#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Kes13a]

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.

hey. you arent alone in being a "super casual". I would use that term to describe myself as well. the only thing "optimized" would be my desk I play at, and its a holy mess. my partner does savage etc and I live vicariously through them, I have seen the inside of savages by watching them if their static streams them playing. but I dont do them since I have a hard time grasping mechanics, I have what I call "rng feet" that may, by sheer random chance, have me in the right place to avoid something.

The point of this strike is not to make everyone have to crunch numbers, to always have smooth flawless runs etc, but to make things fun and interesting. playing games is supposed to be fun. the problem as someone has said, the way encounters are designed. if healers are meant to contribute damage, having more damage options is not going to make healing more complicated or challenging. a couple extra options wont make or break you especially since using them are still your choice. if healers are just supposed to heal, then having more party damage wont change much either because you are still going to be choosing to heal or not.

the encounter design, SE needs to work on. if there is no place to stand to cast heals etc, then its going to be a bad run, especially if they ramp up party or raid wide damage.

job design decisions need to be revisited. such as giving an already virtually unkillable tank an AOE heal. or a dps the same thing? how long before tanks get a raise and kill of healers for good?

the best time to push back against changes is while there is time. I think the continual simplification of jobs isnt good for you, me or anyone else. and I empathize with you 100% being a casual. the point of all this isnt to make things harder for us or other people that enjoy healing, its too make sure we still have a role we enjoy.

[Tigore]

Yeah. ForsakeRoe has some neat ideas to look at from the last time I checked. You wouldn't be alone with the Strayborough first boss opinion. From the last few weeks, the healer I was with was usually cursing it by saying they look forward to the Expert roulette dumping the dungeon away. Even as melee for me, I sometimes can't even hit the boss except for sometimes using my slightly weaker ranged attacks. So even though getting grabbed by the adds stuns us for 8s, the stunned feeling is not very different from having to disengage from the boss to avoid everything in all directions. One may think a VPR would laugh at this with Uncoiled Fury, but I am actually using the base Writhing Snap because I still can't get in over several GCDs. Having a lag spike makes it worse, of course since now you see the add catch you from an extended 8 - 10 yalms away instead of melee range from your end. It doesn't sound bad on paper, but the adds in practice are nearly around 3 - 15 yalms apart from each other with 5-ish at once frequently. If Square and CS3 wants to keep the mechanic, they may need to tone it down with half of the adds in comparison. It may be an Expert, but it's supposed to be a casual end game option.

For the record, I wasn't trying to advocate for more of those troll adds in Strayborough. I think it went too far into that pendulum swing of "avoidable dance mechs" for content in general. Since it causes different issues for casuals and veterans with a huge delta for damage taken. If nobody gets hit, the boss is doing "almost no damage" and the healer is yawning for 10 seconds. If everyone gets hit, it is emergency mode with Medica 3 + Asylum + Regen on high vuln stack players. Possibly even Medica / Cure 3 usage with the lilies dried up. The point I was making is some of the mechs could be switched to unavoidable pulses of damage that deal less than those dance mechs with no vuln stacks. Of course, ForsakenRoe has the heal absorb idea that can be healed through or dispelled with Esuna. That way, we have some moments to actually stop to heal without requiring an emergency mode of mistakes to stress out on.

The tanks having very high sustain will be something to look at too. Although we might not need to nerf them much if the encounter damage is designed around the presence of those tools. Well, except WAR. There is no justification for Bloodwhetting and Raw Intuition to fully heal them from 10-100% in one GCD because they hit 8 - 10 enemies at once. Even during Endwalker when my WAR class had fresh gear for our first 90 story dungeon, my friend from savage using SGE said he still didn't need to heal me much. If that is not enough proof, Xeno also made a video of not needing the healers and also not wanting our help during a Savage run. Whether he was just joking or not with an outrageous sounding point, he was still right in a way.

[GartredZW]

maybe it's not that great to play a turret job in a game that keeps demanding more and more mobility?

Personally, I'll put equal blame on the average pseudo-parser and the dev team.
What I mean by pseudo-parser is someone who tries to optimize as far as it's convenient, and anything that isn't convenient is a problem that the dev team have to fix.
I signed up for Black Mage when I first started playing because I wanted to be the one with long cast times and big powerful hits. I don't care if I need to not do anything for a couple seconds to move out of a mechanic. Minimizing that downtime was a lot of fun trying to master.
But then someone took the ever reliable "Always Be Casting" way too literally, and complained that certain casters weren't viable because they couldn't always be casting. They want to optimize the job, but not if it means minimizing movement time to do it. They see the lack of mobility as a bug instead of a feature.
Now, at level 100 Black Mage, in a normal 2 minute rotation without overcapping on resources, we get roughly 34 casts out of 48 GCDs instant. (this doesn't account for leylines speeding up your GCD, or saving polyglot and triplecast to use outside of this window, but you get the point.)
That's completely insane if you ask me. I also did the math for Endwalker, and it's only 21 out of 48. Still pretty high, but at the very least it's not almost three out of every four casts that you don't even need to cast on this immobile caster class.

