G-give it Back T---T; !! (Scholar Edition)

[5trange]

Logging in on these Forums after forever and bumping this up, cause this is honestly the most important topic around and needs to stay on the first page at all times.
Not only because I'm a SCH lover and therefore partial to it, but because this thread encapsulates and expresses perfectly what the problem with the game is and how to solve it (or soften it, at the very least).

Everyone is aware of the "burnout argument" flying around alongside the mostly naive responses of people saying "oh, it's just the natural patch cycle". The truth of the matter is that no matter how many positive or negative aspects you highlight about Endwalker as an expansion, what ultimately makes or breaks it is Job design.
I'll use myself as an example. I'm a healer-role kinda guy, who's always liked Scholar. Been following XIV since late HW/early SB, but started playing in ShB because life. Since I started playing, I've done every Savage and a few ultimates, though I don't consider myself to be really "good" compared to people who actually are. For the longest time I've also been a religious Roulettes practitioner, even when I didn't care about rewards and just did it for fun or to make queues more bearable for that poor DPS player who has been waiting 38 mins to get into Leveling Roulette. So even though endgame is where I prefer to be, I also enjoy casual play: dungeons, trials, normal and especially alliance raids... I don't need an overwhelming amount of new content to have fun in XIV. And yet soon after Endwalker released without fixing anything from Shadowbringers, I pretty much stopped doing these casual activities and found myself loathing endgame content too. Why? Because the Job I love is boring and unnecessary. I won't even talk about the fact that healers have been proven unneeded in most content with minimal organization. The fact is that when a healer is around, the only thing it can do is to be bored out of its mind — or pray that other people generate enough chaos to create artificial engagement (very rare, overall).

But how simple would it be, to solve this issue without interfering notably with the game as it is? Let's outright disregard the million things that could be said, and make it easy: give me back the buttons OP listed (and the Quickened Aetherflow Trait, which I'm sure OP had in their heart even if it wasn't mentioned), and I'd go back to doing even ARR content with glee — even the dreaded LotA! —, seeing as by Level 50 I'd have all of my DPS kit (ED is Lvl. 6, Miasma is Lvl. 10, Bio II and Bane are Lvl. 30, Miasma II is lvl. 46, Shadowflare is Lvl. 50) — heck, even Sastasha would become slightly enjoyable!

This affects not only casual content, but Savage and Ultimate too. Always speaking from direct experience: due to an issue with a couple of party members, I've had to do P8S for the longest time and P12S has been the same. Sure, repeating the fight a million times in a row can get tedious for all jobs, but for healers especially it's an absolutely harrowing experience (slightly less so for Astro, but not by much). Incidentally, I think the only Job which has it worse than healers is poor Summoner, cause in addition to being mad easy and horribly repetitive, it has no group responsibility whatsoever besides throwing out Addle. Now, if I had my own toys to play around with? That would be less terrible and place healers in the same category as the other Roles and Jobs.

I repeat, I don't want to dismiss the fair criticism EW as an expansion has received (just as an example, I had an absolute blast in Bozja/Zadnor, both alone and with friends, so it was sorely missed for all the reward-issues it had). Nor do I want to disregard the fact that a little disinterest might be normal at this stage of the expansion. But I feel like people are looking in the wrong direction when they say "oh, it's lack of content" or "oh, it's the 2-min meta" or "oh, now it's a single-player game" or "oh, people just raidlog" etc. Such things all have their relevance, but ultimately what would keep people around is the enjoyment of just playing one's own favorite Job — whichever it may be, SCH in my case — in any sort of content and in any sort of situation: in easy duties, in hard duties; with a good group, or a bad group; in optimized fights, or in yolo fights; in new content, in old content; etc. Really, screw "go do ultimates", the most obnoxious, ridiculous and objectively wrong statement ever made, only good to make my blood b(r)oil — as if I didn't Broil enough already...

So yeah, I would encourage everyone and especially SCH players to keep these threads relevant. Of course we know that's mostly useless, as evidenced by the impotence of the "Healer issues", "Bring back Kaiten" and similar threads. But we must have something to cope with, right? We're certainly not getting our fun by actually playing our Job. Or maybe we just have to wait for someone to make a HW/SB private server, so we can all collectively flock there lmao
All in all though, I must say I'm disappointed. When I joined the game, all I heard was how great the devs were with listening, so for the longest time I deluded myself into thinking the healer situation would be fixed at some point, during ShB even. Fast-forward... what? 3.5, 4 years? And nothing has changed. My mind just cannot process how such a thing could stand, for the benefit of absolutely nobody except that 1 guy who's gonna play healer once and then shelve it forever after. I wonder if players should have been even more aggressive, with their — most often perfectly reasonable — demands of change...

[ForsakenRoe]

stuff

I wonder if players should have been even more aggressive, with their — most often perfectly reasonable — demands of change...

