#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[TheDustyOne]

When someone recommends a game to me, I first ask "is it fun?" The same is true if someone were to recommend a different class, different build, content I don't usually do, etc.

If the people who normally play healer say that healer isn't fun, then it doesn't matter how much Square intends for it to attract new players, why would they stick around when the people who supposedly enjoy it most don't even want it? It's one thing to lower the skill floor so that new healers can get a feel for the job without getting too overwhelmed, it's another to do what Square has done and crash the ceiling to the ground.

Quite frankly, the floor should be raised a little; we're at level 100 now and we still don't have enough incoming damage at a decent frequency to justify the amount of healing healers are capable of.

If we want the healer population to grow, you first need to get people to find it fun; making it easy is only a short term solution. Word of mouth can do the rest.

[Kes13a]

When someone recommends a game to me, I first ask "is it fun?" The same is true if someone were to recommend a different class, different build, content I don't usually do, etc.

If the people who normally play healer say that healer isn't fun, then it doesn't matter how much Square intends for it to attract new players, why would they stick around when the people who supposedly enjoy it most don't even want it? It's one thing to lower the skill floor so that new healers can get a feel for the job without getting too overwhelmed, it's another to do what Square has done and crash the ceiling to the ground.

Quite frankly, the floor should be raised a little; we're at level 100 now and we still don't have enough incoming damage at a decent frequency to justify the amount of healing healers are capable of.

If we want the healer population to grow, you first need to get people to find it fun; making it easy is only a short term solution. Word of mouth can do the rest.

100% agree.

I like healing in games because its fun, and part of that fun is the challenge. having something so braindead isnt fun, and only having a "challenge" when the rest of the party are, turnips... isnt enough to carry the job as it now sits.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I am impressed by your patience, Supersnow845, a true healer main at heart…

It’s the same song & dance that many veterans had dealt with before for the last 5-8 years depending on where they draw the line. It certainly won’t be the last either lol. Ironically it’s more ‘engaging’ than actually pressing 111111111 in-game.

[…]If we want the healer population to grow, you first need to get people to find it fun; making it easy is only a short term solution. Word of mouth can do the rest.

Anecdotally speaking, there’s simply no real benefit that I can say to people who seek to try it out other than “It’s fastest que rate” and “easiest to get comms” which made them frown why I have nothing else to add out of my main role. Friendo gave a try for a bit, find it fun for first few runs, then they quickly drop it few days after because “It’s boring.”

Imagine MSQ’ing as an AST… /shudder

[ForsakenRoe]

If you played enough MMOs you know Healers and tanks will always be in shortage, no matter how complex or fun or amazing the class/role design is, it will never be as popular as a dps. In short, that means, the entire point they made is useless.

What are you trying to say? That SE shoudn't bother trying to make the healer role fun/amazing, because 'DPS will always be more popular'? Additionally, there's a difference between 'Healer (24% pickrate) is not as popular as DPS (54%)', versus 'Healer (12% pickrate) is not as popular as DPS (62%)'. In both examples, the statement 'Healer is not as popular' is true, but in the former, the number is much closer to the right balance, because we need 2 DPS in a party and only 1 Healer. DPS is MEANT to be more popular, the game's designed that way. If Healer were as popular as DPS, or more, then we'd have dungeon queues grind to a halt because there's not enough DPS in the queue to serve all the Tanks and Healers.

"but it's hard to draw concrete conclusions from this since that could all be artifacts of the data ". Yes, I get it you enjoyed HW design but guess what.. it's GONE.

I'm fully aware that HW is gone. I don't actually want HW though, I'd prefer something more like SB. Far more accessible for casual players, far less punishing, still gave us depth to chase. The 'best combined healer run' of O12S still had some GCDs in it, because optimizing a fight to be clearable with 'zero healing GCDs used' was something to aspire to but never truly achieve, now it's commonplace. But since you imply I didn't read:

So if these numbers are to be believed, HW actually had...

