#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Kazmarek]

Well, there is one thing that is for certain: Every healer that strikes only increases the chance that you get a donut healer in your party. Apparently they are a dime a dozen according to you. If you're a non-tank, make sure not to stand in the bad.

I suspect a lot of the healers striking are already donuts to begin with. You yourself, the creator of this thread, have admitted to not doing much higher-end content. Frankly, your opinion is completely irrelevant because of that. You'd see that roles actually matter more in harder content if you bothered to do it. Sure, ucob was cleared with 8 tanks. Sure, top was cleared without any healers. Sure, tea was cleared with 2 tanks, 5 white mages and a dragoon. But that's not the norm. Nobody is actually doing that because it's optimal, they're doing it for fun. To see if they can actually do it.

Casual content is casual content. For better or worse, it's meant to be cleared by anybody at any skill level. This is unfortunate in my opinion because people can get to max level and still have exactly 0 idea what they're doing. Just look at most mentors for proof of this. Warriors, in dungeons, are awesome. They can do the entire thing no problem. Warriors, in trials, are still awesome, but only to a certain extent. Warriors, in normal raids, are still awesome, but only to a certain extent. When you get up to the extreme level, the savage level, the ultimate level, the sustain of tanks (and dps) matters less and less because the fights are mechanically difficult, not healing difficult. Healers matter most, in my opinion, in prog, when everybody's still learning and making mistakes. That part is where healers can shine with their improvisation skills.

Content in this game is a puzzle. It might be a difficult puzzle to figure out, but once you do, that's it. It's solved. This means that once you've got it down, tanks will always know where they're putting their mits, healers will always know where they're putting their heals, dps will always know where they're putting their mits, when they're using their burst, etc. etc. That's just how it is. So instead of making healer good, or making tanks worse, there would need to be a complete overhaul of the battle system to make it less puzzle-like. I'm far from the first person to have this idea. I genuinely don't think this is ever going to happen. Again, for better or for worse, the game's gotten easier over the years and it's now "acceptable" now more than ever to be bad.

[Turtledeluxe]

I'm sure just about every strike has been told it's irrelevant, only going to fall by the wayside of history, result in "replacements" of better behaving individuals (as though wishing for fans of a broken system is a noble or good thing) etc. Well wishers are a strange bunch.

I will say this-- if the healing strike gets ignored, then SE should be prepared to abandon roles. There's simply no point when omni jobs already exist-- they've already made them. So just make all jobs equal parts dps, healing, mitigation and be done with it. Let people dive into the playstyle they prefer on any job. Just destroy what FF is since they have already done it. Or better put-- stop piddling around and just finish the job already.

[Pandurah]

I suspect a lot of the healers striking are already donuts to begin with. You yourself, the creator of this thread, have admitted to not doing much higher-end content. Frankly, your opinion is completely irrelevant because of that. You'd see that roles actually matter more in harder content if you bothered to do it.

Now now, no need to be an elitist about this, because that's such an ugly stance to take, and you've already hit yourself with quite the shovel. People are allowed to their opinions about a videogame, and as you can see (if you'd taken the time to look), there're more players from all kinds of skill-levels that have an issue with the current healer role. And yes, believe it or not, some have completed Savage tiers and Ultimates. Gasp!

[Kazmarek]

Now now, no need to be an elitist about this, because that's such an ugly stance to take, and you've already hit yourself with quite the shovel. People are allowed to their opinions about a videogame, and as you can see (if you'd taken the time to look), there're more players from all kinds of skill-levels that have an issue with the current healer role. And yes, believe it or not, some have completed Savage tiers and Ultimates. Gasp!

I mean it's true. Why listen to people who don't know what they're talking about?

Oh, and just so we're clear, I'm aware there are people in here who have cleared higher end content. I'm much more receptive to hearing what they have to say considering they've actually, y'know, played the class in more difficult content, as opposed to the casual who forgets they have a dot.

[Pandurah]

I mean it's true. Why listen to people who don't know what they're talking about?

