The death of savage raiding and SE's lack of action

[SerephinaBlossom]

Most of Us healers are in Static's.
because why would we want to sign up for Party finder where we are first to blame when we can raid with a group and enjoy the people we are with.
Yeah healers are around we just aren't using Party finder because we have groups.

I like to enjoy my game not get thrown under the bus when a wipe goes bad thanks. But hopefully when we are done with our groups we can come help otherwise find a static?

[Havenchild]

So now you are arguing the shield healer should have mitigation responsibility there should just be less mitigation overall across the entire party like in SB (which is what we have been arguing for the last 5 pages)

I thought your point was the healer should be irrelevant and have no responsibility

Do you HONESTLY think that shifting the entire paradigm of the trinity is easier and more worthwhile than just making healers good to play for healer mains

No my point has always been with CURRENT encounter and job design, you need to lower responsibility overall of something that healers deal with to entice more people to play the role while also not crushing the supply of players that already play it in PF.
Mitigation, DPS, Healing, Mechanics - Choose which one do you think we should make harder for Healer role? PF doesn't care to make any of these harder as proven by previous tiers. It NEVER responds with an increased presence of Healers. Please point to the example anytime in all of XIV, where we added onto the load of healers on any of these and it increased Healer pop decisively. Even people disagreeing with me are saying Healers get blamed for mitigation issues when they occur regardless but it becomes extremely hard to make that claim if Healers no longer own the large chunk of mitigation.

As for Healer, in this post move should look like, not much different than current but definitely removing the overly present MIT tools on Healer. Shield healers can have 1-3 extra mit options nothing major, and that's about it.

And lastly, the people who have played healer and continue to play healer are healer mains. Not the people that played Healer one tier, then left after whatever discontent they have. They are no longer healer mains if you are not currently playing a healer. Period.

Now that's not to say they shouldn't clean up the gameplay loop of healers. But these are two separate issues that need tackling.

The gameplay loop of healers and the current shortage of healers are not directly tied together as the forums would lead you to believe. Even when we had arguably the OPTIMAL gameplay loop of healers in SB, there was STILL a huge shortage. When they reduced DPS skills from SB to SHB, more people went on the role. It's still a shortage though.
Arcadion is something special. DPS requirement is reduced overall for the raid, but simultaneously alot more healers also progressed through the content week 1, more than the last expansion. It is critically well received, comparable only to SB and Omega, and I think it's potentially even higher than that.

So where does this leave us off? We need more healers in PF, but we can't add responsibilities to the role to not deter people currently playing it. The only option I forsee helping is to remove something from the class, lowering the entry barrier perceived in PF and enticing DPS players to it with the two options I suggested before.
One solution being, remove a specific responsibility from them, while introducing DPS elements back into it. This will align it more with the general responsibility against DPS and Tank.

snip

Honestly, at least other people are reading specifically what I'm saying whereas you seem to piece meal parts of my responses and then mix and match what's being said and then saying "So you're basically telling people to go play a role they don't like and spam 1 singular button for 90% of the fight because you think it's a good idea to foist extra responsibility that they're trying to avoid by playing a DPS role onto them for no reason other than you think it would help the healer population, ok."

Like you arguing with your own thought bubble at this point. If you put on your reading glasses, I have very clearly said after shifting mitigation more off, they add DPS kits back onto healers and tune some of the healing capabilities down for other classes. This centralizes Healing to Healer Role, You get some DPS responsibility going and you have mechanics and that's it. It brings down the entry-point for healers, it tools out healers for the people who dislike the current heal design, it takes away blame of everything beyond healing being a "Healer" problem and lastly paired with a job in need bonus it adds incentive for the overall playerbase to fill missing roles. I say all of this with the CURRENT design of encounters and jobs in mind.

You solve the gameplay loop, you solve the entry-barrier, you solve the lacking incentive to play it.

Most of Us healers are in Static's.
because why would we want to sign up for Party finder where we are first to blame when we can raid with a group and enjoy the people we are with.
Yeah healers are around we just aren't using Party finder because we have groups.

I like to enjoy my game not get thrown under the bus when a wipe goes bad thanks. But hopefully when we are done with our groups we can come help otherwise find a static?

