#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[KageTokage]

Can someone give me a genuine TLDR of what this thread is about? Because imma keep it a stack, I'm not reading 304 pages of this to find out what is going on.

The first post has a good "in a nutshell" explanation of why people are kind of sick of the current healer design.

[Kazmarek]

The tank has more HP and is tankier because they are supposed to be walloped by the boss, not just shrug everything off with zero effort because the boss is doing anything

So at the start of Endwalker, my friend (a white mage) and I queued into the Dead Ends. He disconnected on the final boss, right at the start. This was in the time period where if you got disconnected, you'd be waiting an hour+ to get back into the game. So he's gone, the two dps go down. The boss is at roughly 60%. I tell them I think I can do it, and ask for permission. They tell me to go for it, so I did, and I finished the instance.

This is all to ask you, genuinely, have you ever done it yourself? Soloed a boss on a tank? Because there was not "zero effort" that went into that example. I was considering my options, I had to carefully pick which mit to use where, where to use my invuln, how to use my heals. I was genuinely focused and had to actually think about that attempt. So I want to ask you, not as a "gotcha," not to be rude, but genuinely, have you ever done it yourself? Because if you have and it really was "zero effort" to do so, then I guess I just overcomplicated the entire attempt for no real reason.

I said the healers died and the rest of the dps died to raidwide because the tank did nothing to keep them alive. I've seen PLDs solo or duo heal fights when the healers wipe early (I main PLD and its what I always do). When I'm on DPS and healers go down WARs never even try. They're all such great players like you.

My mistake for misremembering, then. Those don't sound like good WARs to me. If the healers go down, I at least try to keep my dps alive. It's not easy though, it's really not. I've got nascent flash, I've got shake it off, and I've got reprisal. Nascent flash/bloodwhetting really isn't as good on single targets as people are making it out to be. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it's not that good.

Edit just to add more thoughts, I think part of the reason it feels like there's not a whole lot of damage going out is just because ilvl restrictions are too lax. The best gear right now is ilvl 660 (except the weapon being 665 but we'll skip that) and the latest dungeon of the game has an ilvl requirement of 620. So if you went in min ilvl, you'd probably have a different experience, though I haven't tested it myself. Reasonably, you'll probably be going in with people not much lower than ilvl 640, meaning "at worst" they've already got 20 ilvls of gear more than the requirement, or 40 ilvls more "at best." That's... a lot of extra ilvl. The latest alliance raid is average ilvl 625. So again, you can easily have people coming in with 35 more ilvls than the requirement. Both of the latest trials also have ilvl requirements of 625, meaning, once again, you're almost certain to have way more gear than is required.

[Rolder50]

Can someone give me a genuine TLDR of what this thread is about? Because imma keep it a stack, I'm not reading 304 pages of this to find out what is going on.

First post is good but in short,

Healers are upset because the role is boring. The two main reasons for this are
1) The game doesn't do enough damage for healers to make use of the bazillion healing buttons they have. Everywhere from a casual dungeon to the hardest ultimate, you will spend 75%+ of your gameplay spamming your singular DPS GCD
2) While you spend the majority of your time doing damage, you only have a single direct damage and a single DOT GCD, with maybe an ogcd or two if you're lucky. It's ungodly boring to be stuck to two buttons for most of your game time.

[Evergrey]

Can someone give me a genuine TLDR of what this thread is about? Because imma keep it a stack, I'm not reading 304 pages of this to find out what is going on.

The first post has a good "in a nutshell" explanation of why people are kind of sick of the current healer design.

Yeah, the rest is more or less people going back and forth about ideas of what they think could be a good change or not and those who disagree with it all.

[ty_taurus]

Can someone give me a genuine TLDR of what this thread is about? Because imma keep it a stack, I'm not reading 304 pages of this to find out what is going on.

