#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Eorzean_username]

My gut feeling is that most players would prefer something like SMN + 4/5 healing buttons versus 14/15 healing buttons + 4/5 DPS buttons.

I know this is a bit delayed, but I've been wanting to respond to this, since it's a very interesting question in the current context.

And as far as "gamers in general", as a nebulous whole population on planet Earth, I think that your instinct may well be correct.

But the problem here is that, while we don't have "hard numbers", there is definitely some segment of the FFXIV Healer population that quite literally and very confidently will assert that they'd rather have the latter of your two options. Anecdotally at least, I've seen such affirmations come up multiple times, not just in discussion sites, but also just conversations flying-around in-game.

I think that such opinions may also be a "visibly" larger portion on the JP side of the discussions, but I don't have enough personal experience with JP viewpoints to be able to state that confidently. It's an impression that I've seen carried-over by players who have taken part in or observed JP discussions, though.

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If you then assume that the developers are consciously trying not to upset anyone — no matter how unrealistic that sort of approach is in actual practise — then it puts the design situation in a position where assumptions about gameplay engagement that seem "obvious" can actually be incorrect for some portion of the Healer population, who genuinely would prefer to receive nothing but Panhaima 3, Quantum Physick, Supercollective Unconscious, and High Cure 1 as their 8.0 upgrades, even if there's mathematically or objectively absolutely no need for them in the course of most encounters in the game.

Because, for some FFXIV Healer Players, their Job identity literally is just, "I can Heal things", and they consider an expansion to only be providing them interesting upgrades if those upgrades provide more Healing.

It's hard to remember now, but there was actually a vocal backlash from some Healers during Heavensward about Level 51-60 providing offensive upgrades, complaining that they wanted Healing tools, not DPS tools. I think that the debates that combusted from the HW design led to a lot of the Stormblood design decisions for Healers, which in retrospect you can now see as just a "middle-step" along the way to what the developers really wanted to do, which finally "finished" in Shadowbringers.

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But you can't just assume "Well, then the developers are doing the correct thing", because it needs to be remembered that there were also a lot of Healers during Heavensward who reacted to upgrades like Broil, Aero 3, and Assize with excitement, and prided themselves on being able to turn into avatars of destruction while inside Cleric Stance. Even today, there's endless memes about the thrill that even the most "casual" White Mage gets from activating Afflatus Misery.

I think that we're still seeing the fallout of the fact that SE basically, in ARR and HW, provided players with a very different approach to MMO Healer design — or at least in-combat functionality — compared to traditional MMOs, even WOW. And for some of the audience, that design felt fresh and interesting and fun.

But for other parts of the audience, it felt like a betrayal of the expectations that they had been conditioned-into when imagining what it means to choose a "Healer Class".

And so, following the sustained HW backlash from a certain portion of Healers, SE slowly seemed to acknowledge, "I suppose people are correct. Our Healers don't feel like other Healers in other MMOs," and then ultimately seemed to decide, "And that difference is a bad thing."

But by that point, SE had already built the fundamentals of their entire system around a certain vision for Healing in FFXIV. And rather than properly-dismantling that system and rebuilding it from scratch to support "real Healing", SE instead just took the corner-cutting approach of removing Healers DPS tools, no longer giving them new DPS tools as expansion upgrades, and began a habit of giving them more and more Healing tools — all as a naïve attempt to imitate what made "Healers feel like Healers" in other games.

I think that the compounding effects of that have been a slow downward-spiral ever since, and at this point, I'm not exactly sure how it can be effectively-resolved without either keeping one portion of Healers perpetually-disappointed, provoking the other portion of Healers that like it this way, or refactoring the entire combat system to an extent that I don't think CBU3 has either the resources or the appetite to engage in.

Wait hang on one last post because this is incredibly funny to me, what if they added a button to warrior that did a lot of damage to everything in the area. Mobs, the boss, and of course, party members.

Now, see, this is productive. That would be unironically entertaining and on-theme.

It would never fly in modern FFXIV design, because anything that could generate "blame" is clearly seen as taboo to CBU3, but that's the sort of creative Action design that MMOs used to liberally-experiment with in the more "Wild West" days of the genre.