Quote Originally Posted by Nanananami773 View Post
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Thank you for sharing JP thoughts, it's very interesting see discussion between the two sides here!

When it comes to making video games, I think a common and successful tactic to make it "easy to play, hard to master." In other words, lowering the skill floor (the minimum skill level required) to invite new players to try it out, and raising the skill ceiling (the highest amount of skill expression possible) to keep veterans interested in the game. Making a game both accessible and engaging requires keeping the skill floor as low as possible, and raising the skill ceiling as high as possible.

Currently, I think the skill floor for healers, which can be considered just keeping the party alive, is low, which is a good thing. However, the skill ceiling, which can be considered any kind of optimization while the party is still alive, can be raised much higher.

Healers have an abundance of healing abilities that do the same job as what their GCD heals already did, for no cost of MP or damage. For example, AST's Celestial Opposition does exactly what Aspected Helios does. SCH's Fey Blessing can feel like Indominability, or even the new Seraphism feeling very similar to Dissipation except that you don't have to eat the fairy as a cost. In general, I feel like having healers depend more on GCD heals and replacing the redundant ability heals with more interesting utility or attack abilities is a good step towards raising the skill ceiling and keeping the skill floor low.

I don't want to exclude casual healers, but I believe that using GCD heals properly is a part of the skill floor, because you have to level up almost all of the healers using only GCD heals in lower level content. So that's why I believe we should start replacing overabundant healing abilities with other kinds of abilities. I think this kind of design for healer kits can support any direction taken with battle content, whether it stays relatively predictable to heal or if more damage intensive mechanics are introduced.