i guess it's kind of evil but it's sort of funny to me seeing a friend tryhard and speedrun an entire ff14 burnout arc in like 1 expansion. this is what healing does to an mf
healing in mmos is fascinating to me because it's a legacy mechanic that everyone is convinced is necessary but mmos aren't the same genre they were 20 years ago
(god, what the fuck, this got so long)
i remember in early wow when one of the top EQ guilds playing was absolutely livid that their healer stacking wouldn't let them beat ragnaros bc he would just keep spawning more and more little guys that would kill everyone. a primary challenge of ff14 and wow to this day is of course being able to line up enough people's schedules, but in those days of 40 (and more, in EQ, as i've heard) people there was truly a whole other level. still, before the first expansion came out the raid devs invented an idea that was basically codified in the lingo of the game forever: "patchwerk fight"
patchwerk was a kind of basic undead guy who, as i recall, would beat on tanks very hard for several minutes while occasionally bopping other people with damage. pretty much everyone else in the raid was supposed to hit him the whole time. but he also had a high dps requirement because of this, and if you didn't kill him in time or your damage ran out at the end he would powerup and start one shotting everyone quickly. this was fairly well liked, i think partly as a change of pace from all the complicated dancing, and while i don't think all the other bosses of that dungeon had "enrages" it quickly became a defining concept in the game. though in a lot of cases it wasn't strictly defined; you didn't die immediately when the weapons disappeared in kael'thas, for example, but if you weren't close to winning you probably were in a lot of trouble.
because of this, and the proliferation of Game Science, the tuning got a lot more refined and combat started to consistently require certain benchmarks of damage, set varyingly depending on how hard the rest of the fight was supposed to be. "patchwerk fights" became the description of simple battles with higher damage requirements, while more complicated ones were usually more forgiving. you also couldn't revive people repeatedly in world of warcraft, so there was some leeway there too, but that tightening led ultimately to the hard mode raids requiring everyone to play really well for a first clear. the other big thing in world of warcraft was that top guilds would make up for having worse gear by using fewer healers, allowing more slots for damage dealers. that's the biggest trait here that really didn't make it into ff14 (at least not for long?); the game has enforced 2 tank 2 healer 4 dps for a long time.
sometimes, playing a healer in wow, it started to feel like...this is really easy, and it doesn't matter, and if i switched places with that one dps and they pressed like 2 buttons over and over and i was hitting the boss surely this would be easier. because as healers you have no scope to end the fight faster (and, in that era...generally didn't have to interact with the "boss mechanics"). i remember even arguing against this view once, early on when i was healing in cataclysm, but after a few months, it really hit. the person i was talking to was right. i mean, "the top guilds use less healers" is proof enough of that, right? at a certain point, it doesn't help you win.
it's frustrating because i like healing. it's the power fantasy in mmos i think is most enjoyable, and the dynamics of it are something rarely, and not easily replicated in single player games. but to enforce that 8 people, or 10, or 20 or 25, have to do things correctly...it simply can't be that good. i never raided seriously in wow after cataclysm, since i had gotten forced to play a class i really didn't want to and it burned me up. but in ff14...of course i wanted to heal. and healing dungeons was hilarious, with in-battle rezzes and powerful tools allowing all sorts of wacky outcomes. one night when i was super drunk i healed a fairly difficult dungeon (dusk vigil, the first dungeon of heavensward, which hit really hard at the time) without a tank. one of the guys in the party just suggested that we try it, and we would've been waiting for a long time since one only showed up when we were at the final boss.
