#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Gemina]

WARNING! Please be warned of phishing attempts being made using the healer strike hashtag. These malicious attempts are in no way or under any circumstances being used, accepted, or implemented by any player in support of the strike. Do not click or download any suspicious links or emails.

As has been discussed in this thread:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...thout-healers.

What lead to the strike:
A summary of healer's issues. - A comprehensive take from the communities healers. https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-healer-issues
Reactions to the response for more engaging content:https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-play-Ultimate

I would like to make this the official thread for those in support of a healer strike as a collective voice to the dev team to express the dissatisfaction with the continued direction the game has gone concerning healer gameplay and what is an arrived consensus that has deemed to be a negligence towards the role, as well as the players who main it.

I would like to note that this thread is not to attack, or in any way intended to be offensive towards any member of the dev team, Director/Producer Naoki Yoshida, Square Enix, or any of its affiliates. The purpose of the healer strike and this thread is to garner support for necessary changes and adjustments to be made in order to once again validate its place in content that requires grouping, and an equal contributed effort among all members of the group in order to facilitate clears within FFXIV.

Please use this thread to voice your concerns, express your feelings in a constructive manner, point out issues, make suggestions, and to add your name to those who will be striking.

The strike entails that players will not be participating in group content as any of the four available jobs to the healer role. It is understandable that there are likely active statics that are still working on EW content and healer mains in general who would like to finish out the current expansion. In fairness, I would like to give those healers who wish to participate a grace period before the strike is official.

The strike will be officially underway when Dawntrail launches on Tuesday, July 2, 2024.

I appreciate your time fellow adventurers. Let our voices and our hearts be heard.


===================================================

Petition for #FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

Gemina Lunarian - Siren

===================================================

~~Manifesto~~

• Self-sustain and healing abilities given to other roles.
  The choice/direction to give such abilities to roles outside of healer encroaches on the role.
  
• Over simplified DPS rotation
  Every job in FFXIV has a 'filler GCD' skill that they press when there are no other requirements. No role in the game pushes this skill more than healer. Not by a long shot. Our offensive capability should still feel dynamic and rewarding. Yes, we are healers, but we are also casters.
  
• Homogenization of healer jobs
  Barrier/Pure healer split is largely redundant. All healers essentially play the same with the exception of few and far between niche abilities.
  
• Excessive oGCD heals.
  These are not only abundant, but exceptionally powerful. This in addition to self-sustain on other roles reduces the dynamic of healing comrades.
  
• Lack of engaging content outside the most difficult duties (Savage/Ultimate). i.e. the threat level is too low.
  Healers should feel like they have a place in all forms of content. It is understandable that difficulty can't be so great as to bar progression of story-based content. However, innovative means should still be employed to make greater/full use of abilities.

• This strike is a protest. As such, it is not intended to disrupt the game or the players who have subscribed to FFXIV.
• The message of the strike is a collective voice of those who are not happy with the state of healing and healers in FFXIV.
• Players supporting the strike wish to hold the development team and Square Enix accountable on their promise to provide a fulfilling and enjoyable experience for everyone.
• The activity of a player supporting the strike has chosen to not participate in duties as the healer role. Most supporters are still going to actively participate in duties, meaning they are still contributing to the community. Just not as a healer.
• #FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE in a player's search comments expresses their support of it.
• No player participating in the strike is telling others to do the same or to spread the hashtag. Those who do so are doing so at their own volition.

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Join the resistance! https://discord.com/invite/jeDzvBf74X


Edit to add additional links (06/23/2024)
Edit to update manifesto (06/18/2024).
Edit to add manifesto.
Edit to add official Discord.
Edit to add a compiled healer's issues thread.

[ASkellington]

I'm just here to add my name. I've long since said my piece, I'm tired of my feedback being ignored.

I'm not touching healer for DT in any content except maybe trusts.

Edit:

Because a lot of people like to read my post (looking at you content creators) may as well add this:

The healer strike is not because of a DT dungeon being completed without healers. This was happening in EW. Its because of a multitude of things:

• Lack of changes going into DT for healers (still boring 111111 spam; a proc after a 2 minute recast timer buff does not change that)
• Increased tank sustain that they didn't need because again, THIS HAPPENED IN EW. WHY is it being made WORSE?
• Unwanted changes to the classes in the upcoming expac (Seraphism, AST card changes)
• The dev team's apparent unwillingness to change or even listen to feed back

We're striking because we're still being ignored.

We're tired of being ignored:

"Go Play Ultimate" thread made by healers in response to YoshiP's statement where they complained that we should be engaged in all forms of content NOT just Ultimate - 22/2/19 and where this whole thing even spawned from.

"A summary of healer issues" made back in the SHADOWBRINGERS ERA 20/5/8.

Mentions of tank healing being too high back in 2021.

More talks about how boring healing is back in 2022

Ya'll are acting like WE'RE acting this is new. Its not new. We're just sick of it.

[TheDruidOcelot]

same. feedback's always been ignored. I won't be touching healers for dawntrail. it'll be my first expac since STARTING this game where i'm not maining a healer.

[Niroken]

I already removed auto payment and I'm going to let my house just expire. Some poor DPS can have the plot because they are going to need something to do with that queue time. Healers have had several threads, some with hundreds of pages. There is enough feedback.

