DoTs everywhere and he neglected to mention my Healing Stream / Tide Totems, Healing Rains and Riptide HoTs ... As well as the tank also using their rage more on Revenge DPS rather than Ignore Pain shields. Nobody died either... The damage meter add-ons there almost never fully get used to see this stuff by most players...

Anyways, I do not mind to get a damage rework for the healer classes. I was even around for Cleric Stance and used it to throw out powered up double DoTs. As I said in another thread, we may need to survey what healing styles we want for each class that has been suggested on the forums. So far, I have only noticed surveys just asking if more healing or damage buttons are desired with damage being a higher pick.

We should also check with Ultimate raiders which healing buttons were least useful or never used for them. I usually never use Cure 3 with Medica being better for PuGs, but Savage may sometimes coordinate players together to make Cure 3 better.

[ForsakenRoe]

Well, we can start by merging lower level garbo skills with the higher level 'clearly a replacement' variants. Cure1 and Cure2, Benefic and Benefic2, Medica and Medica2, Helios and Asp.Helios, Physick and Adlo. WHM's already way lower on button count than other healers as it is so we already have room to add to it, even without merging stuff

[Deceptus]

It's get really damn old when you're trying to point out obvious flaws, trimmed down systems and boring gameplay only to be met with:

"WHAt wOuLd YoU dO TO FIX iT"

I don't have to come up with solutions. My part is to identify what I consider negative aspects of the game and voice my opinion on the forum CBU3 tells us to voice our opinions on.

I don't have to fix it because I don't get paid to fix it.

The line crossed that adds toxic to the casual label is the one beyond those positions. It's not that everyone approaches the game at their own pace, it's that anyone doing it faster than me is an elitist, a tryhard, a sweaty metaslave dirty raider ruining the game by...being over there, MENACINGLY threatening us all by dint of being more skilled than me

Over the years I've become more casual. EX content is about the max I'm going to do because I play the game to chill and not have a second job.

But if my casual @$$ can see these flaws it's tough to believe others can't unless they're oblivious, lying to themselves, or just white knighting a multimillion dollar company that doesn't need the plebs to defend them.

[OdinelStarrei]

https://twitter.com/mitsurugi137/sta...4660636639232?

Semirhage, and other friends in suffering, I return for this. I have questions.

What is going on here? Why are there no healers in the final phase of TOP? Would Magic Number LB3 be the only thing preventing a no-healer kill?

How did they even make it this far?

How and why is this even possible on-patch? Solo Healer TEA and TankCOB post-GNB was one thing, but this is a bit much, no?

[Aravell]

https://twitter.com/mitsurugi137/sta...4660636639232?

Semirhage, and other friends in suffering, I return for this. I have questions.

What is going on here? Why are there no healers in the final phase of TOP? Would Magic Number LB3 be the only thing preventing a no-healer kill?

How did they even make it this far?

How and why is this even possible on-patch? Solo Healer TEA and TankCOB post-GNB was one thing, but this is a bit much, no?

It's not a particularly big surprise that this happened. Especially since they design fights around needing heavy mitigation but very little actual healing nowadays. Honestly, UWU would've already been cleared by 8 tanks by now if healer LB wasn't required.

[Lyth]

Going back to Semirhage's opening post, the 'Sylphie' debates, as I remember them, were about the emphasis on healing/mitigation vs. dealing damage within the role. The primary issue, of course, is that healing checks are ultimately pass-fail, so keep experienced players engaged you either design a healing/mitigation check that is so difficult that it excludes the majority of healers, or else you provide more opportunities for skill expression through dealing damage (and more interesting damage-dealing rotations to support this).

There's always going to be a subset of players who like the idea of playing a more strictly supportive part, and that's not unique to any role group (DPS included - think of physical ranged when it brought resource management tools for the party). I think where tanks and healers diverged was that there wasn't as much of a dichotomy between doing damage and performing support actions on tanks. If you had actions which forced you to waste a GCD or spend resources in order to do mitigate, that was seen as bad game design and tanks demanded that they be removed or changed. By the end of Stormblood, there was no real dichotomy between doing damage and support on tanks, so the debates stopped. You just weren't required to sacrifice damage to mitigate more, which is the best of both worlds.

There's another issue at stake, though, and this ties in to Odinel's post. The unfortunate truth is that in order for traditional tanks and healers to bring more value, you needed those hard pass-fail checks. If you make the pass-fail check softer, then you start getting in to situations where you can get away with a solo tank or solo healer (or no healer). It makes DPS happy, because they're not held back by subpar tanking or healing. You see this design more in action MMOs, where everyone brings support actions, and you simply have some slightly more support flavored DPS. But if you want to go this route, you also have to narrow the dps gap between 'pure DPS' and supports. Right now, if you're a good player, it is to your advantage to play DPS, because that's where the carry potential is. The only way that will change is if you narrow the dps gap, and I suspect this is the direction the game will need to go.

