We've been complaining for a long time to the point where we basically stopped somewhere along the way because we were so fed up about not being listened to. Since the current thread that we're now showing our frustration yet again since the Healer Strike didn't really get any attention by Developers.
But, how did we get to this point?
Well, let's start back in A Realm Reborn.
In ARR, we had two healers: WHM and SCH. There was a role action system that was built on leveling various jobs towards certain levels to obtain their cross-class. You had limited slots, and what this did was make Healers have various things: Going from utilizing the old TP System all the way to having mitigation tools, the cross-class system had healers feel really engaging, even at a base level. You could have your Bio, your Virus(currently Addle), your Eye 4 an Eye(removed), and other things like Second Wind.
We had a lot of customization, and this trend continued into Heavensward.
We still had the cross-class system, but we had new bells and whistles: new spells that added onto that engagement that Healers had. Aero III in particular was a huge part of WHM's kit that wasn't just them using Stone II. It added an extra layer and gave us a healthy balance of more damage and healing tools on top of what we already had.
We also had the introduction of Astrologian, which was WHM's pure healing counterpart that was almost effectively the same minus the Cards that granted a variable amount of buffs to the party.
Then came Stormblood. This expansion stripped the Cross-Class system and instead built in key abilities into Role Actions as we know them today. The party also had aggro tools with how the game was made at the time, meaning we'd be using them often to allow Tanks to keep aggro. It left an extra level of aggro management with the loss of some of our Cross-Class damage tools; however, our base jobs still had the damage tools we had from Heavensward alongside more healing tools. It was a very good expansion for raiding; but then came the worst.
Shadowbringers. The Big Reset.
Healers were stripped of multiple damage tools, namely WHM and SCH, and devolved into two buttons, which we know now as a Glare/Malefic/Broil Button and a singular DoT we could apply. It was the start of the worst of Healers, but we did retain some level of brevity in our healing having meaning, even in normal content(unless WAR was involved).
Towards the end of this expansion, Healers started to have grievances about the 1-button spam and how the development team had essentially made every job the core equivalent of WHM, except in their separate flavors in their damage profile while WHM was actually lacking identity towards the end of Stormblood when AST was pushing it out of PF quite a deal due to cards.
Going into Endwalker, things then got worse.
We had the stat squish, meaning we would have to learn an entirely new game and how our healing felt. This resulted in it being okay for a time, though in Endwalker we had the introduction of Sage: Supposedly the "DPS Variant" of Healers where your damage did healing; however through enough playtime and learning, Healers were able to identify it essentially being a carbon-copy of SCH, which heavily disappointed the community.
Even worse, this was the expansion where Tanks got their favorite toys: Short Cooldowns with powerful effects. While WAR was the one at the forefront of this since Shadowbringers' Bloodwhetting, PLD received Holy Sheltron which had a Regen attached to it(not counting Clemency as most PLDs wouldn't use it), GNB got the equivalent of Excogitation in the form of Heart of Corundum; and DRK got nothing worth noting aside from an Invuln rework that was absolutely necessary for it to function better in general instead of draining Healer Resources unlike the other Tanks. WAR also got a Regen on top of their Equilibrium, and later in the same expansion got a healing tool in Shake it Off which was shown to be heavily unnecessary even in the Tank community.
These effects allowed Tanks to take away the healing aspect that mattered, and drove us to a point where our Healing began to not matter anymore. We got pushed further and further down the road with no response even when discussions were happening ad nauseam, which was incredibly frustrating considering Dungeons were being completed more reliably with a good Tank and 3 DPS playing at a decent skill level.
By the end of this expansion, we had gotten no response - and on top of that, there were Ultimate clears that further showed us how broken our role was compared to the other two - we were a shell of who we used to be.
That continued in this expansion. More Healing Tools, but they literally trickled down on Healers by giving them just one 2-minute button to do damage with. An insult to what Healers have been asking for, even when it comes to Sage since this was the time where they actually had access to AoE DoT(No, it does not apply on top of the single target sadly).
Tanks further got buffed, now having stronger mitigation tools in their arsenal through their 30% being increased to 40%, on top of having extra effects. DRK got the Excog treatment with their 40%, giving them a source of self-healing, WAR got a HoT on their 40%, PLD has a heavy Shield on their 40%, and GNB got the equivalent of Thrill on their 40%.