I repeat: there're more players from all kinds of skill-levels that have an issue with the current healer role. And yes, believe it or not, some have completed Savage tiers and Ultimates. Gasp!

[ty_taurus]

Now now, no need to be an elitist about this, because that's such an ugly stance to take, and you've already hit yourself with quite the shovel. People are allowed to their opinions about a videogame, and as you can see (if you'd taken the time to look), there're more players from all kinds of skill-levels that have an issue with the current healer role. And yes, believe it or not, some have completed Savage tiers and Ultimates. Gasp!

If anything, I think it's more telling that there's players not only of varying skill levels, but also who have started at different times during FFXIV's life span. From casual to hardcore raider, from 1.0 legacy players to EW beginners, a lot of people see healer design as a problem. It's not just a raider thing that casuals don't care about or vice versa.

[Aravell]

"After invasively hunting-through people's profiles and Achievements, and without considering people who post on alt accounts to avoid running afoul of psychopaths who stalk-through people's profiles and Achievements, I have determined that very few people in this thread have cleared Dragonsong's Reprise Ultimate, therefore, your desire for healing change is unfounded. Rather than protesting, I recommend that you simply begin healing on-patch Ultimates through Party Finder."

This is exactly why I use an alt as a display character.

People who stalk your profiles are those who realise they cannot challenge your stance so they stalk your stuff to try and pull authority over you and discredit your argument.

Having people out themselves in that way is one of the best reasons to use a display alt.

[Turtledeluxe]

I mean it's true. Why listen to people who don't know what they're talking about?

What is the point of a game where the majority of the content is imbalanced, nonsensical, and boring? All so your tiny % of sweaty parsers (because let's be real, it's not just high end players) can have your way? Answer me that.

I understand the necessity of tuning for Ultimates. However they are a tiny % of the game. That's the simple reality. What about the rest of the game making sense?

I haven't seen one good response for example, why it's ok for a tank to solo down a boss at 80% health alone. I've been told it's because "they're too angry to die", which is funny and all, but it's just not balanced.

[TheDustyOne]

I mean it's true. Why listen to people who don't know what they're talking about?

I've healed a couple of savage fights back in ShB, it still sucked and I only stuck to the occasional heal in roulettes when I couldn't be bothered to wait in queues. I know what I found fun back in SB, your elitism is just an attempt to gaslight people that they don't know what they're talking about and be dismissive rather than listening to any concerns that they may have.

The inverse has also been a massive concern; experienced healers get dismissed because poor Johnny Casual who struggles to press Medica won't be able to clear if we increase the healing requirements, or he might drop the role if he has 1 extra DPS spell to contend with.

Stop dismissing people because of your own ego.

[Eorzean_username]

So for those who want cleric stance back, you really don't.

Man, come on, don't J Allen Brack me.

Yep, I'll play the "villain" on this topic — I want Cleric Stance back. No caveats, no buts. If the developers suddenly put Cleric Stance right back in the game, exactly as it was in ARR/HW, it would not bother me at all.

I liked Cleric Stance. I thought it made healing in FFXIV more fun.

I personally feel like Cleric Stance is being cartoonishly-vilified by most of FFXIV's community, now that it's all far-away and in hindsight.

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I was playing in the Cleric Stance era, and in my own experiences, Cleric just wasn't that big of a problem. Dungeons, Normal Raids, and Alliance Raids didn't constantly wipe because Healers were in Cleric. If someone wasn't feeling confident about DPSing, or the encounter seemed too risky / unfamiliar / spicy, then Healers would just... stay out of Cleric.

There's a tendency to exaggerate and portray "less dedicated" / "more casual" players as complete idiots who can't do anything correct, but in my actual experiences, most people playing Healers had no problem utilising Cleric correctly. And if someone wasn't using Cleric correctly, it was almost-invariably due to being too cautious, and not entering Cleric as much as they could have. Which didn't even feel that bad back then, because Healing from Healers actually mattered a lot more, so if your Healer was being cautious, it was like... "OK, no problem, that's fine, just keep the HP bars up".

