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

[Deceptus]

AST got added to the mix, which was where we ran into balance problems because AST has to fit both SCH and WHM's roles in the party and SCH got buffed and it became OP.

Just for the sake of context, SCH got buffed in that situation shortly after AST was released because AST (Noct) was straight up better than SCH in every single way.

Their Shield spell was:

1) Instant Cast
2) Higher Potency
3) Lower Mana Cost

AST as a job did nothing but cause balancing issues since it was implemented.

Either it was a jack of all trades / master of none who had buffs to compensate for it's shortcomings, or it could do everything the two other healers could do just as well or better and had buffs on top of that.

It wasn't until SE basically neutered Cards and healers in general that they simply became carbon copies of each other with minor job flair.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Silver-Strider]

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)

Then they complain when the straight forward class does better than them. "My job is complicated, it should be better" is a common argument.

[ItMe]

Then they complain when the straight forward class does better than them. "My job is complicated, it should be better" is a common argument.

Truth.
And if a job is more complicated without having a higher potential output... it still artificially warps what people actually play. Especially after Thoughts Per Second got the world's first TEA clear by, like, 5 days because they picked jobs that let them focus on the boss instead of bring more mechanically complex jobs that just divide their attention and jeopardize the clear.
It's very difficult to keeo a healthy balance between two jobs, equal in all things, but one has advanced execution.

It's a frustrating damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

[Gemina]

Yeah... it's a tall order. Really tall. You're talking about adding another six figure (USD) salary per designer. These new designers would also have to have extensive experience, will have their own demands, have ideas of their own that could potentially clash, fit in with an already tightly knit handful of designers, and come into the #1 mmo currently on the market. I think it goes without saying the level of expectation placed on a new hire.

There is no doubt that the demand on the team has grown along with the game resulting in spaghettification of their resources, but there is a reason why there is a saying, "good help is hard to find." The designers that would best fit these positions are likely already on other projects of their own. There are probably one or two out there who have developed quite the reputation for themselves that SE would take in a heartbeat if they could get them, and would pay whatever they wanted.

IOW, I think it's a bit wishful thinking. It is not out of the realm of possibility, but I would place your faith elsewhere if you believe this is the only way the game will continue to improve. That faith has to be placed in the main people in charge of the various departments wrapped into the development of the game. If it is of any consolation, I truly do believe that if they have the opportunity to add value to the design teams, they will take advantage of that opportunity.

[Sebazy]

<snip>

Eh, granted I used to work for Bullfrog and by proxy, EA rather than SE. However, the only way I see a new hire getting that kind of salary would be if they were specifically trying to poach talent from elsewhere in the industry. Whilst that's something I've certainly suggested (Blizzard's hiring out of the Everquest raid scene was hugely successful and I'd wager very good value for money as well), it's just not really a thing I can see SE doing if I'm honest. The more likely option is someone stepping over from a different internal team.

One clarification I will note though, having a fully likeminded design team isn't actually a good thing. You want the broadest range of ideas possible going in. It's then down to having good management to refine these concepts into a more focused form to be implemented into the game itself. This is why I'm of the mind that hiring someone like Mythic in a consultancy manner would be an interesting route to take, effectively buying in ideas and concepts from team with vast experience in the field but yet aren't really in direct competition. This would still give Yoshida and his leads complete creative control but over a far broader well of concepts and ideas.

In all honesty, I really struggle to place my faith in SE's current situation because I've been there myself. After I left Bullfrog, I went to another studio and immediately got dropped into the world builder team for a World War 2 FPS. Whilst Quakeworld maps were pretty much the thing that got me hired in the first place, tech, metal and lights were pretty much my jam. Words cannot describe how hard it was to motivate myself to churn out bland dreary mud brown maps. To say it was a struggle to stay motivated would be the understatement of the century. Whilst system design and world building are indeed different kettles of fish, they are still both tasks place large demands on a designer's creativity. I can vouch first hand that it's significantly harder to get those creative juices flowing on a task that you just don't have much interest in.

This is largely why I feel the way I do. A designer with a keen interest in the healer role will be a much more efficient & creative worker vs what we appear to have currently and would hopefully avoid the repeated pitfalls and shortcomings that we keep seeing each expansion. However I do agree that the odds of SE pulling their own Tigole out of thin air are extremely slim. Hiring external teams on for consultancy work is a much more common practice and I think this is the more likely route assuming SE ever do decide to tackle this.

Here's hoping they at least try something.