#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Xuled]

230 days later and nothing's changed. good strike lol this is no different than reddit "banning" twitter links lmao

[ForsakenRoe]

230 days later and nothing's changed. good strike lol this is no different than reddit "banning" twitter links lmao

What do you mean? Since the launch of Dawntrail, and the creation of this thread, multiple content creators, the so called 'influencers' (who SE gives special access to for the sake of generating additional hype around the game's release) have made videos on the topic of the state of Healers in the game. Some of them have said they support the strike's points, some say 'the strike isn't the way to go about it but the points they raise, I've noticed too', some say we're stupid for even trying. But what used to be criticism that was confined to the Forums (and mainly the Healer Role section) has now spilled out of containment. These kind of videos are surely on SE's radar now. With Dawntrail's release, and the lie put to the constant whiteknight retort of 'just wait till launch, there's gonna be so much healing to do that you won't have time to DPS, that'll solve your issues', the dam has burst. And with DT's story being so... divisive, there's really very little that people can use to deflect and defend the state of the role with.

Something needs to change, and SE should be fully aware of that fact by now. It's tragic that it took like... 5 years for the message to hit the mainstream like this, because it means a lot of time has been lost that could have been used to course correct, but we've got to play the hand we're dealt (that saying is now even more apt, since they've now deleted Redraw from AST). Maybe the 'encounter design changes' in 7.2 will be the magic bullet that fixes the Healer Role and everyone lives happily ever after. But I doubt it'd be able to be so all-encompassing, it wouldn't affect any old content (so doing roulettes means a 99% chance of 'the problems come back'), etc. So, waiting game it is

[Tigore]

@ Lorika

I realize it was an obvious troll remark. I just thought I would let it go this time and have fun with the situation.

@ Kohashi

Umm, the questions you asked don't seem that hard this time. You knew we would draw from Warcraft for some healer ideas since they have had about double the run time of FF14 to try things out. For the question of which top 10 MMOs have even distribution on the trinity, it's pretty safe to say none. Even Warcraft has near instant queue times for healers and tanks with DPS possibly waiting for an average of 10 - 20 minutes.

Others have mentioned Guild Wars 2 frequently moving away from the trinity as well since all attempts to get that 33% sweet spot on all 3 role types kind of failed. The DPS role provides the bigger numbers on damage and it's almost always made fights easier just by killing the bosses or dangerous adds faster. The tanks have been given very strong defences to become the kings or queens of soloing stuff too. Warcraft also had a problem where there are a glut of tanks who are unwilling to queue for full PuG dungeon roulettes. Some Warcraft DPS players let it get to their heads too much that they "don't need" the others and pull ahead. When they have to admit they did need help after kissing the floor, they try to dodge accountability by getting toxic on the tanks and healers like as if they are slaves to them. Happens less here since the game moderators have been more strict to teleport the offenders to a jail instance to talk to them or even ban them from playing.

As a result, the 5% made up number for healers from Snow actually sounds like a good estimated guess. The lowest personal damage, worst soloing capabilities and an unfair amount of perceived responsibilities shoved onto the support roles all seem to contribute to this estimate. This is probably why dance mechs and self heals on off roles were added here to try and shift the responsibilities back to DPS more. Although, it was too far of a pendulum swing, clearly >.> We need party damage taken to heal and too much dance mechs can have the problem of either too little or too much depending on if the players know how to handle it. Unavoidable damage will have to be used a little more to ensure we still need to heal. When players all succeed on the dance, the healers will need something to do with nothing to heal and a few more damage buttons should do for that.

[ForsakenRoe]

The premise of 'Name X MMOs that have a 33% split between Tank, Healer, DPS' is a flawed one anyway. You know what would happen if we had a perfect 33% split between the 3 roles? Dungeon queues would grind to a halt, same as now, but it'd be because of the DPS being too few. We need 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 2 DPS for a dungeon, and 2x of each for a full 8man party, for any 8man content. So the ideal split would actually be 25/25/50. Other MMOs would need different ratios, dependent on their party compositions (eg for WOW, they have 1T 1H 3D as a 5man party in dungeons, so they'd actually want a ratio of 20/20/60) And someone has previously argued with me, and linked numbers as part of their argument, that implied that HW did in fact have almost a 25% playrate for the Healer role. Latest numbers from their stats (end of Endwalker IIRC) was about 18%, so we've got some improvements to make, to reach that lofty HW peak again (and that is also factoring in the fact that SGE should have bumped the numbers up cos 'people reroll to new job' effect).

