The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Renathras]

So, you've got 4 starving people...

And this is where you're wrong. We don't.

We have millions of people (probably around 1-1.25 million playing healers), with the vast majority of them well fed and happy with what they've eaten. You have a small percentage who are not and want more. That's the actual situation.

Healers are not "starving" right now.

...but you alone specifically asking...

It might shock you to know this, but if you leave the official forums and read other discussions of FFXIV healers, like in YouTube comments and content creator videos, your position is actually the minority one. Most seem to be entirely satisfied with healing in FFXIV right now, and don't consider it truncated or starving at all.

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That all said:

But, we've had more triage-based healing. Not for a long while now and not terribly often, but... there wasn't anything exclusive between having more of a rush and sense of gamble from the healing itself AND having far more damage skills. We did have both. The devs gave up caring about it in the face of "just give them more skills(' bloat) as an expansion selling point" before they'd come anywhere close to leveraging it terribly well, but it was there.


Okay, but, who all actually thinks the near-entirety of our healing coming from fixed-timer oGCDs or mechanics devolving into "See A, slap button A," is... an improvement over what we had prior?

On the rest, mostly agreed, but... wanting more of our dopamine to come from the healing itself, wanting to feel like we're making more vital decisions in our healing, etc., isn't a preference that leads to "Well just go play WoW" anymore than just "Well, just go play (older) FFXIV." It's not so much that XIV isn't for that sort of player as... not for that sort of player anymore.

And given that I'm pretty sure those wanting more from healers, or even just the kind of "more" that we already had, outnumber those happy with their current state, that should mark a problem, not just a difference in preferences.

...I basically agree with this entire post.

[Shurrikhan]

It might shock you to know this, but if you leave the official forums and read other discussions of FFXIV healers, like in YouTube comments and content creator videos, your position is actually the minority one. Most seem to be entirely satisfied with healing in FFXIV right now.

So your position is that the forums comprise too small a user base... so let's instead look to only the dozen or so big, consistent XIV streamers --whose revenue is better met by skipping gameplay criticisms in favor of upbeat play-- and who make up a group a thousandth or so the size of the already small forum community???

But, okay, by all means, let's go ahead and test that.

If I type in "FFXIV healing" into YouTube, my first several videos are...

• A Crap Guide to Healing in FFXIV - which basically notes that the only ones who'd like healing in XIV are those who like the ego-trip of being able to let others die.
  
  
• The Ultimate Beginner Guide to Healing - gives no comments either way as to whether XIV healing is fun or well designed, but simply how best to think about it.
  
  
• Healer Guide | Introduction to Healing in FFXIV | Tips for Becoming a Better Healer - neutral (<picture of fight spreadsheet> "healing in XIV... means researching a fight or making mental notes of outgoing damage as it happens and planning your toolkit around it with little to no variance") - makes no attempt to say it's fun or that people should try it, only what it is.
  
  
• Comparing All Healers in FFXIV Endwalker - Neutral - Notes that there is a preferred healer duo, "Mechanics in FFXIV's raids are very predictable and easy to play around. Healers at that level generally don't struggle to keep up with heals once the fight is known, and overall healing output becomes less important than the damage dealt."
  
  
• Healing in FFXIV is Not Fun - (It wasn't sarcastic -- about that, at least.)
  
  
• 5 Jobs for People Who Lack Brains - [I](Warrior + Healers give or take an AST and a RPR.)
  
  
• Healing in FFXIV Has Big Problems - (Zepla's response video to "Healing in FFXIV is not fun") - she notes that likewise healing, especially, on AST, has got more boring / made it lose that spark for her.

If I more specifically put in "FFXIV healing bad," "FFXIV healing problem," it narrows further towards the negative, but if I put in "FFXIV healing fun," "FFXIV healing good," or "try FFXIV healing," or "FFXIV healing for you..." I get no increase in positive posts. There's just the one positive video, which opens already with the very words "Healer is not well designed."

:: Heck, there are entire series of videos specifically on ideas for healer improvements or in hashing out what the crux of the problems are...


