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

[Turtledeluxe]

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.

I saw this commented on in an interview as well. When you really think about it, jobs and encounters were going through meaningful changes up to 5.0. I think when any player, including healer, comes back between 5.0 and 7.0, and feels like their job hasn't changed much or at all (aside from removing abilities or maybe buffing) it can feel stagnated. I think devs and some players aren't bothered by this because a. Their solution is to focus on encounters for gameplay excitement or b. You can play other jobs to avoid stagnant feeling jobs. But this these aren't solutions for people who main jobs or roles imo. I think some degree of change is needed for jobs periodiocally, even if it may not be well received, because that's better than just setting it out to pasture.

I kind of feel like the problem with XIV overall is that devs have shaped the game based on this idea of perfect player satisfaction and balance. And that's boring. Games should be designed based on creative vision. That's what made FF popular in the first place. You could argue jobs and combat are where they are now because of creative vision, but I don't buy that. The game feels like players are taking the wheel, and that's making it safe. I'm not sure who the loudest voices are that they are listening to-- when you think about the current healer rotations who asked for that? And why are they listening to them? The dev philosophy isn't communicated clearly and consistently likely because it does not exist. Devs are chasing the satisfaction of loud players who, tbh, probably just suck at games.

I would even argue that overly thinking about what players want is affecting the narrative, especially with respect to the latest patches. And unlike most, I liked the patch msq. But I want to hear the story writers want to tell, not one with scenes that seem entirely driven by Twitter Fandoms.

[Aravell]

I'm not sure who the loudest voices are that they are listening to-- when you think about the current healer rotations who asked for that? And why are they listening to them?

I'm not sure who asked for it, but there are a few people who say they really enjoy the current healer gameplay. One common thread among all those who say they enjoy what healers currently are though, is that they usually only started loving healers after ShB.

Look at the SCH mains after ShB. They want Energy Drain gone, they hate Dissipation, they call the fairy jank, and they hate DoTs. They hate everything that old SCH mains love about SCH. This is what SE is doing, they're changing jobs to appeal to a different type of player while not caring if the previous player the job catered to has anything else to enjoy. It's displacing a lot of players, old healer mains, old MCH mains, old BRD mains, and most recently, old SMN mains.

[Turtledeluxe]

I'm not sure who asked for it, but there are a few people who say they really enjoy the current healer gameplay. One common thread among all those who say they enjoy what healers currently are though, is that they usually only started loving healers after ShB.

Look at the SCH mains after ShB. They want Energy Drain gone, they hate Dissipation, they call the fairy jank, and they hate DoTs. They hate everything that old SCH mains love about SCH. This is what SE is doing, they're changing jobs to appeal to a different type of player while not caring if the previous player the job catered to has anything else to enjoy. It's displacing a lot of players, old healer mains, old MCH mains, old BRD mains, and most recently, old SMN mains.

I wish the dev team would be more transparent here. Are these players who play the game more than average? Do they spend more in the store? Were healer roles not being filled in duties or party finder? "Players asked for this" isn't the best answer. I'd like to know what their motivation is since, as far as I am aware, it hasn't really been addressed outside "appeasing players".

[ty_taurus]

I wish the dev team would be more transparent here. Are these players who play the game more than average? Do they spend more in the store? Were healer roles not being filled in duties or party finder? "Players asked for this" isn't the best answer. I'd like to know what their motivation is since, as far as I am aware, it hasn't really been addressed outside "appeasing players".

I don't remember the exact origin, but I recall Ren and Roe arguing about a topic quite a while back, and Ren linked some census data that indicated the healer population was at its lowest during Stormblood, increasing slightly for Shadowbringers and Endwalker, but that the healer population was at its highest during Heavensward. It was a long time ago, but the numbers that I recall I think are in this ballpark in regards to how much of the total player population were healers:

HW: 25%
SB: 17%
ShB: 19%
EW: 20%

Take these values with a grain of salt, because I don't remember where Ren got that information from and I could be misremembering them. If anyone is able to relocate that information, it would help to get a more reliable source to that data. Truthfully, I don't actually think the changes to the role have that big an impact on those values. I think it was more the influx of new players that started flooding in from Stormblood just weren't interested in healers. But my point is I don't think these changes are done to try and appease any particular group of players, becuase we're not really seeing any growth on the healer population. If anything, I think they're trying to make the healers as inoffensive as possible because there are too many different, loud voices revolving around the healers. I also think it has something to do with balance. For some reason, the only way they seem to know how to keep a role balanced is to homogenize that role. If everything is largely the same, then it's easy to ensure their performances are within a healthy margin of one another.

