Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[HyoMinPark]

Not necessarily for the healer population, though I guess I can't really check the numbers on that. If I go by the most recent lucky bancho census numbers, then it could be suggested that healers currently represent the smallest population of the playerbase across most, if not all, levels, but I'll be honest and say that I don't really know how much, or well, that census represents anything, and I may actually be interpreting it incorrectly.

Unfortunately there are healers that want the jobs to remain braindead. I was in a conversation in my server’s NN about this, and there were some in there that said they’d rather have content do no damage at all so Eos/Selene can do all the healing while they just DPS and watch stuff on their other monitor. Not even it being about more damage = more healing = more stress. Literally just wanting to be lazy.

While there were others that agreed with my statement that healers are the only role in this game that become more boring to play the better your party is and that that is a problem, there are others out there that just want EZ queues, EZ roulettes, and EZ Netflix time. And it’s unfortunate that the latter group is who the developers seem to want to favor. Not those that actually want to feel more like healers and less like gimped damage dealers or glorified babysitters.

I like a healthy balance of both. I don’t want to be a heal bot—I like dealing damage as a healer—but since they don’t want to give me stuff to actually heal (outside of Ultimate, apparently, and you still aren’t spending even 50% of your time healing in those fights), give me something interesting to do while I’m dealing damage.


Also gonna piggyback off of Askellington’s assertion that healers aren’t tested until high-end—100% agree. And that is another issue, because they go 90 levels basically breezing their way through the game, and then decide to try out something even remotely challenging (read: something where you have to pay attention), and now suddenly everything is too hard and needs to be brought down.

Really, that goes for all jobs when it comes to content design. But healers especially.

[Shin96]

100% agree. Despite our criticisms about healers and the direction of the game, all of us still love FFXIV. We just want to see the game improve and not get worse over time. Doing nothing will get us nowhere, even though the devs don't listen to us 100% of the time. Apathy is death. If we say nothing, then nothing will ever happen in the future.

The only problem here is that we pay them in order to even access these forums. Way I see it, they have us by the gut. If people put their money where their mouth is most problems would have been solved by now.

I also understand the bigger problem. Even if a small portion unsubscribes you still have Andys that will only pay because they like watching cutscenes. Gameplay is important and so are healer issues but the more money we put inside their pockets.. the worse this will get.

After Endwalker I have essentially quit the game, only came back for PvP. I don't even care about the content anymore. My job is trash and so is every other job I once liked. Think I will just let my subscription run out this time. I encourage people to be vocal but always keep in mind that what you say and do are two different things and the developers know that very well.

[Sani2341]

The only problem here is that we pay them in order to even access these forums. Way I see it, they have us by the gut. If people put their money where their mouth is most problems would have been solved by now.

I also understand the bigger problem. Even if a small portion unsubscribes you still have Andys that will only pay because they like watching cutscenes. Gameplay is important and so are healer issues but the more money we put inside their pockets.. the worse this will get.

After Endwalker I have essentially quit the game, only came back for PvP. I don't even care about the content anymore. My job is trash and so is every other job I once liked. Think I will just let my subscription run out this time. I encourage people to be vocal but always keep in mind that what you say and do are two different things and the developers know that very well.

Mhm.

Luckily for me, some of the non-healer jobs are still fun, and I am curious to see where the story is headed.

On the other hand, this means best thing I can do in regards to Healers is not play them more than necessary to check if the changes in a given patch helped.

[Nethereal]

I figured instead of making a new thread I would simply put this here. Tera nonsense.

When you keep bringing up Tera healing: It was soo good though. And it's finally shutting down on June 30th.

Keep in mind what I'm about to talk about is completely separate from boss mechanics and is simply how overall combat went.
Your job as a healer in Tera was managing resources. You managed health & debuffs first, dead people second, mana third, buffs fourth.

If you were in front of the boss you would be one shot/trampled as anything but a tank. Some attacks where so strong that they would even bleed through the tanks block and require immediate & consistent healing so that the tank would be able to survive the onslaught. If they didn't block said attack or were stunned they simply died in one hit like everyone else.

