#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

At the end of the day, both aspects are in need to rectifying. There is not single magic fix that will right all issues healer role have. We can't really single out 1 issue without talking about another.

The main reason that I (and maybe others) ask for DPS action variety moreso than healing requirements increases, is because of how each relates to the content, and the gear you have. If SE increases healing required by 50% across the board, in all content, that only holds so long as you don't have the gear to power through it. Once you have gear, the content becomes Glarespam again. You can see it with the 'super difficult to heal through' EX dungeons, like the dolls in the final pull of Strayborough. Week 1, they hurt and demanded some GCD heals. With just 10 item levels more than the AF gear gave (going from 690 to 700) by buying the tome set, the difficulty dropped off a cliff. With another 10 ilvls coming in now via Crafted gear, it's even more apparent. So, the 'healing requirement' increase would only hold for a set amount of time, and once you get gear, it's business as usual.

Contrast this with adding new damage actions, ideally ones balanced to make Glarespam 'viable, but not optimal'. What do I mean by this? Eukrasian Dyskrasia, before the Ol' Yeller-ing of the ability, was a great example. It would gain the player 40p over the Dosis cast it replaces, provided that it was able to tick for the full 30s. Nobody would have caused an enrage by not using it on boss fights and choosing instead to Dosis (especially not this tier, with M4S's enrage timer). But people conflate 'optimal' with 'the skill floor', and mistakenly believe that these optional tricks you can do for more damage are 'required', when you can just ignore most of them and still clear. Putting Misery inside raidbuffs is 'optimal' gameplay due to the extra damage it rewards you. But you don't have to do that to clear any fight.

But the biggest factor in this, is 'dev time'. It's much MUCH simpler to add one or two new buttons to each healer that are semi-regularly used, than it is to completely upend the healing paradigm of the game, while also needing to make sure that old content still functions correctly (Eg legacy Ultimates). As an example, giving Glare 3 a new proc wherein using it 3 times gives a stack of Sacred Sight (allowing a Glare 4 cast), and shortening Dia's duration down to 12 or 15s, would take far less dev time than messing with how healing interacts with content. The damage buttons would be an immediately noticeable change for the player, they'd be able to instantly notice the difference in their rotation, while an increase of, say, 25% healing required in EX roulette dungeons might go unnoticed due to how potent our healing tools are. I think what the devs need is an 'instant-win', something that they can implement quite quickly, yet has a big impact in the 'feel' of the gameplay. With that, they 'buy' themselves some player goodwill (which, when it comes to healers, they're desperately lacking atm), to make bigger and more sweeping changes. The difference between 'yeh we're going to work on the Healer role, it'll be ready for 9.0' and 'yeh we're going to work on the Healer role, the full changes to the healing side of things will be complete in 9.0, but for the 8.x series you will have these damage button related changes' cannot be understated, because we've had so long of radio silence on the matter already

M4S cleanerd without healers. Peak healer design!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCr3Vk2y1mc, if people were curious. No healing GCDs used, no Tank LB used on the transition. And all of this is in the second week of the content being out. There's no argument of 'oh but they're overgearing it they're in full BIS' to be made this time. If the 'lets try doing a no healer run' window gets any closer to the release date, we'll be seeing a world first taken by a no-healer run. Maybe then SE would consider addressing the issue