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

[HappyHubris]

One thing that I don’t think gets bought up enough with healers amongst the other 10,000 issues they have is that the modern healers don’t feel like classes a WOL would use

Can any of us legit imagine meteor in the wedding cake gown AF gear throwing out UWU lily spells. We don’t even feel like WOL’s we feel like the actual WOL’s UWU cheer squad here to remind them of the power of friendship in their darkest hour

How is it in a game that goes to such lengths to characterise what the WOL is they just utterly fail to make all classes feel like classes the WOL would actually play

Honestly, my WHM feels like a WoL - impressive casting animations. It's just that there aren't enough attacks to really feel like someone who would dominate a battlefield.

[PercibelTheren]

All the more reason for them to just effin’ get rid of the role restrictions off the glamour system. Not only it’ll benefit healers, it’ll benefit everybody else.

I personally have no issue wearing the conventionally feminine gears. They’re just a piece of clothing to me—they don’t necessarily define much of my character. I do have issue if that is what they come up with 9 out of 10 times when designing new set of gears while at the same time having good amount of diversity reserved for other roles instead. I don’t need anymore favoritism/double standard happening outside job gameplay design space. Istg we’re given white tablecloths perfectly represents how our entire role is made of salt.

I even *like* the pretty robes. My issue is that 95% of them aren't pretty. Most robes look like pretty dresses on female characters but on male characters it looks like a hideous potato sack.

[Valence]

But I'm saying that no amount of simplifying draws in enough people in that hypothetical. The state of DF gets critical due to lack of healer participation because almost no one is willing to put up with the boring gameplay.

Counterpoint: why are they all flocking to SMN which is essentially the same boring gameplay? Why the most played healer by far has always consistently been WhM, the most boring of them all? Why every time something gets dumbed down to oblivion, the playing rates dramatically increase?

( the questions are rhetorical )

[Tint]

I even *like* the pretty robes. My issue is that 95% of them aren't pretty. Most robes look like pretty dresses on female characters but on male characters it looks like a hideous potato sack.

They look like potato sacks on Lalafell too.

I was looking for a nice dress to wear and being a WHM main it should be easy I thought.

But there actually are no dresses, just oversized robes.

[Supersnow845]

It’s obvious the modern healer job gear designer designs almost exclusively around the shorter non lala female races (so hyur, miqote and au ra)

The robes hug them relatively well and pieces are designed to complement each other

On males the robes that hug the females sit in baggy waves and any sort of short skirt or shorts designed to accentuate the boots are replaced with baggy pants

I’m generally of the opinion that no non lala specific gear looks good on lala’s but long flowing robes and gowns certainly looks the worse

[AnimaAnimus]

This person clearly never played summoner before EW. There was a lot to juggle besides spamming ruin and hitting a pet rotation every minute.

Not necessarily. I have experienced many many man smn that only ever spammed ruin and ignored all dots and everything else between ARR and ShB. Talking with a few ruin smns usually their thought process was since they didn't read or couldn't comprehend the tool tips and they couldn't see dot damage as readily as ruin, that dots didn't really do enough damage so they were pointless to use as were anything associated with them. Other moves like Shadow Flare were "too hard" to place so that was out. Basically they just didn't take the time to learn the class and made a lot of assumptions and then complained about the class being too simple or boring. Kinda like ice mages, songless/dotless bards, cure1 only whms or rdm who don't use their physical rotation.

[HappyHubris]

Not necessarily. I have experienced many many man smn that only ever spammed ruin and ignored all dots and everything else between ARR and ShB. Talking with a few ruin smns usually their thought process was since they didn't read or couldn't comprehend the tool tips and they couldn't see dot damage as readily as ruin, that dots didn't really do enough damage so they were pointless to use as were anything associated with them. Other moves like Shadow Flare were "too hard" to place so that was out. Basically they just didn't take the time to learn the class and made a lot of assumptions and then complained about the class being too simple or boring. Kinda like ice mages, songless/dotless bards, cure1 only whms or rdm who don't use their physical rotation.

Any class is boring if you use 25% of the toolkit. Indeed on new SMN you could just spam ruin and ignore the summons.

[HappyHubris]

Counterpoint: why are they all flocking to SMN which is essentially the same boring gameplay? Why the most played healer by far has always consistently been WhM, the most boring of them all? Why every time something gets dumbed down to oblivion, the playing rates dramatically increase?

( the questions are rhetorical )

Honestly, I preferred healing on WHM, because it scratched that Final Fantasy / generic fantasy aesthetic so, so much better than the other classes. Mechanical complexity didn't have much to do with it, and SCH never felt like it had enough extra complexity over WHM to use it instead. When the fights mean that you're mostly blasting your 1 key, it's sort of moot.

[ZiraZ]

Counterpoint: why are they all flocking to SMN which is essentially the same boring gameplay? Why the most played healer by far has always consistently been WhM, the most boring of them all? Why every time something gets dumbed down to oblivion, the playing rates dramatically increase?

( the questions are rhetorical )

Because once a healer gives up on healing they can pick SMN and it's like playing healing but without worrying about the health bars. Similar situation when a melee player gives up on crit savage and just chooses a phys range so they can autopilot and brain off.
Also WHM is not the most played healer by far, its barely above the rest in TOP, 2nd in DSR, 3rd on Savage raids, and equal to Sage in easier stuff like Zeromus.

[Valence]

I refuse to believe that the SMN bloated numbers of players is due to ex healers picking a new job... But who knows.

I mean you can see the same pattern on every job rework. PLD has higher numbers than before the rework. It's not that huge but it's there. MCH has more numbers than before SHB. DNC has never been as popular as well. MNK doesn't, because it hasn't been dumbed down. It's not just because healers decide to pick up easy DPS jobs.

Occam's Razor would probably be more about 2 main reasons:
- Path of least resistance, especially in raiding (I don't have casual numbers anyway, unless we look at alliance raid charts maybe).
- The majority of people don't give a crap about job intricacies, which incidentally tends to make SE right with the current direction they give to the game...