The Problem With Healers as a Role Withing FFXIV

[Dearche]

Steps of faith was bad because:

1) If you failed you had to wait 10 min or so for the entire scenario to play out before you could try again.

2) And they gated an expansion behind it.

I addressed the first point in my post, but I don't think the second is an issue.

Odd mechanics are things which keep things fresh, and the ones in steps of faith really made you feel like the Dragonsong War was something we'd struggle to fix alone. If they made it so that you'd automatically fail if you didn't do enough of the special mechanics by certain checkpoints, there'd have been a lot less whining.

Those important design considerations aside (failing fast is a good thing after all), Steps is another shining example of that skill gulf I was talking about. The boss is -almost- a mobile training dummy. You have to avoid its feet, but there are very few mechanics to look out for. You can use the cannons and the dragonkillers if you want, but the encounter won't end if you miss them. There are some adds, but none of them have complex things to handle. Just fairly basic field mob dodging. The boss itself originally had the same amount of HP as the Avatar, the boss from T8. We were a full patch cycle/raid tier's worth of gear ahead of T8 at the time. So the community essentially complained that they couldn't beat a walking training dummy with almost no mechanics, with the HP of a previous raid tier's penultimate boss, using extra optional damage boosters conveniently available in towers along the way.

Meanwhile parties doing Final Coil were just killing it without touching the cannons or the dragonkillers.

Again, I don't think Steps is a well-designed trial. But it's got that juicy skill gap story right there.

Geez, I never realized how bad it was. As long as you got the dragonkillers, the HP didn't really matter anyways, so I didn't realize that it was just a target dummy shaped Avatar.

Though as long as I had two others who knew what they were doing, it was easy to carry the rest of the party in that trial.

[Lyth]

I don't think that you are going to specifically make healing more interesting by raising the average mechanical difficulty of fights. Instant oneshots and raidwipes generally aren't your problem. What is your problem is when deaths from unavoidable damage (tankbusters, raidwides) translate into wipes. This is where triage, prioritization, and resource management come in.

I think that it's comfortable to focus in on dps gameplay as a healer. You don't have the actual competitiveness of playing a real DPS, so you can get props from your friends while simply competing against a section of the playerbase that, for the large part, isn't actually competing with you. Simply disagreeing with the Sylphie mantra pushes you well above the average.

But as the devs whittle away at the impact of tank and healer damage output, this sidequest matters less and less. What you need to be asking for is wipe potential. You should have fights where your teammates turn around to you and are genuinely glad that you've got their back and not someone else. Without genuine wipe potential, healers just aren't going to matter, and good players aren't going to want to stay on healer.

Right now, insufficient dps is what causes wipes. You can stick any clown on tank or healer, they're just there to lower queue times. Bosses tank themselves, healing checks are trivial. You want carry potential, you want first pick on gear, you want to be valued, then you play a real DPS. It's awful, shortsighted design, but that's the way things are now. You want to reverse this trend, then healing checks and tank checks need to make or break whether your raid group clears fights.

[Mortex]

I’m still curious why they don’t give healers good dps rotations. People that don’t wanna dps don’t do it even with a single button you need too press. Like if you don’t wanna dps you aren’t forced too like now so it shouldn’t even be a problem for player that wanna play like this only .And people that try to play the job as good as possible die of boredom because you hit 1 button 150 times in a fight forcing you to buy a new keyboard every major patch

[Reiryuu]

I’m still curious why they don’t give healers good dps rotations. People that don’t wanna dps don’t do it even with a single button you need too press. Like if you don’t wanna dps you aren’t forced too like now so it shouldn’t even be a problem for player that wanna play like this only .And people that try to play the job as good as possible die of boredom because you hit 1 button 150 times in a fight forcing you to buy a new keyboard every major patch

Easy. None of the devs play a healer. None of them know how to make healers or even make engaging mechanics for them. They lack creativity in ways healing can be done and, for some reason, they seem to think that being a healer is scary. Yet... tanks get all the achievements, tanks are constantly in demand, etc... Why don't tanks get 1 button to press for their damage rotation and 500 buttons for mitigation? Then more people will play tanks... right?

[Gruntler]

Ah, this reminds me of Steps of Faith as well.

That was one trial that went from fun to pants on head retarded in the span of a month or two.

I really wish that SE just made a good way to reset instead of nerfing it to the ground. Maybe have mechanic checkpoints that causes instant wipes if you ignore them.

