Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[AmiableApkallu]

I'm just pointing out in my post that changing a job to remove everything that "feels bad" is stupid, especially since not every player feels bad about doing certain things. Take Aetherflow for example, people often argue that it feels bad to use Soil/Indom/Lustrate/Excog because they lose 1 ED. I personally don't feel bad for using Soil, should Aetherflow be changed because some people feel bad when they have to use Soil?

I'm also pointing out that the healer role is just that, you heal, you fix mistakes, that is what you're there to do. If someone whines about losing damage when they need to heal, I question why they're even playing a healer in the first place? It just annoys me that people keep harping on about "Only GCDs being spent on damage and all healing being relegated to OGCDs will work because using GCDs on healing feels bad!".

The thing that rankles me with the whole "feels bad" and "losing damage" mentality is that it focuses on one's personal, direct damage dealt and all but ignores the party's combined damage dealt.

Raising someone is a personal loss, but you do it because the party's total output over the entire encounter is presumably better for it. If some website with funny colored numbers doesn't recognize that, it's a problem with the website and the people using it, not healer job design.

The same goes for any other heal or for any other action that might actually require one to evaluate trade-offs and make a choice.

[ty_taurus]

And how does this help with healer shortage?

For one, I’d go back to being a career healer.

I spent a little bit of time giving Sage a fair chance, but otherwise I have not healed since the last day of Stormblood. And I’m currently waiting by the exit because healer changes are going to be a make or break for me in DT, and there are other healer players who have left specifically because of the changes before as well. Doubtlessly there are players who have also left without talking about it. Is that a large number of players? Who knows, but we know it has pushed away at least some people.

Meanwhile, erasing DPS certainly has not increased the healer population, so evidence suggests adding it back would not have the adverse effects that removing it has.

[Supersnow845]

Skill ceiling would be purely about dps then, like for tanks where mitigation and aggro management is braindead.

The tanks still have to at least consider how they stagger and organise their CD’s around damage and the CD’s

A spammable oGCD heal Is just insanely powerful because you can weave it after everything, all other healing skills become useless you would just go glare^heal->glare^heal->dia^heal heal->glare, at that point you could macro it to a foot pedal like we used to do with HW embrace and suddenly you aren’t even a healer anymore

The problem is the fact that oGCD’s are too powerful, a GCD heal’less run should be impossible, we literally had this design till ShB, why are we acting like it’s impossible, people feel like casting a GCD heal is gimping their DPS BECAUSE it’s possible to do a GCD heal’less run (whether not casting a GCD heal when it’s needed is griefing or not is irrelevant to the point)

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I've said it before and I'll said it again: the current healer design framework will only make sense if you view it from a DPS/Tank mains lenses. It is NOT made for healers mains. Their true purpose is to make sure Duty Finder queue pops faster/survive through mechanics designed to be RNGfest if not all appropriate role is present.

[Aravell]

The thing that rankles me with the whole "feels bad" and "losing damage" mentality is that it focuses on one's personal, direct damage dealt and all but ignores the party's combined damage dealt.

Raising someone is a personal loss, but you do it because the party's total output over the entire encounter is presumably better for it. If some website with funny colored numbers doesn't recognize that, it's a problem with the website and the people using it, not healer job design.

The same goes for any other heal or for any other action that might actually require one to evaluate trade-offs and make a choice.

Not only is raising someone better for the party's total damage output, it's also literally your job as a healer. A healer that won't heal or raise might as well be kicked and replaced with a RDM.

That's why I raised a hypothetical scenario before:
If a GNB/DRK says to you after a failed tankswap that resulted in the other tank's death "I can't fit Provoke into my weave window during burst, it's the other tank's fault for dying, they should've dropped stance and used Shirk!", is that an acceptable stance to have?

If it's not, why is the argument that 'healers can blame someone for not avoiding damage if they have more damage buttons' such a common one? Why would people point fingers at a tank for behaving in a way where they shirk(ha!) their own responsibilities but a healer cannot be blamed for not healing someone that took avoidable damage?

