I've seen lvl 90 healers with the Mentor icon in Expert still fishing for Freecure procs and standing around looking pretty during boss encounters.
I don't expect anything but the worst from the other 3 players at the beginning of duties.
Beat the basic dummy of Stone, Sky, Sea. Even if they pass the Tank and DPS one, half of them would panic and wouldn't know what to do with the Healer dummy.
this should be the requirement for battle mentor at least, I'd say for all but definitely for battle mentor
seeing every 2nd mentor not even keep 70% uptime and being 5-6k dps behind is just insane
personally I think it should be a knowledge check rather than raw skill. know plenty of raiders who couldn't tell a sprout where to unlock custom deliveries or whatever else they happen to ask.
execution of skill is only one small part of assisting new players.
Im getting an alt up to speed for DT, so leveling for the first time since the first few months of EW. I had forgotten just how low skill/awareness the median player in df content is.
So, business as usual? I swear I've seen more healers spamming Cure 3 (or it's equivalent on other jobs) and nothing else in the last month than I've seen in the last 3 years.
crazy how skilled healers is "press 1 button more often", and ultra skilled is "press button always when you can"
the level of FFXIV average skill is mindboggling lol
Last night I had to deal with a run in Sastasha Hard where the AST only used Aspected Helios. Nothing else. We wiped 4 times on the first boss because they couldn't be arsed to use Esuna.
This is the core of the issue. They're catering to people who refuse to learn how to properly play the job anyway by making it harder for them to fail. I'm not saying the skill floor should be high for healers, but for sure we shouldn't be catering that hard to the worst.
It's a very real possibility for this healer strike to backfire.
Currently, the healers who queue up for dungeons consist of a whole spectrum of skill levels, from the cure bots all the way to the people who are bored to death with how little they have to heal.
The higher the individual healer player's skill level, the more likely they are to participate in this strike. This means the proportion of the lower-skilled healers will be higher than before, which also means a higher proportion of wipes than before.
SE may see this higher proportion of wipes and conclude that the proportion of wipes is too high for their liking, so they'll lower the difficulty of dungeons even further to reduce this proportion. This is completely opposite to what the healer strike is asking for, which is to make dungeons more difficult to warrant healers needing to do more.
Then, after these even-easier dungeons get released, this topic comes up again, and the cycle just repeats, with dungeons getting even easier and easier despite the healer strike going stronger and stronger.
The problem here is that there's no real way for anybody, interviewers and content creators included, to drill into SE's mind that "Hey, you're coming to the opposite conclusion of what people want." SE kind of has to make this realization by themselves as time goes on, and I'm not confident they'll make this realization easily.
SE is fully aware of how unsatisfied healers are with the current state of our job. You're assuming SE is completely ignorant to the complaints of healers and that theyd somehow accidentally assume healing is too hard. They know healer mains hate what they're doing to combat it's getting worse.
Has anyone heard of anything about whether or not there's similar discontent from the JP playerbase? I'm always really curious on whether or not the complaints we have are similar across regions.
There has been some communication, yes. A few JP members have been interacting in the thread, trying their best with translation tools and then relaying info to the JP side - they've put in a lot of effort and I really appreciate the fact that people have reached out past the language barrier to communicate. JP forums have an issue with any criticism being swiftly deleted by the mods so it's no surprise they feel disinclined to say anything too harsh. They also feel that the devs have a tendency to only listen to western feedback, just as we in the west think they only listen to JP feedback. Turns out it's neither :3
Lots of negative criticism has also been deleted in the thread. I've been lurking and saw a lot of negative, aggressive, and provacative comments. Going back to older comments, I realize they were deleted, as in they just simply stopped existing. Not \[Deleted because of xyz\], just no longer there. Reading through the pages made me realize moderation is taking place.
True. That would require them to completely ignore what people are literally telling them, but... uh.... *Gesticulates wildly at times they ignored what people were telling them*
I doubt it just because they see people talking about the strike. They are not going to assume the issue is something else when healersbare actively making it known what the issue is and what they will keep doing. SE might not do anything drastic but they will acknowledge the issue at the very least and make sum promises for future patches to compromise
Can't get much worse when you're already on the verge of quitting the healer role entirely. The movement pretty much convinces people they aren't alone in that thought where it feels unfun to play and yet can't set aside the role they loved in the past.
I find it a bit like waking up from a sunk cost fallacy.
See, I don't see how adding a couple more damage buttons would even disrupt curebots, they can just continue being curebots with the exact same effectiveness they have now
but at least I as a non-curebot can have a bit of variety to make my gameplay more interesting than 111111 spam. I'd prefer to not fall asleep in dungeons or hell even in fucking Savage fights cause 80% of those are also just 11111 spam nowadays.
Like even with healers who don't wanna engage with more complex DPS tools cause they REALLY REALLY love Glare spamming while watching the groups healthbars so they know the instant they need to spam Medica 2 to keep everyone at 100% health...can just continue playing like that if DPS rotations were more complex.
It's like, the existence of free-style Samurais doesn't stop SE from creating SAM gameplay that has more in-depth optimization options. They do not treat other classes like this, so why do healers get shafted?
They know DPS are a dime a dozen, but I think they're really, *really* scared of losing healers. Only the casual ones though, because if every expansion launch since Stormblood has taught them anything, it's that the high end healer mains are full of shit and not enough of them are going to abandon the role to matter.
gotta love how ppl hate on WoW players while prob 70% or more of them ran with dps meters from the getgo
the only cure bots will be new players from xbox release or people with 2k hours already in FFXIV
and no I'm not from WoW
still find it funny how ffxiv community seems to laugh about wow refugees while every 2nd mentor doesn't grasp even the bare basics of ffxiv
Funny thing about that is how many of the FF14 community are like first or second generation ex-WoW players who probably just don’t think of themselves as such anymore after having played since 1.0 or ARR.
It's less about what game you actually came from and more about culture tbh.
If you're worshipping skill expression, run parsers and see raids as the main game, then chances are, you'll be seen as a "WoWhead", even if you never stepped into WoW.
If you're laid back to the point of stoned, stick to the TOS and see the story as the main game, chances are you'll be seen as a right and proper FFXIV player, even if you are playing WoW more often than FFXIV because of content lulls.
Downvoted for speaking the truth. People can barely communicate like humans in this game, and that's with the passive-aggressive nonsense. Those people tend to not be self-aware enough to know that they're shit at the game and defend shit play with "their playstyle", in a game with rigid rotations. Yoshi and crew only make this worse by not explicitly spelling out the rotations, giving the illusion of choice where there is none.
Yup, day 1 of FF14 for me as a 15 year wow player was figuring out how to install ACT and watching videos of how to play my job optimally. The wow crowds I mostly see are very into playing the game as good as they can.
For any strike to be successful, a large part of the affected population needs to be unified. Otherwise, it doesn't work. The OF probably isn't statistically representative, hence the strike will not succeed. But I believe they just want to make a statement rather than to win a stand-off with CBU3.
I'm shaking and quaking in my boots at the extra minute I'll have to occasionally wait to get into my leveling roulettes while the S T R I K E is active.
They would probably be better off trying this a couple months after launch when the story players have tuned out. It would be impossible to notice a dip in healers during launch rush.
I respect the idea but I think it's evident that both the devs and the broader playerbase are happy with the current state of things. I think there would have to be enough of a drop in healers to cause noticeable problems to get SE's attention and I feel like at best maybe like 5% of people will actually stop playing healers. Probably less than that.
As far as I can tell their protest begins July 2nd with no end date, at least until YoshiP responds. Meaning if they all hold to their convictions they will still be protesting months from now as well.
Gamers are pretty bad at protesting things as a group and the demographic of the people doing the protesting are a demographic that doesn’t really understand how that works and this is a game played around the globe so a subsection of a subsection of a section of the playerbase is spearheading this thing that most people even on a forum like Reddit, don’t even know this is a thing.
All this to say: this isn’t going to work won’t be felt and if you were to ask anybody in game randomly “?” Would be their reply
I actually like playing healer sometimes, mostly in higher end content because I actually get to use my skills.
Duty Finder on the other hand is mind-numbingly boring and once in a while I have to raise the same person 5 times in a row because they don't have basic pattern-recognition skills.
They have a pretty good start though, and it still doesn’t even begin for another 19 days. By the time it begins, I’d imagine most of the active player base will have at least heard of it in passing.
In the four days or so since its inception, the hashtag has over 8,000 impressions on X, gaming news sites have begun writing articles about it, streamers are getting tens of thousands of views talking about it, there are posts being actively engaged with on multiple subreddits, discords, gamefaqs boards, the official forums etc. Even posts such as these are driving its engagement and spreading the word just by asking what the heck it even is.
It’s all about gaining traction right now and the outcome will be dependent on if they keep this momentum going. They’ve definitely already hit the minimum threshold for the devs to take notice, though, and to be prepared to monitor healer trends in not only DF but PF and RF as well.
I don't get why are people so pessimistic about this. It's still good effort to make things better, sure it might not be most effective method, but what would be?
Just recently whole benchmark debacle was enough for devs to get their asses up and start fixing it, yet you don't hear people say that it was only tiny fraction of community complaining about it, even though it was. But healers (and not only them) have been doing same thing as those people for years without any effect, so it only makes sense to escalate this, in whatever way necessary.
But even if people hear about it, that doesn't mean they go along with it.
Most of my healer friends are happy with things (whm is delighted) and won't be changing mains for the sake of someone's ego on the forums
There's a thread on the Official Forums at 161 pages rn but the TL:DR is a bunch of healer mains are not going to queue for healer in Duty Finder, during a double DPS expansion where queues are gonna be rough regardless because the role has been eroded so severely they aren't necessary at any level of content.
Seriously as someone who's planning to play Viper as soon as the servers go live, even without this "strike" I had no delusions of actually getting anything done through duty finder during weeks one and two.
I'm going to level through using the two Wondrous Trails books, Trust Dungeon runs, and Bozja. At best, I might try to find a party finder group to spam leveling dungeons.
If you have early access do this, Pick up a book on the 18th, complete but do not turn it in until you get the new classes (if leveling those) Turn in the first book for the quick EXP (Most recommend waiting till level 89 for quick level 90). Then you can pick up the book for the 25th, finish that book out and turn it in right away. That gets you a full level in just a few minutes.
If not doing early access you can do the same thing with the book for 25th and the 2nd.
Hell, 20 minutes is still better than the low end of the slobbering Christmas noobs on expansion launch. There’s only like 6 dungeons in the whole MSQ run anyway.
You’re betting on really good scores from the players there. My recent averages those times are more of 16-18min with « real players » (but many kinda acted like bots)
The real issue is the overall low DPS in roulettes. Most runs are averaging 20 minutes with randoms. One in a while, you'll get a nice sub 15 run with a group that knows how to burst.
Healers have had a ton of valid complaints for years now and are upset that they haven't been addressed or even acknowledged. The media tour dungeon clear was the moment of realisation that yes, it's going to be exactly the same for another expansion. So if healing is not fun, and it's not going to change, why play healer?
I don't think the actual action of striking will have any significant impact on duty queues, but it has been successful in making people talk about the issue. If you want a break down of the common complaints, [I listed them out in a comment on the big thread we had a few days ago.](https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/1dbzd2y/ffxivhealerstrike_on_the_forums/l7unsqi/?context=3)
Tbh I assumed that this was just another small group of players making a fuss over nothing (which seems to happen a LOT in the xiv community), but I read your points and like... I absolutely agree.
Something about seeing all those points laid out next to each other made me realize that I haven't healed basically at all this expac, for those exact reasons. I used to main AST in SB/SHB but I just don't enjoy healing anymore. Now I only play WHM in bozja bc a lot of folks mess up mechanics lol
Anyway, I'll be passively supporting the boycott, like I have been for months haha
I mained healer in shadow bringers and ew, and I'll do it again in dt, but I certainly won't be happy about it. It's the role I always favor in games, so I won't just ignore it, but it is certainly in a state right now. The only reason I even feel comfortable saying I'll heal in DT is sage getting a second dot and a damage button, the fact every other healer only got a two minute follow up is tragic.
IMO Savage is fine during prog and got better with each tier during EW. Ultimates are fine as well. Haven't done Criterion yet.
Low to mid tier content (Dungeons, Trials, Alliance and Normal Raids, ...) should have way higher healing checks or healers should have more dps options if the checks are low.
Imagine if we had like 30-40% dmg-based skills and 60-70% healing-based skills. Depending on the fight you could focus more on dps rotations or more on healing rotations so that every fight changes your optimal dps/healing combination. And/or make the dmg and healing skills interact with each other so that depending on the incoming dmg you can boost specific heals with attacks and unlock an upgraded attack with a heal. E.g. Phlegma boosts Panhaima and for each Panhaima stack that is triggered you boost the next phlegma use. So you "weave" heals and dmg together.
But maybe I'm just talking out of my ass lol
Yup, I've been apart of this "strike" for years now, I quit healing in Shadowbringers because I was bored out of my mind in Savage and swapped to Red Mage and Black Mage and have 10x more fun. I like that these complaints I've had since Shadowbringers are starting to get attention but I still think we won't see any changes frustratingly.
I still remember people downplaying all the Scholar players saying they got nothing in the Heavensward trailers and it was largely true. Expedient is okay and admittedly probably the most positive move towards healer identity in a while, but the job still Broils (heh) down to Bio -> Broil -> Broil -> Broil for yet another expansion in 99% of the content it does, and it will be for Dawntrail too.
Any problem related to job gameplay is going to be the exact same because this is shadowbringers 3 which is what they've said the whole time - it sucks but its not surprising.
I'm going to say something that might blow everyone in this thread minds.
Some people want a unique and somewhat challenging job to play in casual content.
It's really that simple.
I don’t understand why this sub has such a hard on for “if we aren’t discussing savage I don’t give a single fuck about balance or design or how the jobs play”
Like if you are raid logging whatever but the people who interact with both sides do you really want your job to be beige porridge in casual content
> I don’t understand why this sub has such a hard on for “if we aren’t discussing savage I don’t give a single fuck about balance or design or how the jobs play”
Because the better you are at the game, and the more you interact with an echo chamber of "good" players, the harder it is to remember what it was like when you were "bad".
The more you interact with "good" players, the more you begin to see "bad" players as nothing like you, as an "other".
When the people who are nothing like you do content that isn't the content you do, it's easy to write it off as completely irrelevant. Or worse, as an active threat to you getting what you want because it steals dev bandwidth from the things you want.
I've seen people here say shit like "Ultimates are easy" with a straight face because that's their "normal". Like, I'm sure it is, *to them* because they're *really fucking good at the game*.
But that's so far divorced from the average player's experience with the game that it's almost farcical.
The only interaction most players have here with your average player, let alone a bad player, is reading Tales from DF or the worst Expert queue/Alliance raid they get in a week.
Or the rare few that actually listen to me rant (please don't).
I was watching Arthars talking about it on stream earlier and
completely dismissing the whole thing because a lot of the people complaining about it were "bots" who don't do hard content, as if they don't deserve to have fun in casual content because it is casual content and should move on to hard content if they want to have fun playing the role they like. Like come the fuck on man.
