Time to expand a little on my comments about SE needing to hire a healer designer.

[Sebazy]

Plenty of people have probably noticed my repeated quips about SE needing to actually hire a healer designer in the first place. Some of the commentary going around at the moment makes me think that this is something worth putting a little more context to.

Please note that the following credits are for combat and class design teams. These are NOT dungeon or raid designers.

Jiliang Kim, Hyukjun Choi, Minho Kim, Juyoung Min, Sungjae Park, Jangwon Park, Shinkyu Lee, Junghwan Lee, Junehee Lee, Youngha Jeon.

The above is the battle system design team for Aion.

Floyd Grubb, Lee Ridout, Maria Aliprando, Doug Carroll, Philip Draven, Michael Schroeder, Eric Wrobel.

TESO.

Georg Zoeller, Jason Attard, Austin Peckenpaugh, Reece Thornton, William Wallace, Pete Warner, Cameron Winston

Here's SWOTR.

Kei Sato, Takashi Kawamoto, Hikaru Tamaki, Tsuyoshi Yokozawa

And last but most certainly not least. FFXIV's battle system design team.

Please don't take this as me bashing Sato and his team. I will always stand by my opinion that they did an incredible job with ARR.

However, the number of jobs has increased, the complexity per job has increased, the community's understanding of the game has increased and with that, the demands and expectations of the player base have increased exponentially.

Meanwhile, Sato has had the same 3 people behind him since ARR and I've not seen anything to suggest that anything has changed for Shadowbringers. It's quite apparent now that this team is overworked, understaffed and starved for fresh creative ideas in many aspects of the gameplay that they oversee.

When I pitch into a thread with my lol SE needs to hire a healer designer I quite literally do mean that. Yoshida didn't deny us a 4th healer because of some disdain for the green team. Rather, at this stage there isn't really anyone with their hands on the wheel of the healer role. The team are simply too thinly stretched to give it the attention and time that it needs. Thus we end up with the last minute knee jerk changes that are riddled with flaws and shortcomings. This isn't even a new thing. Every single expansion has landed with glaring problems afflicting at least one of the healer jobs.

There is neither the manpower or the willpower to correct this problem within Yoshida's team at the moment and this will continue to be a problem until either he stops being stubborn and accepts that this is an issue or SE's beancounters open their wallets and let him get hiring.

TLDR: There's not much point complaining about SE's healer designers, they basically don't have any.

*edit* - Update for Endwalker

Battle Director
Kei Sato

Battle System Designers
Takashi Kawamoto
Hikaru Tamaki
Hironori Isami

We're now at literally double the number of jobs coupled with far more abilities per job and the team still hasn't been expanded.

Small
Indie
Company

[Deceptus]

Kei Sato, Takashi Kawamoto, Hikaru Tamaki, Tsuyoshi Yokozawa

And last but most certainly not least. FFXIV's battle system design team.

That moment you realize they don't have at least one developer per job role (Tank, Heal, Melee DPS, Caster DPS, Ranged Physical DPS)

[Kabooa]

That moment you realize they don't have at least one developer per job role (Tank, Heal, Melee DPS, Caster DPS, Ranged Physical DPS)

Implying that Tank and Melee DPS are different.

[MaraD_]

Implying that Tank and Melee DPS are different.

Technically they are.

Fundamentally "roles" break into 2 primary gameplay designs.
(1) Offensive (win condition)
(2) Defensive (to make it feel less of a numbers game, and add tension in a tug of war)

Further divided by sub roles;
(A) Selfish (high self sustain usually)
(B) Support (good synergy with the team, aiding in numbers/effectiveness)

Lastly, role/sub roles are divided by aesthetics, flavor, and gameplay mechanics; (Strengths and weaknesses apply)
Ranged, at the cost of Cast bars/mobility.
Melee, at the cost of positionals/mobility.
(There are more, such as pets, burst vs sustained, faster paced GCDs, etc)

NIN is a support with positionals, so its odd BRD and MCH dont have equivalents for thier mobility/freedom.
Though one could argue their lack of gap closers and anti pushback, which I'll agree comes pretty close, so its ok. (plus part of their flavor.)


Now, back to the point, tanks are "supposed" to be under the defensive/selfish category.
They are the equivalent of a Selfish Healer, who can only heal themselves (rampart/potent self mitigation).
They lost decent direct healing (while healers lost decent party targeting mitigation) for the sake of doing far more DPS.
Most people see tanks as melee DPS with slight/occasional mitigation.
(Here's where it gets complicaited.)
The reason they arent an Offensive role, isnt because of their mitigation despite being a big reason, but due to how other DPS dont actually raise the tanks DPS to the same levels of other DPS, and due to healers not having propper mitigation tools. For tanks to be primarily an offensive role, they need to be a DPS with enmity control, and no/little mitigation. (other DPS and Healers make up the differences)
They need to do the same damage as the other DPS at the end of the day (or roughly equivalent). While non tanks are the types to support the tanks lack of personal DPS. (Think DNC.) So that tanks are raised to the same DPS level of the other DPS.
Now healers need to have heals better suited to a single target, and heals better suited for raid wide dmg. The person who would get the most use of a strong single target heal (something like aldo, but with a shorter shield timer, so u want to keep it on a single target) is the person who gets hurt more often.
Pretend healers can put a "tank stance" on one person, but cant reapply it to another person for 30seconds. This is why u want a DPS who keeps the focus of the enemy.

