#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Connor]

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Right. And the dev’s answer to that is a 120-second cool-down oGCD offensive ability on every healer. Based on current design they’ve technically fulfilled every requirement people are asking for. Created dps variance between healers for skill expression (pressing buff buttons is apparently ‘skill expression’ to devs), gave more dps options, some are DoTs, varied with Psyche being 60 seconds, WHM’s being 3 stacks. Oracle is…there, I guess.

I’m not really sure what Blue Mage has to do with the healer role as a limited job. Unless you’re saying ‘If you want to think about using abilities just play a limited job!’, which I’ll admit I certainly wasn’t expecting. I mean, I guess, but I’d prefer being able to do actual content lol.

The more we follow the path of ‘conforming to current design’ the more we eventually end up exactly where the devs are at now.
- healers need to dps
- needs to be accessible, mp-friendly, unaffected by healing
- can’t create too much skill variation
- (theoretically) the dps options cannot exceed those of the dps role.
- Optional dps abilities that experienced healers can use to gain an advantage
= stick all the potency into a super-filler, super-dot, and make an optional dps skill for healers to hit every so often.

Technically all of those points already do exist in the current design. It’s just that they’re extremely boring and uninteresting in execution. But, the question is whether that makes any difference to the developers. I imagine they’re at the point of ‘who cares if it’s fun if it’s easily balanced and accessible?’.

The only way the developers can ever get out of the design corner they’ve pushed themselves into is by making changes overall anyway.

If they stick to the current design then we just get them saying:
- Healers can’t heal too much because that’s not accessible
- Healers can’t dps too much because then they won’t heal
- Healers have (presumably) limited design space / ability amounts.
- Make the healer dps super limited and heal kit expanded and everyone become filler bots
- Make the healer’s healing kit super limited and everyone becomes Cure bots.
- Doing both means more balancing for poor indie developer SE.

No matter which way you turn you’re just going to run into a brick wall with current design anyway. I don’t think any amount of changes purely to job design in a vacuum will change that, and it goes for other roles too (tanks, phys ranged). And I mean, it’s ultimately worth considering whether SE is ‘willing’ to continue the sacrifice of player engagement over job accessibility; all signs point to yes. Unless they make ‘major’ design changes anyway

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Squishing a reply in to this now giant post to avoid double posting lol. I mean, I don’t have any issues with healers having offensive abilities in a vacuum. Things like DoTs make sense, but I’d also argue there are other aspects associated with the ‘healer’ role like buffs/debuffs, healing gcd vs oGCD usage, MP management and requirements, etc. My issue with the system is that basically outside of ultimates none of them are going to matter anyway leading us down a spiral staircase of bad healer gameplay. And with those changes I’d like to hope we can actually start to see interesting and varied skills with interactions and actually requiring some thought, rather than just taking what we have now and ‘stretching it out’. Like, 2 DoTs with debuffs that are mutually exclusive so you have to deliberately rotate application based on which one you want, is much more appealing to me than ‘4 DoTs that do damage’.

[Somnolence]

Leagues better than the travesty we have now?

I was watching Rinon video where he gushes over new AST and he called Afflatus Rapture a WHM movement tool. I haven't realized this since I am casual healer but I guess the idea is that if Glare can't be casted due to mechs forcing movement, Lily heals can be used to move that potency onto Misery, not for healing, but for solely for DPS purposes. As WHM movement tech.

How are devs so out of touch with the job design that the players are resorting to such degen optimization?

[OliviaLugria]

I agree with Connor that adding damage rotations to healers are a bad idea. Let tanks and damage dealers keep them because that's part of what keeps them interesting to play.

I dunno, I would rather say let us have 4 unique ways of dealing damage. Let one have a moderate rotation, let one juggle cleric stance, let one have the single filler and dot, let one juggle dots.

People cite healers wanting different things as a problem with our cause, but I don't really see that as an issue. The point of different jobs is to cater to different playstyles, and the developers could make that happen.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Rapture/Lily spells has always been double triple duty'ing as movement/healing/weaving tool since ShB days. Their more limited nature back in those days coupled with 2.50s base Glare cast time made such consideration(s) more apparent - you always try to capitalize at least 1-2 of them; the more, the better. We're seeing less of those nowadays mostly 'cause of the trashologification of filler cast times and lowered lily timer since 6.0/6.1.

[Azurarok]

I think at least WHM/SGE should have methods to be dps neutral somehow on *all* their GCD healing and not just lilies. I think they don't want to increase healing needs because bad healers exist, and I don't think they can really reduce bad healers as long as casting stuff like MedicaII's going to be a dps loss.

