#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Aravell]

For all the people recently who say that "it's not that healer needs more damage options, it's that there's not enough damage going out", I have to ask you all.....

What do you do when there's nothing to heal? Do you keep up your damage? If so, do you not find your 2111111111112111111..... rotation boring?

There is actually zero possible way to make it so there's no downtime in this game. You can attempt to shorten the downtime, but you also have to keep in mind that the shorter the downtime becomes, the less time you also have to recover mistakes. This would undoubtedly raise the skill floor and would thus be not considered for regular dungeon content.

A solution should target all levels of play, it shouldn't be a half solution that cannot be applied to the content where healers are currently suffering an identity crisis the most.

[Rubiss]

I would love for YoshiP to play Healer for a tier. Maybe he'd understand what it's like to press the same single button 80% of the time. I feel as though not a single soul in the entire dev team actually plays healer. How could anyone let it remain the way it is for so many years? Promises of things changing in 7.2? Cool, so wait more than a year for what's likely going to be mid? Healing is just going to suck and remain bad. Better off playing DPS.

[KisaiTenshi]

i still don't understand why cleric stance was straight up removed. it was too hard? ok, but it was also fun, so don't delete it, re-balance it. make it an optimization thing instead of a requirement. like a +5%/-5% alteration.

"Yoshida: For example, in a side scrolling game, if there aren’t any holes you can drop down into if you miss a jump, ofcourse the game would lose its stress, but it would also lose its fun."

Non-conspiracy theory reason: Simply that cleric stance was not compatible with lag. All "stance dancing" was incompatible with lag, but as a healer, cleric stance swapped MND and INT, so if player had min-maxed MND as a healer, and not PIE, then when they hit cleric stance, they could do as much damage as a black mage does. But that's not the reality that happened. People would hit cleric stance, and then their heals would drop to 1-10% of what they should be, and if that was done at the wrong time, that wiped the party. Every time. People were mad.

You still see this effect with swiftcast. Where swiftcast will fire but then the thing you cast after it still takes the GCD time to cast. The only time swiftcast ever fires perfectly is when it's in a macro without any "wait" statements, because the game client is assured to have sent it in the same data packet.

Cleric Stance was only introduced in 1.20, so it hailed from the game's initial rework of the classes. Back when the combat involved little movement and a lot of standing in place.

The reason why "Cleric Stance" itself was bad, and say, "DPS stance" for a tank wasn't, was because Tanks had to tank swap. There is no point in the game that requires the healer to ever DPS, so having this skill at all during dungeon play was pointless. So when they removed the ability to set custom INT/MND/PIE values at level up, they had to remove Cleric Stance, because it no longer did anything. Now DPS is fixed and predictable without having to waste two GCD's to cast DPS. The DPS GCD should have just been 5s recasts, while the Healing 2.5s GCD's being affected by skill/cast speeds.

People who "weren't there" didn't experience the numerous bad "green DPS" players who played healer just to get a fast queue pop, and then they all die at the first pull. Healing isn't "1-2-3" combos where you have to be casting continuously. In 8-player content you could always tell which was the green DPS because they would switch to cleric stance and STAY in it. Healing was more "intense" by pure virtue of the number of players who just didn't know how to heal, and didn't know that they shouldn't be in Cleric stance to heal.

Cleric Stance intended only so you didn't spend 10x as long in solo MSQ content, and that skill should have been inaccessible during a party. But alas, the game's MSQ doesn't require anything but DPS, so people never required to play their non-DPS job. Tank stance is more complicated, and if the duty only requires one tank, then the tank stance should have been locked on, since there isn't a second tank to shirk enmity to. But people keep floating this notion that every job in party content must be doing 95% DPS rather than being completely optional. So a lot of ARR-era fights on the forums were this circular argument about "pure healer" (who did zero DPS) and "lazy healer" (who only used Medica and focused on DPS, even without cleric stance.) Once Cleric stance was disposed of, there was no more reason to have this argument because the time penalty to DPS was removed. Now anyone telling you to DPS can be ignored because you will DPS if you find time to, or you can just do no DPS and it won't be missed except by people violating the TOS who can't say anything.

[Oizen]

I would love for YoshiP to play Healer for a tier. Maybe he'd understand what it's like to press the same single button 80% of the time. I feel as though not a single soul in the entire dev team actually plays healer. How could anyone let it remain the way it is for so many years? Promises of things changing in 7.2? Cool, so wait more than a year for what's likely going to be mid? Healing is just going to suck and remain bad. Better off playing DPS.

