Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Semirhage]

What's frustrating is that had this balance right IMO. But they decided to change it.

I'm trying to figure out what the root cause of this was. It's likely a list of reasons. Heavensward design was the best for this (WHM needed something extra to manage, but that bridge has been crossed). And then out of seemingly nowhere, job design directly was like, "no wait, let's double the heals and halve the damage spells, they'll love that!"

Was there some invisible complaining Sylphie contingent in the Japanese forums that hated everything about Heavensward design?

[Saefinn]

I'm trying to figure out what the root cause of this was. It's likely a list of reasons. Heavensward design was the best for this (WHM needed something extra to manage, but that bridge has been crossed). And then out of seemingly nowhere, job design directly was like, "no wait, let's double the heals and halve the damage spells, they'll love that!"

Was there some invisible complaining Sylphie contingent in the Japanese forums that hated everything about Heavensward design?

When you think about it, Dark Knight's got a similar treatment, it was a Heavensward job, it was still fine in SB and they lowered its skill floor, but now, it's a shadow of its former self IMO, but at least I can still enjoy playing it.

But the impression I get is that they don't understand how this particular balance works when it comes to healing. Yoshi P's reading of the patch notes I think is telling of this:

On SCH's Energy drain adjustments for Patch 5.4
The dev team wants you to use Aetherflow more on healing. To compensate on the nerf they buffed the DoTs.

This helps confirm thoughts I've had in a previous thread before, where I've suggested that the devs are looking at the wrong numbers. It feels like they can see, for example, healers are DPSing for 70% of a run and healing for 30% and want to balance those percentages better. But they think this is resolved by reducing our DPS abilities and adding to our healing abilities. Maybe they thought it was because people were getting too hung up on their DPS rotations? By as we know, it just means we're more efficient and it's more boring, because we don't have anything much to break the monotony. And if anything means we DPS /more/.

But Yoshi's comments here are, well, backwards. It seems they think creating a disincentive to DPS means that you will save more abilities for healing. But if, say, we had 20 DPS skills, that 70%/30% balance would remain more or less the same. Because people are taking the same damage and the efficiency of our healing spells remains just as effective. I think people erroneously believe that it's people's DPS drive that means healers don't heal as much as people think they should. In addition to that, as we've seen from some complaint threads, people think somebody who lets you drop below 50% isn't healing enough, so these players tend to misunderstand how efficient healing works too. But maybe I can see how when looking at it from "these people are too driven by DPS" that you might see the logic in "we'll disincentivise their DPS aspect so they focus more on healing".


So I think it makes sense that people more erroneously think that healers are too driven by their DPS to focus on their healing, especially if that healer makes a mistake. But the question that doesn't seem to be considered is on why healers seem so focused on DPS? I mean, we've seen the comments like, "if you want to DPS so much, why don't you play a DPS job?"

Of course, most of us who hang out on the healer forum probably would say something along the lines of "it's because it's more efficient, we only need to heal you enough to keep you alive and this game is scripted meaning damage is predictable and as a result we have nothing else more to do than DPS."

[Hyperia]

To fix healing and have healers lean more into a more focused role on healing rather than DPS, they will have to totally change their mentality on encounter design. Right now its all about memorization and repetition. Most content is predictable, in some cases, laughably so. I cant do it as I have a horrible memory but if I could memorize 15 minutes worth of content, it would be fairly low impact. I would like to see rezzing be made instantly and then a 60 second CD timer, more AOEs but not too harsh. Near removal of all one shot kill mechanics and replace them with DPS reduction mechanics or slows, a long ticking dot, etc. As it stands now, the encounters move so fast, its just not practical to use a GCD heal because I'll get caught in some AOE or other mechanic and die, same with rezzing. There overuse of instant kill mechanics, falling off, ROUND platforms, etc. Its time to change things up and square platforms are not a solution either. Every time I see a raid or trail boss now, it feels like the developer is saying "hey look at this cool raid I made, can I go do the next Ultimate now?"

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. They have forgotten the most important thing in encounter design... FUN. Start with fun and then make it challenging, instead they make it challenging and hope its fun. Well... its not. Story mode raids and trials should be easy and fun for the casuals, hard (Yes add a new difficulty mode, call it hard) and savage for people who want a challenge with ultimate being around for people who want to cry tears of blood.

[Dyvid]

I'm trying to figure out what the root cause of this was. It's likely a list of reasons. Heavensward design was the best for this (WHM needed something extra to manage, but that bridge has been crossed). And then out of seemingly nowhere, job design directly was like, "no wait, let's double the heals and halve the damage spells, they'll love that!"

Was there some invisible complaining Sylphie contingent in the Japanese forums that hated everything about Heavensward design?

It all comes back to Cleric stance and the group that didn't want to DPS. 3.0 saw the expectation and almost requirements from the community to stance dance and DPS, which alienated players to a degree. So in 4.0 SE removed stance dance in order to help with DPS stress but people still complained so in 5.0 SE removed DPSing. Fine, if people don't want to DPS then give healers mechanics based around raid utility abilities.