Exactly. The classes in a game with 'choose your class' are the lens through which we perceive the content of the game. If the fights are cool and flashy but the classes suck to play, boring/clunky/whatever problems, then the game is unsalvageably bad. If the classes are fun and engaging, but the fights and other content are kinda run of the mill, people can forgive that and look past it, because the class gameplay is fun. It's only fair expectation that all of the classes evolve each expansion. The issue for healers is that while the kit has (more healing tools), the content's demand of the kit has not increased in balance with that. We could have dealt with Styx with the SB kits. The SHB and EW additions are not 'required' for something like that, they're just 'nice stuff to have i guess'.

Additionally, I am livid, furious and generally miffed, that anyone would hold the opinion that 'if you want to have fun on your class, you should do harder content'. Not only is it incredibly dismissive of the problem, it doesn't fix anything. I've done some ultimates, not the new two but I did TEA on content, and went through Living Liquid's heal check. And even then, I spent most of my GCDs on damage. And what of those who DID do the new ultimates, who feel healer needs something more? The idea that someone like me, for example, someone who clears Savage and has previous Ultimate experience, should not consider 'EX roulette being boring' as an issue because 'that content isn't targeting me in difficulty scale' is stupid. What, am I, a player who has devoted enough time to the game to get better at it, now supposed to accept that anything below Savage, literally 95% of the content of the game, is 'not for me' anymore? That it's not 'supposed to be enjoyable' to me, it's to be treated as a chore, a means to the end of 'cap tomes'?

SE said they 'didn't really know what to do with SCH' in the pre-EW liveletter, with the job action trailer. I put forth the hypothesis: If SE had not removed all the damage buttons from healers, they might have had some design space open to add some new stuff to SCH, and indeed to all of the healers. Locking off such a massive design space in the way SE has done is absurd to me. If it weren't a game I hold so dear, I'd laugh at it, how stupid the move was. I'd call it Mickey Mouse class design, or perhaps clownshoes. But what's done is done, and I don't really want to complain about how bad it is right now, I want the dev team to accept that this design doesn't have any longevity for the health of the game, reverse course, while the problem is still fixable. It requires them to acknowledge that it's a problem, though, and they seem very disinclined to admit any amount of failure. I still remember when YP told everyone, proudly, that 'no, MCH isn't too weak, everyone is just playing it wrong' in HW. Then next patch, it was buffed because actually yes it was too weak.

As for the final bit, about us being more extreme: I'm not sure if that would even help. We got told a couple of times that we should 'be nice to the devs' because they were getting called names or whatever. Any 'more aggressive' would likely just get thrown out for being 'too aggressive', and anything 'not aggressive enough' doesn't get through. The healer class design is going to be decided entirely by the dev team who already put it in the shallow grave it's now sat in for the past 3 years. I'd love for the devs to see ANY of the feedback that gets left on the forums. More healing demanded of us, more damage buttons for the invariable downtime, I do not care what the solution they go with is. I just want them to choose literally anything going forward, with one exception: the continuation of whatever the heck this is. It's already stale, two more years of it may well kill the healer role's participation numbers entirely. Without a new healer release to obfuscate the problem, I think the 'playerbase drain rate' from the healer role will be way more apparent next expansion if we get SHB 3.

I want to know who's feedback they take for this stuff. Cos it sure as hell doesn't seem to be the players. Some of the healer design choices in recent years honestly feel like the DPS-Main testers tried to do a fight playing healers, failed, said 'damn if only I had a skill that does X', and then said 'hey wait write that down, we can throw it in when the next expansion comes out'. I refuse to take any lip about 'the devs listen to us' until I see SAM get either Kaiten, or a skill that replaces Kaiten and it's interactivity with the Kenki gauge. Because the outcry of feedback, from EVERY region, is massive, and it's insane that there's been zero word, nothing, nada, about the skill. Even just saying 'yeh we heard you, we will return Kaiten in 7.0 sorry' would at least let people know that their feedback was heard. Instead it feels like we are shouting into the abyss

edit: like 2 minutes after I post this, the Liveletter reveals that they're adding extra rewards to Criterion because they listened to the feedback. Thank you SE, I will acknowledge I got it wrong in my rant above. I did kinda get caught up in the 'stream of consciousness' thing, sorry. Now if you could you turn that 'listening to feedback' thing towards the class design, I would be very happy to fully eat my words

[Ririta]

I want to know who's feedback they take for this stuff. Cos it sure as hell doesn't seem to be the players. Some of the healer design choices in recent years honestly feel like the DPS-Main testers tried to do a fight playing healers, failed, said 'damn if only I had a skill that does X', and then said 'hey wait write that down, we can throw it in when the next expansion comes out'.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...no_new_healer/

"As for the healers, it is difficult to balance them, so I would like to focus on balancing the existing jobs in 5.0 before adding new ones."

It was their own decision it seems.