Healer Queues are going to be different?

[LanFangHua]

Did I understand it correctly?
On the last live letter they said that they were "planing to create a different type of queue for healers, so that the healing composition was always made out of a pure healer and a shield healer (in raids and trials)

If I understood this correctly. What are you guys thoughts on that? Since most people will be very excited to play sage and it probably will be the most seen at the start of the upcoming expansion.

[Reiryuu]

To be honest? If people are excited to play Sage and it creates a problem for a lack of Pure Healers, that would be great. It means SE made a mistake and haven't given the "pure healers" enough attention to make them interesting enough for people to play and adjustments might actually be made. Otherwise... meh? It doesn't really hurt or harm. It just irks me that they are forcing this dichotomy in the game when there could be more diversity on all the healers. Variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes after all. And healers are lacking a lot of spice right now... aside from Sage.

[LanFangHua]

To be honest? If people are excited to play Sage and it creates a problem for a lack of Pure Healers, that would be great. It means SE made a mistake and haven't given the "pure healers" enough attention to make them interesting enough for people to play and adjustments might actually be made. Otherwise... meh? It doesn't really hurt or harm. It just irks me that they are forcing this dichotomy in the game when there could be more diversity on all the healers. Variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes after all. And healers are lacking a lot of spice right now... aside from Sage.

Agree with all of this!
Also find it personally ridiculous, specially in a pve game to give up creativity (which equals fun) for "balance". I say that because that seems to be their excuse for the apocalyptic homogenization we are having...

[Tranquilmelody7]

I just hope this isn't applied to the MSQ dungeons (Castrum Meridian and Praetorium)

[Sebazy]

Agree with all of this!
Also find it personally ridiculous, specially in a pve game to give up creativity (which equals fun) for "balance". I say that because that seems to be their excuse for the apocalyptic homogenization we are having...

SE just seem to have some strange priorities.

Making Aetherflow clunky and often irritating to use in casual content such as dungeons for the sake of stopping savage raiders wait a minute between pulls? k =(

[Liam_Harper]

I think it's ridiculous.

No MSQ, Normal mode or even EX content requires a Shield healer and Pure healer. Even all of Savage can be cleared with Diurnal + WHM. I have no reason to believe this will change in Endwalker, especially now we've seen that Sage has a huge pool of Pure heals and they aren't turning Shield into a separate playstyle at all. All this does is reinforce bad mindsets in the playerbase, like the current "must go Noct with a WHM" nonsense.

I expect AST+WHM or SGE+SCH to be perfectly viable in the majority of content and the majority of the playerbase to firmly believe that you cannot use those comps, because SE has almost stated that officially now.

It's so obvious none of the designers play healer.

[Risvertasashi]

Did I understand it correctly?
On the last live letter they said that they were "planing to create a different type of queue for healers, so that the healing composition was always made out of a pure healer and a shield healer (in raids and trials)

If I understood this correctly. What are you guys thoughts on that? Since most people will be very excited to play sage and it probably will be the most seen at the start of the upcoming expansion.

I welcome the change.

-

As far as systems design goes, I imagine it will be a soft requirement - if only shield healers or only pure healers are available, it'll probably match them together anyways after a time.

With all that said, I'm not worried about sages flooding the queues. I think one thing bears in mind - White Mage is always massively, massively popular, even when it gets the crap end of the meta stick (which is pretty much always). This is even what leads to a lot of the healer imbalances - SE buffs Astro and Scholar in an attempt to get more people to play them, but white mage's massive playerbase won't really switch unless white mage falls really far behind. We saw this last expac. And even for this expac, despite people saying "WHM does so much DPS!", it's been behind AST+SCH in combination, and lately, it's behind AST and SCH both individually as well.

But people don't say WHM is dead; right now in particular, they say SCH is dead. That's not because SCH isn't powerful though, it's due to playstyle issues; and white mage, despite being the weakest overall, is "close enough" that it retains its massive playerbase.

So, I don't see the queues bottlenecking around too many shield healers.

[Rongway]

The Raid Finder, which is used for matchmaking in high-end duties, will function the same as before with the exception of the healer role category. We understand that some of you would like the matchmaking settings to be divided even further to avoid being matched with other players of the same job. However, encounters are generally designed to be completed with any party composition and splitting the roles even further would lead to longer matchmaking times, so only the healer role has been divided.

Only Raid Finder will force AST/WHM + SGE/SCH. As in, only the most recent Extreme trial, the current Unreal trial (whenever they return), and the current Savage raids.




The Regular Duty Finder will still just use whatever two healers are available. This change will basically not even affect anyone outside of JP because NA and EU players don't queue for Extremes and Savages, so please stop bashing the devs for this misunderstanding. There are plenty of other things we can complain about that actually are their fault. This isn't one of them.

[LaylaAlder]

Honestly, I don't think it'll be too much of an issue. Get a Pure and Shield healer built up, then just toggle which one you use based on which one is needed more.

[Deceptus]

To be honest? If people are excited to play Sage and it creates a problem for a lack of Pure Healers, that would be great. It means SE made a mistake and haven't given the "pure healers" enough attention to make them interesting enough for people to play and adjustments might actually be made. Otherwise... meh? It doesn't really hurt or harm. It just irks me that they are forcing this dichotomy in the game when there could be more diversity on all the healers. Variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes after all. And healers are lacking a lot of spice right now... aside from Sage.

What's worse is enforcing this Dichotomy when it pretty much doesn't exist.

Pure healers have shields, shield healers have regens.

What's the damn point of separating them now?