What exactly is the design philosophy underlying the healer role?

[Sebazy]

Do you think they are in a completely irreprable state?

No not at all. However, I think that nothing is going to improve until Yoshida's team put the arrogance of their success aside for a moment and accept that the whole class design process has gone off the rails for quite some time now.

If I was tasked with course correcting things, I'd make one simple change over night. Allow Extreme and Savage bosses to continue auto attacking mid cast and up their melee damage significantly. Going forward, I'd also push for the return of short cooldown non telegraphed mini busters on bosses as well as allowing both auto attacks and these mini busters to crit.

From there, things get a lot more complex though as beyond that the healer jobs themselves need a pretty fundamental re evaluation at this stage. Personally I'd lean towards pruning and merging with the goal of replacing fluff oGCDs with abilities that have actual purpose and utility whilst shortening the cooldowns on bread and butter tools to compensate if needed.

I'm under no illusion that it would be a simple task at this point though and the biggest issue is that I don't think SE's class design and QA teams have the depth of knowledge and understanding to do it well.

[fulminating]

Arrogance is an unpleasant word, but it does seem to be the right one. Hubris could be another apt one. Sometimes I get the feeling that every job but black mage and fisher could slide into dullness and they'd still not really care. I know it's not a particularly charitable interpretation, but it feels true enough that it's hard to shake.

Regarding the auto attacks, I've felt a lot more concerned about tanking ultima unreal than any of the savage fights this tier because of the largely untelegraphed tankbusters and the constant stream of damage. I'm not going to pretend I'm great at tanking so it's likely I'm missing something fundamental about mitigating ultima (been using a mitigation when I get a stack, seems to precede a tankbuster), but it's a lot more satisfying to do correctly in some ways than certainly hesperos. Maybe all it'd do is reencourage the upkeep of regens, but that's something at least.

I wonder if part of the reason they like homogeneity is an attempt to not enforce healer compositions in the ultimates? Then again I can't really see this being the case - or really any justification for it at all unless the job devs have significantly more work than they can handle. And even then the logical course of action would be either hiring more staff or not adding new jobs. Sage is just a bad joke.

Perhaps if they swallowed their pride, they could rework healers into a state that fit the game more, but given some comments about their healer becoming "too good" I can't see it being fixed without outside help.

[Corbeau]

Healer design philosophy in this game is to get as many healers into all levels of content as possible so that the DPS players can have fun.

[LeonKeyh]

Healer design philosophy in this game is to get as many healers into all levels of content as possible so that the DPS players can have fun.

This seems to be the case.

If I were to take a swing at the philosophy of healers today, it could be wrapped up in a single word, "Accessibility."

Simple DPS kit makes it accessible for healers to be able to DPS (if they want to).
Making it so a majority of the time you're doing something that is largely optional makes it accessible for people who may not be good at healing (i.e. "pure" healing players sit around most of the time)
Predictable, spread out, and negligible damage make it so that reaction time is much less of a factor making it more accessible

And, most importantly, making healers accessible means that more people play healers which means that DPS queues are quicker.

[IDontPetLalas]

This seems to be the case.

If I were to take a swing at the philosophy of healers today, it could be wrapped up in a single word, "Accessibility."

Simple DPS kit makes it accessible for healers to be able to DPS (if they want to).
Making it so a majority of the time you're doing something that is largely optional makes it accessible for people who may not be good at healing (i.e. "pure" healing players sit around most of the time)
Predictable, spread out, and negligible damage make it so that reaction time is much less of a factor making it more accessible

And, most importantly, making healers accessible means that more people play healers which means that DPS queues are quicker.

Accessible is being extremely charitable. Also, your last statement is a conclusion "by being accessible (your word, not mine) more people will play healers" - maybe, maybe not. Which thereby threatens your desired outcome- i.e. DPS queues are quicker.

Why should a job be designed for people who are not good at it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for bad job design in any way. However, while there are people who are are good at every job, in many cases a person will tend to play a job they like, which is generally one that they are good at. So why would a job designer look at those people who really can barely function at a job and make decisions that limit everyone else ?

[LeonKeyh]

Accessible is being extremely charitable. Also, your last statement is a conclusion "by being accessible (your word, not mine) more people will play healers" - maybe, maybe not. Which thereby threatens your desired outcome- i.e. DPS queues are quicker.

Why should a job be designed for people who are not good at it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for bad job design in any way. However, while there are people who are are good at every job, in many cases a person will tend to play a job they like, which is generally one that they are good at. So why would a job designer look at those people who really can barely function at a job and make decisions that limit everyone else ?

I'm fairly sure that most (admittedly unofficial) censuses have shown an increase in healers/tanks being played after they slaughtered their gameplay. I'm not sure how a more balanced community "threatens" DPS queues being quicker. Reason why DPS queues are slow is because most people play DPS and there aren't enough healers/tanks to fill the parties that DPS wants. Current DPS queues are extremely reasonable.

For example, let's say there are 100 Tanks, 100 Healers, and 200 DPS running a particular queue (I know it's unlikely, just trying to explain why this makes DPS queues quicker)

That is exactly 100 parties worth of people, so, if people are queuing nonstop, they'll basically have instant queues.

