Thread: Healer boycott in 5.0

I will stop being a healer main in Shadowbringers.
I already got bored healing the last couple of raid fights and when no new healer was announced, I hoped that they would make the healers more complex and interesting with the new skills, but the opposite happened.
I'm especially sad about the Ast changes, if they wanted to get rid of some card effects, they should have at least let the effects of balance, spear and arrow stay instead of just balance x6. And why get rid of the effects that increase the times on buffs?
But I'm lucky that my static is flexible and so I will be a Blm or Dnc main in Shadowbringers. Probably going to level the healers to 80 for the caster achievement someday though.

Yea not participating in your boycott. I think things are fine. I'll wait to play it and see how healing goes.

I think art of war is lazy and could have had more done to make spamming it cool or fun but it's a month out. Sure the effects can be enhanced or something easy enough

I want to level DNC as I'm a dancer irl, but by no means boycotting healing. It's my favourite thing to do in MMOs.

I'm not going boycott healing but if anything changes I will stop maining Sch and for sure I wont ever go again to a dungeon with that...thing the devs call Sch

Bye Felicia.

I am one of the people who wants more focus on tactical healing. FFXIV is one of the few mmos I don't heal in because healers are just DPS with very simple rotations and a minor extra job where you don't need to think that much because everyone has nearly every kind of heal (burst, aoe, mana efficient HoT, ect), a ton of mana, and only 1 person is generally taking damage over time outside of aoe burst windows so you don't need to manage more than one HP window outside of specific events.

Statics may be different, but getting to statics takes forever. The only healer that had much going on in terms of mental effort to heal well was Astro, and that was due to Essential Dignity and Lightspeed being very interesting limited healer resources, not cards.

It seems like they are tipping the scales more towards wow style healing where healers are more focused on healing. Maybe it will be good, maybe it will suck (there is a real danger it won't actually be about tactical CD and mana management and just be 'mash your heal instead of dps' which would indeed be worse) but the idea no one wanted healer to focus less on DPS is an overt lie. A lot of people don't heal because healers are basically dps for most content and don't bring the things they like about healers from other mmos to the table.

You should do things that make you happy. I recommend against reactionary compulsive anger, its bad for you. If you are LEGITIMATELY worried rather than reactionary (ex: you actually read all the abilities rather than listened to a hot take and paniced) by all means sign the boycott, I think you deserve support and respect even if we don't agree, and at least one healer should stick about giving you what you want! Like maybe a healer that gets heals from a dps style offensive rotation that get stronger the better executed the rotation is!

But it is worrying some people are super mentally engaged with the thread and are actively throwing themselves into something upsetting them and seem to be looking to maximize the mental energy they commit to being upset.

Originally Posted by dezzmont

I am one of the people who wants more focus on tactical healing. FFXIV is one of the few mmos I don't heal in because healers are just DPS with very simple rotations and a minor extra job where you don't need to think that much because everyone has nearly every kind of heal (burst, aoe, mana efficient HoT, ect), a ton of mana, and only 1 person is generally taking damage over time outside of aoe burst windows so you don't need to manage more than one HP window outside of specific events.

Statics may be different, but getting to statics takes forever. The only healer that had much going on in terms of mental effort to heal well was Astro, and that was due to Essential Dignity and Lightspeed being very interesting limited healer resources, not cards.

It seems like they are tipping the scales more towards wow style healing where healers are more focused on healing. Maybe it will be good, maybe it will suck (there is a real danger it won't actually be about tactical CD and mana management and just be 'mash your heal instead of dps' which would indeed be worse) but the idea no one wanted healer to focus less on DPS is an overt lie. A lot of people don't heal because healers are basically dps for most content and don't bring the things they like about healers from other mmos to the table.

You should do things that make you happy. I recommend against reactionary compulsive anger, its bad for you. If you are LEGITIMATELY worried rather than reactionary (ex: you actually read all the abilities rather than listened to a hot take and paniced) by all means sign the boycott, I think you deserve support and respect even if we don't agree, and at least one healer should stick about giving you what you want! Like maybe a healer that gets heals from a dps style offensive rotation that get stronger the better executed the rotation is!

But it is worrying some people are super mentally engaged with the thread and are actively throwing themselves into something upsetting them and seem to be looking to maximize the mental energy they commit to being upset.

Unfortunately, healers are not going to be 100% about healing in parties and it's entirely due to how this game works. If you press them on it, I imagine most DPs healers are like myself, and are just happy doing whatever they can to help the party. The problem is that DPS is the only area we can actually excel in. Allow me to explain:

FFXIV is a mechanics-driven MMO. Based more on a modern action-RPG style, the majority of attacks can be mitigated or dodged in some fashion, and resources come back quickly to minimize downtime between fights. Older games where "pure healers" existed such as FFXI are what I like to refer to as resource-driven MMOs, where it's based more on the classic RPG style where there was little you could do about attacks hitting outside of hoping your stats are up to par, and MP is a resource that must be cherished.

The newer resource-driven style means players are rewarded for skilled play with less damage. The speed with which MP comes back means running out of MP is not a major concern. These two aspects combined are part of why we have the healer DPS meta, and changing this would require changing the battle system as a whole. There's a lot of little things tied to these two aspects that would need modifying as well: If you simply took away our tools to gain MP in combat it'd simply lead to bored healers tossing out a heal and then AFKing, and if we were to make the party damage even after dodging avoidable stuff sufficiently difficult to heal it would make the game VERY unfriendly to casuals who can't dodge everything (Even Savage raiding leaves me tons of time to DPS.)

The other issue is a matter of excelling at one's job. There's satisfaction in doing something well. It's what pushes us to get the best gear, to research our tools and theorycraft. But there's a problem with healing: Once you've restored someone's HP back up to full, more healing doesn't help. Keeping someone alive through a fight is the bare minimum of healing, we can push a little bit past that but all that means is getting people topped off faster and using tools like regen or damage mitigation to keep them safe for longer, creating downtime. Using our utility options to smooth fights and make rDPS better is another area we can work on, but unfortunately our utility options rarely care about our stats. The one area where we can actually excel at is DPS: Our skill at healing gives us more downtime we can use to DPS, and both our stats and our skill at our (admittedly simple) rotation allow us to put out the most DPS we can in the time we give ourselves.

For pure healing to be engaging and fun, we need a reason to be constantly healing and a benefit for excelling at our role besides getting to AFK.

(Also, for what it's worth my own complaints are from reading the tooltips and looking over how things have changed. All the media tour folks I saw were positive about the changes, but were also not healer mains so they were just like "Oh it has pretty wings, that's cool I guess.")