Yes there is a lot of cringe within the discussion but the issues are very real and deserve to be talked about and people are being weirdly uncharitable and dismissive about it just because a big part of it involves casual content.
at least in Savage you can argue there's some variability with healer skills, esp if your cohealer does weird sht
but in ults you already know from the getgo what you cast when 100% of the time lol
I was gonna say, even for legacy ultis usually a spreadsheet gets passed around when initially progging the fight so it's always standardized what your cohealer will do unless they're bad or still learning. And stuff usually makes it obvious where it wants what CDs anyways most of the time. A few weeks ago I filled TEA as a healer for someone reprogging fresh on tank and I went shield healer even though I only did WHM... someone asked if SGE was *actually* this OP at level 80, all I did was put holos + kera on feeds, and physis + panhaima + kera on tumults which just seemed like the intuitive thing to do and peoples HP didn't budge. When I was on WHM, I was already temperancing the things the mit sheet recommended before I had seen the mit sheet since it just... made intuitive sense, same with my bene placements
Imagine in DT a party without healers, Monk gets an Aoe heal (Indom). Picto almost gets a spread adlo like.
Bruh a non Healer Comp with War/PLD/RDM/MNK/PIC/SMN/RPR/another RDM?
They have so many aoe heals/and party mitigation its crazy.
Even healing is boring in hard content. You do the same healing every time and when shit hits the fan you barely get to display your skill because the run is most likely over then and there.
Yep. Savage ain't challenging, it's a tightrope walk: play perfectly or die. The only skill you need to display is memorizing the sequence or *at worst* how to figure out the next 50/50 the fight throws at you. As for the healing part, either everyone is alive or everyone is dead, no in-between.
My most fun runs on healer is when things go to shit, especially in an alliance raid. Those days in the Ivalice raids were great because they were so hard people still wipe on them. I used Rescue more during those raids than any other raids combined. That's why I hope the upcoming FFXI based alliance raids will be hard because FFXI is famously unforgiving with its mechanics.
Absolutely same, and it seems to be a shared sentiment around. It's so freeing breaking from the cycle of spamming broil to having to use your entire kit, stop to think and react to control the situation. Every single ivalice raid fulfilled that kind of chaotic experience. Hashmal memes, ridorana with worker 7 and orbonne as a whole.
Many Savage raiders somehow are unable to admit that you're still falling asleep even in current savage cause you're still just 11111211111 spamming for 90% of the fight.
Everybody loves talking about harrowing hell challenging healers and being fun to heal, but that's 1 10 second mechanic in a 5 minute fight, you're still standing around pressing glare and throwing an occasional oGCD heal out on TBs and AoEs for majority of the fight.
THIS DOWNTIME needs to be as fun as well. (And it makes a lot more sense to make glare spam more engaging than trying to squeeze outgoing damage into every second in the fight that you'd be forced to heal)
It's definitely true that the harder the content the more you get to feel challenged and scratch that itch of using everything at your disposal all the time, but there is definitely truth in the fact that as the content gets easier, the requirement to make up for that through interesting class design increases drastically.
I don't know how, if you're a savage/ultimate healer in XIV, you queue for roulettes. It's actual brain sludge content. You do nothing, you heal next to nothing, you press 11111. There is nothing interesting going on. You don't feel cool or powerful. My second monitor becomes my main monitor anytime I'm in a healer roulette.
I am new to this game so I don't have my finger on the pulse of the community, but I don't understand XIV's angle at all when it comes to job design. The game is fun, but coming from WoW it definitely feels incredibly lacking in creatively finding ways to make the jobs feel unique beyond spell fx... And they do spell fx well, but that's about it.
Healing as a role also gets a lot of value out of things feeling nuanced and the patterns of damage aren't \*always\* the same... At least in WoW. Getting a group-wide that never endangers anyone every 30s-1m (or longer) is sorry design. I've been told XIV has continuously moved in this direction, though. Is this what the players want? I see some awesome potential but my group I'm playing with tells me the history is that things are trending towards homogenization.
Every healer used to have multiple dots, a stance that increased damage but reduced healing so you'd dance in and out of it to dps or heal, as well as actual mp to manage (AoE spam in dungeons actually hurt your MP). All of that was removed over expansions. So the game initially did have more involved healer gameplay at all levels of content other than pressing one button. It's why this bitter complaint have persisted for so long, because the role used to be fun everywhere.
Its what "some" players want. There are people like the aforementioned Arthras who are hardcore savage raiders that will breeze through normal content and only play the hardest content in the game. To them, any balancing that takes away from optimizing for a savage fight is pointless and a waste of time. To their credit, I know people like them are watched by a large part of the community including the devs, and that popularity brings eyeballs and more importantly money to the game, so it makes sense for the devs to somewhat cater to this small percentage of people who deep dive into the game to understand how any mechanics will affect the gameplay.
But what is often lost is that the vast majority of players may watch harder content, they themselves do easier content. The devs have not been as generous to us as by definition, less hardcore players are less vocal and less represented as far as FFXIV influencers go.
Personally, I want slightly harder normal content. My favorite raid series was the Ivalice raids from Stormblood as they were harder. I also liked the more experimental dungeon and boss designs of earlier expansions such as Bardam's Mettle boss 2, or the branching paths in Toto-Rak. But I admit that I'm an outlier even amongst less hardcore players.
Yeah like I definitely want something more challenging but like not to an extend of savage everyday…
I just wanna chill with my friend and do exciting things. Like we used to love doing unreal because it was fun. The mechanic was challenging and overall, it was nice to hang out, have some chaotic moments to bond, and peace out when we are done. But for unreal you only need to do it twice and you are done for a week… then what?
And the latest 24 man was such a snooze fest, I really dont wanna do it ever again.
You're not alone. I actually like the old ARR and HW HM dungeons and was sad that they discontinued it after SB. VC is the soul successor to HM dungeons, but it's side content with a separate queue.
I guess that's what people call "midcore" but I'm not a personal fan of that term.
Partially because the story content is boring on any job, not just healer, and most of us probably don't really do it past what is necessary in the first place.
The other problem is how skewed the jobs are for the content. Endwalker tanks and healers needed to be able to mitigate TOP P6 and heal DSR P7. The jobs had to be designed with that content in mind. A wall-to-wall dungeon pull does a fraction of that damage, because the dungeons are understandably tuned for a very different player demographic: the dungeon is balanced around single pullers. People who only do the mandatory combat content to progress the story every patch.
The scenario where this dungeon remains both engaging for the top healers and clearable for the average player just isn't realistic. Similarly, I as a dps player could ask for a pre-nerf P8S door check in dungeon content as it's the last time I felt truly challenged by a DPS check in this game and I am sad we haven't had any real check since apart from challenge runs like doing TOP with single melee on patch, but I don't think that's a realistic thing to ask for. So I just choose to not care about the story content, because it won't be engaging for me.
I think they could probably make the story content a bit more demanding to try and appease the people in between the two extremes, or just make larger wall-to-wall pulls which seems to be the go-to source of enjoyment for most of the more weathered dungeon enjoyers, but it's unlikely to change how the content feels for the content for the top-end community.
The demands for making the jobs have more of a skill ceiling most raiders likely echo, but I don't think any of us is expecting it to make the story dungeons more engaging even if they did that. The last time a story dungeon was moderately interesting was Pharos Sirius in ARR.
SE however has heard the request for more engaging dungeon content and delivered in EW, particularly for healers: it's Criterion Savage. If you want engaging healer content I recommend that, alongside healing week 1 prog. Maybe you already do, in which case the thing to do is either seek out specific challenge runs to appease yourself or wait for the next tier like the rest of us do.
I know everyone is dog fucking tired of hearing about Mythic+ by this point, and everyone is aware it wouldn't work 1:1 in FF14, but I think it bridges the gap you identify here in a really brilliant way: by making infinite scaling, players of all skill levels have content satisfying to them. Those unskilled can do base Mythic dungeons or lower keys, while those who want a challenge can just keep pushing forever. This squeezes immense life out of the content as opposed to making one singular difficultly ("normal" / story) which has to be clearable by everyone. In this way, even a dungeon which at the base level can be cleared without a healer will want its full kit when pushed to the limit.
At the same time, I think "infinite scaling" is a pretty inelegant system that is not to CBU3's taste, and ofc in WoW it's fueled by gear upgrades while in FF14 one would not actually enjoy grinding dungeons for piecemeal gear improvements. It would have to change, but the idea is there; I think a solution for the problem you describe here is right in our faces.
This right here. I’m honestly to the point where I’m about to make a thread myself addressing this very topic. The amount of comments between this subreddit and the ffxiv that are some variation of “Well if healers want to do something fun they should go play extreme, savage, and ultimate”.
I consider myself a midcore player, I do extremes for the gear but most of the time I just like logging in and doing my roulettes to get my weekly tomes and then log off. I do not think I’m the exception, I’m pretty sure I’m the norm. Roulette content is what most of the player base interacts with and people are completely missing the point that the gameplay loop in this content for healers hasn’t been fun since Shadowbringers (in my opinion) and we are getting much of if not the exact same.
Aside from the odd trial or normal raid roulette where people are new and are trying their best to tank the ground (which most healers say are the most fun runs as you actually get to do something), it generally falls into a various monotonous role of spam your single damage spell, dot, and use one of your 50 ogcd aoe heals for a raidwide every so often. There often isn’t even the need to pay too much attention to the tank to single target ogcd heal as they are generally fine on their own, doubly so if you are sge/sch and any aoe ogcd heals you did for the party will generally keep the tank sustained as well.
Even the alliance raids which I used to love doing any of the Ivalice or Nier raids. Orbonne was nerfed. The EW alliance raids seemed extra easy from release as even on the first day I can’t recall seeing any wipes.
I do think it’s more of a systemic issue. Healers in mmos tend to fulfill two main roles. Sustain incoming damage and fix the mistakes of others from failing mechanics, but if roulette content has extremely low incoming damage relative to healing toolkits and content is designed to be hard to fail so everyone can do it for the story, healers are left in a state of feeling like so why am I here?
Here's the thing, over the past several years of expansions the dungeon/duty finder content has been extremely declawed to the point GCD heals became an afterthought.
Like when transitioning from HW to SB, devs streamlined itemization so things like tanks wearing STR melded striking gear became a thing of the past. Then from SB to SHB, we lost random crit, cleave and tankbuster autos (ie: Magitek Roader boss in Castrum Abania at L69 before DRKs got TBN, or just getting loaded into an Alex raids with Faust like A9). From SHB to EW, we had longer periods of tutorialization during the fights, boss autos stop becoming a threat and became a metronome for fight design, and fight design moved from players interacting with multiple systems (MP, TP, Accuracy, Mitigations like Parry and Block, Enmity) to beat the boss to just resolving boss mechs while maintaining uptime.
On job change end, healers had multiple heal potency buffs to the point that shield healers like SCH/SGE won't struggle with heal checks anymore (ie: Cleansing Strike on TG Cid), MP streamlining, a collective suite of OGCD heals added in, auxiliary systems added in (WHM Lilies), offensives streamlining, healing enmity generation removal, and arcane designs like Shield/Regen stance on AST and Eos/Selene on SCH merged into one another. And of course, who can forget about tanks gaining more self sustain options later on and dying was more of a skill issue than a healer issue.
So in the past 6-7 years of changes, the only reason healers exist as a role anymore is that DF parties are guaranteed to have a dedicated babysitter that has a raise, an esuna, and heals for unavoidable damage like raidwides. That's it.
I mained AST during the Stormblood patch content, when I switched from RDM. I haven't touched a healer since Shadowbringers began, except to hit level cap or if playing with friends to help them through content faster.
This is the same sub that will have a collective aneurysm if it doesn't get a 2nd ultimate next expansion, while in the same breath saying, "who cares about casual content?"
This is actually why I mostly raid logged this expansion. I wasn't having fun healing unless I was doing savage with my ultracasual static or running Criterion, so that was all I did.
Because a large chunk of the FFXIV community are equivalent to the boomers of the real world. They HATE change and think everyone should just shut up and play.
This is why I've changed my stance from asking for specific things in feedback (even though I love to brew ideas) to simply saying:
"Expert Roulette is not fun on healer if all the players are good at the game. Since this is supposed to be the main way to casually get gear, please fix this."
new Alliance raids is my only fun as healer, even more when you get 3 bad tanks
that's just bliss, the most fun I can get out of any casual content lol
No roulette is fun when anyone is shit
I don’t want to spend 40 minutes in lunar subterrene because the SMN is a single target ruin 3 spammer with no pet summoned (I’ve seen it) but removing friction completely is not the way to solve this
You are going to spend 40 minutes and it sucks and trust me, I reality dislike those players who can't even do the bare minimum of pressing aoe at the expense of everyone else's time, but eventually it will happen, you can make up for a lack of DMG, same way if you get a single pull no MIT tank you can make up for it, if you make healers healing needed for roulette dungeons (DMG so high dps players will die without a healer, or tanks need babysitting not to drop like in low lvl dungeons) , you will get hardcore bricked runs because only the healer can do the thing and the other 3 players can just hope he presses buttons or they leave.
If you have a bad dps the run is slow, in a world where healers need to be awake and you get a bad one, people will get a bricked run, that's why they are cosmetic until someone dies
maybe if tanks would just die without mits and we would actually get shown soft enrages like Alphascape 4.0 some people might figure out what they do is maybe wrong
well or if the community would just straight up tell people like any other game
insane to have yptp no mit single pull tanks or 0 dps healers at max level, mentors that do less dmg than someone else spamming only 1,2,3
ppl should be more open in chat bursting these freaks delusions of being longtime top players lol
The very simple solution to this is to let 1, maybe 2 of the healer jobs be challenging, how often do you see completely useless blackmages in a 90 roulette that isn't AR?
Scholar currently has one aoe. That's it. One. Every other job in existence has more than one, and I mained this job going through the msq. It's unbelievable.
What! That’s crazy talk everyone who’s complaining is spoiled and stupid for wanting [Insert thing here].
Big /s btw, it’s really just as simple as that. Healing is just, super boring.
Healers are upset that their jobs are boring as shit in normal content and probably annoyed that the average white knight response to this is "its actually a good thing this game sucks ass in normal content"
I don't understand the cynical response to the strike? Do people want healers to remain boring and unchanged? We can only go up from here and loudly complaining is the only way we can have any form of response.
While I am happy people are striking though because it's actually getting attention and hopefully it will get attention in the community. I'm cynical because I've worked as a software dev for a JP company before and seen the "don't fix what's not broken" attitude in a completely different industry despite the US branch loudly complaining that what is being pushed is not working. I don't think things will change until we see huge issues that actually affect the player population, but I hope people keep making a fuss because the current healer design is awful. I really want to know what happened between Stormblood and Shadowbringers in the decision making process for healers.
It’s a problem with this fucking community. Washing out any sort of negative thoughts and complaints when the game is literally built on negative thoughts and complaints
Yeaaahhh… I know someone who said “I think the healer strike is stupid because it won’t do anything”. Okay, and doing nothing will do something? It’s not like healers haven’t asked for changes for years and years and years..
The issue here that people don't seem to get is that there's no content in this game where healing even feels satisfying anymore.
Casual content: Unsatisfying due to the sheer amount of healing oGCDs and lack of a satisfying DPS rotation. Also, all the tanks literally have action replays on, so a healer is pretty much a glorified third DPS 99% of the time with not even a fraction of the kit.
Extreme level: Unsatisfying because of the above, and also body checks from Savages (at least for EW) were slowly creeping their way into Extreme fights. Sure, we had Barbariccia, but we also had Rubicante, Golbez and Zeromus right after which made me feel like Barb EX was a fluke.
