I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex DPS rotations

[Aravell]

Personally speaking, I don't play the healer role for any "noble" or "selfless" reasons, I play it because I'm not interested in wiping in fights due to people not recovering a situation that is clearly recoverable. While the melee DPS are better designed and I have been enjoying MNK, I can't exactly salvage a bad situation as a melee DPS.

I do agree that the latest trend appears to be setting the weakest member of your static to play the healer role though. It makes the most sense because healers have been getting responsibilities stripped from them repeatedly, they just need to drop enough heals to clear the content.

I’ll get some good laugh if they take away SCH’s Expedient one day only to give it to one of the Phys Ranged under the “we don’t think healer should have this”-pretext.

It's going to be given to BRD, because they keep asking for in-combat Peloton. They'll call it Battle March or something and it will just steal directly from Expedient.

[KageTokage]

I'm honestly not sure what they can even give healers in 7.0 that won't feel redundant that isn't either more offensive abilities or more support/utility.

We already have so much healing and mitigation that you're pretty much always going to have something ready for a given mechanic.

[ty_taurus]

I understand that significant changes are needed to supports in general. I've been arguing in favor of tank positioning responsibilities for years, so I'm no stranger to this. I've seen a lot of the same faces here post about healer concerns across multiple years, fighting the same fight endlessly. My question is simple: why?

For my part, I’ve stopped playing healer completely since Shadowbringers apart from giving Sage a fair chance in the first couple patches of 6.X, doing the first raid tier (and the new PVP). So I’m not playing the martyr for the sake of the community. In fact, a part of me hopes the healer situation crashes and burns, because from the fire comes fertile land. If the situation were so dire that the design team were forced to respond, we could see really worthwhile and meaningful change.

To put it plainly, I criticize healers because I care. I want to love this game, and I want to love healing. I enjoy some jobs like Dancer to some degree, but it does not fulfill me like how Scholar used to. Until I see chance I will not stop talking about it, or until I quit the game because of the lack of healers, which is something that will probably happen in DT if nothing changes.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I'm honestly not sure what they can even give healers in 7.0 that won't feel redundant that isn't either more offensive abilities or more support/utility.

We already have so much healing and mitigation that you're pretty much always going to have something ready for a given mechanic.

Obviously, the only thing the people designing combat know what to give healers. More OGCD heals.

[ty_taurus]

Obviously, the only thing the people designing combat know what to give healers. More OGCD heals.

And bosses with 2 minute intervals between two raidwide AOEs with 4 dinky auto attacks for the tank, and slow, massively telegraphed avoidable AOEs for the party.

[IDontPetLalas]

I can appreciate the aesthetic choice, sure. But looking at the thread title, that's not really the point, is it?

I think the value of those 'support' elements, at present, is vastly oversold, and deep down everyone knows that real value comes from doing more damage. Again, that's pretty much the point of the thread topic. In an ideal world, they would fix all this and make all three roles equally important. In practice, that isn't happening (in fact, I think if FFXIV was released in current times, it wouldn't be a trinity MMO, but that's another story). If you want to be valued for what you do, then why haven't you switched yet?

I believe you've already received some very good answers as to why it isn't an acceptable choice for many people to simply abandon a role. I'd just like to add my voice., with the addition of saying that while you've phrased this as "In an ideal world, they would fix all this and make all three roles equally important.", in actuality the bar has been even lower in my view, even some recognition of involvement of healer changes in public discussions like the FanFest, the addition of a dedicated designer for healers would be promising changes. Some incremental communication of changes or even a vision would be a plus.

Instead the healer role is the only one that does not have a dedicated designer. It seems to be the only role where it is acceptable for Square to say "we do not what to do with this job" (SCH) and walk away, or even have the lead designer repeatedly defer job design questions in interviews for years.

[Lyth]

...

The recurring answer seems to be 'we're actually playing other roles now', which is a sensible one. Like taurus suggested, the role will likely have to fall completely flat before a change in the design philosophy can be initiated.

But I also don't believe that the average player is specifically in it for a 'challenge for its own sake'. What it really comes down to is the balance of effort and reward. As long as support roles remain sufficiently 'comfy', there's always going to be a subset of the playerbase that migrates to them, simply for the opportunity to weave watching their favorite shows inbetween GCD heals. If the healer population doesn't plummet next expansion, it's unlikely to happen in the long term. I think as an individual, you have to make a conscious decision on what you are willing to invest your time in.

I'm not so sure about the job designers claim, though. I remember something from an interview back in Stormblood that has been paraphrased for many years, but I haven't seen anything recently about the number and distribution of designers. If you can point me to a source from this expansion, I'd be interested to see it.

I do think that more needs to be done to communicate job design philosophy with the playerbase directly. It'd be great if when it comes time to do the job showcases, that they break it down into a number of smaller reveals by role, and really take the time to discuss their design philosophy on each (especially since we're going up to 23 jobs next expansion). The Endwalker job reveal itself was several hours long, so they're bound to cut corners in discussing some jobs if they try to get through it all in a single sitting.

