Has anyone quit healing?

[ForsakenRoe]

That's because we see things differently. And you may also be thinking CC while I play Frontlines exclusively.

<words about classes>

That's where we're differing. Not in 'I see damage, you see healing' or whatever. The kit was designed with CC balance in mind. The fact it's also in Frontlines is a side effect, and it had to be hastily hotfixed due to massive issues that were not expected, because it was not designed for it. Stuff like 'PLD can allow someone to cap a point risk free via Cover cheese', and 'SMNs can all use Bahamut at the same time and wipe a whole GC from the game'. I don't look at 'what can the class do in Frontlines' because it's not balanced for that, same as how I don't go 'wow X is so OP because it can do <neat trick in EX roulette>'. Now, if it can do neat tricks in raids, like the O11S Cover strats, then yeh, I acknowledge that as a strength the class has.

Thanks for the rundown on how the classes are different in PVP, but I think I'll manage.

Ah, I see you've found a new way of saying "mitigation" that you can pretend means "damage". That's...literally what the word "mitigation" means, and it's generally considered a form of defensive utility/buffing, not offensive. By nature, something that reduces damage...is defensive. I genuinely don't understand why...well, never mind. Anyway, the word you're looking for is "mitigation".

This is the attitude issue people tried to point out. I miss the previous seasons when LB generation was one of the cards. Bole's too turtle-mode for PVP, reminds me of high-ground turtle games in DOTA taking like 2 hours.

That's...literally what you're doing. You're describing how your view was formed...via your own personal experiences. Ahem.

The point is that you put forward a tone that smacked of 'I preach gospel truth', about how everyone was having trouble with the tier's healing requirements. My experiences run counter to that. The explanation, clearly, is that we play with players of different skill levels. The ones I ran into could handle it, adjusting mit usage as needed, as we do with every fight while progging. You got players who had more trouble adjusting, which is fine. But the fact of the matter remains, if SE makes the next tier have the same amount of healing required, the players you bumped into might struggle again. This also ignores the fact that, once we know when to use what, healing required drops like a rock. The issue is not, and has never been, 'how much healing do we need to do in prog'. It's 'how much of that healing is removed when we do reclears, and therefore filled with glarespam in it's place'.

ANY-way: As I pointed out, it was different in different DCs. My first clear, I think the only thing I had was the same thing I always buy first, the Tome ring (since you need two rings no matter what). Otherwise I was in min ilevel gear clearing it. And all I run is PF since I have no Static, as noted. I'll randomly get dragged into things by the FC from time to time, but that's generally once it's been out a while and I've already cleared it myself.

So you ran into people who couldn't adjust fast. I guess because I got my clears faster, I never had the chance to run into these issues, as week 2 onwards I was in duty complete parties? Which, by the sounds of it, means I got lucky.

Great, we agree, then. Though half-way would be fine as well. I'm honestly fine with whichever. Adapting to greater healing needs is fun and not really impossible or anything. Healers in FFXIV have ample tools for dealing with high or consistent damage - their toolkits are arguably built (GCD heals, anyway) around doing so - it's just a matter of making that mental transition and using them. Half-way between P1-4 and P5-8 would probably be fine.

You'd be fine with halfway, I'd be fine with the same as this tier. I'd probably be fine with like, this tier but +25% on top. But it still doesn't solve the core issue. That being, gaps of up to 40s where we have no healing to do, and therefore just GlareDosisOthers the boss. It doesn't matter how hard they make the boss hit, if they then make it just AFK for the next 30s. Why not have the double fist slams in P7S also do raidwide damage, as well as 'dont stand in this'? Instead of having the 'once per minute' raidwide be 'once per minute but now it has a bleed', why not change it so raidwides come out way faster, like every 20s or something?

I'd be far more inclined to believe this if:

A) Said people were fine with changing 1-3 of the Healers and leaving 3-1 of them alone, since they'd get that "how (they) deal that damage" fix on the one(s) changed, and,
B) If said people didn't also argue that if 3-1 are left alone, their complex one needed to do more damage to "reward" them for it.

