TOP cleared with no healers

[WaxSw]

Isn't this more of an issue with the battle design than healer design? You could have a healer job with 1 button that was Cure I and you could still design a fight that would require that one button to clear

The thing is that its not only this fight, solo/no healer runs happen on every content, even content that have remained largely unchanged over the years. Healer design is the constant here and when you consider that as time goes on healers have lost their identity, depth and a lot of fun tools for a bloated kit that fights don't make use of, it shows clearly that SE have designed healers for a game that does not exist.

[Nanne]

The thing is that its not only this fight, solo/no healer runs happen on every content, even content that have remained largely unchanged over the years. Healer design is the constant here and when you consider that as time goes on healers have lost their identity, depth and a lot of fun tools for a bloated kit that fights don't make use of, it shows clearly that SE have designed healers for a game that does not exist.

I still don't see how changing healers would suddenly make these parties not able to clear content without those said healers? You would have to design the battle differently or hit the other jobs that dip their toes into healers job

[Sebazy]

I don’t know how many times I need to say it. It’s both a healer problem and a content problem. I literally explained it not 2 posts above yours. Only changing the content doesn’t solve the issue unless you want to effectively write off puzzle fights.

[WaxSw]

I still don't see how changing healers would suddenly make these parties not able to clear content without those said healers? You would have to design the battle differently or hit the other jobs that dip their toes into healers job

Its not about them clearing without healers. The issue is not that content can be cleared without healers (not entirely) but how the healer's kit has lost a lot of depth and tools in favor of all those extra healing tools, when those tools are not required even in the hardest challenges the game has to offer. To draw a paralel with materia, is as if SE removed our crit stat (i.e something useful regardless on where you are) over the years and forced us to meld only tenacity/piety

[Crushnight]

My personal feelings on this entire thing is simple.

-Grats to the group
-this shouldn’t have ever been possible in the 1st place especially for on patch ultimate content, design of jobs change every expansion and there is no way to account for everything when said design changes(sometimes a buff for endgame content will suddenly allow a job to solo old content they previously couldn’t)
-I hope the devs take to heart that they need to adjust how they both view job design and battle content. Both are out of whack, job design has caused too much self healing and mitigation on non healers while giving healers too much honestly speaking it is the healing side of the current healer toolkit that needs a pruning while being replaced by more debuffs/support/damage options, and battle content is not incentivising healers enough, dungeons should only be non healer able by the extremely skilled players. EX and up should be impossible without at least 1 healer and 1 tank present, and Ultimates should be forced into the 2/2/4 party design, the top end fights need to push every role to their absolute limits.


When your holy trinity game is becoming more a unholy duality game, you have fundamentally messed up your core design and need to go back to the drawing board and find a solution to fix it.

[Coatl]

Designing a role around babysitting players doesn't make for compelling gameplay when the party you have doesn't require it.

Hence the majority of the complaints around the role is how absolutely mind-numbingly boring it is to play.

Healing just isn't fun anymore, hasn't been for a long time for me. Those who felt the same got shut down or ignored and moved on to different classes or games. Over the past decade the healing role and fight design has just changed so much and I'd be lying if I said it didn't sting.

Honestly feels like the the bosses are just throwing out damage out of pity sometimes.

Literally the first thing I'd do before I took my jacket off would be to allow bosses to continue to auto attack through some means whilst casting. The main goal of this is to prevent situations like RubiEX where the fight literally goes well over a minute at a time between attacks. This also almost instantly course corrects the current lack of tank damage and brings value to once key abilities like Regen again.

These are some good ideas. Making boss autos actually do something again would be a start.

[RyuDragnier]

I'd like to see more Seat of Sacrifice EX levels of random yet organized mechanics, but change where raidwides are. Like having a raidwide at the beginning of two of the mechanics, and a raidwide at the end of the other two. Guess what happens if a raidwide end of mechanic is followed by a raidwide beginning of mechanic...the amount of healing needed, the amount of damage tanks and the party would be unable to mitigate, the amount of PURE CHAOS WORTHY OF A HEALER'S TIME! Then have it repeat for the next 2 mechanics...GLORIOUS GLORIOUS CHAOS! But that's just me wanting more chaotic healing moments that make you feel alive as a healer.

[Avoidy]

Recently I took Yoshi's advice and played another game, namely an old-school maplestory private server. There are party quests in that game, which are about the closest thing we have to party dungeons, and in one that I did last night (Ludibrium PQ for you old MS players) there are actual puzzles that you cannot progress through if you don't have the right roles in your team. There's a room that can't be progressed without a magic-job, for example. And there's another part where if you're lacking a ranged guy, you're just out of luck. In this way, the game forces groups to take specific roles or else they literally cannot win. A literal 20 year old 2D side scroller MMO did a better job of making roles feel like they were actually necessary -- back in 2006 when this content launched, even -- than a "critically acclaimed" MMO in 2023.

