The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Payadopa]

For what it's worth, from Yoshida's recent responses to the two healer questions in the live letter, it seems clear that he's frustrated of hearing the same thing over and over too, which is why I think it's even more important to keep striking the bedrock. I hope people with the same grievances go to all three FanFests that are coming up and keep pushing. Make the developers unable to keep ignoring us.

What did he say again? Must have missed that particular one. As a healer main I'm intrigued. haha

[Beddict]

What did he say again? Must have missed that particular one. As a healer main I'm intrigued. haha

There were two questions, transcript is on Reddit here. Question 1:

Q2: For this Savage, there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question here to you is: Are you aware of the reason and is there something you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by a long "hmmm") Things to reflect on......things to reflect on? Well for one I did read something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green river"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also experience situations where there is a serious lack of tank participation and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....well, this is hard to answer...I mean there's also the request we got from players that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, and among other things that is asked of us...(another long pause) So in this case, due to certain circumstances and certain "wall" which caused deviations (biases?) to occur, and this is definitely a thing after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely......I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything on this matter what I am able to say at this point is "please give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you are allowed to handle multiple roles, and when you try playing a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting through that experience....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "Healer slots being so open and available in PF due to so little healers willing to join recruitment". There's also a DPS equivalent of such meme, called "Red River", where the excessive amount of DPS slots open for Ranged role (PFs usually are full of melees and casters, but not so much on ranged, which created the perception of ranged being undesirable). The "Red River" meme usually applies to PFs with practice parties as their objective.

Question 2:

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean this happened before, but if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Right, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required... I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments saying it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do for now.

[Deceptus]

There were two questions, transcript is on Reddit here. Question 1:



Question 2:

What's crazy about both of those quotes is that he's reacting like it's the first time he's actually had to answer those questions or that they've even been posed to him.

Just another example in the massive amounts of the lead designer not having a single clue about healers, healer balance, or healer feedback.

[ForsakenRoe]

What's crazy about both of those quotes is that he's reacting like it's the first time he's actually had to answer those questions or that they've even been posed to him.

Just another example in the massive amounts of the lead designer not having a single clue about healers, healer balance, or healer feedback.

It's probably because so many 'I want to heal, not do damage' healers kept shouting about how the solution for healer engagement is to 'have more to heal', then when they added more to heal this tier and it not only didn't help the situation, it made it WORSE, his reaction is 'wait what, we gave them what they asked for, this doesn't make sense'

[DayHealer]

There were two questions, transcript is on Reddit here.

Question 1:

Question 2:

This was eye opening, thank you. I hope they continue with the road started from P8S, is a step in the right direction.

[Recon1o6]

the main problem with healer feedback is none of it is listened to

the fact we got slightly more to heal this patch is the exception that proves the rule

[GrimGale]

Keeping your party alive is the skill floor.

Keeping your party alive while doing good damage is the skill ceiling.

Adding more skills to make the secondary role of healers more complicated, doesn't raise the skill floor, it raises the skill ceiling and that is a good thing.

[SaberMaxwell]

How to make the DPS part more engaging with 3 dps buttons: By World of Warcraft's Restoration Shaman.

You get 1 DoT: Flame Shock
You get 1 Quick basic damaging spell: Lightning Bolt
You get 1 very slow cast but very hard hitting Nuke: Lava Burst

Flame Shock has a chance, everytime it deals damage over time, to cause your Next Lava Burst to become instant cast.

Lava Burst will crit if it hits a target affect with Flame Shock

Now, replace Flame Shock with Dia, Lightning Bolt with Glare and Lava Burst with, I dunno, some new very flashy spell that is very satisfying visually.

The funniest thing is thats basically lv50 BLM.

[Beddict]

What's crazy about both of those quotes is that he's reacting like it's the first time he's actually had to answer those questions or that they've even been posed to him.

Just another example in the massive amounts of the lead designer not having a single clue about healers, healer balance, or healer feedback.

Yeah, he looked pretty frustrated. My money is that the final tier will return to Asphodelos style healing and Yoshi-P will continue to ignore or twist complaints about healer downtime being a massive problem. In the Endwalker Media Tour he said he doesn't want new players to feel pressured by DPS buttons which I can understand for players new to the Role, but he wants that mentality to continue all the way into fucking endgame for some Godforsaken reason. Then either someone fucked up the translation or he deliberately twisted what Recon asked to try and dismiss Healers with his "try Ultimate" bullshit after launch. Will be neat to see what happens once Abyssos finishes.

[Allegor]

Honestly, a concern and I guess hot take I kinda have is that it's not all about how the role performs in savage tier only either. I'm a casual, but casual doesn't mean lazy - Just because I don't want/can't play the highest difficulty the game has to offer doesn't means I'm comfortable with only pressing ~5 of my 30 ish buttons (3 of which have a considerable cooldown) in all other forms of content.

I play a healer because I want to, not because the system arbitrarily says someone needs to.