A: Leaving one of the healers alone would cause it to be perceived by players as 'the bad one' or 'the one idiots play' or whatever. It doesn't take much for an MMO playerbase to write off a class as 'not good'. Even when the perception is completely unjustified.

B: Anyone asking for 'more complexity should mean more damage' is probably a lemon, assuming they are referring to the job's kit in a vacuum, without considering raidbuffing and the like. The whole argument that 'AST should do more damage than WHM' is, in two runs where the same players play the same classes, and only the AST/WHM player changes jobs, it is harder for them to get a perfect run as AST than as WHM, as there are way more factors at play. The RNG of the cards is not the only factor. If it was entirely AST-centric differences, I'd say they should do the same damage. But the fact that AST is reliant on other jobs performing well, for up to 20% of it's RDPS contribution, means I believe that a perfect AST should be slightly ahead of a perfect WHM. At 80th percentile and lower, I'd argue that an AST doing 80th would be at around 96% of the damage of a 80th WHM. This difference would close to equal at around 95th percentile, where the AST would overtake WHM and be, at 99th or Max or whatever you want to call it, around 1.5% to 2% ahead of the WHM. The fact that this requires basically perfect play, and perfect RNG, from not only the AST, but the rest of the party too, means these runs are exceptionally rare. People just love to see 'AST did better' on the 'Max' charts and assume that it happens every time. But how many runs got scrapped, because of bad Lord luck, or bad cards forcing constant 'lmao gotta put one on the physranged again'?

But yeh, I've gone through why I think leaving WHM behind in a 'role revitalization plan' is counterproductive, many times. The spec I play in WOW was in the top 10 mythic raid clears somewhere. Despite that, it's B tier on most tierlist websites and as such, it's hella hard to get invites for groups. Why take my class, when the S rank spec is played by all the FOTM chasers and plentiful in the groupfinder tool? I don't want to see a class have that happen to them here. I watched it happen to WHM in SB, to the casters in HW, to AST at the start of SHB for about 2 weeks before they emergency patched it, and to PLD WAR RPR DNC this tier. Oh, and MCH dear god poor MCH. Idiots in PF going for 'clear party, pls have seen enrage uwu smile' and they lock a BIS MCH out because 'MCH bad'.

On which note, could the reason your numbers dropped in SB be because everyone was saying 'WHM bad omegalul' and insisting on having AST/SCH for everything? If the 'most popular healer' was being blocked from PFs because AST was, lets be real, busted as hell strong, wouldn't it stand to reason that those WHM players would either quit the role and try another class, maybe one of the two new DPS that were added, or just quit altogether? Not everyone would have been fine with 'oh my class is ostracized, I'll just level and play AST instead'

Yes, yes, and my point was, locking healing behind dealing damage is a bad idea in general. And one most people (not everyone, but most everyone) agrees is a bad idea. It's why people far more often pitch "damage neutral" or "heal by doing damage" ideas over "damage to unlock healing efficiency" ideas.

Guess you missed the part where it says 'using BOTE gives three buffs, each turning the next Glare, Dia and Banish into Quake, Tornado and Flood'. It's not shown in the quote I put, because I cut it off to prevent it from being too long, but the whole point of the 'next-cast upgrades to powerful new spell' buffs is to make the heal damage neutral. What else were the buffs gonna do, change the VFX for Glare but have it be functionally identical? If people don't want to be efficient with damage, they can be not-efficient with damage by replacing this cast with a damage-losing Cure3 or Medica. They'll still be able to 'heal enough to clear'. If they're ignoring their damage skills enough that they cannot access this healing tool, they evidently don't care about their damage efficiency in the first place. Or is the issue that 'the heal-only players will be sad they can't use the cool new tool'?

[Connor]

Am I the only one who thinks PvP healer design is light years ahead of PvE? You have like 4 abilities yet they’re more interesting and diverse than most of what we have in PvE. And most important there’s a great balance of offense and support without making the jobs feel too far removed from the ‘healer’ role.

