A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

As for tomes, I assume the reason they don't up the cap on uncapped (so, astronomy last tier, currently causality), is that, for example one week ago when the patch went live, I could trade my 2000 stocked Astronomy into 500 Causality, allowing me to effectively stockpile 2500 'uncapped tomes' for crafting stuff. If that limit was upped to 4000, even for uncapped only, that'd go to 3000.

To be fair, they could just cut the exchange rate of old tomes to the "new-old tome" by half. Instead of 2,000 Astronomy for 500 Causality (4:1 exchange rate), it could be 4,000 Astronomy for 500 Causality (8:1 exchange rate) and the result would be the same.

I never did figure out why they locked the "legacy tome" at Poetics instead of one of the others (say, the very first one), though. I feel like that would have made more sense, though I don't remember what the very first one was at this point...

The moving the character is kinda funny/sad. Is that also true of DNC? I always thought that was more visual effect, not actual, like how the DCN can shoot off the platform/out of the arena boundary when they do the three dashes before jumping back to their starting position.

[Iedarus]

Extremely correct. Like, legitimately, no sarcasm, this is exactly right.

The thing is, all the "initial" changes are for no good reason or don't actually do the thing they were supposed to do. At that point, the answer SHOULD be to revert the changes, instead, they go through several iterations of "fixes" for what could have been solved by a mere reversion.

They also are weird in that SOME changes they are willing to go back on - often the ones that are mostly fine and just need some little tweaks. But the changes they really SHOULD go back on, for whatever reason, they stick to their guns on THOSE. I honestly have no idea why they stick to their guns so hard on some of the most inane stuff, but then stuff that's more or less fine, they decide have to be changed. Or perhaps worst of all - where they change one thing but not another like thing, even though the change makes perfect sense. Like how Crafter scripts now stack to 4,000 as does Hunt currency, but Tomes, even Poetics, are still locked at 2,000. Like...WHY?!

SE seems to be notorious for digging their heels in on bad decisions; for example, look at bow mage.

[Shurrikhan]

SE seems to be notorious for digging their heels in on bad decisions; for example, look at bow mage.

...Of all the possible examples... ???

They didn't "dig their heels in" on Bow Mage. They refused to do more than a single buff's worth of reiteration and instead threw a tantrum, getting rid of it outright and fully re-saddling physical ranged with their then-unmitigatable "mobility tax".

Example of actually "heels dug in": doubling down on changes favoring the lowest denominator when the first few rounds of changes having affect the floor less than the ceiling, to further reduction of the skill ceiling; doubling down on homogeneity between jobs when prior homogenization and difficulty decreases left no differences of note between jobs of most roles except their overall damage; homogenizing encounter design further after initial homogenizations make players consider every job as interchangeable to the point of featuring "take the job, not the player" biases despite even minute differences; doubling down on decisions to make MP a non-mechanic via oGCD bloat because actually using the oGCDs they decided to make the center of healing gameplay... is apparently too hard for their imagined average healer; neutering tank agency further just because they couldn't previously be bothered to balance rDPS gains of even sparse defensive play; refusal to deal with the game adding roundtrip ping's uptime cost to every action (ignoring obvious highly lucrative QoL fixes) and instead GCD- or stack-ifying everything; etc.

[Renathras]

...Of all the possible examples... ???

They refused to go back on it for an entire expansion, same thing with "main tank/off tank" in ShB. Yes, that is "heels dug on".

"favoring the lowest denominator" isn't what "heels dug in" is defined as.

[Shurrikhan]

They refused to go back on it for an entire expansion, same thing with "main tank/off tank" in ShB. Yes, that is "heels dug on".

"favoring the lowest denominator" isn't what "heels dug in" is defined as.

See the difference between "reduce the floor, no matter the cost to ceiling" and that, though? One lasted only one expansion; they took a step, and then stepped off. The other's "solution" has only ever been to dig further.

Seen them go back on designs favoring the lowest denominator at almost any expense any time lately?

