Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
All of this is very anecdotal, but my point is that there are other driving forces to why someone would level a job other than because they enjoy playing as that job, more now than there was during Stormblood. Leveling has also become easier than ever. In other words, the actual percentage of players who actively play healer is undoubtedly lower than the total population implies, but without knowing by how much, how can we really say that there are more active healers now than during Stormblood?
I think the dip in Stormblood being used to explain that healer players don't like that direction is wrong. I'm almost 100% sure that the dip at that point was due to the fact that the most popular healer, WHM, was destroyed with the lily system. You do raise a good point about the role quests, some people would level a healer just for that, which would bring me to a point that I would like to make, how many of those endgame healer players in the data are people who level exclusively on SMN and get a free max level SCH?