Now, if we take a list of content creators typically considered "big" around FFXIV and don't solely cover lore or music, we might end up with something like...

• Desperius - "even [dealing self-damage] would address the problem of how boring dealing damage can be [as healer], since then you'd have to heal yourself up after..."
• Zepla - 'healer changes since Stormblood have, on the whole, made them less interesting.'
• LucyPyre - {Essentially calls it a shitshow, but fine for brain-dead-ing.}
• MisshappenChair - {Essentially calls it a shitshow, but fine for brain-dead-ing.}
• Drak - <doesn't heal>
• Larryzaur - notes that their distinctions are almost solely in their visuals
• Merri - frequent critiques
• Shenpai - <no comments>
• Meoni - fights are overly one-and-done
• MrHappy - modest critiques, usually more on the Twitch side
• Xeno - has critiqued, despite likely having been bred/evolved, and subjected to many surgeries, to make him better fit a two-minute burst mold.
• Grael - <just does fight guides>
• Misteq - <just does fight guides>

So where's this grand majority consensus, then, that XIV healing are "entirely satisfied with healing in XIV right now"?

[Renathras]

Now I've slept I was gonna ask Ren if they'd be ok with WHM getting the changes I suggested back in my 'I hate the pure/barrier split' thread, that is, Dia becomes 12s duration, and Banish is added as a 15s standalone GCD.

Honestly, I think one healer - JUST one healer - should be left alone as it is. I'm not sure why that's somehow the bridge too far for people who would be getting what they want 3 times over across the other healers. I genuinely believe the game needs a healer to stay the same otherwise there are going to be a lot of alienated people. I mean, look at SAM with Kaiten or SMN with the rework or MCH with the rework in ShB (which people generally think was good but a lot of people who mained MCH were upset about) or the changes to WAR back in...uh...HW? SB? Whenever that was. Sometimes changes are major, sometimes minor, but they always upset some people. If the upset is minor (usually with minor changes), most can be relatively happy with it. If the change is more major, but there are "outs", people swap to those. But if the changes are major AND there's no option out, you lose people.

ShB did this with healers and we had a dearth of healers because of the changes to SCH and AST. While WHM's were generally happy (hard not to see why considering WHM's state in SB...ShB WAS an improvement, despite losing Aero 3), but SCHs and ASTs quit healing in large numbers. There was a bump in the number of RDM and DNC players for people that wanted something of that gameplay of being a support healer/DPS hybrid (even if you aren't really in either, it was the closest thing), and there was a crash in healer population. Given all of you guys' position on healer DPS rotations, I'd wager you remember what I'm talking about and how bad it was.

The thing is, doing the same thing in reverse would likely yield very similar results, especially since now ALL healers, not just WHMs, are used to the slimmed down DPS kits. Going cold turkey would likely cause another crash in the healer population. Forcing healers to use GCDs in P5-8S already caused a bit of a crash in healer population. I just can't see how changing all healers into support healer/DPS hybrids wouldn't cause a massive catastrophe on a similar scale.

That said, regarding this question in particular and having played a few other Jobs more this expansion, I wouldn't be as opposed to this kind of change. Thing is, that's kind of what SGE is already. Lower the CD of Plegma to 15 seconds and you basically have...that. Well, also, I'd hate Dia being 12 seconds. DoTs, as I think I told you before, are the single type of ability I hate most in all of MMOs. I'm okay with some in different kind of games - like building a full on bleed build in Remnant: From The Ashes where the DoTs heal you and all kinds of fun stuff like that - but in MMOs, I just honestly hate the things. So having to engage with a DoT more often would annoy me. And I feel having to Dia every 4 GCDs would be too constraining for cases where you DO have to cast GCD heals. Maybe 21 seconds wouldn't be terrible, but then it would drift from 1/2 min windows. Which is probably why they use 30 sec, honestly.

Leaving one healer in a sorry state is NOT compromise.

The problem is, we don't agree on what "sorry state" is. Many players think the current healing is in a fantastic state. Many others think it's in a passable/acceptable one. Until you acknowledge that it isn't a "sorry state" objectively (that's your subjective position), it's impossible for you to actually understand the problem or the solution.

