Why is the Healer Subforum so Toxic?

[Semirhage]

Coming back to this topic. Let's liken healing to running a marathon. Some people are going to finish before others. Some people are going to finish long before others. The finish line in this metaphor is your downtime activity. You have to wait at the finish line until the encounter is over. We have quite a few people who have trained for this marathon and finish it reasonably early who are asking for maybe snacks, board games, books, something to do at the finish line while they wait for the race to be over. Then we have people who take a long time running the marathon shouting "NO! Runners should RUN ONLY! If you want to do anything other than run you're not a REAL RUNNER. You enjoy playing those board games at the end more than you like running! I run for longer so I obviously enjoy it more than you! You should be asking for longer marathons, not more activities at the end!"

Cool. Double the length of the race. I'm still going to finish early. I'm still going to be bored waiting for the day to end.

I really like the ideas presented around here over the last few weeks. The Glare-equivalent rotation that gets you 98% of the way to the damage output of the full rotation. Auto battles. They showcase a lot of creativity on their designers' parts. And they make excellent data points because they're both summarily rejected as I suspected they'd be. See, Sylphies will tell you all day long that they're True Healer Enjoyers who Want To HEAL. They'll feed you all kinds of BS like finishing off field mobs slower is "more fun" because Glarespamming while "weaving heals in" (on field mobs? Pull the other leg.) is this amazing feat of game design. You can throw whatever design ideas you like at this. Bend over backward trying to preserve the Sylphie experience in its own bubble while also providing room for skill expression. Bend so far your spine looks like a nautilus. Go so far as to bend the entire design of a job around shielding Sylphies from ever, ever, ever having to engage with their skill ceiling, and you'll be told "no".

The asymptote you're approaching here is preserving the Sylphie experience while providing room for skill expression. That's the objectionable part. All of this nonsense back and forth about "NO! It's ONLY encounter design! The healer kits are just fine!" is a smokescreen. Mention raising the skill ceiling above ankle-height and it's like presenting a braid of garlic to a vampire. Skill expression is the line in the sand over which they WILL NOT budge. They can swear up and down and sideways that they just "don't like" interacting with it, but their aim is to make damn sure nobody else can do it on that class either.

Sylphies lie about their intentions. The objections they raise are always complete non-sequiturs with their stated goals. What does the demand for near-zero skill expression in a healer's downtime kit have to do with "wanting to heal"? That's easy. It doesn't. It has everything to do with redefining being bad at healing as good at healing. Increase healing requirements to the Andromeda galaxy and beyond, it doesn't change the fact that the better you get at healing, the less of it you do. Occam's Razor provides the reason why pancaking the skill ceiling is priority numero uno, and it has f-all to do with "wanting to heal".

[ForsakenRoe]

You can throw whatever design ideas you like at this. Bend over backward trying to preserve the Sylphie experience in its own bubble while also providing room for skill expression. Bend so far your spine looks like a nautilus. Go so far as to bend the entire design of a job around shielding Sylphies from ever, ever, ever having to engage with their skill ceiling, and you'll be told "no".

Skill expression is the line in the sand over which they WILL NOT budge.

These parts need extra attention, with bold or italics or something. Let's compare someone like me making a design for a 'rework' to make healers more interesting, to a group of workers going on strike for better pay. The workers know they're not getting 10% raises going into the negotiations, and the company knows they can't keep the wages the same. Yet they put forward those terms as their starting points, and negotiate from there.

I, and I guess others too, made the mistake of taking the stance of 'look, Sylphies. I know I'm not getting the 10% I want. You should know you're not getting the 0% you want. So I'm putting forward this 4% idea, so we can skip the slow slog of 'negotiating' and get it out of the way'. And then I've been told I'm the one who's refusing to compromise. No, you just didn't get to see the changes I made in the background to pre-compromise, knowing that what I would have originally done would have been thrown out immediately. But somehow I'M the one acting in bad faith. For trusting the opposite side would be willing to 'compromise' whatsoever.

If I ever get round to making more ideas for SCH/AST, I'll make them so complicated they require a degree in aerospace engineering to work out how to cast a Succor. And no, I would not be leaving one healer out from this to languish in the mud, to be rejected from PF constantly, as we saw in SB. I'd go back to the WHM and SGE ideas and add extra complexity to those too. Now that I know the playing field, that 'add one damage button and three healing/mitigation buttons' is still too heavily weighted towards damage for some people, well, I don't need the heal skill to be damage neutral now. In fact, I don't need the heal skill to be there at all. I can make Quake, Tornado, Flood come from something else, more impactful, instead of being relegated to being a damage recoup system.

Alternatively, I'd just make the damage output of everything sky high for one patch, just to see if the 'i play healer to heal' players actually have the chops to back up their constant rallying for 'the solution is to add more healing required'. Something tells me that if they cannot do damage now, it means they're not being efficient with their healing. And if they're that inefficient with their healing now, when the game starts demanding efficiency they'll die to it and cause wipes and disbands and bla bla we've been through this before too many times to count

Can the media tour just come out so we can see whether healing will be changed at all in the next expansion or if I should be considering going back to tank

[Iedarus]

Snip

Funny, I just came back from finishing a 5k. It would definitely suck if one day I was forbidden from running that much because I might offend the couch potatoes. On the flipside, I know for a fact I'm not cut out to run a marathon since I'm only dedicated to exercise to the point of having, and teaching others to have, a better quality of life. That's healers. I'm not going to sit and sulk because I can't do savage content (mainly because I have no one to run with and pubs are...well...yeah) and demand people stop being good at the game, and I will always tell turbo casuals to pound sand if I dare to let the team drop to 50% hp because my regen will top everyone up before the next raidwide.