Even though this news basically just means a niche skilled team did something that nobody else will replicate anytime soon, it still demonstrates that all the way through, at every level you could imagine, the healer role has been demonstrated to be superfluous. In the casual content, this much has been obvious for a while. People run expert without healers constantly, and the outgoing damage in stuff like euphrosyne and aglaia are a complete joke. But now in Ultimates, the most difficult content in the game, in its current patch even, a group has come out to demonstrate that it can be done without a healer as well. Granted, again, the level of coordination and strategizing necessary were off the charts, and I doubt it'll be typical for any group to clear this way going forward, but in a game that pretends to care about the holy trinity, this shouldn't be possible at all. Like, imagine if you could clear without a tank. You're having a hard time even conceptualizing it, right? Because tanks have a purpose, while healers have had their purpose doled out to so many other jobs that they can effectively be replaced. That's the difference.

I can't speak for everyone, but when I play a support role I like feeling needed. Healing in this game feels like shit because so so so often (especially if you're just doing your dailies or whatever) you don't feel necessary at all. In some cases, your team would even be better off if you just went on a dps and helped burn shit down faster. This role isn't fun to play, and its sense of purpose has diminished so hard, especially if you're sort of a casual player. And -- again -- in playing other games, I've seen them make healing feel both engaging and/or necessary in casual content as well as hardcore content. But here, we can't seem to have either. SE's just terrified that if they make the role engaging, it might lose players. As if it's not already losing players because it's boring af and feels like it doesn't even have to exist.

[drtasteyummy]

The most logical answer to this issue is to just remove Ultimates they cater to a small Community and only cause issues

[ForteNightshade]

...

The players locking out jobs below the Savage level are a fraction of a minority. Even in Abyssos, which was notorious for how poorly balanced the tier was, you could still find plenty of parties as any of the non-meta jobs. And that was a case of it being warranted. When it comes to casual content, like Sebazy already outlined, virtually nobody cares. I've been top five DPS in Alliance as a tank without a single peep mentioned. So long as a healer does something people generally won't even pay attention to how efficiently they're DPSing. They certainly aren't going to be looking for whether they're pressing all three DPS buttons. Cleric Stance was a different beast altogether because it shined a giant beacon on the players who didn't turn it on that they weren't dealing any damage. Much in the same way tanks who refused to turn off their stance told everything they were taking a massive damage penalty.

In a strange way, they were almost like having a parser telling you "that person is basically doing no damage."

The reason for its removal is the clunky design and the dev team wanting to make DPSing as a healer easier. They outright said as much in one of the LLs leading into Stormblood. Throughout the expansion they continuously maintained Healer DPS was optional. MrHappy has a rather infamous interview of Yoshida actually asking him to relay that to his audience. They've long since walked that statement back but it goes to show where their mindset was with the change: ease and accessibility. Which I don't say as a negative, by the way. Cleric Stance in its original form was awful.

Efficiency is an argument though. You're dismissing it out of hand because tanks aren't 100% necessary for Rubicante without acknowledging the context on why people drop healers so readily. That 7 DPS/SCH comp was a meme done simply to see if it's possible. Healers being dropped from Lapis or EXs is done because it's more efficient to run with only one or none of them. You could absolutely do a Tank/Healer run of any dungeon in the game but why would you? It'd take longer for no benefit. Same with a healer and three DPS. It's just slower. Dropping the healer and running three DPS with a tank is a direct benefit to everyone involved because it's faster, and thus more efficient. Replacing the Scholar in that Rubicante run with a Warrior accomplishes the same thing but with a faster kill as the Warrior won't be sacrificing damage to GCD shield. So the end result is while neither role is needed per se, one still retains value while the other doesn't.

Translating this to TOP. No one is going to drop Healers in Ultimate but it does show their overall contribution to the fight are substantially less than everyone else by virtue of the encounter having minimal healing requirements and their kits being overbloated with ways to heal what's actually there.

The point is both are at fault. Like I've said several times nerfing or even outright deleting all healing from the other roles won't suddenly make healer gameplay involved or engaging nor will cracking up all the numbers. You're just trading some Glare casts for Cure II but will primarily spam the same single button ad nauseam. Everything needs to be looked at going forward: Healer kits being far too powerful, their DPS suite being a complete bore, other roles (especially tanks) having far too much sustain and mitigation tools and encounter design not necessitating enough raw healing. Simply looking at one while ignoring the other won't fix that problem of healer gameplay being largely dull.