#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Zolvolt]

I’ve been healing since ARR phase 3 beta. It has been so disheartening to see healing gameplay destroyed across the expansions. I support this strike.

Oh yeah let's just Casually forget that healing for sch didn't exist in arr outside of coil and Shiva ex. Whm+eos could do everything besides those. Healing hasn't been destroyed, there is more to heal, it's just covered by ogcd 90% of the time.

[JamsC]

Oh yeah let's just Casually forget that healing for sch didn't exist in arr outside of coil and Shiva ex. Whm+eos could do everything besides those. Healing hasn't been destroyed, there is more to heal, it's just covered by ogcd 90% of the time.

Hmmmm - your answer makes me doubt you did much healing in the old days. Healer gameplay then was about more than just casting cure and medica. It was the interplay between (1) support actions - virus/eye for an eye etc - (2) actual damage to respond to in dungeons, trials, and raids and (3) healer dps that was so important. We had three different functions in ARR/HW. That’s what I loved about it. Two of those have been taken from us now and there is little left to enjoy.

And I can assure you. I never left all the healing to the white mage :P

Also, bring back Cleric Stance :P :P

Edit: I forgot to mention that encounter design was much more oriented towards giving healers things to do too. We had lots of chances to help squeeze out clutch wins from potential wipes, rather than groups wiping because one person messed up. And there was just much more incidental damage going out that had to be triaged and attended to.

[Zolvolt]

Hmmmm - your answer makes me doubt you did much healing in the old days. Healer gameplay then was about more than just casting cure and medica. It was the interplay between (1) support actions - virus/eye for an eye etc - (2) actual damage to respond to in dungeons, trials, and raids and (3) healer dps that was so important. We had three different functions in ARR/HW. That’s what I loved about it. Two of those have been taken from us now and there is little left to enjoy.

And I can assure you. I never left all the healing to the white mage :P

Also, bring back Cleric Stance :P :P

Edit: I forgot to mention that encounter design was much more oriented towards giving healers things to do too. We had lots of chances to help squeeze out clutch wins from potential wipes, rather than groups wiping because one person messed up. And there was just much more incidental damage going out that had to be triaged and attended to.

lol what. Eye for an eye was a terrible ability that relied on RNG to proc. On single target it would very often never proc during it's entire duration. We have single target and raid-wide OGCD mitigations currently that function nearly identical to virus. "but virus goes ON the boss instead of on the raid" that just literally makes virus worse than what we have now. Cleric stance was annoying, especially with it's short cd. take the nostolgia glasses off :P

Healer gameplay was almost explicitly casting cure regen media, and praying you can get an aero II cast off before having to move and getting everyone to yell at you if you ever used fluid aura for dps. Scholar was even worse off because shields weren't necessary because medica 2 was going to top people up whether the shields were there or not. (coils with holding which most people couldn't even get to twintania let alone past it.)

I healed arr and you can probably find videos of my twintania kill somewhere. The high points of ARR healing was getting to put on multiple dots on the boss and having no OGCD heals. It's sad how similiar the game is now and then in terms of healing. We have more to heal and more OGCD heals to perfect our "never GCD heal" gameplay, but the engagement in healing is in the boss encounters just like it was in ARR. Healers have never given us engaging gameplay.


my point in all of that is to say that healing has gotten better over the years. Playing "never gcd heal" still feels better than "sorry you died because I mistimed my heal due to wanting to cast stone over doing nothing" But it hasn't gotten better enough. they just play healer design too safely. I hope they fix that, but it's not like they've ever given us a reason to think healing will change. It's one of those "well if I wanted to go play wow healing for example I'd go play wow." We can ask for better healing but it's not like it's a surprise when they say "well we've always done our healing this way and are going to continue to do so"

[JamsC]

lol what. Eye for an eye was a terrible ability that relied on RNG to proc. On single target it would very often never proc during it's entire duration. We have single target and raid-wide OGCD mitigations currently that function nearly identical to virus. "but virus goes ON the boss instead of on the raid" that just literally makes virus worse than what we have now. Cleric stance was annoying, especially with it's short cd. take the nostolgia glasses off :P

Healer gameplay was almost explicitly casting cure regen media, and praying you can get an aero II cast off before having to move and getting everyone to yell at you if you ever used fluid aura for dps. Scholar was even worse off because shields weren't necessary because medica 2 was going to top people up whether the shields were there or not. (coils with holding which most people couldn't even get to twintania let alone past it.)

I healed arr and you can probably find videos of my twintania kill somewhere. The high points of ARR healing was getting to put on multiple dots on the boss and having no OGCD heals. It's sad how similiar the game is now and then in terms of healing. We have more to heal and more OGCD heals to perfect our "never GCD heal" gameplay, but the engagement in healing is in the boss encounters just like it was in ARR. Healers have never given us engaging gameplay.


my point in all of that is to say that healing has gotten better over the years. Playing "never gcd heal" still feels better than "sorry you died because I mistimed my heal due to wanting to cast stone over doing nothing" But it hasn't gotten better enough. they just play healer design too safely. I hope they fix that, but it's not like they've ever given us a reason to think healing will change. It's one of those "well if I wanted to go play wow healing for example I'd go play wow." We can ask for better healing but it's not like it's a surprise when they say "well we've always done our healing this way and are going to continue to do so"

I stand corrected. Apologies for making assumptions. It seems that we both had very different experiences of healing in ARR and I’m sorry that you didn’t feel more engaged by it.

I promise Im not just being nostalgic about Cleric Stance. It really was my favourite part of being a healer in ARR/HW. When we found out it was being gutted in Stormblood, my ingame friends had a good laugh at my expense about it. I take revenge on them for that by speaking at length in raids about how much I miss it . And I honestly think that it Cleric Stance being removed is at the root of at least half of the issues we have with healers today. But I also know thats not a popular opinion and that others mileage may vary on my beloved stance dancing.

Speaking more generally about the points you made, healer gameplay for me was:

In dungeons - to me, being a healer meant using all of my mitigations and support abilities to carve out more time for stance dancing and dotting all the things I found eye for an eye to be extremely useful in dungeons, where it often proc’d on most of the enemies in a big pull, giving me more time in Cleric Stance to dot, bane, and blizzard 2. I also had to manage my MP appropriately throughout the dungeon, in case I actually had to do some GCD healing. I miss that. And lastly, even the dungeons did some actual damage! Big pulls were dangerous! All of this kept me engaged in dungeons and meant that I throughly enjoyed running them. Which is the polar opposite of how I feel today.

In raids - I loved coordinating with my white mage cohealer. I was that nerd that had a specific macro for embrace which (by spamming) allowed me to focus it on to a specific person in order to take some of the pressure off of both healers. And my memories of running coils do not include being useless because of medica 2. In fact, I distinctly remember having to shield and mitigate several mechanics to keep everyone alive. And in your specific point about virus being ON the boss as opposed to our mitigations now being buffs, I agree with that. And you have helped me clarify my thinking. The reason I liked virus/disable was because healers most of the responsibility for group mitigations. It was another thing that I had to be aware of when triaging and dpsing, and it meant I was more engaged in the fight.

Overall, I definitely felt more engaged in healing in the past than I do now. That is my main reason for supporting the idea of the healer strike. I share your pessimism about the possibility of things improving, but this is the last thing I can do before I just stop playing the game completely. So here I am.