Healers have been uphappy with the design direction of healers since Shadowbringers. Over time, more players have gradually come to feel the same way. A summary of the problems:

1. Healers have lost most of the DPS actions they used to have, namely Scholar, making DPS very boring and monotonous which healers are stuck with for nearly the entire duration of even hard content like Savage and Ultimate. This also includes Sage, who despite being marketed as a DPS oriented healer ended up spending more time spamming Dosis than the other healers would spam their Glare equivalents.

2. We have too many healing actions, and the game is not providing enough damage to demand those resources, which has led to healers DPSing more and more with every expansion despite their lackluster DPS gameplay.

3. Healer identity is the weakest amongst all roles. Very few differences between the healers feel like they have any impact on gameplay, and qualities that were once unique to healers in the past have gradually been erased over time.

4. Other roles continue getting more and more sustain to the point where in normal content, it's not particularly hard to clear content without healers, and this makes the role feel underwhelming as we do not feel that we are providing value to the team regardless of how little healerless runs are currently impacting the landscape of FFXIV.

5. Feedback has constantly been ignored with healers getting barely any changes since Shadowbringers, and the few times anything has been said about healers, the responses feel tone deaf to the actual issues being asked about.

Dawntrail has done almost nothing to try and address these issues, making most of them worse. The new attacks each healer got do almost nothing to actually address the monotony of healer DPS due to their incredibly long cooldowns. Even Sage's new DOT and 60 second cooldown will do very little to offset the constant amount of Dosis spam they are subjected to. Meanwhile, healers continue getting healing resources that clash with their respective identities mechanically, and in Scholar's case, visually.

[Supersnow845]

So at the start of Endwalker, my friend (a white mage) and I queued into the Dead Ends. He disconnected on the final boss, right at the start. This was in the time period where if you got disconnected, you'd be waiting an hour+ to get back into the game. So he's gone, the two dps go down. The boss is at roughly 60%. I tell them I think I can do it, and ask for permission. They tell me to go for it, so I did, and I finished the instance.

This is all to ask you, genuinely, have you ever done it yourself? Soloed a boss on a tank? Because there was not "zero effort" that went into that example. I was considering my options, I had to carefully pick which mit to use where, where to use my invuln, how to use my heals. I was genuinely focused and had to actually think about that attempt. So I want to ask you, not as a "gotcha," not to be rude, but genuinely, have you ever done it yourself? Because if you have and it really was "zero effort" to do so, then I guess I just overcomplicated the entire attempt for no real reason.



My mistake for misremembering, then. Those don't sound like good WARs to me. If the healers go down, I at least try to keep my dps alive. It's not easy though, it's really not. I've got nascent flash, I've got shake it off, and I've got reprisal. Nascent flash/bloodwhetting really isn't as good on single targets as people are making it out to be. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it's not that good.

I wouldn’t say it’s zero effort but it’s as close to it as you can really do without it being no effort

Basically to me any dungeon boss can be soloed by WAR simply by pressing bloodwhetting near on CD (or holding it for like 5 seconds if a TB is coming) rotate your other mitigations and be liberal with equilibrium useage. In PLD it’s a little bit harder as you may need to drop a burst phase to hold for clemency but that’s a rarity

And of course this is when I don’t have gear. If I go into say aetherfont now on the final boss I just plant myself in one spot and press holy Shelton on CD and I don’t even come close to dying

To me the prospect is just way too easy and I don’t find it particularly hard to keep up a DPS either by sharing my mitigations

[Evergrey]

I don't think that the issue is the tanks self heals.
Sure, they can perhaps get tweaked somewhat.
But the main issue is that fights in FFXIV aren't encouraging for healing. Boss fights in particular are scripted and attacks are marked.
In other MMOs a boss hits for a lot more damage, more frequently and a lot more of the special attacks aren't marked out like they are in FFXIV.
FFXIV fights leave little room for errors that would normally end up as wounds a healer would heal up.
A healers toolkit is designed for when a fight struggles, which they more or less can't since everything works as a clockwork.
A clockwork that once players learn the patterns they can avoid anything but room-wide AoEs. ('cept the tank ofc holding the aggro)

In FFXIV when I cleared the first 5 floors of Savage Pandemonium I was ofc thrilled that I made it.
But the feeling was more of a "I actually managed to remember everything in the fight".
Where in other MMOs the thrill was more about personal skills, reaction times and quick thinking during chaotic situations.
FFXIV has none of that when it comes to content, it's all a memory game and pressing buttons in a sequence.

