#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Alice_Rivers]

Noooo! I would rather actually remove the healer role!

Clarification: Automating healing is an absolute nightmare, hence I'd rather lose the role completely.

[ForsakenRoe]

Healing aura: your very presence soothes your allies, giving everyone in a 50y radius from yourself a 1200 potency regen. Lasts indefinitely or unless you toggle it off.

If there's the option to toggle it off, that introduces the potential for someone to 'play it wrong', which is quite hilarious, and also sad, that not only is it a possibility, in this game it'd be an inevitability

[Kes13a]

That is what scares me.

A situation where the senior developer is going to get the "brilliant" idea to automate healing. None of the junior developers will speak out against it because... well, Japan... and we end up with something a 3 year old could play.

A future, where in 8.0, all a healer will need to do is move their character through the same boss fight mechanics they've faced in prior expansions while their heals go off automatically and the player gets to choose whether to press their sole single target damage spell or their sole Aoe damage spell once every 2.5 seconds.

Please look forward to it...

we already have something a 3 year old could play

[Kacho_Nacho]

we already have something a 3 year old could play

Nah. I'd say it's more like what a six year old could play but it is mind-numbingly dull to play.

It's scary when you realize, out of all the roles, healers could be played just by using macros while impacting their performance the least. It is not a big leap from where healers are in 7.0 to having healers being as automated as the NPC healers are in trusts and duty support.

[Aravell]

It's scary when you realize, out of all the roles, healers could be played just by using macros while impacting their performance the least.

This isn't strictly true. SMN can also be played entirely using macros without really impacting performance at all.

But yes, they already removed meaningful choice from healers so that every road leads to success unless you go off-road. Making it any easier will just end up with automation.

[ForsakenRoe]

I can't see 'full automation' being on the cards (ie you simply existing causes the party to be healed), but I can see SE trying something similar to the 'smart healing' that some WOW actions have. For example, if Regen is on someone and they reach full HP, then it jumps to someone else in the party who is still missing HP, automatically preventing overheal (unless everyone has full HP). If that were implemented with something like Medica 3, where everyone's one stack collapses onto the Main Tank (because they're the only one who's got less than 100% HP due to autoattacks), just thinking about it ugh, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if it were on a specific healer (eg a new one), but adding it to all of them sounds... not great. The Faerie's already jank enough as it is with Embrace targeting. It only works in WOW because A: they have more people in a raid (minimum 10 up to a max of 30 in current gameplay), B: there's a lot more instances of damage occurring, so people are sitting at 100% HP a lot less often, and C: they have WAY less access to AOE spells (either because of CDs, resource costs, or just the way the class is designed)

But, one could argue that we already have 'automation' somewhat in FFXIV, thanks to the range increases of 6.3. We don't need to think about where we stand when using Kerachole or Physis anymore, it's been 'automated' in a sense due to being increased to a 30y radius

[KernCadfan]

So, i'm going to tip-toe in here and ask a few questions because I'm curious. A few baselines of my mindset first:
1) I agree jobs have been gutted, and healers suffer greatly.
2) I don't agree that healing is too easy, because for players like myself with motor function disorders healing isn't easy while also dancing around mechanics.
3) I think the Trinity standard is perhaps the worst thing to happen in this game, and the instance party list set-up we have doesn't allow for the true beauty of the final fantasy franchise. In FFXI, and almost all of the single player games, support jobs were mandatory because they provided an added metric to the combat. Even in WoW and Rift there were heavily support based utility classes... FFXIV fails to balance properly because jobs that weren't exactly maid to primarily be DPS are sadly DPS in this game... Bards were never DPS for example, they were party support. A little healing, a lot of mitigation, and a lot of utility to empower each and every party. RDM, the same is true... and that tended to empower healers, not invalidate them...

So, with those baselines in mind here are my questions for the healers here:

1) Firstly, what exactly is the goal with this strike, and what is the collective hope to attain with it? Furthermore, what can we do to help you get noticed by the development staff, or make gameplay more fun for you?

It doesn't seem like all of the healers are on the same page outside of the idea that healing is broken... which, it is, terribly so... personally, the way I see this balance issue, I wonder if we need to beef up the monsters hard core, but also provide real party support? Is there a middle ground among players for perhaps allowing true party support and an emphasis on allowing jobs to be classical, when it has a baseline to be a true supporting class?

White Mage doesn't feel like White Mage, and I would suggest that's probably the largest issue for a lot of the classes. For jobs like AST which is finalFantasyXIV innovative that's a separate discussion because that job doesn't have prior baselines to go by... a vast majority of the jobs do, and classical Warriors for prime example never healed in Final Fantasy games. That was left to PLD when it came to tanking in order to keep hate, but in the progression segments of the game in its hayday the healing of a pld couldn't sustain the entire party. Warriors had decent mitigation, and decent damage. Without a heals in FFXI, that warrior couldn't tank. They'd eat the floor in level appropriate content.

