A summary of healer issues

[IDontPetLalas]

Well, I fully support anyone adding questions, my sole concern - and this goes to everyone adding a question, was one that you have already pointed out- that questions can easily get lost after several pages. I don't you if you recall one of our previous live letters, we managed to get one healer post with well over a hundred likes and it was impossible to be ignored, even though it was multiple pages down. It's harder to get that when questions don't focus on a single topic.

[Deceptus]

Well, I fully support anyone adding questions, my sole concern - and this goes to everyone adding a question, was one that you have already pointed out- that questions can easily get lost after several pages. I don't you if you recall one of our previous live letters, we managed to get one healer post with well over a hundred likes and it was impossible to be ignored, even though it was multiple pages down. It's harder to get that when questions don't focus on a single topic.

Healers issues can't really be boiled down to a simple single topic though, they have multitudes of issues.


Us: There's not enough outgoing damage to justify the amount of heals we do
Yoshi: Go play ultimate.

Us: Our downtime is a single filler spell, we cast it as much as a tank has auto attacks
Yoshi: We don't want healers to feel stressed

Us: It's not fun.
Yoshi: Some people say it is

etc. . . etc. . . etc.


My Question, tried to make it as simple and straightforward as possible:

Healers are consistently in short supply and high demand in almost all content, in higher end content they the the first role dropped in favor of an extra DPS. Many players feel that this is due to their poor job design and job balance.

Moving forward, will you commit to hiring a developer, or having a developer dedicated specifically to work on healers and healers alone to make them better designed.

[ForsakenRoe]

Yeh, so what we have to do is like all the healer questions, so that rather than there being just Recon's 'un-ignoreable' amount of likes as we had previously, we have multiple healer questions with 'un-ignoreable' numbers of likes, and at least one gets picked up, if not more. There were 2 questions in that Live Q+A about how there were loads of PFs on JP that were full, except for healers, and how it's a problem, so it's possible that we might get more than one healer question raised if they're all really high on like-count, which would hopefully show the devs that 'actually this is a very serious issue please dedicate appropriate time to resolving it instead of these fluff questions'

The only other thing I've gone through and liked on that thread is 'make a more futureproofed glam system' because damn we need that too. But some of the questions are like, 'what the heck are you thinking' tier, especially the lore related ones, why tf are people asking Yoshida about lore instead of saving it for Koji-Fox or Oda at a Fanfest

[IDontPetLalas]

Healers issues can't really be boiled down to a simple single topic though, they have multitudes of issues.


Us: There's not enough outgoing damage to justify the amount of heals we do
Yoshi: Go play ultimate.

Us: Our downtime is a single filler spell, we cast it as much as a tank has auto attacks
Yoshi: We don't want healers to feel stressed

Us: It's not fun.
Yoshi: Some people say it is

etc. . . etc. . . etc.


My Question, tried to make it as simple and straightforward as possible:

I never said that healer issues can be boiled down to a single topic. I said that "a post" can be constrained to one, and the more complex your question was, the more likely it would be either mis-translated and/or not supported (or , if is too lengthy even misunderstood , now that I reflect more)

I said that given the large number of questions it is far more likely that a question regarding healer issues is not going to be ignored and is going to be asked if it is highly promoted which is a very different thing. Basically - as ForsakenRoe has explained.

[ForsakenRoe]

Okay, regardless of what we think is the highest priority for change on the healer role, I'm sure we can all agree with this statement:

'SOMEthing needs to change regarding the healer role, and it's lack of engagement/fulfilling gameplay loop for many players.'

So for example, you believe that healers need more support tools, more healing required in raids, and a better damage rotation, in that order of priority. If the question is asked that 'hey can healers get an actual damage rotation', and the devs agree and add a damage rotation, it's not your top priority, but it's SOMEthing that's changed. Others may not feel as I do, but I think the worst possible outcome for 7.0 is that nothing at all changes in terms of healer class design direction, or fight design direction, and we essentially get 'Endwalker 2' for 2 years. So while I think that healers need Damage rotation, Support/utility skills, more HPS required, in that order of priority, if they bump the HPS required for story dungeons up to Living Liquid TEA levels, firstly I'll laugh at the 'healers should heal' players who don't actually know how to heal when the metaphorical hits the fan, and secondly, I'll be slightly happier about the role. It's not the way I'd aim to solve the issues the role has, but it's better than nothing. And if it turns out to be a disaster? We'll have more hard evidence it's a disaster to throw at the Sylphies when they insist that 'noooo damage isnt the solution'

[ty_taurus]

Okay, regardless of what we think is the highest priority for change on the healer role, I'm sure we can all agree with this statement:

'SOMEthing needs to change regarding the healer role, and it's lack of engagement/fulfilling gameplay loop for many players.'