but of course, in raids, you aren't allowed to just do that. sure, some people will talk up the fact that healers have damage rotations and all that, but the dps contribution of healers is not some grand coincidence or something. it's made by the devs just like party balance, and they could certainly change how it works. now, i think it's obvious that the controller focus of ff14 precludes the kind of fast whackamole healing that was common in wow (it's very difficult to do on controller, and in the same way, makes astrologian considerably more difficult than other healers), and the other ideas i've thought of are also silly ("make healer spells show placebo numbers!" "just make heals damage the nearest enemy as a side effect!"). plus i feel that cbu3's designers are generally very conservative in the first place...a bit less so with ultimates and alliance raids, but there's definitely still a clear preference toward stability and consistency. healing is needed in low level ff14 dungeons but the "endgame" is all about puzzle mechanics and stuff where generally one death is going to quickly kill everyone else. hell, the first fight of endwalker's second "tier"-the generally easiest one-had one of the most punishing body checks i've seen, since it was designed in a way that people could never possibly be revived if they failed the dodge before it. and even those times where you can recover from people dying, the damage penalties of getting hit or killed also make it likely that you'll fail to reach the damage checks and still lose. so healing is fake, basically. you learn the sequence of damage and movement that comes out and come up with a sequence that solves it. a lot of healers don't like "farm" (repeating the fights after winning) because of this, and the fact that correspondingly there's very little room for improvement in terms of play skill and damage, but honestly that's my favorite part. pushing high difficulty means that even playing amazingly has virtually no effect, while once there's a little leeway for mistakes there's, y'know, the actual ability to make up for them.
i've heard it claimed that the changes to healer damage four years ago (it's all piled onto just a few buttons per job) came from the devs hearing that people find healing stressful. and of course i hear people who play constantly say that regular difficulty is too easy, and that players are too averse to failure. i think it's true that that fear of judgment and failure is also fake and the kinds of people who are mad about other people playing bad judge dps players as hard as anyone else, lol. but at the same time, playing endwalker's main story i actually died a lot! because you die really fast in normal mode now! maybe that's why healing is stressful! because you can die in one second and then you know that you're probably all going to lose when if you were just a dps then maybe you'd get saved by the person who did it right and still win!! (in fact, the powerful targetable tank shields are way more powerful for saving someone who you see get hit or who is about to get hit than heals are...) it's easy to feel helpless as a healer. when you play worse than a certain threshold it matters a lot. when you play better, it basically doesn't matter at all.
(i also think that the game has gotten harder, and firstly, people who play every day find it easy because they play those things every day. and if they pf'd every day for a few months they would start to think a lot of that stuff is fairly easy too. but i also think a lot of the normal mode fights of the last couple expansions just aren't as interesting as they used to be. there's a lot more of an obvious focus on buildup and tutorializing which is "better game design" in the big picture of players who go and try to beat the harder difficulties but makes the easier versions feel disposable or even outright bad. but that's not much to do with this.)
subscription mmos rely on a broad playerbase to be successful, and inevitably that means players with very disparate goals and interests share space in and out of the game. but like competitive games, both the most die-hard power users and occasional dabblers live under the same rules and mechanics. the exacting design needed to engage those top percentile players for extended periods of time has led to, essentially, a singular barometer of skill: the dps number. even healers are most easily judged by this metric, since healing more than the amount you would normally "have" to implies that someone (the healer or a party member) made a mistake, rather than suggesting higher proficiency of healing. i certainly don't truly think it "better" to have some kind of healer-centric world like the one dreamed up by the EQ players, where victory is determined more by the attention span needed to whittle down a single enemy for hours at a time or some such.
but these are the kinds of thoughts that have led me to believe that "good design" is a fallacy, and one that narrows the game space much more than the things it's meant to prop up (particularly "balance" with the intention of preventing people from being excluded for wanting to play certain jobs). though, needless to say, the game's still really popular, and probably a majority of players are happy enough with it they might disagree with me; even the increasing amounts of relatively disgruntled comments i've seen don't convince me otherwise, particularly because with the expansion in its lame duck arc people's complaints and nostalgia tend to peak. though it does seem like a good portion of players are dissatisfied with healing one way or another. honestly since i barely play i'm back to thinking scholar is fine and has what i want (the ability to pop off and improvise bizarre ideas i've never had nor had to use before).
i thought healing sounded cool even before i started playing wow, and to me the appeal is still as clear as ever. sometimes, it can truly feel like you've worked a miracle, and really are the most powerful member of the party. i realize that above all this just means that this activity is no longer suited to my interests and that's fine. but i think it's telling that despite attempts to avoid making people do things they'd rather not, healers and tanks remain vastly less common even for the game's desired proportions, and that i see people lose interest and grow frustrated more easily playing them.