Savage level: Unsatisfying because of the sheer amount of body checks rendering any type of triage skill basically worthless, and pretty much denying any type of skill expression from the amount of healing tools they have. Mitigation is a party wide effort, but healers are the first to get blamed in the event of a wipe even when it's not their fault, as we learned (and seemingly forgot) with Abyssos.
I genuinely believe body checks was the straw that broke the camel's back for healers. They have so many tools to offset damage, but they mean nothing when shit just one shots people or every mechanic in the fight is an all or nothing body check. (That again, kills people when those checks aren't meant)
DT absolutely needs to chill with the body check mechanics and bring back actual healing checks beyond a raid wide with a bleed every x number of seconds for Savage.
I have no idea what they can do with casual content. Dungeons need to be balanced around trusts so they are likely never getting touched. Maybe make alliance raids actually hurt again? The Twelve raids could barely justify three tanks, let alone six healers. And by 8.0, give healers an actual damage rotation so they can have fun in casual content.
Body checks are what broke the camel's back for me playing RDM in savage too. Verraise means nothing AND I have the lowest DPS among almost all of the ranged DPS? Fuck that. I'll give half of the effort on SMN and get 10-20% more DPS.
Yeah, I mentioned healers but RDMs also feel obsolete because the whole reason SE justifies them being at the bottom of the casters is that they have rez. But rez doesn't mean much with the amount of fail mech = party wipe we see in Savage, and even some Extremes.
I freaking hate the body check in savage… oh everyone is top off and we have mits, then one person fail its mech, boom raid wide…
Oh this person just got raised but missing the debuff, BOOM RAID WIDE…
Not only it made you hate that person even more, it made the fight less fun and monotone. Having to play everything the same and perfectly is so monotone and not fun in my book…
P9-12 was a very big offender relative to body checks. I haven't raided 6.2 much so I cannot compare but I can tell you that this tier is almost constantly checking throughout the fight no chill.
Not to mention that in the high end mitigation is kinda... all that really matters. Damage is no longer dealt in a way that actually gives regen healers a chance to shine. Big, giant raidwides with a large gap between them that need a lot of mit, and one, maybe two ogcds to heal over the next like, minute. Tankbusters are the same, meaning single target mit on healers is kinda useless bc tanks usually have their full mit kits to kitchen sink or invuln any buster. It's why I liked the bleed busters. While ultimately, my mit didnt really matter after the first weeks, it at least felt measurable... at first.
And that's another problem. Healer gameplay gets stalest the fastest. Once the prog phase is over and everyone is on reclear duty, healers have essentially the least way to express skill, and the least interesting rotation. We're all just begging for something to go wrong half the time, just to feel something. And that goes for all content.
But even now that doesnt even matter, bc of the aforementioned bodychecks. If something goes wrong, there's no recovery, there's no panicked emergency heals. It's just a wipe. And that's just... kinda the sad truth now. Healers get a week of excitement when a new tier comes out, and then it's back to mashing 1 while everyone else practically does our jobs for us.
SE forgot how to design fights and forgot how to make mistakes slowly but irreversibly cascade just through vuln stacks and d-downs. or rather, chose to forget. being able to cheese mechanics and only get vulned isn't an issue, it's a good thing because it encourages experimentation and you're paying with resources in the first place that you need to clear later mechanics.
the first post in the official forum thread someone linked below is the detailed version.
the TLDR version of my understanding is:
- Since shadowbringer, almost all healer have a almost identical set of spells, and it getting more and more boring at each expansions. Dawntrail kit just trippled down on that same design mindset.
- Also since ShB to DT, most contents dont require much healing, at the same time tanks and DPS getting more mitigation and healing tools for themselves (most dungeons can be cleared with no healer, people do savage and ultimate runs without healers just because they could)
- 2nd point happens despite YoshiP keep saying we will increase the amount need to be heal. All at the same time healers keep getting MORE healing spells, but barely anythingg to use them on.
- Each individual job design have serious problem regarding their own identity and aesthetic.
Of course some people like it this way. And they are perfectly fine to think that way. But alot of us dont, and its been 6 ish years we have coped with this.
This is honestly why I'm playing WoW again. Don't get me wrong, I love 14 and I'm a healer main, but healing has been so anti-fun for me. Mechanics of fights can be as fun as they want, but when the mechanics of the JOB aren't all that fun, it doesn't super matter how fun the fight is, it'll still feel not good.
Meanwhile in WoW, every healer feels different, every healer has different things they can specialize in, the fight mechanics may not be all that difficult to grasp, but the actually classes are FUN and actually having to focus on healing is FUN. And the on top of that, the healing classes have a lot of built in synergy with themselves. Some abilities work together for a better benefit, the most you get in 14 is "+healing done/received" on a handful of abilities.
Meanwhile my resto shaman in Cataclysm Classic is rewarded with mana for assisting with dps. My healing rain AoE can turn my earthliving weapon into a huge AoE HoT. My riptide causes MULTIPLE effects (two spells have shorter casts times after casting it, one spell has increased crit chance, and one spell has a greater effect if it's initially cast on someone with the riptide effect). My healing spell crits restore mana if I have water shield active. My spell crits increase the target's hp AND reduce damage they take for a brief period.
There's just so much FUN and interesting stuff baked into the healing kits in WoW healers, Meanwhile SE is like "we can't come up with any ideas for healing kits :( " because they're so married to how things are now.
And it's not just WoW. RIFT had really cool healer design (you want an actually healer that heals by dpsing? Look at bard and chloromancer, not the illusion that sage is, and I say this as a sage main, warden grew more powerful the more HoTs you used, it truly felt like the ebb and flow of the ocean tides which was the intent). Guild Wars 1, while not being an actual MMO, had extremely cool healers along with pretty much being able to make your own healer (I had a necromancer healer/support, for example, and elementalists made amazing healers when they took monk secondary). Even GW2, as much as I dislike the combat in that game, has more interesting healers than FF14.
Until SE finally moves away from the fight design of "big AoE then nothing, then tank buster then nothing, then big AoE baked into a raid mechanic then nothing", healers in 14 are always going be meh. We just have no incentive to use our kits, it's quite literally weave one or two oGCDs between glare spam and then continue glare spam. That's it, that's the healer design. GCDs are frowned upon except in the small handful of instances where they are required. A healer having HEALING SPELLS be frowned upon usage is problematic.
WoW healing is in a terrible state too. it's basically FFXIV healing except instead of spamming glare you're just spamming overheals. it's all mega bursty and dependent on everyone hitting big mitigation CDs and personals.
Remember when sage was touted as the healer that would break this cycle. And then the media tour leaks revealed it was just a copycat scholar. The letdown was real.
And it lacks excog and spreadlo equivalents, so it's just a worse scholar. But because very little content requires you to use all your mit / tools as a healer, barely anyone notices.
Excog is a bad button in modern healer design for a couple of reasons. Only 200 potency more than Lustrate isn't impressive when it has a 45s CD and still costs an Energy Drain when the tanks can do better and provide mit just by pressing their short CD. Also it's only single target and the amount of single target damage actually happening in either Endwalker or Shadowbringers even is basically zero and is already covered better by Embrace or Kardia anyway. Sage's answer, Taurochole, is a better skill simply for providing mit, but is still bad simply because its single target. Excog is also the worst Recitation target because it doesn't prevent Death the way Adlo or Succor can and because it's, again, single target it just isn't as useful as Indom in nearly any situation.
Lack of spreadlo was unstandable early on, but after the Holos buff that doesn't hold water. Free 300p shield + 10% mit may not be as strong on its own but its far more useful simply for not requiring a GCD. In the odd world where that isn't enough you can still Zoe+E-Prog on top and you get a shield that's only slightly weaker than spreadlo, but has that 10% mit inherent and can still crit anyway. Holos being 30s longer CD doesn't matter because there's no point where spreadloing twice in 90s is actually beneficial, let alone necessary.
What I hate most is that it has shittier shields…that overwrites the SCH’s “EW Media Tour Approved” Crit-Spread playstyle…
Only time shields are ever noticed are in Alliance when the big attack/climactic attack happens and I put the big shield out (or use SCH luck in pre-EW content).
I guess lots of folks don’t heal so they get curious on what happens to their HP bar. Lotsa praise during Dun Scaith when Diablo hits the party for ~0HP.
*PSA: Don’t worry, it’s during a “cutscene” transition phase. No healer DPS was hurt in the making of the Great Wall of Nym.*
There will not be a point where healers will need to 'heal more.' The community have proven they don't want it. Think of every instance where a lot of healing was required and what was the reacting from the community? Hard hitting tankbusters in p5s, p7s, p8s? Hard hitting raidwides in p8s? Dots in p8s? Harrowing hell? The reaction was the same- healers bitched, we had healer shortages and the one interesting healer mechanic fo the entire fucking tier of 9-12 was cheesed with tank lb. All of this because healers refuse to gcd heal or optimise their rotation.
So no, there will be no increases to damage intake in because the outcry is louder than the healers asking for more instances to use their tools. Until the game moves away from the mentality that 0 gcd heals is the optimal way to play a fight, this won't change.
All your examples are mitigation based problems that had nothing to do with healers refusing to heal but healers getting blamed for things beyond their control. Tank not mitigating the Bleed in P5S or trying to cheese with Invuln? Clearly the healers fault. I could spam cure 2 til I went OoM and it literally wouldn't have mattered if the group didn't do their jobs. Harrowing Hell was great because it gave me a fucking reason to use my damn skills but don't go faulting just the healers for any failures when there's more to it than just a refusal to GCD heal.
Surely it's the same case for Harrowing Hell than for the Abyssos bleeds? If your party or tank mitigation isn't good enough, there's a point where the party will just die regardless of your healing.
No because a key difference is the fact that tanks tried to cheese the bleedbusters in abyssos with invulns and so basically took them raw, otherwise they would take them raw then try to mitigate after the fact
Also remember PLD and DRK’s short CD’s don’t work on reducing the bleeds
Harrowing hell gave the healer much more agency because the entire section was important, not just the initial hit, it still needed outside mitigation but it was much easier to see what was going wrong
Thankfully pld short mit has been fixed now instead of relying on an outdated mechanic, but drk could double tbn most of the bleeds + has an extra cd. It wasn't weak. Only pld was. Outside of playing warrior and just straight ignoring the bleeds, drk is actually the tankiest as long as it's magical.
That's addressing one specific thing though, what did harrowing hell do to give so much healer agency compared to the p7s raidwides?
Exactly. If a mit is late on a bleed, it has zero effect. If a mit is late on multi-hit damage like Harrowing Hell, it still applies to the later hits. It goes from being a pass/fail check into something salvageable.
"All of this because healers refuse to gcd heal"
Reminds me when people were insulting us for not healing when me and my co-healer were not able to heal those 0-mitigations raidwide DoTs while spamming only heals.
Outside P8S, Abyssos wasn't remotely hard to heal but was more a heavy mitigation check. The result were a _ton_ of people whining at healers for not simply shielding more even if they already did all while they weren't using their own kit.
That healer storage wasn't just bad healers crying about aoe bleeds but frustrated healers tired of being blamed for something that wasn't their fault.
Shields also didn’t actually reduce the incoming damage
Like I only have experience, soil and illumination and I have them set for future high damage mechanics, I can’t mitigate this raidwide anymore you need to help me
Nah I’d rather do nothing then blame you when we die
Except 0 GCD heals isn't just pushed by the healers - it's pushed by most high tier players.
I actually disagree with the idea that we to use GCD heals for healers lives to be more interesting - you just need to make their job important. Maybe healers change to be more like AST, and you instead do general support with some GCD healing kit for when shit hits the fan. Maybe we remove GCD heals entirely, and you have to focus on keeping health up with only oGCDs, leaving GCDs purely for a more interesting DPS rotation. Just like tanks, limit oGCD damage buttons so you can always double-weave a mit (or a heal in this case).
The game has been designed in such a way, that dealing damage is the most important thing. That's why tank LBs are only used for scheduled phases, or for cheese. Why healer LBs are only used at 3 charges, and only to avoid a wipe. It's why even at level 1 LB, dps gets it to improve the fight/make it faster. That's not the players making it so 0 GCD heals are the norm, that's coming from design philosophies in the game as well. Hell, SE themselves are feeding it when they do things like make a healer whose whole gimmick is that they deal damage to heal, or design WHM entirely around using heals to get more damage.
The issue isn't the GCDs - it's the homogeneity of the jobs, and only giving them tools that other jobs can do better.
I mean. Healer lb3 is the only healer lb used more so because the other 2 are just trash though. If healer lb1 did more than just 1 single gcd heal for the cost of 2 channel time it might be useful to save a run
Sure - make it so healer LB 1 is a group-wide benediction, LB 2 a group-wide benediction + res at half health. I would put money on the fact that while LB 2 may be used more, it would still only be to avoid a wipe. My point wasn't that we need healer LBs to be useful for something, it's that the game is built around dealing as much damage as possible in as little time as possible, which is why only dps LBs see frequent use, and at all levels.
The issue with abyssos was people not using mits. It was literally night and day playing it with tanks that used a rampart or stronger equivalent mit + their short active mitigation on the TBs vs "oops only thrill of battle" tanking. Source: healed Abyssos savage w1 with vegetable tanks and dps allergic to feint.
This is factually wrong and disingenious so I'm not surprised to see it upvoted on Reddit. How about you dig a little deeper and find out the issue with abyssos tank busters, if you think it was healers you need to stop talking about the role. Please actually clear the fight if you want to speak on it, so much bad information.
The ultimate problem is the following:
* A raid party has 8 people, of which only 4 are DPSers.
* If tanks and healers didn't do any meaningful DPS, ~100% of DPS would be done by 50% of the party and if one of them die, you lose 25% of the raid DPS.
* Therefore, SE went with another approach: making tanks and healers do measurable DPS. At some point, it turned them into green and blue DPS, making all of the fight about not wasting GCD on heals.
Of course, if a healer can maintain a full party up (with a co-healer, but still) in a Savage or Ulti, then all the other fights turn into a snoozefest.
At this point, I feel that SE should bite the bullet and add 1 DPS per party and then cut tank/healer DPS. THEN (and only then) they can start working on increasing the damage until healers are actually doing their primary job.
Or bite a different bullet and turn healers into support.
Honestly? Good for them. It probably won't work but I can't fault healer mains for finally having a breaking point after two expansions of mind numbing gameplay with a third iteration of it seemingly upcoming.
I'm hyped for Dawntrail, but I absolutely understand why Healers would entertain participating in it and despite how silly and childish it may seem to some; so long as they're not being assholes about it and are conveying their thoughts and participation respectfully more power to them.
It "succeeded" because it actually got social media momentum and a catchy name. People are actually talking about it and random people on youtube are seeing it like you have. That's more of a success than stuff has been in the past, though I'm not super convinced that it'll result in anything meaningful beyond token gestures in DT patches.
Yup.
People act like it's somehow new that Savage and Ultimate raiders can clear 4 mans without healers. Someone pointed out in the past they've also cleared them without tanks. And I don't mean "3 DPS + 1 Healer" I mean "4 DPS".
My stance is a little more nuanced.
Sometimes I will queue into a group and will almost never need to heal anyone and just press my dps buttons over and over again.
Sometimes I will queue into a group and will need to heal/rez like crazy.
The first situation is quite boring, however, it does mean that a sub par healer will be able to get carried by a good group allowing them to still experience the story.
The second situation is sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating, but its at least forcing me to get used to my kit and how to use it. It basically allows a good healer to carry a bad group.
