#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

so what your saying the entire game has to cater to bottom of the barrel people. everyone else just has to put up with it being dull and boring or.. leave

The concept of a job being both accessible to the 'bottom of the barrel', with multiple design elements that aid said 'bottom of the barrel' players to be less 'bottom of the barrel', while also allowing more skilled players to explore additional depth within the job's kit... apparently, those two can't coexist in a single job kit. Either a job is 'turbonerd sweaty max parses or kick' complicated, or it's 'babby's first <role> job'.

It's not that hard to design a job that appeals to both sides. SE manages it with various DPS or Tank jobs on the regular. You can clear a dungeon on PLD by just spamming Total Eclipse. OR, you can do the full 'proper rotation' that you'd use to clear Savage. DPS are in a similar boat, they can spam Doom Spike on everything (even bosses) and while it would take longer to clear, you would still clear. Healers, meanwhile, ooh if we give them an extra button to press they'll be too busy looking at their hotbars and not at our HP bars!

The double standard between Tank and Healer is disgusting. We've all seen plenty of Tanks eat TBs raw with zero mitigations. Yet that role does not see 'DPS simplification' to the extent Healer did in SHB. I personally have had a DRK Tank say 'I will not mitigate the TB, because I have too much stuff to weave in my 2min window, and this is the 6min so it's with Potion too'. He used a few more swearwords than I write here, but point is, he specifically said 'I will not do the Tank role things expected of my Job, because I am prioritising doing damage over all of that'. And to be fair, it was pre-nerf P8S so he was justified in hindsight, but my point remains: Tanks focus too much on DPS, they not only get away with it, SE continues to encourage it via adding new damage actions. Healers dare to ask for a crumb of what we once had to return? We get belittled, called names, blamed for things that aren't even our fault (like how the terrible healer players in PFs are somehow the strike's fault instead of SE's), and we're told to 'play a different role'.

I don't want to play a different role. I want to play the role I picked when I started raiding, the Healer role which has a very modest selection of damage actions, and has a fun and rewarding gameplay loop of balancing keeping the party alive, with contributing to the damage dealt to the boss. Now, if I want to have that vibe from a Job, of balancing my healing with my damage, and a 'modest damage kit', it feels like Dancer might fit more accurately than some of the healers. And maybe Red Mage. Seriously, up until DT gave WHM Divine Caress, DNC had more ways to protect the party from raidwides than WHM did. Even now, DNC's two mitigation tools (Shield Samba, Improvised Finish) are separate, whereas WHM's are tied together, so DNC still retains 'versatility' in where/when to mitigate, compared to WHM. It's like the devs just... can't accept the prospect that their idea for WHM to be the 'pure healer' is just... bad, when placed into the encounter design of this game. It'd probably do pretty well in a triage game like WOW's raids, what with Freecure, Asylum (cough Healing Rain) and Lilybell, but FFXIV raiding is not a triage game. And that desire to keep WHM as 'the pure healer', who focuses on big HPS, bleeds into the other healers, giving us things like SGE who responds to a raidwide with a 900p AOE heal (Zoe Pneuma), instead of a more thematic 'use multiple Augmentation CDs to manipulate Kardia's strength, make it AOE, etc. then use attacks to trigger that Augmented Kardia to heal the party'

Damn rereading this, I got really sidetracked

[Kes13a]

*snip*

I agree. The promos say "play your own way" what they leave out is "as long as its tank or dps... (healer isnt recommended)"

I want to play a viable healer. but all that people keep saying is "be quiet and do your job" well.. what IS MY JOB?

[Aword3213]

So I have to hope my entire party is dog water times 10 that I actually have a challenging time and can press more then 1 button for the entire dungeon ????? Peak design decisions if you ask me. It’s like a car having an air conditioner you can only use while you are in the desert. Maybe a vacuum cleaner that needs it to be rainy outside.

As long as you use Duty Finder, you ARE part of typical DF group. We don't get to have all star team in Dead End dungeon just because we cleared Ultimate.

It's so weird that people keep bringing out the average skill level of duty finder group when most of strike supporters meet unexpected chaos in normal DF content from time to time.

The problem is that it's still not all that engaging as healers when everyone faills all possible mistakes in normal content. The frequency of incoming damage from mechanics isn't high enough to warrant full healing kit usage.

