TOP cleared with no healers

[Renathras]

...

You know what the weird thing about all this is?

I agree ARR WHM was fun. I don't agree with the Cleric Stance "dancing" (which as we've discussed before didn't really happen much since people often didn't "stance dance" so much as "stance stay"). Your "compromise" is what I oppose. The ACTUAL ARR WHM - GCD healing, lots of spot healing, somewhat unpredictable damage, your tools being strong enough to deal with it but requiring actual focus and intelligent choices to manage MP - that I actually support.

Moreover, adding more "DPS/suppoort/buff complexity and engagement" isn't a solution. As I've said and no one has argued against, doing those things would not have prevented the 0 Healer TOP clear or the 1 Healer clears of other content. Because the issue isn't Healers not having enough complexity or buttons. That's not what made those clears possible. It's that encounters do not require much healing, and what they do require, Tanks and DPS can make up for through either mitigation or outright healing. Meaning the "compromise" doesn't actually address the problem. It addresses top end Healer players being bored, not healing in general, the trinity breakdown, encounter design issues, or 0/1 Healer clears.

That means it's not a solution at all.

That's why I don't agree with it. It doesn't address the actual stated problem.

If the problem is "People shouldn't be able to clear Ultimates (or other content in general) with 1 or 0 Healers", then the solution has to address THAT. And the "more DPS/support/buff complexity" doesn't.

[Deceptus]

2) Can you prove - objective proof - that there is a "healer shortage" right now?

Look at any of the Lucky Bancho surveys that come out

(if you wanted a specific world (example)

https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/wsurve...orld=Carbuncle)

Elemental JP Datacenter:



Primal NA Datacenter



Chaos EU Datacenter



Notice how these distributions are ridiculously consistent across ALL datacenters? It's almost like there's a trend or something. . .

Healers are by far the lowest represented roll, virtually being non existent in lvl 1-69 content, and barely there after that.

[Zeastria]

Notice how these distributions are ridiculously consistent across ALL datacenters? It's almost like there's a trend or something. . .

Healers are by far the lowest represented roll, virtually being non existent in lvl 1-69 content, and barely there after that.

Healers and tanks is the least played role in every mmo, it's not just an ffxiv thing..
There will always be more players who play dps than tank/heal..
So it's not uncommon or surprising to see.. bc thats how it has been since forever..

[Renathras]

Look at any of the Lucky Bancho surveys that come out
...
Healers are by far the lowest represented roll, virtually being non existent in lvl 1-69 content, and barely there after that.

That's not how you prove there's a Healer shortage. First, the Level 90 (which is what counts; 1-59 tells you very little since there's only 1 Healer Job even AT levels 1-30), and notice that from 70-90, the three left circles and once you have all Healing Jobs, the nuumber is stable across them?

What you'd need to do to prove there is a shortage is two things:

1) Show that ques/PFs are unable to make - AT LARGE SCALES, not a few anecdotes - due to lack of Healers,

2) Compare these numbers against the prior numbers from Lucky Bancho's surveys, at least 3 but ideally more, to see if there is a trend developing or how these numbers compare. For example, suppose you compared this to the ShB and SB numbers and there were more Healers at 90 now than were at 80 in ShB or at 70 in SB. Would that prove there's a shortage NOW? No, it would show that there's a surplus compared to historic trends.

So you need to do that if you're going to try using those numbers as proof. And I'm not saying this to disparage you - I'd like to see you do that since I'm genuinely curious if we have more or less Healers at 90 now than we had at 80 in ShB or 70 in SB. Can you do that? Would be neat to actually see the perecentages. Also, could you get these as percentages not, "what's the raw number of X which is (I assume?) overrepresented vs the standard 1/1/2 party distribution"?

That is, the circle in the bottom left, for example. Looks like 25% Tanks, 55-60% DPS, 20% Healers? We need to know that to compare against the historic values and see if it's up or down vs the historic trend.

Conversely, can you give me a link to the data and the past iterations? I might do this myself since I'm interested now...

.

EDIT: (No one's posted, so no reason to double post)

Clearly you haven't played enough MMORPGs then, a prime example is Aion, where majority of characters were actually healers and support characters.

Yes, but notice the "and support". You'd have to provide statistics, but there's an interesting thing. Looking at the Pantheon (MMO) poll results of "What role do you want to play?", their playerbase almost always splits around 15-20% Tanks, 15-20% Healers, 30-35% DPS, 30-35% Control/Support since they're going for a four-role Quaternity instead of a three-role Trinity. That is as many potential players of that game want to play the fourth role as want to play DPS. That's a pretty eye opening statistic.

Why is this important?