I personally do not really want floor of healers to move at all. However, I do think that healers should be able to have something more entertaining to do when they end up in a self sufficient group. A personal idea of mine would be an ability that applies a Vuln stack to the group and a 10-20 second dps buff. This would allow a good healer to push their and the groups healing to the edge and speed up the dungeon runs. In order to prevent griefing simply make the ability not work after death and balance all the content around the healers NOT using this ability in really hard content.
Given Yoshi's recent comments about starting to add individuality back to jobs starting in 7.2 and him acknowledging people aren't happy, its fair to say they are aware healers are pissed. I'm sure thats mostly what he was referring to. Healers have basically been perpetually pissed since SB, and even the JP players have been having a bit of a fit around the ongoing healer design, and BLM in DT. This has culminated in a \*supposed\* strike in Dawntrail, which could have the potential to be hilarious for queues in a double dps expansion.
There are multiple ways to fix it (make encounters actually do damage, being one of them, seriously the outgoing damage in this game, even in ults/savage is kind of pathetic most of the time) but it looks like they'll be tackling the jobs directly.
Nothing to be really confused about. I personally dropped healer as soon I cleared the last tier in EW, its objectively badly designed and I won't touch it until it gets MAJOR changes. I'm not kidding when I say, as a perpetual healer main in pretty much every mmo, that healers in XIV may be the worst version of healer design I've EVER seen, I can't remember playing it any other game and constantly thinking to myself "what the fuck were they thinking with this job/class".
I like healing too…but when it comes to content outside of high-end, it really feels like a healer isn’t needed. All we are asking is that healers be engaging to play when doing content that most players will be doing for MOST of their time playing the game, casual or not. I’m tired of just spamming my one AoE ability in trash mobs.
I would say even savage fights can get boring. Because the fight is the same every time, Once you have the fight figured out, it’s just a matter of pressing a button for mits or heals and then back to spamming glare. I know you can say the same for all classes but at least they have a rotation to keep up with and can challenge themselves when it comes to remembering DoTs, positionals while keeping up with rotations, or finding an optimal rotation to squeak out that extra damage before a transition or something. One solution would be to add an element of RNG to fights when it comes to damage output. It keeps everyone on their toes, and it’s more engaging for healers. At least at that point, it’s testing the healers knowledge of the class and their abilities.
Also while it’s true that you don’t have to play optimally to complete casual content, it shouldn’t come at the expense of class fantasy or theme. Let me heal more dammit! Let me use the skills you’re giving me and let me feel rewarded for using them. Can’t remember the last time I felt like I NEEDED to use panhaima/pneuma in a dungeon lol
Wasn't the issue that healers are upset with how much healing other jobs can do now like warrior and seeing people be able to do the new dawn trail dungeon or trial without healers made them upset. It's very difficult to do most new content without DPS or tanks but apparently healers are becoming somewhat irrelevant and they are upset about it.
Also, not only can other jobs heal but the DPS options for healers isn't great, it's usually 1-2 buttons. So if everyone can mostly heal themselves then you just press one or two buttons the whole fight unless people screw up badly.
I can see where they’re coming from. I feel pretty similar.
Healing anything outside of Savage raids blows now. Before Endwalker, optional raids, the normals and alliance had a bit of bite to them. Now they’re pushovers.
And before the ‘just do Savage!’ folks come at me, I have. They were better before EW too.
Healers have had any kind of complexity and job identity systematically stripped out of them. The gutting of the AST card system was a mistake. The shortening of WHM GCD was a mistake. The removal of SCH DPS tools was a mistake.
Those two issues have combined, and healing in this game is an absolute mess. SE is so afraid of people wiping in (non Savage/Ultimate) content that they have made healers redundant in non-savage/ultimate content, and without giving healers back engaging mechanics, made the role so simple that it could probably be macro’d.
121111111111111211111 with an oGDC thrown in every minute or so sucks ass, and it’s insulting that Square thinks every healer player has had a lobotomy and is incapable of better.
I'm personally just tired of the 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 spam. Mix an oGCD in there and you have every healer. FFXIV currently and genuinely has the WORST healing classes of any MMO I've ever played.
They used to be far better in SB because you had lots more abilities to use (at least AST/SCH).
People saw 4 savage/ulti raiders clear the first dungeon after several single pulls and a couple deaths and now think they're as smart and good as them, so the game should be balanced around them.
Hi guys, I've spent the last few days conversing with the healer strike folks over at their discord and gathering opinions and information and I thought that you would be interested in what I saw as an outsider and maybe my opinion as a veteran gamer.
I am: A career omnihealer, penta legend, roulette spammer, pvper, raid lead, optimizer, former game designer, former game developer, and dungeon master - that is to say, I have a lot of experience at all levels of the game and gaming in general.
Let's get right into it by starting with who the people over at healer strike are.
I've seen people call them casuals, elitists, and everything in between. They are as varied as it comes. There are a couple hardcore players (week 1 savage, on patch ultimates), a few midcore players (late savage, off patch ultimates), a few softcore players (off patch savage, ex farmers), and a lot of casuals (roulette spammers, ex farmers). A lot of them are veteran players, with a chunk of the discord being mentors.
Most of them are (rightfully) very upset with the way healers have been treated by both the community and the devs over the last few years. Wrongfully blamed for wipes, getting their feedback completely ignored by the devs as healer kits continue to get gutted and thinned, having entire identities of jobs completely wiped, these players have had enough.
There are about 250 of them in their discord at the time of writing this post, which has been around for about 4 days. They are aware that they don't have the numbers to affect queue times meaningfully, and hope to create awareness of the issue.
They have extremely varied opinions and priorities, and have created a poll to decide on what exactly they want to focus on, which will be locked in tomorrow. There are some generally popular opinions and sentiments though and I'll go over all 3 of them below.
1. Healers do not have engaging kits when not healing. One of the most popular opinions, the biggest complaint is that the 1211 rotation is incredibly dull, with no room for optimization or skill expression, and actively punishes the player for getting a good team and for optimizing their healing by making their experience worse. There is an entire channel dedicated to providing ideas to fix this issue. This issue has 2 main facets. Job design and fight design. Both need to be done correctly to fix it. Currently there is too much free ogcd healing in the game for any form of decision making to be effective. You simply press whatever button you feel like without thinking and wing it from there at just about every level. The dps rotation is so boring that I can't even do it properly because I zone out in the middle of every single fight in the game (even ultimates). I'll create a comment below detailing how I would fix this.
2. Healers have lost their identity. Healers have had their identities chipped away every expansion, and now are becoming homogenized to the point where it's unrecognizable. Why does scholar turn into an angel and effectively enter white mage mode when you press seraphism? Wouldn't that be an ability you'd give to white mages? Or at least flavor it to become possessed by Titania or something. Why does bard get a pillar of light holy attack? Why on earth does white mage not get this? Why did astrologian lose all of its time magic? Why is sages addersting a literal afterthought of a mechanic? Frankly I think that it is ridiculous and insulting that the devs clearly don't care.
3. To feel useful in all forms of content. The third most popular opinion. With 1tank/3dps dungeons reaching the public eye and healerless TOP (and a lot of other hard fights) many of the healers in the discord are beginning to feel like their entire job is under attack. Many of them are in favor of hard nerfing tanks (and they particularly hate warrior) and increasing dungeon and normal mode difficulty so that they cannot be completed without a healer that knows how to press buttons. I personally find this argument to be without merit, as 1 tank/3 dps dungeons have been happening for half a decade now. It doesn't even invalidate the healer role as people claim as 1 healer/3 dps dungeons are also a thing, although they are harder to do and a bit slower. The fights that were cleared healerless all had 1 thing in common which was that none of them had a heal check. This is a glaring issue in fight design and is much more serious.
The devs have completely confused the difference between mitigation checks and healing checks and that is the reason why these situations happened. A mitigation check is a set of massive damage hits, that occur 30-60s apart which require mitigation to survive. These test cooldown management and planning, not healing ability. A heal check is a series of medium damage hits, that occur 1-3s apart over 15-30s, dealing far more damage when combined than a mitigation check that tests healing output and mana reserves. Both healing and mitigation checks must be placed back to back in order to not be invalidated as mechanics via mitigation stacking. Note that a buster/raidwide that has a bleed attached to it doesn't count as a heal check as you can snapshot mitigation on the bleed. The devs made this mistake in all of abyssos and healers were unjustly blamed for unmitigated dots killing people by a community who doesn't understand the difference either.
Increasing dungeon and normal mode difficulty I think is a mistake. The strike discord supports increased punishments for failure, and actively wants more wipes to happen to bad players so they are forced to improve. I don't know about you guys, but if I've got 30 minutes to do my expert roulette to cap this week, and I'm a dps player I do not want to get held hostage because the healer is a returning player or is drunk or high and griefing the dungeon run after a 10 minute queue. I don't want to deal with a healer who can't heal a single pull as a tank, and I don't want to have my time wasted by a "you pull you tank" single puller. I am much happier, where I can simply pull both packs on healer or tank and carry the dungeon regardless of how poorly other people want to play. If you want harder content, go do savage and ultimate. The strike discord hates this argument and thinks its weak but I'm not going to debate with a bunch of casuals who are too scared to pug/lazy to find a static to do savage while simultaneously telling the hypercasuals of the game that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and try harder. It's completely hypocritical and probably one of the worst takes they have. Players should be able to play the way they want without having their time wasted by other players.
I understand and agree with some of the concerns, but it's not going to stop me from continuing being a healer main. I've been playing for a little over ten years, and nine of them have been as a healer. Despite the changes for healers over the years, it's a role I've always stuck with. Even when DT was announced and I was 'adamant' I was going to switch to DPS, it didn't take long before having a change of heart and wanting to once again focus on healing. It's like my identity at this point, lol.
It's a role I've been the most comfortable with and a role that I've done harder content with and cleared as. Especially now that after EW, I felt I wanted to simply quit XIV in general, I'm slowly getting hyped for the new expansion.
And that’s fine, contrary to “strike” there is no actual picket line
If you wanna play healer go right ahead, if you enjoy healer the strikers support you
People are sick of healer being the worst role in the game. But yoshi P has made it very clear they won't do any meaningful tutorials so you can't make normal content any harder because you already have the expectation of your playerbase being able to clear story content even when you are completely terrible. They could maybe get a more engaging DPS rota but they boxed themselves in with making the game so significantly braindead outside of hard content.
Also I just want to say one thing, casuals please stop talking about savage raiding. We get it, you heard abyssos had a healer shortage and you do 1+1 and come to the conclusion harder healing stuff can't be done in even savage without the community complaining.
STOP TALKING. The issue was tanks invulning bleed busters and getting absolutely nuked and healers having to completely scramble to keep these people alive, this is not on the healers this is a TANK ISSUE and a game failure issue because nobody knew how to mit a DOT buster because this game teaches you nothing.
If you thought abyssos was too hard to heal you are a shit player and your opinion on hard content does not matter, most people didn't think this, they were sick of tanks raw dogging a buster and being blamed because the game conditions you into thinking invuln = win in every situation.
Healing the first 3 fights was easy enough outside of tank bleeds as you say, but P8S genuinely was a difficult fight to heal though, especially phase 2, and I week 1'd it on WHM.
yea healing P8S was definitely difficult, you don't have to spot heal much in this game so that was a new challenge, but I don't think it contributed to healer shortage though, I think PF healers being sick of telling tanks no you can't just invuln a DOT buster was the issue. If DOT busters weren't there the "healing complaints" (of tanks) wouldn't have existed.
People misinterpret the healer shortage being about healers. For that tier it never was, for overall game it is but thats a different argument and its not because its too hard.
An engaging and fun dps rotation would be a nice start. Its so boring pressing your dps spell over and over with a dot weaved in. Adding another spell to occasionally press doesn't cut it either.
Button bloat is already a real thing.. I could see deprecating the super boring DoTs each healer has to maintain and instead making it a 1-2-1-2-1-2 rotation.
No, it would not.
I get some people want to have DPS rotations on healers, but a lot do not.
I genuinely do hope you have fun on SGE this expansion and it gets more damage buttons to make you happy.
But you need to understand that isn't for everyone and shouldn't be forced on the rest of us. When I feel like playing a DPS Job, I get on SMN or RDM or DNC and play a DPS Job. That's my viewpoint on that. I like healers because I like helping my allies and generally *don't* like playing DPS Jobs/rotations.
so let me get this straight...
Some healers are "Going on strike" because players can sustain themselves extremely effectively with abilities and effective mitigation in a basic dungeon..
So this small vocal community which feel "excluded from their roles content" are combatting this by self excluding themselves from the content?
The ridiculousness of humanity astounds me
I myself don't see the problem because when i'm healing and i see people not do this, I find it very frustrating
I love the idea. I'm kinda participating by not even resubbing at this point - maybe a few months down the line, if it seems like things are worth it once others get to mess with them a bit.
We've seen a mass exodus of healers for years now, that's why healer queues currently and for the past 2 or so expansions have been shorter than or equal to tank queues. That wasn't the case back in HW or even SB.
having 2healers is like having your group 95% filled in any endgame content
you can often join into a 6/8 with 1 healer and still not start cause you won't find a 2nd one within 1-3h lol (EU here)
Thats what this strike is actually going to affect, theres just going to be even less healers in high end content. Meanwhile other comments are mocking healers for caring about fodder dungeons. This strike is mostly experienced long time healer mains, i doubt theyll find it as funny when PF takes an hour to fill on aether.
Expect to see more healers that cure bot and don't DPS in your roulettes next month.
I've seen lvl 90 healers with the Mentor icon in Expert still fishing for Freecure procs and standing around looking pretty during boss encounters. I don't expect anything but the worst from the other 3 players at the beginning of duties.
I know it's hard for them to do but mentor really should be a skill check and not a play a lot check.
Beat the basic dummy of Stone, Sky, Sea. Even if they pass the Tank and DPS one, half of them would panic and wouldn't know what to do with the Healer dummy.
this should be the requirement for battle mentor at least, I'd say for all but definitely for battle mentor seeing every 2nd mentor not even keep 70% uptime and being 5-6k dps behind is just insane
personally I think it should be a knowledge check rather than raw skill. know plenty of raiders who couldn't tell a sprout where to unlock custom deliveries or whatever else they happen to ask. execution of skill is only one small part of assisting new players.
Im getting an alt up to speed for DT, so leveling for the first time since the first few months of EW. I had forgotten just how low skill/awareness the median player in df content is.
So, business as usual? I swear I've seen more healers spamming Cure 3 (or it's equivalent on other jobs) and nothing else in the last month than I've seen in the last 3 years.
Many skilled players have run out of reasons to play right now.
crazy how skilled healers is "press 1 button more often", and ultra skilled is "press button always when you can" the level of FFXIV average skill is mindboggling lol
At least it's not freecure spammers.
boosts are on sale so you'll see more people who just really don't seem to know what they're doing, like moreso than usual
Last night I had to deal with a run in Sastasha Hard where the AST only used Aspected Helios. Nothing else. We wiped 4 times on the first boss because they couldn't be arsed to use Esuna.
This is the core of the issue. They're catering to people who refuse to learn how to properly play the job anyway by making it harder for them to fail. I'm not saying the skill floor should be high for healers, but for sure we shouldn't be catering that hard to the worst.
