Patch 5.2 Feedback

[Sebazy]

But I still can't help but wonder. what is the plan for healers?
What is their stance on healers?
Why haven't they talked much about healers at all? Almost like they are avoiding the questions.

My honest opinion:

They literally have no idea what to do.

The job design team is understaffed, overworked and beyond dry on fresh ideas. They've burned themselves out trying to get the DPS and Tanks in some semblance of shape and there's nothing left for the healers. I don't think they have a stance because they've simply not had a window to actually work on them and frankly, it's at the point where I don't think they actually have much of any interest on working on them either.

Wow, Seb, y u so salty? How can you claim this? I hear you ask. It's simple, each expansion has bought impactful job reworks combined with additional jobs to be introduced. The job design team meanwhile has remained tiny from ARR to this day and healers have repeatedly drawn the short straw both in terms of gameplay attention and perhaps even more seriously, QA.

The fact that they keep making the same mistakes over and over is just getting dull at this stage. Numerically, healers are actually pretty fine at the moment. However the struggle of finding good ASTs and SCHs attests to how horrible they are to play at a high level.

[EaMett]

With sebazy on this one.

I think the devs are also unmotivated in part by the reaction of the community and how direct and unforgiving (from a JP culture point of vue) our posts have been. But it's an egg and chicken situation. It started with them not really understanding how healers are played and trying to push their vision of healers onto the community (a poor one at that when you see changes like removing ED or the initial lily implementation that are obvious signs they don't understand the healer role that well). Things obviously don't work out and create frustration probably even within their team. They lose motivation, we hate their changes, rinse and repeat and everyone becomes jaded.

The piety substat on stuff like eden WHM weapon is just one of many examples of this total disconnect.
We still even haven't heard back from them on the SCH BUGS. Not like we're asking for feature changes, just bug fixes.

I enjoy healing, I don't enjoy the healers.

[Rai_Takara]

I feel like healing in general has been fairly consistent in this game and the devs don't intend to change it anytime soon. They design raids in a way that new players can clear by excess healing and more experienced healers can optimize their healing to pump out more damage. They don't want to put a DPS rotation for healers because they don't want it complex.

Unless they accept that non-optimized healers shouldn't clear and DPS rotations are important for healers, I don't expect anything to change even by like 10.0 or something. Heck the next healer is going to have mitigation (either in shields/buffs or both) and oGCD heals with standard heals like cure/physik/benefic/helios/medica/etc, with a standard single target and a AoE spell. It's just going to be a new aesthetic/feel/skin for a healer job. I'm sure some people will be disappointed to find out when it releases, but we can predict this from now itself.

Personally, healing was the most fun when things went WRONG, not when people played perfectly. Recovering is big part engaging healing in this game but for most it's the most stressful part of healing. I actually enjoy playing AST and want to go back to maining it at some point, but Dancer also scratches the aesthetic itch and encourages my Thavnairan tastes more.

[MintnHoney]

(from a JP culture point of vue)

The same criticisms found on the English forums are also found on the Japanese forums, and they're sometimes even more severe. So, really, even from a Japanese point of view, the healer situation is still bullshit.

Being honest, for as many posts and outcries of "SQUEEN HATES HEALERS" as there are, there are far more posts and feedback, even suggestions, being delivered in very calm and understanding ways, and even more people are simply asking for explanations so that we can actually understand what they're after. If they really can't handle what feels like a 1/50 ratio of outrage to fair and genuine criticism, they probably shouldn't have gone into this business.

It's like watching a young DeviantArt Furry unveil their photo-shopped Sonic OC as they react to comments before inevitably setting their whole account to private.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

And this was supposed to be the expansion that they really focus on healers. Instead they're completely ignoring them. Nice, can't wait till 6.0...

[Mesarthim]

And this was supposed to be the expansion that they really focus on healers. Instead they're completely ignoring them. Nice, can't wait till 6.0...

Imagine the theoretical scenario where they use the healer balance excuse for a third time. I'd get a bunker ready.

[shao32]

I don't consider the job design team have enough staff to fulfill his duty properly, oversimplification of Tanks and Healers, proliferation of inner release spam mechanics among the tanks and several questionable designs choices that cut the fun to play certain jobs, certain jobs that are considers clones with very small variations right now which is insane.
But the worse thing is not about they mistakes, the worst thing is the lack of response about our feedback and the unreasonable choice of make us wait 2 years for gameplay fixes no matter how popular are our demands since they are "balanced", I consider negligent make us wait a entire expansion to see if they address our concerns to maybe fail again and wait another 2 years.

[Saefinn]

Remember also that out of the jobs Yoshi said he hopes people will like what they have done with MNK in the job changes.

MNK remains the least played job with the most bloat and very few of their issues addressed...again. They've been complaining since HW. Like WHM on the healer side have too.

I expect there is a problem as far as the job design is going.

Yet there are some I feel they've nailed pretty well, DNC, SAM, BRD, MCH, PLD, GNB, RDM. Not to say they lack problems, but just these are examples of great job design IMO, where they flow and feel fun to play and skills meld with each other and also respect their source material well. PLD for example I think has progressed leaps and bounds compared to what it was like in 2.0, which is the opposite experience I have with SCH.

So if there is a bottleneck I hope they can solve it.

But even then, some communication would make it easier to be understanding. I know it is a project of passion for them, I think if we knew where we stood more, our feedback could be better directed, rather than a vent of frustrations as to why we have a problem and a million ideas on how to fix that.

[Lastelli]

Remember also that out of the jobs Yoshi said he hopes people will like what they have done with MNK in the job changes.

MNK remains the least played job with the most bloat and very few of their issues addressed...again. They've been complaining since HW. Like WHM on the healer side have too.

Actually MNK's functional issues are all gone now and the job is very effective. The problem is it's boring as hell to play. It's more simplistic than its ARR version in terms of skills, it has perpetual GL and several tools to easily avoid losing stacks and 2 skills to pretty much ignore positionals 50%+ of the time, which at this point is the only exclusive feature of the job.

[FoxCh40s]

My honest opinion:

They literally have no idea what to do.

The job design team is understaffed, overworked and beyond dry on fresh ideas. They've burned themselves out trying to get the DPS and Tanks in some semblance of shape and there's nothing left for the healers. I don't think they have a stance because they've simply not had a window to actually work on them and frankly, it's at the point where I don't think they actually have much of any interest on working on them either.

Wow, Seb, y u so salty? How can you claim this? I hear you ask. It's simple, each expansion has bought impactful job reworks combined with additional jobs to be introduced. The job design team meanwhile has remained tiny from ARR to this day and healers have repeatedly drawn the short straw both in terms of gameplay attention and perhaps even more seriously, QA.

The fact that they keep making the same mistakes over and over is just getting dull at this stage. Numerically, healers are actually pretty fine at the moment. However the struggle of finding good ASTs and SCHs attests to how horrible they are to play at a high level.

Can I just say Sebazy, you are my spirit animal, and have wanted to discuss things like this with you on the forums, and only just now got the capacity to do so.

Your knowledge of programming and actually working on games makes you more qualified to answer the questions and problems going on likely more than anyone here.

I agree with you, it's clear they have ABSOLUTELY no clue what to do, and healer keeps getting passed around during the devs and it's like hot potato.

Cause their design decisions are completely baffling at this point.