I did already quantify the numbers as 'maybe they have merit, maybe they don't'. I dunno if they're real or not. Only way to know for sure either way is if SE were to give us the data themselves. Until then, estimations done by third party sources such as FFXIV Census, or Lucky Bancho, are all we can go on. On which note...

As for the 5% it's just plain garbage with 0 verifiable data, however, if you go on the lucky banjo website that also holds the census and class/role distribution you will find out that is entirely not true.

'Lucky Banjo' (lol) is a third party as much as FFXIVCensus, and if one can be used as a citation (as you are here), then the other (the FFXIVCensus numbers I quoted previously) can be too

Lastly, I've seen some Vanilla WOW census data (which is a lot easier to get because they have addons for such things) from around a month ago, saying that for a lot of PVE servers, Paladin (which the majority of players will play as a healer) and Priest (which is played as a healer) have a higher playrate at max level than Rogue (a DPS) and Warlock (a DPS). On the Horde side where they have Shamans instead of Paladins (but are also played mainly as healers), they too are incredibly popular, and have not only higher pickrate than Rogue and Warlock, they're equal pickrate with Hunter, and are a very small gap behind the pickrate for Mages, of all things. But maybe Vanilla WOW doesn't count, because it's too old, or because back then there was more reason to bring a specific class (eg Rogues are needed for the Suppresion Room in BWL, or Hunters are needed for Tranquilizing Shot despite having lower damage than some other classes), so it's not apples to apples. But I'd also posit that maybe Vanilla WOW is a good example actually, precisely because it's been out for over 20 years, people know that the DPS specs for Shaman are not so great (doing like, 25-35% of the damage of an equally geared DPS Warrior), and so the vast majority of people who decide to play a Shaman go in knowing that they'll be healing at endgame

I'd also estimate that more players play certain Healers here, than certain DPS (eg I expect there's more WHMs than BLMs). The issue is that we have 4 Healers, and 13 DPS. But, if SE releases a new healer (to eventually try to have 7/14 and have the Healer/DPS ratio of 1:2 that the DF format asks for), the addition of Healer jobs won't take from DPS numbers enough, instead it'll be mainly already established Healer players, swapping within the role. Maybe if SE were to add a proper 'DPS focused Healer', that is, one with an actual rotation, they'd actually capture some of the players who usually go for a DPS. Giving the playerbase four Healers (or five in the future maybe), that all have the core damage rotation of 'refresh your DOT twice per minute, then press <filler spell> to fill', doesn't attract as many players to the role as could be attracted by having the Healers have different gameplay designs.

[Maltothoris]

Honestly I'm not sure if they want to add more healers or if they can. If I remember, they want all healers to be magical which kind of rules out physical healers. Plus we have the pure/barrier dichotomy which would veeate an imbalance in the role.

[TheDustyOne]

Honestly I'm not sure if they want to add more healers or if they can. If I remember, they want all healers to be magical which kind of rules out physical healers. Plus we have the pure/barrier dichotomy which would veeate an imbalance in the role.

Honestly, a physical/magical (or melee/ranged) dichotomy sounds more interesting than what we have now. I don't expect it to happen considering that pretty much most fights are designed with healers being ranged, but an attempt at a "sometimes melee" healer akin to what RDM is for casters would be neat. Square just needs some inspiration and to be able to take some risks in job design.

[ForsakenRoe]

As for WoW healers being incredibly popular, a dozen recent posts and data contradict your claim. Perhaps the healing spec of the Paladin is more popular than other specs but it doesn't mean healers overall are popular. Tigore did comment on it and his estimation and take on it sounded a lot closer to reality and in line with what I have also found than what you say.