Most players raiding engage with PF. Pretty sure LuckyBanchos numbers and FFL prove this as well. We also already know that an overwhelming portion of the JP playerbase is PF centric and the base situation in NA seems to be similar judging by the presence of parties in PF and again FFL where we can see static uploads versus general uploads. Yes there are alot of Healers in statics but I'm not sure it's even close in the spread.

[MisterNublet]

No my point has always been with CURRENT encounter and job design, you need to lower responsibility overall of something that healers deal with to entice more people to play the role while also not crushing the supply of players that already play it in PF.

Strange how there is hardly any difficult mechanics for healers this savage tier, yet there is a severe lack of healers in PF. Almost like dps who don't want to play healers, still wont play healers even if they make the role easier, and those who enjoyed having responsibilities in their gameplay are quitting due to the removal of it over the last few expansions.

Mitigation, DPS, Healing, Mechanics - Choose which one do you think we should make harder for Healer role? PF doesn't care to make any of these harder as proven by previous tiers. It NEVER responds with an increased presence of Healers. Please point to the example anytime in all of XIV, where we added onto the load of healers on any of these and it increased Healer pop decisively.

Can you show proof of a time when making the role easier has increased the healer population? I would love to see a chart or graph of the player count.

Even people disagreeing with me are saying Healers get blamed for mitigation issues when they occur regardless but it becomes extremely hard to make that claim if Healers no longer own the large chunk of mitigation.

Holy hell, what are you going on about? Healers were getting blamed for a lack of healing, not a lack of mitigation. It was the dps' lack of mitigation getting parties killed, which they tired to shift the blame onto healers as if the "lack of healing" was the culprit.

And lastly, the people who have played healer and continue to play healer are healer mains. Not the people that played Healer one tier, then left after whatever discontent they have. They are no longer healer mains if you are not currently playing a healer. Period.

Cry more. Ex-healers can still comment about the state of healers. Get over yourself. You're not the appointed healer representative, and thank god you're not.

The gameplay loop of healers and the current shortage of healers are not directly tied together as the forums would lead you to believe. Even when we had arguably the OPTIMAL gameplay loop of healers in SB, there was STILL a huge shortage. When they reduced DPS skills from SB to SHB, more people went on the role. It's still a shortage though.

The burden of proof is on you to prove that there was an increase in healers after the removal of dps skills from SB to ShB. Until then, it is nothing but a baseless claim.

Arcadion is something special. DPS requirement is reduced overall for the raid, but simultaneously alot more healers also progressed through the content week 1, more than the last expansion. It is critically well received, comparable only to SB and Omega, and I think it's potentially even higher than that.

DPS requirement wasn't reduced... it was due to them having to buff dps jobs to match PCT and they weren't able to adjust the bosses health pool to account for the higher overall dps. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

So where does this leave us off? We need more healers in PF, but we can't add responsibilities to the role to not deter people currently playing it. The only option I forsee helping is to remove something from the class, lowering the entry barrier perceived in PF and enticing DPS players to it with the two options I suggested before.
One solution being, remove a specific responsibility from them, while introducing DPS elements back into it. This will align it more with the general responsibility against DPS and Tank.

Lets go ahead and delete the healer role completely, that way healers don't have to have any responsibility.

[Alice_Rivers]

Have you considered the possibility that people play healers because they enjoy healing? And that maybe the answer to healer population is to make healers A: Feel necessary, B: Satisfying and C: Fun? A decent part of the healer problem is that other roles are getting an increasing amount of our job making healers feel unnecessary, damage being large scripted and spikey further degrades the necessity of healers and serves only to make healing unsatisfying; especially as healer optimisation is ironically to remove the healer. All of which results in healing not being fun. So you have healers that are A: Unnecessary, B: Not satisfying and C: Not fun and then people wonder why people don't play them.

Then you come along and tell us that the solution is to degrade these things even further...