Scholar is a pretty good example if you ask me. Managing upkeep of a buff and debuff/dot, tactical usage of Expedient to increase their effects, managing use of Deployment for both dps and support. It’s simplistic enough that it doesn’t feel overly stressful but still needs you to actually weigh up the options of whether to buff the party, debuff the enemy (or both lol since Deployment has two charges). And best of all its literally just three buttons so nobody can say ‘but muh hotbars’ lol. And, obviously I’m not saying they should literally make healers have three buttons each, just making the point of quality of quantity. To me 1000 dps spells is no better than 1 if they’re all just straight up damage. It’s interactions, interesting additional effects, meaningful ways of supporting the party (including dealing damage to the enemy), that make healers engaging, not just ‘more dps spells’ like Yoshi-P seems to think people are asking for

Obviously the charges on healing spells would be replaced with MP costs since it’d be a pain if you ended up literally incapable of healing lol, but I think it’d be much more interesting than what we have now. Plus that’s a PvP balance thing for Recuperate, invincible healers in the past etc, rather than a way to enforce optimised healing strategies (hard to optimise a single direct healing spell lol)

Yoshi Plz let this guy do PvE healers too lol (unless it’s the same person doing both which would be kinda confusing lol).

[IDontPetLalas]

Am I the only one who thinks PvP healer design is light years ahead of PvE? You have like 4 abilities yet they’re more interesting and diverse than most of what we have in PvE. And most important there’s a great balance of offense and support without making the jobs feel too far removed from the ‘healer’ role.

Scholar is a pretty good example if you ask me. Managing upkeep of a buff and debuff/dot, tactical usage of Expedient to increase their effects, managing use of Deployment for both dps and support. It’s simplistic enough that it doesn’t feel overly stressful but still needs you to actually weigh up the options of whether to buff the party, debuff the enemy (or both lol since Deployment has two charges). And best of all its literally just three buttons so nobody can say ‘but muh hotbars’ lol. And, obviously I’m not saying they should literally make healers have three buttons each, just making the point of quality of quantity. To me 1000 dps spells is no better than 1 if they’re all just straight up damage. It’s interactions, interesting additional effects, meaningful ways of supporting the party (including dealing damage to the enemy), that make healers engaging, not just ‘more dps spells’ like Yoshi-P seems to think people are asking for

Obviously the charges on healing spells would be replaced with MP costs since it’d be a pain if you ended up literally incapable of healing lol, but I think it’d be much more interesting than what we have now. Plus that’s a PvP balance thing for Recuperate, invincible healers in the past etc, rather than a way to enforce optimised healing strategies (hard to optimise a single direct healing spell lol)

Yoshi Plz let this guy do PvE healers too lol (unless it’s the same person doing both which would be kinda confusing lol).

Very much this. Each healer has its own unique identity, which not only presents options that can appeal to various play styles, but also is fun for those people who are omni-healers and want to mix things up a bit.

Also, as you say the skills themselves are very well designed, they can be fun to manage and there is a good mix of options.

[Renathras]

I mean yoship came out the other month and begged people to try healing because it was such an issue.

To be fair, he begs people to try things all the time - Tanking, Savage, and Ultimates have all made the list. I think Island Sanctuary, too. And he begged people to take pictures of themselves ocean swimming in La Noscea and posting it to their online accounts. So that's not really a good metric, either. My point was more "We don't have any data that backs up the claim Healers are quitting in massive numbers".

I said...

I was referring to the 95%. I'm guessing you meant 95th percentile, but no, it wasn't clear. When someone says 20-25% and your reply is "95% <link>", the most rational way to read that is "Nope, not 20-25%; 95%, and here's my proof". That was why I even asked what percentile that was.

Seems YOU are the one that doesn't read people's responses before replying, since I said 'the reason I don't like Tank anymore' was because the responsibilities beyond 'do damage' were removed.

*cough*

I'll tell you my reason, and likely the reason most others feel that way. It's because we were always Blue DPS. Always. But that was hidden, masked, obscured, by the extra responsibilities we had.