Tigore seems to be more on about 'Retail WOW', since he mentions 'Tank/Healer get instant queues'. I was on about Classic WOW, the re-release of older versions of the game (and specifically data about a server for Vanilla), which does not have queues at all, because it requires the players form a party in town and go to the dungeon entrance manually (a relic of older MMO design). And in that, the 'hybrid classes' (ie the ones that have a spec for healing, and a spec for damage) have been mathed out to be 'play this as a Healer, or you are literally griefing, that's how bad your DPS spec is' because Blizzard hadn't really worked out 'class balance' at that point. So if someone picks Shaman/Paladin/Priest/Druid, it's a pretty safe bet that they're intending to play it as a Healer. Thus, the dataset I saw which said that 'Shamans (90%+ of which are going to be played as a Healer) are played as much as Hunter (one of the most popular specs in WOW because you get to have a cute pet ally)' is quite interesting to me, as I'd never have expected such a result to occur

[Supersnow845]

Honestly at this point I’m more leaning towards them even regretting RDM being partially melee because they seem to suck at designing mechanics that allow RDM the flexibility to actually do its melee combo when it needs to

If you really want to gold parse RDM you really want a melee spot but to facilitate that you kinda need a BLM/PCT but then you’d get more benefit out of giving the melee spot to them anyway

[Kohashi]

Honestly at this point I’m more leaning towards them even regretting RDM being partially melee because they seem to suck at designing mechanics that allow RDM the flexibility to actually do its melee combo when it needs to

If you really want to gold parse RDM you really want a melee spot but to facilitate that you kinda need a BLM/PCT but then you’d get more benefit out of giving the melee spot to them anyway

xd!!!!!!!!!!!!

Knowing how to manipulate RDM resources and adapt based on whether you have to resolve a mechanic while also being during the 2-minute burst or not is part of the class mastery and difficulty. Not every burst comes with mechanics to do. Otherwise, you can delay your melee combo. SE gave RDM Grand Impact, Prefulgence, and Vice of Thorns, in addition to the already available ranged mechanics.


@ForsakenRoe
Lucky Banjo does however post the methodology how he approaches the entire research and how he obtained the said numbers. Both Census and Banjo simply take the database made available by SE through Lodestone and correlate the data with the help of certain filters.

Census is a lot more basic and from what I see, it's just a bunch of numbers of created characters still present in lodestone but nothing beyond it (which makes sense since it is a census). In any case, the numbers are approximate because some profiles are hidden.

As for WoW healers being incredibly popular, a dozen recent posts and data contradict your claim. Perhaps the healing spec of the Paladin is more popular than other specs but it doesn't mean healers overall are popular. Tigore did comment on it and his estimation and take on it sounded a lot closer to reality and in line with what I have also found than what you say.

I have a very basic understanding of WoW (I never really played it) and I had to do a bit of research on which specs are considered healing (lol) to see if the WoW player base claims/posts held any truth or if it was also skewed by personal perception as it is in some post in FF14 forums.

Other factors skew the pick and progression of playing/ staying a healer in WoW the same way FF14 also has its own additional variables but that wasn't the point of the discussion.

In any case, I am not saying the design cannot improve overall, but saying it needs to change or else, or that this forum represents the majority is just simply grossly out of touch with reality. At the end of the day, it's their game, their vision, you have the privilege of playing this and they don't owe you anything. It's up to you if you want to stay or find something that better aligns with your idea of fun. Every single game that tried to fundamentally change based on a very vocal minority found its fast demise.

[Kes13a]

As for WoW healers being incredibly popular, a dozen recent posts and data contradict your claim. Perhaps the healing spec of the Paladin is more popular than other specs but it doesn't mean healers overall are popular. Tigore did comment on it and his estimation and take on it sounded a lot closer to reality and in line with what I have also found than what you say.

I have a very basic understanding of WoW (I never really played it) and I had to do a bit of research on which specs are considered healing (lol) to see if the WoW player base claims/posts held any truth or if it was also skewed by personal perception as it is in some post in FF14 forums.

a whole dozen??? thats CLEARLY a majority view then. I am impressed.. a dozen recent posts CLEARLY reject any data of WoW healers being more popular.

hate to point it out but... anything is going to be all "personal perception". as for WoW, in my experience, and I only have about 12 years of experience playing WoW, the healing there is is more rewarding. I didnt leave that game because of the healing, I left because of the company and the game direction. FFXIV, however, I dislike being treated like a turnip in order to play jobs I enjoy.

oh, my apologies, I didnt mean to call you a turnip for loving FFXIV healer design (nor did I mean to imply it)