#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Loggos]

Ok one last thing I would like to add because I have been thinking about the question how to make healers necessary while still ensuring a low skill floor and keeping normal/casual content accessible (while allowing for a high skill ceiling in hard content).

I think that “needs a healer” and “is not too difficult” are not mutually exclusive.
Imo there just needs to be enough damage over time that exceeds the healing non-healer jobs can provide/mitigate.

Here is a very simple example. I’ll focus on GCD healing for the sake of the argument but of course this should also work with other/more interesting healing mechanics. I’m also not addressing more DPS options here.

Example:

You have your standard dungeon run/boss fight and the boss will cast their usual “big” raid wides. You can deal with those with your oGCD tools as you normally would.

But in-between those raid wides the boss would continuously deal low damage to the whole group (either by bleeds or by high frequency low-damage raid wides).

This damage can be countered by casting GCD aoe heals.

Additionally it could also keep on targeting random players to deal single target damage. That damage doesn’t need to be super high.

One GCD could cover it.

Why could this work:

1. Since the damage isn’t high, one “tick” of this low frequency damage shouldn’t lead to much stress and could be dealt with by replacing one of your regular DPS casts with a GCD heal cast.
   
   
2. As mentioned above the goal of this kind of approach is that the cumulative damage should exceed what non-healers can mitigate/salvage.
   
   This means by pure numbers a healer would be mandatory because after too many ticks of low damage (plus “regular” big raid wides) the party would just be dead.
   
   But at the same time dealing with it should be comfortable enough for casual players.

You could argue that replacing 11111 DPS GCDs with heal GCDs doesn’t make a difference but I’m not sure I completely agree (though as said above I’m certain there are more ways to make a healing scenario like this interesting).

Imo it continuously forces you to divert your attention to your party’s health (your party as a whole plus alternating between individual players’ health pools).
This could break up the 111111 tunnel during downtime, at least a little bit.


In harder content you could gradually increase the difficulty of resource management to up the stakes.

In midcore content dealing with frequent partywide and random single target damage should be more taxing than on normal mode but not completely unforgiving.

Hardcore content should really test your resource management.