G-give it Back T---T; !! (Scholar Edition)

[ForsakenRoe]

stuff

I wonder if players should have been even more aggressive, with their — most often perfectly reasonable — demands of change...

Exactly. The classes in a game with 'choose your class' are the lens through which we perceive the content of the game. If the fights are cool and flashy but the classes suck to play, boring/clunky/whatever problems, then the game is unsalvageably bad. If the classes are fun and engaging, but the fights and other content are kinda run of the mill, people can forgive that and look past it, because the class gameplay is fun. It's only fair expectation that all of the classes evolve each expansion. The issue for healers is that while the kit has (more healing tools), the content's demand of the kit has not increased in balance with that. We could have dealt with Styx with the SB kits. The SHB and EW additions are not 'required' for something like that, they're just 'nice stuff to have i guess'.

Additionally, I am livid, furious and generally miffed, that anyone would hold the opinion that 'if you want to have fun on your class, you should do harder content'. Not only is it incredibly dismissive of the problem, it doesn't fix anything. I've done some ultimates, not the new two but I did TEA on content, and went through Living Liquid's heal check. And even then, I spent most of my GCDs on damage. And what of those who DID do the new ultimates, who feel healer needs something more? The idea that someone like me, for example, someone who clears Savage and has previous Ultimate experience, should not consider 'EX roulette being boring' as an issue because 'that content isn't targeting me in difficulty scale' is stupid. What, am I, a player who has devoted enough time to the game to get better at it, now supposed to accept that anything below Savage, literally 95% of the content of the game, is 'not for me' anymore? That it's not 'supposed to be enjoyable' to me, it's to be treated as a chore, a means to the end of 'cap tomes'?

SE said they 'didn't really know what to do with SCH' in the pre-EW liveletter, with the job action trailer. I put forth the hypothesis: If SE had not removed all the damage buttons from healers, they might have had some design space open to add some new stuff to SCH, and indeed to all of the healers. Locking off such a massive design space in the way SE has done is absurd to me. If it weren't a game I hold so dear, I'd laugh at it, how stupid the move was. I'd call it Mickey Mouse class design, or perhaps clownshoes. But what's done is done, and I don't really want to complain about how bad it is right now, I want the dev team to accept that this design doesn't have any longevity for the health of the game, reverse course, while the problem is still fixable. It requires them to acknowledge that it's a problem, though, and they seem very disinclined to admit any amount of failure. I still remember when YP told everyone, proudly, that 'no, MCH isn't too weak, everyone is just playing it wrong' in HW. Then next patch, it was buffed because actually yes it was too weak.

As for the final bit, about us being more extreme: I'm not sure if that would even help. We got told a couple of times that we should 'be nice to the devs' because they were getting called names or whatever. Any 'more aggressive' would likely just get thrown out for being 'too aggressive', and anything 'not aggressive enough' doesn't get through. The healer class design is going to be decided entirely by the dev team who already put it in the shallow grave it's now sat in for the past 3 years. I'd love for the devs to see ANY of the feedback that gets left on the forums. More healing demanded of us, more damage buttons for the invariable downtime, I do not care what the solution they go with is. I just want them to choose literally anything going forward, with one exception: the continuation of whatever the heck this is. It's already stale, two more years of it may well kill the healer role's participation numbers entirely. Without a new healer release to obfuscate the problem, I think the 'playerbase drain rate' from the healer role will be way more apparent next expansion if we get SHB 3.

I want to know who's feedback they take for this stuff. Cos it sure as hell doesn't seem to be the players. Some of the healer design choices in recent years honestly feel like the DPS-Main testers tried to do a fight playing healers, failed, said 'damn if only I had a skill that does X', and then said 'hey wait write that down, we can throw it in when the next expansion comes out'. I refuse to take any lip about 'the devs listen to us' until I see SAM get either Kaiten, or a skill that replaces Kaiten and it's interactivity with the Kenki gauge. Because the outcry of feedback, from EVERY region, is massive, and it's insane that there's been zero word, nothing, nada, about the skill. Even just saying 'yeh we heard you, we will return Kaiten in 7.0 sorry' would at least let people know that their feedback was heard. Instead it feels like we are shouting into the abyss

edit: like 2 minutes after I post this, the Liveletter reveals that they're adding extra rewards to Criterion because they listened to the feedback. Thank you SE, I will acknowledge I got it wrong in my rant above. I did kinda get caught up in the 'stream of consciousness' thing, sorry. Now if you could you turn that 'listening to feedback' thing towards the class design, I would be very happy to fully eat my words