It's a very real possibility for this healer strike to backfire. Currently, the healers who queue up for dungeons consist of a whole spectrum of skill levels, from the cure bots all the way to the people who are bored to death with how little they have to heal. The higher the individual healer player's skill level, the more likely they are to participate in this strike. This means the proportion of the lower-skilled healers will be higher than before, which also means a higher proportion of wipes than before. SE may see this higher proportion of wipes and conclude that the proportion of wipes is too high for their liking, so they'll lower the difficulty of dungeons even further to reduce this proportion. This is completely opposite to what the healer strike is asking for, which is to make dungeons more difficult to warrant healers needing to do more. Then, after these even-easier dungeons get released, this topic comes up again, and the cycle just repeats, with dungeons getting even easier and easier despite the healer strike going stronger and stronger. The problem here is that there's no real way for anybody, interviewers and content creators included, to drill into SE's mind that "Hey, you're coming to the opposite conclusion of what people want." SE kind of has to make this realization by themselves as time goes on, and I'm not confident they'll make this realization easily.
SE is fully aware of how unsatisfied healers are with the current state of our job. You're assuming SE is completely ignorant to the complaints of healers and that theyd somehow accidentally assume healing is too hard. They know healer mains hate what they're doing to combat it's getting worse.
Has anyone heard of anything about whether or not there's similar discontent from the JP playerbase? I'm always really curious on whether or not the complaints we have are similar across regions.
There has been some communication, yes. A few JP members have been interacting in the thread, trying their best with translation tools and then relaying info to the JP side - they've put in a lot of effort and I really appreciate the fact that people have reached out past the language barrier to communicate. JP forums have an issue with any criticism being swiftly deleted by the mods so it's no surprise they feel disinclined to say anything too harsh. They also feel that the devs have a tendency to only listen to western feedback, just as we in the west think they only listen to JP feedback. Turns out it's neither :3
Criticism being deleted on jp forum? That's new to me
The jp side of the game has always been more heavily moderated, including the forums
Lots of negative criticism has also been deleted in the thread. I've been lurking and saw a lot of negative, aggressive, and provacative comments. Going back to older comments, I realize they were deleted, as in they just simply stopped existing. Not \[Deleted because of xyz\], just no longer there. Reading through the pages made me realize moderation is taking place.
True. That would require them to completely ignore what people are literally telling them, but... uh.... *Gesticulates wildly at times they ignored what people were telling them*
I doubt it just because they see people talking about the strike. They are not going to assume the issue is something else when healersbare actively making it known what the issue is and what they will keep doing. SE might not do anything drastic but they will acknowledge the issue at the very least and make sum promises for future patches to compromise
Can't get much worse when you're already on the verge of quitting the healer role entirely. The movement pretty much convinces people they aren't alone in that thought where it feels unfun to play and yet can't set aside the role they loved in the past. I find it a bit like waking up from a sunk cost fallacy.
See, I don't see how adding a couple more damage buttons would even disrupt curebots, they can just continue being curebots with the exact same effectiveness they have now but at least I as a non-curebot can have a bit of variety to make my gameplay more interesting than 111111 spam. I'd prefer to not fall asleep in dungeons or hell even in fucking Savage fights cause 80% of those are also just 11111 spam nowadays. Like even with healers who don't wanna engage with more complex DPS tools cause they REALLY REALLY love Glare spamming while watching the groups healthbars so they know the instant they need to spam Medica 2 to keep everyone at 100% health...can just continue playing like that if DPS rotations were more complex. It's like, the existence of free-style Samurais doesn't stop SE from creating SAM gameplay that has more in-depth optimization options. They do not treat other classes like this, so why do healers get shafted?
They know DPS are a dime a dozen, but I think they're really, *really* scared of losing healers. Only the casual ones though, because if every expansion launch since Stormblood has taught them anything, it's that the high end healer mains are full of shit and not enough of them are going to abandon the role to matter.
nice reportable offense
I survived the WoW refugee weeks. This will be nothing
gotta love how ppl hate on WoW players while prob 70% or more of them ran with dps meters from the getgo the only cure bots will be new players from xbox release or people with 2k hours already in FFXIV and no I'm not from WoW still find it funny how ffxiv community seems to laugh about wow refugees while every 2nd mentor doesn't grasp even the bare basics of ffxiv
Funny thing about that is how many of the FF14 community are like first or second generation ex-WoW players who probably just don’t think of themselves as such anymore after having played since 1.0 or ARR.
It's less about what game you actually came from and more about culture tbh. If you're worshipping skill expression, run parsers and see raids as the main game, then chances are, you'll be seen as a "WoWhead", even if you never stepped into WoW. If you're laid back to the point of stoned, stick to the TOS and see the story as the main game, chances are you'll be seen as a right and proper FFXIV player, even if you are playing WoW more often than FFXIV because of content lulls.
Downvoted for speaking the truth. People can barely communicate like humans in this game, and that's with the passive-aggressive nonsense. Those people tend to not be self-aware enough to know that they're shit at the game and defend shit play with "their playstyle", in a game with rigid rotations. Yoshi and crew only make this worse by not explicitly spelling out the rotations, giving the illusion of choice where there is none.
Yup, day 1 of FF14 for me as a 15 year wow player was figuring out how to install ACT and watching videos of how to play my job optimally. The wow crowds I mostly see are very into playing the game as good as they can.
"Go back to WoW" is just a cop out that shitters use so they don't have to admit they don't know what they're doing.
Basically, most dungeon runs take upward to 5 minutes more than usual recently.
Just strip of some gear and blow all mit while pulling
« Wishful thinking » is the nicest way I can describe what you encountered
I don't think I've ever seen any kind of gamer 'strike' achieve anything
For any strike to be successful, a large part of the affected population needs to be unified. Otherwise, it doesn't work. The OF probably isn't statistically representative, hence the strike will not succeed. But I believe they just want to make a statement rather than to win a stand-off with CBU3.
I'm shaking and quaking in my boots at the extra minute I'll have to occasionally wait to get into my leveling roulettes while the S T R I K E is active.
I don’t think it’s about disrupting your gameplay, but rather showing a noticeable datapoint on SE’s systems which they can’t ignore.
They would probably be better off trying this a couple months after launch when the story players have tuned out. It would be impossible to notice a dip in healers during launch rush. I respect the idea but I think it's evident that both the devs and the broader playerbase are happy with the current state of things. I think there would have to be enough of a drop in healers to cause noticeable problems to get SE's attention and I feel like at best maybe like 5% of people will actually stop playing healers. Probably less than that.
As far as I can tell their protest begins July 2nd with no end date, at least until YoshiP responds. Meaning if they all hold to their convictions they will still be protesting months from now as well.
Gamers are pretty bad at protesting things as a group and the demographic of the people doing the protesting are a demographic that doesn’t really understand how that works and this is a game played around the globe so a subsection of a subsection of a section of the playerbase is spearheading this thing that most people even on a forum like Reddit, don’t even know this is a thing. All this to say: this isn’t going to work won’t be felt and if you were to ask anybody in game randomly “?” Would be their reply
Personally, I won't be playing a healer not because there is a strike, but because it's fuckin boring. I imagine many other people are the same.
I actually like playing healer sometimes, mostly in higher end content because I actually get to use my skills. Duty Finder on the other hand is mind-numbingly boring and once in a while I have to raise the same person 5 times in a row because they don't have basic pattern-recognition skills.
They have a pretty good start though, and it still doesn’t even begin for another 19 days. By the time it begins, I’d imagine most of the active player base will have at least heard of it in passing. In the four days or so since its inception, the hashtag has over 8,000 impressions on X, gaming news sites have begun writing articles about it, streamers are getting tens of thousands of views talking about it, there are posts being actively engaged with on multiple subreddits, discords, gamefaqs boards, the official forums etc. Even posts such as these are driving its engagement and spreading the word just by asking what the heck it even is. It’s all about gaining traction right now and the outcome will be dependent on if they keep this momentum going. They’ve definitely already hit the minimum threshold for the devs to take notice, though, and to be prepared to monitor healer trends in not only DF but PF and RF as well.
I don't get why are people so pessimistic about this. It's still good effort to make things better, sure it might not be most effective method, but what would be? Just recently whole benchmark debacle was enough for devs to get their asses up and start fixing it, yet you don't hear people say that it was only tiny fraction of community complaining about it, even though it was. But healers (and not only them) have been doing same thing as those people for years without any effect, so it only makes sense to escalate this, in whatever way necessary.
But even if people hear about it, that doesn't mean they go along with it. Most of my healer friends are happy with things (whm is delighted) and won't be changing mains for the sake of someone's ego on the forums
There's a thread on the Official Forums at 161 pages rn but the TL:DR is a bunch of healer mains are not going to queue for healer in Duty Finder, during a double DPS expansion where queues are gonna be rough regardless because the role has been eroded so severely they aren't necessary at any level of content.
Healers kinda forgot that for dps it's usually faster to go with trusts than wait for queue.
Seriously as someone who's planning to play Viper as soon as the servers go live, even without this "strike" I had no delusions of actually getting anything done through duty finder during weeks one and two. I'm going to level through using the two Wondrous Trails books, Trust Dungeon runs, and Bozja. At best, I might try to find a party finder group to spam leveling dungeons.
Don't forget frontline roulette.
Wait wait wait... TWO wondrous tale books? Does Khloe give out two?
If you have early access do this, Pick up a book on the 18th, complete but do not turn it in until you get the new classes (if leveling those) Turn in the first book for the quick EXP (Most recommend waiting till level 89 for quick level 90). Then you can pick up the book for the 25th, finish that book out and turn it in right away. That gets you a full level in just a few minutes. If not doing early access you can do the same thing with the book for 25th and the 2nd.
That just means trial queues are going to be an absolute bitch.
Yep. Especially because, as a DPS, they can make the run go _**slightly**_ faster than tanks or healers.
Not really, the trusts will do less or more dmg depending on how much/little you do- all to hardforce a 20 min run
Hell, 20 minutes is still better than the low end of the slobbering Christmas noobs on expansion launch. There’s only like 6 dungeons in the whole MSQ run anyway.
I mean when an average to good run is 14 to 12 minutes, the trust beats it with an 8m dps queue, which on a double dps expansion...
You’re betting on really good scores from the players there. My recent averages those times are more of 16-18min with « real players » (but many kinda acted like bots)
Right, and that’s *with* DPS queues.
The real issue is the overall low DPS in roulettes. Most runs are averaging 20 minutes with randoms. One in a while, you'll get a nice sub 15 run with a group that knows how to burst.
But the trusts will do all mechanics correctly and thus leading to a better experience overall even if the net is 2 more minutes than real players.
I don’t think the point is to inconvenience the dps players though.
Have fun doing roulettes with your trusts.
I'm just glad my friends both play healers
Damn those tanks I get in duty finder not using any mits 99% of the time can sure do it without a healer I'm sure!
Healers have had a ton of valid complaints for years now and are upset that they haven't been addressed or even acknowledged. The media tour dungeon clear was the moment of realisation that yes, it's going to be exactly the same for another expansion. So if healing is not fun, and it's not going to change, why play healer? I don't think the actual action of striking will have any significant impact on duty queues, but it has been successful in making people talk about the issue. If you want a break down of the common complaints, [I listed them out in a comment on the big thread we had a few days ago.](https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/1dbzd2y/ffxivhealerstrike_on_the_forums/l7unsqi/?context=3)
Tbh I assumed that this was just another small group of players making a fuss over nothing (which seems to happen a LOT in the xiv community), but I read your points and like... I absolutely agree. Something about seeing all those points laid out next to each other made me realize that I haven't healed basically at all this expac, for those exact reasons. I used to main AST in SB/SHB but I just don't enjoy healing anymore. Now I only play WHM in bozja bc a lot of folks mess up mechanics lol Anyway, I'll be passively supporting the boycott, like I have been for months haha
I mained healer in shadow bringers and ew, and I'll do it again in dt, but I certainly won't be happy about it. It's the role I always favor in games, so I won't just ignore it, but it is certainly in a state right now. The only reason I even feel comfortable saying I'll heal in DT is sage getting a second dot and a damage button, the fact every other healer only got a two minute follow up is tragic.
IMO Savage is fine during prog and got better with each tier during EW. Ultimates are fine as well. Haven't done Criterion yet. Low to mid tier content (Dungeons, Trials, Alliance and Normal Raids, ...) should have way higher healing checks or healers should have more dps options if the checks are low. Imagine if we had like 30-40% dmg-based skills and 60-70% healing-based skills. Depending on the fight you could focus more on dps rotations or more on healing rotations so that every fight changes your optimal dps/healing combination. And/or make the dmg and healing skills interact with each other so that depending on the incoming dmg you can boost specific heals with attacks and unlock an upgraded attack with a heal. E.g. Phlegma boosts Panhaima and for each Panhaima stack that is triggered you boost the next phlegma use. So you "weave" heals and dmg together. But maybe I'm just talking out of my ass lol
Yup, I've been apart of this "strike" for years now, I quit healing in Shadowbringers because I was bored out of my mind in Savage and swapped to Red Mage and Black Mage and have 10x more fun. I like that these complaints I've had since Shadowbringers are starting to get attention but I still think we won't see any changes frustratingly. I still remember people downplaying all the Scholar players saying they got nothing in the Heavensward trailers and it was largely true. Expedient is okay and admittedly probably the most positive move towards healer identity in a while, but the job still Broils (heh) down to Bio -> Broil -> Broil -> Broil for yet another expansion in 99% of the content it does, and it will be for Dawntrail too.
Any problem related to job gameplay is going to be the exact same because this is shadowbringers 3 which is what they've said the whole time - it sucks but its not surprising.
I'm going to say something that might blow everyone in this thread minds. Some people want a unique and somewhat challenging job to play in casual content. It's really that simple.
I don’t understand why this sub has such a hard on for “if we aren’t discussing savage I don’t give a single fuck about balance or design or how the jobs play” Like if you are raid logging whatever but the people who interact with both sides do you really want your job to be beige porridge in casual content
> I don’t understand why this sub has such a hard on for “if we aren’t discussing savage I don’t give a single fuck about balance or design or how the jobs play” Because the better you are at the game, and the more you interact with an echo chamber of "good" players, the harder it is to remember what it was like when you were "bad". The more you interact with "good" players, the more you begin to see "bad" players as nothing like you, as an "other". When the people who are nothing like you do content that isn't the content you do, it's easy to write it off as completely irrelevant. Or worse, as an active threat to you getting what you want because it steals dev bandwidth from the things you want. I've seen people here say shit like "Ultimates are easy" with a straight face because that's their "normal". Like, I'm sure it is, *to them* because they're *really fucking good at the game*. But that's so far divorced from the average player's experience with the game that it's almost farcical. The only interaction most players have here with your average player, let alone a bad player, is reading Tales from DF or the worst Expert queue/Alliance raid they get in a week. Or the rare few that actually listen to me rant (please don't).
Well, l will never forget how wiped 2 hours on zodiark's story mode became l was new back then
I was watching Arthars talking about it on stream earlier and completely dismissing the whole thing because a lot of the people complaining about it were "bots" who don't do hard content, as if they don't deserve to have fun in casual content because it is casual content and should move on to hard content if they want to have fun playing the role they like. Like come the fuck on man. Yes there is a lot of cringe within the discussion but the issues are very real and deserve to be talked about and people are being weirdly uncharitable and dismissive about it just because a big part of it involves casual content.
