A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

And this screws healers even more because despite the vision being "healers only healing" healers are now expected to DPS even more to get clears.

"Yoshi, we do nothing but mash 1; what is your solution?"
Yoshi: "Healers should only heal."
The actual content: "Mash 1, HARDER!!!!!!"

Come now, sometimes we mash 2. Occasionally 3.

This has essentially been CBU3's modus operandi for this entire expansion, make a change for no reason (or for the sole reason of appeasing the absolute lowest common denominator), find out said change had a bunch of negative knock-on effects, sell us a solution to the problem they created in the first place.


Let's make giant hitboxes for basically no reason.
Oh no, now melees have 100% uptime with no effort required, better increase the dps checks.
Oh no, now certain party compositions can't mathematically clear the dps check, better nerf that into the ground and then buff them.
Oh no, because of our giant hitboxes people may occasionally miss buffs when they have to move, better increase the buff range to cover the entire arena to make it extra braindead.
Oh no, since melees have 100% uptime in every fight they are completely trouncing the ranged dps' output, better buff all of tho-...oh wait, they didn't do that, instead they just buffed Blackmage and told every other ranged to go pound sand.

Extremely correct. Like, legitimately, no sarcasm, this is exactly right.

The thing is, all the "initial" changes are for no good reason or don't actually do the thing they were supposed to do. At that point, the answer SHOULD be to revert the changes, instead, they go through several iterations of "fixes" for what could have been solved by a mere reversion.

They also are weird in that SOME changes they are willing to go back on - often the ones that are mostly fine and just need some little tweaks. But the changes they really SHOULD go back on, for whatever reason, they stick to their guns on THOSE. I honestly have no idea why they stick to their guns so hard on some of the most inane stuff, but then stuff that's more or less fine, they decide have to be changed. Or perhaps worst of all - where they change one thing but not another like thing, even though the change makes perfect sense. Like how Crafter scripts now stack to 4,000 as does Hunt currency, but Tomes, even Poetics, are still locked at 2,000. Like...WHY?!

[ForsakenRoe]

If they really wanted to child-proof the healers, they'd do things like give Medica II a 15 second cooldown so you literally can't recast it until the regen has finished.

In a hilarious twist, during 12S prog I found that, during Limit Cut (yes another one) the range on Medica is not enough at 15y to reach the other side of the arena to heal between LC dashes. My workaround? To use Medica 2 and purposely clip the HOT, because it has 5y extra range (and matches Rapture's range). The boss isn't targetable during the phase, so the 'loss of damage' isn't a factor, and people have to be healed between each damage instance such that the 3 (maybe 4 cos of chargetime) Lilies you get are not enough. So if Rapture/Med2 are 20y, why is Med1 still 15, is my question. And if it's for parity with AST (Helios/AspHelios/CO are 15y), then why was Rapture made to be 20? Confusing my poor brain. But yeh point being, my 'strategy' wouldn't work if I had a 15s CD on Med2 as suggested, and I'd have to do something else for it. I can't go more middle cos there's proximity baited lasers, so it's kinda weird to work around. I have taken to purposely holding Asylum and Temperance both for that part, just in case I'm still missing people with the casts because I'm too busy looking at numbers and dashes and lasers to see if I'm hitting everyone with my heal, which is probably not optimal but hey it (was) week 1 so optimal can bugger off for a few weeks

If you wanted to 'childproof the healers' and stop people from clipping their HOT by spamming Medica2, rather than 'forcing it' ie with a CD, massively incentivize the alternative. For example, we see people using Freecure because they see they got a trait that says 'oh you have a chance to get a Cure2 for free!'. So add a trait that says 'When you are affected by Medica 2 or Regen, your Cure3's MP cost is halved'. Ok, so now you're incentivized to, instead of spamming Med2, put up just one for the party regen, and then you can push more Cure3. And because Medica2 is 250p on cast (or maybe it's 150 when you first get it, idk anymore cos of that 85 trait), and Cure3 is like 550 (later 600), the BIG GREEN NUMBER from Cure3 will tickle the newbie healer's dopamine receptors and make them go 'yes I am god' moreso than the smaller green number being caused by Medica2 spam

MP economy discussion is a whole other can of worms

Or perhaps worst of all - where they change one thing but not another like thing, even though the change makes perfect sense. Like how Crafter scripts now stack to 4,000 as does Hunt currency, but Tomes, even Poetics, are still locked at 2,000. Like...WHY?!

