A summary of healer issues

[RobynDaBank]

... Can I put a "lack of more suave coats in AF gear especially WHM and AST" down here as a healer issue? It's been an hour or so since I Fantasia-d and I already feel the pinch...

Edit, update me already Lodestone!

[ThorneDynasty]

... Can I put a "lack of more suave coats in AF gear especially WHM and AST" down here as a healer issue? It's been an hour or so since I Fantasia-d and I already feel the pinch...

Edit, update me already Lodestone!

Let alone completely giving up on healers getting anything but re-colored casting gear. I actually said "are you joking?" out loud when I realized the FF4 set is just Rydia's gear. How lazy can you be, you literally have half the work done for you for Rosa's outfit. I understand it's not always a (immediate) money issue, but this one is just peak "small indie publisher". Hiring another 3D character modeller for already designed and once-rendered stuff is definitely not a 1-year-orientation-at-minimum issue.

[RayneBoemir]

We definitely need more damage buttons to push considering that’s what we spend doing most of the time in groups.

[NemuNemu14]

I was an AST main in stormblood, then scholar main in shadowbringers. Now I main no healers this expansion. I can't stand one button spamming, and sometimes I consider quitting the game overall because I feel they are just making every job braindead... I hate it...

[SargeTheSeagull]

I hope whoever goes to the next media tour brings up how bad healers are to Yoshi P. It's at the point where as a tank I am starting to have 5+ minute wait times for roulettes bc nobody wants to heal.

[Rolder50]

I hope whoever goes to the next media tour brings up how bad healers are to Yoshi P. It's at the point where as a tank I am starting to have 5+ minute wait times for roulettes bc nobody wants to heal.

It's been tried before but he always hand-waves it with junk like "just play ultimate lol"

[Renathras]

It's been tried before but he always hand-waves it with junk like "just play ultimate lol"

I think part of it comes up to how the question is asked.

If it's "(some) healers are bored" or "healers suck", there's not much to say other than "Oh well?"

But the flip side is, if people are proposing total and complete reworks, that probably won't go over well, either, especially mid-expansion. Moreover, many people actually DO like healing as it exists in the game right now. The amount of people that complain about it is probably a minority of the playerbase. Passionate and vocal, mind you, and I'm not saying minority = wrong, but still the majority are playing and either loving or at least tolerating it.

It's why I always say any change should leave at least one healer with a system much like now, so that people who love that can play it. (Let's face it, probably WHM, given that it's the most straightforward healer by design)

.

But outside of a major combat system redesign, I'm not exactly sure what they can do with healing, really, that won't just lead to EVEN MORE complaints.

[QooEr]

I think part of it comes up to how the question is asked.

If it's "(some) healers are bored" or "healers suck", there's not much to say other than "Oh well?"

"im bored" should not be responded to with "do ultimate". ever, really. difficulty should not be conflated with how engaging or fun something is. UCOB is one of the hardest fights in the game, and i think the fight is miserably boring for the first 11 minutes of the fight. conversely i actually had fun doing titan and shiva unreal. hell, i used to have fun doing leveling dungeons as scholar back in HW and stormblood.

someone in another thread said something that i think should be taken more into account when telling the devs that we find healing insufficient.

Any professional dev team has a laundry list of 'ideas for things they could do'. The probably have pages of discarded ideas, implementations, etc. that just didn't fit. Heck, nearly every idea we've proposed they've probably already considered at some point or another. They don't need our ideas.

And they don't need to know numbers - because their analytics and data can tell them that.

The one thing they do need, [...] is how playing the game makes us feel.

if healers feel healing is boring, thats probably the most concerning feedback they can get. they can have all the participation metrics in the world, but without so much as even a survey they cant really tell if the majority are enjoying healing, or if as you yourself put it, merely tolerating it. i dont think the LL question itself was worded perfectly, mind you, but thats because its ONE persons feedback thats representing many who at the very least agreed on the sentiment that healers are boring.

if anything we should be telling the devs that healing, is in fact, still boring even in ultimate. glare and broil and dosis and malefic 150 times is boring. pressing a single spell more times than every other skill combined is boring, no matter the difficulty of the fight.

