M4S has officially been beaten without healers in week 2

[Ozmandis]

MMO players, by nature, tend to gravitate towards the most efficient methods to tackle content, optimizing group compositions to meet the demands of high-end challenges or simply to clear content faster. In FFXIV, the flexibility to switch between all jobs on a single character offers a unique advantage in adapting to changing metas.

Despite ongoing debates about the necessity of healers or their supposed redundancy, traditional party structures continue to dominate, suggesting that healers still play a crucial role in the game’s ecosystem. You will still find Two Tanks, Two Healers (1 Pure/1 Shield), and Four DPS (2 Melee, 2 Ranged) to be the norm. This consistency raises the question of whether the concerns about healers and their place in the game are truly warranted. The answer appears to be a definitive no.

If healers were in as poor a state as some suggest, we would likely see a shift away from traditional norms, as the nature of gaming often prioritizes efficiency over everything else. The fact that the game offers accessibility to alternatives while maintaining viability in traditional roles indicates a balanced system that encourages creativity.

In discussions about the "Healer Strike" or similar threads, I often see healers expressing boredom and a desire for a more robust DPS rotation. Simultaneously, videos showcasing exceptions to the traditional setup are treated as the rule. This is puzzling because if you seek more engaging gameplay, experimenting with a healer-less meta might provide that experience. As a White Mage main, I would alternatively play Summoner if it was the path of least resistance.

I don’t believe healing is in a bad state. The composition of player groups reflects this stability. If healing were indeed suffering, we would see a noticeable change in group dynamics, which simply hasn’t happened.

It's because the player base is not skilled enough to play without healers, that's all. I'm playing with hardcore players and if we don't need a healer, we don't bring one. We're tagging every normal content with 1 tank and the rest DPS because even when there is a double TB, the tank can protect the DPS most of the time with a little bit of added party mitigation. By doing so you are cutting 30% of the duration of a fight and at least we have a somewhat "challenging" experience doing our roulettes. And like, it's not very difficult to do so, not at all. We're simply using every tool the game is giving us and that means we have to press one ot two more buttons per minute than an average player. Damage is such a joke that except some niche mechanics such as 1hp doom check (and even then we have cheese strats to pass them) your passive regen is pretty much all you need to survive as long as you don't take avoidable damage. Sure you are not at 100% health but why should you care ? As long as you have 30% hp pretty much nothing unavoidable can kill you.z

On another note, you all need to stop thinking it is hard to do in savage/ultimate. You vaguely press one button that you should be pressing anyway in the first place every minute or so. How is that hard ? You think planning it is hard ? You can litterally ask a computer to make the mitigation/healing plan for you and if you don't, it's gonna take at most 1h to do it...

The situation is so bad that I know some week1 static that have seriously considered to go with no healers for their kills and seems like one of them did.