And, for the record, even if you WERE correct: That would still be compromise. It would only not be a compromise if EVERYTHING you want is being rejected OR if you got everything you wanted and everything those who disagreed with you wanted was rejected - which is your proposal (ergo, your proposal is the one that is not a compromise). As it is, changing 3 healers to suit you and 1 not would absolutely be what compromise is. Not only that, it'd be a compromise weighted in your favor.

Leaving the healer skill floor as accessible as it currently is, is a very acceptable compromise, and one that I don't think any of us advocating for more complexity would argue against.

Considering one of your number has advocated for people with this skill floor to not be able to clear even Extremes and that they should quite FFXIV and go play WoW, I'm not sure you're quite right on that point...

I still can't fathom the answer to the contradiction though. If Ren 'doesn't care about parses one whit', how does the presence of an extra GCD to do damage with on WHM, tuned in such a way that you could fairly safely ignore it if you're not pushing bleeding edge content, negatively affect their gameplay?

If it were tuned that you could remove it from your bars and clear all content? Sure. But that doesn't seem to be what is being asked for. Again, Ty's posts seem to indicate otherwise, and he's not the only one with that sentiment.

Though I do acknowledge you may not be quite that strict, even you say that people wouldn't likely be able to clear Savage without it absent good Crit luck. But at least you aren't in the "quit the game" camp...so that's something.

[glamazon]

The problem is this will never change until someone with power takes an interest.

For example:
If Yoshi p mained a healer job we would not be in this situation.

[Magikazam]

What's a few extra DPS buttons going to change, really?

Most of healer uptime considering in average 85% of what you press in a fight is the same single button for dps.

No joke, I kinda love when the healer dies early in a dungeon boss and I get to see if the rest of us can avoid getting hit and survive off things like my Curing Waltz. It's fun and invigorating. I guess it sucks for the healer who has to sit their and watch, but I mean, how different is that from healer gameplay anyway?

I love the fact how healer are so useless they can die and it not a problem, but if the tank die it a guaranteed wipe unless he get rez Asap.

If what you want is to play as a healer who doesn't attack and focuses the vast majority of their attention on healing, then would you not be happier playing a game that supports that?

my point is simply, if you're really frustrated with the idea of healers having DPS rotations, the lack of damage taken in most if not all forms of content,

Well you see that the issues, Healer gameplay ain't made to be just a heal bot and it doesn't even have a DPS rotation. We get kit made focused to be for full healing yet you probably will over heal just by spamming your normal healing skill. Yet we're expected to be doing dps with most of our uptime, just to throw some heal when tank get hit hard or someone fail mechanic or if there a healer check.

It really feel to me that the class design team and the encounter design team just don't talk to eachother

[Renathras]

She didn't ask for them to have the same total count of DPS abilities. She asked for them to have the same addition to one's offensive abilities per expansion

Which would result, over time, with healer DPS abilities reaching parity with tank ones. Unless you mean to just give healers 2-3 new damage abilities each expansion that are upgrades of existing abilities and don't take up new hotbar slots or rotation space? But...that's what we have already, so I don't think that's what was being asked for.

Our couple dozen or less consistent XIV streamers/content creators alone are not a larger sample than the whole of these forums.

Did I not just reply to this?

Did you see what I said?

Though maybe you replied before the Edit, so I'll post it again:

Also, note I said the COMMENTS, not the CREATORS. Chair also said the same thing I have - to change three healers and leave one braindead. I think that may have been his exact wording, with "probably White Mage". So again, this seems like the logical and best solution.

Specifically here at this timestamp in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbWubxOTUWU&t=376s

...I'm guessing that's the video you're talking about. And I'd also note I basically agree with him overall. A bit less dripping sarcasm and I don't find 1-2-3 NEARLY as exciting as he does, but overall I agree with him. And to this day, I don't see why nAST needed to be removed. Because...there's no reason it needed to be removed. It's not like having ShB d/nAST would break the current game in any way at all. And I say this as a person that really dislikes AST!