[Aravell]

I wish the dev team would be more transparent here. Are these players who play the game more than average? Do they spend more in the store? Were healer roles not being filled in duties or party finder? "Players asked for this" isn't the best answer. I'd like to know what their motivation is since, as far as I am aware, it hasn't really been addressed outside "appeasing players".

The reasoning of "appeasing players" and "we got feedback that people wanted this" is in regards to the homogenisation of buff timers to 120s. As far as I'm aware, the dev team has gone to great lengths to actually avoid talking about healers in any way ever since ShB launch. If you can provide where it's been said that the healer changes were done to appease players, I'd love to see it.

Take these values with a grain of salt, because I don't remember where Ren got that information from and I could be misremembering them. If anyone is able to relocate that information, it would help to get a more reliable source to that data. Truthfully, I don't actually think the changes to the role have that big an impact on those values. I think it was more the influx of new players that started flooding in from Stormblood just weren't interested in healers. But my point is I don't think these changes are done to try and appease any particular group of players, becuase we're not really seeing any growth on the healer population. If anything, I think they're trying to make the healers as inoffensive as possible because there are too many different, loud voices revolving around the healers. I also think it has something to do with balance. For some reason, the only way they seem to know how to keep a role balanced is to homogenize that role. If everything is largely the same, then it's easy to ensure their performances are within a healthy margin of one another.

Personally, I'd disregard those numbers outright because the only way to get such information would be the luckybancho surveys, and those only check if someone has a healer levelled to max. That's very different from someone actually playing healers, only SE would have the data on that and they're not showing us anything.

As for my opinion on why they made these changes, it's definitely to appeal to other people to play the healer role. They're definitely dissatisfied with the supports : DPS spread, so they must be trying to coax some DPS players to main healers. The problem is that, the way they want to coax players into playing healers is to massively simplify the healer jobs so literally anyone can play them. This causes 2 problems:

1) The people who mainly play healers before the changes have a chance of being uprooted and quit the role, resulting in a loss of healer players.
2) The DPS players that they manage to coax into playing healers may reach max level and decide that they don't like healers, then they go back to the DPS role again, resulting in a loss of healer players also.

In the end, the general simplification is because they want more people to play the role (this happened to tanks too) and the homogenisation of toolkits is likely for balance purposes. I think the simplification of the role isn't doing a good job of drawing players into the healer role as we've had some newer players make threads saying that they just got healer to max and found it intensely boring, but if we want healers to be fixed, the dev team has to see that what they're doing isn't working and is putting more people off than it is drawing people in.

[ty_taurus]

The reasoning of "appeasing players" and "we got feedback that people wanted this" is in regards to the homogenisation of buff timers to 120s. As far as I'm aware, the dev team has gone to great lengths to actually avoid talking about healers in any way ever since ShB launch. If you can provide where it's been said that the healer changes were done to appease players, I'd love to see it.



Personally, I'd disregard those numbers outright because the only way to get such information would be the luckybancho surveys, and those only check if someone has a healer levelled to max. That's very different from someone actually playing healers, only SE would have the data on that and they're not showing us anything.

As for my opinion on why they made these changes, it's definitely to appeal to other people to play the healer role. They're definitely dissatisfied with the supports : DPS spread, so they must be trying to coax some DPS players to main healers. The problem is that, the way they want to coax players into playing healers is to massively simplify the healer jobs so literally anyone can play them. This causes 2 problems:

1) The people who mainly play healers before the changes have a chance of being uprooted and quit the role, resulting in a loss of healer players.
2) The DPS players that they manage to coax into playing healers may reach max level and decide that they don't like healers, then they go back to the DPS role again, resulting in a loss of healer players also.

