#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Mortex]

Ah, but we're not in ARR or Heavensward now, are we?

No we are in a time of the game were you as war can do it all. Best invuln, best sustain and good dmg. But instead of taking a step back and maybe consider warrior could be a problem and in some aspect the other tanks (not drk) also you come around the corner and try to tell us”hur dur I need to be this busted as a job or I might need a healer for clearing this dungeon and can’t solo that entire thing”. And we as a healer have the most brain dead experience while you have a war power trip.

[Mortex]

100% agree and the core identity of jobs should and do change over time.

Though, with warrior the change has seen a ton of praise and I'd hate healer woes to take away from other players experience. Especially with the increasing mindset of healers aren't needed. And yes, at the same time healers shouldn't be forced to suffer to make other roles happy either.

So the identity of war is “too angry to die” the problem is final does it In the most dumb way possible by making war heal all the time. Even a berserker in any good fantasy medium will feel the pain and drawback after some time but war just shakes his shoulder and his entire blood and his organs will be back in his body. There are some really cool ways for a berserker to work but this ain’t it chief.

[Turtledeluxe]

So early on the design was GNB/DRK are the DPS tanks with low party sustain, and WAR/PLD were lower damage but bigger support tools. Including better party mitigation, party healing, and just generally stronger targeted short mits on allies.
Nascent double dips its healing and shares mitigation for both the WAR and their target, while Heart of Corundum is all or nothing you or your target, PLDs is kinda similar.

A combination of a streamer screeching and an overtuned damage check in abyssos caused them to close the damage gap, which indirectly just make PLD and especially WAR super tanks with superior buttons and damage.
They seem to like the tank healer direction given they buffed shake it off to have heal over time mid patch. Though I'd argue it was never healthy to begin with

Ah, so the usual source of problems regarding job management in this game.

[Gemina]

Just adding my 2 gil to help strengthen your arguments, assuming it does reach the devs.

While the DPS rotation being boring is a valid critique, I highly recommend you instead emphasize and make the foundation of your argument around how it is physically damaging instead. The repetition of pressing a single button/key so much has forced multiple high level raiders to retire the role due to getting carpal tunnel / tendonitis this expansion. This gives you a much stronger argument based on a legitimate health risk rather than a subjective opinion that can't easily be countered with other subjective opinions from other player groups (not that they won't still try). The correlation between pressing a single button and contracting tendonitis / carpal tunnel is also not difficult to get valid supporting evidence from it being a documented occurrence within office jobs (it's anecdotal but I have to use an ergonomic mouse to avoid getting tendonitis for my job).



Points with only 2 sentences like this should be modestly expanded to give clarity to the uninformed who may stumble upon this thread. As they are right now, they're too vague and easy to misunderstand for those with zero context on the problem. My recommendation is to treat this like explaining symptoms of a condition to a doctor, as that will more clearly communicate to the devs (who you ideally want to see this) what the problems are as a player. For example:

"Playing the healer role feels unsatisfying with no impact as an overall experience. Having so many healing tools doesn't feel useful or necessary when most content doesn't need you to use them. This leaves my only methods of contribution to be resolving mechanics and pressing a single button on repeat, which is starting to give finger pain to some. It's either worsen this pain or just stand there and appear to others like you're not contributing, which puts the role in a lose/lose situation. Instead of feeling like a savior or preserver of life, improving your skill as a healer only serves to punish the player with monotony and physical pain from repetitive action."

Not perfect, but it at least tries to communicate the player experience and current problems. Hopefully all of this came off as constructive, because I'm genuinely not trying to tear down what you're doing.

Thank you for your suggestions! I will take all of this into consideration as the manifesto is still being worked on and finalized. We would like to have it complete before the strike is officially underway, so all suggestions are welcome. However, I would recommend joining our discord. Your suggestions are more likely to get seen there. I do read all the posts here, but I am also human and can miss some things.

[aiqa]

I wasn't around pre Endwalker. Can someone enlighten me as to why WAR/PLD are in this situation? Were they underperforming in high end content or not being played enough? What's the motivation behind making them healers?

Because ultimately I'm curious if they were nerfed-- what exactly would be the consequences.

I don't have a good idea on why WAR selfhealing was improved over the years, but for PLD it was quite sudden.

PLD always had some team support, even in ARR. But before EW those were limited to mitigations, a far more situational shield, and a GCD heal. Before EW PLD lacked any ogcd/inherent selfhealing, and even now it has very little before level 82. The idea was that the few percent (4% on average) extra mitigation from block would be PLD's version of selfhealing, but (imo) that was lacking and a litlte selfhealing was warrented. Then came the PLD rework and selfhealing went of the rails. Still not at the level of WAR, but close. The devs never gave a reason for it, but I assume they took WAR as a target and tried to get PLD selfhealing in the same ballpark.

Without any ogcd/inherent selfheals PLD didn't feel very good. And I wouldn't want removal of all tank ogcd/inherent selfheals even though PLD could still tank in all content without them. But there is a middle ground between no selfhealing and what tanks get now.