I'm just gonna self-quote here.

A perfect personal example about the "memory game" was during sP3.
for those who knows there's that fire tornado that was a real gatekeep for PF groups, even "enrage" groups kept failing on that.
I had myself never managed to get past it due to group members failing, so finally I got tired of progress and Enrage groups failing, so I lied a little and told that I've seen enrage to a "last day clear" group.
And even though I had never personally gotten past that part, I aced it in that group simply because after all those countless times memorizing the fight through youtube guides I knew everthing from that part and beyond simply by memory of watching.
There was no personal skill or anything involved, simply memory of how it goes and where to stand during specific parts.
FFXIV needs more randomness and room for errors in a fight for healers to have something to heal.

Also good to mention something someone else mentioned, is that most times an error happens its due to 1-shot kill mechanics.
And a lot of times a simple error could leave no room for recovery, even if the healers try.

[Len_]

So at the start of Endwalker, my friend (a white mage) and I queued into the Dead Ends. He disconnected on the final boss, right at the start. This was in the time period where if you got disconnected, you'd be waiting an hour+ to get back into the game. So he's gone, the two dps go down. The boss is at roughly 60%. I tell them I think I can do it, and ask for permission. They tell me to go for it, so I did, and I finished the instance.

This is all to ask you, genuinely, have you ever done it yourself? Soloed a boss on a tank? Because there was not "zero effort" that went into that example. I was considering my options, I had to carefully pick which mit to use where, where to use my invuln, how to use my heals. I was genuinely focused and had to actually think about that attempt. So I want to ask you, not as a "gotcha," not to be rude, but genuinely, have you ever done it yourself?

Personally no, I have nothing to prove to myself by wasting my time killing a boss at .5% DPS during a random dungeon so I will always reset if it's faster because my priority is speed. What I HAVE done as a tank is solo healed every boss of Dead Ends on several occasions keeping both DPS alive. I wouldn't say it was hard. It was kind of a thrill. Reminds me why I used to be a healer back in ARR.

[Eorzean_username]

Can someone give me a genuine TLDR of what this thread is about? Because imma keep it a stack, I'm not reading 304 pages of this to find out what is going on.

Please excuse the fact that this is as close as a TLDR as you can get from me, partially because it's just not a simple topic.

Many dedicated Healer Role players — whether strictly "Healer Mains", or just frequent "switches" between Healing and other Roles — are no longer having fun in the game, a problem that has been escalating for years on end without any perceived developer action (and in fact, repeated comments from the developers dismissing the concerns).

As for the reason that Healers aren't having fun, that's a complicated sum of a large number of factors that have all reached, basically, "critical mass":