Also what he says at 11:48:

"If someone complains that they need to be rewarded with more DPS for their complicated Job, simply tell them that their reward is being able to HAVE FUN and not being BORED out of their ------- minds! Shut the ---- up about a whole 2% dps variance!"

Also rules to live by. Basically, I'm fine with everything he said in that video and agree with the overall position entirely. I'd say it's my own, but it's a bit different - with the return of nAST, that would be FOUR healers with you guys' preferred playstyle to 1 without.

[Conchoidal]

If you think that the person who's arguing with you isn't doing so in good faith or is just wasting your time, feel free to ignore them instead of derailing the thread.

Anyways, it's not really an inconsistency of feedback that's the problem than the designers apparently hating the idea of making any job more complex than it already is, either to appeal to their new demographic or because of time constraints since the job designers probably have roles in designing, implementing, and testing other content too (although the increased lapse between patches doesn't really reflect an increased quality or amount of content). Maybe we should just keep asking them to bring back or create new abilities which don't require many new assets, since all MCH mains got recently was a basic QoL change and Dismantle and they're incredibly happy over just that.

[Connor]

This argument has gone on since literally like 2.0 with Cleric Stance.

‘If u don’t use cleric ur trash and don’t deserve to play this game’
‘I’m a healer I shouldn’t have to nuke how DARE you’
‘BUT ENCOUNTER DESIGN’
‘But ROLE/ JOB DESIGN’


Repeat for what, 6 years? Except replace Cleric Stance with ‘press healer dps button’ after 4.0.

If you ask me the real problem is that we’re having the exact same arguments we did when the game released. We’re still using the same tired arguments, either Sylphie logic or Raider logic (no dps vs all/some dps).

Isn’t the whole point of a balanced argument to acknowledge the opinions of both sides?

I don’t say this to lay blame on any particular side as well. Of course it’s natural to consistently give an opinion on something you’re passionate about. And unfortunately like every multifaceted argument there’s as much good as bad on any side of it lol

Like yes healers in their current state feel very underwhelming, like you’re barely contributing anything. I don’t dislike playing current healers personally since I’m drawn more towards support play styles, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still need major changes or ways to deal damage on their own.

Likewise, I get that healers are supposed to offer a different playstyle from dps. Which makes sense - otherwise it becomes functionally redundant as a distinct role. At the same time though, encounter design in ffxiv simply does not support a ‘support oriented’ playstyle for healers, necessitating the need for alternative playstyles, which then naturally gravitates towards dps oriented healers.

If nothing else can’t we all at least agree that there’s a gaping contradiction between encounter design and healer job design?

Whether people believe that gap should then be filled with dps rotations, support abilities, more healing, etc, everyone agrees that something needs to be done with the healer role. It feels like so much of this entire (and the healer argument in general) is players trying to ‘defeat’ each other’s arguments instead of accepting a difference of opinion.

The developers are not making their changes based on the arguments of a singular poster. (Unfortunately they seem to be making their changes based on pretty much nothing lol.) No argument anyone ever makes is ever going to single-handedly change the way healers are designed. The mythical ‘Sylphies’ are not destroying the healer role, nor are the evil elite ‘healer raiders’ twisting the role into a dps shaped peg for a healer shaped hole.

The ones to blame here are the developers for their nonsensical job adjustments that seem geared towards a completely different game. Warriors getting a regen added to Shake it Off is pretty good evidence of that. Who needed this? Who asked for it? Healers are already languishing on the heal requirement side of literally every encounter in the game, so the devs make a tank even closer to just flat out replacing them? As far I’m aware Warriors haven’t generally been saying that they desperately needed ways to heal the party lol

[ForsakenRoe]

Repeat for what, 6 years? Except replace Cleric Stance with ‘press healer dps button’ after 4.0.

