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

[Ryoutoshi]

This was news to me and a very good point. I've always been a hardcore healer. I like not dpsing and having my status bar filled with managed buffs and shields. That what I wanted out of scholar and I've been honestly annoyed with my fellow SCHs. They always sounds like DPS that wanted better queues rather than wanting the healing better.

So I'm not mad at the decreased attacks. I'm mad at how lazy it was. Skills we got look like bland garbage. Who cares about balance when the class itself looks boring. Forget how it plays. Looking at it makes it obvious it was rushed and incomplete.

Sch needs a stylistic update more than anything or the overall appeal of the class is going to drop regardless of what playstyle SCHs prefer.

[DPZ2]

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.

You are basing your opinion on the number of end credit entries for "Battle Planners" (the title "Battle System Designer" is a 4.0 thing) and ... what appears to be a gut feeling?

Please reword to something like "To me, it is apparent now ...", or "In my own humble opinion ..." and I might let you get away with it. To me, in my own humble opinion, it is not apparent that the team is .... yadayada.

It may not take a lot of people to deal with ongoing battle system design work once a game is in production. If one were to look for the ongoing development team for SWOTR and TESO, I suspect it would be extremely small, if there is even one out there.

For comparison, Final Fantasy XIV had 11 members for "Battle Planning" in 1.0, and Kei Sato was not one of them. You may not be feeling the love for your particular classes, sure, but know that it takes a lot more time and personnel to design boss fights (and animations, and gear and glamours) that complement the battle system.

For an interesting perspective on the full design team for FFXIV (and comparison to other comparative MMOs), check out https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...nges_over_time

[Sebazy]

You are basing your opinion on the number of end credit entries for "Battle Planners" (the title "Battle System Designer" is a 4.0 thing) and ... what appears to be a gut feeling?

Hiya. Nope, I'm basing it off how the credits have changed (or not) over time.

It may not take a lot of people to deal with ongoing battle system design work once a game is in production. If one were to look for the ongoing development team for SWOTR and TESO, I suspect it would be extremely small, if there is even one out there.

Disagreed, initial balance changes, fixes and PvP adjustments are a lot of work post release. There's a very good chance that SWOTR's team has been axed to a thread by now, since yeah, EA. But you'll mostly find that it's the art and writing teams that get cycled off onto other projects between patches.
This is something that's easily verified with some searching.

For comparison, Final Fantasy XIV had 11 members for "Battle Planning" in 1.0, and Kei Sato was not one of them.

I didn't bring 1.0 into it for a couple of reasons. First off, Battle Planner is a much vaguer category in 1.0's credits. They don't have a separate section for the raid/trial design team (Which was called Monster Planner in ARR). However, I think that it's a reasonable assumption to make that the boss fight team was combined into the class team for 1.0's credits as you'll note that Daisuke Sase's progression to the Monster Planner lead.

You may not be feeling the love for your particular classes, sure, but know that it takes a lot more time and personnel to design boss fights (and animations, and gear and glamours) that complement the battle system.

Not going to dispute this. The fact remains in my eyes that what people they do have are clearly stretched too thin though. There is no justification for multiple classes needing to have significant balance changes between expansions without fail. This isn't something unique to healers. Rather healers just seem to get it in the neck a bit more consistently than the rest of the roles.

For an interesting perspective on the full design team for FFXIV (and comparison to other comparative MMOs), check out https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...nges_over_time

That's a good link. Thanks <3

[Cled-cat]

Totally agree with OP here. I keep getting this gut feeling of being really unsatisfied and almost forgotten about in each expansion as a healer. I used to main healer up until 4.0 but I just got tired of feeling disillusioned and let down by the direction the healers were taken in. Where’s the excitement and radical ideas here? More AoE heals that we REALLY don’t need, even in ultimate levels of healing??? AST getting a literal PI rip off and putting stars on it to try to cover it? Dumbing down the cards to stop the issue of people ignoring many other cards to fish for Balance, and just giving us an AoE balance in Divination anyway? Which they could have added on TOP of the old cards? WHM getting Divine Seal back yet again (with wings!) and some lazy mitigation slapped on to cover it’s origin? Stripping their DPS down to even more boring repetitive levels, especially SCH? God, no that’s not what should be happening. Where’s the innovation? I just don’t feel it with the healers so I’m maining a DPS now since they clearly get the much more engaging and exciting end of the stick this expansion as always.