It was a repeat of what we got in Endwalker. And now? We're at a point where Healers are essentially irrelevant unless the content demands a Healer to exist, either for Role Mechanics or due to damage profiles that the development team has accounted for. It does not discount how in 90% of content Healers are by and large unnecessary because Tanks can essentially solo the content themselves through smart cooldown rotation and usage time and again.
So, where do we go from here? I think this is an important question to ask as Healers are in the absolute worst state they've ever been, breaking the Trinity and putting the onus of healing upon Tanks and DPS. As for why, this is a guess, but I want to believe it's because they've been watching the Healer Population.
They tried to make Healers more approachable by giving them strong, reliable healing buttons they could use whenever and bloating it to the point that your basic healers would not have to think much about anything but that. Just. Heal.
They didn't want to add another layer of damage upkeep on healers because they fear it would affect the Healer Population negatively due to skill requirement; but this has been proven otherwise. Adding damage buttons that aren't tied to 2 Minute does not harm the casual healer as if you look at it through a casual lens, they don't have to worry about damage. They just have to heal the party and do their job.
There's also alternatives to adding more damage buttons, but it also creates a unique problem in itself: tweaking damage to scale up against our Healing Options can threaten DPS HP Profiles at a baseline alongside their Defense, making it a hard line to balance properly. Tanks in particular don't have to worry about this due to their massive HP Pool and the mitigations, self-healing, and party tools available to them. Regardless, something has to give.
If we go another expansion where Tanks are supreme and Healers yet again get gutted with more heal bloat that overwhelms the healing profile of the combat content, all discussion about Healers might as well be pointless because Square Enix will have proved itself that they do not listen. What will it take at that point? Will it take influencers to fix this problem? If not influencers, will it take the entire community to do so?
The best thing anyone can do is just keep giving feedback about our role and even if Yoshida himself cherry picks out of QnA if those happen again, the conversation has to continue for Healers to be heard, even if it does sound like screaming into the void for all the years we've dealt with their design. I only am posting this thread because I care about where the game is going, especially for a role that the game is supposed to be balanced for when it comes to recovery.
That is all I'm leaving for this thread, and you're welcome to continue it if you so like. I just wanted to put this down so that we don't forget where we came from, and how we got here.
Continue reading...
But, how did we get to this point?
Well, let's start back in A Realm Reborn.
In ARR, we had two healers: WHM and SCH. There was a role action system that was built on leveling various jobs towards certain levels to obtain their cross-class. You had limited slots, and what this did was make Healers have various things: Going from utilizing the old TP System all the way to having mitigation tools, the cross-class system had healers feel really engaging, even at a base level. You could have your Bio, your Virus(currently Addle), your Eye 4 an Eye(removed), and other things like Second Wind.
We had a lot of customization, and this trend continued into Heavensward.
We still had the cross-class system, but we had new bells and whistles: new spells that added onto that engagement that Healers had. Aero III in particular was a huge part of WHM's kit that wasn't just them using Stone II. It added an extra layer and gave us a healthy balance of more damage and healing tools on top of what we already had.
We also had the introduction of Astrologian, which was WHM's pure healing counterpart that was almost effectively the same minus the Cards that granted a variable amount of buffs to the party.
Then came Stormblood. This expansion stripped the Cross-Class system and instead built in key abilities into Role Actions as we know them today. The party also had aggro tools with how the game was made at the time, meaning we'd be using them often to allow Tanks to keep aggro. It left an extra level of aggro management with the loss of some of our Cross-Class damage tools; however, our base jobs still had the damage tools we had from Heavensward alongside more healing tools. It was a very good expansion for raiding; but then came the worst.
Shadowbringers. The Big Reset.
Healers were stripped of multiple damage tools, namely WHM and SCH, and devolved into two buttons, which we know now as a Glare/Malefic/Broil Button and a singular DoT we could apply. It was the start of the worst of Healers, but we did retain some level of brevity in our healing having meaning, even in normal content(unless WAR was involved).
Towards the end of this expansion, Healers started to have grievances about the 1-button spam and how the development team had essentially made every job the core equivalent of WHM, except in their separate flavors in their damage profile while WHM was actually lacking identity towards the end of Stormblood when AST was pushing it out of PF quite a deal due to cards.
Going into Endwalker, things then got worse.