In the end, the general simplification is because they want more people to play the role (this happened to tanks too) and the homogenisation of toolkits is likely for balance purposes.

Fair enough.

Honestly, at this point, I don't get why we haven't heard any real response. Regardless of the scale, our subset of players is unhappy and downright angry about how the healer role has been handled for over 4 years now. If they refuse to do anything about that, then I really wish they'd talk about why. Be a little transparent. Discuss what sort of metrics are reinforcing the current status quo. Or tell me why Sage ended up the way it did after all the talk about what it was supposed to be. It was literally stated to be designed with the Shadowbringers healer feedback in mind, and yet it failed miserably to appeal to the people who gave that feedback.

[ForsakenRoe]

Be a little transparent. Discuss what sort of metrics are reinforcing the current status quo.

I imagine it'd end up being similar to the time where Yoshi-P said that 'SCH tended to DPS away and leave WHM to take care of the healing' (paraphrased), then right underneath is the screenshots of logs showing both doing great damage and roughly equal HPS (with SCH doing slightly more, ironically). It's almost like the dev team don't recognize the difference between healing and overhealing

The old stats you linked are interesting and possibly relevant though. I do remember them being posted, but I remember Ren prefacing them with 'I got them from WaybackMachine so they might not be reliable info'. But if we take them at face value, that SB saw a massive drop in healer playrate, they do line up with what we know about the time: Two DPS jobs were released at once with no tank or healer to dilute the 'migration' effect (in contrast to HW, where all three roles received a new job), the two jobs released were VERY big fan favourites (SAM and RDM), and several missteps were made with healer design at the beginning of the expansion's lifecycle (Lilies were a CHANCE from Cure1/Cure2, Confessions were stacks generated by singletarget heals and boosted AOE healing power, and SCH lost Energy Drain for a bit). Now we look at going into DT, and some of the same environmental factors are showing up: we have two DPS jobs releasing at once (though, one is 'original' and so not a 'fan favourite' to the extent the SB ones were, and one is still unknown for the next 60ish hours), and healer design has seen missteps in some people's eyes (for several years at this point). If DT doesn't do something big for healers to address the concerns, if we get 'SHB 3', then I would bet that a lot of healers will say 'twice is coincidence, thrice is a pattern' and move on to play another role (or quit altogether).

I know I've been playing basically zero FFXIV at this point, only doing occassional Frontlines to do the series and capping tomes. I did not 'burn out' of previous expansions to this degree, this is new to EW. Back in SB, I didn't even do Ultimates. Back then, I farmed out every O12S drop, every weapon, every chestpiece. Now, for P12S, I did enough reclears to get everyone in the pseudo-static I temp-joined one coffer and the mount, and we all immediately agreed to stop doing the fight together. I continued in PF until I had all healer weapons (as is my usual MO) and then quit the moment I had all four. Was O12S somehow more fun to do than P12S? Was Hello World somehow 'more interesting' or 'more fun' to resolve than Pangenesis or Classical Concepts? Or is the issue actually that the jobs themselves have lost their lustre, that their ability to carry a boring fight in terms of engagement has been reduced too far? I did not like O10S as a fight (Middy), it felt slow and lumbering, had a chance to just screw DRK over due to lack of Phys Mit CD access (by giving the DRK all of the phase 3 'you have to take the boss' debuffs), and a tether mechanic that was infuriatingly unresponsive. But I'd still do that fight ten times over with the DRK of that era (my main at the time), than do even one more reclear of P7S. Whoever said 'if they make the jobs simpler to execute, they can make the fights more varied and fun' has some explaining to do