If you're someone who says that it's not fun to play a job that needs to stand still to deal damage in a game that forces you to move sometimes, I'd suggest playing Dancer.
I know I kind of got off track of healers here, but I'm just still mad about what they've been doing to my baby this expansion.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]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

Well there you have it. That's the consequences of dev's approach to shove majority of difficulty to encounters. Going down this path, what do you think will happen to the hypothetical 'hypercasuals' when they couldn't deal with... say, "Strayborough on steroid"-in their roulette? It doesn't matter what job they pick up, they'll just get eviscerated (unless if they're a tank maybe, lol).

So how about we tone that down and dial back the job gameplay difficulty so we can have both in moderation? :P

[...]If you're someone who says that it's not fun to play a job that needs to stand still to deal damage in a game that forces you to move sometimes, I'd suggest playing Dancer.
I know I kind of got off track of healers here, but I'm just still mad about what they've been doing to my baby this expansion.

This is precisely why I despise the Trashologification done to healers back in 6.0. Having to think even in E5N thunderstorm phase? Anybody remember that? Hell no we can't have that!

Looking at their recent decision to further reduce Holy cast time, they've done anything but 'adding stress' back to the gameplay, which goes against what they've stated.

[GartredZW]

Looking at their recent decision to further reduce Holy cast time, they've done anything but 'adding stress' back to the gameplay, which goes against what they've stated.

I don't know about you, but I'm stressed as hell. With the way this game is going, class design wise, the best we can hope for right now is our class not even being included in the patch notes for more than slight potency adjustments.
Maybe Machinist players have it better than we thought.

[Gwenkatsu]

The only thing I’m gonna roast you for is after 969 pages people are still coming in here...

I hope you did not expect me to read through 969 pages in this thread. To be honest, I stumbled in here by accident, and when I saw someone on the last page asking for a casual's insight, I thought that this could be my 15 minutes of fame

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'

Then I got everything here wrong, maybe I really should have read through all those pages
If it tones down the overwhelming mechanical mess FF14 dungeons are becoming, I'm all for more complex classes. This is something I can handle, while the crazy lightshow some of the fights are these days is just getting too much for me. Zeromus felt like juggling seven glasses while someone shoots a laser pointer at my eyes in random intervals. Not fun. Not fun at all.

Sorry for derailing this thread with my rant about annoying dungeon mechanics.

[Somnolence]

Rin just dropped meaty healer issues video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTT5LGWt35k

[Maltothoris]

Then you also have the worst case scenario where the encounter sucks and then it just feels not that great to play. We already have quite a few examples with E7s, P6s, P7s and some ex trials like Rubicante. Ya let jobs have a low barrier to entry but there needs to be at least a foot between the ceiling and the floor and not the 2 inches we currently have.

Edit: Heck look at the strat that being used for ex 3 now with reject authority doing the same thing as TOP meteors and mitting the heck out of it. Just putting more emphasis on mitigation and not actual healing.

[Tigore]

@Gwenkatsu

From the looks of it, your comments are actually way more relevant than us discussing what happened to BLM and DRG >.> I think only a few of anyone can claim to have read all 970+ pages of the thread so far. I can understand if one does not go through it since it sounds like an ordeal that would take all day or two when a person could respond faster with what's going on. I looked at the first post of the thread and I don't remember seeing that person in our conversations up in this area. The first post still looks the same even though some YouTubers are commenting about it sounding unclear. Although the discord link is intriguing. I haven't viewed it yet, but it does make me wonder if a lot of updating happened there.

An example is the post talking about the threat level being low. As we discussed here, that is the veteran side of problem and doesn't address the mechs causing too much damage to happen for a full group of new players. I have also noticed from my Savage friend that he commented about the healing quality declining a bit. The M4S group or so he was in asked the tanks to LB3 the healing check part. Some others have doubts if that means we don't know what we are talking about, but it turns out some of the veterans I knew here unsubbed from the game or are playing different roles. It may be possible that the healers asking for the tank LB3 may still need some practice with the cooldowns we have. Hard for me to say without being there and not seeing the logs of what is happening.

[ForsakenRoe]

An example is the post talking about the threat level being low. As we discussed here, that is the veteran side of problem and doesn't address the mechs causing too much damage to happen for a full group of new players. I have also noticed from my Savage friend that he commented about the healing quality declining a bit. The M4S group or so he was in asked the tanks to LB3 the healing check part. Some others have doubts if that means we don't know what we are talking about, but it turns out some of the veterans I knew here unsubbed from the game or are playing different roles. It may be possible that the healers asking for the tank LB3 may still need some practice with the cooldowns we have. Hard for me to say without being there and not seeing the logs of what is happening.

Assuming I'm thinking of the part that you're talking about, that part is more than likely supposed to be Tank LB'd, given that it is 9 or 10 hits in quick succession of around 60k damage per hit, unmitigated. Healing through it without Tank LB would require using all of your Mits, and throwing in GCD healing, all in order to use a Melee LB to skip a 'hard' mechanic later in the fight (which we can skip with gear now anyway even without that Melee LB)