A summary of healer issues

[Lyth]

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I think the reason why balance matters so much is because players are torn between playing what they know provides more value to their team, while simultaneously wanting to play a job with gameplay/aesthetics that they are attracted to. I think that there's a middle ground that you need to strike between making jobs feel unique, while also giving them the capability of solving the same set of problems (ideally in unique ways).

The other issue that crops up is that players just get tired of seeing the same comps being used in skilled play expansion after expansion with the same interdependencies. Heavensward was particularly bad for this. Pretty much every comp was running WAR/SCH/NIN/DRG, and the remaining four slots didn't have that much variability in them either. Ranged demanded a DRG. Tanks demanded a NIN. NIN demanded a WAR. And so on. And this game is incredibly slow to make balance adjustments, so if something is grossly unbalanced you pretty much have to put up for it for the next two years. That's why it's so important for them to get it right at the start of an expansion.

To make things worse, there are a couple of jobs that have been kicking around since ARR that are just consistently on top because they've been grandfathered into a bunch of advantages, and there's a very vocal playerbase that gets real, real mad if you try to take those advantages away because they're used to ruling the roost. We're only more recently starting to see those jobs finally get gently moved out of the meta, and it's a massive step forward for the long term health of this game.

I would say that it's critical that the dev team take an iterative approach to balance and show ongoing, active responses to player feedback. You can't wait two years between balance adjustments. Because if people feel that the job that they want to play is completely ineffective and that they aren't being listened to, then it definitely won't be fun, and it they'll likely just lose interest and find something better worth their time.

I just want to do healing. Why are you telling them to make me do damage. Stop speaking for me I just want to do healing when I play a healer.

This was far too good of a setup for it to not be deliberate, but someone had to do it.

Jokes aside, though, I think anyone who is truly serious about healing focused gameplay would want a major revamp of both the current healer job designs and the current approach to raid design. Both are inadequate as they stand.