Again, the logical way to read that "We always were Blue DPS, people just didn't see it, but it's always been true just as true as it is now", which implies you were saying Tanks were Blue DPS back then, not "Tanks were not Blue DPS back then, they have not always been Blue DPS, they were Tanks with Tank responsibilities at one time, and those were stripped away leaving nothing but DPS". When you say "were always Blue DPS. Always.", the implication isn't "were NOT always Blue DPS, but have become so". Perhaps you can see the reason I'd misunderstand that based on the actual words you typed. The ones that I read before replying to them.

Not trying to nitpick, but I'm actually reading what you type and replying to that. You just don't seem to type quite what you mean, apparently. Conversely, I type what I mean and you don't read it before replying.

Again, this may stem from us having different interpretations of what "Blue DPS" and "Green DPS" mean.

"Green DPS" is generally taken to mean "DPSer that does support healing/buffing", not "Healer that on occasion contributes to party damage". Likewise, "Blue DPS" would mean "DPS that occasionally uses mitigation abilities" as opposed to "Tank that mildly contributes to party damage". Perhaps the breakdown here is that you are somehow using different definitions, but I'm not sure what definitions you're using. When you talk about Healers, you talk about damage contribution as a necessary part of encounter clears, but when you talk about Tanks, you talk about damage in the sense of damage rotation, instead. So your definitions don't exactly seem...consistent, leading to me being unable to try and identify what the commonality is that makes something a "<color> DPS" in your worldview.

Does Yoshi-P responding to two Q+A questions about 'hey there's so many PF groups that can't find a healer this tier', saying they need to look at the data for the tier, but can see there is indeed a lack of healers, to the point where he says 'please give healer a try' count? question 1, question 2

Not really, since that doesn't say what the overall state of Healers is. It specifically is in reference to JP Datacenters, and seems not to be true across all servers or all datacenters. For example, on Primal, the Healer slots are often the first full in any PF group. I often have to start my own because the Healer slots are already taken when I look at other people's groups. That also doesn't indicate people are quitting the role in massive numbers, it only indicates that top end Healers are not healing Savages in PF groups, which isn't really saying a whole lot about the overall role population.

It's probably started to bounce back a bit, now that we're 20 item levels higher than the Savage is tuned for.

The bounce back started around Jan/Feb 2022, so a year ago. Trends like this are more longer term and thus more durable than that. They don't reflect ilevel changes.

The issue of 'It's too hard to heal this fight' isn't an issue now that you don't need to heal as much,

It wasn't an issue at launch, though, people were just doing it wrong. I healed P5S in...I think it was week 3 or 4 and I had maybe 2 weeks of tome gear (was out a week or so). I just actually used Regen and Medica 2 and relied on my DPS players - what with being alive and all - making up the difference so we beat the enrage. Oh, I cast a lot of Glares/Dosises as well, mind you. But I didn't play as if I was allergic to GCD heals. It was honestly not difficult to heal on WHM once people figured out the mechanics, and I was even capable of saving people that goofed here or there (the odd DPS that ran through the edge of the green puddle, for example), it just cost GCD heals to do so.

I can't speak to the higher fights in the tier because I don't have a Static as I've said and just clear the first one or two (didn't raid Savage before EW, so I consider this about where I want to be as far as PF anyway), but recall - before you discount my statement on the basis of not doing so - that people were complaining about bleeds even from the first fight, P5S. So my experience and knowledge there is valid to the discussion.

Again, the issue isn't that healing was made "too hard". It's that the change was abrupt enough and people were/are still trying to play the way they did in "the before times". And your proposed changes to Healer complexity would result in the exact same kind of paradigm transition requirement, with Enrages if they fail, so just as detrimental to clears.

the waves of people quitting would flare up again.

Again: We don't actually have any data or statistics showing that there were "waves of people quitting" now. At best, we have circumstantial indications based on inferences from a Yoshi P statement which isn't unlike statements he makes about other roles and content on a pretty frequent basis. We have contradictory anecdotal evidence from people in PF, where some say they always see the Healer spots as the last to fill while for others, they're the first to fill. None of this allows us to make the assessment you're making.