Bosses had specific attacks that would either hit everything around them or would have 'back attacks'(hind-kick from a horse) to deal with dps behind it or they would have other attacks that would target you based on distance to the boss, random selection, and ordered selection. These would have tells you could use to avoid said hit, if you did get hit though you either got one shot or would lose 80% of your health and get applied with a debuff that would need the healer to help you or you would die in the next few seconds from: A. Another attack because the prior hit stunned you B. It was a bleed C. You were a living bomb.

Essentially you died, a lot. This was okay because the penalty for dying wasn't that bad: You lost all your resources(Class resources, health, mana, etc.) and any temporary buffs that fell off after death(later removed for the most part).
Healer deaths were a lot more important because of this and the game recognized this by giving healers buffs they could apply to themselves that would revive them or multiple people including themselves depending on the class.

In your spare time you would use your class specific skill that regenerated mana for the entire party so they could keep dpsing and so you could keep healing or to help recover from a death(Yours or a party members).
These skills usually recovered anywhere from 30-70% mana and were on a 15-30 second cd.

After that you had debuff management on enemies which was fairly simple, it was 1 button and a ranged attack.
If you had buffs on your healer that had to be applied to the person and weren't perpetual you needed to apply them before the fight or after you revived someone mid fight.

You were reviving people a lot and part of being a healer was understanding how far you needed to be away from the boss so hind attacks wouldn't hit you as well as hitting the dps.
Funnily enough this usually meant you were in a 'V' formation, a trinity formation in every fight, the tank was one end, the healer was the bottom, and the dps was on the opposite side of the tank.
With this you could easily avoid attacks that targeted different roles.

Needless to say this game wasn't as accessible as FFXIV as death could be 0.5 seconds away for anyone, especially if you didn't understand a tell as simple as the boss turning.

The skill gap was huge not just for healers but for every role. Anyone that constantly died would break a run because every role was pivotal in completing something.

A constantly dead dps would make it so you couldn't beat the dps check, a constantly dead tank would not only make it harder to beat the dps check it would make it harder for everyone else in the group to simply survive, some mechanics simply would be over because you wouldn't have a tank to hide behind & block the bosses room wide AoE hit from killing everyone.
A constantly dead healer? Well now you're pretty shit out of luck because you aren't finishing anything. Everyone had access to revive scrolls but they had long cds(15-30 minutes) and took awhile to use and could be interrupted, they didn't revive you at full health, etc. The healer class could revive you faster than a scroll, revived you at full health, had no cd.

And you wanna know the worst part? This is simply what happens when you attack any boss, this doesn't account for mechanics in relation to role or party, this is what the games PvE simply is.

I recommend you try Tera so you can truly experience what a trinity game is, especially healing. Before it goes away for the majority of people. It's overall a shit game though.

[ty_taurus]

Just thought I'd share this:

[MintnHoney]

Just thought I'd share this:

We can't even pretend to be divided into glass half-empty vs glass half-full crowds, here. We're just glass empty.

[Reiryuu]

We can't even pretend to be divided into glass half-empty vs glass half-full crowds, here. We're just glass empty.

Wait... we have a glass?

[Sani2341]

Wait... we have a glass?

Apperently. Wonder who left it for us.

[EmpyreanHelios]

The only problem here is that we pay them in order to even access these forums. Way I see it, they have us by the gut. If people put their money where their mouth is most problems would have been solved by now.
.

I don’t know if what we’re doing is actually going to even bring about any changes.

Here’s what I’ve seen:

1. People who still play healer, but advocate for changes.
2. People who avoid playing healer and advocate for changes.
3. People who outright quit the game.


People in the 1st category populate the healer queues so there doesn’t seem to be much impact. People in the 2nd category don’t fill the queue, but still pay sub and it seems SE is quite fine with that arrangement thus far.

Do we all have to go with the 3rd category to get the changes we want? Asking people to just quit the game they love is a hard ask and honestly ridiculous, but it’s starting to feel like the only option left to us.

Also, the devs saw what they could get away with when they simplified healers and now the other roles are on the chopping block (if what the recent dps changes can foretell). I guess I expected to feel some level of validation or “I told you so” shadenfreude, but instead I’m just tired.

[AngeliouxRein]

It’s actually depressing at how many vets in game just stopped logging in… granted I’m mostly a solo player but my lala actually had skilled healers in game to ask questions to by endgame and all. Not a single one of them has logged since some time around ShB. One of them even used to post here but .. yup. I don’t know if our voices or wallets will bring change but at least we tried I guess.