Specifically this part has activated a part of my brain and made me realise that the real 'compromise' position was actually just SB all along. Cleric Stance (HW and ARR ver) was bad and clunky and restrictive for people who wanted to try and dip into DPSing. SHB and onwards DPSing as a healer is an exercise in tedium. SB had the 'compromise' mid point solution, of reworking Cleric into '5% more damage' coincidentally a 2min CD so it'd fit perfectly in current meta, making DPS skills scale off of Mind instead of Int, and having a more broad spectrum of 'damage skills' to use. The perfect midpoint of 'healers can do damage with a kit roughly similar in size to tank's damage kits at the time (varies depending on class)', versus 'its restrictive to try and dip into throwing some damage during downtime in raid, because Cleric Stance shifting felt unintuitive, clunky, and punished mistimings with 5sec of 'you cannot do your primary role now lmao''.

For example, SCH had 3 DOTs to use in it's rotation (Bio2, Miasma, Shadowflare), and a 4th that could be used as a MP intensive movement alternative to crappy Ruin2. But at no point did it need to use any of those DOTs, outside of Savage. And by Week 8 or so, the gear difference would mean that SCH could still ignore it's DOTs, even IN Savage, because everyone'd be doing a bit more damage to cover that missing DPS. Again, it's a matter of tuning. If Broil V does 300 potency, you could have Biolysis total 350p, Miasma total 320p, Shadowflare total 400p (but it's 15s duration, once every 60s, like SB), and the difference between a 'ignore all the DOTs SCH' and a 'perfect refreshes' SCH would be fairly low in terms of damage output (enough that you could clear up to, I want to say 3rd Savage Fight week 1), but there's still a level of optimization that can be used.

If Energy Drain is enough to 'optimize' around, even in it's 100p state, I think the idea that 'the DOT doesnt do much more damage than the nuke, so people would complain that it's pointless busywork and ask for it's removal' is BS. If it was the SAME damage, yes, but if it's even 30p more total over it's duration, it'd be welcomed as a way to optimize. A good example would be MNK, the difference between TwinSnakes and TrueStrike is only 20p. So theoretically, you could just ignore True, and use Twin on every Raptor Form GCD and automatically keep the damage buff without thinking about it. 'It's only 20p every 3 GCDs, so why not just remove TrueStrike, since it's just busywork to keep the buff up?' You could probably beat enrage of a lot of savage week 1 by ignoring TrueStrike actually, 20p every 5-6 sec adds up to, what, 200p a minute? 2000 over a 10min fight? That's not that much really, equal to 2 Communios. Hell, 7 Glares is more than 2000p, and in prog you're probably missing at least 7 due to safety healing and/or movement for mechanics you don't have committed to muscle memory yet. But TrueStrike remains, because it's something to think about to keep your rotation interesting.

No doubt I'll get naysayed for my example though, because 'bad faith you're comparing a DPS rotation to a healer!' So I'll give another, an old Tank example. WAR in HW used to still have a third combo, Heavy Swing, Skull Sunder, Butchers Block. IIRC the potency values correctly (it's been years), SkullSunder had 10p more than Maim, and BB had 20 more than Path or Eye. Path also only generated 1 Stack of Wrath (now 10 gauge), not 2 (or 20 gauge now), but it applied a 10% damage down to the enemy that could have 100% uptime. So you'd juggle between 'refresh Storm's Eye selfbuff', 'refresh perma-reprisal effect with Path' and 'do max damage with BB combo', but you'd also be keeping an eye out for aggro, as SS and BB had bonus aggro generation effect, and Shirk didn't exist back then. A careful game of chicken, trying to push 30p more per 3 GCDs without accidentally stealing aggro when you're not meant to have the boss. An opportunity to 'optimize' that no casual player had to bother with if they didn't want to, you could week1 clear Savage with just 'use Eye for buff, then path for selfheal/apply damagedown debuff to enemy'. So I really don't see why the idea that 'if it isnt much of a gain, people will want it removed' is a thing. Fracture was a DPS loss in most situations, only being used by WARs in situations like 'your last GCD of Berserk, and your next 123 combo hit is Heavy Swing, and you don't have a Fell Cleave left, and it's not going to leave your TP bar in shambles later in the fight'. Ignoreable by most people (you could get a 95%+ without even bothering with it), but still a cool thing for people who wanted to optimize it.