So, that's my question in a nutshell... when it comes to re-tooling jobs, should we be pushing for classical iterations of the jobs? Is that perhaps a better way to begin looking at this mold when we talk about how job design works? Or am I just super way off base about what healers want?

I'm genuinely asking...

[Supersnow845]

A lot of people who are complaining here are older players who remember the old versions of the healers (and the rest of the classes) where support did use to be a function that existed in alot of the classes. For example SCH used to have an AOE haste buff for party members, an AOE oGCD esuna and a silence effect. AST used to have stun and could dilate the time of particular buffs, phys ranged could share their MP with other party members etc

However the game trended towards a system where only DPS contribution matters so a lot of these effects got cut (and even ones that wouldn’t actually damage anything like SCH’s AOE esuna got cut when they gutted the healers). However while the classes played very differently and had very different effects in the older version they never really played like the old FF classes anyway, they played like 14’s iteration of the classes and that was fine. Like I could say that Astro used to play more like 12’s time battle mage than it does now but it’s not like at any point it really ever played like time battle mage

How people want to fix the healers varies by person to person because we all have different ideas of what’s wrong with the healers and that’s fine, the intention was never to present an alternative design for healers that we wanted them to implement it was simply to finally get them to notice we are sick of the current healers and refusing to change them isn’t doing anything for the game as a whole. We simply want them to be more open to feedback when it comes to changes

[KernCadfan]

How people want to fix the healers varies by person to person because we all have different ideas of what’s wrong with the healers and that’s fine, the intention was never to present an alternative design for healers that we wanted them to implement it was simply to finally get them to notice we are sick of the current healers and refusing to change them isn’t doing anything for the game as a whole. We simply want them to be more open to feedback when it comes to changes

Oh, okay, that makes more sense than the rhetoric flying around in-game that makes the healer strike out to be something more concerted than merely getting devs to switch up their methods. I started reading the thread, but about 20 pages in I was met with such conflicting standards of what the healers should be that I was honestly confounded. Considering this is over 900 pages long, I didn't think it was feasible to read all of that, so I just skipped to the final ten, but that simply left me more confused about what the actual goal was... but it seems the strike is more general discontentment than an actual strike in its truest and rawest form... I don't really notice it, outside of people talking about... I do wish healers would be re-tooled because I too miss the early days of ARR... but that's because of class feel. I dropped my DRG because it stopped feeling like a dragoon... That's one thing I like about Picto, it actually *feels* like a Final Fantasy 6 Pictomancer...

Which I suppose is why I wonder if a classical bent isn't a better way to clarify to the devs what the problem was... I tried playing WHM when returning to the game, and I completely hated what I was playing because WHM just doesn't feel like WHM, so I stopped healing... I don't mind it being hard, but I want it to feel like what it is, even if it is just the ARR standard, and not the classical standard.

[Lyth]

...

The problem with support design is that most skill checks are pass/fail. Once you are capable of passing that check, there isn't really anything else that you can offer as a player outside of optimizing your DPS. That may seem challenging to you as an individual, but when you look at the subset of healers participating in a given content level (i.e. Savage PF or Dungeon Roulette DF or whatever you're specifically interested in), you'll find that everyone who shows up can do the check to the same level of competency, leaving little in way of differentiating skill.

This is coupled with the fact that there are numerous redundancies in place to ensure that you meet those support checks collectively as a group. Even if your healer dies, your tank can just take over and shield/heal the group while keeping themselves up. Even if your tank dies, there's a second tank waiting to replace the first one. Classically, the design would be if your healer dies, your tank goes down nearly instantly after, and then the boss oneshots everyone else with a chain of autos.

Modern design breaks this interdependence, such that everyone is playing a single player game. The end result is that supports are less valuable, and DPS are much more valuable. Healers are hit the hardest by this because they're the most support-orientated role in terms of action counts (to the point that they have very few actions in their damage rotation), but a lot of that support functionality is cross-covered on other roles to the point that none of it is truly 'essential'.

Broadly speaking, there are a few commonly suggested directions. The first is that we give healers more engaging damage rotations, so that once you pass the base healing check for a fight you have room to optimize. A second is that you change the job balance and fight design such that those pass/fail skill checks become more healer dependent and less open to cross-compensation from other roles (i.e. increase outgoing damage, decrease self-sustain and access to raise on other roles). A third is that you develop the support functionality of healers in other ways that lends itself to optimization, such as movement tools and speed boosts. There are a lot of different opinions on this, which makes it difficult to get a consensus.

I'll also say that what you're seeing in this thread is actually just the natural consequence of the game's current design direction. If there's no skill-based value in playing a healer, then people move over to roles where their skills will be better appreciated. Those who can make the switch to DPS will switch. What you're calling a strike here is really just people openly acknowledging that they don't have to be locked into playing a role that isn't valued. Supports are probably more likely to consider themselves to be 'career tanks' and 'career healers'. But once you make that switch, you're much less likely to come back. And a trinity design game cannot afford to lose those players.