[localareanetwork]

This has been the case since ever btw. Even in Shadowbringers the last slots to fill were heal slots

[Aravell]

I have very clearly said after shifting mitigation more off, they add DPS kits back onto healers and tune some of the healing capabilities down for other classes. This centralizes Healing to Healer Role, You get some DPS responsibility going and you have mechanics and that's it. It brings down the entry-point for healers, it tools out healers for the people who dislike the current heal design, it takes away blame of everything beyond healing being a "Healer" problem and lastly paired with a job in need bonus it adds incentive for the overall playerbase to fill missing roles. I say all of this with the CURRENT design of encounters and jobs in mind.

You solve the gameplay loop, you solve the entry-barrier, you solve the lacking incentive to play it.

If you read and understood what I said, most DPS players do not pick up a DPS job because they want to support the party. Most people don't pick up SAM because "Woah, I can Feint and reduce the damage the party takes!".

You actually solve nothing with what you're proposing other than inflating tank ego further by giving them far more power over the survival of the party. DPS players aren't going to want to play a gimped DPS with a simpler damage rotation, which will be the case because there's no way they would ever give healers a rotation on par in complexity with any DPS job.

All your proposal will do is further reduce the amount of healers that want to play the role, because believe it or not, most people play healers because they want the responsibility. Some people failing to heal in PF doesn't change that.

You're misunderstanding the reason why Abyssos lost a bunch of healers, it came after a very easy tier that onboarded a lot of new healers, introducing a DoT-heavy tier that puts a lot of importance on mitigation right after that would obviously filter out a bunch of newer healers. It's also a tier that came out in the expansion that doubled down on the healer design that people criticised in ShB, meaning some veterans have quit at that point. As for Anabaseios, that tier came after Abyssos, so the newer players who got filtered by it are more hesitant to return. As for more experienced raiders, the tier dropped after TOP, which famously burned out a lot of raiders, I know a lot of raiders who quit after TOP because of how burned out they were.

The actual solution to the problem is to stop treating healers like babies and actually challenge them in content so they don't go all the way up to savage expecting an easy ride just from playing the healer role, your proposal would just push their easy ride all the way through savage because all they have to do is heal the damage and not consider where to place their mitigation cooldowns when the tanks and DPS are responsible for the bulk of it.

Edit: One more thing worth noting is that if you do entice a DPS player to play your new version of healers, what would stop them from purely spamming damage spells and not healing because they only made the swap to the healer role to avoid the extra responsibility you've dumped onto the DPS role?

[Havenchild]

snip

Regardless of the stupid sarcasm, I will answer one thing. Showing the proof.

1) We have proof in the form of YoshiP who has previously acknowledged the feedback they have received and the statistics they see on their end about how many people are playing Healers. It was the DRIVING reason why they reduced buttons for Healers from SB -> SHB, because according to them, they kept getting comments like people saying they wanted to Heal but felt there was too many things they had to do and it felt too intimidating. From HW to SB, Healer mains complained that Cleric stance and overall usage of it felt janky and non interesting, both iterations of it. After both changes, they saw a decent enough uptick in each expansion in the role that they didn't change much beyond that.
Arcadion with the overall lower DPS check, also has a staggeringly higher amount of week 1 clears compared to other tiers which means that there were a lot more Healers in the mix. I argue it's the lower DPS check tuning overall is what allows this to be present to begin with. Both in clears that occurred and the presence of Healers. That's the point. The lower DPS Requirement for each job in the raid, lead to it being completed more overall by everyone and also receiving high praise. If the check is lower because they didn't tune the raid to accommodate the increased DPS, that DIRECTLY means that the DPS contribution requirement for ALL roles is LOWER.

2) We have never truly had a reduction in responsibility on Healer role but other roles have had reductions. While we had some DPS tools removed from the role, Healer DPS is still a heavy factor into raid clears. If you were to remove even half the DPS from healers, least with current damage, a lot more parties would not be clearing the fights. There are two distinct differences between what happened in HW -> SB and SB -> SHB. The difference is that in HW, the complaints were coming more from Healer mains. In SB, the complaints according to Yoshi P, sounded more from people outside of the role. It was undoubtedly their attempt to mitigate the Healer shortage in PF as after cross-world came into the mix, it became a lot more present that Healers were massively missing and more specifically, SCH. If you see the problem of "wow, we need alot more healers in PF" and the feedback you are getting from non-healers are "hey, we'd like to heal but the barrier is a bit too much" and the feedback you are getting from some healer mains from PF are like "Hey I don't like to play shield healer, I'll just stick to WHM or AST" and the only raid availability is for shield healer, then the logical conclusion to all of that is to lower the barrier of entry for the Healer role as specifically SCH which had a good chunk of it's toolkit nuked. I think at the time, it was probably the best overall decision as whoever was playing the job, was already playing it, so that's that and clearly from SHB to EW, they didn't make any major changes to the toolkit on healers meaning that they both:

