A summary of healer issues

[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.

[Renathras]

<in reply>

To the first: Well, yes and no. I remember reading on the WoW forums the Devs saying this same thing. Whether they DID IT OR NOT was a matter of debate, but they said that they tried to actively engage in and take feedback in threads where people were making and discussing suggestions, not merely saying they hated a thing or were bored, etc. When you're making detailed suggestions ("add more DPS buttons" isn't detailed, "SCH: Add Miasma and Poison as two more DoT spell lines. Add Bane (spread) and Fester (damage based on active DoTs). Have Art of War inflict a DoT and either a Heavy or a Slow (heavy might make tank positioning more annoying for them; in other words, old Miasma 2 just with another name and some tactical effect, as befits a SCH). Remove Energy Drain, have Lustrate upgrade to be a heal + shield (so you can burn excess AF stacks on it and the shield will actually be useful, something akin to "Divine Benison, the Aetherflow ability"), give Sacred Soil a Shadow Flare effect. I think collectively that would work well. Remove Dissipation, having it instead be some lower level ability to be a proto-Seraph that upgrades to Seraph at 80. Maybe something like "for the next 20 seconds, boosts the potency of all Eos's spells or adds a shield for 50% of the amount healed, something like that. Either scrap Faerie Gauge or...make it actually useful. I was hoping they'd remove the CD for Fey Blessing and make it just cost 30 gauge, since that way I could use it for burst AOE healing...but instead they kept the dumb CD. I'd either reverse that or just delete Gauge and make Fey Union just a powerful HoT like the one SMNs get when Phoenix is out that you can just fire off on the tank and forget about it." IS rather detailed.)

This doesn't mean they will DO those things, especially if they have a specific goal in mind (e.g. "DoTs are taxing on the servers and there's a maximum that can be placed on bosses, we want less of them not more of them"), but it does mean "Okay, we see that players find X fun while finding Y boring".

.

To the second: Yes and no. To some people (most people?) things SHOULD be easier and easier as you get better and better at them. Imagine if writing a paper was as hard at 30 as it was at 5 when you could barely even think of how to spell the words you were using. But some other people want things to be consistently "challenging" to them. It's a different mindset, but both exist simultaneously.

.
EDIT:
To the third: More or less agreed. One problem is that camp WAS once catered to (exclusively), which cased a ton of problems. In SB, they kind of catered to both groups (SMN and AST were complex, WHM simple), and the complex players complained endlessly that they wanted to get more REWARD for what they were doing. "not being bored" wasn't rewarding in their minds, they needed to also do more damage. Since the Devs were balancing around healers doing a given amount of damage in line with each other, that was out of the question, so instead, they nerfed complexity to end that argument.

If we gave, say, SCH (say DoTs) and SGE (say RDM's caster rotation with each damage spell healing via Kardia) and/or AST a more complex rotation now while leaving WHM and maybe 1 of the others as simple, would that not lead to the exact same issue of complaint once again? I call this the "This is why we can't have nice things" problem. "I don't want to be bored" VERY QUICKLY changes to "I should be rewarded since I'm 'working harder'", even when said person ASKED to work harder! I think that's the tightrope here.|

.

And no, the answer isn't just to cut off the players that want and enjoy the simpler rotations from the game - they make up a majority of the healers. The reason that they even went that way in the first place was because of rampant healer shortages and people saying healing was too hard while non-healers also complained that healers weren't doing enough damage or Cleric Stance dancing enough to their liking.

As I've said many times before, the reason for all the "dumbing down" changes were because, in one way or another, the community asked for it. Either directly ("Healing is too hard and we can't find healers! Make it easier!") or indirectly ("We have to do more work than WHM and do less damage! If we have to do more work, increase our damage!" = "so now you all have less work and simple rotations! FIXED!"; "Healers don't use Cleric Stance enough/Healers don't cast damage spells!" = "Now Cleric Stance is removed (after a brief time of being a short duration CD) and healing is so minimal there are plenty of GCDs to use the super simple healing DPS rotations! FIXED!"), and this has resulted to the situation we're in today. NOTE ON THIS POINT: This isn't JUST healers. This includes Tank and DPS roles and Jobs. Not ALL, but MANY of the changes we've seen to FFXIV, and the bulk of the homgenization and dumbing down, came from the community asking/demanding it, either directly or in a "corrupt-a-wish" indirectly way.