We've had our melee die to using LB when the boss in 12 doorboss takes away platforms, because DRG/MNK LB moves your character's position. This, in the same patch that fixed HighJump and Jump to specifically NOT do that. I guess they thought 'oh DRG can't do it's burst on time if Jump is delayed by a bind' but they didn't consider they could accidentally fall through the damn floor if they LB at specific times in the fight, classic SE oversight.

As for tomes, I assume the reason they don't up the cap on uncapped (so, astronomy last tier, currently causality), is that, for example one week ago when the patch went live, I could trade my 2000 stocked Astronomy into 500 Causality, allowing me to effectively stockpile 2500 'uncapped tomes' for crafting stuff. If that limit was upped to 4000, even for uncapped only, that'd go to 3000. Maybe it doesn't affect much of anything but SE probably sees it differently. Poetics has zero excuse, since it's for old stuff only and you can get like 400 at a time by just doing MSQ roulette each day. It'd help people with older relic grinds too, being so stocked on poetics when they decide 'you know what, I kinda like the look of the bingo ball AST wep from HW'.

Now, you want a 'real' tome related change, here's what I'd do: change the name of Poetics to 'Allagan Tomestone of Histories', to link it to how it's for old stuff. I get that Poetics was the final tier of tomes from ARR but come on, have some theming about it

[Renathras]

As for tomes, I assume the reason they don't up the cap on uncapped (so, astronomy last tier, currently causality), is that, for example one week ago when the patch went live, I could trade my 2000 stocked Astronomy into 500 Causality, allowing me to effectively stockpile 2500 'uncapped tomes' for crafting stuff. If that limit was upped to 4000, even for uncapped only, that'd go to 3000.

To be fair, they could just cut the exchange rate of old tomes to the "new-old tome" by half. Instead of 2,000 Astronomy for 500 Causality (4:1 exchange rate), it could be 4,000 Astronomy for 500 Causality (8:1 exchange rate) and the result would be the same.

I never did figure out why they locked the "legacy tome" at Poetics instead of one of the others (say, the very first one), though. I feel like that would have made more sense, though I don't remember what the very first one was at this point...

The moving the character is kinda funny/sad. Is that also true of DNC? I always thought that was more visual effect, not actual, like how the DCN can shoot off the platform/out of the arena boundary when they do the three dashes before jumping back to their starting position.

[Iedarus]

Extremely correct. Like, legitimately, no sarcasm, this is exactly right.

The thing is, all the "initial" changes are for no good reason or don't actually do the thing they were supposed to do. At that point, the answer SHOULD be to revert the changes, instead, they go through several iterations of "fixes" for what could have been solved by a mere reversion.

They also are weird in that SOME changes they are willing to go back on - often the ones that are mostly fine and just need some little tweaks. But the changes they really SHOULD go back on, for whatever reason, they stick to their guns on THOSE. I honestly have no idea why they stick to their guns so hard on some of the most inane stuff, but then stuff that's more or less fine, they decide have to be changed. Or perhaps worst of all - where they change one thing but not another like thing, even though the change makes perfect sense. Like how Crafter scripts now stack to 4,000 as does Hunt currency, but Tomes, even Poetics, are still locked at 2,000. Like...WHY?!

SE seems to be notorious for digging their heels in on bad decisions; for example, look at bow mage.

[Shurrikhan]

SE seems to be notorious for digging their heels in on bad decisions; for example, look at bow mage.

...Of all the possible examples... ???

They didn't "dig their heels in" on Bow Mage. They refused to do more than a single buff's worth of reiteration and instead threw a tantrum, getting rid of it outright and fully re-saddling physical ranged with their then-unmitigatable "mobility tax".

Example of actually "heels dug in": doubling down on changes favoring the lowest denominator when the first few rounds of changes having affect the floor less than the ceiling, to further reduction of the skill ceiling; doubling down on homogeneity between jobs when prior homogenization and difficulty decreases left no differences of note between jobs of most roles except their overall damage; homogenizing encounter design further after initial homogenizations make players consider every job as interchangeable to the point of featuring "take the job, not the player" biases despite even minute differences; doubling down on decisions to make MP a non-mechanic via oGCD bloat because actually using the oGCDs they decided to make the center of healing gameplay... is apparently too hard for their imagined average healer; neutering tank agency further just because they couldn't previously be bothered to balance rDPS gains of even sparse defensive play; refusal to deal with the game adding roundtrip ping's uptime cost to every action (ignoring obvious highly lucrative QoL fixes) and instead GCD- or stack-ifying everything; etc.