• Healer Damage rotations have been repeatedly-"pruned" and simplified since Stormblood, reaching rock-bottom at Shadowbringers with the reduction of Healer Damage rotations to strictly "apply 1 dot every 30s, and then spam one single key for the next 27.5s, and then repeat", for the duration of entire encounters. This has become mind-numbing.
• Healers cannot fall-back on "Healing rotations" to engage them instead, because the design of content, the pacing of enemy actions, and the excessive and legitimately "bloated" Healing tool-kits that keep getting added each Expansion have rendered the need for actual "healing" to be near-zero — in the sense that simply continuing to spam your 1 damage key while cycling-through your gigantic bag of OGCD Heals will be sufficient to clear almost any content in the game.
• It's true that the most difficult content, or even just chaotic and mishandled "lower-tier" content, can force Healers to use their GCD Heals, and their overall kit, more aggressively (or at all). But this creates a problem where Healing is the one Role that becomes actively less-interesting the more experienced that you are with a piece of content, and the better that your fellow Party Members play — once you are no longer panicking or "repairing chaos", then you're back to simply having nothing to do except 1 30s dot, spam 1 filler Spell for 27.5s, repeat.
• On top of all of this, the developers — struggling to find ways to add any "new ideas" to Jobs over time — have repeatedly expanded the amount of not just personal, but also Party-wide, Healing, Barrier, and Mitigation that is available to Tank and DPS Roles. This has reached the point today that it is not only possible, but actively more-efficient, to complete "lower-tier" content without any Healer present at all, and leads to the experience of the Healer Role feeling "literally useless" in large portions of the game's content, because other Roles — especially specific Tank Jobs — can, functionally, replace Healers entirely.
• All of this can be compared to prior states of FFXIV's design — such as Heavensward or Stormblood era — where even Dungeons, Normal Raids, or Alliance Raids would apply enough damage, and Jobs would have limited enough "solutions", that essentially all "tiers" of content justified having the Healer Role present, even if the actual mechanical challenge was not necessarily overbearing. This is pointed-to as proof that it's entirely-possible for FFXIV, as a game, to be in a design-position where Healing still matters, even for "casual content" (or however you want to refer to it).

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Now, understand that different Healer Players are more or less upset about different parts of this, and some Healers legitimately don't care at all about any of it.

So there is not a single, unified opinion about "what is most-wrong", or even if there is anything "wrong" at all, because all Healers are ultimately individuals with their own preferences and priorities.

For example, some Healers don't mind having less to Heal these days, as long as they could have a less-tedious and less-monotonous Damage rotation.

Other Healers aren't concerned about their Damage rotation, and just want content to require more active and more challenging Healing again, especially damage-patterns which can't be solved by an over-abundance of OGCD Heals, or even just tools provided by other Roles.

Regardless, however, the situation has reached a point where members from all types of "Healer personalities" have reached a consensus that none of them are having fun, and so some of them are attempting to make a symbolic protest about what they perceive as continued dismissal and neglect of their concerns by the FFXIV designers.

The form that this symbolic protest is proposed to take, is to deliberately-refuse to play Healer Jobs in the upcoming 7.0 Dawntrail expansion — in the hopes that this registers at least some sort of "dip" in the Healer population in developer statistics-gathering, and thus, sends some sort of clear message which 5-7 years of increasingly-accumulating "Forum Feedback" have failed to achieve.

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There is generally (generally) no delusion that there are enough people aware of this idea to actually "shut-down content", or anything bombastic like that.

But the hope is that a sufficiently-loud "roar" might serve to actually startle the developers into realising that Healers really, seriously mean it when they say that they're not having fun any more, and that many Healers have not been having fun for a long time, now.

And if even that fails, well... at least Healers will be able to take it as a clear message that this game truly isn't for them any more.

One could argue that this is a decision which should have been accepted a long time ago, but for many people, the 7.0 Media Tour Job previews served as the "snapping point" which transitioned them from "unhappy, but still stubbornly-hopeful" to "genuinely feeling doomed".

And since most people here seem to genuinely-like the game, and have genuinely-good memories of enjoying being a Healer in FFXIV in the past, many people want to at least "try" to wake-up the developers before giving-up on the game completely.

[OdinelStarrei]

So at the start of Endwalker, my friend (a white mage) and I queued into the Dead Ends. He disconnected on the final boss, right at the start. This was in the time period where if you got disconnected, you'd be waiting an hour+ to get back into the game. So he's gone, the two dps go down. The boss is at roughly 60%. I tell them I think I can do it, and ask for permission. They tell me to go for it, so I did, and I finished the instance.