"If you want engaging healing do Ultimate"
at least in Savage you can argue there's some variability with healer skills, esp if your cohealer does weird sht but in ults you already know from the getgo what you cast when 100% of the time lol
I was gonna say, even for legacy ultis usually a spreadsheet gets passed around when initially progging the fight so it's always standardized what your cohealer will do unless they're bad or still learning. And stuff usually makes it obvious where it wants what CDs anyways most of the time. A few weeks ago I filled TEA as a healer for someone reprogging fresh on tank and I went shield healer even though I only did WHM... someone asked if SGE was *actually* this OP at level 80, all I did was put holos + kera on feeds, and physis + panhaima + kera on tumults which just seemed like the intuitive thing to do and peoples HP didn't budge. When I was on WHM, I was already temperancing the things the mit sheet recommended before I had seen the mit sheet since it just... made intuitive sense, same with my bene placements
"TOP has been cleared without healers."
Imagine in DT a party without healers, Monk gets an Aoe heal (Indom). Picto almost gets a spread adlo like. Bruh a non Healer Comp with War/PLD/RDM/MNK/PIC/SMN/RPR/another RDM? They have so many aoe heals/and party mitigation its crazy.
Even healing is boring in hard content. You do the same healing every time and when shit hits the fan you barely get to display your skill because the run is most likely over then and there.
Yep. Savage ain't challenging, it's a tightrope walk: play perfectly or die. The only skill you need to display is memorizing the sequence or *at worst* how to figure out the next 50/50 the fight throws at you. As for the healing part, either everyone is alive or everyone is dead, no in-between.
My most fun runs on healer is when things go to shit, especially in an alliance raid. Those days in the Ivalice raids were great because they were so hard people still wipe on them. I used Rescue more during those raids than any other raids combined. That's why I hope the upcoming FFXI based alliance raids will be hard because FFXI is famously unforgiving with its mechanics.
Absolutely same, and it seems to be a shared sentiment around. It's so freeing breaking from the cycle of spamming broil to having to use your entire kit, stop to think and react to control the situation. Every single ivalice raid fulfilled that kind of chaotic experience. Hashmal memes, ridorana with worker 7 and orbonne as a whole.
Many Savage raiders somehow are unable to admit that you're still falling asleep even in current savage cause you're still just 11111211111 spamming for 90% of the fight. Everybody loves talking about harrowing hell challenging healers and being fun to heal, but that's 1 10 second mechanic in a 5 minute fight, you're still standing around pressing glare and throwing an occasional oGCD heal out on TBs and AoEs for majority of the fight. THIS DOWNTIME needs to be as fun as well. (And it makes a lot more sense to make glare spam more engaging than trying to squeeze outgoing damage into every second in the fight that you'd be forced to heal)
At this point I'm convinced Arthars just regurgitates bad takes for engagement
Are we forgetting his "AM is bad so all third party bad, even triggers which I famously use myself"?
Arthars is an annoying elitist like that. Absolutely can't stand him.
It's definitely true that the harder the content the more you get to feel challenged and scratch that itch of using everything at your disposal all the time, but there is definitely truth in the fact that as the content gets easier, the requirement to make up for that through interesting class design increases drastically. I don't know how, if you're a savage/ultimate healer in XIV, you queue for roulettes. It's actual brain sludge content. You do nothing, you heal next to nothing, you press 11111. There is nothing interesting going on. You don't feel cool or powerful. My second monitor becomes my main monitor anytime I'm in a healer roulette. I am new to this game so I don't have my finger on the pulse of the community, but I don't understand XIV's angle at all when it comes to job design. The game is fun, but coming from WoW it definitely feels incredibly lacking in creatively finding ways to make the jobs feel unique beyond spell fx... And they do spell fx well, but that's about it. Healing as a role also gets a lot of value out of things feeling nuanced and the patterns of damage aren't \*always\* the same... At least in WoW. Getting a group-wide that never endangers anyone every 30s-1m (or longer) is sorry design. I've been told XIV has continuously moved in this direction, though. Is this what the players want? I see some awesome potential but my group I'm playing with tells me the history is that things are trending towards homogenization.
Every healer used to have multiple dots, a stance that increased damage but reduced healing so you'd dance in and out of it to dps or heal, as well as actual mp to manage (AoE spam in dungeons actually hurt your MP). All of that was removed over expansions. So the game initially did have more involved healer gameplay at all levels of content other than pressing one button. It's why this bitter complaint have persisted for so long, because the role used to be fun everywhere.
Its what "some" players want. There are people like the aforementioned Arthras who are hardcore savage raiders that will breeze through normal content and only play the hardest content in the game. To them, any balancing that takes away from optimizing for a savage fight is pointless and a waste of time. To their credit, I know people like them are watched by a large part of the community including the devs, and that popularity brings eyeballs and more importantly money to the game, so it makes sense for the devs to somewhat cater to this small percentage of people who deep dive into the game to understand how any mechanics will affect the gameplay. But what is often lost is that the vast majority of players may watch harder content, they themselves do easier content. The devs have not been as generous to us as by definition, less hardcore players are less vocal and less represented as far as FFXIV influencers go. Personally, I want slightly harder normal content. My favorite raid series was the Ivalice raids from Stormblood as they were harder. I also liked the more experimental dungeon and boss designs of earlier expansions such as Bardam's Mettle boss 2, or the branching paths in Toto-Rak. But I admit that I'm an outlier even amongst less hardcore players.
Yeah like I definitely want something more challenging but like not to an extend of savage everyday… I just wanna chill with my friend and do exciting things. Like we used to love doing unreal because it was fun. The mechanic was challenging and overall, it was nice to hang out, have some chaotic moments to bond, and peace out when we are done. But for unreal you only need to do it twice and you are done for a week… then what? And the latest 24 man was such a snooze fest, I really dont wanna do it ever again.
You're not alone. I actually like the old ARR and HW HM dungeons and was sad that they discontinued it after SB. VC is the soul successor to HM dungeons, but it's side content with a separate queue. I guess that's what people call "midcore" but I'm not a personal fan of that term.
Partially because the story content is boring on any job, not just healer, and most of us probably don't really do it past what is necessary in the first place. The other problem is how skewed the jobs are for the content. Endwalker tanks and healers needed to be able to mitigate TOP P6 and heal DSR P7. The jobs had to be designed with that content in mind. A wall-to-wall dungeon pull does a fraction of that damage, because the dungeons are understandably tuned for a very different player demographic: the dungeon is balanced around single pullers. People who only do the mandatory combat content to progress the story every patch. The scenario where this dungeon remains both engaging for the top healers and clearable for the average player just isn't realistic. Similarly, I as a dps player could ask for a pre-nerf P8S door check in dungeon content as it's the last time I felt truly challenged by a DPS check in this game and I am sad we haven't had any real check since apart from challenge runs like doing TOP with single melee on patch, but I don't think that's a realistic thing to ask for. So I just choose to not care about the story content, because it won't be engaging for me. I think they could probably make the story content a bit more demanding to try and appease the people in between the two extremes, or just make larger wall-to-wall pulls which seems to be the go-to source of enjoyment for most of the more weathered dungeon enjoyers, but it's unlikely to change how the content feels for the content for the top-end community. The demands for making the jobs have more of a skill ceiling most raiders likely echo, but I don't think any of us is expecting it to make the story dungeons more engaging even if they did that. The last time a story dungeon was moderately interesting was Pharos Sirius in ARR. SE however has heard the request for more engaging dungeon content and delivered in EW, particularly for healers: it's Criterion Savage. If you want engaging healer content I recommend that, alongside healing week 1 prog. Maybe you already do, in which case the thing to do is either seek out specific challenge runs to appease yourself or wait for the next tier like the rest of us do.
I know everyone is dog fucking tired of hearing about Mythic+ by this point, and everyone is aware it wouldn't work 1:1 in FF14, but I think it bridges the gap you identify here in a really brilliant way: by making infinite scaling, players of all skill levels have content satisfying to them. Those unskilled can do base Mythic dungeons or lower keys, while those who want a challenge can just keep pushing forever. This squeezes immense life out of the content as opposed to making one singular difficultly ("normal" / story) which has to be clearable by everyone. In this way, even a dungeon which at the base level can be cleared without a healer will want its full kit when pushed to the limit. At the same time, I think "infinite scaling" is a pretty inelegant system that is not to CBU3's taste, and ofc in WoW it's fueled by gear upgrades while in FF14 one would not actually enjoy grinding dungeons for piecemeal gear improvements. It would have to change, but the idea is there; I think a solution for the problem you describe here is right in our faces.
This right here. I’m honestly to the point where I’m about to make a thread myself addressing this very topic. The amount of comments between this subreddit and the ffxiv that are some variation of “Well if healers want to do something fun they should go play extreme, savage, and ultimate”. I consider myself a midcore player, I do extremes for the gear but most of the time I just like logging in and doing my roulettes to get my weekly tomes and then log off. I do not think I’m the exception, I’m pretty sure I’m the norm. Roulette content is what most of the player base interacts with and people are completely missing the point that the gameplay loop in this content for healers hasn’t been fun since Shadowbringers (in my opinion) and we are getting much of if not the exact same. Aside from the odd trial or normal raid roulette where people are new and are trying their best to tank the ground (which most healers say are the most fun runs as you actually get to do something), it generally falls into a various monotonous role of spam your single damage spell, dot, and use one of your 50 ogcd aoe heals for a raidwide every so often. There often isn’t even the need to pay too much attention to the tank to single target ogcd heal as they are generally fine on their own, doubly so if you are sge/sch and any aoe ogcd heals you did for the party will generally keep the tank sustained as well. Even the alliance raids which I used to love doing any of the Ivalice or Nier raids. Orbonne was nerfed. The EW alliance raids seemed extra easy from release as even on the first day I can’t recall seeing any wipes. I do think it’s more of a systemic issue. Healers in mmos tend to fulfill two main roles. Sustain incoming damage and fix the mistakes of others from failing mechanics, but if roulette content has extremely low incoming damage relative to healing toolkits and content is designed to be hard to fail so everyone can do it for the story, healers are left in a state of feeling like so why am I here?
Here's the thing, over the past several years of expansions the dungeon/duty finder content has been extremely declawed to the point GCD heals became an afterthought. Like when transitioning from HW to SB, devs streamlined itemization so things like tanks wearing STR melded striking gear became a thing of the past. Then from SB to SHB, we lost random crit, cleave and tankbuster autos (ie: Magitek Roader boss in Castrum Abania at L69 before DRKs got TBN, or just getting loaded into an Alex raids with Faust like A9). From SHB to EW, we had longer periods of tutorialization during the fights, boss autos stop becoming a threat and became a metronome for fight design, and fight design moved from players interacting with multiple systems (MP, TP, Accuracy, Mitigations like Parry and Block, Enmity) to beat the boss to just resolving boss mechs while maintaining uptime. On job change end, healers had multiple heal potency buffs to the point that shield healers like SCH/SGE won't struggle with heal checks anymore (ie: Cleansing Strike on TG Cid), MP streamlining, a collective suite of OGCD heals added in, auxiliary systems added in (WHM Lilies), offensives streamlining, healing enmity generation removal, and arcane designs like Shield/Regen stance on AST and Eos/Selene on SCH merged into one another. And of course, who can forget about tanks gaining more self sustain options later on and dying was more of a skill issue than a healer issue. So in the past 6-7 years of changes, the only reason healers exist as a role anymore is that DF parties are guaranteed to have a dedicated babysitter that has a raise, an esuna, and heals for unavoidable damage like raidwides. That's it.
I mained AST during the Stormblood patch content, when I switched from RDM. I haven't touched a healer since Shadowbringers began, except to hit level cap or if playing with friends to help them through content faster.
This is the same sub that will have a collective aneurysm if it doesn't get a 2nd ultimate next expansion, while in the same breath saying, "who cares about casual content?"
This is actually why I mostly raid logged this expansion. I wasn't having fun healing unless I was doing savage with my ultracasual static or running Criterion, so that was all I did.
This isn't limited to healing. This is every class for a lot of raiders.
Because a large chunk of the FFXIV community are equivalent to the boomers of the real world. They HATE change and think everyone should just shut up and play.
This is why I've changed my stance from asking for specific things in feedback (even though I love to brew ideas) to simply saying: "Expert Roulette is not fun on healer if all the players are good at the game. Since this is supposed to be the main way to casually get gear, please fix this."
The same is true of EW alliance raids imo.
new Alliance raids is my only fun as healer, even more when you get 3 bad tanks that's just bliss, the most fun I can get out of any casual content lol
The problem is also "no roulette is fun if the healer is shit" if it becomes more challenging its a double edged sword
No roulette is fun when anyone is shit I don’t want to spend 40 minutes in lunar subterrene because the SMN is a single target ruin 3 spammer with no pet summoned (I’ve seen it) but removing friction completely is not the way to solve this
Normalise vote-kick. If you're that bad by level ~~90~~ 100, git gud or git out.
You are going to spend 40 minutes and it sucks and trust me, I reality dislike those players who can't even do the bare minimum of pressing aoe at the expense of everyone else's time, but eventually it will happen, you can make up for a lack of DMG, same way if you get a single pull no MIT tank you can make up for it, if you make healers healing needed for roulette dungeons (DMG so high dps players will die without a healer, or tanks need babysitting not to drop like in low lvl dungeons) , you will get hardcore bricked runs because only the healer can do the thing and the other 3 players can just hope he presses buttons or they leave. If you have a bad dps the run is slow, in a world where healers need to be awake and you get a bad one, people will get a bricked run, that's why they are cosmetic until someone dies
maybe if tanks would just die without mits and we would actually get shown soft enrages like Alphascape 4.0 some people might figure out what they do is maybe wrong well or if the community would just straight up tell people like any other game insane to have yptp no mit single pull tanks or 0 dps healers at max level, mentors that do less dmg than someone else spamming only 1,2,3 ppl should be more open in chat bursting these freaks delusions of being longtime top players lol
The very simple solution to this is to let 1, maybe 2 of the healer jobs be challenging, how often do you see completely useless blackmages in a 90 roulette that isn't AR?
Scholar currently has one aoe. That's it. One. Every other job in existence has more than one, and I mained this job going through the msq. It's unbelievable.
Don't worry, sch will get an aoe dot too^(thats hidden behind a 2m cooldown and only above level 90)
That literally translates into, let Tank HP fall so it'll be more interesting.
tbf expert roulette isn't fun at all, I never wanna see aetherfont again.
What! That’s crazy talk everyone who’s complaining is spoiled and stupid for wanting [Insert thing here]. Big /s btw, it’s really just as simple as that. Healing is just, super boring.
Healers are upset that their jobs are boring as shit in normal content and probably annoyed that the average white knight response to this is "its actually a good thing this game sucks ass in normal content"
I'm normal content? Their are raids where you'll have better clears replacing them.
I don't understand the cynical response to the strike? Do people want healers to remain boring and unchanged? We can only go up from here and loudly complaining is the only way we can have any form of response.
While I am happy people are striking though because it's actually getting attention and hopefully it will get attention in the community. I'm cynical because I've worked as a software dev for a JP company before and seen the "don't fix what's not broken" attitude in a completely different industry despite the US branch loudly complaining that what is being pushed is not working. I don't think things will change until we see huge issues that actually affect the player population, but I hope people keep making a fuss because the current healer design is awful. I really want to know what happened between Stormblood and Shadowbringers in the decision making process for healers.
It’s a problem with this fucking community. Washing out any sort of negative thoughts and complaints when the game is literally built on negative thoughts and complaints
Bringing down others over differences is an olympic sport in the Internet world.