I say this not based on my personal subjective opinion, but objective data. Look at the interval between each mechanics

Dead Ends
P12N Athena


We have roughly 10 seconds in average to recover from falling mechanics. If people have trouble healing in DF content when things get chaotic, they're indeed terrible healers.

[ForsakenRoe]

Something that occurred to me within the hour, while taking with some people about previous design idea pitches. One thing that came up a lot in relation to one of the changes in a WHM design that I've posted (here), was that the UI for trying to track DOTs in FFXIV is... quite bad. And the part of my design where I suggest reducing Aero/Dia to 12s duration (so we use it more often and therefore Glare less often), would exacerbate the issue somewhat. The game doesn't show your DOTs on the Emnity List (although starbirds inform me that there's a way to do just that via less-than-TOS-compliant methods), for example. But, the point raised was that if your DOT falls off, it can be difficult to 'notice' and refresh it. If only the DOT was a burst CD instead, so you could see it on your hotbar that it's 'ready', some players would say.

...So, why not do just that? Abilities can 'light up' when a combo is being executed, or when a resource is high enough to use the action (for example, Fan Dance lights up when you have a Feather). So, how about some kind of system change, or a trait, or whatever way to implement it, wherein 'If you have an enemy targeted, and that enemy does not have <DOT name> applied to them by you, the ability 'lights up' on your bar to indicate 'hey, it could be a good idea to use the DOT again''

Is there any reason not to implement this? As far as I can think, it'd help lower end players keep their DOT up, and higher end players who have the fight knowledge to know 'I should ignore the DOT even though it's flashing, because the boss jumps away in 8s and it'd be more efficient to use another use of <filler spell> instead' would be able to, 'ignore the dot even though it's flashing'. Make it optional of course, some people might not like having their DOT yelling at them 'USE ME USE ME'

edit: maybe even make it customizable, so that you can specify that it starts to flash 'at or below X duration', EG you could tell it to start flashing when the DOT is at 3s or less, rather than 'it fell off'

[Kohashi]

It's not that hard to design a job that appeals to both sides.

Sure, let's hear your suggestions for it, cause saying stuff is very easy.

Now, if I want to have that vibe from a Job, of balancing my healing with my damage, and a 'modest damage kit', it feels like Dancer might fit more accurately than some of the healers. And maybe Red Mage. Seriously, up until DT gave WHM Divine Caress, DNC had more ways to protect the party from raidwides than WHM did.

Take that back.. LOL!! I played a lot of DNC and WHM and this statement alone is offensive for both. If you are one of those healers who only reduce their gameplay by spamming Medica II/III and Glare, then yeah, I guess your argument makes sense. Also comparing a cure 100 (Improvisation 1 cause nobody has the time to fully cast that, nor they should, even when Athena left the arena you didn't have the time) vs 400 potency + the difference in healing overall from having Mind as the main stats is just mindblowing.

You are doing healers a huge disservice by saying this stuff..I guess even the bottom of the barrel can clear Ults if given enough time, huh?

[Tint]

DoTs

Yeah something better to track the DoT would be nice. It often gets burried under all the other debuffs on the boss and you can't see your own DoT on the focus target at all anymore.

I usually have no problem tracking my DoT, but when it's simply not showing on the UI anymore I have to refresh it randomly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Venarius]

I guess even the bottom of the barrel can clear Ults if given enough time, huh?

I mean yes, it do be like that.

[ForsakenRoe]

Sure, let's hear your suggestions for it, cause saying stuff is very easy.

Literally the post right before yours, links to my suggestions for each of the healers. But in case you missed it, here it is again.

[Mortex]

So did the Job quest for healer and sadly the poison esuna debuff only stacks to 4 and I had the boss still on 0.1 % hp before the other character does the lb and that’s a bit boring if you ask me.

[Galvuu]

Sure, let's hear your suggestions for it, cause saying stuff is very easy.

The argument of "you tell me how to fix it" is nonsense, you're not the job designer, you're not paid by SE- there's clearly an issue with healer design, they're the ones that have the onus of fixing it.
The solution isn't so hard to find anyway, other games do it and, in the past, SE did it too. With some changes to Cleric Stance, you could port HW SCH and it would exactly fix this issue.