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

[Iedarus]

That’s not quite it, it’s more been dissatisfaction that ultimates were unironically suggested by yoship as the content where healers would be interesting, only for them to mainly be mitigation checks & broilspam, and then to top it off the most recent ultimate was cleared without any healers. The role is not in a great place and people are disgruntled.

People not understanding that the issue is not just the ultimate being cleared without a healer. The issue is that if it is possible to no-healer clear the hardest content in the game then it is very much possible to no-healer clear the rest of the game's content.

[grinkdaboy]

with all of these body checks outside of ultimate now i'm left scratching my head what the point of having healers around for even is

[Malackai]

with all of these body checks outside of ultimate now i'm left scratching my head what the point of having healers around for even is

As a healer main this has crossed my mind more often lately.

All classed have some form of mitt or healing.

Doesn't matter what type of content(casual/savage or ultimate) the basics is the same across the board just a variance in degree of how often your able to spam 1 i guess...
Its just boring just mindlessly clicking 1 for minutes/hours on end with an occasional 2 here and there..... (to the point I just even had to tone that down because it was wrecking my hand with carpal tunnel because even my thumb is literately not moving from its spot on the numpad on the mouse....)

I am just at the point I am just going whatever and just zone out half of the time..
Only joy I have left is just being on voice with peeps and enjoying the evening that way but game play wise its just yikes at this point.

And I am not really interested in playing tank or dps either for group content so this is all I have.

Just imagine Yoshi saying this to Tanks...all their dps buttons get replaced with "tank role mitigation" buttons instead. They only get one dps button and one dot.
and they just spam that for hours on end. doesn't matter if its ultimate or casual content its just bad design.

At this point I would say just give cleric stance back and rework that button so it just converts our healing kit in a DPS kit instead. Remember Kuribu in The Lost City of Amdapor (Hard)? this boss had a similar switch was called reverse I believe

In the start of the fight when your learning you use it less to learn and heal maybe a bit more in the end when people learn the fight and get more optimized healers can experiment and switch more often to cleric stance/reverse instead and start converting their healing spells to dps spells instead. And then you can see how you can optimize if that's your Jam i guess. People that don't give a damn just ignore the button.

Would make solo/msQ and fate stuff less boring as well that way

[ForsakenRoe]

The problem with that is that some players (not mentioning names), cannot seem to understand the idea of 'You don't need to use this extra optimization in any content except week 1-3 Savage, or Ultimate'. Upon the suggestion of 'What if we had more damage buttons as healer' being pitched, they invariably retort with strawman hypotheticals about Schrodinger's Raider: A player who can both clear Savage right now, being able to learn complex mechanics and positioning for something like Natural Alignment or High Concept, and simultaneously be unable to learn a new rotation because they now have an extra skill or two to use. That someone like me, suggesting we add anything beyond Glarespam to WHM, is 'gatekeeping people out of content they can currently do'.

And you can tell this is true, because I suggested a change where you could Glarespam as you do now, and only lose 160 potency a minute (2% of the full rotation, for comparison) and it was rejected. Also, I suggested 'what if we had a heal skill that uses a gauge, that charges from damage skills' and that was rejected because it'd force players to do damage. 'What if the tank is about to die, and you need the heal skill but you don't have it cos you prioritized healing over doing damage', uhh, A: the heal skill I suggested was 500p AOE, so use Solace or Tetra or Bene instead, and B: if you're prioritizing healing that much, why on earth is the tank about to die in the first place? The arguments are so easy to rebut and yet they keep insisting that us who make these theorycrafts etc. have somehow 'missed' a detail, that they know better because they know what Healers are. We're just 'Supports in disguise'.

Best part is when one of them linked some numbers about playerbase percentages, of 'how many people mained healer at each point in the game', showing that EW has the most healer participation. You know, to prove that the current 'damage rotation' is a good thing. Except the numbers also showed that the highest participation rate was actually the end of HW, and not even EW managed to get that high (it was close but HW was still higher), which would theoretically disprove the whole 'oh people would quit if healers were more complex', because HW had the old Cleric Stance. Those numbers have suspiciously not been mentioned for a while, though. Wonder why.

It's not that they don't want to have the choice of whether to optimize or not. It's that they want their preferred gameplay, the current morass of Glare, to be THE optimal way to play. We try and try, to accomodate the hypothetical casuals. MP-free heals you can spam in a pinch (ie Prognosis is free), tuning potencies so that 'not using the new stuff' is as small a damage loss as possible, while still being a gain so you actually want to use it if you're an actual player, I put so much effort into keeping the thematic of WHM, as the 'bursty, simple, easy-access healer'. I pitched adding one damage button and THREE healing/mit related buttons. And it was still rejected by the 'healers should only heal' player, because Glare spam would no longer be the optimal rotation. As it was once put so succinctly:

Don't worry, you have me for that. I don't feel bad about it. Because I feel like at this point I've seen every single angle on the Sylphie attack vector. I'm beyond over it and uninterested in a "good faith discussion" about it. Because there really isn't common ground. You see, every discussion in this vein starts seemingly neutral. I want X, they want Y, there's a vague attempt to describe a world where X and Y have their time in the sun. But push them on it even a little bit and they start stamping their feet and revealing what they actually want: not X. They don't want Y. They want -not X-. Suggest a skill ceiling and the wailing and gnashing of teeth begins.