[ForsakenRoe]

The healer shortage would be fixed by restoring the healer role to a state that is enjoyed by the old healing veterans once again. You do not fix the healer shortage by endlessly catering to DPS players and hoping that they'll make the switch permanently. By gutting the healer playstyle into a form enjoyable by people that don't even want to heal in the first place, you are not increasing the healer population, you are simply replacing the existing healer population with a bunch of DPS players that don't have the proper mindset to play a healer, which will lead to more wipes and frustration due to their lack of recovery skills.

Trying to appeal to a new audience with something is fine. Doing so by alienating the original audience is absolutely insane in almost any walk of life, especially business decisions. I have no idea why SE decided to chase non-healer mains and try to effectively 'bribe' them onto the role with promises of easy rides through content, low-effort rotations and effectively instant queues for content, all at the cost of driving away players who enjoyed the role for what it was in the past. And especially especially, when we already know that a lot of mains of a role (in numbers large enough to demonstrate that it's a general pattern across the game) will stay with their role, often 'trying out the new thing' in another role (eg a DPS main hopping over to try SGE), but will go back to their original role after a while.

There was never any chance that people would drop DPS role in favour of these new-design healers in numbers big enough to justify SE's actions in the design of the role. And even if they did, the reason people derive enjoyment from DPS jobs even in casual content is that they have the option to optimize a nuanced rotation, independent of the fight design. If someone enjoys pushing their class to the limit as, say, a NIN or MNK, doing their burst window right and getting that massive dopamine when their whole opener crits, why in Nophica's Nips would they want to swap to a class who's optimization journey leads to 'instead of pressing your 'do damage' button 120 times in the fight, you can press your one 'do damage' button, 140 times!' There's no 'If I do X with my opener, I can get Y GCD as my final move before the phase ends', because the Y GCD is Glare/Broil, just like the 5 GCDs before it. There's no 'if I hold 2mins, I can use just the 60s, and we can do a re-opener 2min on the next phase instead' for something like TOP, because we don't HAVE a 60s. Hell, the WHM 'burst window', laughable thing that it is, is 'do your usual 2min thing, but faster'. You don't get new moves that are able to be used in the burst like WAR getting Primal Rend, or PLD getting Confiteor. You get 'Glare, but a bit faster'. We as players had to come up with putting Misery into the raidbuff window, it's probably not intended by SE. And if it IS intended by SE, then to me it proves that they have no idea what the heck they're doing with healer design, because it, as a system, is actively encouraging degenerate gameplay. 'Waste your healing resource in downtime! Blow your limited healing resource just before the 1min mark, even if it's overheal! All to keep your Misery aligned to the 2min mark, for more damage!' And the best part is, that 'more damage' isn't even attributed to the WHM, because it's attributed to the players who put the raidbuffs up.

[Somnolence]

The tanks still have to at least consider how they stagger and organise their CD’s around damage and the CD’s

A spammable oGCD heal Is just insanely powerful because you can weave it after everything, all other healing skills become useless you would just go glare^heal->glare^heal->dia^heal heal->glare, at that point you could macro it to a foot pedal like we used to do with HW embrace and suddenly you aren’t even a healer anymore

The problem is the fact that oGCD’s are too powerful, a GCD heal’less run should be impossible, we literally had this design till ShB, why are we acting like it’s impossible, people feel like casting a GCD heal is gimping their DPS BECAUSE it’s possible to do a GCD heal’less run (whether not casting a GCD heal when it’s needed is griefing or not is irrelevant to the point)

You are thinking from current bloated healer kit perspective. Naturally for this to be balanced we would need to cut down amount of healing skills a lot and balance remaining ones based on MP and class resource usage. So if you spam Cure 3 needlessly you would go OOM.

I've said it before and I'll said it again: the current healer design framework will only make sense if you view it from a DPS/Tank mains lenses. It is NOT made for healers mains. Their true purpose is to make sure Duty Finder queue pops faster/survive through mechanics designed to be RNGfest if not all appropriate role is present.