It's like 343 Guilty Spark said to Master Chief in Halo 1 "You were with me every step of the way as we managed this crisis. Why would you refuse to do what you've already done?"

[QooEr]

To the first: Well, yes and no. [...] When you're making detailed suggestions [...] This doesn't mean they will DO those things, especially if they have a specific goal in mind (e.g. "DoTs are taxing on the servers and there's a maximum that can be placed on bosses, we want less of them not more of them"), but it does mean "Okay, we see that players find X fun while finding Y boring".

i much rather outright say waht i find fun and what i find boring and let them decide what to do with that. i like ast because its busy, i dislike that it is shallow. i miss the time magic, i miss scholars dps spells, i think fey blessing is pointless bloat, i think the fey gauge is extremely underutilized, i think kardia and eukrasia are a bunch of wasted potential, etc. i dont need to redesign the jobs to identify their shortcomings. when i give feedback i dont just say "im bored" because like you said its not conductive to anything. im saying "im bored of pressing malefic 150 times in a single fight. im bored that almost none of my skills have any interaction or synergy. im bored because my cards have been reduced to shallow busywork every 2 minutes. im bored because theres barely anything to heal even in ultimate". in fact the LL question itself didnt just say "healers are boring lol", it tried saying why they felt it was boring (in that specific case they said there was barely any damage to heal so we just spammed our one dps spell for 90% of the fight, and it used the healerless clears as evidence of there being barely any damage).


now im not telling you or anyone not to give suggestions or solutions, do as you please. i just dont think we as customers have the duty to tell the devs how to fix the problems we identify.

To the second: Yes and no. To some people (most people?) things SHOULD be easier and easier as you get better and better at them. Imagine if writing a paper was as hard at 30 as it was at 5 when you could barely even think of how to spell the words you were using. But some other people want things to be consistently "challenging" to them. It's a different mindset, but both exist simultaneously.

you are conflating difficulty with fun. i used to have a blast spreading dots with bane in some ARR dungeon and managing my fairy so i never needed to leave cleric stance in the whole dungeon. im nearly falling asleep on the first half of p3s because theres almost nothing to heal between mechanics, and all i do when not healing is spamming X on my controller. what is harder, brayflox longstop or asphodelos savage?

healers need to be designed so that they are fun when not healing too. the game expects you to farm, the game has solo duties, the game actively rewards doing less healing, and people get better with experience. the class design needs to match the gameplay loop and stop pretending its something else.

To the third: More or less agreed. One problem is that camp WAS once catered to (exclusively), which cased a ton of problems. In SB, they kind of catered to both groups (SMN and AST were complex, WHM simple), and the complex players complained endlessly that they wanted to get more REWARD for what they were doing. "not being bored" wasn't rewarding in their minds, they needed to also do more damage. Since the Devs were balancing around healers doing a given amount of damage in line with each other, that was out of the question, so instead, they nerfed complexity to end that argument.

when are we talking about? because in stormblood the main complaint wasnt that ast and sch needed to do more damage. they were already doing more damage. the complaint was that they were so good that they were overcentralizing, and meanwhile WHM was completely awful and had nothing going for it.
in HW the main complaints were that cleric stance made dpsing scary or whatever and that "my cohealer is chadding me !!!!!!"
it was only after shadowbringers busted sch and asts kneecaps that the complaints about damage performance started happening.

If we gave, say, SCH (say DoTs) and SGE (say RDM's caster rotation with each damage spell healing via Kardia) and/or AST a more complex rotation now while leaving WHM and maybe 1 of the others as simple, would that not lead to the exact same issue of complaint once again? I call this the "This is why we can't have nice things" problem. "I don't want to be bored" VERY QUICKLY changes to "I should be rewarded since I'm 'working harder'", even when said person ASKED to work harder! I think that's the tightrope here.

i personally would not be complaining unless whm was somehow top dog while pressing 1 key and astro had 40apm only for it to be always worse. but thats a balance problem, not a gameplay one. numbers can be easily tweaked.
either way i dont think whm being simple means it needs to be simplistic. PLD's rotation is simple, and yet you have probably heard the jokes about PLD being an microsoft excel main. black mage is a simple job with the highest skill ceiling in the game.

a job can be simple without it being shallow, and things can be easy without being boring.