The problem with Steps of Faith wasn't it's difficulty (it wasn't difficult), it was the fact that once your good players who could teach people got their clear, they would bail upon seeing Steps of Faith. Bailing on content that you didn't want to do was very much the norm in ARR, and we'd find imaginative (and non-imaginative ways) to avoid doing any trial or dungeon that was seen as a pain in the ass. Design decisions today have echoed from what we did.

So, no, it wasn't a skill problem, it was a 'the vets fucked off and left new players high and dry so after a few days it'd take days before you'd get your stupid clear' problem.

If it was as 'fun' as the 'vets' claimed, you'd not have had that problem.

And... this was nerfed before they 'gated an expansion' behind it. They should not fix that trial to appease players who want to 'play it when it was fun' but are clear from their language they didn't actually experience it when it was 'fun.' Players who started

[Shurrikhan]

The problem with Steps of Faith wasn't it's difficulty (it wasn't difficult), it was the fact that once your good players who could teach people got their clear, they would bail upon seeing Steps of Faith. Bailing on content that you didn't want to do was very much the norm in ARR, and we'd find imaginative (and non-imaginative ways) to avoid doing any trial or dungeon that was seen as a pain in the ass. Design decisions today have echoed from what we did.

This. And while I understand it's a more fundamental issue at heart, it's a little sad that there were so few attempts to just, idk, increase the bonus reward from new players, maybe even allowing for partial stacking if 1 new player would be irrelevant while 2 would damn near necessitate wipes. Or, heck, they could have dealt with the fundamental issue with roulettes' non-scaling daily bonuses long ago and we'd have likely have less homogenous content now.

[Kabooa]

This. And while I understand it's a more fundamental issue at heart, it's a little sad that there were so few attempts to just, idk, increase the bonus reward from new players, maybe even allowing for partial stacking if 1 new player would be irrelevant while 2 would damn near necessitate wipes. Or, heck, they could have dealt with the fundamental issue with roulettes' non-scaling daily bonuses long ago and we'd have likely have less homogenous content now.

You know what I miss?

Healing the NPCs and having my own personal army poking that dragon in the bum. 80 damage per auto attack doesn't seem like much until you have 60 of them present.

[Shurrikhan]

You know what I miss?

Healing the NPCs and having my own personal army poking that dragon in the bum. 80 damage per auto attack doesn't seem like much until you have 60 of them present.

Yet another reason to want smart-heals on AoEs (up to X total potency across wounded allies in range, party member or otherwise, favoring party members > most wounded).

(Ideally, make the max total healing of AoE heals a bit less in turn, as to make them less absurdly strong in general, though.)

[Liam_Harper]

So, no, it wasn't a skill problem, it was a 'the vets fucked off and left new players high and dry so after a few days it'd take days before you'd get your stupid clear' problem.

If it was as 'fun' as the 'vets' claimed, you'd not have had that problem.

That's not the vets fault. They cleared it, they had their fun already. There's no rule against bailing from duties you dislike.

New players are not entitled to carries from experienced players. How did the vets get their clear in the first place when it was new and there was no one to teach them? They patiently figured out the fight by trial and error, learned it, researched and beat it. There's no reason new players cannot do the same. This applies to any difficult fight, including those entitled rants you see regarding "Duty Complete" PF's for endgame.

If you want to beat a difficult fight, progress it and don't be lazy and sit back complaining that vets won't walk you through.

[Deceptus]

So, no, it wasn't a skill problem, it was a 'the vets fucked off and left new players high and dry so after a few days it'd take days before you'd get your stupid clear' problem.

If it was as 'fun' as the 'vets' claimed, you'd not have had that problem.

And... this was nerfed before they 'gated an expansion' behind it. They should not fix that trial to appease players who want to 'play it when it was fun' but are clear from their language they didn't actually experience it when it was 'fun.' Players who started

If newbies need the vets to carry them that's on the newbies, not the vets. The content wasn't so hard it couldn't be done, most just didn't even try to coordinate it.

I attempted to assist multiple groups trying that fight. Hands down the best strat was for the off healer and the off tank to man the cannons so the dps could focus on the dragon and the adds. Off tank / Off Healer much higher aoe damage via the cannons than they would have normally.

Guess how many people actually did that? Hell most people ignored the cannons all together (when it was new and the cannons / dragonkiller were pretty much mandatory).

At some point it's not worth the headache to try and help people who actively will NOT listen.

That's for each player to decide. But if you have enough bad group experiences in certain content, I can't blame people for seeing "Steps of Faith" pop up and they bolt.