- Saw the numbers ticked up enough so they were content with it and didn't feel they needed to do anything else.
- Numbers held on enough that it didn't regress all the way back to SB levels.

The issue we face now is very similar to SB. You have a lot of people coming into the tier playing DPS, compared to tank or heals. General PF response from the current Healer base seems to be "don't give us more work or we quit" as proven by EW tiers, and the overall healer class design seems to lean positive, enough that they haven't felt the need to shift backwards further. They added a single extra DPS button for some healers, likely as a test to see the general response and that was smart as if you just dumped a whole toolkit on people, there is a good chance, people would have left. However, that is not going to solve the shortage that we see now. To solve the shortage we see now, you have to lure people to playing the role. Specifically DPS. You can flush out Healers to SB levels and that will still NOT increase Healer presence in PF by any substantial degree. The only thing we haven't as a whole tried is giving equal responsibility to all roles.

Right now we have

Healer: HEAL, DPS, MIT, MECH
DPS: DPS, MIT, MECH
Tank: MIT, DPS, Mech

I say we shift to

Healer: Heal, DPS, Mech
DPS: DPS, MIT, Mech
Tank: MIT, DPS, Mech

And finally the last component to incentivize players to make the jump, job-in-need bonuses. If Healer role is taking to long to fill too often, then alot of people are going to start queuing as healers. If they gameplay loop is good enough, they will stay playing as healers come the next tier.

Have you considered the possibility that people play healers because they enjoy healing? And that maybe the answer to healer population is to make healers A: Feel necessary, B: Satisfying and C: Fun? A decent part of the healer problem is that other roles are getting an increasing amount of our job making healers feel unnecessary, damage being large scripted and spikey further degrades the necessity of healers and serves only to make healing unsatisfying; especially as healer optimisation is ironically to remove the healer. All of which results in healing not being fun. So you have healers that are A: Unnecessary, B: Not satisfying and C: Not fun and then people wonder why people don't play them.

Then you come along and tell us that the solution is to degrade these things even further...

Please learn to read exactly the comment I made just slightly above yours.

If you put on your reading glasses, I have very clearly said after shifting mitigation more off, they add DPS kits back onto healers and tune some of the healing capabilities down for other classes. This centralizes Healing to Healer Role, You get some DPS responsibility going and you have mechanics and that's it. It brings down the entry-point for healers, it tools out healers for the people who dislike the current heal design, it takes away blame of everything beyond healing being a "Healer" problem and lastly paired with a job in need bonus it adds incentive for the overall playerbase to fill missing roles. I say all of this with the CURRENT design of encounters and jobs in mind.

You solve the gameplay loop, you solve the entry-barrier, you solve the lacking incentive to play it.

------------

If you read and understood what I said, most DPS players do not pick up a DPS job because they want to support the party. Most people don't pick up SAM because "Woah, I can Feint and reduce the damage the party takes!".

You actually solve nothing with what you're proposing other than inflating tank ego further by giving them far more power over the survival of the party. DPS players aren't going to want to play a gimped DPS with a simpler damage rotation, which will be the case because there's no way they would ever give healers a rotation on par in complexity with any DPS job.

All your proposal will do is further reduce the amount of healers that want to play the role, because believe it or not, most people play healers because they want the responsibility. Some people failing to heal in PF doesn't change that.