The SCH issue strikes me as relatively obvious, but you do have to read between the lines a bit. Historically, SCH has generally had a dedicated spot in raid comps. I've watched the dev team attempt to stealth nerf the job between expansions since Stormblood, and they're consistently forced to backpedal from the backlash. This time around they just turned it into its own subrole, to split the SCH fanbase up. It's an effective strategy, and they've done it before.

[IDontPetLalas]

If you decide to to play a game that is advertised as a holy trinity style game then your quality standard may be that "as long as one role is acceptable for me, that's fine". However that may well not a "sensible" view to other people. Other people may well expect that each role is given a sufficient, dedicated number of resources and no role is overshadowed by the other roles. If I had a model, it would be a triangle instead of the distorted balance that we have now.

Regarding to your request about the job designers? I don't want to seem uncooperative however it's not just something I invented. For one thing, in the helare forums , around 2 years ago, when one mega-thread started, there was a comparison of the job designers by name from at least 3 games, compared to FFXIV. All of their names can be found, and guess who had the least? That's right- FFXIV- and jobs have been added since then.

Also, I am being completely sincere when I do not comprehend your statements regarding SCH. I don't think Square is that Machiavellian. In particular, when you discuss "sub-role" , are you actually trying to say that the SGE design was meant to set SCH players against each other? So I believe it's really more of a question of them having a mis-translation of some player feedback and their translating that through the views of DPS and tank viewpoints, not from dedicated healers.

[ForsakenRoe]

I honestly can't think of a single RPG where you press 1 button for 80% of your gameplay and it being considered good gameplay.

'press 1 button for 80% of the gameplay' is when I'm doing auto-battle to grind XP/money in SMT games. And even then, it requires more attention/reaction than healers do atm, on account of the chance of running into some bozo demon that reflects physical damage and if I don't react in time I'll oneshot myself on it

It's going to be given to BRD, because they keep asking for in-combat Peloton. They'll call it Battle March or something and it will just steal directly from Expedient.

Now this, I've actually posted as an idea before, but not just as 'take it from SCH, give to BRD', but as a new way to customize playstyle via Materia. If a system were made where you could pick one of three 'traits' that modify your supporting skills in some way (eg they're not DPS-output related, else there'd be 'the locked-in choice'), one of the Materia choice 'traits' for phys-ranged could be something akin to 'Peloton now functions in combat, but has 15s duration and a 2min CD'. This gives groups the potential to have the benefit of a SCH's Expedient, without the SCH. However, for groups that DO have a SCH, they have Expedient naturally, and so the phys-ranged player's 'trait Materia' choice can be dedicated to something else, such as 'Repelling Shot clears the BRD of any Bind or Heavy effects', or MCH getting 'Dismantle's CD is reduced to 90s'

This would cause an avenue to open up for 'players communicate with one another about their strategy' and so SE cannot have that, on account of 'the potential toxicity' or some such

I'm honestly not sure what they can even give healers in 7.0 that won't feel redundant that isn't either more offensive abilities or more support/utility.

We already have so much healing and mitigation that you're pretty much always going to have something ready for a given mechanic.

As I've said previously, my predictions for WHM are thus:
92 - New Glare/Dia rank, +10 potency
94 - trait that gives Divine Benison a third charge
96 - new skill, Salt and Light, causes Asylum to flare up and deal 400p of healing to anyone inside
98 - trait that finally gives Tetra a second charge
100 - Afflatus Purgation, 2min CD that fires a line that is damage neutral. It's literally Pneuma, but instead of 600p it's 500p, and then 500p as a 15s regen

[Lyth]

I've seen that reference about job designers before, and it dates back to a Stormblood interview. The reason why I asked for a source is because I wanted to know what time period you were specifically referring to. I am genuinely interested in knowing how their job design process currently works, so if there's an up to date reference I would be definitely interested in seeing it. I tend to go to the source for most things, simply because I want to understand what's actually being said without alteration.

The SCH observation is a personal one that I've noticed from watching the game across multiple expansions. SE is extremely reluctant to do direct nerfs to jobs, sometimes at the cost of game balance. They would much sooner employ a system of 'upward balance' through job buffs alone, just to avoid the backlash. But the difficulty with this approach is that it leads to a gradual power creep that ends up being addressed inbetween expansions.

Job nerfs (stealth nerfs) typically happen during these transition periods when nobody has a sense of what any of the potencies and stat values mean. This is typically where they go after perennially powerful and dominant jobs. These jobs tend to stay in power perpetually because there's a strong and vocal backing from the fanbase, which in turn fuels their popularity.

The problem with this approach is that people catch on to the nerfs, and then start demanding buffs, until they're back in the position that they originally started off in. Over the course of each expansion cycle, you see this pattern repeat itself. WAR and SCH are two of the longest running targets of this.

This time, they opted for a slightly different strategy. They turned SCH into its own subrole, and created a new flavor, SGE. Now, you no longer have a unified fanbase demanding revisions. The same would be true if they introduced in a lifestealing Hammer tank as a counterpoint to WAR (and I would not be surprised if that is next in the cards for 8.x). In the long term, these sorts of approaches are good for the state of the game because they ensure comp diversity.