Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Vahlnir]

I may be crazy, but I’ve not witnessed this drop in the healer population that seems to be the main concern here. Roulettes still primarily give out tank bonuses, as always. I still adore my SCH.

One detail that jumped out to me from this thread was the idea that if everything is perfect, healers don’t have to heal and in ShB’s that means healers, in general, are bored since our DPS is so simple. From my understanding, this was always the intention from the get go; healer DPS is a bonus addition in group content, never required. I always thought there was a break between dev vision and player vision regarding this since all of us who heal are trained to weave exponential amounts of DPS over our actual purpose because everyone runs off of being as time efficient as possible with ALL content.

Oh, there's not a lack of healers. It has been my observation, however, that there has been a bit of a drop in GOOD healers. Not enough to make a catastrophic impact but it's noticeable, at least to me. Getting into healing has never been easier, but a fair number of veteran healers are either unsatisfied but keep playing, or they have moved on to other jobs/roles entirely. We've probably got more healers now, but we have also lost a good bit of talent as a result of the streamlining.

[Laphicet]

I may be crazy, but I’ve not witnessed this drop in the healer population that seems to be the main concern here. Roulettes still primarily give out tank bonuses, as always. I still adore my SCH.

My stupidly long queue times on anything but healer say otherwise.

Adventurer in need is a bit broken, it looks for tanks before everything else and thus you will see Tank AIN more in spite of the fact that healers are noticeably rarer and most often the last role to fill when queueing for most things, or that's the case on crystal at least (it checks TANK then HEALER then DPS when it comes to filling slots, and thus gets stuck on filling the tank slot more in spite of healer taking longer to fill, and with how it gets locked into a role for a set period of time regardless of what fills, it ends up giving the illusion that tanks are rarer while actually trying to queue for stuff tells a very different message, as I have come to learn while trying to level DPS classes over the last month).

[Vahlnir]

My stupidly long queue times on anything but healer say otherwise.

Adventurer in need is a bit broken, it looks for tanks before everything else and thus you will see Tank AIN more in spite of the fact that healers are noticeably rarer and most often the last role to fill when queueing for most things, or that's the case on crystal at least (it checks TANK then HEALER then DPS when it comes to filling slots, and thus gets stuck on filling the tank slot more in spite of healer taking longer to fill, and with how it gets locked into a role for a set period of time regardless of what fills, it ends up giving the illusion that tanks are rarer while actually trying to queue for stuff tells a very different message, as I have come to learn while trying to level DPS classes over the last month).

On Crystal I have noticed that it usually varies for "in need" roles but it favors tanks and dps for the most part. Alliance, Trials and Level 80 Dungeons seem to alternate between tank and dps every so often and you will occasionally see healer as the needed role for Alliance raids or something random. It's actually somewhat of a rarity for me to see healers in need for anything, at least in my experience.

[Gobio]

Just saying the most well known job to die, even for non FF14 players is dragoon and this is not a healing job.

[Vickii]

I actually think the answer is to make more other jobs self sufficient and put less dependency on healers, not more.

Today I did E11 normal and Emerald Weapon normal. On both occasions both healers died right at the start of the fight. One was a wipe, the other we won. Difference was a Red Mage.

I’m sorry to the good healers, but I don’t want my runs to be make or break on the ability of two random strangers, which more often than not at least one is not good.

[ADVSS]

I actually think the answer is to make more other jobs self sufficient and put less dependency on healers, not more.

Today I did E11 normal and Emerald Weapon normal. On both occasions both healers died right at the start of the fight. One was a wipe, the other we won. Difference was a Red Mage.

I’m sorry to the good healers, but I don’t want my runs to be make or break on the ability of two random strangers, which more often than not at least one is not good.

That was beautiful, I couldnt have said it better myself

[Greyhawk]

I actually think the answer is to make more other jobs self sufficient and put less dependency on healers, not more.

Today I did E11 normal and Emerald Weapon normal. On both occasions both healers died right at the start of the fight. One was a wipe, the other we won. Difference was a Red Mage.

I’m sorry to the good healers, but I don’t want my runs to be make or break on the ability of two random strangers, which more often than not at least one is not good.

The only thing I can say about this is - The patch just came out four days ago, and quite honestly this statement makes you sound like you are expecting them to win in Savage already which was most likely their first time there to heal. I agree with you about less dependent healing!

