#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Evergrey]

The party just instantly dies. You're not even allowed to salvage most encounters.

That's also one thing, a lot of the danger evolves around 1-shot mechanics and if too many fail one there's not enough time to recover from it.
If instead a fight have less 1-shit but more heavy hitting attacks instead.
It's been a while since I played any other MMO on a regular basis so can't really come up with any good comparisons.
But in those the bosses mostly hit more frequently and the fights aren't designed to always be foguth in a more or less stationary position like FFXIV boss arenas.

Regardless, maybe it's not the lack of healers to do during downtimes in a fight that's the major issue, but that the fights themselves are designed in such a way that there aren't much for the healer to do.
Bosses hit in a slow fashion, almost each and every hard hitting ability has a several seconds castbar.
The fights leave little for accidents to happen for healers to heal up.

Before we didn't have stuff like Tankbusters adding a visual marker on a player, and many of the boss's skills weren't marked either.


Edit:

From my own perspective, a tanks self healing is (or should at least) be a "oh, crap" button for when something hits too hard or missed to pop a defensive, giving a healer some time to top them up again.
But since the fights leave so little to accidents, a tank can easily use those "panic" buttons to sustain themselves.

[OdinelStarrei]

That's also one thing, a lot of the danger evolves around 1-shot mechanics and if too many fail one there's not enough time to recover from it.
If instead a fight have less 1-shit but more heavy hitting attacks instead.
It's been a while since I played any other MMO on a regular basis so can't really come up with any good comparisons.
But in those the bosses mostly hit more frequently and the fights aren't designed to always be foguth in a more or less stationary position like FFXIV boss arenas.

Regardless, maybe it's not the lack of healers to do during downtimes in a fight that's the major issue, but that the fights themselves are designed in such a way that there aren't much for the healer to do.
Bosses hit in a slow fashion, almost each and every hard hitting ability has a several seconds castbar.
The fights leave little for accidents to happen for healers to heal up.

Before we didn't have stuff like Tankbusters adding a visual marker on a player, and many of the boss's skills weren't marked either.

This is honestly why something like Barbariccia EX were so well liked, it's probably the most unanimously praised fight in EW, an opinion I share. Rather than relying on debuff overload, or a really precise positioning for every member of the team, Barb was fast, there was always something happening or to plan for, damage was frequent, and one player making a mistake usually did not cascade into an immediate unrecoverable situation. But the underlying mechanics were straightforward to understand, there was no need for a twenty page toolbox or a 15 minute YT video. The fight builds upon itself, and I even think tanks have a solid time in there. There's a lot of good there. I think every role got their time to shine in that fight somehow.

But I will highlight that it's not "too many" people failing a mechanic leading to a wipe. It's one person doing something major, or sometimes minor incorrectly, and the result is the entire party exploding instantly. It's okay to have those things in fights. But when it's every fight, I feel that it starts breaking the trinity somewhat, outside of the more common issues detailed in this thread, because you didn't wipe because "the tank didn't get aggro" or "the dps check was failed" or "the healers were out of MP", you failed because Player 5 was out of position on mechanic sequence 4, or Player 2 didn't read their partner's debuff correctly and did 999999 damage to the group.

I feel that it promotes really frustrating and darwinistic perspectives for progressing through content.

[Evergrey]

This is honestly why something like Barbariccia EX were so well liked, it's probably the most unanimously praised fight in EW, an opinion I share. Rather than relying on debuff overload, or a really precise positioning for every member of the team, Barb was fast, there was always something happening or to plan for, damage was frequent, and one player making a mistake usually did not cascade into an immediate unrecoverable situation. But the underlying mechanics were straightforward to understand, there was no need for a twenty page toolbox or a 15 minute YT video. The fight builds upon itself, and I even think tanks have a solid time in there. There's a lot of good there. I think every role got their time to shine in that fight somehow.

But I will highlight that it's not "too many" people failing a mechanic leading to a wipe. It's one person doing something major, or sometimes minor incorrectly, and the result is the entire party exploding instantly. It's okay to have those things in fights. But when it's every fight, I feel that it starts breaking the trinity somewhat, outside of the more common issues detailed in this thread, because you didn't wipe because "the tank didn't get aggro" or "the dps check was failed" or "the healers were out of MP", you failed because Player 5 was out of position on mechanic sequence 4, or Player 2 didn't read their partner's debuff correctly and did 999999 damage to the group.

I feel that it promotes really frustrating and darwinistic perspectives for progressing through content.

Mm.. a lot of the higher tier fights (I've only done savage pandemonium 1-5 so can't speak for all) really required the group as a whole to know what to do and where to stand, or else it can really crumble fast.
Which is counteractive when I think that a Healers toolkit is designed around a fight where accidents happen.
But since every fight is static with its rotations and mechanics are more or less all marked out, accidents are less likely to happen.
Unless ofc new to a fight and learning said boss patterns.


