Quote Originally Posted by Evergrey View Post
For in the end, the more who can have have a "good time" playing the better.
It's about the quantity and not quality apparently.
The problem is, while new players might join the role due to these changes, veteran players leave due to those same changes. So, all you're doing is trading player for player, and the net result is that the playerbase of the role doesn't shift as much as predicted, while also suffering from a 'brain drain' as the players who are skilled at the role give up on it. Effectively, they're sacrificing quality for quantity, and not even getting the quantity they wanted to get. Making it a bad deal for them and for the players because eventually, those 'new players' will become veterans too, and then they'll be in the same position us current veterans are. Then does the cycle repeat? Simplifying the gameplay even more, to appeal to yet another lower rung of the ladder? Eventually SE will run out of ladder to pull from.

More sensible would be to design the healers to have depth to strive for, and to give the 'struggling' players aid via the design of the job, so that they can more easily output a larger amount of the job's potential.

An anecdote would be, if I can swim well, and someone else cannot, is it fair to remake the swimming pool to be more shallow so that the weaker swimmer can feel more 'safe' (but limiting my swimming ability because I'm tall), or is it more sensible to give the weaker swimmer some sort of swimming aid (eg armbands, pool noodles etc) so that they can swim in the pool together with everyone else, without their skill being an impact on everyone who's confident in their swimming ability? Because when I was younger, I was the latter person, I couldn't swim well. And the instructors kept me, and some 5 other pupils (when we were like 7) in the kiddie pool. I felt awful, that they were being kept from having fun learning in the 'adult size pool', because I couldn't learn. I even asked them to let my classmates progress, and leave me alone to my failure, but the instructors couldn't even let me have that. And the worst part was, because I was so tall for my age, I wasn't able to learn in that kid's pool, because it wasn't big enough to support someone of my height. The instructors thought they were keeping me safe. Little did they know, they caused me to never learn how to swim. I ended up teaching myself in high school (age 13ish), in a proper size pool where I could freely move my legs.

So, I resent the idea that SE should decide to hold a job's design potential back (eg healers having any variety in damage actions removed in SHB), because someone else might be 'less skilled'. I've been that 'less skilled' person.