In fact, I went and looked for the numbers in question:

So I compiled some data for numbers. I find it honestly too suspect to be useful, but the Wayback Machine's crawls of FFXIV Census. The issue I have is I can't tell enough from the numbers if FFXIV's census is trying to capture mains or not. It seems to be more "Job at level 90 on a player that has completed the current expansion's MSQ", but that's a pretty low bar. It MAY be counting only one Job per player, but I'm not certain enough to be sure. It is still interesting that you can see some trends, like DPS getting a spike in SB and again in EW (especially Melee in Meleewalker), and that Tanks got a bit of a spike in ShB and Healers got a small one in EW; but it's hard to draw concrete conclusions from this since that could all be artifacts of the data (another Job being leveled alongside existing ones for someone that's a dual/tri/omni-main of a given role will inflate its percent unless the data only counts one per player). The FFXIV Census data also had an error for two years, though this only affected "all characters" not the endgame "active characters" count - it missed/counted as deleted characters who didn't have at least 1 mount and at least 1 minion...but that's mainly going to be less than level 20 characters, so it's pretty safe to exclude them from the count. But that said, the data DOES help to draw conclusions in the sense of telling us what arguments are likely NOT accurate. For example, if we expect a massive decline in Healers but the percent goes up, even if we factor part of that as people leveling multiple Healers and so counting a second, third, or even fourth time, if the decline was massive, we'd expect to see a hint of that in the data. We do not.

The Lucky Bancho numbers are harder to get via the Wayback Machine, and I can't read the original Japanese anyway to really understand the older datasets. Translations on Reddit and the Official Forums tend not to be made by the same posters or with the same topic/thread titles, and aren't a static address to have been archived by the WM's crawler, anyway. I wish they were, because I find that data's more reliable (judging Job count by "Person was logged out on it" is a bit dubious, but it is by "Has current patch Extreme weapon or better" is a good measure for "the person actively plays this Job...probably; or at least considers gearing it important enough to spend Tomes/Totems on doing so"), but it is what it is.

The FFXIV Census data, given those caveats, is still the best data I could get my hands on, and it shows Healers as holding approximately steady. Here's the Healer % vs All Jobs over time:

HEALER %
2017: 0.25047
2018: 0.215359
2019: 0.191224
2020: 0.172927
2022: 0.19941
2023: 0.205038

What we can see from this is that Healer Jobs at level cap with MSQ completion declined as a percentage of the whole from HW through ShB, but then started increasing into EW. PART OF THIS is for people maining multiple Healer Jobs, they now had another one to main, but that only really explains the people (like me) that level all of them. While that's likely a portion of the data, it doesn't tell the whole story. But the super short version is: "The Healer population declined in middle-to-late HW going into SB, then declined further going into ShB, before somewhat reversing and increasing to about the SB level in EW."

So if these numbers are to be believed, HW actually had the perfect ratio (25% players to 25% of the 'slots in a dungeon party composition'), and ever since we've not had the right balance. If I were to make an assumption about the way the numbers have progressed since, I'd expect it'd be something to do with 'WHM was awfully designed in SB, SCH got actions removed for launch (and later returned after complaints came in), and two fanfavourite jobs were released (RDM/SAM), so any healers that were not happy about WHM/SCH's situation on launch, might have hopped to the new jobs instead of remaining within the healer role'. Then, we lose more and more as SHB happens, GNB/DNC come out and potentially take more Healers out of the role (plus the whole 'SHB prune' thing), and finally with EW, we see a bit of an uptick (presumably due to SGE launching, which may have taken some players off of other roles and made them into Healer players). But, the number of players we've gained according to these numbers, hasn't equalled how many have been lost

[Tint]

So if these numbers are to be believed, HW actually had the perfect ratio (25% players to 25% of the 'slots in a dungeon party composition'), and ever since we've not had the right balance. If I were to make an assumption about the way the numbers have progressed since, I'd expect it'd be something to do with 'WHM was awfully designed in SB, SCH got actions removed for launch (and later returned after complaints came in), and two fanfavourite jobs were released (RDM/SAM), so any healers that were not happy about WHM/SCH's situation on launch, might have hopped to the new jobs instead of remaining within the healer role'. Then, we lose more and more as SHB happens, GNB/DNC come out and potentially take more Healers out of the role (plus the whole 'SHB prune' thing), and finally with EW, we see a bit of an uptick (presumably due to SGE launching, which may have taken some players off of other roles and made them into Healer players). But, the number of players we've gained according to these numbers, hasn't equalled how many have been lost

Also Cleric Stance was removed in SB which made it easier than ever to dps on a healer job. So it became expected to dps more. Which alienated that part of the healer players who were not interested in playing a green dps job.

