Quote Originally Posted by Rilifane View Post
I think this is the biggest problem. They don't understand how the playerbase interacts with healers because they don't listen and stick to their own healer fantasy while designing the game itself for something entirely different and then do a surprised pikachu face when the players don't play how they wanted them to play.
Even if they don't have a dedicated healer designer (which they desperately need), it wouldn't be as bad if they would just listen and accept the feedback of knowledgable healer mains instead of brushing it off and twisting their words. But they don't and so everything they did achieved the exact opposite of what they set out to do.

Increase healer population by making it accessible - and they dumbed it down so much that they drove off more healers than they got. Queue times for healers have never been this consistently low as they are since early ShB.

Reduce pressure on new healers to multitask by reducing dps kit complexity - and they dumbed down healing requirements and dps kit complexity so much that now everyone expects healers to dps and with good reason because it's literally one button.

There was far less pressure to dps on healer when we still had multiple dots and Cleric Stance because people knew and understood that it's not as risk-free as it is now.
To be honest, even without a dedicated healer designer, which they should have, Yoshi-P maybe should go back to what made the game good compared to 1.0., taking inspiration from WoW instead of being all sentimental about oldschool MMOs like the guy before him. People love to shit on WoW, but if anything the game has proven to offer the formular for a MMO with staying power and it has actually great healer core design. Every class has unique and diverse styles of how they heal and with many of them, there is some synergy between dps and healing abilities, which would be appreciated. I think the damage profile also allows casuals in low level content also much more to focus on healing and be excused instead of a push to dps, just because constant chip damage is more present.

I feel like they really missed an opportunity to take a lesson from WoW back when they decided not to make Dancer a Healer. It could have opened up more possibilities to have a healer whose damage profile is more like that of a physical ranged. In WoW, healers are not bound to be pure casters in their damage profile. You have pure casting healers like Shaman and Priest but at the same time more melee focussed healers in Paladins and Monks and Druids, who can decide if they want to owl- or catweave.