The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Desna]

So summing up what I'm seeing across many threads beyond just this one.

1) Healers are suffering an identity crisis where they're all feeling lacking in a firm commitment by design to actual roles in the game. Healer, Tank, DPS are starting to bleed into each other instead of staying distinct identities.

2) Pure Healers (WHM, AST) are showing a lack of interest by the designers because healers as a role have no representation on the design teams, the designers don't Main healers, don't appreciate them or what they do and have even now reached a point where they have the game set so raids can function without a healer at all, content can be cleared without a healer so the whole ROLE has been disenfranchised and that's producing Healer mains scrambling to play TWO roles (Healer and DPS) at the same time to stay relevant and useful. This causes ridiculous amounts of confusion and frustration among the people Maining Healers.

This disenfranchisement has resulted in the jobs becoming hodge podge messes of buffed and nerfed skills that are outdated for current gameplay and clunky poorly designed functions in the classes that make them even more confusing and less enjoyable to play because of the clutch grinding playstyle they require to get through a raid or dungeon. Buffing and nerfing is not fixing. Some skill sets are just in need of updates so they work better.

In a nutshell, for our beloved designers. Please...restore class/role integrity and identity. Make a role (Healer, Tank, DPS) distinct and make sure it is NEEDED and can not be left behind in current content. Do not ask a role to fill another role on top of it's own because then...we end up where we are now...with Healers pulling their hair out trying to be DPS AND Healers at the same time and everyone upset because...that just can never work out well, there is no way to balance it without making healing classes god-like overpowered and OP classes are BORING, unchallenging and always always fail in every MMORPG that lets them coast along for long. Distinct roles...please...quit muddying the waters. Hire some healer mains, not just raiders either, find some people who run those roulettes and MAIN Healers and play them more often than anything else. Get Healers represented on your design team. Stop saying you should and you need to....do it, show us, your fan base and loyal players...that you're going to give more than lipservice to this. If you really cared? You should have DONE it by now, this problem isn't getting better. You have teams running without healers now and it never should have reached that point.

[ty_taurus]

2) Pure Healers (WHM, AST) are showing a lack of interest by the designers because healers as a role have no representation on the design teams, the designers don't Main healers, don't appreciate them or what they do and have even now reached a point where they have the game set so raids can function without a healer at all, content can be cleared without a healer so the whole ROLE has been disenfranchised and that's producing Healer mains scrambling to play TWO roles (Healer and DPS) at the same time to stay relevant and useful. This causes ridiculous amounts of confusion and frustration among the people Maining Healers.

I think a better way to explain this point is that the game is constructed to support a combat healer role--a role that is meant to juggle a combination of offense and healing--however, the healers we have are designed as if the game's content is designed for heavy healing output as if it were more in the vein of WoW, and that offense is an insignificant portion of healer gameplay.

In truth, it's the opposite. Content is designed with damage being entirely scripted. The game delivers to the player windows of avoidable damage, windows of unavoidable damage, and windows of no damage. These dictate when the healer needs to prioritize recovery or offense, and the windows of offense are significantly larger than the windows of healing. This is not bad design. Not every gamer may like this, but no game is meant to be liked by everyone. It's just a choice. The problem is the refusal to build healing jobs that support this design.

[moroarda]

In truth, it's the opposite. Content is designed with damage being entirely scripted. The game delivers to the player windows of avoidable damage, windows of unavoidable damage, and windows of no damage. These dictate when the healer needs to prioritize recovery or offense, and the windows of offense are significantly larger than the windows of healing. This is not bad design. Not every gamer may like this, but no game is meant to be liked by everyone. It's just a choice. The problem is the refusal to build healing jobs that support this design.

I think this feels a bit like saying if you build the foundation of your house on wooden stilts and then slap a bunch of concrete up there and the stilts break under the weight that the stilts weren't a bad idea.

Well, perhaps stilts aren't a bad idea inherently, but if you plan to slap giant concrete slabs atop them then in this context... yeah, that's a bad idea.