We had the stat squish, meaning we would have to learn an entirely new game and how our healing felt. This resulted in it being okay for a time, though in Endwalker we had the introduction of Sage: Supposedly the "DPS Variant" of Healers where your damage did healing; however through enough playtime and learning, Healers were able to identify it essentially being a carbon-copy of SCH, which heavily disappointed the community.
Even worse, this was the expansion where Tanks got their favorite toys: Short Cooldowns with powerful effects. While WAR was the one at the forefront of this since Shadowbringers' Bloodwhetting, PLD received Holy Sheltron which had a Regen attached to it(not counting Clemency as most PLDs wouldn't use it), GNB got the equivalent of Excogitation in the form of Heart of Corundum; and DRK got nothing worth noting aside from an Invuln rework that was absolutely necessary for it to function better in general instead of draining Healer Resources unlike the other Tanks. WAR also got a Regen on top of their Equilibrium, and later in the same expansion got a healing tool in Shake it Off which was shown to be heavily unnecessary even in the Tank community.
These effects allowed Tanks to take away the healing aspect that mattered, and drove us to a point where our Healing began to not matter anymore. We got pushed further and further down the road with no response even when discussions were happening ad nauseam, which was incredibly frustrating considering Dungeons were being completed more reliably with a good Tank and 3 DPS playing at a decent skill level.
By the end of this expansion, we had gotten no response - and on top of that, there were Ultimate clears that further showed us how broken our role was compared to the other two - we were a shell of who we used to be.
That continued in this expansion. More Healing Tools, but they literally trickled down on Healers by giving them just one 2-minute button to do damage with. An insult to what Healers have been asking for, even when it comes to Sage since this was the time where they actually had access to AoE DoT(No, it does not apply on top of the single target sadly).
Tanks further got buffed, now having stronger mitigation tools in their arsenal through their 30% being increased to 40%, on top of having extra effects. DRK got the Excog treatment with their 40%, giving them a source of self-healing, WAR got a HoT on their 40%, PLD has a heavy Shield on their 40%, and GNB got the equivalent of Thrill on their 40%.
It was a repeat of what we got in Endwalker. And now? We're at a point where Healers are essentially irrelevant unless the content demands a Healer to exist, either for Role Mechanics or due to damage profiles that the development team has accounted for. It does not discount how in 90% of content Healers are by and large unnecessary because Tanks can essentially solo the content themselves through smart cooldown rotation and usage time and again.
So, where do we go from here? I think this is an important question to ask as Healers are in the absolute worst state they've ever been, breaking the Trinity and putting the onus of healing upon Tanks and DPS. As for why, this is a guess, but I want to believe it's because they've been watching the Healer Population.
They tried to make Healers more approachable by giving them strong, reliable healing buttons they could use whenever and bloating it to the point that your basic healers would not have to think much about anything but that. Just. Heal.
They didn't want to add another layer of damage upkeep on healers because they fear it would affect the Healer Population negatively due to skill requirement; but this has been proven otherwise. Adding damage buttons that aren't tied to 2 Minute does not harm the casual healer as if you look at it through a casual lens, they don't have to worry about damage. They just have to heal the party and do their job.
There's also alternatives to adding more damage buttons, but it also creates a unique problem in itself: tweaking damage to scale up against our Healing Options can threaten DPS HP Profiles at a baseline alongside their Defense, making it a hard line to balance properly. Tanks in particular don't have to worry about this due to their massive HP Pool and the mitigations, self-healing, and party tools available to them. Regardless, something has to give.
If we go another expansion where Tanks are supreme and Healers yet again get gutted with more heal bloat that overwhelms the healing profile of the combat content, all discussion about Healers might as well be pointless because Square Enix will have proved itself that they do not listen. What will it take at that point? Will it take influencers to fix this problem? If not influencers, will it take the entire community to do so?
The best thing anyone can do is just keep giving feedback about our role and even if Yoshida himself cherry picks out of QnA if those happen again, the conversation has to continue for Healers to be heard, even if it does sound like screaming into the void for all the years we've dealt with their design. I only am posting this thread because I care about where the game is going, especially for a role that the game is supposed to be balanced for when it comes to recovery.
That is all I'm leaving for this thread, and you're welcome to continue it if you so like. I just wanted to put this down so that we don't forget where we came from, and how we got here.
Continue reading...