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

[Deceptus]

-This expansion's "new healer" is an Sch clone.

-Their GCD heals are as carbon copies as they can get down to the exact potency

They pretty much took everything people complained about scholar, made them better, and gave them to SGE.

No Fairy? Have double actions on a single button (regen + mitigation etc) <-- the biggest offender. Due to this SCH is just a clunkier version of SGE.
Fey Union that requires resources? Nah, let's just put a free buff on the tank that increases the passive healing Kardia does to make up for it.
Embrace macros? Nah, let's remove those a few expansions ago, repackage them as Kardia, and give it to SGE.
DPS options? Forget that's a "shield healer" thing and just make it a SGE thing instead.

[ty_taurus]

They pretty much took everything people complained about scholar, made them better, and gave them to SGE.

No Fairy? Have double actions on a single button (regen + mitigation etc) <-- the biggest offender. Due to this SCH is just a clunkier version of SGE.
Fey Union that requires resources? Nah, let's just put a free buff on the tank that increases the passive healing Kardia does to make up for it.
Embrace macros? Nah, let's remove those a few expansions ago, repackage them as Kardia, and give it to SGE.
DPS options? Forget that's a "shield healer" thing and just make it a SGE thing instead.

I wouldn't even say "Better" just more smoothbrain.

[OgruMogru]

They pretty much took everything people complained about scholar, made them better, and gave them to SGE.

I hate to bring up league because -UGH- but the Scholar to Sage dynamic reminds me so much of Sona and Seraphine. The do-over child.

[Aravell]

Job identity and lore took a backseat a long time ago.

Gameplay not fitting the lore kind of makes the jobs feel disjointed. It would be kind of like designing a job that's talked about in the game lore as being a highly technical job that's hard to master and it ends up spamming 1 button for 80% of the time.....oh wait

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Imagine my surprise when that one kid from post-ShB MSQ asks my WoL how he gets so strong & in my NG+ I just answered it my mind: Broiltherismitten!!!

Great design btw!! /s

[Aravell]

Imagine my surprise when that one kid from post-ShB MSQ asks my WoL how he gets so strong & in my NG+ I just answered it my mind: Broiltherismitten!!!

Great design btw!! /s

"How did you get so strong?"

"Well, I keep flinging some sparkly crystals around and do almost as much damage as an angry person with a large axe."

[Calysto]

I wouldn't even say "Better" just more smoothbrain.

Nah, they smoothbrained SCH, then made a "better" version, which is a bit smoother, but not by a lot.

[Maltothoris]

Of course lets not forget the while Abyssos debacle with this

Q2: For Savage this time there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question is that are you aware of the reason and is there anything you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue? (edited)

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........) things to reflect on......things to reflect on? I did see something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green river"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also have situations where there are lack of tank participations and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....this is hard to answer, I mean there's also the request we got that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, among other things that is asked of us as well...(another long pause) So in this case, in some circumstances due to certain wall that caused deviation (bias?) to occur, and this is definitely a possibility after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely...I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything about this matter what I am able to say at this point is "give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you can be multiple roles, and if you're playing in a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting in doing so....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "Healer slots being so open and available in PF due to so little healers willing to join recruitment". There's also a DPS equivalent of such meme, called "Red River", where the excessive amount of DPS slots open for Ranged role. The "Red River" meme usually applies to

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter? (edited)

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Ok, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".
Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.
He seems to know that by making this tier heal intensive he's definitely going to get people swarming at him about it lol

The reason I bring this up is that is all those long pauses. I bolded everything he said and not the questions or the little asides that the translator brought up.

[Hazama999]

Gotta say, I do miss those few instances when some job actions were integrated into the job story. Kinda gave those particular skills a bit more flavor... Guess the idea now is that we just kinda learn stuff on our own cause we're just that damn good but... eh... feels like something's missing there.

[Aravell]

The reason I bring this up is that is all those long pauses. I bolded everything he said and not the questions or the little asides that the translator brought up.

The things he said in that Q&A really does just point decisively to him being out of touch with the feedback of the playerbase.

There was widespread discontent after they simplified healer gameplay in ShB, not just here on the forums, but other places as well. But a lot of people were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, because many thought it was just a reset to a basic foundation so they can build upon it in later expansions.

Then came EW, everyone saw that there's been no evolution to their job kit at all, in fact, there were changes that made healing even easier, so many people just jumped ship entirely. However, EW saw a massive influx of new players, so the veterans that quit did get replaced by newer players. Then came the problem along with Abyssos, the dev team decided to increase the healing requirements, keep in mind that the healer playerbase at this moment is filled with a lot of newer players, this would naturally filter out those who can't handle it. And then the newest mistake was Anabaseios, some healers saw the healing requirements go up in Abyssos and took up healing again, except Anabaseios is mainly body checks, there are very few situations where you can skillfully save a party, because a mechanic will be missed and you will die.

In the end, I expect a downturn in the healer playerbase count come DT. They've chased off the newer players that can't deal with more damage with Abyssos and the veterans who came back for Anabaseios would've been put off by all the body checks which prevent them from saving bad parties from their own mistakes. They've really made a mess out of this role since ShB.