There is a huge class of underserved players in games who want to play a Support. No matter the MMO, historically, those that offer a Support role often see something like 20-30% of their players choose it. Support is distinct from Healing, as many people who want to Support don't care much about health bars or "playing wack-a-mole" with party health. They don't exactly want to be a DPS, but they don't really want to be a Healer, either. In games that offer them a dedicated role, they jump on it. In games that do not, they play what feels similar to it.

In FFXIV, these players have several options. In ARR, they mainly played SCHs and BRDs. In HW, before SB, they largely played Healers, especially AST, and occasionally still BRDs. But when SB released, the game was introduced to RDM, which became immensely popular as a Support/DPS hybrid in a game that often didn't allow blurring of the roles. At the same time, PLD became a more Support focused Tank with the powerful Clemency spell and a more party support feel. SB is also, historically, when the Healer role reached its minimum percent of the total population from what I was able to get using the Wayback machine (did this in the Healer forum a few months back). And in ShB, this was reinforced with DNC. While BRD had a lot of its party utility stripped (initially almost all of it, to tremendous outcry until there was a reversal), DNC was made into almost a straight Support/buffer class. And in EW, SMN's complete kit rework made it something of a Support/DPS hybrid as well. Notably, DNC and SMN's support is part of their standard rotation in large part.

Point is: You cannot assume "Support" transfers 1-to-1 to "Healer" in different games. I've never played Aion but just loaded up their Class page. As far as I can tell, there are 6 main archetypes (Warrior, Scout, Mage, Priest, Technist, Muse) that seem to roughly correlate to "Tank", "Melee", "Caster DPS", X (will get back to this), "Ranged DPS", Y (will get back to this)

X consists of exactly ONE Healer class, Cleric, and one buffer Support class, Chanter (Enchanter?) - "inspire the morale of allies" "strengthen allies". While this could be something like an AST, a Healer with buffs, the description seems more of a buffer. The description bullet points include "Is able to use some recovery and healing abilities." Conversely, Y consists of Songweaver ("lifting their allies' hearts and spelling their enemies' doom with the power of song") which sounds more like BRD than like a Healer, or perhaps a BRD mixed with a RDM; "can reduce opponents stats and control their movement" sounds like a Control/Support, not a Healer. The closest thing to healer there is "Viable secondary healer when accompanied by a Cleric", and Vandal, which is a ranged physical damage dealer and debuffer with a "Variety of control effects".

Strictly speaking, only Cleric there sounds like "Healer", with the other three being a buffer with "some" heals, a debuffer/control (control effects are also used too describe the Songweaver) with magic song damage and crowd control effects, with some limited "secondary" healing, and a full Control class that seems to not even mention Healing.

If a Vandal were to play FFXIV, for example, would that player be playing a Healer? Probably not. They'd probably be playing a DPSer.

.

You cannot compare a 4 role game to a 3 role game, since the fourth role does not 1-to-1 transfer to one of the three roles. The reality is that it probably splits up. I would wager most people inclined to play a Chanter or Songweaver in Aion play RDM or DNC in FFXIV. And I have no idea why I think this, but I feel like Vandal players would more likely play DRK. Knowing nothing about its history or playstyle, it just strikes me as DRK-like somehow...

Because the system in Aion was nothing like we have here, synced runs, roulettes and all of that. In Aion, if you were 9 levels above a mob, you would not get drops from monsters, forcing you to either make alts or just buy stuff from the market.

Endgame in Aion was PvP mostly, not PvE, so of course the majority of players were at max level doing that type of content, not low level dungeons.

So...why did you try to compare it at all, then? It doesn't seem remotely comparable...

No they weren’t. I got begged to run things on my Cleric all the time and lack of healers for groups was a thing.

So...I take it my general assessment was correct, then?

Then maybe you didn't play it enough to understand, lack of healers was always a thing, and yet the majority of characters were clerics and chanters. This is coming from me, who mained cleric for years.

From what I can tell, Chanters aren't Healers, they're more akin to RDMs.

Before Shb's lobotomization (and Ew's not addressing any issue with the role) they were easier to find than tanks so now them being so low in % of population should show there is something wrong.

Yes, but perhaps not what you think.

What else happened?

In science, what you're doing is known as "violation of ceteris paribus". "ceteris paribus" means "all other things held constant" (or close to). If you want to compare two things directly, you try to do this. The problem is, if other things WEREN'T held constant, you have to factor in those effects. From SB to ShB, Tanks were made far easier to play, especially WAR. Further, a new and very cool, very hyped Tank Job was added, and one that has a strong appeal to Melee DPS players. This saw an explosion in Tank players, with many former DPS players shifting their main to Tank.

"Tankxiety" was vastly reduced across the board, and GNB played more like a Melee DPS than a Tank, appealing to players who enjoyed playing DPSers.