Actually, my suggestion accounts for that. By reducing the healing capability of other jobs, you bring back that responsibility into the healer role, thus making them a requirement. So think like bloodwhetting not being as potent as is, same with heals / ress not being so readily available to use on RDM / SMN / PLD. Things like Cover, (Link), also need to be evaluated which allows something like no healer raids to exist. We could always just introduce a doom mech, but I imagine the only difference we'll see is more clemency and RDM presence in those no healer parties.

You're misunderstanding the reason why Abyssos lost a bunch of healers, it came after a very easy tier that onboarded a lot of new healers, introducing a DoT-heavy tier that puts a lot of importance on mitigation right after that would obviously filter out a bunch of newer healers. It's also a tier that came out in the expansion that doubled down on the healer design that people criticised in ShB, meaning some veterans have quit at that point. As for Anabaseios, that tier came after Abyssos, so the newer players who got filtered by it are more hesitant to return. As for more experienced raiders, the tier dropped after TOP, which famously burned out a lot of raiders, I know a lot of raiders who quit after TOP because of how burned out they were.

Do you believe that the amount of people that voice discontent and left the role for Healer design are a huge chunk of the healer base that raid on healer in PF overall? I don't. Imo, if it was, then I HIGHLY DOUBT we'd even be in this state with Healers. If those voicing any specific discontent with Healer role was a major percentage of the overall healer playerbase, I think we'd see a dramatic shift on how healers play. We have had nearly the same exact playstyle more or less for now 3 expansions since the culling going from SB -> SHB. If the devs haven't chosen to do a complete 180 over 3 expansions then I take that to mean that, no major amount of players have left the scene due to those changes that didn't offset the gain in players on the role.

The actual solution to the problem is to stop treating healers like babies and actually challenge them in content so they don't go all the way up to savage expecting an easy ride just from playing the healer role, your proposal would just push their easy ride all the way through savage because all they have to do is heal the damage and not consider where to place their mitigation cooldowns when the tanks and DPS are responsible for the bulk of it.

Edit: One more thing worth noting is that if you do entice a DPS player to play your new version of healers, what would stop them from purely spamming damage spells and not healing because they only made the swap to the healer role to avoid the extra responsibility you've dumped onto the DPS role?

My suggestion goes in two parts. You don't only entice with gameplay but ALSO with drops. If people want to gear their mains faster, they will undoubtedly, jump into job-in-need bonuses that reward extra drops. I have no doubt that people will respond in kind to filling those roles. Creating casual off job Healers is smart. Getting people into the mentality "Hey I want more chances for drops guaranteed but I'd have to play "x" role and they also just expanded on the toolkit so let me see what its about" is a good thing. You also have a higher chance of converting casual healers -> main healers another tier then converting Main DPS -> Main Healers. And you have to entice DPS specifically because they FAR outweigh the support roles in presence. Now more than ever.

[MisterNublet]

Regardless of the stupid sarcasm, I will answer one thing. Showing the proof.

1) We have proof in the form of YoshiP who has previously acknowledged the feedback they have received and the statistics they see on their end about how many people are playing Healers.

Link me to an article that Yoshi-P has acknowledged healer feedback, even better if they show a metric in the healer population. You haven't shown me any proof besides "your word".

It was the DRIVING reason why they reduced buttons for Healers from SB -> SHB, because according to them, they kept getting comments like people saying they wanted to Heal but felt there was too many things they had to do and it felt too intimidating. From HW to SB, Healer mains complained that Cleric stance and overall usage of it felt janky and non interesting, both iterations of it. After both changes, they saw a decent enough uptick in each expansion in the role that they didn't change much beyond that.

People stated they were happy a janky stance was removed doesn't mean a slew of people who've never played healer suddenly started to play a healer. I also have yet to see a chart, or graph that illustrates the healer population increasing from them having reduced the (dps) buttons that you have been claiming.

Arcadion with the overall lower DPS check, also has a staggeringly higher amount of week 1 clears compared to other tiers which means that there were a lot more Healers in the mix.

Or it just means that groups that would have cleared week 2 or 3 have cleared on week 1 instead.

I argue it's the lower DPS check tuning overall is what allows this to be present to begin with. Both in clears that occurred and the presence of Healers. That's the point. The lower DPS Requirement for each job in the raid, lead to it being completed more overall by everyone and also receiving high praise. If the check is lower because they didn't tune the raid to accommodate the increased DPS, that DIRECTLY means that the DPS contribution requirement for ALL roles is LOWER.

