#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

Personally, I love the idea from some players that 'healer strike is pointless, because I'll just play healer myself if the queue times are too long'. Because, let's say you're playing a tank or DPS through the story. You get to the final level 100 trial, and the queue won't pop because there's no healers (due to combination of this and VPR/PCT hype). So you swap to a healer to get a fast queue... which healer, exactly? You'll all have used a non-healer to do the story, so your healers will all still be at level 90. The idea that people will just casually swap to a healer to avoid the long queues is wishful thinking, only SMNs will be able to do this on release. Of course it'll be less of an issue after the first week or so, when people start levelling secondary classes, but it's the first week that this strike aims to impact the hardest anyway

I definitely think you should try ultimates and criterion (not variant). It sounds like you need harder content that actually forces you to use more of your toolkit and more gcds.

Already do Savage week 1, and I've done Ultimates as a healer (even on-content Ultimates, not just outdated UCOB/UWU). What more can I do? And besides, as mentioned a million times, I still have to do things like EX roulette/Hunt Trains to cap my tomes. My job should feel fun to play in that content too. Or are you really trying to take the stance that 'your job should only feel fun to play in 5 pieces of content per 8 months, and nowhere else'

edit

As I said, I'm not trying to invalidate people's own personal experiences with Cleric Stance.

On the subject of Cleric Stance, I think it'd be good to bring back a stance-dance optimization tool on one of the healers, but not all of them. I think SCH is the best candidate for it, and this is how I'd do it:

Strategy: Offensive, increasing the base potency of Bio (30s), Miasma (24s), and Shadowflare (15s) by 20p. Every healing tool works mostly as it currently does while in Offensive stance, so 'locking yourself in stance' doesn't punish you with 'your healing is pathetic'.

Strategy: Defensive, adding additional defensive properties to actions. Turns Physick into Adlo (saves a hotbar space), Enthuse (new basic AOE heal GCD) into Succor, adds a barrier to Excog upon application, changes Indom to a barrier, Expedient's mitigation increased from 10% to 15%, Protraction applying a second copy of itself, Perpetuation, for another 10% Max HP increase effect, etc.

Strategy: Emergency, increasing the healing power of actions, at the cost of removing their defensive aspects. For example, Indom is increased potency, Excog heals on application as well as via the buff, Enthuse/Physick heal for 2x as much, Expedient's sprint duration increased to 15s, Protraction healing on application, etc.

For those that don't care to optimize anything, they could just stay in Defensive and everything (mostly) works as normal, with some bonus potencies on their barrier effects compared to now. For those that do want to optimize, they'd want to swap to Offensive every time they have to refresh their DOTs (a total of 17 per 2min), and swap to use Defensive or Emergency to get a slight bonus on their healing tools, depending on the situation. For example, swapping to Defensive to use Excog and get a Galvanize barrier from it, then using Deployment Tactics to spread both the Galvanize, and the Excog effect. Also the fairy's Embrace and Fey Blessing actions would be modified based on your selected stance, to make it feel like you're an actual duo, instead of the fairy feeling like little more than 'a permanent regen'.

[ty_taurus]

Already do Savage week 1, and I've done Ultimates as a healer (even on-content Ultimates, not just outdated UCOB/UWU). What more can I do? And besides, as mentioned a million times, I still have to do things like EX roulette/Hunt Trains to cap my tomes. My job should feel fun to play in that content too. Or are you really trying to take the stance that 'your job should only feel fun to play in 5 pieces of content per 8 months, and nowhere else'

"What do you think this is, a video game? Stop asking to have fun!" -Someone, probably

[Kazmarek]

Personally, I love the idea from some players that 'healer strike is pointless, because I'll just play healer myself if the queue times are too long'. Because, let's say you're playing a tank or DPS through the story. You get to the final level 100 trial, and the queue won't pop because there's no healers (due to combination of this and VPR/PCT hype). So you swap to a healer to get a fast queue... which healer, exactly? You'll all have used a non-healer to do the story, so your healers will all still be at level 90. The idea that people will just casually swap to a healer to avoid the long queues is wishful thinking, only SMNs will be able to do this on release. Of course it'll be less of an issue after the first week or so, when people start levelling secondary classes, but it's the first week that this strike aims to impact the hardest anyway

I'll just grab 7 friends and queue into it as a warrior. Easy, problem solved.

[TheDustyOne]

Strategy: Offensive, increasing the base potency of Bio (30s), Miasma (24s), and Shadowflare (15s) by 20p. Every healing tool works mostly as it currently does while in Offensive stance, so 'locking yourself in stance' doesn't punish you with 'your healing is pathetic'.

