Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Renathras]

Oh then this is where I would disagree. You are one of the core players and it's clear that you are the target audience for these changes.
I don't think there's any point of discussion any longer because simply put, we just simply disagree.

Wait...but...you just said you agree with that...? o.O

Regardless, it's probably the best solution, as it WOULD address different people's needs. Note that I'm not against a change in combat model and so on, but I'm not in favor of a massive over arching and all at once overhaul. Those tend to end poorly for everyone.

If healers are made too complicated then it would drive more away from Healing. A lot of players don't Heal even when it's not too hard to Heal in FF14.

Agreed.

For all people say that Healing is so braindead easy, many people don't think so and so don't take up the role.

Per your example, Group B not asking for a change and the change being made for them aren't mutually exclusive.

Right, but that's my point: The change was made for a subgroup of A, by group A's request. It wasn't made for group B at all. If the change as made for ACTUAL casuals, it would have been just removing the buffs entirely.

the perception from the dev team is what matters here.

Can you find a direct quote from the Dev team where they said "we did this for casual players"? I don't think that you can...

I do agree that the problem has been misidentified and the Devs have taken several steps in the wrong directions. Off the top of my head:

1) Big spikes of damage + long downtimes in between them.
2) Tons of healing in healer oGCDs.
3) Tons of healer oGCDs in general.
4) Fights too movement focused (this isn't just a Healer issue; BLM is now more mobile than RDM because IT HAS TO BE)
5) Tons of healing from Tanks.
6) Tons of healing from DPS.
7) Tons of mitigation from DPS.
8) That MUCH of that healing and mitigation costs DPSers and Tanks nothing (special shout-out to Clemency and Vercure actually costing damage to use, though they're still not SUPER MP limited; contrast Curing Waltz, Phoenix, Nascent for no trade at all)
9) Little unavoidable damage/damage telegraphs largely being pass/fail mechanics that outright kill or inflict a debuff a Healer can do nothing about if failed.
10) The Healer Jobs are all (arguably) near identical; especially in their DPS kits, but many of the heals have a 1-to-1 or near 1-to-1, meaning if people don't like the way current Healer Jobs play, there's no alternative to them that isn't "play a DPS/Tank". Having the Healer Jobs be more distinct would greatly help with that since people would have an outlet for something different (this also isn't just a Healer issue; Tanks are suffering from this one in a lot of ways right now, too, and there's a thread in the Tank forum of people talking/complaining about how the Tanks all feel too similar.)

More on point 8, as it's the big culprit a lot of the time with the 1/0 Healer clears: A TON of this healing is "for free". Back in ARR/HW, if a PLD wanted to heal the party, they could. They had Cure 1 as a Cross-Class option. But using it was a pretty big loss of damage and agro, AND it cost MP which they needed for Flash if they were reducing their agro by engaging in Cure 1 spam. Needless to say, Cure 1 spam was relatively weak AND only considered in dire situations. It was not a go-to that could be worked into the rotation seemlessly like it can be today. And Clemency is one of the BETTER (that is, lesser offenders) in this situation.

WAR - the barbarian with an inner beast - is able to HEAL PARTY MEMBERS. When did that start making sense to people? "To angry to die" is one thing, but "so angry, it un-dies other people" is quite another. When did it make sense for WARs to become party healers in lore or mechanics? And that's before getting to the utter ridiculouslness of WAR using Bloodwhetting/Nascent and then AOEing 8+ enemies for 25 sec Benediction spam for themselves (and a party member) for 8 seconds. DNC has a 600 potency (two 300 potency) AOE party heals that cost no damage. Sure, it's on a 2 min CD, but its 1.5x Indoms for the cost of nothing other than the CD to use them. WAR and GNB both get pretty powerful heals on a 25 sec CD for a party member or themselves, and in WAR's case, or BOTH. GNB has a 90 sec 2 charge Regen, though that's not nearly as big an offender. All the Tanks have pretty strong self-heals just baked into their rotations. SMN has a big party heal baked into its rotation.

Clemency and Vercure are the only exceptions here, and they're probably still a little TOO powerful (contrast HW Cure 1 400 potency with Clemency's 1000, and that was MIND based curing; Clemency scales off of STR and Weapon Damage), but at least there's a strong tradeoff there, even if it can be made up by having a 5th DPS. And it's been a while, but I feel like the first iterations of Clemency cost more. Like 4,000 MP in ShB more, and probably more for lower levels (back before MP pools were fixed at 10k), meaning you could only use them so many times straight. Oh, and PLD didn't have self-healing baked into its core rotation NOR additional healing from Shelltron.

Then we get into mitigation. Every Job has at least one, several have two, some have three. With the right comp, you could have 16 mitigations easily with no Healers, and several of those will be 1 min meaning up twice every 2 minutes. That's something like 20-24 mitigations per 2 min time period in a party with zero Healers, meaning the party can mitigate literally everything without even needing a Healer around for that, Barrier or otherwise. Hell, some of the DPS have more party mitigation than WHM does!

Well, it's hard to develop at both extremes unless they want certain healer jobs to be the complicated ones.

That's honestly probably the best call at this point. We used to even have that system in this very game. If they leave the DPS alone, it won't be a problem. The people saying they're bored now can work harder to get the same result so they aren't bored. And if they all swap to the easiest Healer because it's the path of least resistance, then they can no longer claim they don't have an option.

The other thing is to do it with the content - which in theory should already be happening. As people have noted, P8S requires more healing than TOP does, and definitely more healing than P5 normal or Lapis Manalis.

...

No, it's really not. Firstly, because not being rewarded doesn't lead to things being shunned; some of the world first clears were with DRK and BLM when they were super hard but didn't offer any rewarding competitive advantage, the people playing them simply said "This is the Job I like, so it's what I'm playing." If it does comparable DPS, it won't be shunned in anymore than Jobs are now. What gets shuns is when things do LESS than comparable DPS.

Compare SMN to BLM. One is considered complicated by the playerbase while the other is considered braindead. There are quite a few metrics to determine "complexity".

Finally, while it's good for all Jobs to be accessible at their core, it's NOT always good for them all to have "very high nuance". You run into one of two problems. On the one hand, the people not doing the nuance are not able to clear content, which causes your "shunned" problem. On the other end, if the gap between mastering the nuance and not is small, then the high end people complain they aren't being rewarded enough. Granted, they're going to do this no matter, what, but the point is that this doesn't fix that problem.

The best solution is to have the Jobs actually be different and offer multiple skill levels.

In 5.X, SMN > BLM >> RDM in terms of complexity and difficulty, but they were all brought to content. Sometimes it's fine for some class or Job in a game to be "easy".