#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Aravell]

The continuous reduction of veteran healers is an inevitable consequence of the current design direction. You cannot design a job that can be mastered in 30 minutes and expect people to stick with it long-term.

As a result, there's not going to be a lot of people that want to stick to the role for a long time once they realise how there's nothing to strive for or improve, people don't tend to like playing a job where they can't get any better after a short period of time.

That said, if we go by PF trends, the role seems to also be failing to draw very many people into it.

[Packetdancer]

It depend what you mean by ''balanced for the top player'' I've never really seen a game like that at all tbh.

WildStar.

Sort of.

To elaborate: WildStar was made by a bunch of the original WoW devs and a bunch of the original Everquest devs. And there were a lot of old-school raiders who were like "oh man, it would be amazing if you had those 40-man raids like in the old days, that you really had to work to unlock and clear!" And the devs listened, and they tuned the entire endgame around those (loud) requests. Moreover, the fact that they made the endgame combat pretty tricky led to a rather dramatic difficulty curve that was more like a difficulty cliff after a certain level.

As you might guess from the fact that WildStar is not still around, this did not end well.

Because it turned out that:

1. The loud old-school raiders were vastly outnumbered by people who just wanted to play an MMO, and when they suddenly slammed into a difficulty wall where the combat difficulty suddenly scaled dramatically upwards, many went "nope."
2. Those who stuck around past the difficulty increase got to endgame, and found there was little to do but the large-scale raiding, so then many of them noped out.
3. And even the loud old-school raiders had things like "jobs" and "families" and "social obligations" and it turned out that a solid chunk even of that group didn't actually want what they said they wanted.

Mind you, the focus on Serious Endgame Raiding to the exclusion of everything else was not the only decision that led to WildStar's downfall, but it was sure a contributing factor. And while it wasn't exactly "balancing for this specific group," it is sure an example of "heeding the requests of the 'top players' to the exclusion of all else can be harmful."

(Despite its flaws, I do miss WildStar, though.)

[Kleeya]

Even if a shortage of competent healers leading to longer waiting times was true, and not some confirmation bias of some people seeing only what they want to see, wouldn't that be a risk of SE, looking at their metrics, thinking "omg making the fights harder was such a mistake ! We have to make everything easier again, nobody want to be accountable for healing these things", "there is so many wipes because of doom debuffs... seems like we can not use this mechanic anymore, the players are not gifted enough to handle it" or "the healers are struggling so much to heal people this xpac, we have to make GNB and DRK on par with the other tanks when it comes to healing, and add more survivability tools to dps jobs !" ?

You know, exactly the contrary of what the #healerstrike is asking for XD

Joke aside, WAR's survivability is not always a bad thing. I did some treasure maps yesterday, and because of bad RNG it did take more than three hours to end up in the final room only one time. Most of the group, not knowing the encounter, did die right at the beginning of the fight, including the only healer, letting only me (as the tank) and one dps alive. If i wasn't on WAR we wouldn't have get the clear, and people would have been so pissed off that some of them would have think twice before wanting to do some maps again, instead of ending up thinking that doing all these efforts did end well.

[Ramiee]

I don't think those 2 games are near perfection in term of balancing, but I rarely see people bringing real proof that some game are balanced around top player.

Idk about league but at least for WoW they do have a massive bias for top players. It's been known for years the team purposely overtune the mythic raids so streamer raid teams can have a more interesting race which makes anyone below this group suffer because it's literally unplayable until after the race is done when it gets nerfed down for the normal mythic players to play.
They also do take suggestions from these players on how to balance their game but mostly specifically for raiding which can have some drop down effects that leads to the balance of a class sucking.

[Supersnow845]

Even if a shortage of competent healers leading to longer waiting times was true, and not some confirmation bias of some people seeing only what they want to see, wouldn't that be a risk of SE, looking at their metrics, thinking "omg making the fights harder was such a mistake ! We have to make everything easier again, nobody want to be accountable for healing these things", "there is so many wipes because of doom debuffs... seems like we can not use this mechanic anymore, the players are not gifted enough to handle it" or "the healers are struggling so much to heal people this xpac, we have to make GNB and DRK on par with the other tanks when it comes to healing, and add more survivability tools to dps jobs !" ?