Here I thought people were praising the tier because the fights were fun and the designs were great. Guess I missed all of those posts that people only enjoyed the fights because dps balance was off.

2) We have never truly had a reduction in responsibility on Healer role but other roles have had reductions.

List some examples then.

While we had some DPS tools removed from the role, Healer DPS is still a heavy factor into raid clears. If you were to remove even half the DPS from healers, least with current damage, a lot more parties would not be clearing the fights.

And pressing Glare for 80% of one's GCDs isn't exciting, which is why players are asking for a more involved dps gameplay for healers.

There are two distinct differences between what happened in HW -> SB and SB to SHB. The difference is that in HW, the complaints were coming more from Healer mains more. In SB, the complaints according to Yoshi P, sounded more from people outside of the role. It was undoubtedly their attempt to mitigate the Healer shortage in PF as after cross-world came into the mix, it became a lot more present that Healers were massively missing. If you see the problem of "wow, we need alot more healers in PF" and the feedback you are getting from non-healers are "hey, we'd like to heal but the barrier is a bit too much" and the feedback you are getting from some healer mains from PF are like "Hey I don't like to play shield healer, I'll just stick to WHM or AST, then the logical conclusion to all of that is to lower the barrier of entry for the Healer role. I think at the time, it was probably the best overall decision as whoever was playing the job, was already playing it, so that's that and clearly from SHB to EW, they didn't make any major changes to the toolkit on healers meaning that they both:

- Saw the numbers ticked up enough so they were content with it and didn't feel they needed to do anything else.
- Numbers held on enough that it didn't regress all the way back to SB levels.

This was just a whole lot of assumptions on your part and words that amounts to nothing while adding Yoshi-P's name to try to make it sound legit.

The issue we face now is very similar to SB. You have a lot of people coming into the tier playing DPS, compared to tank or heals. General PF response from the current Healer base seems to be "don't give us more work or we quit" as proven by EW tiers,

your opinion != healer base's opinion

That's fine if you don't want more work, just say "I don't want more work." Don't pretend like the its a shared feeling among healers.

and the overall healer class design seems to lean positive, enough that they haven't felt the need to shift backwards further.

Kinda weird seeing multiple threads on the official forums, reddit, and even discord constantly talking about the poor state of healers and ways to improve them if the overall state of healers is leaning positive. If you can link me a thread praising the state of healers, I'd be more than happy to read it.

They added a single extra DPS button for some healers, likely as a test to see the general response and that was smart as if you just dumped a whole toolkit on people, there is a good chance, people would have left. However, that is not going to solve the shortage that we see now. To solve the shortage we see now, you have to lure people to playing the role. Specifically DPS. You can flush out Healers to SB levels and that will still NOT increase Healer presence in PF. The only thing we haven't as a whole tried is giving equal responsibility to all roles.
Right now we have

Healer: HEAL, DPS, MIT, MECH
DPS: DPS, MIT, MECH
Tank: MIT, DPS, Mech

I say we shift to

Healer: Heal, DPS, Mech
DPS: DPS, MIT, Mech
Tank: MIT, DPS, Mech

Quick, easy steps to make the healer role even more frustrating to play. Healers being at the complete mercy of DPS and Tanks to mitigate. I recall WHMs having a real blast last expansion with their limited mitigation tools and how much fun they were having with that.

And finally the last component to incentivize players to make the jump, job-in-need bonuses.

Achievement mounts ain't gonna fix this. Lol.

[Aravell]

If the devs haven't chosen to do a complete 180 over 3 expansions then I take that to mean that, no major amount of players have left the scene due to those changes that didn't offset the gain in players on the role.

You can choose to believe that the devs don't do a 180 pivot because they're seeing it going well. I can point out an equally possible alternative that they're continuing with this design and just randomly throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks because admitting that gutting the healer role in ShB didn't bring them the large increase in healer population they were expecting would mean that they're admitting that they were wrong.

Neither of us is inherently correct though, because neither of us have hard data, all we have are trends and personal anecdotes.

