A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

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.

I didn't say the change was "for the highest common denominator", I said it wasn't for the lowest; even now, many players can't align party buffs. Run a 24 man and watch how many times players miss their 2 min buffs.

Something like 'they left NIN DRG BRD MCH as the absolutely best comp for way too long' in end of HW/part of SB, now that's something more like 'heels dug in'. They could have changed MNK to piercing type, to give at least a choice between a DRG and MNK for one of the slots, but nope

Fair enough. Though I was thinking they continued talking it up even during ShB where some Tanks seemed more inclined to one or the other (I think it was PLD that was supposedly a good wingman OT?, don't recall, though). But yeah, the point was, when they dig in their heels, it's not always "to make things easier for casuals". Sometimes it's pretty random stuff, or stuff that isn't really "for" anyone; they just decided on something they were going to do come hell or high water even if it made no sense and didn't help anyone and no one asked for it.

The changes to boss hitboxes eliminated that aspect of playing a melee dps entirely, so who was this change made for?

Honest answer?

I think the encounter design teams. They want to make more fights where players have to move all over and spread and such, and they want to keep the DPS checks relatively tight, which means they can't have Melee/Tanks stuck in Narnia spamming their ranged attacks for long periods of time. Same reason they made Healer effects bigger. It's not to help Healers, it's to allow the mass arena combat encounter designs to work.

The fact that melee dps still perform significantly better than ranged dps however is a case of them digging their heels in for no justifiable reason.

Agreed. Hell, they JUST managed to realize that MCH being a "selfish DPS" in a subrole that suffers a DPS penalty doesn't work. It only took a massive blacklisting for an entire tier to wake them up to this years-long truth enough for them to get a few minor buffs and RETURN TO THEM a utility button they used to have.

See also the "But Verraise" thread in the DPS section. RDM is being thrown to the wolves for utility Square has done its level best to make as irrelevant as possible, while also creating movement profiles that hate hardcasts with a passion. Monk has similar utility to RDM, and yet it gets to do way more damage. Because lolMeleewalker, all fight design absurdly caters to melee and Square gifts them huge damage bonuses they keep buffing more and more with each patch, for difficulty they keep stripping out more and more each patch.

Agreed with both of these posts (this one and the one above). SMN maybe debatable, but RDM does far too little damage, and it's patch 6.4 and BLM is JUST NOW getting buffed to be around where it should have been 4 patches ago.

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).

In a game design space where DPS >>>> all, you CANNOT have Jobs overly distinguished (within a role) by damage, otherwise one will always be brought over the others. ShB SMN was a good example, as it was arguably harder than BLM, but did slightly less damage. The reason this worked out is that it also brought utility in the form of a Raise and a party buff. It didn't just do more damage, otherwise BLM would have been irrelevant.

The ideal is to have Jobs doing similar damage and people play harder ones because they like the gameplay of them. If people don't like the gameplay, then it's a bad Job design, and trying to lure people to it with the promise of bigger numbers is just trying to paper over it being a bad Job design. On the other hand, if it's a good design, people will want to play it, no matter the damage. Many times we see people playing Jobs that do less damage and are harder because they simply enjoy them. They're being punished for doing a thing they enjoy, which is bad design.

It isn't nonsensical, even discounting the lack of an uptime struggle, there's still half of the dps jobs being melee,

This is irrelevant, and I say so just about every time I see this argument.

Imagine if they didn't add RPR and SAM. There'd be less Melee than Ranged Jobs. But suppose there were more Melee PLAYERS than Ranged players. Should there still be more dedicated Melee slots or less?

The number of Jobs in a role isn't relevant. It should be more based on the amount of players, paying attention to the fact that the "standard party" already has likely impacted that number from what it naturally would have been. Back when 2 Casters or 2 Ranged was considered more viable, this argument didn't hold any water, either.

There are 4 DPS slots. Not 2 Melee, 1 Ranged, 1 Caster. They're all DPS. You want one of each for the % bonus, then one wildcard slot. That slot shouldn't be reserved for Melees.

What's next, there are only 4 Tanks and there are 6 Melees, so the 8 man party composition should be reduced to 1 Tank to make another Melee slot? It's just not a good argument.