Boring design

[Supersnow845]

SE really loves to assume frictionless healers in a Vacuum huh?

Healers are a spherical cow apparently

[Adeacia]

With a healer you at least get to move a lot. Play a melee dps or a tank and all you do is just stand there pressing your attacks.
I actually get really bored playing those compared to a healer since I have so much to juggle at once.

[Sylvain]

Without being dramatic, I just feel that for the dev (or just Y.P?), the healing progression is just "figuring out how to optimally heal the fight" and it stops here.
As in, a DPS needs to optimise its rotation to the constraint of the encounter (most iconic example would be BLM) to dish out optimal damage.

For healers, our DPS is directly correlated to our ability to optimise healing. The more optimised your group is, the more glare you'll be able to dish out until you effectvely have 99.8% uptime with the bare minimum amount of gcd heal.

Which is sound I mean... this is exactly what happens. Until we reach that point, having extra DPS button could be seen as irrelevant as we're already busy figuring out how to optimise the fight.

The issue is that once that point is reached, DPS have a busier rotation which keeps the game more engaging. However, when we do, we're left with a rather boring format of 1111111111.
And on top of that, as other players help with mitigation and we get more gear, we end up doing less and less.

It's kind of sad that the most engaging Extreme fight are the one where everyone is kind of bad, as in, tank don't do any mitigation, DPS collect vulnerability debuff like pokémon cards and your other buddy healer only healing knowledge seem to be, spamming Medica1 and Cure1. (And dying a lot)

Basically, healers have a diminushing return on fun.
The better we get, the more gear we have, the boringer it gets.

[rawker]

Copying my post from another thread.

Why cant they design healers to have low entry points for the casual healers and have high ceiling to incentivize skilled players?

[Supersnow845]

Copying my post from another thread.

It seems to be the same design philosophy that drives WAR

People who would benefit from the low entry don’t like knowing that there are parts of their class they aren’t skilled enough to fully utilise, BLM is as usual about the only class that avoids this because most of BLM’s true optimisation is so unintuitive that people think just doing the standard line is good enough (which to be fair it usually is). People don’t seem to want to play AST like WHM when they know there is parts of the class they aren’t using even though playing AST like WHM is still good enough for almost all content

They would prefer to have a dead easy class they can play and also have that dead easy class be strong as hell

[rawker]

Indeed. A good design choice leaves room for players to learn, and get better. It gives a sense of achievement and progression where one started off as a scrub but grew better in time. The problem with let's use SMN as an example, you're just stuck to that same rotation until current expansion level cap. There is no room for optimization/improvement from the player. Basically, the floor and ceiling are low.

[Mimilu]

Honestly, my mindset is "If derplander can't look cool playing as it in a trailer, that's a problem" because that tells me the devs don't know how to show off that job/role to the audience versus just telling us about it, loosely. ┐(´～｀)┌

[Supersnow845]

Honestly, my mindset is "If derplander can't look cool playing as it in a trailer, that's a problem" because that tells me the devs don't know how to show off that job/role to the audience versus just telling us about it, loosely. ┐(´～｀)┌

DT was the perfect opportunity to make meteor even a SMN given considering it’s a book class SMN has a lot of dynamic casting animations

They need to stop making him a melee every single expansion

[ThorneDynasty]

Melee tend to get artifact gear that just generally looks cool. Caster gear on the other hand just has to stay absolutely recognizable for that job, for some reason. The side effect is that it also makes the gear look like a goofy caricature every time, which isn't very box art friendly.

[Sylvain]

DT was the perfect opportunity to make meteor even a SMN given considering it’s a book class SMN has a lot of dynamic casting animations

They need to stop making him a melee every single expansion

Imagine DerpLander throwing holy flowers as a WHM! (not AST / SGE cuz it's already taken by other npc).

Unless someone from the dev team starts playing healer full time don't expect things to change. I'm convinced devs think of healer players as we're some e-boys/e-girls not capable of playing REAL jobs (dps ahem), so they have to make it easier for us so we can "uwu beeg heawls im being sooo usefuwl ^_^". You can't change my mind on that. In yoship's mind I'm just a stupid little twink not capable of pressing buttons or thinking at all, for that matter.

I highly doubt this to be the case.
In fact, I feel the opposite is true.
Y.P said in an interview that they wouldn't add more dps skills to healer to not intimidate new healers by making them feel like they have to heal AND do a DPS rotation.

The fact of the matter is, healing (not roulette healing obviously) is quite intimidating to most players. The idea that any fuck up can lead to a wipe, or that your death is more impactful is scary.
In most EX and Savages, if a DPS dies, you rez him. If a healer dies, unless there's no AoE coming soon, it can lead to a wipe.

It's really to keep the floor and ceiling lower.

I feel like the floor for healing is low enough. I really can't see how a daily roulette can be considered challenging to heal... A fairy on autopilote can heal most bosses.

The issue is the ceiling, we want a higher ceiling, they don't.
What I don't understand is, why keep the ceiling low?

Bad players still do bad dps with only 1 button, it's not like adding extra will change anything.
Mid players would do their best and usually, their only flaws would be to cast a bit too many gcd heals... (but if you wipe on savage week 10+ because your healer did 5 medica2, the 5 lost glare are definitely not the reason you enraged) so extra dps skill should be fine... Like, they'd use it but still overheal.
And good players would just be less bored.

I don't feel they'll ever change that but it's such a shame that we're denied extra dps skills to avoid, according to them, frighten newbies healer (who would probably don't even notice those skills anyway)