So for example, you believe that healers need more support tools, more healing required in raids, and a better damage rotation, in that order of priority. If the question is asked that 'hey can healers get an actual damage rotation', and the devs agree and add a damage rotation, it's not your top priority, but it's SOMEthing that's changed. Others may not feel as I do, but I think the worst possible outcome for 7.0 is that nothing at all changes in terms of healer class design direction, or fight design direction, and we essentially get 'Endwalker 2' for 2 years. So while I think that healers need Damage rotation, Support/utility skills, more HPS required, in that order of priority, if they bump the HPS required for story dungeons up to Living Liquid TEA levels, firstly I'll laugh at the 'healers should heal' players who don't actually know how to heal when the metaphorical hits the fan, and secondly, I'll be slightly happier about the role. It's not the way I'd aim to solve the issues the role has, but it's better than nothing. And if it turns out to be a disaster? We'll have more hard evidence it's a disaster to throw at the Sylphies when they insist that 'noooo damage isnt the solution'

There are still a few things that I'm looking forward to in EW, namely the soon release of the new deep dungeon and the new Gold Saucer feature, blitzball potentially. But beyond that, I'm kinda over EW and just anxious to see what information we get on 7.0, and this is the biggest thing I want to see. My faith in change is shaky, but I also have a very cautious optimism that this is the lowest point and what comes after will be better to some degree. This largely comes from a couple places: mainly the heated criticism of EW's stagnancy. It's not just the 2 minute meta, but also things like the kaiten removal sparking the delay in the AST and DRG reworks (presumably). Concerns about healer gameplay were largely out of sight, out of mind in the past, but not as much anymore.

[ty_taurus]

i dont understand the healers have nothing to do mindset, bc while more than 3 spells would be better than spamming one spell with a dot is boring, i always find myself too busy healing? even i agree, with sage the healing from dpsing doesnt do enough to keep my tank healthy alone, so im always using a lot of my spells to try to reduce dmg taken and stuff

i dont get it .- . i panic just trying to keep my party healthy in regular content sometimes bc someones always getting hit by something or someone, regardless of healer job

i aint touched savage or ultimate n i dont want to based on my panic in just current other things trying to do mechanics i dont know AND heal but i just dont understand. this. what ppl say here? that theres not enough to heal, nothing to do? moments of downtime like a boss anim for phase change or smthn seems to be a blessing during long moments of stress but idk for me theres always something to heal bc i want to keep my pt healthy

im having fun healing as long as i dont fail anyone n i dont know when healers would have opportunities to have intridicte dps rotations bc of the need to be able to heal :shrug: nless it's not a combo that can be interrupted or just lets you do other things idk man

the thing i'd agree with, which for me isnt as much an issue bc it lets me order my hotbars similarily, is that all the jobs i guess dont have much to their identity, and even then, to make sure every job is equally competent in all content so u can play what u want, im not sure what the solution is if balancing gets hard

i get other people have issues but im just dumb and dont understand. bc i am not having the same experience of healers being unnecessary or boring. i like being able to help

What it comes down to is a mastery of the craft of healing. The better you become at healing, the less you actually need to heal due to a combination of feeling more comfortable with outgoing damage and more knowledgeable about how best to use your tools. In a dungeon, for example, as a SGE, I almost never find that I need to use anything other than Kerachole, Ixochole, and Kardia healing--maybe a Taurochole on the tank during pulls, and I also try and get the most out of Pneuma since it's a small DPS gain against multiple enemies. I quite literally never spend a single GCD on Diagnosis, Prognosis, or their Eukrasian equivalents outside of prepull. For the entire duration of a dungeon, the only spells I cast are my limited DPS buttons. I would have a more engaging experience playing Brayflox Longstop on BLM. And that's not because I don't want to heal or support. I've just reached a point where I am completely unafraid of damage, because I know what will and will not kill my party members.

And that's where the issue lies. It's important that the healing role feel approachable and forgiving to a novice or intermediate healer, but the role stagnates heavily as you expand into expert and master territory.

The healing toolkits of each healer could easily be slimmed down by making the healing tools more interactive, and utilizing things like charges, or buttons like Eukrasia to enable more flexibility with those tools to address the content we have. This would add room to include more tools that are useful regardless of whether healing is needed or not--Tools that are not required to clear content, but allow the expert and master healers to have a more engaging experience without alienating the novice and intermediate healers.

[Renathras]

Hm...

Ran someone off again....?

EDIT: I don't mean that antagonistically, but it does appear to have happened. Judging by the deleted post with the message "Meh" after a person posted about liking Healers/healing and was...well, yeah.

[Sebazy]

It's the usual thing of someone new or less experienced/confident in the role not really understanding why the old vets are fed up with things because they haven't experienced it yet.

Again, it's seemingly hard to convey how the role is actually pretty fun when everyone is new, under geared and generally bad.

It falls to bits at in end game casual content once people get some gear and have half a clue what they are doing. The experience gets objectively worse as everyone gets better.

[Renathras]

It's the usual thing of someone new or less experienced/confident in the role not really understanding why the old vets are fed up with things because they haven't experienced it yet.

Again, it's seemingly hard to convey how the role is actually pretty fun when everyone is new, under geared and generally bad.

It falls to bits at in end game casual content once people get some gear and have half a clue what they are doing. The experience gets objectively worse as everyone gets better.

Three problems with this:

1) That's subjective, not objective. To many people, the experience gets objectively better as everyone gets better. In old style games, the reward for being a better healer was being a less stressed healer. That's still true today.

2) Not everyone who disagrees with your position is a new/less experienced player.

3) Even if we ignore both of the above - that's no reason to run people off by hitting them with a wall of salt when they come to the forums. Often you guys suggest that no one thinks like I do, as no one is here regularly posting on the forums from the position I am other than me. But every time someone does, they're met with a wall of bitter vet salt that's pretty grating to most people (it is to me, but despite what I'm called by the regular jaded vets, I have thicker skin and so stick around anyway). To most people, that's REALLY toxic and alienating, so they just leave. Having a toxic forum environment not only gives you a slanted view of what the playerbase actually wants, it's just a bad environment to cultivate in general, and creates a self-fulfilling "fact" of "No one disagrees with the echo chamber, because they aren't here in the echo chamber disagreeing", when said echo chamber is actively repelling dissenting voices from stepping into (or staying in) it.