[Renathras]

...Of all the possible examples... ???

They refused to go back on it for an entire expansion, same thing with "main tank/off tank" in ShB. Yes, that is "heels dug on".

"favoring the lowest denominator" isn't what "heels dug in" is defined as.

[Shurrikhan]

They refused to go back on it for an entire expansion, same thing with "main tank/off tank" in ShB. Yes, that is "heels dug on".

"favoring the lowest denominator" isn't what "heels dug in" is defined as.

See the difference between "reduce the floor, no matter the cost to ceiling" and that, though? One lasted only one expansion; they took a step, and then stepped off. The other's "solution" has only ever been to dig further.

Seen them go back on designs favoring the lowest denominator at almost any expense any time lately?

[Renathras]

Seen them go back on designs favoring the lowest denominator at almost any expense any time lately?

That would mostly depend on how you define that. For example, unifying the buffs does not favor the lowest denominator, since it favors groups that coordinate their buffs since them being ABLE to be aligned means doing so generates a huge boost in performance over those who do not. That very much does not favor "the lowest denominator".

Melee have been able to do more damage than Ranged for at least 3 expansions now, and it was debatably intended in HW, they just mucked up the tuning on a lot of Jobs. The explicit reasoning for this is "Melee are harder" (even though that's highly debatable these days). The design intent there is to give advantage to the harder thing over the easier thing. That also is not favoring "the lowest denominator", as if the intent was to favor "the lowest denominator", it would be the Ranged allowed to do more damage. And they've stuck with that one for 3 expansions and counting, despite it being entirely ridiculous to do so in this expansion due to the massive hitboxes and reduced positionals in Meleewalker.

BLM is also consistently kept as higher damage output over RDM and SMN because it's harder. It was kept over SMN in ShB (despite SMN being on par with its difficulty) to keep that going. While this one is a two part thing (it's the difficulty argument + the Raise argument), part of that IS the difficulty part, and thus not favoring "the lowest denominator".

They consistently lock really cool rewards (gear, glam, mounts, and minions - all things that are highly desired) behind high end content. This is also not favoring "the lowest denominator" and has been their practice for 5 expansions now.

So clearly, they often stick with things that do not favor "the lowest denominator". What they do and don't stick with seems decided by a blindfolded person throwing at a dartboard, not a preference for "the lowest denominator".

[Aravell]

For example, unifying the buffs does not favor the lowest denominator, since it favors groups that coordinate their buffs since them being ABLE to be aligned means doing so generates a huge boost in performance over those who do not. That very much does not favor "the lowest denominator".

This part isn't true at all. Groups that were capable of aligning buffs were already aligning it, with or without the change, they gain no net benefit from this change at all. Unifying timers just forces the regular players to align naturally by simply pressing on cooldown.

[Shurrikhan]

That would mostly depend on how you define that. For example, unifying the buffs does not favor the lowest denominator, since it favors groups that coordinate their buffs since them being ABLE to be aligned means doing so generates a huge boost in performance over those who do not. That very much does not favor "the lowest denominator".

Previously, you'd hold CDs variably and coordinate compositions. Now, if you open even just not-too-stupidly, your CDs are synced to raid buffs automatically, because everything shares the same timers.

That's... objectively simplified.

The design intent there is to give advantage to the harder thing over the easier thing. That also is not favoring "the lowest denominator", as if the intent was to favor "the lowest denominator", it would be the Ranged allowed to do more damage.

Not at all. If people were enjoyed added difficulty, itself (at least as importantly, including whatever extra they may saddle their party with in their shortfalls while learning) there would be no need to incentivize the jobs that are harder to learn with greater on-paper damage so that they have parity for the average player while content is still relevant.

Rewarding what's harder allows you to have even significantly easier jobs --for better or worse-- without reducing the breadth of job choice available to even less-skilled players (who would otherwise feel pushed only towards whatever's easiest -- say, MCH/BRD/EW SMN).