[dspguy]

The original Cleric Stance was good back in the day. Not the bastardized version that was a 20s or so buff that increased damage. When a healer knew the fight, they knew when they could jump in Cleric Stance, do extra damage, while being "locked in" that stance for 10s before switching out. It was a skill and experience thing. In a similar vein, that's how tank stance was too. DPS down, mitigation up. And there was a 10s cooldown, so if you knew the fight, you knew when to jump in and when to jump out.

If I recall, part of the problem in ARR was that some tanks would stay out of DPS stance as long as possible making the healer's job harder and they couldn't go in Cleric's Stance as often. It's all the tank's fault!

[sharknado]

For WHM it could look like so:

• Glare IV is removed from PoM: Your Holy casts also apply a "holy" debuf that after 2-3 seconds adds a stack to permanent "holy marked" dot. At 3+ dots all normal glare casts are actually Glare IV against all dotted enemies in range (so you stunlock for 3 holy and then go cleave-glare for better damage with increased potency)
• Dia dot gets replaced: instead get a short dot that is a ward - either a one universal dot or "choose type" dot in a way. You have 2-3 second dot that could be placed on a boss as he is doing a tank buster, attack that will hit you (aoe) etc and if the dot is present as the cast goes off you get a stackable mark on the boss while the ward could have some beneficial effect.
• Blood Lily gets moved: Blood Lily costs X stacks of the mark on the boss - if you cast glare and there is enough marks they get consumed and it's a Lily. No longer related to Afflatus.

IMHO all healers could have their dot replaced with skill dot-ward that then builds marks for bigger DPS options. Instead of spam-casting healer would ward, heal to get the marks for the big stuff.

And if we would to get more healer responsibility even in normal content then some sort of death-protection would have to exist - an option for healer to survive more (or an item to rez usable by anyone).

[Kacho_Nacho]

I dunno, I would rather say let us have 4 unique ways of dealing damage. Let one have a moderate rotation, let one juggle cleric stance, let one have the single filler and dot, let one juggle dots.

I'd like that! It'd certainly make each healer feel different from the others. Regaining our job identities would be a big win.

People cite healers wanting different things as a problem with our cause, but I don't really see that as an issue. The point of different jobs is to cater to different playstyles, and the developers could make that happen.

Yeah, it's almost like we're all different people with different ideas. I don't see why that's an issue with our distractors.

What do they expect? A monolithic hivemind? I think the one thing we all agree on is written on Gemina's original post and it's clearly stated what we all want collectively.

As for our different suggestions, we're all speaking from our experiences. As someone who plays white mage and scholar far more than sage and astrologian, my feedback is naturally going to be different than someone who strictly plays sage.

Personally, for the 8.0 job update, I think Square Enix should internally revert every job to where they were in Stormblood or their introduction and start from there because where we are in Dawn Trail is pretty bad and would be a horrible foundation to build upon. In addition, I think there should be two things before 8.0 is released.

1. An open playtest of 8.0, months before the release date to allow subscribers to provide feedback.
   
2. A quiz open to all to determine what players feel is the identity of each job is, what doesn't match the job identity, and what can be done to better match the job's fantasy.

[Bobby66]

All these ideas are fine and dandy but they are utterly pointless if we don't know if SE wants to keep in lines with their current design philosophy.

What we needed was our content creators to ask more relevant questions regarding class design, 2min, homogenized classes and roles.

If this is the design space SE wants to keep FFXIV in they should say that so people can just leave or learn to deal.

[Kacho_Nacho]

All these ideas are fine and dandy but they are utterly pointless if we don't know if SE wants to keep in lines with their current design philosophy.

What we needed was our content creators to ask more relevant questions regarding class design, 2min, homogenized classes and roles.

If this is the design space SE wants to keep FFXIV in they should say that so people can just leave or learn to deal.

That's true. Right now, we've been providing feedback for years. We have no idea if it is being ignored out of complacency or if our feedback been disregarded because it doesn't fit Square Enix's idea of what a healer should be.

If Square Enix would tell us what what they won't budge upon, we could then provide feedback which fits within their parameters. Silence on the part of Square Enix has done nothing but exacerbate the frustration healers are feeling due to the state of our role.

Ignoring healers has resulted in a green river less than two months into an expansion. The river will only get worse the further we go into Dawn Trail without hearing anything.

If there was ever a good time to address the concerns and complaints spelled out in Gemina's original post, it would be now.