Current fixes to Forked Tower is not good enough

[Taranok]

Omg, 100%. As a White Mage, the sheer number of incurable punishment debuffs literally makes me question the legitimacy of my role in anything other than the most casual of content: healers are kneecapped in their ability to recover the party from mistakes "to maintain difficulty" to a degree that artificial heal check mechanics are necessary to even keep them from being obsolete altogether, ripe to be replaced by additional red jobs instead. (And if you get expert enough this isn't even enough as has been shown several times this Xpac)

Rez limits by themselves are alright (eg WoW gives you a strict limit on how many rezzes the group is permitted during a boss pull) but combined with all the other punishment debuffs seen in raiding it's getting to be much.

Caught this section mostly because Valence responded to it directly, but WHM is truly just the finest example of: "We don't know how to design our healers, so we're going to force encounters to meet what the healers can do, and then force healers to that new standard."

If there's any poster child for homogenization, it's healer design. Every attack is either a party buster or a tank buster->solve with medica 1/2 or cure 2. Every expansion thing healers got are literally variations on those 3 skills. Tetragrammaton in HW is just cure 2 on an oGCD. Asylum is a medica 2, assize a medica 1. You can transcribe almost every single button on other healers back to those 3 skills, outside of things like cards or what little uniqueness exists inside the role.

Fast forward from Stormblood when the devs botched AST so much (in HW) to the point where they realized they needed AST to be a WHM, and we have the modern design of healer where it's a panic-inducing mess of completely overpowered hits with absolutely no flexibility and little in the way of disaster recovery. And some people have the gall to say the design is 'casual,' despite being a hair-pullingly-frustrating set of mechanics all built around the concept that they want healers to heal by numbers and mistakes are just insta-punished.

Unlimited ressing is a problem that shows the devs can make better fights without it (see: BA/DRS,) but healers need triage gameplay. The class just fundamentally doesn't feel good with this binary pass-fail design with heal-by-numbers. Hell, unlimited ressing is a consequence of it, because a proper triage design means MP is a vitally limited resource. Which it kind of was in stormblood, which made things like mana shift much more entertaining and satisfying.

One day, I hope the devs will realize just how awful their support design is at a meta level. Pressing 4 buttons to survive a tank buster doesn't make it anything but a binary pass-fail. Pressing 1 or 2 instant oGCD heals that solve the next party buster on a 40 second timer doesn't make the healing more engaging. This might not even be your point, but 100% of tank and healer design's problems are directly tied to awful fight design and the consequences of forcing all tanks and healers to tank, and heal, almost literally identically to each other. There's no room for variation when everyone is expected to do the same thing.

Furthermore, what we have in Dawntrail is the exact consequence of the bad fight design. Healing has to be done faster, with more precision, with less room for error both on the party and the healer themselves. And if you do die as a healer, there's a good chance you're going to wipe town. It's unbelievably awful design, and it's a big part of why Dawntrail as an expansion is so garbage. When the devs let their worst habits dictate job and fight design, eventually you wind up with a game that no one wants to play. ShB was too big a success that the devs didn't stop to think that the direction they took tier 2 and 3 of the raid series was extremely toxic for the game's future health. So here we are, dealing with the consequences of it.

/rant.