The death of savage raiding and SE's lack of action

[Loggos]

Optimising your DPS rotation is a completely different challenge on its own. DPS tunnel vision is real because you are basically playing two mini games at once (your rotation and the boss puzzle). For me personally the difference is night and day. On healer I can easily dodge even bothersome stuff like honey bee's hearts or the leonogg zombies because I'm just pressing 1 anyway (and reactive healing of people who make mistakes in those phases is still easier for me than tracking a tightly timed DPS rotation).
I'm having way more fun optimising my DPS mini game even in fights I know well. With healing, once I have mapped out when to play what heal it's all pretty much done. :/
(Or, if I don't have a plan, like in random normal fights, I have enough tools to salvage pretty much every scripted situation without thinking if others play well.)
I can just hope that other players make mistakes to spice things up for me.

[Havenchild]

I have been in pf reclear parties and it's still boring. Fights are too scripted and too predictable in both the timelines and damage.

It's all subjective, but I haven't grown bored of healers in PF and almost always have to adjust my gameplay around my co-healer or the parties gameplay overall. It is never a dull moment on reclears even considering the scriptability of the damage and mechs. I have had more satisfying saving the raid moments on PF then ever in a static, especially when a co-healer goes down on a big mech. That happens way more often on PF and I stand by the optimal gameplay experience for current FFXIV healers is in PF, not in statics. You can't really use your full toolkit in a static. While that is a problem, it is also a separate one with a separate solution.

If the goal is to increase Healer supply in PF, the solution is to reduce responsibility (including a more lenient gameplay loop) of the role so people would be enticed to the additional responsibility. Separate from any other enticing solutions SE could implement.
If the goal is to make Healers "fun" or "fixing" them, both of which are also subjective in their suggestions, then the best path that everyone can deal with is to redesign all of the jobs from the ground up and how encounters engage with the healer (and other) roles.
Even still for either solution, you will still absolutely have a problem getting people to play the role as the AVERAGE MMO player tends to play a DPS role in literally any MMO. No game has found a perfect solution for this but SE does have some options like Job-in-need guaranteed drops or specialized role tome acquisition bonuses they can implement to soften the blow.

Well thing is, they've lowered the amount of both tankbusters, a fight like o4s has 17 tankbusters while here m4s has 7 in total over the same timeframe.

TB's happening less, does not equate to difficulty in PF. In fact, TB's on average don't matter because they either don't hit hard enough where a healer has to pre shield them (despite tank mits), or if they do hit hard enough, the occurrence of said TB's is so spread out that the tanks can just cheese them with invulns. Something more to PF determining dificulty is like the AoE's that are followed with hard ticking DoTs, which require more of a follow-up of GCD heals on average or overlapping body check/ doom mechs that require re-topping players. The problem is, when this happens in a raid tier, the PF supply of healers goes down not up.

[SieyaM]

It's only a hard fact in your dreams.

So the circles you run in think there's no issue and you don't run into any issues yourself. Alright, there's no issue in your narrow circle. That doesn't make it a hard fact.

In my circles, everyone agrees that healers suck to play and nobody wants to play them, so now we're at odds, we both have different experiences, that now dissolves your "facts" into an anecdote.

So since we're comparing, I waited over 40 minutes for a regen healer on reset day, right at reset, on a JP DC. People said JP loves healers, so what gives? And here's another one, my friends made a PF 2 hours after reset, at JP peak time, and they waited close to an hour for healers.

Huh, looks like your experience isn't fact after all.

So you are surprised you had trouble finding a healer at midnight on a weekday in Japan when most people probably had to work in the morning and wouldn't want to be up that late.

[Ayan_Calvesse]

Honestly speaking, there's actually not enough information to say with 100% certainty whether or not there is a healer shortage. It's all just anecdotes against anecdotes.

But we do have some things that are facts:
- More people have been pointing out that PF is lacking healers recently.
- There's been a lot of screenshots of all the empty green slots in PF across multiple regions.
- There's been documented screenshots of people offering healers gil to help their party, and no one is offering tanks any gil to help their party.

That's all we really know about the current situation. SE is the only party with the actual numbers and we won't know about it unless Yoshi P chooses to address it in the upcoming LL.

Honestly the whole - Pure healer vs Shield healer Bs doesn't help either; as many groups are looking for either a SCH or SGE or a WHM or AST so the scarcity increases due to limited options.

[Sensui]

I guess last question I have is, the ppl complaining about content being too easy, are they using plug ins that make the fights easier? I play on PS5 and don't join others in discord, so I gotta learn the fights (actually learn it) without callous. Maybe try turning it off. Makes if more fun.

