A summary of healer issues

[Recon1o6]

you will all need to forgive me for not updating this, rl, a bug in the login system and my contempt for the way healers are being treated by yoshida put me off trying. Still going to do it but now i got more to add.

[SpiralMask]

good to hear youre back

[deadman1204]

Couldn't the all the problems just be summarized with "the devs don't care and don't wanna even take the time to know".

[FoxCh40s]

Couldn't the all the problems just be summarized with "the devs don't care and don't wanna even take the time to know".

Yes, and at this point, I have no idea why we're even bothering to offer feedback. They clearly dont care about the role and veterans feedback, that much has been made clear.

The official statement from them for not being satisfied with the role is 1 of 2 items:

"If you are not satisfied with the current playstyle of healers, there are many other roles and jobs within the game that you might find appealing, we suggest you try them."

"If you are not satisfied with the current difficulty of content for Healers, please que for Ultimate."

Point?

Go play another role.

[HyperiusUltima]

We're still offering feedback mainly because how else are we supposed to air out the issues? Even if it looks ugly, we still have to press it. The DRK Megathread in particular in the Tank Subforum is a veritable example of this - and they've still yet to have their requests answered properly, akin to how we deal with it. Face it: Yoshida and his team CANNOT and WILL NOT take criticism from the West because of Japanese work culture. The "influencers" themselves aren't allowed to air out the laundry either because it'd basically be "OH! You're making SE look bad! Oh well, hope you liked working with us." and they'd prevent them from criticizing certain aspects.

I think Asmongold said it best when he was reacting to Preach's talk about Bozja and Eureka - if you don't focus on the systems, then it feels better to summarize. Our issues stem from the healing system itself and flaws in battle design, which I've felt the team's gotten lax with outside of Savage, Alliance Raids, and Ultimate. Why we cry about it is because we're dissatisfied with the state of healers and how the job feels at a basic level. The only way the playerbase can believably bite back is if we continue to offer constructive, yet scolding criticisms ad nauseum until they properly fix healers. Give credit where it is due of course, because not everything is unicorns and rainbows for WHM(even though it ought to be given the rose tinted glasses people get at the mere mention of it if they haven't healed yet).

[FoxCh40s]

We're still offering feedback mainly because how else are we supposed to air out the issues? Even if it looks ugly, we still have to press it. The DRK Megathread in particular in the Tank Subforum is a veritable example of this - and they've still yet to have their requests answered properly, akin to how we deal with it. Face it: Yoshida and his team CANNOT and WILL NOT take criticism from the West because of Japanese work culture. The "influencers" themselves aren't allowed to air out the laundry either because it'd basically be "OH! You're making SE look bad! Oh well, hope you liked working with us." and they'd prevent them from criticizing certain aspects.

I think Asmongold said it best when he was reacting to Preach's talk about Bozja and Eureka - if you don't focus on the systems, then it feels better to summarize. Our issues stem from the healing system itself and flaws in battle design, which I've felt the team's gotten lax with outside of Savage, Alliance Raids, and Ultimate. Why we cry about it is because we're dissatisfied with the state of healers and how the job feels at a basic level. The only way the playerbase can believably bite back is if we continue to offer constructive, yet scolding criticisms ad nauseum until they properly fix healers. Give credit where it is due of course, because not everything is unicorns and rainbows for WHM(even though it ought to be given the rose tinted glasses people get at the mere mention of it if they haven't healed yet).

Even though they completely and actively ignore feedback? It's literally pointless, they themselves have shown they don't care, and if you get particularly rowdy about it, they ban you from the forums for a week or so to make it clear you should stop complaining about it loudly.

It is literally useless to provide feedback on Healers; there is no pay off, there is no real acknowledgement, there is no solutions that are viable offered from them, and the changes they continue to make to healers borders on bizarre and head scratching at best.

Give up, that is the unofficially official implication from the Devs and their management, "Que for Ultimate if you are unsatisfied with the difficulty of current content."

White Mage will always be bad for reasons they cannot appropriately or accurately explain; they actively hate Scholar and genuinely don't care about its player bases feedback, Astro is something they legitimately don't know what to do with, and Sage is just Scholar.

[ty_taurus]

Even though they completely and actively ignore feedback? It's literally pointless, they themselves have shown they don't care, and if you get particularly rowdy about it, they ban you from the forums for a week or so to make it clear you should stop complaining about it loudly.

It is literally useless to provide feedback on Healers; there is no pay off, there is no real acknowledgement, there is no solutions that are viable offered from them, and the changes they continue to make to healers borders on bizarre and head scratching at best.

Give up, that is the unofficially official implication from the Devs and their management, "Que for Ultimate if you are unsatisfied with the difficulty of current content."

White Mage will always be bad for reasons they cannot appropriately or accurately explain; they actively hate Scholar and genuinely don't care about its player bases feedback, Astro is something they legitimately don't know what to do with, and Sage is just Scholar.

Isn't going on a public forum to tell people to give up kind of an oxymoron? If you're of the mindset that you should give up, then what drives you to log in just to tell others to give up? If you've given up, wouldn't you logically have... given up and not log in to talk about it any further? It actually hurts my brain trying to think about that.

[Lyth]

I think that 'megathreads' aren't really effective at communicating player wishes on the EN forums, given how frequently people post. More often than not, they end up turning into a glorified discord chat room with a flurry of disposable comments. So even if you do post something clever that catches people's interest amidst the dross, it usually doesn't get the visibility that it needs for long enough. If a thread has 62 pages, you'll probably encounter the first page of comments when you enter, but how often do you actually bother to flip back to see what people were saying on page 54? This type of thread format, in contrast, is good. Not because forum-goers are going to necessarily sift through 70 pages of chat comments to find a hidden gem to upvote, but because you have a (relatively) structured OP post that players can pool their support behind.

If I had to offer a critique on it, it would be a lack of focus. The first two points listed are excellent and hit the mark on the bulk of the complaints across the past two expansions. But yet, there's only one line written on each. Of the remaining eight points, there's four fluff points about visual effects, glamour, and lore, one point reiterating that healing sucks, and one point about healer feedback being ignored. This is length for length's sake, and it almost would have been more effective as a two line post.

Of course, what's even more effective is to take those two to three key issues (i.e. a large amount of healer downtime and a corresponding lack of damage options to use in that downtime), and then expand on each one of those under section headers. I'd personally probably put a relative lack of playstyle diversity as a third point (why does every healer released have to be a caster?) But I don't think editing the OP from two years ago adds anything to it.

In Q+A, people similarly spread themselves too thin, either posing multiple questions at once or offering opinion pieces in place of questions. When you do this, you risk getting an answer that doesn't address your main point. You have to be selective. When you wade through the short essay posed as a question during the last live letter, the bulk on it is a mini-rant on fight difficulty and how tanks are clearing Asphodelos without healers. So the answer itself focuses on how Asphodelos was undertuned because it is the intro raid, subsequent raid tiers will be harder, and there's Ultimate if even that is too easy for you. But that wasn't even the central issue that you actually cared about in the first place.

In short, this is the sort of high quality thread that is needed, it just needs to be articulated in a more focused way.

[Recon1o6]

snip.

when i eventually get round to it, im going to finish updating this post. Hopefully before my sub runs out if i would no longer be allowed on the forums to make it more concise as discussed on previous pages.

[baklava151]

This type of thread format, in contrast, is good. Not because forum-goers are going to necessarily sift through 70 pages of chat comments to find a hidden gem to upvote, but because you have a (relatively) structured OP post that players can pool their support behind.

Maybe someone should revive Shin96 to do the same with the DRK megathread