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

[Recon1o6]

I remember reading somewhere that HW was only slated to have DRK and MCH as the newest jobs but they added AST in at the last minute...and if that's actually the case, frankly it showed with how poorly designed that job is to this day. The spell effects of AST are gorgeous and I love the job's overall theme, but the Sect system is lazy and terrible and was a really strong demonstration IMO of how overwork really stifles the dev team's creativity when it comes to new healers.

Mch was supposed to be chemist actually with the gun. They ended up splitting it into two jobs

so yeah, they were making a tank and a healer, both of which turned out to be incredibly popular and now they gone and wrecked both of them

snip

It is a combination of factors that feed into one another.
-SE doesn't have a healer designer and is unwilling to listen to feedback>healers do not get designers that take SE goals and playerbase feedback into account>healers are terrible
-SE does not have the staff required for the many roles>jobs getting pushed out untested>jobs dont get adjusted with feedback>healers are terrible

obv thats simplified, but it is completely clear at this point that SE does not give a damn about healers, and even if they did, they don't give the resources to do things mid expansion without harming their favourite dps jobs. They only made sage to round off numbers and generate hype which is why the hype for it has died down the moment its toolkit got released. All its got going for it is gundam aesthetics and being able to start at 70

[SieyaM]

I think there can be more to do on healers than just heal and DPS, there are lots of untapped options in the support category but support abilities tend to be hard to balance since their effect on combat is indirect.

[Sebazy]

I wouldn't go as far as saying that SE don't give a damn about healers. But rather they don't appear to have anyone either directly on the battle system team or perhaps even someone that carries weight within the design lead that is heavily invested in the healer role.

It's not so much that they are treating it with contempt, but rather they don't have any long term vision or insight into the role's issues and how things actually pan out when played at a competent level across a wide range of content. This has caused them to make stupid decisions and basic mistakes over and over again, often repeating near enough the same errors.

A few quick examples:

AST's lack of a spammable AoE until later than the other healers was generally considered to be a bad thing, especially by veteran healers who would have likely had Blizzard II when levelling WHM and SCH. SE took this knowledge and decided that it would be a good idea for SCH to not have a spammable AoE at any level for Stormblood.

Large stathes of WHM's kit is just stupid. Free Cure is just dumb, sorry if you feel otherwise but it genuinely is and I die a little inside whenever I see someone mention about fishing for Free Cure procs. Spending 400MP for a 15% chance to save 1000MP. Why? Cure has a small amount of value in it's faster cast but that is literally all it brings these days.

Continuing on the WHM warpath. 4.0 Plenary Indulgence. What was that ability supposed to be? When the SB media build went out I was hoping it'd be a return to the days of bosses such as Caduceus and Kaliya with both tanks getting curb stomped at the same time. Instead we got Deltascape which was anything but. PI mk1 was an ability that was 4 years too late and made zero sense at the point it was introduced, expecting us to spam Cures in a tier that never needed us to spam Cures. Secret of the Lily I and II fell foul of exactly the same fundamental flaw.

Whilst we're talking about useless WHM abilities. Fluid Aura in patch 5.0. I've seen the occasional defence for it mentioned here in that 'it's useful to bind something that's dangerous in the overworld' to which I counter 'just Regen yourself instead.' If you can land a bind on it, it's not dangerous. If it's dangerous enough that you don't want it hitting you, it's probably a fate boss in which case A) It's going to be bind immune and B) It's going to have something else hitting it in which case the bind would break even if it did land. Regen yourself and carry on. Why did they not realise that this ability was entirely useless and a waste of an icon in it's 5.0 form?

I think it's already been mentioned here earlier but SE made changes to WHM citing wanting to reduce agro, but the change to Assize actually increased WHM agro generation overall, and quite significantly at that.

Moving onto AST. Cards went from being 4 keys in total (Draw, RR, Spread and Shuffle) to 8 keys (Draw, RR, Spread, Shuffle, Undraw, Undraw Spread, Minor Arcana, Sleeve Draw). The Undraw abilities were fine in their own right. But removing ASTs ability to click off cards in their buff list was undeniably idiotic.

I'm sure there's loads more, but these are the ones that spring to mind for me. Most of these wouldn't have made it off the team whiteboard if they had have had someone there with a healthy amount of experience playing healers to a good standard. Instead we have our role being designed by people who likely barely understand the role anymore than the occasional random DPS we get coming in here ranting that we need to only heal in group content because some Netflix watching healer got them killed in a dungeon somewhere.

Adding a few more battle system designers would allow them the luxury of trying to have someone invested in each role within the team which would hopefully not only improve the consistency and relevancy of new abilities and changes to the role, but also add a bit more creativity and passion into the mix as well. Even the great hope that is Sage is yet another cut and paste job once you start looking a bit more closely.

That's not acceptable for a game of this scale and size.