And I also think that it's overexaggerated that Healers were being bullied about Cleric uptime or something. I cannot personally remember a single moment in any content outside Savage and maybe some EXs when I ever saw anyone even care whether one or more Healers were in Cleric or not, as long as the Party wasn't wiping to healable damage.

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Actually, thinking about it now, Cleric Stance was one of the first things about FFXIV that stuck-out to me as a new player. It was interesting and a new sort of mechanic to me, and it made Healing actually work differently from how it felt in other MMOs.

In fact, FFXIV used to be full of strange and interesting differences in its design and play-feel like that, and it was a large part of what made me become interested in the game past the free trial, and stay-on as a dedicated player.

The successive changes that Mr. Yoshida has pushed-for since Stormblood to "broaden appeal" have, for me, served to water-down, genericise, and dilute FFXIV's gameplay design more and more, and at this point, if you put me in a test environment where the player-units had FFXIV's Job mechanics, except everything was reskinned with generic models purchased off an Unreal Engine asset-store, I might be hard-pressed to correctly identify which game I'm even playing.

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As far as the statements about how supposedly-unpleasant it was to have to deal with Cleric, I personally didn't view Cleric as an "inconvenience" — I viewed it as a mechanic.

A mechanic that was just like any other mechanic that is part of how Jobs and Roles functioned, like Enochian or Blood of the Dragon.

So I just learned how and when to use it. And it felt good to get better at encounters, and become more confident and bold about when to safely enter Cleric to deal some more damage. There was a sense of definite "skill progression" as I repeated encounters more and more, and it also made even Dungeons feel a lot more engaging to learn and practise the mechanics and patterns.

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As for Cleric clock-blocking you from DPSing... I don't know what to say, really.

I mean, I did "switch between DPS and Healing Spells freely", because the cooldown on Cleric was 5 seconds, and even in ARR/HW, FFXIV's healing pace was lethargic compared to other games.

So tales of switching to Cleric, and then everyone DYING HORRIBLY AHHHHH because you can't heal because you're strapped in Cleric Jail, seem perplexing and greatly-exaggerated to me.

At worst, you might sweat slightly for ~1 GCD before you just toggled Cleric back off and Cure 2 or Lustrate or something. Maybe burn a Swiftcast if something really weird happened.

Honestly, dancing into Cleric to reapply DOTs, then swapping back out to reapply Regen or something, was an enjoyable rhythm to me. And again, it felt actually-distinct, rather than just "What if we made WoW, but the server responsiveness was really bad?"

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And as for gear and stats... I personally found the INT/MND split interesting.

I liked that different stats actually did different things, and it felt cool to "shift" between Help Mode and Death Mode, even at the numeric level.

There was a tangible power-reward for using that shift intelligently, and it felt cool to gradually watch content clear faster and faster as I became more confident about when to Cleric.

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Actually, I don't even see how Cleric would be a problem with FFXIV's modern design — everything has only become more hyper-scripted and meticulously-plotted. Dedicated EX, Savage, and Ultimate Healers could probably map-out down to the exact GCD exactly when they would toggle Cleric Stance on and off.

Especially because, there is already barely-any need for "spontaneous emergency healing" in current FFXIV, so there would be little risk of being caught inside Cleric at the wrong time, unless you're completely YOLO'ing a Savage floor with no plan whatsoever... which would probably cause you not to succeed anyway, with or without Cleric Stance in the game?

And even if you did "mess up" your Cleric timing, it's just not very common in FFXIV to encounter cases where a maximum possible delay of 5s would actually cause a wipe, because you would both need the timing of incoming damage-waves to be that precise, and also to have activated Cleric literally right before the designated mechanic occurred. Otherwise, you'd have a delay before Healing of less than 5s, because Cleric was already cooling-down by some amount.

To be honest, Cleric's 5s CD is actually incredibly-forgiving in a game that has scripted and paced-out damage as precisely as FFXIV does.

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...So yeah, you're totally welcome to personally dislike Cleric Stance as a mechanic, we all have different play-sensibilities.

But lecturing me about what I "actually want" is... pretty inaccurate, regarding this topic.