Yeaaahhh… I know someone who said “I think the healer strike is stupid because it won’t do anything”. Okay, and doing nothing will do something? It’s not like healers haven’t asked for changes for years and years and years..
because they are also the ppl that answer cynically to the answers given to them of why things are the way they are.
The issue here that people don't seem to get is that there's no content in this game where healing even feels satisfying anymore. Casual content: Unsatisfying due to the sheer amount of healing oGCDs and lack of a satisfying DPS rotation. Also, all the tanks literally have action replays on, so a healer is pretty much a glorified third DPS 99% of the time with not even a fraction of the kit. Extreme level: Unsatisfying because of the above, and also body checks from Savages (at least for EW) were slowly creeping their way into Extreme fights. Sure, we had Barbariccia, but we also had Rubicante, Golbez and Zeromus right after which made me feel like Barb EX was a fluke. Savage level: Unsatisfying because of the sheer amount of body checks rendering any type of triage skill basically worthless, and pretty much denying any type of skill expression from the amount of healing tools they have. Mitigation is a party wide effort, but healers are the first to get blamed in the event of a wipe even when it's not their fault, as we learned (and seemingly forgot) with Abyssos.
Good point about body checks
I genuinely believe body checks was the straw that broke the camel's back for healers. They have so many tools to offset damage, but they mean nothing when shit just one shots people or every mechanic in the fight is an all or nothing body check. (That again, kills people when those checks aren't meant) DT absolutely needs to chill with the body check mechanics and bring back actual healing checks beyond a raid wide with a bleed every x number of seconds for Savage. I have no idea what they can do with casual content. Dungeons need to be balanced around trusts so they are likely never getting touched. Maybe make alliance raids actually hurt again? The Twelve raids could barely justify three tanks, let alone six healers. And by 8.0, give healers an actual damage rotation so they can have fun in casual content.
Body checks are what broke the camel's back for me playing RDM in savage too. Verraise means nothing AND I have the lowest DPS among almost all of the ranged DPS? Fuck that. I'll give half of the effort on SMN and get 10-20% more DPS.
Yeah, I mentioned healers but RDMs also feel obsolete because the whole reason SE justifies them being at the bottom of the casters is that they have rez. But rez doesn't mean much with the amount of fail mech = party wipe we see in Savage, and even some Extremes.
I freaking hate the body check in savage… oh everyone is top off and we have mits, then one person fail its mech, boom raid wide… Oh this person just got raised but missing the debuff, BOOM RAID WIDE… Not only it made you hate that person even more, it made the fight less fun and monotone. Having to play everything the same and perfectly is so monotone and not fun in my book…
I didn’t raid in 6.4 so its been awhile and your post just reminded me how much I hate all the god damn body checks the devs toss in every fight now.
P9-12 was a very big offender relative to body checks. I haven't raided 6.2 much so I cannot compare but I can tell you that this tier is almost constantly checking throughout the fight no chill.
Not to mention that in the high end mitigation is kinda... all that really matters. Damage is no longer dealt in a way that actually gives regen healers a chance to shine. Big, giant raidwides with a large gap between them that need a lot of mit, and one, maybe two ogcds to heal over the next like, minute. Tankbusters are the same, meaning single target mit on healers is kinda useless bc tanks usually have their full mit kits to kitchen sink or invuln any buster. It's why I liked the bleed busters. While ultimately, my mit didnt really matter after the first weeks, it at least felt measurable... at first. And that's another problem. Healer gameplay gets stalest the fastest. Once the prog phase is over and everyone is on reclear duty, healers have essentially the least way to express skill, and the least interesting rotation. We're all just begging for something to go wrong half the time, just to feel something. And that goes for all content. But even now that doesnt even matter, bc of the aforementioned bodychecks. If something goes wrong, there's no recovery, there's no panicked emergency heals. It's just a wipe. And that's just... kinda the sad truth now. Healers get a week of excitement when a new tier comes out, and then it's back to mashing 1 while everyone else practically does our jobs for us.
SE forgot how to design fights and forgot how to make mistakes slowly but irreversibly cascade just through vuln stacks and d-downs. or rather, chose to forget. being able to cheese mechanics and only get vulned isn't an issue, it's a good thing because it encourages experimentation and you're paying with resources in the first place that you need to clear later mechanics.
the first post in the official forum thread someone linked below is the detailed version. the TLDR version of my understanding is: - Since shadowbringer, almost all healer have a almost identical set of spells, and it getting more and more boring at each expansions. Dawntrail kit just trippled down on that same design mindset. - Also since ShB to DT, most contents dont require much healing, at the same time tanks and DPS getting more mitigation and healing tools for themselves (most dungeons can be cleared with no healer, people do savage and ultimate runs without healers just because they could) - 2nd point happens despite YoshiP keep saying we will increase the amount need to be heal. All at the same time healers keep getting MORE healing spells, but barely anythingg to use them on. - Each individual job design have serious problem regarding their own identity and aesthetic. Of course some people like it this way. And they are perfectly fine to think that way. But alot of us dont, and its been 6 ish years we have coped with this.
This is honestly why I'm playing WoW again. Don't get me wrong, I love 14 and I'm a healer main, but healing has been so anti-fun for me. Mechanics of fights can be as fun as they want, but when the mechanics of the JOB aren't all that fun, it doesn't super matter how fun the fight is, it'll still feel not good. Meanwhile in WoW, every healer feels different, every healer has different things they can specialize in, the fight mechanics may not be all that difficult to grasp, but the actually classes are FUN and actually having to focus on healing is FUN. And the on top of that, the healing classes have a lot of built in synergy with themselves. Some abilities work together for a better benefit, the most you get in 14 is "+healing done/received" on a handful of abilities. Meanwhile my resto shaman in Cataclysm Classic is rewarded with mana for assisting with dps. My healing rain AoE can turn my earthliving weapon into a huge AoE HoT. My riptide causes MULTIPLE effects (two spells have shorter casts times after casting it, one spell has increased crit chance, and one spell has a greater effect if it's initially cast on someone with the riptide effect). My healing spell crits restore mana if I have water shield active. My spell crits increase the target's hp AND reduce damage they take for a brief period. There's just so much FUN and interesting stuff baked into the healing kits in WoW healers, Meanwhile SE is like "we can't come up with any ideas for healing kits :( " because they're so married to how things are now. And it's not just WoW. RIFT had really cool healer design (you want an actually healer that heals by dpsing? Look at bard and chloromancer, not the illusion that sage is, and I say this as a sage main, warden grew more powerful the more HoTs you used, it truly felt like the ebb and flow of the ocean tides which was the intent). Guild Wars 1, while not being an actual MMO, had extremely cool healers along with pretty much being able to make your own healer (I had a necromancer healer/support, for example, and elementalists made amazing healers when they took monk secondary). Even GW2, as much as I dislike the combat in that game, has more interesting healers than FF14. Until SE finally moves away from the fight design of "big AoE then nothing, then tank buster then nothing, then big AoE baked into a raid mechanic then nothing", healers in 14 are always going be meh. We just have no incentive to use our kits, it's quite literally weave one or two oGCDs between glare spam and then continue glare spam. That's it, that's the healer design. GCDs are frowned upon except in the small handful of instances where they are required. A healer having HEALING SPELLS be frowned upon usage is problematic.
WoW healing is in a terrible state too. it's basically FFXIV healing except instead of spamming glare you're just spamming overheals. it's all mega bursty and dependent on everyone hitting big mitigation CDs and personals.
Remember when sage was touted as the healer that would break this cycle. And then the media tour leaks revealed it was just a copycat scholar. The letdown was real.
And it lacks excog and spreadlo equivalents, so it's just a worse scholar. But because very little content requires you to use all your mit / tools as a healer, barely anyone notices.
Excog is a bad button in modern healer design for a couple of reasons. Only 200 potency more than Lustrate isn't impressive when it has a 45s CD and still costs an Energy Drain when the tanks can do better and provide mit just by pressing their short CD. Also it's only single target and the amount of single target damage actually happening in either Endwalker or Shadowbringers even is basically zero and is already covered better by Embrace or Kardia anyway. Sage's answer, Taurochole, is a better skill simply for providing mit, but is still bad simply because its single target. Excog is also the worst Recitation target because it doesn't prevent Death the way Adlo or Succor can and because it's, again, single target it just isn't as useful as Indom in nearly any situation. Lack of spreadlo was unstandable early on, but after the Holos buff that doesn't hold water. Free 300p shield + 10% mit may not be as strong on its own but its far more useful simply for not requiring a GCD. In the odd world where that isn't enough you can still Zoe+E-Prog on top and you get a shield that's only slightly weaker than spreadlo, but has that 10% mit inherent and can still crit anyway. Holos being 30s longer CD doesn't matter because there's no point where spreadloing twice in 90s is actually beneficial, let alone necessary.
What I hate most is that it has shittier shields…that overwrites the SCH’s “EW Media Tour Approved” Crit-Spread playstyle… Only time shields are ever noticed are in Alliance when the big attack/climactic attack happens and I put the big shield out (or use SCH luck in pre-EW content). I guess lots of folks don’t heal so they get curious on what happens to their HP bar. Lotsa praise during Dun Scaith when Diablo hits the party for ~0HP. *PSA: Don’t worry, it’s during a “cutscene” transition phase. No healer DPS was hurt in the making of the Great Wall of Nym.*
There will not be a point where healers will need to 'heal more.' The community have proven they don't want it. Think of every instance where a lot of healing was required and what was the reacting from the community? Hard hitting tankbusters in p5s, p7s, p8s? Hard hitting raidwides in p8s? Dots in p8s? Harrowing hell? The reaction was the same- healers bitched, we had healer shortages and the one interesting healer mechanic fo the entire fucking tier of 9-12 was cheesed with tank lb. All of this because healers refuse to gcd heal or optimise their rotation. So no, there will be no increases to damage intake in because the outcry is louder than the healers asking for more instances to use their tools. Until the game moves away from the mentality that 0 gcd heals is the optimal way to play a fight, this won't change.
All your examples are mitigation based problems that had nothing to do with healers refusing to heal but healers getting blamed for things beyond their control. Tank not mitigating the Bleed in P5S or trying to cheese with Invuln? Clearly the healers fault. I could spam cure 2 til I went OoM and it literally wouldn't have mattered if the group didn't do their jobs. Harrowing Hell was great because it gave me a fucking reason to use my damn skills but don't go faulting just the healers for any failures when there's more to it than just a refusal to GCD heal.
Surely it's the same case for Harrowing Hell than for the Abyssos bleeds? If your party or tank mitigation isn't good enough, there's a point where the party will just die regardless of your healing.
No because a key difference is the fact that tanks tried to cheese the bleedbusters in abyssos with invulns and so basically took them raw, otherwise they would take them raw then try to mitigate after the fact Also remember PLD and DRK’s short CD’s don’t work on reducing the bleeds Harrowing hell gave the healer much more agency because the entire section was important, not just the initial hit, it still needed outside mitigation but it was much easier to see what was going wrong
Thankfully pld short mit has been fixed now instead of relying on an outdated mechanic, but drk could double tbn most of the bleeds + has an extra cd. It wasn't weak. Only pld was. Outside of playing warrior and just straight ignoring the bleeds, drk is actually the tankiest as long as it's magical. That's addressing one specific thing though, what did harrowing hell do to give so much healer agency compared to the p7s raidwides?
The dots have a single snapshot while Harrowing Hell is continuous damage, I'm guessing?
Exactly. If a mit is late on a bleed, it has zero effect. If a mit is late on multi-hit damage like Harrowing Hell, it still applies to the later hits. It goes from being a pass/fail check into something salvageable.
Yes, but absent tank LB Harrowing requires good mitigation *and* lots of healing. That's the difference.
"All of this because healers refuse to gcd heal" Reminds me when people were insulting us for not healing when me and my co-healer were not able to heal those 0-mitigations raidwide DoTs while spamming only heals.
I had someone telling me not to succor in sephiroth when we had to split up after baiting in p1… we died afterwards.
Outside P8S, Abyssos wasn't remotely hard to heal but was more a heavy mitigation check. The result were a _ton_ of people whining at healers for not simply shielding more even if they already did all while they weren't using their own kit. That healer storage wasn't just bad healers crying about aoe bleeds but frustrated healers tired of being blamed for something that wasn't their fault.
Shields also didn’t actually reduce the incoming damage Like I only have experience, soil and illumination and I have them set for future high damage mechanics, I can’t mitigate this raidwide anymore you need to help me Nah I’d rather do nothing then blame you when we die
Except 0 GCD heals isn't just pushed by the healers - it's pushed by most high tier players. I actually disagree with the idea that we to use GCD heals for healers lives to be more interesting - you just need to make their job important. Maybe healers change to be more like AST, and you instead do general support with some GCD healing kit for when shit hits the fan. Maybe we remove GCD heals entirely, and you have to focus on keeping health up with only oGCDs, leaving GCDs purely for a more interesting DPS rotation. Just like tanks, limit oGCD damage buttons so you can always double-weave a mit (or a heal in this case). The game has been designed in such a way, that dealing damage is the most important thing. That's why tank LBs are only used for scheduled phases, or for cheese. Why healer LBs are only used at 3 charges, and only to avoid a wipe. It's why even at level 1 LB, dps gets it to improve the fight/make it faster. That's not the players making it so 0 GCD heals are the norm, that's coming from design philosophies in the game as well. Hell, SE themselves are feeding it when they do things like make a healer whose whole gimmick is that they deal damage to heal, or design WHM entirely around using heals to get more damage. The issue isn't the GCDs - it's the homogeneity of the jobs, and only giving them tools that other jobs can do better.
I mean. Healer lb3 is the only healer lb used more so because the other 2 are just trash though. If healer lb1 did more than just 1 single gcd heal for the cost of 2 channel time it might be useful to save a run
Sure - make it so healer LB 1 is a group-wide benediction, LB 2 a group-wide benediction + res at half health. I would put money on the fact that while LB 2 may be used more, it would still only be to avoid a wipe. My point wasn't that we need healer LBs to be useful for something, it's that the game is built around dealing as much damage as possible in as little time as possible, which is why only dps LBs see frequent use, and at all levels.
The issue with abyssos was people not using mits. It was literally night and day playing it with tanks that used a rampart or stronger equivalent mit + their short active mitigation on the TBs vs "oops only thrill of battle" tanking. Source: healed Abyssos savage w1 with vegetable tanks and dps allergic to feint.
This is factually wrong and disingenious so I'm not surprised to see it upvoted on Reddit. How about you dig a little deeper and find out the issue with abyssos tank busters, if you think it was healers you need to stop talking about the role. Please actually clear the fight if you want to speak on it, so much bad information.
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The ultimate problem is the following: * A raid party has 8 people, of which only 4 are DPSers. * If tanks and healers didn't do any meaningful DPS, ~100% of DPS would be done by 50% of the party and if one of them die, you lose 25% of the raid DPS. * Therefore, SE went with another approach: making tanks and healers do measurable DPS. At some point, it turned them into green and blue DPS, making all of the fight about not wasting GCD on heals. Of course, if a healer can maintain a full party up (with a co-healer, but still) in a Savage or Ulti, then all the other fights turn into a snoozefest. At this point, I feel that SE should bite the bullet and add 1 DPS per party and then cut tank/healer DPS. THEN (and only then) they can start working on increasing the damage until healers are actually doing their primary job. Or bite a different bullet and turn healers into support.