You are on to something here. To me current healer role feels outdated, from older style MMOs with harder trinity. This is why it feels so bad - it feels a bit out of place.

T I have no idea why SE decided to chase non-healer mains and try to effectively 'bribe' them onto the role with promises of easy rides through content

They haven't done anything to appease dps players. Getting new oGDCs every expansion is what they do for all jobs, as they have no clue what to do otherwise. So DPS will get yet another oGDC button and healers another oGDC heal in DT for sure.

[Aravell]

Trying to appeal to a new audience with something is fine. Doing so by alienating the original audience is absolutely insane in almost any walk of life, especially business decisions.

Thing is, they did the same thing with MCH and SMN, both ended up being massively successful despite uprooting the entirety of the playerbase that originally enjoyed them. We know from the interviews about the relic that Yoshida thinks engagement numbers going up is a good thing and healer population has certainly increased because overall population has increased. But numbers probably aren't going any higher, we know that old healer mains are quitting, but we don't know how many are quitting as opposed to how many people are newly dabbling in healers.

Point is, if the healer population remains stable enough or even only has very minimal growth, Yoshida will probably see post-ShB healer design as a success. Heck, they probably think that the pure/barrier split is a success because people are taking one of each to most content, despite that being the regular comp that most people would run even without the distinction of pure and barrier.

[Nizzi]

Yeah, right. From what I have seen many healers in ultimate PFs are barse-brains and do the least amount of healing needed. If party is "griefing" them they kick offenders or leave, and since they are the most demanded role they are kings.

The only way to give healers DPS rotation is by moving ALL healing to oGCDs so it won't affect damage, otherwise the toxicity in PFs will skyrocket. In other words, mirroring tank design.

i don't think people are trying to parse in ultimate pf of all things, but i'm not saying it isn't possible and there aren't people dumb enough to try that? but parsing in ultimate is a completely different thing than in savage since fights arent full uptime, regardless though you're never going to be able to stop idiots from trying to parse in reclear/totem parties in pf, and we shouldn't design jobs around that fact or else the logical conclusion is to make literally every role play like the healers do so you don't 'troll' the party because you missed hitting a mitigation on a tank or your rotation was too hard on a dps and you did terrible damage

i also cannot talk for any experiences other than my own but i'm sure that there are lots of times i've done high end content in PF and people have thought i'm some parse brained idiot healer when in reality i'm just absolutely zoning out because spamming broil is not engaging and once i've already cleared a high end encounter i know exactly where i'm going to map all of my mits and heals so i'm just not paying attention at all and it's all autopilot. for me personally at least giving me more plates to spin like SCH's old DoTs would result in less situations where i let people die because i didnt see they took avoidable damage. not that i'm denying that there are healers who would rather wipe than use a GCD because there absolutely are, but i've seen just as many healers who will immediately burn a swiftcast res after someone dies instead of using an ogcd/gcd heal to make sure they don't die which is a bigger waste of resources and damage

i lean into the idea that more often than not, people are just bad or not paying attention because the current healers aren't fun or engaging no matter the encounter

[Ronivan]

That's kinda the paradoxical situations healers are currently in

Can't increase healing requirements because "it'd stress the newbies"
Can't increase dps options either because "it'd stress the newbies"
so apparently the only option that doesn't "stress the newbies" is either pressing 1211111111, or do nothing at all. Riveting gameplay, outstanding, genius, and not patronizing at all.

Very clever observation. Crafting has suffered a lot of this, it fell down from being a well designed endeavor to a trivial mindless thing. Even the beast tribe quests for Crafters are unbelievable dull; some requires you to talk to someone at point A, then with someone at point B, and its completed. Back in RR we had the Ixal quests that required you to gather and craft things, use your head for once. If devs don't want to stress newbies by daring making creative ideas they should stop making games and open a Daycare for Children. I don't like the idea of sacrificing the players you already have with the expectation to get new ones.