Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Crushnight]

I'm going to be blunt and to the point, your healer design mentality for Shadowbringers is bonkers.

Why? Because your trying to design them into something they will never be because you focus on the wrong things to adjust.

Your reasoning for the recent Scholar changes is sound however your actions are backwards design to your intent.

For those that don't know they said the energy drain nerf is to encourage scholars to heal more with their stacks and as compensation they buffed their DoT and nuke spells.

Why is that so backwards to what they want? Because no scholar will change what they are doing currently with their stacks, scholars will still prioritise Energy Drain unless they feel the need to use an ogcd stack heal, the change was moot and does nothing to the mentality people already have.


Developers of healer jobs here are a few things that would make healers follow your vision more.

1. Nerf ogcd heals, literally all of them. We have an overabundance of them and they do so much healing that gcd heals are viewed incredibly negative, cure 1 and benefic 1 are considered button bloat because they don't do enough even with their proccs.

2. Increase incoming damage frequency by a lot more than currently. If you are giving us so much healing ogcds make us want to use them a lot more often so we need to use our gcds on heals more often.

3. Change fight design from scripted to chaotic. The better the healer the more likely that they have mapped out any given fight which means they will have planned to use the most gcd damage spells with the least amount of healing, your fights are that scripted.


But you won't change any of these because the playerbase at large wouldn't be able to handle it, you know this, just like we know this.

So I am imploring you please change your mentality on healers, you are designing things the wrong way to what you want, if healers only had Glare/Broil/Malefic and they had 1 potency, that would still be the most used ability in every single fight by a large margin. You want us to heal more as a community then YOU need to stop targeting the dps abilities as the reason we do so, they are not the cause of the issue IT IS THE HEALING ABILITIES that make us more dps focused than you would like us to be.

[Kule]

I took a pretty long break from the game after Heavensward and only came back sporadically as a casual player for expansions. This year I stuck around though and finally got back to endgame, and one thing I noticed was the abundance of ogcd heals and it felt conflicting to my original memories of healing, like I'm not even a caster anymore. I figured I just have to get used to it, but I do kind of miss having to be good with timing your casts and moving around.

[Veliaire]

They are trying to make all healers identical to one another for some reason. They've all lost what makes them unique, all to fit some sort of mold of what a healer should be. They completely destroyed my precious Astrologian and stripped out all its time magicks, and for what? To make the job more approachable to people too lazy to learn their cards?

[Vahlnir]

They tried to put more focus on healers actually healing instead of dpsing without actually messing with the damage received much to actually matter, so they have less to do in their down time than they did before. It was a...questionable decision to say the least after we got to see this increase in damage taken. It really isn't much different from before. The only difference between then and now is that healers are bored since SCH and AST don't have much in the way of dps spells in their toolkits while WHM is all like "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD LILY!"

[SweetPete]

They are trying to make all healers identical to one another for some reason. They've all lost what makes them unique, all to fit some sort of mold of what a healer should be. They completely destroyed my precious Astrologian and stripped out all its time magicks, and for what? To make the job more approachable to people too lazy to learn their cards?

They destroyed my precious Selene... Destroyed the lore and effects of astros cards yet say they won’t make blue mage a regular job because they want to stick to the lore of what a blue mage truly is. The game got very popular and they sold out to the whiny player base who said content was to hard and some jobs were to hard play. They won’t increase incoming damage because they don’t want to make it to hard that the whiners will flood the forums and complain. So crazy. I guess we will see more homogenization in 6.0 as well. Sch and Astro were at their best in HW and SB. Whm was the odd child that needed a little help now it’s reversed. In 6.0 please take the healers back to the drawing board and rework them. Give them their identities back and make them worthwhile to play again.

[Veloran]

I really can't overstate how bad OP's ideas for healers are. If there's something wrong with the dev's healer design mentality, it's EXACTLY trying to get healers to spam heals all the time rather than allowing them to have their own fleshed out DPS mechanics. Spamming cure at tons of random/extremely frequent incoming damage is just as bad as spamming glare for an entire fight and primarily using ogcds at set points, in fact it's even worse because it completely removes the ability for healers to plan when to hold/unload their ogcds and contribute to group DPS, instead leaving raw gcd healing to completely overtake their gameplay.

The problem with SCH is exactly how hard they gutted their DPS abilities, encouraging more physick spam is precisely the wrong way to try and fix them.

[Fawkes]

idk I think assize and tetra are more fun than cure 1.

[Semirhage]

The only thing the live letters and patch notes from this expansion should tell you is that Squeenix learned exactly nothing about healer design from this expansion.

[Selova]

The only way the design for healers will ever change from what it is is if they change the way damage is dished out during encounters. Yes ogcd's are way too potent, but the reason they are is due to how scripted all the damage is where you can literally plan out all your healing just from your oGCD's alone. Unless they start baking in pulsing or consistent aoe damage throughout a entire encounter healers will continue to stay the way they are. As much as I'd like to see healers change to the point where they can efficiently spend most of their time actually healing, re-designing how damage is presented in pretty much all group content to get healers to spend more of their time actually healing probably isn't going to happen anytime soon sadly.

[Niyuka]

They cant change it because the "i dont wanna DPS as healer" crowd would go mad for STILL having to push non-healing buttons, the "I want to look cool in the logs" crowd will go insane because they suddenly have to fix mistakes of other players to a larger extent, and the playerbase as a whole, used to a very simplistic playstyle, would just quietly quit over the increased difficulty of encounters.
You have to realize, the silent majority just leaves games, sometimes suddenly, and has them die. Happens all the time, and if it happens here, I dont think SE will give the game a chance to recover instead of just dumping it. Shadowbringers post-launch is proof that there are minimal ressources invested in comparison to earlier in the games lifecycle, we are nearing the end. A re-design that increases complexity is the opposite of what mainstream game design dictates.