#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

And if you all get your way to make the healer role more challenging complicated, I guess this will be the end of me playing my favourite role at all. I hate being a carry or leaving groups, but this is where I'm at now (whenever Strayborough pops up in the extreme roulette I'm instantly gone, I just refuse wasting my time in this ****hole - consider this to be my very personal strike).

tl;dr: healers are ok, but it feels like raid encounter design is more and more spilling over into normal dungeons, making them an unplayable mess.

Of course that's just my 5 cents, so have fun roasting me for good

As mentioned, this is the inevitable end result of following the logic of 'if we make jobs less complex, we can make encounters have more complexity'

Funny thing is, it's possible to design Healers to be more challenging, or complicated, or whatever descriptor, at the high end only, without affecting the low end's accessibility. Here's an example, from my megathread:

On WHM, we reduce the Duration of the DOT from 30s, to 12s. Additionally, we add Water/Banish as an instantcast GCD attack with a 15s CD, that has 40p more potency than the Stone/Glare variant you have at that time.

On the surface, it sounds more complex to deal damage as a WHM with these changes, and that is a correct assessment when it comes to optimizing damage. For someone who doesn't care about all that guff, the additional times they're pressing the DOT, and the times they're pressing the Water spell, those are instant spells, so instead of the current gameplay loop where each minute we have 2 Dia casts, that would become 5 Dia casts and 4 Banish casts, vastly increasing how much the player can move, which makes dealing their damage during high movement situations (for example, Strayborough's first boss) easier. Additionally, by balancing the potencies carefully, we can make the gain of doing 'the fully optimal rotation' be small (but still relevant, because any getting any gain you can is what makes something 'optimal'), while also keeping the amount 'lost' by not playing 'optimally', super low. For example, I did the maths a long time ago, and if you played this idea (Dia 12s duration, new attack every 15s) with the same logic as you do now (that is, 'refresh DOT whenever it falls off, press Glare otherwise') and ignored the new damage button entirely, you'd get 98% of the damage output that the 'fully optimized' version of the rotation would do. Players would not only be able to do 'spam Glare, ignore DOT' and clear the story/24man/roulettes as they can now, they'd actually be losing less damage by doing so compared to the current version of the game.

Also, with adding more damage buttons (that we've established are 'mathematically optional'), comes being able to create new systems and synergies which utilize them. For example, one of the keystones of the linked WHM design is the new gauge, which fills when you deal damage or cast healing spells (and for those players who prefer to press healing spells, it's got you covered, as that builds the gauge much faster). And 50 gauge would be spent on a powerful AOE healing action, which is also instantcast. So, instead of having access to 4 instant cast spells when you need to heal an ally quickly (via Lilies/Swiftcast), with this you could have up to 6 (Lilies/Swiftcast/2 Gauge spenders), and the reworked Thin Air would allow you to get another two more instantcasts. All of this would serve to make the WHM more 'accessible', or 'easier to execute', but would also give it 'more to optimize around', theoretically satisfying both the players who want it to remain simple to execute, and the players who want it to have more depth to optimize around.

In fact, on the subject of instantcasts and mobility, the 'fully optimized' rotation for the design I made linked above, more of its GCDs are spent on instantcasts, than are spent casting. Some might consider that a bad thing, considering Healers are meant to be 'a form of Caster', and some think that WHM should be the 'turret healer', but if SE wants to go with making it the 'easy to play, easy to learn' Healer, hey I'd double down on that and make it easier to play, easier to learn, and still give it more depth for those who seek it. Any fanmade design I come up with can't help with the first boss of Strayborough though, because while I can come up with design ideas to help players keep damage while moving, or help maintain their MP, or help them better protect their allies, I can't do much about the whole 'you got Nogg'd and now you can't press any actions for 8 seconds' thing

If anything your problem with the changing design of dungeons is a reflection of the strikes overarching opinion about the jobs relation to savage in that we are sick of 99.9% of the games complexity being shoved onto the encounters with little complexity in the jobs, your problem is similar, the dungeon boss design is approaching the point of becoming too complex for you as a compensation for the lack of complexity in the jobs. That’s certainly not a bad opinion

I did the 24man yesterday (blind), and I have to say, the player we're responding to has an absolutely solid point, because wtf was that last boss? I mean, we cleared it without wiping, but I can't imagine a player with the credentials that this one has given about themselves, having a fun time with that raid. AOEs on top of AOEs, having to look at the Boss's model to see a 'tell', having to look at the sides of the arena to see a 'tell' while also looking at the Boss in the middle and HIS 'tell' and processing both at once? A lot of us here are used to it because that's 'our world', we live in that kind of environment via Savage, or Extremes, or Ultimates, but for someone who's just looking to do the MSQ and check out the 24man, the amount of visual BS going on is reaching, like, a singularity of sorts. At this point, it's less about fighting a boss, and more about fighting our own retinal nerves as they try to process wtf we're looking at

Then we look at... IDK, Void Ark? Rabanastre? Previous, Pre-SHB 24mans (especially first-tier ones as Jeuno is) were nowhere near as bad for visual clarity as this, like what would be the most 'look at 3 different things and interpret where the AOEs will be' thing from back then, Hashmal's pillars?