#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[BabyYoda]

guys please understand FFXIV is a side project that SE is working on they have a main project called NFT project that's the plan for SE for next 10 years

[AmiableApkallu]

who cares if someone does more damage or has more healing or tanks better. the primary concern should be.. is it fun to play?

Inter-role balance is important. It's not fun being the healer in a dungeon run when the tank can take care of all the mitigation and healing that's required.

Intra-role balance is important. It's not fun being told, "Aw, that's baby's first healer. All the other healers are just better."

The balance problem is, itself, one of balance. By all accounts, it's not been healthy for the game to try and balance damage output on a knife's edge, so that every possible party composition can clear an enrage with some seconds to spare. On the other hand, no amount of "gameplay" can make up for a job that's consistently the worst in its role.

It's fine if one job is simply better at some task or in some particular scenario. It just also needs to be the case that these opportunities to shine are spread out somewhat fairly across all the jobs.

[Schan]

who cares if someone does more damage or has more healing or tanks better. the primary concern should be.. is it fun to play?

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

[Kes13a]

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 aesthtically. I dont care if they are "the best", since that often changes next patch... (because people whine)

[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...

[Aravell]

I seriously don't get all the raider hate and bashing, did you know that the people who have been criticising the state of the healer role for the longest are mostly raiders? This isn't a 'righteous casuals vs evil raiders' situation, so kindly don't make it such.

As a former "evil high-end competitive raider" myself, the reason I quit being competitive is precisely because of the absence of fun. It's fun to work around fight and job limitations while still pulling off a good performance. It's not fun and never has been fun to spam filler for 100 (formerly 105) seconds and then pray all your big potency hits crit within the 20 (formerly 15) seconds of buffs.

[Azurarok]

I kinda think it's SE trying to make their hardest content more approachable, to justify spending as much resources on them as they have been

[TheDustyOne]

I seriously don't get all the raider hate and bashing, did you know that the people who have been criticising the state of the healer role for the longest are mostly raiders? This isn't a 'righteous casuals vs evil raiders' situation, so kindly don't make it such.

As a former "evil high-end competitive raider" myself, the reason I quit being competitive is precisely because of the absence of fun. It's fun to work around fight and job limitations while still pulling off a good performance. It's not fun and never has been fun to spam filler for 100 (formerly 105) seconds and then pray all your big potency hits crit within the 20 (formerly 15) seconds of buffs.

This, competitive and fun aren't antonyms; high end raiders would stop being high end raiders if they didn't find raiding fun (although some probably wouldn't, but that's another story).

Many of the changes Square has made weren't necessarily in the name of perfect balance either, but rather to "reduce stress" and to "make it approachable". If anything, that sounds much more like they're NOT listening to highly skilled raiders, but rather people who didn't want to improve their skill but still wanted the rewards from high skill.

SCH didn't need to lose Miasma, Miasma II, and Bane to achieve perfect balance, it just needed potency adjustments. The loss of Miasma and Miasma II were purely because "SCH is a healer, you're supposed to heal", "It's easier for someone to play than tracking all of those timers. Imagine if they tunnel visioned and someone died because of that!"; "I don't want to think, I just want to play the game", etc.

[Kacho_Nacho]

I seriously don't get all the raider hate and bashing, did you know that the people who have been criticising the state of the healer role for the longest are mostly raiders? This isn't a 'righteous casuals vs evil raiders' situation, so kindly don't make it such.

As a former "evil high-end competitive raider" myself, the reason I quit being competitive is precisely because of the absence of fun. It's fun to work around fight and job limitations while still pulling off a good performance. It's not fun and never has been fun to spam filler for 100 (formerly 105) seconds and then pray all your big potency hits crit within the 20 (formerly 15) seconds of buffs.

You don't get it because you've not experienced it from the casual end. Again, I am leery of raiders specifically because I have seen them consistently destroy guilds and FCs because other players weren't meeting their standards.

If you weren't guilty of this, then bravo for you. But, it's been my decades of experience that raiders fall into toxicity far more often than casuals.

Raiders may have been criticising the state of healers but they also were pushing for their damage dealers and tanks to make those big hits and be able to brag about their rankings on the forbidden website. The devs decided the current model was the best way to deliver what the raiders wanted.

We now have to spam filler forever and a day then pray for big hits within a small window precisely because of raiders pushed hard for damage numbers the various jobs within each role to be equal. The fact this also made the game unfun is precisely my point. Healers were made the fifth wheel because the amount of damage each job could potentially deliver was made such a big deal.

Guess who doesn't care so much about making all the damage dealing equal for each role? Casuals.

[Aravell]

You don't get it because you've not experienced it from the casual end. Again, I am leery of raiders specifically because I have seen them consistently destroy guilds and FCs because other players weren't meeting their standards.

If you weren't guilty of this, then bravo for you. But, it's been my decades of experience that raiders fall into toxicity far more often than casuals.

Raiders may have been criticising the state of healers but they also were pushing for their damage dealers and tanks to make those big hits and be able to brag about their rankings on the forbidden website. The devs decided the current model was the best way to deliver what the raiders wanted.

We now have to spam filler forever and a day then pray for big hits within a small window precisely because of raiders pushed hard for damage numbers the various jobs within each role to be equal. The fact this also made the game unfun is precisely my point. Healers were made the fifth wheel because the amount of damage each job could potentially deliver was made such a big deal.

Guess who doesn't care so much about making all the damage dealing equal for each role? Casuals.

I'm pointing out that this is precisely the kind of attitude that will garner pushback from parts of the community that wouldn't have pushed back otherwise. It also risks harming the strike itself as it's made up of all kinds of players, raiders and casuals alike.

I'll say it again, this isn't a 'righteous casuals vs evil raiders' thing, so please stop bashing an entire subsection of the community because you had bad experiences with some people who claim to be part of that subsection.

Raiders are not a monolith, none of the high-end raiders I played with wanted what ShB onwards did to the jobs. Just like casuals aren't a monolith, as some of them have voiced out that they love current healers precisely because they're easy to play and fun is secondary to them.