[Havenchild]

I guess last question I have is, the ppl complaining about content being too easy, are they using plug ins that make the fights easier? I play on PS5 and don't join others in discord, so I gotta learn the fights (actually learn it) without callous. Maybe try turning it off. Makes if more fun.

A good chunk of the raiding community does rely on callouts from ACT and don't actually look at boss mechanics / wording etc but it's hard to say how much of that population are also complaining about Healers. It wouldn't be farfetched to say its possible there is a correlation between people who complain and people who get callouts on average but it also doesn't bear too much on the situation with Healer as a role in an optimized environment. If everyone plays perfect with proper mitigation and communication from all players, healers are essentially reduced to a very simplistic playstyle with generally low heal GCD requirement.

[Hyperia]

A good chunk of the raiding community does rely on callouts from ACT and don't actually look at boss mechanics / wording etc but it's hard to say how much of that population are also complaining about Healers. It wouldn't be farfetched to say its possible there is a correlation between people who complain and people who get callouts on average but it also doesn't bear too much on the situation with Healer as a role in an optimized environment. If everyone plays perfect with proper mitigation and communication from all players, healers are essentially reduced to a very simplistic playstyle with generally low heal GCD requirement.

I don’t like using ACT but I absolutely adore a good raid caller. Those people are the true MVPs. When I did savage and things got messy, they helped give the healers heads up on events while we tried to salvage things.

I’m on long term break from healing because I had my baby boy, so I don’t have a good opinion on the current savage. Last tier I cleared was P8S.

[Miki_L]

One potential solution is to just hand out healer gear/make it easier to obtain than the other roles. I am in the group of people that would like to heal from time to time but I can't be asked to gear a healer in place of my preferred roles.

[Aravell]

Even stacking all your MIT available from both Healers at that moment (mind you two back to back mechanics have already exhausted some before it), you are not clearing Harrowing Hell with no GCD heals and no tank LB. Same thing can be said for M4S P2 opening currently..

Cross-Tail Switch does almost 900k in 8 seconds, if you can find me any party that can heal through that without tank LB, I'll be impressed.

So you are surprised you had trouble finding a healer at midnight on a weekday in Japan when most people probably had to work in the morning and wouldn't want to be up that late.

Did you even read the post? I literally wrote right there that I looked for a weekly savage PF "at reset", weekly reset is 5pm in Japan, not midnight.

[Supersnow845]

If the goal is to increase Healer supply in PF, the solution is to reduce responsibility (including a more lenient gameplay loop) of the role so people would be enticed to the additional responsibility. Separate from any other enticing solutions SE could implement.
If the goal is to make Healers "fun" or "fixing" them, both of which are also subjective in their suggestions, then the best path that everyone can deal with is to redesign all of the jobs from the ground up and how encounters engage with the healer (and other) roles.
Even still for either solution, you will still absolutely have a problem getting people to play the role as the AVERAGE MMO player tends to play a DPS role in literally any MMO. No game has found a perfect solution for this but SE does have some options like Job-in-need guaranteed drops or specialized role tome acquisition bonuses they can implement to soften the blow.



TB's happening less, does not equate to difficulty in PF. In fact, TB's on average don't matter because they either don't hit hard enough where a healer has to pre shield them (despite tank mits), or if they do hit hard enough, the occurrence of said TB's is so spread out that the tanks can just cheese them with invulns. Something more to PF determining dificulty is like the AoE's that are followed with hard ticking DoTs, which require more of a follow-up of GCD heals on average or overlapping body check/ doom mechs that require re-topping players. The problem is, when this happens in a raid tier, the PF supply of healers goes down not up.

Your final paragraph combined with your third (sorry I would quote them directly but I’m on mobile) is EXACTLY the problem of why people are dumping the healer role faster than usual

Your point is “if you want the healer role to be more popular you need to lower the responsibility of the healer” but then later you say “PF struggles with hard hitting raidwides that apply a DOT”. Do you know why PF struggles with these? It’s because how much the raidwide is mitigated determines the DOT damage.

Right now square is going down the path of removing healing responsibility. How do they do that……..by giving healer tools (mainly mitigation) to the other roles so the healer isn’t the single fail point. Okay but what happens when these other roles don’t use the mitigation they’ve been given? They blame………the healer

Square has picked the worst of every world with the modern healer design because you get no joy out of responsibility if you are a career MMO healer but you also don’t get to enjoy relaxing with no responsibility because you get blamed for everything anyway even when it’s far out of your control.

Who wants to play a role that’s both boring with no responsibility but according to the party has limitless implied responsibility. Just as you’ll never break the law that healers are less popular than DPS you’ll never break the law that mistakes are always implied to be the healers fault. Why try to give zero responsibility to the role that players have been trained to associate responsibility with for as long as MMO’s have existed