[Risvertasashi]

SE's always been weirdly selective about the healer feedback they listen to.

Take, for instance, 4.5. They listened to the odd person or two saying PI sucked and so let's buff that so WHMs have more healing. And just a bandaid until the expac, you say? Well, no - even now, they've ignored the many more people pointing out WHM will never be competitive without utility.

It would be very nice if someone from the dev team - at least on the battle systems side of it - had time to get really in depth familiar with healers and how they play at the high end. They've really been missing the mark with healer feedback and balance for so long now...

[EaMett]

Also screams neglect that they haven’t seemed to get a single healer main into the media tour

[Risvertasashi]

Also screams neglect that they haven’t seemed to get a single healer main into the media tour

Mr. Happy's done a pretty good job of covering them, not just for shadowbringers too. But yeah he's not a healer main, and it almost never comes up in interviews (only being very vague mentions when it does). Nature of a niche role I guess..

[EaMett]

Mr. Happy's done a pretty good job of covering them, not just for shadowbringers too. But yeah he's not a healer main, and it almost never comes up in interviews (only being very vague mentions when it does). Nature of a niche role I guess..

I love that mr happy is always present and I do agree that he generally does a good job when covering things. Especially considering he covers everything, like seriously.
But on more than one occasion he’s missed out on the subtleties of the role and missed opportunities to follow up on them in subsequent interviews. Also, why would he when he needs to cover ground for all classes and any other extra questions he may have.
Would be nice to have more niche guests for the tours.

[ForteNightshade]

SE's always been weirdly selective about the healer feedback they listen to.

Take, for instance, 4.5. They listened to the odd person or two saying PI sucked and so let's buff that so WHMs have more healing. And just a bandaid until the expac, you say? Well, no - even now, they've ignored the many more people pointing out WHM will never be competitive without utility.

It would be very nice if someone from the dev team - at least on the battle systems side of it - had time to get really in depth familiar with healers and how they play at the high end. They've really been missing the mark with healer feedback and balance for so long now...

The real irony is they kept stressing how they wanted to reduce WHM's aggro issues with that change. Except the buff to Assize actually caused them to have higher aggro due to the sheer amount of overhealing you now do. It goes to show, they expect us to hold Assize for healing when optimized WHM play tells you to blow it on CD.

I love that mr happy is always present and I do agree that he generally does a good job when covering things. Especially considering he covers everything, like seriously.
But on more than one occasion he’s missed out on the subtleties of the role and missed opportunities to follow up on them in subsequent interviews. Also, why would he when he needs to cover ground for all classes and any other extra questions he may have.
Would be nice to have more niche guests for the tours.

Hopefully by the next media tour Momo Sama has a strong enough Twitch presence to get invited. At least then, you would have someone extremely knowledgeable on healers that can ask questions. Not to knock Happy, Xeno and the like. But they just don't play healers extensively enough to pick at them.

[Deceptus]

The whole idea that "Healers are supposed to heal only" completely disregards the leveling process. They have to be able to reasonably kill mobs in the overworld.

As it stands right now, that's not going to happen.

We saw how long it took a GUN to kill a mob in the job video (they're on the low potency end of tanks), and we have less potencies than they do.

Also screams neglect that they haven’t seemed to get a single healer main into the media tour

Or, as I've said before, they don't want to touch the subject because they know it's sore and they don't have good answers to the hard questions.

Hence why they don't invite anyone knowledgeable about healing.

But ignoring an issue doesn't help solve it, or build consensus. It just pushes people farther away. SE needs to come out with a no sh!t "this is why we did this" statement.