This patch has absurdly brought out this mentality of "You should know the fights already!", when we all seem to forget the influx of new/learning players, and the content is less than five days old (I'm not saying it's you, the general mentality). I'm not making an excuse for them, because by the time they reach this point in the storyline, they should be good enough on the job to do 'decent'. What I've seen though (myself included) is walking into a new Eden as my first time healing the place and dying to a mechanic I just couldn't get out of in time. I'm sorry - not everyone has reached elite status, they are still back at wondering 'WTH is going on'.

Now, if you would have used something like LoTA, WoD, or even Copied Factory as examples of what a hot mess looks like, I'd most likely be completely agreeing with you - and it's not the new people doing dumb things there. People have gotten lazy in not getting out of bad, expecting the healers to bail then out. I'm certainly glad not to live up to those expectations to bail someone out of stupidity.

[Saefinn]

I actually think the answer is to make more other jobs self sufficient and put less dependency on healers, not more.

Today I did E11 normal and Emerald Weapon normal. On both occasions both healers died right at the start of the fight. One was a wipe, the other we won. Difference was a Red Mage.

I’m sorry to the good healers, but I don’t want my runs to be make or break on the ability of two random strangers, which more often than not at least one is not good.

I'm sorry but that's how this game works. It's a team effort. And when you group with randos, it's a roulette, you'll get people of any skill level who can cause problems. Sure you can mitigate this by making the game super easy, but then what's the point? You just make it dull and kill any challenge.

But everybody is supposed to do their part and it can be make or break for different reasons depending on the fight, it's not always the healer's fault nor are the only make or break part, but they're the only one with a completely mindless DPS rotation, which hasn't lessened this perceived issue. You only need to see healer rants to see that so many others can put the strains on a run of something, either meaning the healer has to carry their butts or wipe. In a lot of cases where there is a strain, you might have got a good healer who's saved that part from the clutches of failure.

And example of where it's usually the DPS who're the liability is getting Titania in trials roulette, I find it's the DPS that cause the most wipes, followed by the tanks, followed by the healers. It's a mix of that DPS check and DPS needing to dodge AoE's. Dying to avoidable AoE's means less DPS, means we don't meet the check. Then there's the tanks who don't realise they have to tank the adds even when they're big, so the damage goes straight to the healers. Or as I keep getting it roulette lately: Good King Moogle Mog, not DPSing the adds in the right order, tanks not separating the mobs, people DPSing the King or the Tank Moogles first. Or as it's our new Unreal, I remember most of my Titan EX wipes back in the day were due to the bomb-slam mechanic because DPS didn't co-ordinate which bomb they blew up or they failed to properly dodge the AoE's, die and not get the bomb DPS'd down quick enough. Or as I had recently, Shiva in roulette, the tank turned her around to the party and she cleaved everybody and wiped most of the party, including the two healers.

And you want to put less dependency on healers? There's already very little dependency on healers compared to healers in other games, when you can go through a run of something and find only 30% of your casts are healing spells.

[Semirhage]

I'd suspect it's partially because they don't know how to incentivize healing. They think stripping damage spells will do it; the problem is more meta than that. It's because they understand how damage dealing works on a basic level, but not healing. Healing has a shelf life. The first benchmark is making sure everyone's topped off, then you start gaining skill by shaving that down. After all, it theoretically doesn't matter if the fight ends with everyone at 1 HP as long as they're alive. On either end of the skill spectrum, there's a point where healing more is just a waste of time.

This is a massive difference from DPS. With few exceptions (such as pushing phases too early and causing party wipes with some sort of early push punishment), doing more damage is always a good thing. You're finished with damage when the entire encounter ends. The problem here is that the job designers are treating healing as if it were functionally identical to damage; doing ever more and more is a "good" thing. This is wrong. We keep telling them this. They aren't listening.

So really... I don't think healing is the problem, the jobs are good and pretty fun... its the ENCOUNTER design that's the problem.

Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is not encounter design.

[BlitzAceRush]

It kind of is though, there are several ways they could tackle this problem, if they even see it as a problem. They could keep healers with only one main DPS spell but if encounters had you healing 80% of the time and DPS 20% suddenly "Glare Glare Glare" isn't as big of an issue. Of course they could also give them more DSP tools, and keep fights as they are, but seems pretty clear that's not something they want to do.