Either way, the crux of the debate is that there are really two ways of solving this, each with their share of problems. Do you push more heavily into a traditional trinity design, where tanks and healers have harder checks and you have to funnel gear to them to be able to clear? Do you make mitigation resources scant and force your healers to carefully manage their resources or bottom out? Or do you push more heavily into an action MMO design, give everyone heals and shields, and turn tanks and healers into competitive DPS that can potentially top the charts (having been given appropriately more complex rotations, of course) while occasionally saving the group with a clutch save. Either way, if you don't give stronger players opportunities to 'carry', everyone is going to just swap off to DPS.

[ForsakenRoe]

'Go play ultimate' is really gonna become the 'don't you guys have phones' of this game, they shouldn't have been able to get past phase 2 without a healer if the game was designed well, the fact they got to the LAST PHASE of the hardest content in the game shows what a joke the healer role has become. Yoshi better count his lucky stars I don't got a fanfest ticket because if I got a Q+A spot to ask about some pointless crap like 'What color is Graha's underwear' or some such softball question, you bet your bottom dollar I'd changeup and unleash bankai about the state of healers. Look how much evidence we have now, all the complaint threads, influencers mentioning the state of the role, the survey, now THIS.

If nothing else, I'd pressure SE with a question like 'player did a survey of the forums and found that roughly 80-85% of respondents for the healers want more damage actions as their top priority. Of course, this could be argued to be 'not representative of the playerbase', so can you commit to running an official survey on the Lodestone, to get an accurate sampling of what changes players want for the jobs going forward? Given the previous two AST designs (5.0, 6.0) have been received poorly enough to warrant a third rework in 7.0, DRK and MCH took several years to get the sensible change of Hypercharge being stack based, DRK's Living Dead took since HW to get changed to something that doesn't overly burden the healer compared to the other tanks, not to mention the massive outcry and pushback from every region, even JP, against the removal of Kaiten and the subsequent silence on the matter despite you asking for our feedback, I and many other players were wondering: Where exactly do you get your feedback to guide your job changes from? Because it doesn't feel like posting on the forums with ideas, suggestions, feedback etc amounts to anything more than shouting into the void'

But yeh, no ticket, so Yoshi and his 'perfectly designed healer role' get to continue on oblivious to the problems. Instead I can't wait to hear about whether Hythlodaeus and Hades are canonically in a gay relationship or whatever

It's get really damn old when you're trying to point out obvious flaws, trimmed down systems and boring gameplay only to be met with:

"WHAt wOuLd YoU dO TO FIX iT"

I don't have to come up with solutions. My part is to identify what I consider negative aspects of the game and voice my opinion on the forum CBU3 tells us to voice our opinions on.

I don't have to fix it because I don't get paid to fix it.

Even better is this one:

'healer kinda not good, for these reasons'
"WHAt wOuLd YoU dO TO FIX iT"
'>posts an entire theorycraft of what to do to fix it, including potencies, cooldowns, gauge costs, etc'
"NO YOU CANT DO THOSE CHANGES THAT WOULDNT WORK"

Like, we've tried man, some of us literally have done SE's job with coming up with the ideas on what to do to bring some spice back to the role, and it still gets naysayed by 'certain elements' for whatever reason. In my case, because I had the audacity to tie a healing skill to a gauge that built by doing damage. A healing skill that was weaker than Cure3, PI Rapture, or Solace, yet I was told 'what if the tank needs to be healed and the player doesn't have the gauge because they don't want to focus so much on damage'. I fine tuned potencies so fervently I got the output of 'refresh DOT when it expires, spam Glare', the gameplay we have now, to be 98% of the effective potency of our current output. Despite this (and showing the maths in the post to prove it), I constantly ran into 'the casual players might not be able to do as much damage if it's more complex, and then they'll be gatekept out of content they could do before', like the 2% is going to make or break a Savage run instead of the crit variance.

The people who say "WHAt wOuLd YoU dO TO FIX iT" don't want to know what we'd do to fix it. Whatever we do suggest is to be derided as a terrible idea, because SE can do no wrong and their healer design is perfect. It's the encounter design that is apparently the problem. Except whenever I say 'yeh fair, lets make Savage hit more like Barb EX, actually let's make everything hit with a cadence like Barb EX (I just mean the speed, not the damage, stuff in EX roulette would hit really low and non-threatening, but faster)', I get 'no Barb EX is like a Savage fight and people struggled with it on release', cool? That's the point surely, that it's a struggle to clear until you practice it a bit? Wouldn't be very interesting content if you just roflstomped it on the first try

[ty_taurus]

It really just boils down to them needing more people and more time to work on these kits. Sebazy has said it a hundred times, but the team size has not changed since ARR, yet the number of jobs has doubled. These designers are not only working on FFXIV combat design. I have no idea how scheduling their time looks, or what they do beyond job adjustments, or how often they actually work on FFXIV job adjustments, but they will do both the community and themselves a favor by adding more people or outsourcing job design and simply tweaking what they receive from this other studio. There is no reason why there shouldn't be a designer that specializes in each of the 5 roles.

[Zeastria]

So your idea is that those players who are sufficiently motivated to interact on the forums, should just stop, because some don't?

Well, that certainly is bold of you.

You're twisting my words , to be more clear:
i simply wanted to remind people that opinions on forums
don't reflect the whole player base.