These people don't want low skill floors. They want nonexistent skill ceilings. They don't want accessible content, not really. What they want is healing to be an easy path to free stuff. Paying attention to your job's resources is bad. Even the existence of a suboptimal-but-still-present GlareMedica2 rotation that could satisfy the zero interactivity isn't enough. They want the lazy no-thought gameplay to be the optimal gameplay. They don't want to climb the mountain before them. They want to bulldoze it down, walk into the rubble, and declare they're at the peak now. They want an easy job that they can be told they're masters of by dint of unlocking the job stone.

Prod literally any Sylphie who claims they sympathize with the desire for more complex gameplay and that's the tantrum you're going to get. Every single time.

[CelestiCer]

This definitely makes Yoshi-P's phrase " Just go play Ultimate " hit differently for Healers huh?

[WaxSw]

Best part is when one of them linked some numbers about playerbase percentages, of 'how many people mained healer at each point in the game', showing that EW has the most healer participation. You know, to prove that the current 'damage rotation' is a good thing. Except the numbers also showed that the highest participation rate was actually the end of HW, and not even EW managed to get that high (it was close but HW was still higher), which would theoretically disprove the whole 'oh people would quit if healers were more complex', because HW had the old Cleric Stance. Those numbers have suspiciously not been mentioned for a while, though. Wonder why.

May I ask for those numbers? It would be interesting to see what caused the most changes over time

[GaiusDrakon]

As it was once put so succinctly:

I can put it more succinctly: brain damage

particularly R.T.

lol

[ForsakenRoe]

May I ask for those numbers? It would be interesting to see what caused the most changes over time

You can ask, sure, but the question is if I can find them again. You may have noticed that the person who originally posted them likes to talk... a lot. Mostly about how we are not actually healers, but support players in disguise. Or how Cata was simultaneously terrible because it required so much healing, and amazing because it shows that actually the best design for healers is that they have to spam heals. That one never really made sense to me. If I find them, I'll either edit or make a new post with them in it

[Elizasylen]

Meanwhile TOP Ultimate no healer clear be like

[ForsakenRoe]

Found it god damn that took a while:

So I compiled some data for numbers. I find it honestly too suspect to be useful, but the Wayback Machine's crawls of FFXIV Census. The issue I have is I can't tell enough from the numbers if FFXIV's census is trying to capture mains or not. It seems to be more "Job at level 90 on a player that has completed the current expansion's MSQ", but that's a pretty low bar. It MAY be counting only one Job per player, but I'm not certain enough to be sure. It is still interesting that you can see some trends, like DPS getting a spike in SB and again in EW (especially Melee in Meleewalker), and that Tanks got a bit of a spike in ShB and Healers got a small one in EW; but it's hard to draw concrete conclusions from this since that could all be artifacts of the data (another Job being leveled alongside existing ones for someone that's a dual/tri/omni-main of a given role will inflate its percent unless the data only counts one per player). The FFXIV Census data also had an error for two years, though this only affected "all characters" not the endgame "active characters" count - it missed/counted as deleted characters who didn't have at least 1 mount and at least 1 minion...but that's mainly going to be less than level 20 characters, so it's pretty safe to exclude them from the count. But that said, the data DOES help to draw conclusions in the sense of telling us what arguments are likely NOT accurate. For example, if we expect a massive decline in Healers but the percent goes up, even if we factor part of that as people leveling multiple Healers and so counting a second, third, or even fourth time, if the decline was massive, we'd expect to see a hint of that in the data. We do not.

The Lucky Bancho numbers are harder to get via the Wayback Machine, and I can't read the original Japanese anyway to really understand the older datasets. Translations on Reddit and the Official Forums tend not to be made by the same posters or with the same topic/thread titles, and aren't a static address to have been archived by the WM's crawler, anyway. I wish they were, because I find that data's more reliable (judging Job count by "Person was logged out on it" is a bit dubious, but it is by "Has current patch Extreme weapon or better" is a good measure for "the person actively plays this Job...probably; or at least considers gearing it important enough to spend Tomes/Totems on doing so"), but it is what it is.

The FFXIV Census data, given those caveats, is still the best data I could get my hands on, and it shows Healers as holding approximately steady. Here's the Healer % vs All Jobs over time:

HEALER %
2017: 0.25047
2018: 0.215359
2019: 0.191224
2020: 0.172927
2022: 0.19941
2023: 0.205038

What we can see from this is that Healer Jobs at level cap with MSQ completion declined as a percentage of the whole from HW through ShB, but then started increasing into EW. PART OF THIS is for people maining multiple Healer Jobs, they now had another one to main, but that only really explains the people (like me) that level all of them. While that's likely a portion of the data, it doesn't tell the whole story. But the super short version is: "The Healer population declined in middle-to-late HW going into SB, then declined further going into ShB, before somewhat reversing and increasing to about the SB level in EW."

Had to cut a bit off where they took a potshot at something I'd said (because you can't put a quote inside a quote), but yeh, numbers. They came to a conclusion of some sort, I half-jokingly point out that SB was the sudden downturn and therefore the conclusion is that 'removing Old Cleric Stance Dance was actually the thing that lost so many healer players' (i don't actually believe that), but if the numbers are to be believed, then SB was the point where a lot of players stopped doing healer stuff. If I had to propose an actual hypothesis on why this was the case, I'd go with:

'WHM is the most popular healer by far, and it was not good in SB cos the lilies sucked. Coincidentally, the two DPS classes added in that expansion were fan favorites from past games, RDM and SAM. Therefore I believe that many WHMs who were disenfranchised by how bleh the WHM design was jumped to one of the two new classes, instead of swapping to SCH or AST'

...something like that. Or maybe the numbers are actually just a bunch of rubbish because WaybackMachine is not a reliable source. But we've not exactly got anything else to go off of