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

[Havenchild]

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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.

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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.