#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Kacho_Nacho]

personally, I agree. screw balance... aside from pvp which they have shown they can do different than pve... we are all on the same side. who cares if someone does more damage or has more healing or tanks better. the primary concern should be.. is it fun to play?

Yes! A thousand times yes!

It should have been pushed from the very top person in Square Enix to the lowest office intern to the player base that FFXIV is not a competitive game like World of Warcraft. The focus should have always been is the job fun and does its functionality match its job fantasy via lore, party role, and the feel of its play?

Game balance has shown itself to be a cancer. Players are unhappy with the constant changes to their favorite jobs. FFXIV is losing its veteran players across the boards as a result.

Developers need to change their total approach to this MMO and go back to the question of what makes a job enjoyable and proceed from there.

right now... none of the healing jobs make me happy to be a healer. they are all midsize cars of a different colour. no, they aren't all the exact same... except in the concept of how dull they are. if that was SE's intent, they have succeeded.

Total agree. Playing a healer is terribly dull. I've haven't even finished DT's MSQ on my main. I feel no joy playing a white mage right now.

[Shurrikhan]

Yes! A thousand times yes!

It should have been pushed from the very top person in Square Enix to the lowest office intern to the player base that FFXIV is not a competitive game like World of Warcraft.

...Why, though? Why would competitiveness be bad for the game?

And why are we pretending that being a "competitive" game means less fun or job identity? WoW tends to be far more based around both than XIV, "competitive" or not. And that's just broadly -- not even focused on the far better healing experience.

[Kacho_Nacho]

...Why, though? Why would competitiveness be bad for the game?

And why are we pretending that being a "competitive" game means less fun or job identity? WoW tends to be far more based around both than XIV, "competitive" or not. And that's just broadly -- not even focused on the far better healing experience.

Competitiveness by itself isn't bad. But, the advisors to whom the job developers are listening too, were overly competitive. This caused Square Enix to focus on game balance over everything else.

Every job was simplified to make it easier for them to be balanced. Little or no thought was given to whether the jobs were fun to play. Certainly, no one in the outside player base was asked to evaluate how the jobs felt while playing through various content This left us in the situation we are in now.

It's similar to the old raiders versus casuals dynamic. Raiders tended to excessively push for every job's damage to be somewhat equal because their egos were on the line whenever those damage numbers popped. Casuals tended to focus on having fun. They didn't focus on what numbers posted up on the meters.

Idealistically, a game should maintain a balance between the two camps. However, I lost enough guilds and FCs to know, raiders are more vocal and love to harass people they feel are underperforming, even in content that doesn't matter. This either drove all the casuals out of the guild/FC or resulted in the guild disbanding because the officers hated the drama.

So, I'm not pretending that being a competitive game means less fun or job identity. I have nine years of experiences in WoW and over ten years experiences in FFXIV to rely on. So, I'm taking a hardline on this subject.

Competitiveness has led to the erosion of job identities and made FFXIV less fun.

There are enough competitive games out there for people who love focusing on their personal performances. The raiders and devs should let the people who just want to have fun enjoy their one game here without anyone worrying about their numbers on the forbidden website.

With the way Square Enix has designed their content, focusing on whether or not the jobs are enjoyable, over whether they are balanced, is the only way to bring back the healers who have left the game. It's not realistic to expect the devs to overhaul every instance and raid in order to make healing a better experience. It'd be far easier to release a new MMO than to redo FFXIV from the bottom to the top.

I've had this mindset for job design for a long time; I don't care about the jobs being hyper balanced, but I do care about how fun they are. Now we're currently in a situation where not only are they not fun, but they're incredibly homogenous and badly balanced. We've got the unholy trifecta of bad design.

I'll take some balance hiccups in favour of highly diverse jobs any day of the week. That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to have balance, but that balance should be secondary to engaging gameplay.

i tend to agree. I play jobs because I like them, either play wise or aesthetically. I don't care if they are "the best", since that often changes next patch... (because people whine)

These two posts demonstrate where I'm coming from. People who just want to have fun and their wants have been tossed aside in Square Enix's pursuit of job balance.

I agree but be aware that there are players where more damage = more fun.

Yes but these players shouldn't have their fun at the expense of everyone else's. If they have super competitive personalities, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other games they can play to get their ego stroked.

FFXIV should be the one MMO on the market where fun is the focus. Ultimately this is why #FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE came to be.

Healers weren't enjoying their job anymore because of the changes the devs made to the game in pursuit of game balance.

Jobs became oversimplified because that's easier to balance. Dealing damage became more important than healing health. Individual performance became more important than working together as a group. Etc...