'Remove any kind of critical thinking requirement from the role, make it so I can be carried even when I don't do any damage, and make cure spamming not only functional, but technically optimal gameplay'.

Jesus Christ. I've seen some bad ideas for changes for the game but this one might actually be the worst possible suggestion I've ever seen.

Good thing (a) I wasn't making a suggestion and (b) my suggestion wasn't "'Remove any kind of critical thinking requirement from the role, make it so I can be carried even when I don't do any damage, and make cure spamming not only functional, but technically optimal gameplay'", it was "Nah, they could also simply nerf Healer DPS to the point it's irrelevant."

I can't tell if it's you aren't reading my posts as you reply to them, or if you're reading them, but instead of reading the words I've written, inserting your wild fantasies of the strawman you wish I was saying. It's like DBZ Abridged Goku's perspective showing us how he hears Vegita talk: "Blahblahblahlbahblah, Pride, blahblah PRINCE of all, blahlbahlbah Super Saijin, blah blah blah" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HQUHZ5KyGY ). Like you're seeing my words, but then you insert all these thoughts and emotions packed into them that aren't present in the original nor in any of my overall statements to even give room to think that they would be implied.

And you're still missing the point. Crit variance in burst windows already means that some pulls end at 0.1% instead of a clear.

And as MANY people have said, basically every time that fact comes up, it means (a) encounters are overtuned and (b) stat weightings are FUBAR, largely because of how ridiculous Crit Direct Hits within the 2 min burst window have become. In short, no encounter that isn't an Ultimate should be tuned that tightly, because it means not only can many parties not clear, the clear vs not clear is decided by RNG, and worse, it makes some valid standard comps completely unviable. None of this is a problem with healing, it's a problem with encounter Enrages being overtuned as well as gearing/stats and the 2 min meta being toxic as all sin.

but now you've made it so low, that if the DPS slack at all,

For someone who constantly berates others as wanting to be lazy and get carried, you're awful quick to support DPS slacking...

And before you say "I'm not saying that"...

This idea takes agency and carry-potential away from the healer,

...yeah, you kind of are.

and turns them into a 'damsel in distress' role, forced to sit on the sidelines and hope the big strong hero (DPS classes) can beat the bad guys.

This is everything wrong with your view of teamwork and healing in a nutshell. There's some crazy toxic...if there was a word for misogyny that was DPS classes as male and Healers as female, that's what you're doing every time you trot this out. I've been on teams. This is the internet so you don't have to believe anything I say, but I'm prior military. Not everyone carries a gun, yet everyone contributes. It's not a "damsel in distress" to be a support role backing up the people who are pew pewing, and they aren't "the big strong hero".

And if, for some reason, you genuinely believed all of that...why...play...Healer..?

I'm not saying "Play another Job/Role", I'm just a big confused why you'd play one that, by it's nature, isn't "the big strong DPS". Let's face it, even you putting everything you can into DPSing, you aren't going to save a run if the DPS are slacking. Now, if you were a SAM or BLM, you COULD carry 3 underperforming DPSers. But you can't as a Healer. You simply don't do enough damage and, as you've insisted over and over, you think the Devs already balance around DPSing Healers, meaning your damage contribution is already baked in. You aren't saving the party, you're only doing your fare share. You're still the "damsel in distress" vs the "big strong hero DPS", you just have fallen for a lie that you are not.

No, you're right, mine isn't the only solution. But if what you just suggested

As discussed, you didn't even get what I said right. But it also wasn't a suggestion.

It's not 'no foresight or consideration for longterm ramifications' to ask for 'something similar to Stormblood', since that's already happened.

And was the point in the game's history where the Healer shortage, by the data, was the greatest. That seems like a pretty BAD idea.

We're working off of what we used to have, and have evidence of how it functioned,

Which seems to have been "very poorly", which is why it was changed in the first place.

Randomly ramping HPS required has no previous basis, and is a complete shot in the dark on whether it would work or not.

No, we have precedence for that, too: ARR and HW. And Healers were a greater percentage of the population back then, meaning there was less of a Healer shortage and the role was more popular.

Now, Regen and Medica2 giving Blood Lily is a little bit better of an idea. We can work with that, potentially.

Well, we agree on another thing. I think I'm going to end this here because I honestly do like when we agree on things.

Also, we're not asking for 'more damage required', we're asking for...

...our Jobs to require us to do far more work for no benefit over what we do right now for absolutely no reason?

No no, I get it, so you won't "be bored", never mind all the people who aren't bored now and that it will, once again, open the skill gap between Healer DPS output causing more parties to be unable to clear which will lead to a larger Healer shortage. In other words, it does all the things you say you don't want to do.

Again: This is why I think the answer is to split up the Healers, then at least you aren't dragging everyone else down with your "fun".

Other classes can time when mechanics are going to happen, down to the GCD.

Some can, many can't, and Healers can do this as well. As you and others are fond of pointing out, encounters at this point have long periods of nothing with periods of mechanics in between them. I can easily map out a Boss's moveset based on Dia refreshes.

They know 'ok the boss is going to jump in 3 seconds, because after this Vorpal is my Full Thrust, and he jumps right after that'. We don't get that kind of intuition, because the Glares blend together.

You don't. I do. Because I have other buttons and CDs besides Glare and I use those for this. It's...not hard.

One, 'I'll believe it when I see it',

Fair. It's ShB all over again.

EX roulettes are gonna hit so hard you won't even have time to spell Holy, let alone cast it!'

...you mean Ex4?

Because we just had that.

It was Ex4.

And most people had fun with it.

And Two, 'Bring it on'

Sweet, problem solved. \o/

cos I'm confident enough in my skill at the role to keep up. But I don't think others are. They'll fall and fail and wipe their parties, and what will they do? They won't improve, they won't practice. They'll loudly complain until it gets changed back.

THEN THEY CAN'T COMPLAIN WHEN IT IS CHANGED BACK.

This exact same thing will happen if the DPS rotations are made more complex unless the Devs then balance around Healers doing no damage so that they don't price out the bottom percents. And if they do that, it'll be trivial for the top percents. Your solution has all the problems you say any other solution has.

Nah, we'd just have Stormblood 2. People who don't engage in highend content at all can ignore the extra buttons to their hearts content.

Unlikely unless the gap is small. The reason we changed from SB to ShB was because of people complaining and because of a massive Healer shortage. You seem not to remember one from that time, but back then, Healer slots WERE the last to fill in PF groups almost universally. Moreover, they're trying to get more people to do content like Extremes and Savages. This flies in the face of that and is exclusionary in a game with Devs that want to be inclusive and have gone to great pains to be so.

I want to go from 6k (by spamming Broil and pressing Bio once per 30s) to 6k (by having 3 DOTs to juggle, and less Broil spam as a result).

You're asking to be flooded with more work for no more reward, but that work will still be required. If the Enrages are as they are today, it means everyone else DOES have to do it. That's the problem. Unless the gap is so small as to make it irrelevant. If you only did 5 more DPS than a Broilspammer, sure, we could have that. But you - or others on your side - would endlessly complain about how all your extra work - work you literally asked for - doesn't give you a reward of more damage.

It's like the Misshapen Chair video where he says to change three Healers, leave on the braindead baby healer ("Probably White Mage..."), and that the people with the more complex rotations will just need to shut up and accept they don't do more damage; their "reward" is "not being F---ing BORED".

at the time gearing-wise where 'playing 100% correct' is necessary.

We're not talking Ultimates...

Because the proposal is very visibly flawed, as you claim with mine.

Except it's not. The idea of making Healers distinct across different playstyles to allow players to filter to the one that fits their desired playstyle is, in fact, the ONLY solution that doesn't carry the problems the other proposed solutions do and is also the only one that has a chance of growing the Healer populations vs all the other solutions (even maintaining the status quo) which will drive people out of the Healer role. It is, in fact, the only one that gets around the downsides and prevents the population from collapsing in on itself.

Which is why they should embrace it, lean into it, and open up so many doors for new design paths, instead of shying away from it.

One Solution: Has problem.
You: And so we can't do that!
Other Solution: Has the same problem.
You: And so we must do that and it's the only viable option.

...that does not make sense.

For example, WHM throw rocks, WHM build new gauge. WHM hit 50 Gauge, can now use new damage-neutral healing tool.

Gating healing behind dealing damage = bad bad BAD idea.

SGE kind of has this problem with Kardia. "Oh look, lots of damage is going out so you can't cast your DPS spell. Look at these pretty shiney heals. Would be a shame if you...couldn't use them...", only worse, since Kardia is relatively minor (if the alternative is a Eukrasian Diagnosis). But yeah: No. That's horrible design UNLESS you have Patchwerk style encounters that allow the Healers to sit and turret. That kind of thing would work better in a game like WoW or RIFT or something where Healers have time to stand around. Not so much in FFXIV where our dances are complex and...very active.

Wow, now WHM has a way to get healing from being efficient with damage,

Translation: People will quit healing in droves when their Tank dies because they didn't have their "being efficient with damage" healing spell available at a critical moment and caused wipe after wipe after wipe and people start kicking and harassing and then bans drop and then PFs have no Healers anymore.

Insisting that 'healers shouldn't have to DPS' just closes so many design paths,

It's so bizarre to me to see someone get things exactly 180 backwards. It's not Healers not having to do DPS that close design paths. It's Healers MUST do damage that does. For example, in a world of Healers don't have to do DPS, you wouldn't need GCD heals to be damage neutral to "not be bad". What paints design into a corner is the damage requirement.

Lastly, you posted some numbers you scraped up via Wayback Machine. We cannot use them as 'accurate data', yeh.

Keep in mind, the alternative is you having presented NO numbers or data, yet presenting your opinion with certainty...

I see the part where HW numbers were much higher than SB onward. But the '(the time Healers were most complex is also the time Healers were the smallest percentage of the population, meaning the time they were the least popular/leveled/played)', that's not quite accurate either. Since Cleric Stance-Dance was in the game in HW, and it was not in SB, it's HW, the part of the numbers where it's way HIGHER, is the 'most complex' time for healers.

Rotationally, no.

All the Healers had more damage (and healing) buttons in SB than in HW and ARR. The population was also much smaller at the time overall, and many Healers at the time didn't DPS. At all. Much less use Cleric. The community hadn't cemented "the rules", and as the community did so, and the rules became "do damage", and the kits were expanded to include more damage abilities, we see the Healer numbers decline.

Keep in mind the HW era, like ARR, used my solution - have Healers with different levels of complexity. ARR/HW WHM had the same number of damage spells as EW WHM, as I've shown you before.

Now I'd argue the real reason the HW number is higher, is not actually because it's 'higher'. I think that's the baseline value, and everything since has been 'below average'.

This is possible, and I somewhat agree with it - I actually did a full write-up on the numbers but I'll probably never post it, but I would note that the numbers very much reflect new Jobs being added to various roles. For all the "Adding a new Job to a role doesn't help" - the actual data suggests it does. Though it is very true that PART of that is based on more Jobs. e.g. if 10 people played Healers and there were only 2 Healing Jobs, the most they can be is 20, where if there's a third Job, they can be up to 30. But at the same time, many people in a role don't level all Jobs in it. Like I didn't level AST until ShB. So at least part of that data is trend indicating, not an artifact of just "more Job slots within a role".

What I was getting at with the data was a lot less specifics - since it's hard to draw specific conclusions without MUCH MORE data - but rather that I was using it to eliminate things that SHOULD be very apparent in the data if they were true. In this case, if there was a massive shortage of Healers, that would be reflected in the data.

It isn't.

Which strongly suggests there is not a massive abandonment of the Healer role.

Any more specific or granular conclusions would need better and more data. But if there were a massive exodus of the Healer role, we would expect to see that here. And we aren't. The conclusion being that there does not seem to be a mass exodus of the Healer role at the present time. This isn't to say the role is HEALTHY, but it's not hemorrhaging, either.