TL;DR tanks are currently (in most MMOs) designed as a jack of all trades. They arent fully the defensive role, nor the offensive role. This is because old tanks were more so designed with the defensive role in mind, and to make tanks more appealing to more players, they started trying to make them the "DPS with mitigation" which is technically in the middle, and not an actual DPS. (as explained above)

Being a hybrid melee healer/DPS doesnt mean you're equal to a pure melee DPS.
If you equate them as being the same, apply the same logic to healers as casters, and all ranged as the same function, and melee/ranged/caster DPS as the same role. (consistency)

Yes, there's an obvious lack of general interest for healers coming from the dev team.
They'll go on and on about the intricate changes made to tanks or the ideas behind DPS balance, but soon as it comes to healers, it's a sentence or two about how their healing is more mobile now. It's a little ridiculous.

I agree with this.
If I were to try and redo the classes from the ground up, I'd be hard pressed to give a butt about Physical Ranged play styles. (and more accurately, DPS in general)
But when it comes to tanks and healers, I have tons of interest, with losts of ideas, and also an understanding of which ideas cant work with the other ideas, w/o changing the core of how I wish the game to flow.

One example here, is how they did intend healers to cast DPS spells, but also didnt take that DPS into consideration. The only way to allow GCD DPS, is to have bosses do very little fluff dmg between Tank Busters. But in order to make that considered "difficult" basic healing needs to be very weak, so you would be required to spend multiple GCDs getting them back up after a TB. They made oGCDs mostly for mobility. But here's the problem... You can use oGCDs to replace direct GCD healing. If you do that, what gets interrupted isnt always healing, but actually your DPS. Only in 4man leveling dungeons would tanks take consistent damage, to make up the lack of this dynamic. This is an example of them not understanding the finner elements of defensive roles.

I can easily see all of this, but when it comes to the DPS, i'm much more inclined to make similar mistakes, due to just not caring about the DPS roles as much. I really just dont care about the DPS role, unless they get some more party responsibility. (which then I'd start to care more.)

[Kabooa]

Technically they are.

Sure, on paper you can make this argument.

In practice, tanks are discount melee DPS. Shadowbringers only solidified this further.

[MaraD_]

In practice, tanks are discount melee DPS. Shadowbringers only solidified this further.

And by your logic, SAMs are discount casters.

Its a hybrid. Stop calling grey a "discount black" or "discount white" its intentionally dishonest, as its trying to give a false impression.
We all agree they are heading in that direction. We know thats the general idea behind tanks with SH. but they are still a hybrid even so.

The only reason I feel the need to correct what you say, despite us both understanding what u mean, is that there are plenty who dont understand what u mean, and take it too literal.
As for why I care about that, is because we still have people who dont understand we lack;

Pure Physical Ranged tanks (shield lob equivalents are just hybridization, like SAM being a hybrid caster)
Pure Caster Ranged tanks (PLD is the closest as a hybrid)
Pure Caster Melee tanks (Nothing really comes close, PLDs casts have range on them)
Pure Pet tanks (DRK being closest with a once a 2min pet, or 2.0 ACN/SMN)

Pure Physical Ranged healers
Pure Physical Melee healers
Pure Caster Melee healers

Pure Caster Melee DPS (SAM being the closest as a hyrbid)

And every time I bring up the combinations we lack, they say "nope, we have that, look at this hybrid, or thing completely different than what you mentioned"
(besides the additional "thats not possible in FFXIV because X reasons")
Yoshida even mentioned he was out of ideas for tanks, healers, and melee DPS, and struggled to come up with new ideas. Yet here was a list of what we dont have.
(this includes a lack of full time 2s GCD tanks/healers/ranged(casters too))

So my critique is not personal, and what you said can be taken correctly, but it does give off an impression, due to wanting the dev team to see why people are disappointed in the new "DPS tank" designs, that caused the other issue I feel is never represented as much as the disdain for "DPS tanks" thats currently decently represented.

[Lyth]

That moment you realize they don't have at least one developer per job role (Tank, Heal, Melee DPS, Caster DPS, Ranged Physical DPS)

I don't think it was as bad as all that. They must have had at least 3 people working on the WAR reworks for like half the expansion... Oh.

[Kyohei]

Thanks for climbing back to what could indeed be the core of the issue, i didn't think of checking that.

[Veis_Alveare]

I don't necessarily agree with the idea that there's much wrong with healers going into ShB but I very much agree with the idea that that roster isn't long enough. I hope they can dedicate a bit more effort to job design in general, it's one of the parts of the game that impacts player experience the most and deserves attention.

Good call out!

[Josco]

This is actually a fantastic point.

I realized while watching a bunch of different videos from the media event that people who don't main healer were generally saying, "Yeah, they got this and this and this...looks like they all got cool stuff! Healing will be awesome!" Then when it came time to talk about tank or MNK abilities, they got super technical and critical. The healer questions I saw asked were super general and softball.

We really need some "influencer" healer representation, and obviously an actual healer dev would be great.