Quote Originally Posted by Aravell View Post
The healer shortage would be fixed by restoring the healer role to a state that is enjoyed by the old healing veterans once again. You do not fix the healer shortage by endlessly catering to DPS players and hoping that they'll make the switch permanently. By gutting the healer playstyle into a form enjoyable by people that don't even want to heal in the first place, you are not increasing the healer population, you are simply replacing the existing healer population with a bunch of DPS players that don't have the proper mindset to play a healer, which will lead to more wipes and frustration due to their lack of recovery skills.
Trying to appeal to a new audience with something is fine. Doing so by alienating the original audience is absolutely insane in almost any walk of life, especially business decisions. I have no idea why SE decided to chase non-healer mains and try to effectively 'bribe' them onto the role with promises of easy rides through content, low-effort rotations and effectively instant queues for content, all at the cost of driving away players who enjoyed the role for what it was in the past. And especially especially, when we already know that a lot of mains of a role (in numbers large enough to demonstrate that it's a general pattern across the game) will stay with their role, often 'trying out the new thing' in another role (eg a DPS main hopping over to try SGE), but will go back to their original role after a while.

There was never any chance that people would drop DPS role in favour of these new-design healers in numbers big enough to justify SE's actions in the design of the role. And even if they did, the reason people derive enjoyment from DPS jobs even in casual content is that they have the option to optimize a nuanced rotation, independent of the fight design. If someone enjoys pushing their class to the limit as, say, a NIN or MNK, doing their burst window right and getting that massive dopamine when their whole opener crits, why in Nophica's Nips would they want to swap to a class who's optimization journey leads to 'instead of pressing your 'do damage' button 120 times in the fight, you can press your one 'do damage' button, 140 times!' There's no 'If I do X with my opener, I can get Y GCD as my final move before the phase ends', because the Y GCD is Glare/Broil, just like the 5 GCDs before it. There's no 'if I hold 2mins, I can use just the 60s, and we can do a re-opener 2min on the next phase instead' for something like TOP, because we don't HAVE a 60s. Hell, the WHM 'burst window', laughable thing that it is, is 'do your usual 2min thing, but faster'. You don't get new moves that are able to be used in the burst like WAR getting Primal Rend, or PLD getting Confiteor. You get 'Glare, but a bit faster'. We as players had to come up with putting Misery into the raidbuff window, it's probably not intended by SE. And if it IS intended by SE, then to me it proves that they have no idea what the heck they're doing with healer design, because it, as a system, is actively encouraging degenerate gameplay. 'Waste your healing resource in downtime! Blow your limited healing resource just before the 1min mark, even if it's overheal! All to keep your Misery aligned to the 2min mark, for more damage!' And the best part is, that 'more damage' isn't even attributed to the WHM, because it's attributed to the players who put the raidbuffs up.