This is all to ask you, genuinely, have you ever done it yourself? Soloed a boss on a tank? Because there was not "zero effort" that went into that example. I was considering my options, I had to carefully pick which mit to use where, where to use my invuln, how to use my heals. I was genuinely focused and had to actually think about that attempt. So I want to ask you, not as a "gotcha," not to be rude, but genuinely, have you ever done it yourself? Because if you have and it really was "zero effort" to do so, then I guess I just overcomplicated the entire attempt for no real reason.

I have, at least. Mostly on DRK even, where it's actually significantly harder than on WAR, because I don't have the skills to immediately heal myself to full outside of LD. I have a video of me soloing Quetzacoatl in Shadowbringers by myself. Questions appear, like "I need to generate X amount of mana to TBN this raidwide and two subsequent auto attacks for a break", "What's our composition right now? Who can sustain themselves, or help me live longer? "Melee DPS and ranged DPS are with me right now, Melee can heal themselves with bloodbath, ranged doesn't have as much, they need more priority on the incidental raidwide or stack damage to split the burden between us three" "Do I have enough cooldowns to solo this stack marker?" "Based on boss HP, how much longer would I last if I spammed TBN regardless of the loss of Edges? Can we kill this thing before I'm dry" "Is it better to LD now, or should I get one more Souleater?" Is it better to Tank LB for the mitigation on this raidwide that 100% kill one of my still alive DPS, or should I tell the melee to burn it and hope I can finish it myself? "If I use mitigation, and TBN, based on previous experience, would I actually lose the Edge if I do so? Is it better to just stack Oblation instead?" "Can I bleed this Rampart into multiple forms of damage?" "If my DPS are out of position, is it possible to save them with TBN? Can I negate the vuln entirely if I TBN+Oblation? We can't afford for them to get vuln and take more damage as we try to burn this down"

Repeat these questions for PLD and GNB while you are at it. There's been many a Superbolide > Heart of Corundum + Aurora panic recovery. There's been many a Cover + Hallowed Ground + Mit to salvage a stack marker when there's no other choice. Kitchen sinked the stack away from the party if I have to, as the stacks in normal content are weaker than the average DSR tankbuster. I will always drag the party over the finish line if they want it. Because I know I can do it.

And when it comes to normal raids or trials, well. Two tanks who are even halfway competent control the instance. If they choose not to wipe, you are not wiping. Although, it is fight dependent, as rare as it is to have hard hitting NM. The only exception to this recently is P10N because the party stacks, busters, and tower vulns WILL wear the tanks out pretty quickly, and that's much healthier than watching the tanks drag everyone through the boss when it would've been quicker to wipe. Asura is particularly bad about this.

I have asked these questions. I have made these observations. I have made these considerations. And I have performed, and killed the boss, many times. On every tank for doing what you are talking about, because that's my main role. And even then, even then, I would still give it up, because I know people get bored or angry if I do, and I honestly shouldn't be able to solo something designed for 4 people with THIS much ease. It's not a power fantasy for me anymore to kill a boss that I know is so undertuned that it can't kill me unless I effectively gave it the gun to do so through self inflicted vulns. Even something like DRK with Tycoon, something that I CANNOT solo from 100% to 0 on my own, only about 30% or so, because it would take like ten minutes and I run out of CDs, if I had some DPS flailing about, we absolutely could've downed it with no healers. It's cool to watch for some people, and I love doing it when it happens because I have to think for moment in normal content. A "time to lock in", if you will. But it's a flaw in the design. It shouldn't be this...expected. It's no longer an outlier. It's a feeling of "Everyone's dead? Whatever, didn't need them." That's the last thing I want to feel in an MMO. There is a wide abyss between "Nothing matters, take all the vulns you want who cares" and "If you miss this feint/are out of position, we are all going to die instantly." We continue to fall on the wide sides every time.

We can't get it right in either direction.