#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[kajv95]

Not a Healer Main, but some views I've had which happen to align with the cause.

Why are the developers so extremely concerned with difficulty-based accessibility at the endgame?
We're talking about FFXIV, a game that's so long it'll easily take you atleast a hundred hours or two to get to max level.
Getting to just Endwalker (now about to be Dawntrail) alone takes:
About 50 Dungeons, mandatory, with extra optional ones.
24(?) mandatory trials, with plenty of optional ones to choose from
3 Alliance Raids, with yet again plenty of optional ones. Most of them, really.
A job questline from 1 to 70. Role quests from 71 to 90.
Dozens upon dozens of solo duties.

And yet players aren't expected to know the game by now - everything just keeps getting dumber and dumber and healers are absolutely getting the shortest end of the stick because they're getting every issue under the sun compounded into their role.
Heals have become very, very powerful. Rare to need more than one cast, especially since we're still bringing two healers by default into 8 man content.
Tanks aren't reliant on healers as much anymore, so whoops we don't really need gcd healing anymore at all since they're the only ones who actually needed more than one cast.

If healers have nothing to heal, they should be dpsing. Healers dpsing makes up 90% of their time, so maybe they should be allowed to press more than the button they learned at level 1. Healers aren't the only ones who are getting screwed over "accessibility" of course - tanks had their gameplay absolutely neutered where they're basically just blue dps that occasionally press shirk and provoke but healers are already adopting that same design WITHOUT the dps buttons. Healer accessibility apparently means "do the same thing for 90 levels while everyone else supports you in your job because you cant handle it"

Under the logic healers operate under, tanks should only be pressing 2 buttons for damage as well since they should be focusing on their mitigation abilities instead. No more combos, just press the two damage buttons you were assigned for eternity, please!

There's some resistance from players who don't know better - players who think you cant clear things with just one or zero healers, or players who think this only happens in dungeons. The other day, I had a party member adamantly refuse to go into an ex trial with just the 1 healer because that would've been "impossible!"
But healers are powerful enough now that, unless mechanics demand it, we simply just bring one - and if outgoing damage is low we can just bring 0 healers because quite frankly, we have plenty across the other jobs to pick from, and at this point bringing more healers than necessary is becoming actively detrimental to a party.

Amusingly, the simplification of dps jobs, including 2-min meta, was a direct consequence of meta parties pushing out other jobs in favor of only bringing their preferred jobs. We're about to see the same thing happen to an entire role, with potentially the only thing keeping them alive being mechanics that explicitly target healers without a visible marker and wipe the party if not done correctly. (think mothercrystal ex)

Something needs to be done. And I'm here to tell you that if healer numbers do dwindle excessively, they will look. Just look at the amount of effort they put into making tanks appealing when nobody was tanking in Stormblood. They even got special mounts for playing it, lol

[Turtledeluxe]

Not a Healer Main, but some views I've had which happen to align with the cause.

Why are the developers so extremely concerned with difficulty-based accessibility at the endgame?

Respectfully, claims to accessibility are literal bs. Excuse making for being too unwilling, constrained, or otherwise creative enough to manage the game balance/ problem solve. Accessibility has no meaning in a game like this compared to how we traditionally refer to it in the west. It is a buzzword devs invoke to cover their own behinds.

And their mission makes zero sense. At any rate of progress by the end of the new 10 years, encounters will be hauntingly difficult, even in casual content. So they're chasing accessibility as they're trying to actively deepen the encounters. Eventually jobs will be one button.

This is why they should have placed their bets on a more mixed balance of job and encounter complexity. Progressive encounter complexity for the sake of it goes nowhere ultimately and the healer strike is only one of many symptoms that will arise. It's an actual road to nowhere. Unless of course they're just lying and the game will not in fact grow in difficulty, even in Ultmates. After all people already cheat to clear them, not that devs design the fights around that or anything.