While you an argue that Healer numbers declined, you can't ignore that Tank numbers exploded. The reason it's easier to find Tanks today is that Tanking became much more popular once it got more braindead and even had a Melee-DPS-like Tank Job added to the game to appeal to non-traditionally Tank players.

In theory, SGE was going to be the same for Healers (a Healer Job that appeals to Caster DPS players), but of course, it isn't since it doesn't focus on a Caster DPS rotation.

Moreover, SCH was "lobotomized". WHM was more or less the same as it was before, and ShB WHM was FAR better than SB WHM (the only iteration of WHM in FFXIV's history that was better than ShB's was maybe ARR's), which saw an explosion of WHM players at the same time.

Notice how in nearly a decade, he hasn't come out asking players to play tanks.

Whut? o.O

The entire reason for making GNB play like a Melee AND removing Threat/Damage stances from Tanks was because there was a massive Tank shortage in SB. I could be wrong, but I think Yoshi P said something akin to "Give Tanks a try" back around 5.0's launch. So yes, he has done so within the last decade...

[Neoyoshi]

Btw, whats this?

[Aword3213]

Btw, whats this?

a log informing streamer who's watching your stream.

Bilibili is the chinese version of Youtube.

[Neoyoshi]

a log informing streamer who's watching your stream.

Bilibili is the chinese version of Youtube.

Ahhh, oki doki thank you.

EDIT; as my take on this and my thoughts as a much older mmorpg gamer. This sort of thing is really nothing new- as much of a spectacle as it may seem to some viewers, i wouldn't allow it to make you feel like something is fundamentally broken.

gamers for generations have found ways to tackle hard situations in video games in either gamer-breaking or unconventional ways, all you have to do is look at older mmorpg's and what their communities have accomplished using non-standard means.

I'm not going to site any examples because google doesn't like keeping old information for very long on the surface-web, and there's too many instances of great gameplay achievements out there.

Again, viewing this through a lens in which the game is broken is a lazy way to look at this, and it's also possible that perhaps a lot of us aren't as good at gaming as we'd like to think we are. Let your egos go for a minute.

[RyuDragnier]

Again, viewing this through a lens in which the game is broken is a lazy way to look at this, and it's also possible that perhaps a lot of us aren't as good at gaming as we'd like to think we are. Let your egos go for a minute.

It's more that it's the thing setting off the healer community. MNK was in a similar place not long ago.

[ForteNightshade]

Efficiency is an argument, but not this one.

This argument is "what roles are not needed for content" (usually "Healers aren't even needed for 4 mans, much less harder content!"), but we've had all Tank clears of Pandaemonium raids, all Tank clears of Ultimates (not on patch, but still synced), no Healer, no DPS, and no Tank clears of 4 man Experts, and both no Healer AND no Tank clears of Extremes.

The no Healer clear of TOP here was most definitely NOT efficient. <_<

It still remains applicable though.

You posited several times now why no one ever argues Tanks or DPS aren't needed. Efficiency is the answer. People pulling off no tank runs are doing it for challenge sake or just to see if it's possible but tanks still provide value whereas that same value gets increasingly diminished for healers. Like I said with Rubicante, while it can be done without a tank you're not going to beyond a clear or two for the giggles because it's both annoying to deal with fluctuating aggro and a much slower killtime due to the Scholar having to GCD heal. Meanwhile, a Warrior won't lose any damage and can heal just fine. Paladin makes it even easier as they can Cover the DPS targeted for the buster and invuln their own.

I never said it was. That falls under the "can we do it?" category. What I said was: "Translating this to TOP. No one is going to drop Healers in Ultimate but it does show their overall contribution to the fight are substantially less than everyone else by virtue of the encounter having minimal healing requirements and their kits being overbloated with ways to heal what's actually there."

To further elaborate on this, DPS have the highest engagement due to the damage check, party responsibility is high because of mitigation checks and there are a few tank specific mechanics otherwise they can fall back on their DPS rotation to keep them engaged. What do healers have though? Their abundance of healing tools clearly aren't necessary, mitigation isn't unique to any one role and they have nothing to fall back on beyond a one button "rotation." Nerfing every other aspect won't magically make the role engaging. Maybe Holos and Macro won't be a huge overheal or Lilybell will tick more than twice. Even if you do have to trade in a few Glare casts for Medica II, you'll inevitably be back to spamming Glare. Hence why healers themselves also need to be addressed. They're simply too strong, with far too many answers for practically every situation.

Now the reason you constantly see people bring up wanting to give Healers a damage suite similar to Tanks is because, frankly, a lot of us have long given up on the dev team doing anything to make healing relevant again. They seem far too afraid of making it too difficult for inexperienced players. So our only other recourse is make the Glare spam more interesting.

[Somnolence]

What do healers have though?

Its funny when you realize healers rely only on one single target dps spell and one dot spell since Sastasha.