[Kes13a]

I support the idea, but given their direction, and the apparent addition of aoe heals to dps classes, increased self healing for tanks... I am unsure whether there would be any meaningful changes to healing classes.. or, as they often do, will just shunt off more haling to tanks and dps.

I have no issues in ceasing healing for duties unless its a group of my friends. but since no one in development either plays or seems to have any idea of what to do with healers, I suspect that there will be zero changes no matter what we and will vote with my wallet in 8.0.

[NegativeS]

For most of my time playing this game, I thought I was alone in thinking that healer gameplay was a little... braindead, for lack of a better word, in the vast majority of content. Pretty much all dungeons boil down to casting your AOE shield/regen, spamming your one attack for the situation, and repeating. The only thing making them exciting while leveling is the prospect of getting new toys as you progress--once you hit max, the appeal quickly fades. I've been a healer/support main in pretty much every MMO I've ever played, and XIV probably has the worst overall experience of them all. Either our kit is too strong for healing to be interesting, the sustain of other classes is too strong for healing to matter, or our DPS """rotation""" is too one note for healers to have any complexity outside of simply healing. Whether it be one of, a combination of, or all of those three reasons, the result is a role that is borderline unplayably dull and certainly not fun or engaging in nearly any situation.

And to think, I JUST finished leveling all the healers to 90 for DT...

Oh well, at least I leveled the tanks too.

#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ty_taurus]

EDIT: I wanted to rework my page 1 post to better communicate what are the actual problems being called out right now before my subscription runs out, because no one seems to understand what healers are actually upset about properly. So let me break things down...

What are the issues?

1. Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis spam is boring as sin, and there's no excuse.
Regardless of whether you are soloing or playing in group content, DPS makes up most of your gameplay as a healer, yet having almost nothing to substantiate the majority of your gameplay makes playing healer miserable. This is unacceptable and needs to change. Healing will always come first, but a fun and meaningful selection of DPS spells should be a reward for a healer's job well done, not a punishment. Of course, the healers shouldn't all approach DSP the same way either and should offer not only different styles, but also different levels of complexity. Healing should be fun and engaging regardless of how easy or hard the content is.

2. Our healing tools are bloated and repetitive, and there's no more balance between GCD and OGCD healing.
As it stands, we have too many different buttons for healing. Some of these have fallen out of use due to power creep, such as spells like Cure and Physick. Others are simply repetitive with other tools already available to that healer, like how Celestial Opposition is a copy-paste of Aspected Helios, but OGCD. Additionally, the shear volume of powerful OGCD healing we've gotten with each expansion has rendered GCD healing largely moot on all healers except White Mage, but there should be a strong balance between the two. Trimming the fat and reducing the needless repetition would actually go a long way toward empowering the resources we have. Every action should serve a purpose.

3. Healers lack value in most of FFXIV.
This whole thread sparked out of this notion that "healers aren't necessary in dungeons," but that's not an effective description of the problem. Rather it's that the value healers are meant to bring has been greatly watered down. The majority of players simply don't require the volume of healing we provide outside of brand new or harder content, and that's a problem because one of the main drives people have to play support is to provide a sense value to your team. But when your team could clear whether you're alive or dead on the floor for the entire fight, you don't get that sense of value. If removing sustain from non-healer jobs is out of the question, then what else can we add or change about healers to restore a sense of value to the role--something that feels worth taking instead of extra damage?

4. We are tired of being ignored by Yoshi P.
This "strike" isn't new. People have been abandoning the healer role and leaving feedback for years--largely since the release of Shadowbringers, but some feedback goes back even further. Yet this feedback has consistently been ignored, and Dawntrail is the third expansion in a row where healers received barely any change at all. Promises of 8.0 feel hollow when we're told to endure another 2-3 years of design we hate and have been begging to see changed for half a decade at least.

Conclusion
Ultimately, all this "strike" is is just a message to the community management team that many of us aren't healing in Dawntrail until at least the healer role becomes more fun to play always--not just in ultimate. While many of these points may take time to address, a simple one we can do right now is take the attacks spells we already have on each healer and make them a more frequent part of that healer's gameplay loop. Reduce DOT durations, shorten cooldowns, and disconnect these new 2-minute attacks from their respective buffs and make them available more frequently.

[Supersnow845]

While I fully support this I’ve come to realise it’s pointless

And that’s not because of a lack of feedback from us or a lack of visibility on our feedback or anything of that effect

It is simply the fact that healer mains are the only people in the game who even want healers to exist in this game

Ask a DPS, ask a tank, ask anyone who doesn’t have a strong opinion on healers if they prefer the healer healing or the tank doing it for the healer and 99.9% of those people will say they prefer the WAR doing it

That’s why they don’t respond to our feedback, they are designing this game for the majority of people who play who would just prefer it the healer role didn’t exist

[Rannie]

I think yeah ... with what they've done with the others with the self heals and war, it's left me pretty sour with playing it now... all my healers are going to be shelved...

[Iedarus]

God damnit, you beat me to it. I was just going to post this, myself. I've only been here since Shb, so I can be a voice of the newer players who also find healing as boring as watching paint dry. I don't like it when my intelligence is insulted. The strike will end when healers get a genuine gameplay loop that's unique from each other.

#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE