Has anyone quit healing?

[ForsakenRoe]

I do get that; I’ve been playing since 1.0 so I’ve been right there alongside everyone making suggestions too lol (pretty sure they didn’t listen). The thing is, if you ask for something so many times and still get told ‘no’ isn’t it time to either move on or rethink your approach? I begged for years for them to stop taking apart Bard’s identity and it’s become a laser archer monstrosity lol. Naturally it’s entirely out of my control, and posting on the forums made no difference, so there’s nothing I can do but accept it for what it is (and change mains lol). Some people like Bard the way it is now, so I can’t exactly beg the developers to put it back without giving them a big middle finger lol.

Isn’t it the same with healers? After so much time, if things are still the same when the next expansion comes out, would repeating the same cycle that’s been going for years really accomplish anything? It’s not fair, but unfortunately there comes a point where there’s no choice but to accept the developer’s decisions. Even if they’re bad ones you don’t particularly like (they’ve made plenty I don’t like too lol). That’s why I think maybe it’s better to just float suggestions and see what happens than going over the same points time and again. We need to accept we have no control over the situation.

Imagine you lived in rented accomodation (aka you are paying a sub to your landlord) and you had an issue with the house that you contact them about, nothing life threatening, but it's an annoyance. The landlord doesn't do anything about it, or dismisses your grievances with 'yeh we will look into it bear with us'. After [number of time units] of that dismissive attitude to your issue, is the solution really 'move house lmao'? I don't think it is. I think the solution should be to keep pressing the point, more often, more loudly, more publicly, until it becomes such an annoyance/financial loss for the landlord (or SE in this case) to ignore. It won't happen cos they need it for their income, but if, for example, every big FF streamer who goes to the media tour just... didn't, in protest of the state of healers, and stated as much on their streams, SE would immediately start paying attention. The news articles on Kotaku and IGN and stuff of 'New FFXIV Media Tour Disaster! SE Boycotted By Disillusioned Healers' would be a PR nightmare

Exactly, and the results of their having no dedicated healer designer results in a poorly communicated healer roadmap- which then results in sometimes confusion, disappointment and SE providing extremely poor responses (when they do respond) to healer questions, their flip-flopping on some healer design decisions and most recently delaying on (yet another ) AST rework.

Can't wait for them to look at the current tier's requirements, how the playerbase reacted to it (negatively) and come to the conclusion that the best way forward is 'have everything be like Asphodelos, pretend Abyssos never happened, continue to be confused why healer numbers are dropping in 7.2, say 'Yeh we need to collect more data' in 7.3 Live Letter, repeat'. Also yeh, where tf is the AST change that gives us 2 Lightspeed charges, so we can use one for movement? Surely that's not a 'we need to wait for the expansion' level change?

it's honestly surreal to me that they seem to have a dedicated designer for each role EXCEPT for the role you would expect to have at least two dedicated designers to it. it's been said millions of times already, but Healer is a role that not a lot of people play and yet is incredibly necessary at all levels of play. Sure, you COULD risk just having it replaced by two tank slots dedicated solely to PLD and WAR (which tbf at this point i wouldn't be surprised if that somehow WAS more viable) and then have two DPS slots being SMN and RDM for Rezzes if people actually need it, but at that point, it would loop around to being even worse of a joke than what we have right now. i still remember when they said that their dungeon testing healer got "too good", and instead of doing the more thoughtful thing and possibly trying to come up with ways for said "too good" healer to have a more meaningful contribution besides spamming glare between oGCDs, they just replaced it with a different person. at this rate i wouldn't be surprised if they say around 7.0's release that they'll be hiring people purely to play their healer builds and give feedback...and then the joke is that they still ignore it anyway.

They can hire me, and I'll do it. If they need Savage healer, I can do that. If they need to test a dungeon and my skill is too good for that, don't worry, I have a solution. Literally a solution, they call it 'alcohol'. I'll just drink myself to the point where I'm suffering from 400 ping between my brain and my hands

[ASkellington]

it's honestly surreal to me that they seem to have a dedicated designer for each role EXCEPT for the role you would expect to have at least two dedicated designers to it. it's been said millions of times already, but Healer is a role that not a lot of people play and yet is incredibly necessary at all levels of play. Sure, you COULD risk just having it replaced by two tank slots dedicated solely to PLD and WAR (which tbf at this point i wouldn't be surprised if that somehow WAS more viable) and then have two DPS slots being SMN and RDM for Rezzes if people actually need it, but at that point, it would loop around to being even worse of a joke than what we have right now. i still remember when they said that their dungeon testing healer got "too good", and instead of doing the more thoughtful thing and possibly trying to come up with ways for said "too good" healer to have a more meaningful contribution besides spamming glare between oGCDs, they just replaced it with a different person. at this rate i wouldn't be surprised if they say around 7.0's release that they'll be hiring people purely to play their healer builds and give feedback...and then the joke is that they still ignore it anyway.

What it comes down to is that Healers become engaging with a Risk/Reward system (see: Aetherflow on SCH). SE doesn't want there to be a risk for a Healer to screw up because "party will wipe" and that's not fun (plus think of the harassment the poor healer will recieve!)

Too late for the latter SE I've been healing in MMOs for over a decade. We get thick skin for a reason. And you have a "wonderful" report system.

As for party wipes... you have 0 issues with throwing out those mechanics in Savage, and from ShB onwards all 4 tanks can pretty much handle a boss w/o a healer. What's you're excuse now?

[Vinal211]

What it comes down to is that Healers become engaging with a Risk/Reward system (see: Aetherflow on SCH). SE doesn't want there to be a risk for a Healer to screw up because "party will wipe" and that's not fun (plus think of the harassment the poor healer will recieve!)

Too late for the latter SE I've been healing in MMOs for over a decade. We get thick skin for a reason. And you have a "wonderful" report system.

As for party wipes... you have 0 issues with throwing out those mechanics in Savage, and from ShB onwards all 4 tanks can pretty much handle a boss w/o a healer. What's you're excuse now?

you could argue that a lot of jobs at this point have little, if any, risk/reward system. DRK had Dark Arts and Darkside, but that's been thrown out for the skin of a Marauder. SAM's Kaiten gave you a little flashy animation that lead into the iajutsu animation really well AND made it more damaging as a reward for even attempting to do the rotations properly, but now it's Shiten spam with no sort of damage feedback aside from "you're doing damage". and that's just the more obvious examples, barring Healer's themselves. there's not even a feeling of a reward, it's just empty in the end.

[Absurdity]

you could argue that a lot of jobs at this point have little, if any, risk/reward system. DRK had Dark Arts and Darkside, but that's been thrown out for the skin of a Marauder. SAM's Kaiten gave you a little flashy animation that lead into the iajutsu animation really well AND made it more damaging as a reward for even attempting to do the rotations properly, but now it's Shiten spam with no sort of damage feedback aside from "you're doing damage". and that's just the more obvious examples, barring Healer's themselves. there's not even a feeling of a reward, it's just empty in the end.

Pretty much this. Yes it's especially bad on healers and has been for 3 years now, but this is an issue that is gradually creeping into all job design.

SE clearly hates risk/reward and for there to be any gap between someone mastering their job and someone just spamming buttons, so they slowly rework every job to just spam buttons.
Call me cynical but I expect this to only get worse in 7.0, after all there can't be a skill gap if the ceiling is also the floor.

[Anxin]

I've largely switched to Dancer since I last posted here. I have had some good times healing poorly-geared groups in Aurum Vale and other ARR dungeons recently. It only pointed out how inverted fun is for a healer. The worse, more under-geared the group is, the more fun I have.

We seem to be at the point where we may have to just accept the direction the devs have taken healers and how the role clashes with the game's design. They really could just remove healers and spread some of the abilities across the support DPS classes like Dancer and Red Mage at this stage, sadly.

[ataren3]

I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it.

...why would they have to redesign old fights?

ARR fights all required more consistent healing (bosses could even crit randomly), and it was largely GCD healing since the only oGCD heals in the game were Benediction, Lustrate, and...Embrace/Whispering Dawn?

They did go back and change ARR fights retroactively. No more crits from bosses means no more high damage variance. The tank's personal facing does not matter anymore as to whether they could "block" the damage or have a higher chance to be crit (this was a thing in 2.0). Not to mention all the changes that have been done to tanks in general, since it's much easier to generate and maintain aggro than it used to be.

For this example I'll use Ifrit EX. As a reminder Ifrit EX has these following damage pieces (unavoidable only):
- Tank autos
- Tank buster
- That debuff on a healer that's the big AoE + knockback
- Nail kills
- General raidwide damage
- Incinerate (basically tank cleave)

Keep it simple and just say that Ifrit now does more damage. More damage means more healing. Great right? The problem is that even with this more damage the healers still aren't healing a lot. Tanks are mitigating as normal and swapping as they should. DPS are doing their thing and paying attention to avoidable damage. The damage instances within a majority of this fight are few and far between. So we still have our current dilemma: if Ifrit does more damage but the actual damage instances are still too spread out how can we make the healers heal more?

Reduce their healing? That'd feel awful. Your (limited) heal kit does too little to heal and now the dps check is suffering because you're spending far too long doing these heals. On top of that these reduced heals still have that MP cost to them, so you're burning through mana far quicker than you used to.

Back to the drawing board. What if he did more unavoidable damage and we left the healing the same? Healers now heal more, but they'd still have the mana consumption issue that lucid wouldn't really be able to help with that much. On top of that the dps check is still suffering. Ifrit EX expects everyone to be DPSing most of the time, not healing. Plus we're already in the waters of altering an older fight. We don't want to do that if we can help it, so how can we solve this?

There's no change we can make that will require healers to focus on more healing without altering the fight. If we reduce the damage required to meet the check there's too much and we're skipping it. If we increase the healing in some way that means the dps check becomes more strict than it already is and may lock out other classes.

Now apply that to a more recent (but still older fight) like Titania EX. If I did very little damage or none at all then yes everyone would be healthy but we wouldn't kill it. My damage is baked into the check, and thus I must damage over heal.

[Renathras]

...

Some they've changed over time, but many were left alone. For example, Haukke Manor didn't have to be changed, nor did most dungeons. Guildhests haven't been touched since they were implemented. The changes that were made were global. For instance, the boss crit change was probably a global change applied to all "boss" class/flagged monsters in the game code, so wasn't them going back and individually changing it on each past enemy. Moreover, the Healing model was changed in SB, not HW, which is when many of the changes were made at which point the content hasn't been touched since. They haven't made continual changes with each change to the overall game paradigm for Healers, of which there have been roughly three (one part-way through HW, one with SB's launch, and one with ShB's launch). So the idea they have to keep updating old content to reflect changes isn't borne out in the game's actual history.

As to the rest:

Healing already feels awful. Nothing feels good about pressing one button and it fully topping off the party. The only time that feels good is if it's some really big CD (like old school MMOs that had 1 hour or more "big CDs") or if it's a combination of abilities to generate large effects (Recitation + Adlo + Deploy or in ShB, Plenary Indulgence + Think Air + Cure 3 x5). What feels even worse is when it's an oGCD weaved between damage spells, so you don't even feel like you're healing anymore, you just feel like a bad DPS.

On the DPS checks - the entire point of any change is that the Enrage model would need to be adjusted. It arguably already needs to be adjusted anyway, since a clear or not clear can sometimes be decided by if your GNB got Double Down crits or not, regardless of Healer damage output.

On MP consumption - same thing. You don't make changes like this in vacuum. If Healers were designed to GCD heal, then MP management would actually be an important feature of the design, including having MP regeneration tools and having a tradeoff between more MP efficient but less HPS efficient heals vs more MP expensive but more HPS heals.

And we wouldn't be doing any of this with Ifrit EX. The number of people that try to no-echo sync the fight is already a tiny subset of the playerbase as it is. Moreover, that's what traits like Maim & Mend are designed to address.

Devs have - to date - never once said that Healer DPS is "baked into the check". The only time we have a statement from them, it was from HW and them saying it was not. You can argue it is, but you cannot make a statement of fact that it is. And that is, again, a tuning issue, not a design issue. If Healers were expected to heal more, than DPS checks - if they're based on Healer damage contribution now - would be reduced to account for that. "But what happens when Healers don't have to GCD heal anymore?!", I hear you ask. "You mean when content is two patches old and people outgear it? How's that different than now?"

.

you could argue that a lot of jobs at this point have little, if any, risk/reward system. DRK had Dark Arts and Darkside, but that's been thrown out for the skin of a Marauder. SAM's Kaiten gave you a little flashy animation that lead into the iajutsu animation really well AND made it more damaging as a reward for even attempting to do the rotations properly, but now it's Shiten spam with no sort of damage feedback aside from "you're doing damage". and that's just the more obvious examples, barring Healer's themselves. there's not even a feeling of a reward, it's just empty in the end.

Pretty much this. Yes it's especially bad on healers and has been for 3 years now, but this is an issue that is gradually creeping into all job design.

SE clearly hates risk/reward and for there to be any gap between someone mastering their job and someone just spamming buttons, so they slowly rework every job to just spam buttons.
Call me cynical but I expect this to only get worse in 7.0, after all there can't be a skill gap if the ceiling is also the floor.

Basically these, yeah. People act like Healers are bad and every other role and Job is so much better. They...really aren't.

We seem to be at the point where we may have to just accept the direction the devs have taken healers and how the role clashes with the game's design. They really could just remove healers and spread some of the abilities across the support DPS classes like Dancer and Red Mage at this stage, sadly.

I feel like there is the hybrid solution, but outside of that, yes. People seem not to get that, and so actively fight against the solution that might give them some of what they want. I can't see them ever removing Healers, though they could arguably replace them with an overall Support role (since, god forbid an MMO adds an actual fourth "Support" as a full on role... <_< ), but there's no way they're going to do that.

I think Yoshi P has no idea what a good solution is, either, since they get all the conflicting feedback and there's no way to square that circle when one side of the equation is actively insisting the other side either doesn't exist or shouldn't be playing the game (or parts of it), which the dev team obviously doesn't see as an acceptable answer.

[Vinal211]

watch as they brand 7.0 as a "return to the roots of your journey!" kind of thing, complete with a massive revamp back to old mechs of HW and SB...and then they act absolutely flabbergasted when it turns out the fanbase LOVES it when you have complex designs alongside simple ones! oh my god, a class can have DIVERSITY from others like it? it can be more in-depth than ankle-deep water levels of thinking? it can STILL be viable in all content even though it plays differently from others like it?! AMAZING!!!

also on the topic, do any of you think having expansion jobs having class versions of it be something that would help people branch out more in early content? ex. AST having a class called Diviner, or RDM having Fencer. now granted, the issue that comes with this is knowing where to put it in the ARR storyline, specially DRK, cause goddamn even though that job got gutted the story is still as beautiful as ever. could go the Rogue route and have them be unlocked after level 10, or later on around level 30 once people get a bit more used to the gameplay and jobs are unlocked in earnest?

[ataren3]

Healing already feels awful. Nothing feels good about pressing one button and it fully topping off the party.

Devs have - to date - never once said that Healer DPS is "baked into the check".

Healing absolutely feels bad because it's such a major departure about what a healer "should" do and what a healer currently does, even in most savage. Healers in FFIXV aren't meant to keep everyone "healthy", but to keep everyone "alive". And that's a major difference between healers in other MMOs and this one. Other MMOs you best be near or at full health because there's a lot of damage going out regularly. You're relying on the healer to keep you healed and the support(s) to mitigate that damage. Sometimes you might have your own mitigation but that's not very common.

While it's true that devs haven't explicitly stated that a healer dps check is baked into the enrage check, we can easily see that from the current savage P8S part 1 & 2. It is expected that the healer is contributing damage to the check, because the design is setup in such a way where the healers need to be pressing their one damage button most of the time. I can't focus solely on healing, because regardless of how good our tank and dps class play I'm still supposed to contribute my damage to the kill. It's an unfortunate way they've designed the fights.

On one hand it feels good as a dps or tank. I'm helping kill the boss with my complex rotations and/or weaving in mitigation. But on the other hand it just feels really awful to play a class that spams one button and really doesn't need to think: "How am I going to keep everyone topped off for the next thing?". There's just not a lot of instances where you gotta keep everyone very healthy for X mechanic. Rather it's "keep them alive and go back to spamming Glare III".

[ataren3]

watch as they brand 7.0 as a "return to the roots of your journey!" kind of thing, complete with a massive revamp back to old mechs of HW and SB...and then they act absolutely flabbergasted when it turns out the fanbase LOVES it when you have complex designs alongside simple ones! oh my god, a class can have DIVERSITY from others like it? it can be more in-depth than ankle-deep water levels of thinking? it can STILL be viable in all content even though it plays differently from others like it?! AMAZING!!!

also on the topic, do any of you think having expansion jobs having class versions of it be something that would help people branch out more in early content? ex. AST having a class called Diviner, or RDM having Fencer. now granted, the issue that comes with this is knowing where to put it in the ARR storyline, specially DRK, cause goddamn even though that job got gutted the story is still as beautiful as ever. could go the Rogue route and have them be unlocked after level 10, or later on around level 30 once people get a bit more used to the gameplay and jobs are unlocked in earnest?

I'd love to see that but at the same time I'm not expecting it. It would be a neat way to introduce "the basic healer" and "the advanced healer", where basic can go through most content and advanced is more for people that want that challenge. Give it a high-risk high-reward kinda deal. You have a complex rotation where you need to weave in heals (both GCD and oGCD) to keep everyone alive while killing current endgame things. You get more damage and an "enhanced" style on the class you like.