[Kohashi]

@ Kohashi
Even Warcraft has near instant queue times for healers and tanks with DPS possibly waiting for an average of 10 - 20 minutes.

+ snip

Indeed, well said because while a great deal of people cannot stop yapping about WoW and how amazing supposedly healers are, a light google would very much tell you the state of that role without playing the game itself. This makes me believe that people crying after WoW designs are just the victims of the grass being greener on the other side effects, with nothing to back them up and actually justify their claims.

If you played enough MMOs you know Healers and tanks will always be in shortage, no matter how complex or fun or amazing the class/role design is, it will never be as popular as a dps. In short, that means, the entire point they made is useless.


As for the 5% it's just plain garbage with 0 verifiable data, however, if you go on the lucky banjo website that also holds the census and class/role distribution you will find out that is entirely not true. (much wow, I know). As for the "true" healers, it's such an absolutely preposterous claim. What defines a "true" healer? what makes them the "true" healers and others not. If that is not virtue-signaling toxic waste to fit their narrative I dunno what is..

@ForsakenRoe

let me highlight the part you conveniently skipped reading from the message you have included.

"but it's hard to draw concrete conclusions from this since that could all be artifacts of the data ". Yes, I get it you enjoyed HW design but guess what.. it's GONE.

[Supersnow845]

Can you like point to the place any of us are arguing for role parity

Whether WOW has more or less relative healers than us the fact remains WOW healer mains actually LIKE their healers as evidenced by their forums and their Reddits, our healer mains hate our healers

Maybe instead of randomly looking for role parity solutions out of nowhere we should be trying to make the people who actually play the role enjoy it because there is literally zero evidence people like our healers (to the point even yoshi p had to deflect away from complaints)

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

The only time I recalled healers being more abundant in other MMO that's not WoW was in AION but that was long time ago. Priest and Cleric were both very highly played jobs over there. But considering this was over a decade ago and I wasn't as invested with statistics, what I was hearing and seeing could've been something that's not universally true at the time---there's no real way to find out.

Over here however is the only MMO healer that I recognize to have history of having ungodly monotonous, unintuitive design that also receives so much flak for it, firsthand and secondhand.

[TheDustyOne]

When someone recommends a game to me, I first ask "is it fun?" The same is true if someone were to recommend a different class, different build, content I don't usually do, etc.

If the people who normally play healer say that healer isn't fun, then it doesn't matter how much Square intends for it to attract new players, why would they stick around when the people who supposedly enjoy it most don't even want it? It's one thing to lower the skill floor so that new healers can get a feel for the job without getting too overwhelmed, it's another to do what Square has done and crash the ceiling to the ground.

Quite frankly, the floor should be raised a little; we're at level 100 now and we still don't have enough incoming damage at a decent frequency to justify the amount of healing healers are capable of.

If we want the healer population to grow, you first need to get people to find it fun; making it easy is only a short term solution. Word of mouth can do the rest.

[Kes13a]

When someone recommends a game to me, I first ask "is it fun?" The same is true if someone were to recommend a different class, different build, content I don't usually do, etc.

If the people who normally play healer say that healer isn't fun, then it doesn't matter how much Square intends for it to attract new players, why would they stick around when the people who supposedly enjoy it most don't even want it? It's one thing to lower the skill floor so that new healers can get a feel for the job without getting too overwhelmed, it's another to do what Square has done and crash the ceiling to the ground.

Quite frankly, the floor should be raised a little; we're at level 100 now and we still don't have enough incoming damage at a decent frequency to justify the amount of healing healers are capable of.

If we want the healer population to grow, you first need to get people to find it fun; making it easy is only a short term solution. Word of mouth can do the rest.

100% agree.

I like healing in games because its fun, and part of that fun is the challenge. having something so braindead isnt fun, and only having a "challenge" when the rest of the party are, turnips... isnt enough to carry the job as it now sits.