[Maltothoris]

Secret of the Lily I and II fell foul of exactly the same fundamental flaw.

Secrets of the Lily II was so damn worthless. How in the heck did they ever think that was a good trait? It was the one trait that was worse than Monk's Tackle Mastery. Also I think it was even more insulting that the SCH and AST traits got fixed in either 5.07 or 5.05 with immensely better things such as the 100 percent proc chance to reduce aetherflow's cd or reducing lightspeed's cd.

The fact they super buffed Assize back in 4.5 was them trying to make some sort of band-aid or repentance for it. 300 healing and damage increased to 400 and then the cd reduced by 15 seconds to 45 seconds. Also when they increased PI's duration back to 30 seconds.

Yes this may be all in the past now but it was the fact they made these choices and they were left unchanged for so long. There was no attempt to make the cd reduction of the lilies stronger or other ways to gain them.

[Rongway]

I don't know if this is a resourcing issue instead of a philosophical / design issue.

When your constraints are:
-Incoming damage is low, because we cannot stress weak healers.
-Incoming damage is choreographed and avoidable.
-Healer DPS rotations must be brain dead, because we cannot stress weak healers.

Half a person or a boatload of people won't make much difference. "No healer left behind" doesn't leave much room for experimentation.

Even if a dev came back to their manager's manager and said that they personally were bored, the odds of completely reworking the game are pretty low.

I don't think this should really be made an issue anymore. We have four healers now. That gives us plenty of room to have one super easy healer, one super technical healer, and two middle healers. With twenty jobs and close enough to 1/5 of them being each role, they can't keep trying to make every job work for everyone. If they pop out a healer that is difficult for the average player but is still well-designed, it'll be fine--the players who find it too difficult have three other healing jobs they can try out. Conversely, people who find one healer so simple and boring that they can't stand it should play one of the other healers. But first we have to get to a point where all the healers--regardless of their place in the difficulty spectrum--are designed with clear goals, worthwhile actions, and mechanics that don't conflict within the same job skill set.

[HappyHubris]

It's not so much that they are treating it with contempt, but rather they don't have any long term vision or insight into the role's issues and how things actually pan out when played at a competent level across a wide range of content. This has caused them to make stupid decisions and basic mistakes over and over again, often repeating near enough the same errors.

Bold of you to think that healer design is concerned with play at a "competent level across a wide range of content." Interviews and design choices seem to suggest that the priority is "no healer left behind," where systems and content are balanced to be mechanically relaxed for healing classes.

The company might just be terrified of maintaining a healer population and lowered the skill floor to the sub-basement. It's a self-reinforcing loop, as enthusiastic healers burn out.

[HappyHubris]

I don't think this should really be made an issue anymore. We have four healers now. That gives us plenty of room to have one super easy healer, one super technical healer, and two middle healers. With twenty jobs and close enough to 1/5 of them being each role, they can't keep trying to make every job work for everyone. If they pop out a healer that is difficult for the average player but is still well-designed, it'll be fine--the players who find it too difficult have three other healing jobs they can try out. Conversely, people who find one healer so simple and boring that they can't stand it should play one of the other healers. But first we have to get to a point where all the healers--regardless of their place in the difficulty spectrum--are designed with clear goals, worthwhile actions, and mechanics that don't conflict within the same job skill set.

But what would a difficult healer look like within the current constraints? You can't require more healing, because that's capped by damage. You can't output more damage, or that job will be picked over the others.

You could make one job really clunky and require several button presses to replicate one button on the others, but then players would reject it as weak and nerfed. Imagine a class that requires say 2 oGCDs between each nuke to replicate one glare - why would anyone bother? Or if one healer had really low potencies requiring healing spam, why would anyone take that risk?

[AikenDrum]

You can't output more damage, or that job will be picked over the others.

SE did this with gnb and war

[NobleWinter]

But what would a difficult healer look like within the current constraints? You can't require more healing, because that's capped by damage. You can't output more damage, or that job will be picked over the others.

You could make one job really clunky and require several button presses to replicate one button on the others, but then players would reject it as weak and nerfed. Imagine a class that requires say 2 oGCDs between each nuke to replicate one glare - why would anyone bother? Or if one healer had really low potencies requiring healing spam, why would anyone take that risk?

Scholar is currently pressing two or three buttons to heal as effectively as Astro or WHM. It's called clunky quite often and now that its balanced more or less with the other healers it still gets used. Some people like pressing more buttons for little pay off (BRD Mains lol)

[ThorneDynasty]

I don't know if more complex rotation has to automatically mean astronomically higher DPS than other healers. Seems like another misunderstanding that the complaints are about balance at all. Unless it's way off very few players choose their main to min-max, I doubt we are going to see a mass exodus from GNB and PLD to DRK this expansion even if the speculation of noticeably better DPS output holds out.