Edit:

The simplest solution I can think of would be to make that a boss's auto attacks at least would hit for harder.
And that is the bare minimum to give healers something to heal up during a boss fight.

[OdinelStarrei]

Mm.. a lot of the higher tier fights (I've only done savage pandemonium 1-5 so can't speak for all) really required the group as a whole to know what to do and where to stand, or else it can really crumble fast.
Which is counteractive when I think that a Healers toolkit is designed around a fight where accidents happen.
But since every fight is static with its rotations and mechanics are more or less all marked out, accidents are less likely to happen.
Unless ofc new to a fight and learning said boss patterns.


Edit:

The simplest solution I can think of would be to make that a boss's auto attacks at least would hit for harder.
And that is the bare minimum to give healers something to heal up during a boss fight.

I'm glad you are receptive to the statements I'm providing.

This whole situation is based on a fundamental mismatch between the toolkits of the support jobs and the encounter design itself.

If the fights are static, and the support kits are also static, I think it can cause players to become bored very quickly, because there is no variance, and further more, there is not allowed to be any variance, as that usually leads to a wipe via said body check.

If the fights are going to be mechanic puzzles, with no room to salvage mistakes, players who have "solved" all the puzzles should still be allowed to have fun. I think we have gone way too far into the "spreadsheet meta" of fights, and I support that statement with the increasing frequency of situations where a player will know "i stand here for X mechanic" but doesn't actually understand how said mechanic works because it is SO fixed and inflexible. When healers (and tanks, but we're in the healer thread) have learned everything, we end up hitting a threshold of performance where we can't improve any further outside filler damage, because the game has removed aspects of the role that could promote a more impressive showcase of skill/crisis management/job knowledge.

For example, tanks nowadays specialize in helping a single member mitigate damage to an sizable extent. Oh no! Our Dragoon is being attacked by a targeted, unavoidable attack that will drop them to such low HP they will die to the next raidwide! (Alexander 12 or Omega 7 prey marker for example) Tanks should team up and help that person.

That's not damage, that's not a rotation, that's tanks doing something unique and interacting with the party in a way that only tanks can do. There's not enough of that right now. Instead we just dump all our cooldowns on the telegraphed buster and that's that. Make sure everything is ready for 2 minute burst by the way.
I think that some knowledgeable healers feel that their role is under attack from all directions right now. Tanks heal too much. Bosses don't hurt enough. Everything is a mitigation check. Anytime someone makes a mistake, we have to reset or in situations where mistakes are allowed, healers have significantly less agency and impact, with a gameplay loop that doesn't support the toolkit that has been provided. And there are fewer mechanics outside of fixed stack markers or "set HP to 1" that are designed for healers specifically as of late. What happened to those Shinryu heads that you had to heal to kill? Why aren't we getting more stuff like Fountain of Fire from Pandemonium 3? That was cool!

Are you a party of tanks, healers, and DPS fighting a boss? Or are you just eight players doing synchronized swimming with flashy lighting effects?

If something becomes significantly less fun the better you are at it, or the better your group is, I don't think that is healthy design. I feel that people will just become ambivalent, or worse, really bitter. And well, here we are.

[Absurdity]

I feel that it promotes really frustrating and darwinistic perspectives for progressing through content.

A feeling I absolutely share. It leaves no room for the party to make up for weaker players, either everyone executes mechanics perfectly all the time or you get 0 progression done, let alone actually see enrage.

[Gemina]

This is honestly why something like Barbariccia EX were so well liked, it's probably the most unanimously praised fight in EW, an opinion I share. Rather than relying on debuff overload, or a really precise positioning for every member of the team, Barb was fast, there was always something happening or to plan for, damage was frequent, and one player making a mistake usually did not cascade into an immediate unrecoverable situation. But the underlying mechanics were straightforward to understand, there was no need for a twenty page toolbox or a 15 minute YT video. The fight builds upon itself, and I even think tanks have a solid time in there. There's a lot of good there. I think every role got their time to shine in that fight somehow.

This is such a great take. And while this isn't kind of difficulty healers are asking for in normal mode content, this encounter is a great example of how contributions are equal across the board, and everyone feels rewarded when victory is achieved. However, even the NM version of this fight when it was released was simply chaotic fun and is the last encounter I can recall where players actually stuck around after to talk about it and pass on congratulations to everyone for a job well done. Barbariccia set a golden standard, and I wish we had more fight like her. I also don't recall anyone complaining how difficult she was, and if there were those voices, they were drowned out by how fun the encounter was designed.