The current damage model is stilts. The current healer gameplay model is a giant slab of concrete. The stilts aren't cutting it, and in that way... yeah, it's poor design. Maybe stilts work in some games, but in this one they don't. It's all about context.

You could have either or, but together they fail. This means that together they're poorly designed.

[ty_taurus]

I think this feels a bit like saying if you build the foundation of your house on wooden stilts and then slap a bunch of concrete up there and the stilts break under the weight that the stilts weren't a bad idea.

Well, perhaps stilts aren't a bad idea inherently, but if you plan to slap giant concrete slabs atop them then in this context... yeah, that's a bad idea.

The current damage model is stilts. The current healer gameplay model is a giant slab of concrete. The stilts aren't cutting it, and in that way... yeah, it's poor design. Maybe stilts work in some games, but in this one they don't. It's all about context.

You could have either or, but together they fail. This means that together they're poorly designed.

It's the other way around--it's the concrete that's the bad idea.

When you begin to build your foundation, there isn't a "wrong" answer (technically there is depending on the plot you're trying to build on, like that concrete floor is probably still terrible if you're building your home in wetlands, but let's ignore that reality for the purpose of this comparison). You, as the builder, when nothing is built, have the freedom to take any direction you want. A house on wooden stills is a perfectly valid starting point if you're trying to build something like a beach house. This isn't a bad design. Now, if after you've finished constructing the foundation, you've decided, actually, you want an industrial loft with concrete floors instead, well now you've fucked up your project. It's true that the wooden foundation can't support that concrete floor, but if you wanted he concrete floor, then why did you begin your design with a foundation of wooden stilts?

The wooden stilt foundation is not bad design, starting with that and then deciding you wanted concrete floors is bad design. There is also nothing wrong with having a game designed for combat healers who are active DPS that also must manage party HP. Maybe you (general you) don't like that, but then again, maybe you don't like beach houses. That doesn't mean beach houses are bad houses, it's just not your taste, but a game is not obligated to provide you with an industrial loft if it wants to build beach houses, and if you aren't in the market for buying beach houses, then don't buy a beach house. Inversely, if you're someone who loves beach houses but hates industrial lofts, then don't buy an industrial loft.

Now the issue is that SE started building a beach house, but somewhere down the road, they felt that they didn't want to alienate players that prefer industrial lofts, and what you're left with is a beach house that has none of the finishings that a beach house lover wants and is designed as if it were an industrial loft, enough to appease industrial loft lovers but is done in a very shoddy way that doesn't truly feel like an industrial loft.

As has been brought up ad nauseum, SE needs to either tear down the industrial loft finishings or tear down the entire house and rebuild the foundation. One of this is astronomically more challenging to accomplish since you basically need to rebuild the entire house from the ground up in order to create a true industrial loft, so it makes so much more sense to just redo the finishings to create a beautifully designed beach house. Sure, the industrial loft lovers may hate that, but it's what this game is built to support.

[moroarda]

It's the other way around--it's the concrete that's the bad idea.

The concrete floor is only a bad idea in that context though - so these things only break down in relation to each other. Thing is, their relationship to each other is (in this case) poor design. If you choose a direction and then wildly pivot in another direction that's completely incongruous with your original choice that's likely because that original choice feels bad to continue. Again, poor design at every possible point.

I agree with a lot of what you think as a final result I believe, since the way the whole post reads I think we wind up in a place where healers get more interesting dps options since we can't re-vamp an entire game worth of encounters to fit the incredibly simple one-button-spam 'rotation' that we enjoy currently.

Thing is, this has been tried - we had a homogenous solution to healer boredom for quite a while, but SE decided to ditch Cleric Stance a while back now. For years now healers have been getting streamlined but I don't think any thought was given to how that would make them feel in the framework of existing content. The only consideration was accessibility. That's made healers something anyone can do, but there's no way to accommodate that wide of a playerbase with one toolkit and four paint jobs.