[Absurdity]

Yeah, I don't know why people are trying to rewrite history here.
DrK and PLD were neck on neck during Stormblood, with Warrior standing at the top due to it's higher DPS on average, superior snap aggro generation and simple playstyle (after 4.2). Paladin being the usually preferred pick as the 2nd tank with it's superior utility (basically the dedicated off-tank).

In Shadowbringers it was actually GnB and PLD that were the two highest DPS tanks, with DrK only slightly behind and shining particularly in TEA since it could cleave both bosses, Warrior now firmly at the bottom in exchange for Nascent Flash's strong self-sustain.

So with Nascent Flash and free Equilibrium already giving Warrior strong self-heal in Shadowbringers it's not exactly surprising that they continued in that direction with Endwalker.
Paladin's added selfheal however came basically out of nowhere. While I do remember people occasionally complaining about PLD's lack of selfheal on it's 1-2-3 combo I do not remember anyone asking for massive healing on it's Req phase.
The job's terrible dps output was an unfortunate side effect of the rework to party buffs in Endwalker and the resulting 2-min meta, making Paladin's original playstyle unviable in this new environment.

[Supersnow845]

I actually wouldn’t mind the healing on the requiescat phase if PLD still played like it did in 6.0 when you only healed for 5 GCD’s in a very specific phase of your rotation

It’s the fact that when they reworked it they made Holy Spirit something you cast an extra like 5 times per minute as part of your core rotation then added thay ridiculous regen to holy Shelton which they can also share with no downside with intervention

The original requi phase healing was a good substitute for healing on the 1-2-3

[RhodesToRome]

So I've read through quite a few of the replies on this post, but obviously not all of them. While I've been going through the comments I've also simultaneously been looking up people's characters to see what kind of content they are engaging in. And, to no surprise, the vast majority of the players complaining here are not doing high end content (Savage, Ultimate, and Criterion Savage). Maybe some Extremes here and there, but for the most part they do not seem to be raiding. There are high end raiders with concerns as well, but I feel that their concerns are a bit different, and are coming from a different perspective, compared to the majority I've read here.

Now this brings up an interesting question concerning the casual player. Is it a valid criticism on their part that they do not feel engaged playing the Healer role while they are doing the more casual content like Roulettes and Story? You could say that the game is designed that way. In order to cater to the broadest scope of players possible, the developers have intentionally put up as few road blocks and pain points as possible in everyday content. Opting instead to funnel the player towards raiding if they desire something more challenging and rewarding.

But as the jobs obtain more tools and become stronger over time, as the lines become blurred as to what a Support or a DPS is capable of, I can definitely see where a more casual player can start to feel bored and disinterested. After all, why would healing be interesting when you can primarily rely on powerful OGCDs to heal damage that already feels negligible? Why would healing be interesting when others Jobs are able to sustain themselves without you? Why would healing be interesting when any content, outside of the high end, provides absolutely no friction or challenge to the player?

As someone who has healed Savage and some Ultimate, I do not share most of the sentiments voiced in this post. I may have some gripes concerning the design of raid content and the Jobs, but overall I am still satisfied and I see a purpose for all of the roles in a raid setting. Personally, I don't think a re-work or re-imagining of the Healer role (or any other role) is the answer to a lot of the complaints I've seen here. I think the solution lies in the battle content itself. There needs to be more friction and challenge in casual content. I want to see healing checks. I want to see actual damage checks. I want a dungeon boss' attacks to do more than tickle you. I want dungeon trash to actually be a threat. I want to see more interesting encounter design. I'm not suggesting that we turn the knob to the complete opposite end and scare away these players from attempting anything, but there needs to be an outlet where the average (and below average) player can utilize the powerful tools they've been given and feel like they're contributing and feel good about it.

[Supersnow845]

^the problem with savage content comes from the fact that even in content designed to test you to your near limits we are still spending 80% of our casts on our filler spell and our dot (and that’s inclusive of healing oGCD’s and other damage options like phlegma and assize)

Sure you can up damage and that’s a good thing to do but the slow methodical of 14’s combat means that you’ll struggle to get healers to spend more than 50% of a savage raid healing, should there not be better options for downtime in this other 50-80%

It doesn’t even have to be actual damage it could be buffs and debuffs and the like, just something that’s not broil

However i don’t think it’s wrong for casual players to ask for improvements to the casual experience even if they don’t do high end content, I mean you can look at my logs but it won’t show much, my logs on Andreas are outdated because this isn’t my raiding main (though I’m not disappointed with the EW logs I have on this character my raiding main regularly gets purples), however I don’t think damage experience is necesssry to have an opinion on this

[Oizen]

Normal content is simply too easy, and unlike most I do actually view this as a problem. A problem thats very difficult to solve because this game does not teach you how to play it in any regard, so raising the difficulty is a hard thing to do because the game has a lot of catch up to do in order to expect more of its playerbase. Which is probably why SE doesn't view this as a real concern.

I honestly cant even remember if this game explains the concept of global cooldowns or weaving to you.