[Renathras]

"im bored" should not be responded to with "do ultimate". ever, really. difficulty should not be conflated with how engaging or fun something is. UCOB is one of the hardest fights in the game, and i think the fight is miserably boring for the first 11 minutes of the fight. conversely i actually had fun doing titan and shiva unreal. hell, i used to have fun doing leveling dungeons as scholar back in HW and stormblood.

someone in another thread said something that i think should be taken more into account when telling the devs that we find healing insufficient.

I guess what I mean is "I'm bored" isn't a course of action. I was in the military and something my bosses were fond of saying is "Don't come to me with problems; if you see a problem, DO come tell me, but come armed with a proposal for a solution."

I think one big problem in this discussion is that not all healers ARE bored. And many who are not bored aren't bored all the time - during prog, people often say, healing is far more engaging and not boring since mistakes are being made and chaos is everywhere, so healers actually have to use their healing tools and don't have the (boring as all hells) "healing plan" set up yet. Once those things are no longer true, THEN healing becomes boring. When you're actually having to hardcast heals because all your oGCDs are on CD, you aren't just pressing 1 button over and over. The viewpoint from these people is that healing is fun UNTIL farm, and that the better their team gets, the more bored they get healing.

A second problem/third group of people is that many players LIKE that style of healing and don't like being damage dealers - if they did, they'd be playing damage dealers. They enjoy simplistic rotations allowing them to focus on healing and boss/fight mechanics.

The issue is that a solution has to address all three perspectives - those who are bored, those who are sometimes bored, and those who are not at all bored - and simply saying "I'm bored" or "Give us more DPS buttons" doesn't do any of that. It's also why my solution always involves doing something for each group of people.

[QooEr]

I guess what I mean is "I'm bored" isn't a course of action. I was in the military and something my bosses were fond of saying is "Don't come to me with problems; if you see a problem, DO come tell me, but come armed with a proposal for a solution."

that might work in the military, but we are customers. when designers come up with a product they start with dozens of things that could work, and then they narrow it down based on different criteria. they dont need us telling them how to fix healers. they only need us to tell them if we liked their final product. laymen are incredibly uneducated and i for one wouldnt appreciate my clients telling me how to do my job unless i can see that they know what theyre talking about. and guess what? Despite proposals being unneeded and perhaps even unwanted, people in these forums have suggested a lot of things for many years. not all good, not all bad.

many who are not bored aren't bored all the time - during prog, people often say, healing is far more engaging and not boring since mistakes are being made and chaos is everywhere, so healers actually have to use their healing tools and don't have the (boring as all hells) "healing plan" set up yet. Once those things are no longer true, THEN healing becomes boring. When you're actually having to hardcast heals because all your oGCDs are on CD, you aren't just pressing 1 button over and over. The viewpoint from these people is that healing is fun UNTIL farm, and that the better their team gets, the more bored they get healing.

and i would say i share the sentiment about healing being fun in prog. but that presents a pretty big flaw with the inherent design of healers: healer enjoyment has an expiration date.

this game asks you almost by design to do the same duties over and over and over. you farm dungeons to level, you farm expert to get tomes, you farm trials for mounts, you farm raids for gear, etc etc etc. you even do the same phases over and over in ultimate before you can clear it. healers, as much as any other job, ought to be designed to be fun when farming in a game that expects you to farm. healers are the only role where the replayability value gets worse over time.

I think one big problem in this discussion is that not all healers ARE bored. [...] A second problem/third group of people is that many players LIKE that style of healing and don't like being damage dealers - if they did, they'd be playing damage dealers. They enjoy simplistic rotations allowing them to focus on healing and boss/fight mechanics.
The issue is that a solution has to address all three perspectives - those who are bored, those who are sometimes bored, and those who are not at all bored - and simply saying "I'm bored" or "Give us more DPS buttons" doesn't do any of that. It's also why my solution always involves doing something for each group of people.

its a multifaceted problem that cant be solved with a simple solution. but its not up to us as customers to find solutions. its up to us to give feedback. indeed every camp should be considered and catered to, and the reason you see so many people saying "Give us more DPS buttons" is because that camp is not just not being catered to, its being actively avoided for the most fallacious reasons.