MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[HyoMinPark]

Only SE knows if healer changes is good or bad for the game players can only speculate so lets not claim "its good" because you like the change or "its bad" because you don't.

Also healthy mmo are the worst game for a challenge when it comes to content made for everybody.

I disagree. There’s no one on the development team that really plays the healers, so they have very little understanding on how they function within this game and its design. Complaints about the role have been on the rise since Stormblood. They increase with each expansion. And none are taken seriously. Hence why the role continues to be abandoned steadily by career healers. The absolute highlight of complaints was the SB Lily System for WHM. Universally criticized during the Media Tour, but healers were told to “just wait for the expansion”. SB launches, and the system is still disliked. “Just wait for Savage.” “Just wait for the next Ultimate.” Guess what: the system was criticized and basically ignored for the entire expansion. The Lily Gauge was thrown in the corner of your screen because it was completely inconsequential to the gameplay of the job. And it didn’t stop there: ShB brought about a revamp of AST and its card system, and it remained the most divisive overhaul to the job to date. And the job is still suffering from unnecessary clunkiness, unnecessarily high APM, and button bloat.

Dumbing everything down is not healthy. There’s a difference between accessibility and just making things so simple that it puts people to sleep. You can still have challenge without making this game another Dark Souls. Right now, that challenge simply does not exist. For healers especially. And the lack of challenge and punishment for mistakes leads to, like I said, people whining the second they go into something like an Extreme or Savage because now they’re punished for their mistakes. Punishment isn’t inherently bad, and this game could stand to have more content at level cap that punish for negligent play. Orbonne Monastery used to punish for mistakes. OG Thundergod Cid punished you for trying to ignore his mechanics. Now? It’s a sad, sad shadow of itself. You have to fail multiple things all at once for him to even scratch an alliance now.

Unless you play healers, please don’t speak on the state of the role. You lack the experience and insight that those of us who have played them for years have. Quite frankly, I’d say the players know more about the role than the developers because the players play healers actively in content the way they are meant to be played in XIV. The developers don’t.

If you still don’t believe me that the devs don’t know best, remember that the devs thought it was good to remove Kaiten from SAM and look at the backlash that caused.

[IDontPetLalas]

Only SE knows if healer changes is good or bad for the game players can only speculate so lets not claim "its good" because you like the change or "its bad" because you don't.

Also healthy mmo are the worst game for a challenge when it comes to content made for everybody.

It's one thing to object in the sense of "only SE knows" if SE is actually gathering metrics and surveying players to analyze if changes to job design are having the intended impact.

It's another thing entirely to respond to posts by players telling us we shouldn't say that the changes are good or bad when we are playing those jobs- we know, at least as individuals, if those changes are good or bad for us.

[IDontPetLalas]

We do have statics though, In 2018 there were about 630k active characters and on average each healer had around 420k people who had it at level 70, now we have about 930k active characters and each healer has about 650k people who have it at 90

So the endgame proportion of healers has not changed since the ShB changes, but job satisfaction has gone down the drain

The metrics that you quoted don't tell the whole story. Someone can level a job for any number of reasons, such as achievements (e.g. role quests), it's more painful but more accurate to look at how the job is geared and who often that job is taken into specific content, or to survey users and ask them what job is their main. In the case of healers, for example, i would be that there are a lot of ASTs that might be leveled, but inactive - or there might be a significant percentage that are played in PVP but not at all in PVE.

[Supersnow845]

The metrics that you quoted don't tell the whole story. Someone can level a job for any number of reasons, such as achievements (e.g. role quests), it's more painful but more accurate to look at how the job is geared and who often that job is taken into specific content, or to survey users and ask them what job is their main. In the case of healers, for example, i would be that there are a lot of ASTs that might be leveled, but inactive - or there might be a significant percentage that are played in PVP but not at all in PVE.

Looking at how much it’s taken into fights isn’t viable because square locks content to require 2 healers, healers are also de-prioritised with gear progression so they have that working against them as well

If the proportion of people playing the role hasn’t changed how is that not an argument that the rework is not doing what they want especially since job satisfaction has gone down

[Jojoya]

That hasn't been my experience in any game in which I've played a healer, nor would I want it to be my experience in this one- by the way in all of those other game healers had many options , such as through skill tress- to both heal and do damage. This game has been far more simplified in that aspect than it used to be,

It's helpful if you give detailed examples of how healer classes and encounters were designed in those other games so others can understand where you're coming from. People find it too easy to say "other games aren't like this" but then can't express an actual difference between the two.

If SE is going to improve on healer design, what game should they be looking at for an example?

Evidently not considering the healer population hasn't budged in years despite their constant dumbing down. The dev team is not infallible here. After all, this is the same team which openly admitted they didn't balance Bard and Machinist around the piercing debuff yet were baffled why both were incredibly overpowered.

Regardless, even if we do take that at face value. You're essentially justifying them having a boring gameplay for 1/3 of the playerbase because a portion want to watch Netflix. That's a terrible philosophy.

Healer numbers rarely budge in any MMO because most players are more interested in seeing huge damage numbers splashed across the screen over having to watch health bars and debuffs/buffs on party members. No matter what's been tried, it's hard to get players to try out the role that's perceived as having more responsibility. Tanks also have frequently suffered from this, though to a lesser degree.