I would expect that DT's '% of playerbase value' to be, as a conservative estimate, somewhere between SHB and SB's numbers. Partially because two new non-healer jobs means that the 'number of healer jobs compared to total' goes from 4/19 to 4/21, but also the migratory effect due to dissatisfaction. If it goes below SB levels then there's some serious questions to be asked, and some serious meetings to be scheduled to work out how to fix it. Ion across the MMO pond mains a Resto Shaman, we need Yoshi-P to main a healer for... at least a full tier (6.2-6.4 for example). Maybe if he did his 'Yoshida Check' on raid content as a healer, he'd notice that even in prog we're throwing a rather disproportionate amount of lightballs/lasers/stars/whatever Broil is meant to be per pull as compared to... any other GCD, really. But then again, he plays BLM, so he'd likely see it as 'well, I press Fire4 a lot and it feels cool, so surely pressing Glare a lot as WHM feels just as cool, right?'

[Turtledeluxe]

In the end, the general simplification is because they want more people to play the role (this happened to tanks too) and the homogenisation of toolkits is likely for balance purposes. I think the simplification of the role isn't doing a good job of drawing players into the healer role as we've had some newer players make threads saying that they just got healer to max and found it intensely boring, but if we want healers to be fixed, the dev team has to see that what they're doing isn't working and is putting more people off than it is drawing people in.

It's interesting to think about "drawing in DPS players" to tanks and healers because that goes back to the question of whether these roles were/were not being filled in duty finder or wherever. It's hard to argue without any data. If that were the case I'd also wonder what drove the philosophy behind simplifying vs some other approach-- like is it a resources issue or a creative constraint? It's also interesting to think about whether further homogenisation and simplification are even avoidable given that this is a game that is predicated on pushing every player to play every job/most jobs instead of maining the job they like, and that job pool keeps expanding. I'm definitely interested to see what's happening with DRG and the new jobs-- I've said before I think that will give us the indication of where the game is going long term. It's not because I want to be doom and gloom, but moreso because imo this game is too deep in its life cycle to course correct in any significant way. Every year it doesn't course correct makes it more resource intensive to revolutionize any given part of the game. Even with the graphics update for example--- it's easier to go back and update 10 years of content vs 15. I'm sure it would be easier to look at jobs and rotations with less jobs and even less levels. There's more inherent risk as well because more competing games release over time and they need their core base to stay subscribed. So we may just be stuck in this direction, unfortunately.

[Aravell]

It's interesting to think about "drawing in DPS players" to tanks and healers because that goes back to the question of whether these roles were/were not being filled in duty finder or wherever. It's hard to argue without any data. If that were the case I'd also wonder what drove the philosophy behind simplifying vs some other approach-- like is it a resources issue or a creative constraint? It's also interesting to think about whether further homogenisation and simplification are even avoidable given that this is a game that is predicated on pushing every player to play every job/most jobs instead of maining the job they like, and that job pool keeps expanding. I'm definitely interested to see what's happening with DRG and the new jobs-- I've said before I think that will give us the indication of where the game is going long term. It's not because I want to be doom and gloom, but moreso because imo this game is too deep in its life cycle to course correct in any significant way. Every year it doesn't course correct makes it more resource intensive to revolutionize any given part of the game. Even with the graphics update for example--- it's easier to go back and update 10 years of content vs 15. I'm sure it would be easier to look at jobs and rotations with less jobs and even less levels. There's more inherent risk as well because more competing games release over time and they need their core base to stay subscribed. So we may just be stuck in this direction, unfortunately.

The dev team wanting to coax people from the DPS role into tanking or healing is just my guess, we obviously cannot know for sure as only the dev team knows the reasoning for what they're doing. I'm just saying that it looks like what they're doing because of how they've been emphasising accessibility and how Yoshi P asked people to give healers a try. Although, my bigger concern at the moment is that they lack a vision of their own. You mentioned the things they're doing to jobs and attribute it to their vision for the game, but what if it isn't?

Notice how when people ask Yoshi P about any changes recently, he usually replies that the changes are due to player feedback. Now, he could be deflecting so the playerbase blames each other instead of going after him, that is a possibility. But what if they just have no clear vision of their own? What if they just do what they think the playerbase is asking for and just get confused when people react badly to it? That might be a prospect more scary than them just wanting to simplify the game as their vision.