6 Years without a healer?

[Raylazer11]

WHAT?
WHY?
HOW?
and WHO?

A lot of people that were looking forward to a new healer. Welp it seems like there won't be one. So now we really wanna know.
Why not?
What happened?
How did they come to this?
and finally,
Who is to blame? The players? The design of the game? The holy trinity?

Ask Away and hopefully our questions will be answered.

[Huntrss]

The holy trinity? Because if your going to be True to it you can't Make anything that doesn't fit it or Otherwise Limited Jobs type.

WHY? Yoshi-P said in an interview that GunBreaker came early and he went Dps because he wants to Focus on Balance with Healers (how long that will take is another issue. He has gone on Record saying White Mages need to be Pure Healers and the rest go in line to there place in The Holy Trinity " you can't work outside that line").

[crazedtoo]

I know this is rhetorical, but....feel like the blame will currently lies with Ast just being a duplicate of the other two (as needed) and the design of encounters.

[Kadrothan]

With my friends, the breakdown was mostly like this.

Tanks: “Gunblades!!!”

DPS: “Oooh!! Shiny new Chakras to throw around!”

Healers: “We have to wait another 2 years? Because of balance? AGAIN??!!!?? REEEEEEE!!!”

I play healers a lot and was really disappointed by healers getting passed up... again.

[Lozza]

Given they have provided the same excuse "balance" as they did for why they weren't adding a healer in SB I have pretty much 0 faith that they will actually succeed in balancing them in SHB. We are pretty much in the same place as we were at this same time in HW leading up to SB - SCH and AST meta with WHM sidelined. Frankly I feel the gap between dps and heal output is much less this time, and when you compare healers to tanks the balance issues with healers seem reasonably small - namely utility/raid support. Unless they completely reword the identities of AST and WHM I doubt we'll be in a different position leading up to 6.0 in two years time. I also have no doubt that SE won't hesitate to bring out the "balance" excuse again after showcasing two dps for 6.0.

[Ahrijlaken]

They had 4 years to balance/fix/rework healer .... they don't have any excuse.

DPS aren't balance neither, tank aren't balance neither ... still they add new DPS and new tank.

[programcanaan]

Gaia and the hammer could mean geomancer sooner than people expect. They only dragged on the subject of the hammer. Kind of a nudge nudge. Maybe it just isn't ready to show yet.

[Yuyuka3]

Omg, just shut up about this already I swear...
Better pray they actually change something this time instead of just further unbalancing things... though I have to admit, with that 'make WHM easier' quote floating around my expectations are in the negative numbers until proven wrong on that one, too. Still, no new healer is the best outcome and all the outrage about it is just plain laughable.

[Gemina]

Omg, just shut up about this already I swear...
Better pray they actually change something this time instead of just further unbalancing things... though I have to admit, with that 'make WHM easier' quote floating around my expectations are in the negative numbers until proven wrong on that one, too. Still, no new healer is the best outcome and all the outrage about it is just plain laughable.

This is a discussion forum, and everyone has a right to express how they feel about the situation. If it is grating your ears/eyeballs then turn away. This is a big issue, and we're not just going to sit idly by and ignore it.

Balance is their excuse, but it is not the true reason why we are not getting a 4th healer. We are not getting a 4th healer at least at the launch of 5.0 for a myriad of reasons. One of them is AST. The addition of this job in 3.0 really screwed things up. It showcased that they could not find a way to make a 3rd healer truly unique giving it the base skills of WHM and tossing in a card mechanic. It is now over-tuned and because it has nearly the entire base toolkit of WHM, leaving WHM out in the cold.

Role skills is another. An extremely flawed design due to an antiquated and stubborn FFXI/FFXIV 1.0 mentality of thinking such a system works in this mmo. No role has suffered from this atrocious design more than healers.

PvE content design is a third reason that has also backed them into a corner which does not allow healer A to have distinctive advantages/disadvantages in comparison to Healer B and Healer C. Since all three healers can easily meet the healing requirements, the only way to accomplish this is to diversify their DPS kits and they did a poor job with this as well; once again leaving WHM out in the cold.

Another reason: BLU. The devs made the decision to allocate time and resources into its implementation which could have been spent fixing this healer cobweb we're entangled in. This then leads to reason five: neglect. I don't know if they see the healer community as the least desirable role to play based off some BS chart or other form of figures and numbers but a decision was made to leave the healer status quo as is. See reason number three. What really sucks is that the limited job concept failed. BLU was clearly the wrong choice, and while there are some players who are fine with it, there are far more who wanted this job to be viable for duties in very much the same way the healer community wanted a 4th healer.

We already KNOW that healers are unbalanced. This isn't news to anybody. The problem are the reasons why they are unbalanced. The circumstances that have lead to the state the healer community is currently in. The dev team still has my support because I sympathize with the amount of pressure that is on them to bring satisfactory content to so many different playstyles, but things like this break down those supportive pillars due to feelings of being underappreciated.

I can't even begin to comprehend how you think not having a new healer is the best outcome of this situation when it is the outcome of an extremely bad circumventive situations the devs have put themselves in.

[Darkpaw]

snip

Well the thing is all we can do is speculate why they are not giving us another healer, and while you make a really well constructed and well reasoned argument the fact is that we don't know. All of those things you listed could very easily be the exact reasons why they decided to not give us a 4th healer. Full job role roster balance could be another. The fact is that only the development team truly knows why they made these decisions. Anything we say is just speculation and guess work, and guess work no matter how well educated is still guess work without facts we can verify.

We know they have stated they are planning to revamp/replace the role system and I don't disagree it's unfair to healers more than any of the other roles.

I don't know that I can say that BLU is a waste. Blu and the limited system were an experiment for them and I won't condemn them for trying out new things whether they fall flat or not. It gives them ideas of new things to try in the future that could bring in something truly special in the future.

Ast I can agree that they've always had problems with balancing, and usually when it gets close to being in a decent spot it's only because WHM gets pushed out into the cold. They really need to define set parameters and boundaries between these two classes.

I don't believe this was the best outcome possible but I do think it's probably the most practical outcome they can see for now, and more than likely it probably leaves a pretty bitter taste in their mouths because they know they made a decision that alienates a section of their playerbase. We just have to hope that there's a bigger reason for it in the grand scheme of things.