[Banriikku]

This thread needs more attention. *BumP*

I am not very hopefull for any change because nobody of the SE Staffs, with decision power, plays healer (i know some claim to but the changes and plans for healer tells me otherwise). Period. It is desigend from the perspective of a DPS/TANK that needs healing because the "holy trinity" demands it. A slot to be filled. If people of the Dev-Team would play active healer they would know about the GLARING problems but it is ignored. Remeber SCH is sooo good now they don't even know what to change ??? Like what ?

[Renathras]

Seen them go back on designs favoring the lowest denominator at almost any expense any time lately?

That would mostly depend on how you define that. For example, unifying the buffs does not favor the lowest denominator, since it favors groups that coordinate their buffs since them being ABLE to be aligned means doing so generates a huge boost in performance over those who do not. That very much does not favor "the lowest denominator".

Melee have been able to do more damage than Ranged for at least 3 expansions now, and it was debatably intended in HW, they just mucked up the tuning on a lot of Jobs. The explicit reasoning for this is "Melee are harder" (even though that's highly debatable these days). The design intent there is to give advantage to the harder thing over the easier thing. That also is not favoring "the lowest denominator", as if the intent was to favor "the lowest denominator", it would be the Ranged allowed to do more damage. And they've stuck with that one for 3 expansions and counting, despite it being entirely ridiculous to do so in this expansion due to the massive hitboxes and reduced positionals in Meleewalker.

BLM is also consistently kept as higher damage output over RDM and SMN because it's harder. It was kept over SMN in ShB (despite SMN being on par with its difficulty) to keep that going. While this one is a two part thing (it's the difficulty argument + the Raise argument), part of that IS the difficulty part, and thus not favoring "the lowest denominator".

They consistently lock really cool rewards (gear, glam, mounts, and minions - all things that are highly desired) behind high end content. This is also not favoring "the lowest denominator" and has been their practice for 5 expansions now.

So clearly, they often stick with things that do not favor "the lowest denominator". What they do and don't stick with seems decided by a blindfolded person throwing at a dartboard, not a preference for "the lowest denominator".

[ForsakenRoe]

They refused to go back on it for an entire expansion, same thing with "main tank/off tank" in ShB.

They never DID MT/OT though, they said they were planning to in Fanfest interviews and such, and then it was quietly dropped before launch after they couldn't work out how to get it to work well. Presumably, the fact that there's tankswaps in fights, and a OT focused tank with few selfdefensives and many 'cover the ally' defensives, would struggle to survive if they had to tank a boss for a while due to tankswap debuffs. So yeh, that one's not a great example.

Something like 'they left NIN DRG BRD MCH as the absolutely best comp for way too long' in end of HW/part of SB, now that's something more like 'heels dug in'. They could have changed MNK to piercing type, to give at least a choice between a DRG and MNK for one of the slots, but nope

[Aravell]

For example, unifying the buffs does not favor the lowest denominator, since it favors groups that coordinate their buffs since them being ABLE to be aligned means doing so generates a huge boost in performance over those who do not. That very much does not favor "the lowest denominator".

This part isn't true at all. Groups that were capable of aligning buffs were already aligning it, with or without the change, they gain no net benefit from this change at all. Unifying timers just forces the regular players to align naturally by simply pressing on cooldown.

[ForsakenRoe]

This part isn't true at all. Groups that were capable of aligning buffs were already aligning it, with or without the change, they gain no net benefit from this change at all. Unifying timers just forces the regular players to align naturally by simply pressing on cooldown.

Yep, and by making them all 2min, the potential choice of 'ok blow 90's and 2mins here, hold 3's we won't have another use of them so keep them till the pot window' is gone. In it's place, we have two options, everyone holds, or everyone blows em on CD. And the best part is, people still can't keep stuff aligned, because fight design gets in the way. Even with 30y range, the final fight has people spread so far apart for one of the 2min windows you can't hit everyone, which means a SCH or NIN can put their debuff on the boss just fine, but the DRG and BRD can't get their stuff out till a couple seconds later when the mechanic is out of the way.

So ofc, the SE solution is likely going to be 'Brotherhood range increased to 50y'