My suggestion goes in two parts. You don't only entice with gameplay but ALSO with drops. If people want to gear their mains faster, they will undoubtedly, jump into job-in-need bonuses that reward extra drops. I have no doubt that people will respond in kind to filling those roles. Creating casual off job Healers is smart. Getting people into the mentality "Hey I want more chances for drops guaranteed but I'd have to play "x" role and they also just expanded on the toolkit so let me see what its about" is a good thing. You also have a higher chance of converting casual healers -> main healers another tier then converting Main DPS -> Main Healers. And you have to entice DPS specifically because they FAR outweigh the support roles in presence. Now more than ever.

So, a few things that you'd need to answer to implement this vision of yours:

1) What do you propose removing from the DPS job's kits to make way for the extra mitigation that they're now in charge of?
2) How will you convince the melee DPS that they now need to weave in required mitigation during their busy double weave burst window?
3) What's stopping the DPS players from playing healer for 3 weeks to benefit from the accelerated loot and then abandoning the role altogether after they've gotten BiS for their main?

Also, you're not really addressing the commonly accepted fact that people choose to play DPS to escape responsibility over the party, do you really think it will go over well when SE tells the DPS players that they now play a large part in the survival of the party and they can now be blamed for the party wiping? I think there would be heavy backlash because they didn't sign up for that.

[Havenchild]

snip.

I know you don't agree and that's fine. There is nothing I can say or show at this point that will convince you of why my solution works or why alot of the solutions proposed won't and haven't worked. PF responds very quickly to what it appreciates and doesn't appreciate on the Healer role.

I offered my solution which is a lot more radical than others. I get that but I stand by it. The current Healer gameplay loop and responsibility pool doesn't work for "ex"-healers, it doesn't work for other role diehards who might be interested in hopping over to healer as an off job and it also doesn't solve the Healer shortage in PF. We can go back to just introducing the sole responsibility of Heals and MIT to healer as we had before and ALSO add more DPS toolkits and see if suddenly more people line up to play healer.

I believe the forums will celebrate for such changes, I think in-game will be a very different outcome with many people leaving the role because it becomes too much. I heavily believe there is no encounter they can design that simultaneously increases Healing / Mit requirements from Healer role solely, that also doesn't wind up boring, that also will have people signing up for the role in PF. It will be largely the exact same thing we have right now where DPS / Tanks don't use their MIT and Healers have to adjust with it anyway.

Let's remove MIT from DPS and Tanks.

Healers: MIT, HEAL, DPS, MECH
DPS: DPS, MECH
Tanks: DPS, MECH

You now have created a new issue for Tanks. What identity do Tanks have? and you still won't entice people to assume so much more responsibility on Healer.

oh wait let's instead let Tanks keep their personal TB abilities.

Healers: MIT (Party), HEAL, DPS, MECH
DPS: DPS, MECH
Tanks: MIT (Personal) DPS, MECH

And you are back to square one. You have practically the exact same scenario we have currently. There will still be a Healer shortage and if they try to design a fight that is so overwhelming that warrant Healers being the pivotal point of focus for all Healing and All Party wide MIT, I forsee people in the majority pool who currently play it leaving the role on PF.

Link me to an article that Yoshi-P has acknowledged healer feedback, even better if they show a metric in the healer population. You haven't shown me any proof besides "your word".

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...om_the_14hour/
Specifically Q2 / Q7 halfway down.

https://twinfinite.net/features/ffxi...ers-interview/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...s_going_to_be/
-More excerpts of YoshiP's responses to different interview questions over the years.

You can literally google search "YoshiP response to healer complaints" for every expansion. If you want to engage in the conversation in good faith, the least you can do is a very small amount of research into the responses YoshiP has made over the years including the feedback they have received.

You can choose to believe that the devs don't do a 180 pivot because they're seeing it going well. I can point out an equally possible alternative that they're continuing with this design and just randomly throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks because admitting that gutting the healer role in ShB didn't bring them the large increase in healer population they were expecting would mean that they're admitting that they were wrong.

Neither of us is inherently correct though, because neither of us have hard data, all we have are trends and personal anecdotes.