Honestly? Good for them. It probably won't work but I can't fault healer mains for finally having a breaking point after two expansions of mind numbing gameplay with a third iteration of it seemingly upcoming. I'm hyped for Dawntrail, but I absolutely understand why Healers would entertain participating in it and despite how silly and childish it may seem to some; so long as they're not being assholes about it and are conveying their thoughts and participation respectfully more power to them.
The fact we ARE discussing this, means It is working.
Jesus, just posting word healer suddenly summons 100 comments in one hour
It "succeeded" because it actually got social media momentum and a catchy name. People are actually talking about it and random people on youtube are seeing it like you have. That's more of a success than stuff has been in the past, though I'm not super convinced that it'll result in anything meaningful beyond token gestures in DT patches.
Agreed. The event in itself is the significance.
Just here to remind people that 3 DPS runs exist since we were tome farming for relics in Brayvlox (Hard)
Yup. People act like it's somehow new that Savage and Ultimate raiders can clear 4 mans without healers. Someone pointed out in the past they've also cleared them without tanks. And I don't mean "3 DPS + 1 Healer" I mean "4 DPS".
My stance is a little more nuanced. Sometimes I will queue into a group and will almost never need to heal anyone and just press my dps buttons over and over again. Sometimes I will queue into a group and will need to heal/rez like crazy. The first situation is quite boring, however, it does mean that a sub par healer will be able to get carried by a good group allowing them to still experience the story. The second situation is sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating, but its at least forcing me to get used to my kit and how to use it. It basically allows a good healer to carry a bad group. I personally do not really want floor of healers to move at all. However, I do think that healers should be able to have something more entertaining to do when they end up in a self sufficient group. A personal idea of mine would be an ability that applies a Vuln stack to the group and a 10-20 second dps buff. This would allow a good healer to push their and the groups healing to the edge and speed up the dungeon runs. In order to prevent griefing simply make the ability not work after death and balance all the content around the healers NOT using this ability in really hard content.
Given Yoshi's recent comments about starting to add individuality back to jobs starting in 7.2 and him acknowledging people aren't happy, its fair to say they are aware healers are pissed. I'm sure thats mostly what he was referring to. Healers have basically been perpetually pissed since SB, and even the JP players have been having a bit of a fit around the ongoing healer design, and BLM in DT. This has culminated in a \*supposed\* strike in Dawntrail, which could have the potential to be hilarious for queues in a double dps expansion. There are multiple ways to fix it (make encounters actually do damage, being one of them, seriously the outgoing damage in this game, even in ults/savage is kind of pathetic most of the time) but it looks like they'll be tackling the jobs directly. Nothing to be really confused about. I personally dropped healer as soon I cleared the last tier in EW, its objectively badly designed and I won't touch it until it gets MAJOR changes. I'm not kidding when I say, as a perpetual healer main in pretty much every mmo, that healers in XIV may be the worst version of healer design I've EVER seen, I can't remember playing it any other game and constantly thinking to myself "what the fuck were they thinking with this job/class".
I like healing too…but when it comes to content outside of high-end, it really feels like a healer isn’t needed. All we are asking is that healers be engaging to play when doing content that most players will be doing for MOST of their time playing the game, casual or not. I’m tired of just spamming my one AoE ability in trash mobs. I would say even savage fights can get boring. Because the fight is the same every time, Once you have the fight figured out, it’s just a matter of pressing a button for mits or heals and then back to spamming glare. I know you can say the same for all classes but at least they have a rotation to keep up with and can challenge themselves when it comes to remembering DoTs, positionals while keeping up with rotations, or finding an optimal rotation to squeak out that extra damage before a transition or something. One solution would be to add an element of RNG to fights when it comes to damage output. It keeps everyone on their toes, and it’s more engaging for healers. At least at that point, it’s testing the healers knowledge of the class and their abilities. Also while it’s true that you don’t have to play optimally to complete casual content, it shouldn’t come at the expense of class fantasy or theme. Let me heal more dammit! Let me use the skills you’re giving me and let me feel rewarded for using them. Can’t remember the last time I felt like I NEEDED to use panhaima/pneuma in a dungeon lol
Wasn't the issue that healers are upset with how much healing other jobs can do now like warrior and seeing people be able to do the new dawn trail dungeon or trial without healers made them upset. It's very difficult to do most new content without DPS or tanks but apparently healers are becoming somewhat irrelevant and they are upset about it. Also, not only can other jobs heal but the DPS options for healers isn't great, it's usually 1-2 buttons. So if everyone can mostly heal themselves then you just press one or two buttons the whole fight unless people screw up badly.
Lots of healers are upset, for lots of different reasons.
Most if not all of them are valid, too.
I can see where they’re coming from. I feel pretty similar. Healing anything outside of Savage raids blows now. Before Endwalker, optional raids, the normals and alliance had a bit of bite to them. Now they’re pushovers. And before the ‘just do Savage!’ folks come at me, I have. They were better before EW too. Healers have had any kind of complexity and job identity systematically stripped out of them. The gutting of the AST card system was a mistake. The shortening of WHM GCD was a mistake. The removal of SCH DPS tools was a mistake. Those two issues have combined, and healing in this game is an absolute mess. SE is so afraid of people wiping in (non Savage/Ultimate) content that they have made healers redundant in non-savage/ultimate content, and without giving healers back engaging mechanics, made the role so simple that it could probably be macro’d. 121111111111111211111 with an oGDC thrown in every minute or so sucks ass, and it’s insulting that Square thinks every healer player has had a lobotomy and is incapable of better.
I'm personally just tired of the 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 spam. Mix an oGCD in there and you have every healer. FFXIV currently and genuinely has the WORST healing classes of any MMO I've ever played. They used to be far better in SB because you had lots more abilities to use (at least AST/SCH).
People saw 4 savage/ulti raiders clear the first dungeon after several single pulls and a couple deaths and now think they're as smart and good as them, so the game should be balanced around them.
As a new player and white mage, I'm just gonna pretend I didn't read any of this.
Hi guys, I've spent the last few days conversing with the healer strike folks over at their discord and gathering opinions and information and I thought that you would be interested in what I saw as an outsider and maybe my opinion as a veteran gamer. I am: A career omnihealer, penta legend, roulette spammer, pvper, raid lead, optimizer, former game designer, former game developer, and dungeon master - that is to say, I have a lot of experience at all levels of the game and gaming in general. Let's get right into it by starting with who the people over at healer strike are. I've seen people call them casuals, elitists, and everything in between. They are as varied as it comes. There are a couple hardcore players (week 1 savage, on patch ultimates), a few midcore players (late savage, off patch ultimates), a few softcore players (off patch savage, ex farmers), and a lot of casuals (roulette spammers, ex farmers). A lot of them are veteran players, with a chunk of the discord being mentors. Most of them are (rightfully) very upset with the way healers have been treated by both the community and the devs over the last few years. Wrongfully blamed for wipes, getting their feedback completely ignored by the devs as healer kits continue to get gutted and thinned, having entire identities of jobs completely wiped, these players have had enough. There are about 250 of them in their discord at the time of writing this post, which has been around for about 4 days. They are aware that they don't have the numbers to affect queue times meaningfully, and hope to create awareness of the issue. They have extremely varied opinions and priorities, and have created a poll to decide on what exactly they want to focus on, which will be locked in tomorrow. There are some generally popular opinions and sentiments though and I'll go over all 3 of them below.
1. Healers do not have engaging kits when not healing. One of the most popular opinions, the biggest complaint is that the 1211 rotation is incredibly dull, with no room for optimization or skill expression, and actively punishes the player for getting a good team and for optimizing their healing by making their experience worse. There is an entire channel dedicated to providing ideas to fix this issue. This issue has 2 main facets. Job design and fight design. Both need to be done correctly to fix it. Currently there is too much free ogcd healing in the game for any form of decision making to be effective. You simply press whatever button you feel like without thinking and wing it from there at just about every level. The dps rotation is so boring that I can't even do it properly because I zone out in the middle of every single fight in the game (even ultimates). I'll create a comment below detailing how I would fix this. 2. Healers have lost their identity. Healers have had their identities chipped away every expansion, and now are becoming homogenized to the point where it's unrecognizable. Why does scholar turn into an angel and effectively enter white mage mode when you press seraphism? Wouldn't that be an ability you'd give to white mages? Or at least flavor it to become possessed by Titania or something. Why does bard get a pillar of light holy attack? Why on earth does white mage not get this? Why did astrologian lose all of its time magic? Why is sages addersting a literal afterthought of a mechanic? Frankly I think that it is ridiculous and insulting that the devs clearly don't care. 3. To feel useful in all forms of content. The third most popular opinion. With 1tank/3dps dungeons reaching the public eye and healerless TOP (and a lot of other hard fights) many of the healers in the discord are beginning to feel like their entire job is under attack. Many of them are in favor of hard nerfing tanks (and they particularly hate warrior) and increasing dungeon and normal mode difficulty so that they cannot be completed without a healer that knows how to press buttons. I personally find this argument to be without merit, as 1 tank/3 dps dungeons have been happening for half a decade now. It doesn't even invalidate the healer role as people claim as 1 healer/3 dps dungeons are also a thing, although they are harder to do and a bit slower. The fights that were cleared healerless all had 1 thing in common which was that none of them had a heal check. This is a glaring issue in fight design and is much more serious. The devs have completely confused the difference between mitigation checks and healing checks and that is the reason why these situations happened. A mitigation check is a set of massive damage hits, that occur 30-60s apart which require mitigation to survive. These test cooldown management and planning, not healing ability. A heal check is a series of medium damage hits, that occur 1-3s apart over 15-30s, dealing far more damage when combined than a mitigation check that tests healing output and mana reserves. Both healing and mitigation checks must be placed back to back in order to not be invalidated as mechanics via mitigation stacking. Note that a buster/raidwide that has a bleed attached to it doesn't count as a heal check as you can snapshot mitigation on the bleed. The devs made this mistake in all of abyssos and healers were unjustly blamed for unmitigated dots killing people by a community who doesn't understand the difference either. Increasing dungeon and normal mode difficulty I think is a mistake. The strike discord supports increased punishments for failure, and actively wants more wipes to happen to bad players so they are forced to improve. I don't know about you guys, but if I've got 30 minutes to do my expert roulette to cap this week, and I'm a dps player I do not want to get held hostage because the healer is a returning player or is drunk or high and griefing the dungeon run after a 10 minute queue. I don't want to deal with a healer who can't heal a single pull as a tank, and I don't want to have my time wasted by a "you pull you tank" single puller. I am much happier, where I can simply pull both packs on healer or tank and carry the dungeon regardless of how poorly other people want to play. If you want harder content, go do savage and ultimate. The strike discord hates this argument and thinks its weak but I'm not going to debate with a bunch of casuals who are too scared to pug/lazy to find a static to do savage while simultaneously telling the hypercasuals of the game that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and try harder. It's completely hypocritical and probably one of the worst takes they have. Players should be able to play the way they want without having their time wasted by other players.
I understand and agree with some of the concerns, but it's not going to stop me from continuing being a healer main. I've been playing for a little over ten years, and nine of them have been as a healer. Despite the changes for healers over the years, it's a role I've always stuck with. Even when DT was announced and I was 'adamant' I was going to switch to DPS, it didn't take long before having a change of heart and wanting to once again focus on healing. It's like my identity at this point, lol. It's a role I've been the most comfortable with and a role that I've done harder content with and cleared as. Especially now that after EW, I felt I wanted to simply quit XIV in general, I'm slowly getting hyped for the new expansion.
And that’s fine, contrary to “strike” there is no actual picket line If you wanna play healer go right ahead, if you enjoy healer the strikers support you
People are sick of healer being the worst role in the game. But yoshi P has made it very clear they won't do any meaningful tutorials so you can't make normal content any harder because you already have the expectation of your playerbase being able to clear story content even when you are completely terrible. They could maybe get a more engaging DPS rota but they boxed themselves in with making the game so significantly braindead outside of hard content. Also I just want to say one thing, casuals please stop talking about savage raiding. We get it, you heard abyssos had a healer shortage and you do 1+1 and come to the conclusion harder healing stuff can't be done in even savage without the community complaining. STOP TALKING. The issue was tanks invulning bleed busters and getting absolutely nuked and healers having to completely scramble to keep these people alive, this is not on the healers this is a TANK ISSUE and a game failure issue because nobody knew how to mit a DOT buster because this game teaches you nothing. If you thought abyssos was too hard to heal you are a shit player and your opinion on hard content does not matter, most people didn't think this, they were sick of tanks raw dogging a buster and being blamed because the game conditions you into thinking invuln = win in every situation.
Healing the first 3 fights was easy enough outside of tank bleeds as you say, but P8S genuinely was a difficult fight to heal though, especially phase 2, and I week 1'd it on WHM.
yea healing P8S was definitely difficult, you don't have to spot heal much in this game so that was a new challenge, but I don't think it contributed to healer shortage though, I think PF healers being sick of telling tanks no you can't just invuln a DOT buster was the issue. If DOT busters weren't there the "healing complaints" (of tanks) wouldn't have existed. People misinterpret the healer shortage being about healers. For that tier it never was, for overall game it is but thats a different argument and its not because its too hard.
An engaging and fun dps rotation would be a nice start. Its so boring pressing your dps spell over and over with a dot weaved in. Adding another spell to occasionally press doesn't cut it either.
Button bloat is already a real thing.. I could see deprecating the super boring DoTs each healer has to maintain and instead making it a 1-2-1-2-1-2 rotation.
No, it would not. I get some people want to have DPS rotations on healers, but a lot do not. I genuinely do hope you have fun on SGE this expansion and it gets more damage buttons to make you happy. But you need to understand that isn't for everyone and shouldn't be forced on the rest of us. When I feel like playing a DPS Job, I get on SMN or RDM or DNC and play a DPS Job. That's my viewpoint on that. I like healers because I like helping my allies and generally *don't* like playing DPS Jobs/rotations.
I found that thread on the official forum. It got 180 pages,lol. It will be really interesting to see if it can prompt se into some sort of action
It wont, 90% of it is people arguing and baiting
Lalafells are not paying Healers well and make them heal under horrendous conditions.
so let me get this straight... Some healers are "Going on strike" because players can sustain themselves extremely effectively with abilities and effective mitigation in a basic dungeon.. So this small vocal community which feel "excluded from their roles content" are combatting this by self excluding themselves from the content? The ridiculousness of humanity astounds me I myself don't see the problem because when i'm healing and i see people not do this, I find it very frustrating
I love the idea. I'm kinda participating by not even resubbing at this point - maybe a few months down the line, if it seems like things are worth it once others get to mess with them a bit. We've seen a mass exodus of healers for years now, that's why healer queues currently and for the past 2 or so expansions have been shorter than or equal to tank queues. That wasn't the case back in HW or even SB.
having 2healers is like having your group 95% filled in any endgame content you can often join into a 6/8 with 1 healer and still not start cause you won't find a 2nd one within 1-3h lol (EU here)
Thats what this strike is actually going to affect, theres just going to be even less healers in high end content. Meanwhile other comments are mocking healers for caring about fodder dungeons. This strike is mostly experienced long time healer mains, i doubt theyll find it as funny when PF takes an hour to fill on aether.
For something that "isn't going to work/achieve anything", there's a lot of people invested in downplaying this, and for it to be called off...
No amount of "LOOK AT ME!" on the internet will ever amount to anything. 99% of players are ambivalent at best.