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

[Lyth]

If anybody wondered, -this- was the original question.

This is the downside of putting your votes in the Q+A thread behind an essay, rather than a specific question. The Living Dead question was quite literally just "Living Dead is terrible, when are you going to fix it?" and they did it within the same Live Letter. You may not have gotten a fix right in 6.0, but at least you'd have a better idea of the design plan going into 7.x.

The bulk of that essay talks about healer checks in harder content, and cites examples of healerless clears with skilled groups that had first cleared the fights using conventional strategies. There's a pretty large variation in healer skill in the playerbase, with some healers having cleared every bit of content on release for the past 10 years, and others who apparently think 24p raids and relic fates count as 'midcore' content. Because healer checks are pass-fail, this is one of the least flexible ways to test skill. Nobody wants to sit around while you raidwipe a group repeatedly in the process of figuring out your timings. Entry to harder content tends to be self-selecting because everyone knows this.

The question should have just been "The 'damage rotation' of healers is utterly boring, what are your plans to address this?" All supports end up with simplified damage rotations because a large portion of the action budget goes into defensive actions. The end result is that tanks end up as a simplified version of melee dps, and healers end up as a simplified version of caster dps. Unsurprisingly, the end result is a one button turret simulator. The only way this will improve is if they revise the action budget for support and offensive actions.

[OdinelStarrei]

This is the downside of putting your votes in the Q+A thread behind an essay, rather than a specific question. The Living Dead question was quite literally just "Living Dead is terrible, when are you going to fix it?" and they did it within the same Live Letter. You may not have gotten a fix right in 6.0, but at least you'd have a better idea of the design plan going into 7.x.

The bulk of that essay talks about healer checks in harder content, and cites examples of healerless clears with skilled groups that had first cleared the fights using conventional strategies. There's a pretty large variation in healer skill in the playerbase, with some healers having cleared every bit of content on release for the past 10 years, and others who apparently think 24p raids and relic fates count as 'midcore' content. Because healer checks are pass-fail, this is one of the least flexible ways to test skill. Nobody wants to sit around while you raidwipe a group repeatedly in the process of figuring out your timings. Entry to harder content tends to be self-selecting because everyone knows this.

The question should have just been "The 'damage rotation' of healers is utterly boring, what are your plans to address this?" All supports end up with simplified damage rotations because a large portion of the action budget goes into defensive actions. The end result is that tanks end up as a simplified version of melee dps, and healers end up as a simplified version of caster dps. Unsurprisingly, the end result is a one button turret simulator. The only way this will improve is if they revise the action budget for support and offensive actions.

Have to unfortunately agree here. The reason I think we got an answer to what was possibly my question was because I was very blunt about it, gave them multiple avenues of escaping responsibility by not pining them to address a contentious topic (for some reason???), and I had the luck of multiple content creators talking to devs directly about it in the past. Direct, hard questions to the development team will never get answered by the common rabble. So, I ask "Are there going to be any general adjustments to Dark Knight, specifically for Living Dead and Blood Weapon?" That should have been it, but I go a little testy with them and said "Quite a number of people are unhappy with the job at present" or something along those lines. That alone probably should have gotten my question thrown in the bin, but I made a point to not be accusatory, even if I had been essentially gaslit by Yoshida during the EW Media Tour. My heart said "Ask them why they keep destroying all your favorite jobs, like (insert your favorite job here), give them some sources and some hard facts!" and I feasibly could've gotten a lot more likes on that post. But then Yoshida would never answer. So I approached it as neutrally and concisely as possible, while still saying that people, not myself, but others have been voicing complaints about these issues specifically. That's the best you can do when you have a QA whose tone ranges between "Why are you killing the game" and "When can I romance Y'shtola" And even when the question was addressed, I remember it being pretty handwavy. Something like "There will be adjustments soon." which is unironically more information than anyone had gotten in what, two+ years? Big win!

As much as I respect Recon and their posts (blessings be upon him wherever he may be), there was no adequate way to respond to his posts without outing the healer combat development as either malicious, ignorant or incompetent based on the wording of their question. Even if there was a perfect healer/tank/supports question that could concisely cover all of our bases without being too offensive to the development, be concise enough for an easy read, but deep enough to get to the nuance of our inquiry, I still doubt it would be answered, simply due to the optics around supports in general. I say this because of the response to the Kaiten debacle, where it was similarly wishy washy, not actually addressing any feedback, and ultimately, nothing of note being changed or reverted. That gave me all the proof I needed that they would not answer questions like the ones Recon and others pose in a satisfactory fashion for those most invested in their role.