Now, if there are 50 Tanks, 50 Healers, and 300 DPS there are 200 DPS that don't have tanks/healers. That means those DPS players at front of the queue need to sit around and wait for the tanks/healers to complete their duty (anywhere between 1 minute and 30 minutes), the ones at the back can wait upwards of 60 minutes. I realize that the queue is never this exact and people are never all queuing at the same time, but this makes it easy to see how important having a fairly balanced community is for DPS queues.


Why should it be designed for people who are not good at it? Well, it SHOULDN'T, but it very clearly is being designed that way to get more people to play healers and tanks to get queue times lower. The secondary "issue" with the "design" is a lazy attempt to balance the jobs by...basically making them more or less the same. From a community standpoint, there definitely ARE people who play healer because of the... "design", they're the ones that screech anytime anyone brings up the fact that the healers are not engaging. Also, most community members complaining about healing....are still playing healers... so SE is getting exactly what they want.

[IDontPetLalas]

I'm fairly sure that most (admittedly unofficial) censuses have shown an increase in healers/tanks being played after they slaughtered their gameplay. I'm not sure how a more balanced community "threatens" DPS queues being quicker. Reason why DPS queues are slow is because most people play DPS and there aren't enough healers/tanks to fill the parties that DPS wants. Current DPS queues are extremely reasonable.

For example, let's say there are 100 Tanks, 100 Healers, and 200 DPS running a particular queue (I know it's unlikely, just trying to explain why this makes DPS queues quicker)

That is exactly 100 parties worth of people, so, if people are queuing nonstop, they'll basically have instant queues.

Now, if there are 50 Tanks, 50 Healers, and 300 DPS there are 200 DPS that don't have tanks/healers. That means those DPS players at front of the queue need to sit around and wait for the tanks/healers to complete their duty (anywhere between 1 minute and 30 minutes), the ones at the back can wait upwards of 60 minutes. I realize that the queue is never this exact and people are never all queuing at the same time, but this makes it easy to see how important having a fairly balanced community is for DPS queues.


Why should it be designed for people who are not good at it? Well, it SHOULDN'T, but it very clearly is being designed that way to get more people to play healers and tanks to get queue times lower. The secondary "issue" with the "design" is a lazy attempt to balance the jobs by...basically making them more or less the same. From a community standpoint, there definitely ARE people who play healer because of the... "design", they're the ones that screech anytime anyone brings up the fact that the healers are not engaging. Also, most community members complaining about healing....are still playing healers... so SE is getting exactly what they want.

Your queues may be reasonable, I won't dispute that, and I don't monitor queues on my datacenter very closely at all so i won't comment. The basic concept of how queues work isn't difficult to understand, neither is the concept of alt- which is why it is difficult to measure how many of those jobs are actually mains and how many are alts, unless you go to some additional sites that look at gear and additional information. Even then it isn't so easy.

the comment about 'screeching'- why even go there? and I do understand your point about SE "getting what it wants" although I disagree with those calling for a boycott of healers, although i do sympathize, I just don't think that SE is that smart with respect to healers.

[Liam_Harper]

If I were to take a swing at the philosophy of healers today, it could be wrapped up in a single word, "Accessibility."

Simple DPS kit makes it accessible for healers to be able to DPS (if they want to).

The thing is, dps literally doesn't matter below Savage so simple DPS toolkits don't really affect accessibility.

I can understand their intentions with why things hit like wet noodles and GCD heals are overpowered, that makes the role itself accessible. Even though I disagree and it's a bad direction, I understand the thought process. But I don't get why they're so against more dps buttons. It only affects experienced players. And then they add filler like Krasis and Protraction instead, that no one asked for and barely does anything. It just doesn't make sense.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

The thing is, dps literally doesn't matter below Savage so simple DPS toolkits don't really affect accessibility.

I can understand their intentions with why things hit like wet noodles and GCD heals are overpowered, that makes the role itself accessible. Even though I disagree and it's a bad direction, I understand the thought process. But I don't get why they're so against more dps buttons. It only affects experienced players. And then they add filler like Krasis and Protraction instead, that no one asked for and barely does anything. It just doesn't make sense.

I still stand by my own opinion that they did this to lower the barrier entry into higher difficulties fight, which is just weird af since that very difficulty should’ve been there to be a measure for players to gauge whether said content is for them or not.

Krasis & Protraction honestly feels like “We don’t want you to think we’re ignoring you but whatever here’s your crumbs.”-kind of button.

[Liam_Harper]

I still stand by my own opinion that they did this to lower the barrier entry into higher difficulties fight, which is just weird af since that very difficulty should’ve been there to be a measure for players to gauge whether said content is for them or not.

Krasis & Protraction honestly feels like “We don’t want you to think we’re ignoring you but whatever here’s your crumbs.”-kind of button.

Yep, that's absolutely the reason. There's a lot of discussion about "they did it for new players!" but the reality is the sole reason is to boost participation in endgame content without directly nerfing it. The entire role is torn apart simply so they can hand the tiny bit of difficult content we have over to casual players.

Krasis and Protraction are their way of making no real changes to healers but pretending they did. Strong new heals are overkill and they don't want to add dps, so they have no choice but to add pretend filler and one lv90 skill.