But yeh, it's all speculation, and the numbers aren't exactly reliable for a number of reasons.

Agreed. The only solid conclusion we CAN make with them are that there's not a massive exodus of Healers.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, the 'EX weapon or better' would have also included relics too. How many of those 'healer mains' threw 1500 tomes at a WHM staff, I wonder?

I believe the Lucky Bancho numbers were from well before the Relic. So after Ex4 but before people could get one without doing either Ex4 or Savage. I'm going to say the last round were in October or November of last year...?

[SargeTheSeagull]

I leave the forums for two months, come back, and you guys are still taking the bait.

[Silver-Strider]

I leave the forums for two months, come back, and you guys are still taking the bait.

It's either this, touch grass or go back and play on our Green DPS.
This is more fun.

[Liam_Harper]

It's either this, touch grass or go back and play on our Green DPS.
This is more fun.

I see no fun in arguing with the nonsense here. It's just the same back and forth, over and over and over while the devs have made it clear nothing will change and even if they did listen, they have the worlds most understaffed job design team and can't do anything.

99% of the time I check the healer forums lately I just nope out and tab to something else. The sensible posters here are talking to brick walls and feeding people who clearly have mental health issues. Pure waste of time sadly.

[SargeTheSeagull]

The sensible posters here are talking to brick walls and feeding people who clearly have mental health issues. Pure waste of time sadly.

Good to know I'm not the only one who suspected that.

[Silver-Strider]

I see no fun in arguing with the nonsense here. It's just the same back and forth, over and over and over while the devs have made it clear nothing will change and even if they did listen, they have the worlds most understaffed job design team and can't do anything.

99% of the time I check the healer forums lately I just nope out and tab to something else. The sensible posters here are talking to brick walls and feeding people who clearly have mental health issues. Pure waste of time sadly.

I had unsubbed after 6.1 because I felt EW was a terrible expansion in pretty much every regard. The only reason I resubbed at all was because I wanted to try out the PLD rework and see if the story got any better (no, it didn't) so now, I'm just waiting on my sub to relapse and waiting until 7.0 to see if anything changes, doubtful though I am. The whole game at this point is purely a waste of time and I have more fun on the forums, just because it's more stimulating than hitting 1 all day in game.

[ForsakenRoe]

99% of the time I check the healer forums lately I just nope out and tab to something else. The sensible posters here are talking to brick walls and feeding people who clearly have mental health issues. Pure waste of time sadly.

Look man, I need to weave something between my million Glare casts, it's either this (which I would like to think, along with everyone else echoing the sentiment, stirs up enough noise that the devs are, at the very least, unable to say 'see everyone loves current healer design' without a big western-public backlash), or more recently, clicking to do something in OSRS like cut tree or fish. That's pretty damning for 'how engaging is healer' really isn't it, that there's people (not just me) who alt tab mid-GCD or watch netflix on 2nd monitor? It's not like EX roulette hits hard enough to require our full attention, or even 'any' of our attention.

Maybe I should weave something more productive between Glares, maybe learning a language or something. Imagine if I were to learn fluent Japanese, specifically to ask Yoshi-P, 'yo when are you fixing healer engagement, and no weaseling out of answering with some BS about "oh but tanks too..." we don't need to hear it. Healers, fix, when', no 'lost in translation', no 'cut 2/3 of Recon's question off and miss ALL of the context'

As for that last bit, I don't think 'mental health issues' is a reason for holding opinions that would be fairly obviously detrimental to the game's design. Heck I've probably got mental health issues of some kind, but I suggested a couple ideas that, by and large, seemed to be received positively here. Well, positively by people who partake in even trace amounts of optimization on the healers. To be fair, I did go to uni to study this kind of thing, and how to make games, so I have a little bit of background. Not much, but it's something, and might slightly explain why 'Samantha idea actually not complete trash whoa'.

Yo SE, I'm still down to do all the potency balancing on the WHM/SGE ideas, you'll have to come up with a good AST one yourself though cos I don't play it much now, I got boomer hands and the APM gives me joint pain if I do too much prog on it