Perhaps the real solution is to give DPS additional responsibility beyond watch the boss and move out of mechanics as they DPS. Tanks have the added responsibility of handling their mitigation as they DPS. Healer have the additional responsible of keeping party HP at accepting levels and then DPSing if they have the free GCD (or oGCD if available). What additional responsibility has been given to DPS?

[Deveryn]

Can we please stop talking about satisfaction and all that as if to truly speak for everyone? ... because you can't. There are plenty of reasons for people to be unhappy with one thing or another.

For me, I'm generally happy with healing until I have to deal with someone that throws things off severely. Does the DPS get a little repetitive sometimes, sure (generally on alliance), but adding another button to the mix isn't going to help anything. If they were to add more damage skills, they would still balance out to the same DPS and likely end up as a one-button combo because they're being very conscious of future additions down the road.

[Supersnow845]

Can we please stop talking about satisfaction and all that as if to truly speak for everyone? ... because you can't. There are plenty of reasons for people to be unhappy with one thing or another.

For me, I'm generally happy with healing until I have to deal with someone that throws things off severely. Does the DPS get a little repetitive sometimes, sure (generally on alliance), but adding another button to the mix isn't going to help anything. If they were to add more damage skills, they would still balance out to the same DPS and likely end up as a one-button combo because they're being very conscious of future additions down the road.

Is the fact that healers regularly rank amongst the worst in the job satisfaction surveys enough of “the majority don’t like the healers right now”, SCH has been dead last for like the last 5, 6.0 crashed AST’s ranking and WHM is at best middle of the pack

[Deveryn]

It's helpful if you give detailed examples of how healer classes and encounters were designed in those other games so others can understand where you're coming from. People find it too easy to say "other games aren't like this" but then can't express an actual difference between the two.

If SE is going to improve on healer design, what game should they be looking at for an example?

Everquest 2 actually has a lot of different nukes for healers, but they really get into elemental resistances and potencies. That doesn't exist here, so it would all be redundant.

[Deveryn]

Is the fact that healers regularly rank amongst the worst in the job satisfaction surveys enough of “the majority don’t like the healers right now”, SCH has been dead last for like the last 5, 6.0 crashed AST’s ranking and WHM is at best middle of the pack

A sampling is still just a sampling and I never got to fill one of these out, so I take that with a grain of salt. SCH is actually my favorite.

[HyoMinPark]

Can we please stop talking about satisfaction and all that as if to truly speak for everyone? ... because you can't. There are plenty of reasons for people to be unhappy with one thing or another.

For me, I'm generally happy with healing until I have to deal with someone that throws things off severely. Does the DPS get a little repetitive sometimes, sure (generally on alliance), but adding another button to the mix isn't going to help anything. If they were to add more damage skills, they would still balance out to the same DPS and likely end up as a one-button combo because they're being very conscious of future additions down the road.

Read the healer threads on here and on the discussion Reddit. There’s a lot of similar complaints about healers coming from those who main the role or who have played it for years, not just those who play it casually or whenever they want to mix things up. When you have enough of the same complaints, it is safe to make a statement that healer satisfaction is plummeting.

Adding more buttons makes more difference than you think. I don’t know if you played SCH back when it had more than just Biolysis as its DoT, but it was a lot more engaging than it is now. Having multiple DoTs to manage increased engagement because you were watching those different timers. Even when WHM just had Aero II and Aero III—II was 18s and III was 24s. Again: different timers so you weren’t pressing Stone five hundred million times and have other buttons to press alongside it. And Aero III was versatile in that it could be used in an AOE situation and a single-target one. Now it’s more worth to forsake DoTing and just Holy spam until your eyes bleed in large trash packs.

No one is asking for more DPS as in higher numbers. Healers are asking for more DPS buttons to press because hitting the same one 100+ times in a given fight is boring. The only buttons they seem to be willing to give us are more redundant healing abilities that aren’t even needed in most content because they won’t up the healing requirements. And there is no proof that they’d all be mashed into a single button, either. With the exception of AST, the healers have plenty of space for another DPS button or two. I don’t even fill up two crossbars on any of them but AST—and it could stand to lose a few of its more redundant or useless buttons.

A sampling is still just a sampling and I never got to fill one of these out, so I take that with a grain of salt. SCH is actually my favorite.

Sampling can still be representative. I didn’t fill one out either, but I’m not at all surprised by low healer satisfaction. I’ve shared it for about four years now.

What additional responsibility has been given to DPS?

Well DPS used to have a shared responsibility of managing enmity. But then they didn’t want to press Diversion and got themselves killed by a boss and whined about it, so…

On a less sarcastic note, BRD used to have to manage its MP to optimize and maximize Foe Requiem usages. They even used Refresh to do so. And that was taken away, and now their MP bar sits there unused. Some DPS do still have mitigative responsibilities such as Troubadour, Samba, Tactician, Magic Barrier, Feint, and Addle—but so little content requires active usage of these tools that they’re inconsequential except at the higher level. The physical ranged don’t even need to use their Silence hardly anymore. I don’t think there’s a use where it’s necessary to use it now. Hermes has a silence mechanic in the 87 dungeon, but not silencing his buff doesn’t really make too big of a difference compared to silencing it.

To be honest, with the current state of the game, giving DPS responsibility now would just make them complain more. So many players are conditioned to not need to do more than the bare minimum that adding responsibility to them now after basically removing it would just incite complaints. Not that I think this is a decent reason not to give it to them.