#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Supersnow845]

I keep seeing this, but WHO? Who asked for this? I've yet to see any response to these changes that was received positively in my decade of playing this game. I have yet to see anyone, anywhere, not on the forums, not on the subreddit, not on twitter, ANYWHERE, asking for the boneheaded changes they've been making since SHB.

I can’t find much evidence of actual people asking for the post ShB changes (though I have seen many people who support anything just by nature of it being in the game) but that poster is 100% correct that a lot of the decisions we now realise were mistakes were borne from the devs taking suggestions too far from the HW and SB era

There were complaints about cleric stance and DPS complexity in HW and SB that led to the modern healers, there were complaints about buff alignment in ShB after they removed damage types that led to the two minute meta. People do complain when the jobs are unbalanced

Square has a horrible tendency to use a hammer for a job that requires a nail file but all of the changes that player listed were born from actual complaints, even misguided ones.

[Chasingstars]

I can’t find much evidence of actual people asking for the post ShB changes (though I have seen many people who support anything just by nature of it being in the game) but that poster is 100% correct that a lot of the decisions we now realise were mistakes were borne from the devs taking suggestions too far from the HW and SB era

There were complaints about cleric stance and DPS complexity in HW and SB that led to the modern healers, there were complaints about buff alignment in ShB after they removed damage types that led to the two minute meta. People do complain when the jobs are unbalanced

Square has a horrible tendency to use a hammer for a job that requires a nail file but all of the changes that player listed were born from actual complaints, even misguided ones.

Yep. Part of me is wondering if healers who strike now are just wishing to play the equivalent of Heavensward Classic. Where there were more dps checks and heal checks, more job complexity, enmity management, where savage and extreme were considered hard even for the better raiders.

[Ritsugamesh]

I can’t find much evidence of actual people asking for the post ShB changes (though I have seen many people who support anything just by nature of it being in the game) but that poster is 100% correct that a lot of the decisions we now realise were mistakes were borne from the devs taking suggestions too far from the HW and SB era

There were complaints about cleric stance and DPS complexity in HW and SB that led to the modern healers, there were complaints about buff alignment in ShB after they removed damage types that led to the two minute meta. People do complain when the jobs are unbalanced

Square has a horrible tendency to use a hammer for a job that requires a nail file but all of the changes that player listed were born from actual complaints, even misguided ones.

I think there's been a push and pull from both sides for a while. It's an unfortunate truth that those who are happy aren't engaging in discourse about these issues, and those that aren't are. On a personal level, I've played since (yes the dreaded 1.0) and the vast majority of changes that we've weathered were completely out of the blue. This is across the board - TP changes, MP changes, aggro changes, loss of things like boss stat resist downs (int debuffs, etc. and who would fit them into their rotation), jobs being gutted (SCH DPS RIP), loss of Cleric Stance - the list goes on. I'm not saying these were good, bad, or anything in between, but that I was on-board with the vision of the game at 2.0 and played within the confines.

The fact that the devs do show they listen to feedback is positive in many senses, but I do also think that a vision for a game should be upheld and this is where the problem lies. They have not seemingly had a north star for any aspect of the game, even down to the story, outside of not wanting to enrage the playerbase. I feel this has just created an unhealthy relationship where creativity is out the window and everything is shaved to the softest corners and least objectionable output. Dungeons are a fine-tuned data output to say 'this is how long people accept, this the number of trash they accept, this is the number of bosses they accept' - it's actually insane when you think about it. Nobody should be developing a game under that pretence. I could extend this to almost every system in the game - the gear, the MSQ, the patch releases

The MOBA scene wouldn't respect League of Legends if they removed ults because people didn't like how powerful they were - it's part of the game, deal with it or don't. It really boggles my mind.

[Shurrikhan]

I can’t find much evidence of actual people asking for the post ShB changes (though I have seen many people who support anything just by nature of it being in the game) but that poster is 100% correct that a lot of the decisions we now realise were mistakes were borne from the devs taking suggestions too far from the HW and SB era

There were complaints about cleric stance and DPS complexity in HW and SB that led to the modern healers, there were complaints about buff alignment in ShB after they removed damage types that led to the two minute meta. People do complain when the jobs are unbalanced

Square has a horrible tendency to use a hammer for a job that requires a nail file but all of the changes that player listed were born from actual complaints, even misguided ones.

Or, yet more often, they prefer reductive solutions over additive ones. "Why teach players how to use X when you could just largely or wholly prune X, thereby reducing the difference?" so to speak.

And among the player base itself, even, there are oddities in comprehension. It shouldn't need to be stated, for instance, that if A player asks to nerf or deemphasize Leaden Fist while Monk as a whole is barely at (or even below) a fair balance point, they're not asking for a net nerf to Monk. It should be obvious when one asks for shorter durations on DoTs, they are not asking for their damage to fall below that of a spammable filler (with only mobility then being of any value) and thereby to further nerf healer DPS overall. Etc., etc. Yet, sometimes players here are just as (seemingly actively) neglectful of scope, context, and likely intent of a given suggestion/request as the devs.
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Ideally, a developer would look at, say, a complaint purely about the "clunkiness" of Cleric Stance, i.e....

• that the lack of queuing functionality on turning the skill off paired with queuing in turning it back on, along with the latency and packet loss more common further from the data centers' locations, causes frequent doubling,
• that it having a cooldown of 2 GCDs only if at no spell speed and causing drift or in effect a longer cooldown at more spell speed, and
• that it necessitates a primary stat loss for either Scholar or Summoner if playing both unless spending Grand Company consumables and reallocating level up attribute points every time you swap)

...and determine first which system issues are not unique to Cleric Stance, fix those, and, if deciding ultimately to remove Cleric Stance, roadmap replacements for its cognitive load in terms of weave space and its impact on uptime (as favored sub-GCD-cast-time spells, such as Regen or Cure II before toggling it on and DoTs before turning it off -- though the last was negligible in Japan), etc. But alas.