Ok...but for 3 expansions? You are telling me that for approximately 4-5 years (half the game lifecycle) they kept looking at Healer role, witnessed all the complaints, witnessed the shortages etc, looked at that and said "Yeah we don't need to change anything".
I highly doubt that. I believe the first supposition that I made backs up the stance they've had. Whatever gains they have acquired on the role post culling + the current core dedicated healers is higher still each expansion then the fall off from ex-healers discontented with it. You had 6 / 7 tiers of raid content to look at. If they saw from SB -> SHB, "wow, the healers catapulted down since we removed all those skills", I am fairly sure they would have reversed course by EW. But they didn't. In fact they didn't make any major changes from SHB -> EW and similarly from EW -> DT. Healers have had the same gameplay style roughly since SB -> SHB. That is more than enough data to analyze and see if the SB skill culling and gameplay tweaks negatively impacted the overall population of Healers.

So, a few things that you'd need to answer to implement this vision of yours:

1) What do you propose removing from the DPS job's kits to make way for the extra mitigation that they're now in charge of?
2) How will you convince the melee DPS that they now need to weave in required mitigation during their busy double weave burst window?
3) What's stopping the DPS players from playing healer for 3 weeks to benefit from the accelerated loot and then abandoning the role altogether after they've gotten BiS for their main?

Also, you're not really addressing the commonly accepted fact that people choose to play DPS to escape responsibility over the party, do you really think it will go over well when SE tells the DPS players that they now play a large part in the survival of the party and they can now be blamed for the party wiping? I think there would be heavy backlash because they didn't sign up for that.

1) Build the MIT into the rotations themselves and give them maybe one more skill they can press to protect themselves. Skills like old ManaWall and current ninja Shade Shift come to mind. Make tools like this be more useful, more often. If it's particularly strong (like an AoE) give it a longer cd, if it's not anything game breaking, let it be available more often. Compoundly, depending on how we handle the DPS MIT, I offer we can also just make tank party MIT more viable. Reduce / Remove the Heal capability on both DPS and Tanks.

2) This is already answered by 1 but if they need to press another mitigation unique oGCD to have the party or themselves survive, they will do it. This is different from what we have now where we have the expectation of survivability despite a DPS forgetting to MIT, solely on the Healers. If you shift the expectation from Healers having to MIT, to DPS and Tanks have to MIT, it suddenly becomes a requirement to playing the DPS job, not a suggestion as it currently is. It is very difficult to say "Healers didn't MIT, Healer issue" when the core of Healer toolkit, doesn't have much mitigation. And oddly enough, mitigation and other outside tools that helped the overall raid were more present on DPS roles in HW and SB and people still played DPS just fine and claim some old school class design was better and less homogenous.

3) Nothing, but the job-in-need bonus isn't Healer exclusive. If more people jump into Healer roles because it's more often the bonus, it stands to reason that the job-in-need will shift back to a different role even within the same PF while a post is up. The incentive behind such a system is both faster gearing and filling out PF. However, one important difference after people touch Healer to utilize this feature is that they now have experience on the role. Which will change the narrative. Now you will have people look at PF and be like "Hey there are only Healer slots available but I know roughly what to do on the role so I can jump in" thus helping to fill out PF. You could make the argument "hey, why can't we just keep current Healer responsibility then with such a system" and my response would be that imo, the perception of healers and responsibilities of the role, haven't changed and the incentive for quicker gear isn't enough to shift people over to make a big difference. I forsee more "Yeah it's Healer in queue so I could get more drops but that's more of a pain in the ass then not so I'll pass"

The point of the system is to create offjob players of roles that are harder to fill, not just reward people who already offjob said roles. Many DPS already offjob other DPS or offjob Tank roles, certainly more than Healer, because a DPS and a Tank essentially function the same way responsibility wise. But the role that's hardest to fill right now is undoubtedly Healer. You need the incentive and gameplay loop / responsibility balance (compared to other roles) to bring people to offjob Healer. Once you get people to offjob Healer, and assuming the refined healer gameplay loop resonates with them, you have a higher potential to create Healer mains from then on.