Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[Boblawblah]

I'm just a newbie healer, but imho, if you make the healing part of healers harder, you'll put more strain on less skilled players. More room for skill expression with dps however, and that lends itself to raising the ceiling, not forcing the floor up.

[NamiRocket]

I'm just a newbie healer, but imho, if you make the healing part of healers harder, you'll put more strain on less skilled players.

It's an MMORPG. It's not supposed to be brain dead.

I don't think it's asking a lot to want the gameplay loop for healers to be more engaging than spamming an extremely limited toolbox of DPS abilities 70% of the time, setting up your group with HoTs, shields/mitigations, and/or procs 20% of the time (mostly so you have to actively heal less), and actual healing when a mistake is made the last 10%. I don't think it's super hardcore or out of touch to suggest that the gameplay loop of healing in FFXIV could be made a little more complex and engaging than it currently is without pushing away newer players.

[Saraide]

It's an MMORPG. It's not supposed to be brain dead.

I don't think it's asking a lot to want the gameplay loop for healers to be more engaging than spamming an extremely limited toolbox of DPS abilities 70% of the time, setting up your group with HoTs, shields/mitigations, and/or procs 20% of the time (mostly so you have to actively heal less), and actual healing when a mistake is made the last 10%. I don't think it's super hardcore or out of touch to suggest that the gameplay loop of healing in FFXIV could be made a little more complex and engaging than it currently is without pushing away newer players.

The skill range between good and bad players is large. Just last week I saw one of the 3 alliances wipe to the exploding water sprites in thaleia. You'd be gating a lot of new players out long before you reach spicy levels for experienced healers. The devs are sort of willing to do that for savage as we have seen with harrowing hell. But doing that in normal will have consequences.

[Sebazy]

<snip>

Indeed. There's a balance to be struck here, IMO SE has gone a bit too far down the braindead road at times which has caused a weird situation where the difficulty floor in mainstream endgame content pretty much begins and ends with finding the DF queue button. When the challenge entails merely not getting kicked for inactivity, even the easiest Extreme is going to be a shock to the system coming from that.

My biggest problems with these sorts of debates is that we always see people trying to push one extreme or another, trying to push a black and white solution as the answer when it really isn't.

Despite what some might want to take away from my boring essay above, I'm not trying to suggest that healing requirements shouldn't be increased. They absolutely should. Whomever signed off Byregot should have an incoming damage timeline emailed to them as a daily digest to remind them never to allow anything like that near the live servers again.

The thing is, there's only so much mileage you can get out that alone. If we really want to solve healer gameplay once and for all, more things need to change, not least the design philosophy SE's job design team uses when they tackle healers. We need something more interesting to do when all the healing is done. It doesn't even have to be DPS. It just needs to be A) Engaging and B) Worthwhile.

[Aravell]

Indeed. There's a balance to be struck here, IMO SE has gone a bit too far down the braindead road at times which has caused a weird situation where the difficulty floor in mainstream endgame content pretty much begins and ends with finding the DF queue button. When the challenge entails merely not getting kicked for inactivity, even the easiest Extreme is going to be a shock to the system coming from that.

My biggest problems with these sorts of debates is that we always see people trying to push one extreme or another, trying to push a black and white solution as the answer when it really isn't.

My main problem with certain arguments is that they push the increase of healing requirements as the only possible solution, well, some would be satisfied if that happens, but the people who dislike the current 2 button DPS kit would still be dissatisfied, possibly for another 2-4 years because SE is very, very slow at making changes.

I can understand that people want to see the thing they want the most, but my main question is, what possible good reason is there for blocking the evolution of the damage kit while evolving the healing kit other than "I don't like doing damage"?