#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[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.

[Kacho_Nacho]

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.

You are right. I'm having a bad bout of "fibro-flu". It's made me irritable and I'm acting out.

Not all raiders are like the bad ones I've encountered. It's clear many of them, perhaps the majority of them, are just as unhappy with the current state of the game as I am. I apologize for bashing them.

I'm going to sit back, take my pain meds, and chill.

[ForsakenRoe]

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.

This may not be a relevant snippet anymore (due to your later post) but I want to focus on this for a sec. We used to have, for example, SCH with Bio, Bio 2, Miasma and Shadowflare as its DOT repertoire (in HW). In SB, they merged Bio and Bio 2, such that the former upgraded to the latter, and Shadowflare changed from a 100% uptime GCD, to a 'press this once per minute' OGCD. These two changes vastly decreased the amount of 'timer juggling' that a player had to do, but apparently it still wasn't enough. If some players are to be believed, even the single 30s DOT we have now is still too much and that should be removed too.

But SE seems to take a hammer to every issue (especially for healer design), even when a screwdriver would work just fine. For example, back in HW, SCH's potencies were (according to consolegameswiki, via waybackmachine):

Broil: 170
Bio (18s): 240
Miasma (24s): 300
Bio2 (30s): 350
Shadowflare (30s): 250

Rather than removing DOTs entirely, the DOT potencies could have been reduced, and that potency redistributed into Broil. Here's some exceptionally fast and dirty maths. As it stands, we do 4 Biolysis per 2min, and the rest of our GCDs (44) are Broils. Biolysis is 700p total, and Broil 4 is 310p. So, we have a total possible potency-per-2min of 16,440 (via GCDs, and ignoring Chain/Baneful). So in a hypothetical rebalancing to make a more HW or SB style kit work with current DPS checks, that's the number I'd be trying to aim for. To prevent confusion between Bio1 and Bio2, let's create a more SB-style kit as an example to aim for with this hypothetical balance experiment, so we'd have just 3 DOTs: Biolysis, Miasmalysis, and Shadowflare. So, in each 2min window how about, and bear with me on the potencies, there is reasoning to them:

Broil 4: 340p
Biolysis: 370p (as 35p per tick, plus 20p on cast)
Miasmalysis: 360p (as 10p per tick for 24s, plus 280p on cast)
Shadowflare: 350p (as 50p per tick for 15s, plus 100p on cast)

(This assumes Art of War remains at 180p. If AOW were made stronger, more of the damage of Shadowflare could be moved out of the DOT portion and into the 'initial cast' portion)

These DOT values would, assuming 'optimal play' (which would mean 8 Shadowflares, 5 Miasmalysis and 4 Biolysis per 2min), have a total-per-2min potency of 16,620, almost within 1% (it's 98.9%) of the current design's per-2min output from GCDs (again, ignoring Chain/Baneful as critrate complicates maths too much for 'quick dirty example'). But at the same time, due to the small difference in potency-per-GCD of each of the DOTs, ignoring them entirely in favour of simply using another Broil, means that using 48 Broils in 2min (instead of 31 Broils, plus 4B/5M/8SF) is a total per-2min potency of 16,320. This means that, a player who decides to just use Broil for their rotation and forgo the DOTs entirely, would function at 99.2% of the Dawntrail design's potential output (IE using the DOT perfectly on time and not losing a single tick), and at 98.1% of the 'use all the DOTs perfectly optimally' output of these values. And we see differences in DPS output of around 5-8% between SMN/RDM, versus BLM PCT due to 'the res tax', so a mere 2% on a healer is not going to make or break any enrages.

Also, you may notice the seemingly bizarre potencies of Miasmalysis in the example. By frontloading the DOT potency so hard, it allows the DOT's total 'per GCD' potency to still be 360, thereby making it more 'worth it' to use in the rotation than a Broil (if you're looking to optimize), but the exceptionally low potency per tick means that it's great for movement (as you'd lose less potency to an early refresh), which allows us to replace Ruin 2 as a button (which has not seen an animation update since ARR, and probably ought to be replaced). Additionally, Shadowflare's low base cast potency means it functions in the opposite way, it can be used for SingleTarget and AOE combat situations (being more damage per GCD than a Broil), but refreshing it early is not good. This means that, in AOE situations like a dungeon pull, you would want to use it and maintain the DOT effect, but NOT to outright replace Art of War with it as the 'spam action' (as that doesn't solve the 'one button' issue for AOE, just moves it to a different button).

Lastly, by having a simple trait that upgrades Energy Drain to Bane at, say, Level 42-46ish (and returning Aetherflow/Energy Drain to Level 6 where they belong, SE please and thank you), ED would find actual use in AOE situations, by spreading Bio/Miasma like the 'good old days'. This would take the potential AOE button count from 1 (AOW) to 5 (AOW, Bio, Miasma, Shadowflare, Bane). I'd argue that it'd actually be a good design choice to leave off the additional effect Bane had in SB, where 'the durations of Bio and Miasma are reset when spread'. By making the durations carry over as they are (eg: you have 10s left and spread the DOTs, the spread copies have 10s left), we can replace the 'reset' effect with a much better/cooler one: 'Chain Stratagem can be spread with Bane'. By doing this, we can turn Chain Stratagem into an AOE raidbuff, which then synergizes with Baneful Impaction also being an AOE action


So I hope I've been able to demonstrate that SE's approach to balance, of 'remove X gameplay element entirely' (in SCH's case, the DOT management), is not the only solution