The Big, Bad, No Good, Very Bad Healer Thread - Healer History from ARR to Now

[HyperiusUltima]

I feel your motivational analysis is correct, but your idea of what it resulted in is wrong.

In a lot of ways, what they did is the correct way of doing things. They probably looked to other MMORPGs for inspiration. Your healers' filler-damage has to be simplistically designed, and ideally they also contribute some damage even when doing their own job, in this case they went the lame route via DoTs, although some classes show extra elements like Astro bomb damage, Sage stuff, that kinda thing.

The issue comes from a combination of:
* The raw amount of buttons on each class by now. People forget this when comparing old expansions, just how simplistic job setups were back then even if the mechanics were less streamlined. In particular the oGCD-weave-mudflation had not happened at the time.
* A desire to make fights more and more complicated. This is entirely natural, and every MMORPG has to grapple with this.
* The inherent need to keep adding things to classes as the game ages, notably with each expansion.

In combination, these three result in a gameplay where each instance of damage the tank or group takes is strictly controlled (as it is already as high as can be without killing someone, basically), all extra damage can be and has to be 100% avoided as it is usually lethal damage, and every healer also has a plethora of non-GCD ways of dealing with damage on the group. Hence the meme-like "Oh a boss ability? Press next oGCD!". And with healing being relegated to the 10-20 CD-based healing tools, all GCDs are "free" to be used for damage.
With tools that are setup like in other MMOs, where you spend 25%-50% of your time dealing damage, and sometimes even less than that.

Yet in game design, what even is a "correct" way of doing things? Following trends? Picking up on things that people liked about a game that were successful? Maybe even having a bit of inspiration as well?

There's no straight and correct way of doing things if you're competing in the industry. XIV started to deviate from a WoW-like design come Stormblood, where Cross-Class was essentially what got cut and replaced with Role Actions. However, one rule of thumb we have to remember is this: While the player is not always right, listening to their feedback is what leads to longevity and trust. That's what made FFXIV huge and important back then: They had the community's trust and listened to some of the feedback people gave. However, since the Stormblood criticism of White Mage Lilies being bad(which, they seriously were bad) before the game even launched during Media Tour, they started to hide information so that their developers wouldn't lose motivation due to heavy criticism.

Yet, it is that same criticism that drives a game forward. If the player says that something is wrong with a job and its functions cause clunkiness or say, even make a job feel boring to play, then think about it: If the job is important to fill Duty Finder where you have 1T-1H-2D, then you run into a problem that needs to be solved; but, they know for a fact that even casual players will pick up the job and fill the Duty Finder this way once the veterans have moved onto other jobs. The cycle is essentially the same as the game continues; but the problem persists.

If a problem is technical in nature, then it may take some time to figure out a solution(i.e. The Data Center Problem). Yet, if it is a Role-related problem as we have now, then that is something they should look into and focus on - only because of one reason.

If a role is boring to play, the player will move into a job they feel gives them a good feeling for the time being - but if a role fundamentally lacks player engagement in the form of what the role is supposed to do, then the role is effectively defunct and needs a major change. This goes heavily into why you don't see more healers - it's why you see less healers, because any role outside of Healer has more engaging gameplay than what Healer has to offer if you don't go into EX, Savage, or Ultimate Difficulty Content. Now, with SE's current design approach with every expansion since the beginning of time, they've always used an incremental approach. Unless a job is massively having issues clearing content because of content design or job design(i.e. PLD P8S) within a set time period, then they merely can just bump the numbers up slightly and not bother with a single one of our tools. That's how they've always approached it, and will continue to do so until the next expansion because major redesigns take up a lot of their resources to make.