I dont believe Yoshida plays this game anymore. I think he used to in stormblood but I think theres a lot more distance between him and FFXIV right now

[Kathryn]

So for Clarity on whats wanted from this healerstrike is:

You want mitigations removed from Tanks and DPS?

You want Self heals Removed from Tanks and DPS?

You want enemies to hit much harder?

You want healers to have a more decisive DPS Rotation?

This is what I've gathered from the posts made in this thread, I promise im not trolling Im just gathering feedback confirmation.

[Len_]

i still don't understand why cleric stance was straight up removed. it was too hard? ok, but it was also fun, so don't delete it, re-balance it. make it an optimization thing instead of a requirement. like a +5%/-5% alteration.

"Yoshida: For example, in a side scrolling game, if there aren’t any holes you can drop down into if you miss a jump, ofcourse the game would lose its stress, but it would also lose its fun."

It was removed because it was bad. There's a version of Cleric Stance in the game that actually makes sense called Lost Seraph Strike.

[TheDustyOne]

You want mitigations removed from Tanks and DPS?

No, at worst maybe some could do with nerfs, but otherwise mitigation is more of the tanks job than healers anyway.

You want Self heals Removed from Tanks and DPS?

Moreso nerfed than removed, although a large chunk can definitely be removed. They're powerful enough to make healers largely unneeded in casual content. It's one thing to have skilled players able to do content without a healer with some good planning, but currently you can get extremely sloppy and still succeed without a healer in casual content.

You want enemies to hit much harder?

Depends on how hard; too hard and it will affect casual players, but it certainly needs to be more than now, enough to make the healer feel warranted.

You want healers to have a more decisive DPS Rotation?

Yes. Doesn't need much, I'd be happy with about 4-6 regularly used buttons in a single target rotation, give or take.

[Gemina]

I keep seeing people say this, and then I look at my normal roulette run last night, on P5. I was WAR MT and my friend was DRK. Everything was going well until we hit Devour. Both healers and two of the DPS died with Carby at 25%. One DPS died soon after, leaving three of us. I went down first after burning through all my mits, including Holmgang and my self-heals. The other DPS died, and then it was down to my friend the DRK, who made a heroic effort but died before Undead Rebirth kicked in with Carby at 1%.

Yes, occasionally a WAR can solo a dungeon boss from around half health. But the idea that this means healers are obsolete doesn't track with my experience, especially as a DRK main. Currently I have three self-heals: Souleater, the third part of my single-target combo which I don't use onb wall-to-wall pulls because I'm doing my AoE rotation. Abyssal Drain, which is on a 60-second cooldown and shares a recast timer with Carve and Spit; if I use AD on a second w2w pull I won't have C&S for my opener against the next boss. Oh, and there's Living Dead, which is on a 5-minute cooldown and includes three different 10-second phases and most of the time I die anyway. I'm thrilled that Dawntrail includes another self-heal, not because I don't need a healer, but because it makes my favorite tank more viable.

I get that healing is in a bad state, and I think giving healers more of a DPS rotation and having more damage go out in general would be good things. I'd even agree that WAR is overtuned when it comes to self-heals in normal content, but for most tanks the solution isn't to take away our self-sustain abilities, it's to fix the problems with healers.

I personally don't have an issue with self-heals on a tank. It's when they are so ridiculously powerful as to render the healer useless is where I take issue. The other problem is abilities like Bloodwhetting allow a WAR to heal themselves to full without having to tradeoff their DPS. It is so asinine to me that this even got green-lighted in the first place, and then they actually double-downed on their self-sustain. I'm still over here running my fingers through my hair, mystified.

I can only speak for myself, but I don't even know how someone can play such a busted-arse job with any kind of fulfillment of doing actual tanking.

[PercibelTheren]

I get the feeling this strike is everyone saying "design a healer that suits my specific play style" and everyone having a different play style. Some want more damage and randomized damage, some want more DPS options, some want more support options, some want to change it into a support role and add other jobs to it. In the end the problem is that there are very different wants from everyone and no matter what they choose the people that didn't get their way are going to be right back here saying the same things.

Well, it's a good thing that we have 4 healers, then, isn't it? Not all DPS players want the same things from their jobs and different DPS jobs have different niches. Why do all healers and tanks have to be carbon copies of each other?

[Justicebringer]

While I'm in agreement that healing has been on a downward spiral I end up playing it when I'm feeling lazy these days. Mind you I won't be playing it through the MSQ of DT and probably level them or phys ranged last because they kinda bore me too but that's a different topic. I couldn't imagine going through solo duties during MSQ spamming broil with the occasional biolysis. That and the new angel transformation is kinda ugly.