How to easily have healers dps engaged ( yet another thread)

[Renathras]

We have to also consider, a great portion of new Players also comes from World of Warcraft and I can't see many of them staying engaged with the healer design of this game in the long run, compared to what they knew. WoW Healers are much more diverse and complex in terms of their different playstyles than they were at any point in FF14. Somebody who played Discipline Priest in Wow and jumps to Sage in FF14 because its advertised as similar will probably have a rough awakening after the first honeymoon phase. And that isn't really a process that only affects veteran.

I somewhat agree with this. It's long been amazing to me that WoW had such differences between their healers with them still being relatively well balanced and viable outside of some weirdness here and there (I remember in Vanilla/BC when Disc was "the leveling spec" for Priests until they could respect to unlock Shadow Form because it increased wand damage -and yes, you read that right. Mage was like that with Arcane, and there was even a meme in a machina video at the time, and I quote, "I'm gonna...WAND you to death!!!"). They all feel different, but generally good.

I think part of that is due to the raid size, though. When the game is tuned to encounters where you have 4-7 healers (and the number can be kinda variable based on party, team, encounter, etc) AND where players can easily swap specs (so healers can quickly swap over and DPS or Tank on fights then swap to Healer on the fights they heal), where it can be assumed you have all of them at the table together in most encounters, it's probably easier to balance than if you have only 2 and you have to balance based on (most) combinations of the two.

Though I really do agree that it would be nice to get more diversity between the Healers. There's no reason they should all have the identical "rotations" they do today.

EDIT:

Honestly I think it's a bit unfair to completely discard the opinions of the veteran players who truly have a passion for this game to have played it and engaged with the community for years in favour of newer players who have no real "loyalty" to the game or community and might leave once another shiny new MMO comes out. FFXIV doesn't have new players because of current healer design, it has it in spite of it. We will lose these new players very quickly if jobs are continually homogenised and sterilised.

Good thing...I'm not doing that, then?

I didn't say to "completely discard" them. I'm saying you have to weigh them against others. For example, my main in SB _WAS_ SCH. Want to know the two things I hated about SB SCH?

1) DoTs - because I hate DoTs in general as a gameplay mechanic.
2) Having to macro Eos.

In ShB, they removed the latter and MORE OR LESS removed the former. So not every veteran agreed with the concensus position. Moreover - and this was my point - many people warmed to it after playing it a bunch (especially later in ShB - 5.3 and on) and many new healers or people that newly picked up SCH liked it as well. But people are often very passionate about changes, even if after living with them for a while, once those emotions die down, they reevaluate if their complaints were valid or if they were emotional responses. That was the point I was making.

I'm not saying discard their opinions, I'm saying the dated polling/survey is likely not reflective of the current situation AND likely captured a lot of emotion/passions of the time.

I also contend, to the last point, that a lot of people DO like FFXIV's healer design. I personally believe it can be improved on, but it appeals to a lot of people, including new players.