A summary of healer issues

[Sylvain]

It's more the playerbase needs to recognize what the issue actually is. The problem is class-encounter design interaction. If a party buster is coming every 20-40 seconds, healers are forced to have overpowered spells like medica. If all heals are overpowered spells, then any individual decision slowly becomes meaningless. If there's no real MP management, that's one less bit of complexity. And if the devs want to keep adding new things to healers, but constantly just continue the status quo of giving overpowered heals like medica 1, the situation gets pushed more and more into the extreme.


The problem is that encounter design is nothing but tank busters and party busters. There's very little random damage on 1 person, very little true sustained damage. There is no reason to choose between cure 1 and cure 2, you just tetragrammaton.

To fix this problem, the playerbase as a whole needs to clearly and concisely say that the way to fix healer kits is to nerf healer toolkits into the ground, prune abilities, remove literally every single free heal in the game (except things like freecure,) and pair it with a radical redesign of encounters. Because there will never be such a thing as fun healer design so long as every single mechanic can be solved by your choice of afflatus rapture, assize, indomitability, fey blessing, earthly star, macrocosmos, ixichole, holos.

Throw in barriers and mits to taste and you have a recipe of the singularly most boring healer design possible. The frustrating thing is, this nonsense started in Heavensward. But I'm not really a healer main so I never really detailed what the problem is or why it's a problem.

But then you have the issue of having to have "old encounter" be clearable with the new design.
For DPS it's no problem, in the end, as long as "damage follows", you don't really care how it's distributed.
For healing it's different, while you could say "who cares about old content", it's still something A LOT of people do (and especially people leveling up)

If you redesign healing but it results in most EX/Savages/Ult of older xpac to be unclearable... Sure the design in the newest expansion is better, and it is important (more so than how it interacts with old content) but people would still be utterly mad and again, how do people leveling up manage if suddenly every lv 30-100 content becomes much harder to heal due to the new design? Let's not forget that a significant portion of the player base is **very** casual and can't even tackle EX trials.