Strategy: Defensive, adding additional defensive properties to actions. Turns Physick into Adlo (saves a hotbar space), Enthuse (new basic AOE heal GCD) into Succor, adds a barrier to Excog upon application, changes Indom to a barrier, Expedient's mitigation increased from 10% to 15%, Protraction applying a second copy of itself, Perpetuation, for another 10% Max HP increase effect, etc.

I see what you did there.

[ForsakenRoe]

I see what you did there.

Great minds think alike (or maybe I just subconsciously amalgamated your idea into mine idk), either way, the point is made: there's ways to have Cleric Stance style stance-dance gameplay, without it being as all-or-nothing punishing as the original Cleric Stance was. Of course, these ideas come with the caveat of 'there's a chance for a player to play incorrectly' which SE is deathly afraid of, when it comes to healers, so it's exceptionally unlikely we'd see anything like them ever again. Instead, it would seem SE prefers to have a single, powerful DOT, wherein if you drop them (quite easy because of how long they last now), you lose 55-75p (depending on which healer) per tick

[Dyvid]

Snip

Those healers would be called Strike Scabs. I'M KIDDING, I'M KIDDING. I honestly don't expect people to not player healer when the game drops, but I do believe this thread is important to voice a concern the community has had for years. I don't want to return to a time were healers felt forced to cast DPS spells in lieu of just healing however I do believe Healers and Tanks need better mechanics to provide choices for player in picking which job in a role to use. I also think Healers should have more raid DPS enhancing buffs and debuffs. Alos on the Japanese side of the forums they added a good point, why doesn't the game have more debuffs you can remove? If a player has 3 or even 4 stacks of something, wouldn't it be nice if healers had a way to remove debuff stacks one at a time?

I saw this mentioned earlier in the thread and just wanted to emphasize and expand on it.

Imagine , for tanks, your combo was basically Frontline/pvp variant (One button press continues your combo string of, say, Heavy Swing>Maim>Storm's Path/Eye). You had a singular Dot Gcd. And then, to fill the rest of your class load out, about 10 different variants of Rampart of various effects and cooldowns. That is tragically what playing healer has, and as you can imagine, isn't very engaging

This is literally what DT job design is....

[GoodPerson]

I also think Healers should have more raid DPS enhancing buffs and debuffs. Alos on the Japanese side of the forums they added a good point, why doesn't the game have more debuffs you can remove?

Oh yeah i forgot to mention this the otherday as a generally pretty good point. Theres only been a very few handful of debuffs to remove(through esuna) in new content , and while it's not a novel idea or anything, the variety of occasionally having a debuff to clear is in a odd way, very fun

[ForsakenRoe]

Oh yeah i forgot to mention this the otherday as a generally pretty good point. Theres only been a very few handful of debuffs to remove(through esuna) in new content , and while it's not a novel idea or anything, the variety of occasionally having a debuff to clear is in a odd way, very fun

The issue is that most of the time these debuffs appear, it's as a 'you screwed up' marker that the healer has to react to (eg the Doom from the Doll thingy in Lapis).

As an aside, I've advocated for the Pure/Barrier split to be removed (it sucks), and the Pure healers to get some on-demand shields (eg a WHM Lily spender that applies a barrier). By having all four healers have access to on-demand shields, we'd be able to have 'barrier checks' in content. As an example, let's say that there's a dungeon boss, who hits you with a double-raidwide. The first hit of the raidwide is exactly 200 damage. The second comes one game-frame later and deals the actual damage of the raidwide. But the first, the 200 damage, also applies a heavy Bleed effect if you let it go through. Blocking that 200 damage with a barrier like Succor, though, negates the bleed and prevents its application entirely. So now the healer has options on how to tackle the situation:

You could apply a barrier, negate the damage, and prevent the bleed
You could, if you have strong HOT capabilities (eg AST) ignore the raidwide damage, let the bleed apply, and then use HOTs to counteract the bleed damage
You could Esuna and remove the bleed after the cast. If you have such a tool, an AOE Esuna to clear all the debuffs at once could also find great use here (cough old Selene skill)
You could also just power-heal through the bleed with burst healing moves such as WHM Lily heals, or an AST Macrocosmos/Earthly Star

A visual indicator could be added to assist players in recognizing these opportunities. Like how 'interruptible casts' (remember that's a thing?) flash red, perhaps these 'barrier check' casts could flash green, and/or have a shield icon over the castbar