You know, exactly the contrary of what the #healerstrike is asking for XD

Joke aside, WAR's survivability is not always a bad thing. I did some treasure maps yesterday, and because of bad RNG it did take more than three hours to end up in the final room only one time. Most of the group, not knowing the encounter, did die right at the beginning of the fight, including the only healer, letting only me (as the tank) and one dps alive. If i wasn't on WAR we wouldn't have get the clear, and people would have been so pissed off that some of them would have think twice before wanting to do some maps again, instead of ending up thinking that doing all these efforts did end well.

If there is a healer shortage in PF and at the same time there is a big thing about healerless week 2 clears and mountains of feedback about healers and square still responds by making them easier then it shows 2 things

1) square are utterly incompetent in every sense of the word
2) it’s final confirmation they don’t care about healers so we may as well abandon the role now

[Ritsugamesh]

Nothings going to give until enough players quit the game.

Sorry, but that's just the way business works. People pay, business is good. People stop paying, business make changes so they're willing to pay again.

At this point, no one is quitting. They're switching to other jobs at most.

Tired of healer design? Play tank. A tank not using their stance is a very sturdy DPS with healing and mitigation utility. If the amount of DPS a group of tanks can put out is sufficient to beat DPS checks, there is no reason to play anything else.

Completely agree, as sad as it is. I'd have unsubbed a long time ago but I still hold so much love for the game (played since 1.0) - it's been my mmo home for a decade now, and I have roots with my houses (personal and FC, not one of those multi-home legacy jobbies) and the like. I'm essentially trapped to keep subbing if I ever want to play in the future so I don't lose my homes and progress, or I completely cut loose and stop.

I know it's just a house, but also, it's a house in FFXIV. That stuff is harder than savage!

[Aravell]

Nothings going to give until enough players quit the game..

This isn't even remotely true. MNK gets reworked every expansion, are you saying that every MNK player unsubs and quits after one expansion?

If the job numbers drops low enough, they will take a look. It doesn't require people to unsub.

[Sharawiwi]

This isn't even remotely true. MNK gets reworked every expansion, are you saying that every MNK player unsubs and quits after one expansion?

If the job numbers drops low enough, they will take a look. It doesn't require people to unsub.

"AST is the least played healer in EW"
-> "Let's remove everything that attracts the current AST mains because it will surely bring non AST players to pick the job and stick with it !"
"AST is even less played now, how could this happen ?

I really really don't understand SE reasoning...

And yeah I know it's somewhat popular in savage (at least during week 1 it was), because the balance of the jobs is so bad people feel forced to pick it for the dps (even if it's not needed because the dps checks are laughable).

[Aravell]

"AST is the least played healer in EW"
-> "Let's remove everything that attracts the current AST mains because it will surely bring non AST players to pick the job and stick with it !"
"AST is even less played now, how could this happen ?

I really really don't understand SE reasoning...

And yeah I know it's somewhat popular in savage (at least during week 1 it was), because the balance of the jobs is so bad people feel forced to pick it for the dps (even if it's not needed because the dps checks are laughable).

I'm pretty sure AST has a higher play rate now not because it's more fun, but because it's still a straight up better WHM and now it no longer gives you carpal tunnel when played for long periods of time.

[Sharawiwi]

I'm pretty sure AST has a higher play rate now not because it's more fun, but because it's still a straight up better WHM and now it no longer gives you carpal tunnel when played for long periods of time.

Just checked, still the less played in savage healer, with at the very least a 10k players margin from the second less played healer, and this despite AST dealing a whopping 700+ more rdps than every other healer.
If you correct with this bias + the casualisation bias you mentioned, ie being a carbon copy of WHM but strictly better, it really seems we've lost a chunk of AST players, and this population will rapidly plummet the moment AST is nerfed.

Maybe I'm mistaken tho, I haven't done a full study about it (we need to hire a data scientist !!).