Hell, I knew a guy who played MNK in SB, who refused to learn the 4.3 TK rotation for the longest time. He got 95% or above with the 'standard' rotation pretty often. TK wasn't 'needed' to clear the fights, it wasn't 'needed' to parse well. But it was a very different and interesting way to play the same class, for people who wanted to mess with it, and I think that was cool.

[Renathras]

This argument has gone on since literally like 2.0 with Cleric Stance.

...

Isn’t the whole point of a balanced argument to acknowledge the opinions of both sides?

...

If nothing else can’t we all at least agree that there’s a gaping contradiction between encounter design and healer job design?

...

I agree with most of this.

My ONE change would be that there's a third "logic" - Bulk of the Playerbase Logic which is the "some dps" position (the Raider logic is the "all dps" position). That there are more than just two extreme positions and the bulk are actually somewhere in between. Both sides posting here fall into that, for example. My own position includes "some dps", and I think even the people contesting me are "some dps" not "all dps" as well. People like arguing against extremes on the opposite end from them, but that's just because it's easy, not because anyone realistically is arguing for those positions. (It's also why I've specifically avoided the "You just want to be a DPSer with healer ques!" argument, because it applies to so few people it's stupid to even use in almost all cases - just as stupid as the "You just want to be a Sylphie and never cast a damage spell!" argument.)

And 100% agree that healing needs a shakeup. It's why my ideal solution to ALL of this isn't just "change 3 healers". It can more completely be stated as:

"Change 3 healers, leave 1 alone, re-add dAST/nAST (basically give us a 5th healer), and completely change healing encounter design to focus more on sustained healing instead of high potency oGCD burst healing on rigid fight timings."

I think you're right in that we all agree that something needs to change and the Devs seem to be building healers (abilities) for a different game than the encounter designers (fights) are making. Also agree it's beyond bizarre that they're dumping yet more healing on other roles instead when healers already have no need of the bulk of our heals unless things are going wrong.

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If you think that the person who's arguing with you isn't doing so in good faith or is just wasting your time, feel free to ignore them instead of derailing the thread.

That is, in fact, what I'm doing and intend to do.

Note that this person keeps quoting me to reply to me, which is either an attempt to goad me into a response, an attempt to snipe at my points uncontested (e.g. if I don't reply to contest or rebut the point, they can claim I have no counter/defense and/or am conceding the point), and seems to want to keep engaging despite doing so in bad faith, being called out for doing so in bad faith, respoinding in bad faith to the calling out, and then making a bad faith attempt to "level the playing field" by insisting I'm acting in bad faith as well (a type of "what I'm doing isn't really bad if other people are doing it/you are doing it" defense), ignoring that what they're doing that is bad faith isn't a few little things like not having evidence for claims, it's things like outright ignoring that people can have other positions and insisting that other positions do not exist even as people are arguing them.

But yes, I'm going to try to refrain from replying to that bad faith actor further until he/she changes their ways away from bad faith.

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Specifically this part has activated a part of my brain and made me realise that the real 'compromise' position was actually just SB all along.

I think it was. For SCH and AST, anyway. Agree with you on that.

WHM reached the compromise position in ShB - as I think we can all agree at this point, SB WHM sucked.

Is this not more or less what I've been proposing this entire time? Return SCH and AST to their SB kits (including nAST), and WHM should probably be "ShB WHM + Aero 3". Granted with their EW abilities tacked on and SGE in the game. This would give us a simple healer more or less as it is today with the only big difference being DoT cleave for AOE and macroing Cleric Stance onto Presence of Mind (WHM), a DoT and plate spinning healer (SCH), not one but two buff healers (dAST and nAST for both Pure and Barrier healing spots), and a semi-WHM equivalent barrier healer (SGE). I think that is the ideal solution.

Indeed, when they were adding RDM at that time, I briefly considered it could be the next healer Job. It had White Magic (presumably some heals and a raise) while also having black magic (so substitute Stone, Aero 1, and Aero 2 for Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder). RDM would have fit into SB-era FFXIV healing model as a healer with no one really batting an eye if you think about it.