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

[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?'