#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Reinha]

If you really want to make an impact that SE notices, you don't want to be healing anything at all. No roulettes, no hunt trains, no FATEs, no treasure maps, no Extremes, no Savages, no Ultimates.

Nothing.

Some of us will be doing that and some will show their support in other ways. You say it's ineffective but this strike is already being talked about on all platforms and it hasn't even started yet.

[Bloody_Kenny]

Are you really spending THAT little time actively healing in high end content?

The healing in high-end content is an "Excel Sheet gaming". You just spread your oGCDs so they cover every damage instance. And for early runs, like week 1-2, you throw a GCD shield before every AoE, just to be safe. It is kinda engaging during prog, but the closer you get to the end of the fight, the more boring it becomes, as CDs line up so you already know what tools you will be using in advance. So basically when your Excel sheet is done, all you have to do is to press 1-1-1-1-1 for 90% of the fight.

Raids are designed in such a way now that the points where people fumble the most are usually mechs that either body checks themselves or there is a body check right after, so there is nothing your healing ability can save. Even if you throw the most quickest Raise on the Wild West, the chances that the person will rise in time for the check are really small.

The only content where healers' excessive healing can fix something is casual content. Mechanics rarely work in the "either you all do it or you all will die" way there, the worst you can get is a vuln up stack. So your GCD healing can actually carry people who fumble there. But as was told, if the role is only fun when your teammates are bad at the game - something is wrong with the role.

[Erakir]

When people say this, are they talking about all content? Or when they're doing content with their statics? Is it only during farm or also during prog? Is it all the time that you run into this or is it just high end content with a static etc?

In high end content, as someone with a static - yes, I am spending very little time healing. Things get past progression very quickly, and then it's all a memory map with perhaps one or two flubs throughout an entire fight. Clutch plays remain clutch, but consistency takes over.

I cannot speak for PF in high end content, since I stick with my static and other friends. It's a different ballpark there.

In normal content, it's a mixed bag. I queue for 10-15 trial/raid roulettes daily - most of them go pretty fine, and some spiral out of control. I think people who don't spend a lot of time in DF underestimate how often things go wrong enough to encourage snap healing and triage, or aren't familiar enough of the fights to watch and anticipate who you can save in the 1.5 seconds between the avoidable damage they just took, and the unavoidable that can be following it. You can do some insane carrying in the fights that people often insta-leave for, if you really know the fight down to a T and know how to identify the types of players in your party for who is most likely to cause issues and need extra attention. This is part of why I queue for them, as I want to see the sparks fly enough to get my adrenaline going. It does happen. Less than half the time, for sure, but it does happen. It can be insanely bad, or it can be just kinda 1 or 2 people off requiring resources. It's not like I am always sitting on 3 charges on sage. As you say, if I am and I'm burning them solely for MP, it's just a sign of a good (or average) run.

Of course, as you heal more you get better at identifying these, and it takes a worse run to really tax you simply because you're that much more skilled at triage than you were before. When you get used to driving in rain you know what to watch out for and what to avoid doing, so it takes more of a storm to throw you off your comfort game.

What is also true, though, is those clusterf- runs that you are going all out on to try and salvage can very easily wipe, and people will have learned some in that one experience to cruise right on through on pull two. Not always, but I'd bet there are an insanely higher number of 1-wipe trials/raids than there are 2, 3, 4, and 5 combined. That's just a guess though.

[WaxSw]

Question about how much time we spend dealing damage

Let me answer your question with a few images:



These are my casts during P10s which is considered the "hard to heal" fight of this savage tier


One could say that I let the healing duties to my cohealer and thats why I spent so much time dealing damage so here's the healing:


(censored my cohealer)

As you can see this was not a case of healer avoiding their duties to fully commit to dealing damage, that was a normal run where both healers healed as they had planned.

[Eorzean_username]

What I'm saying is that framing it as a strike is counterproductive and more likely to garner hostility/ridicule from other players instead of their support.

Who cares?

How does that materially change the situation at all?

What do I gain from having the approval of other players, who don't play Healer, and don't care about the quality or enjoyment of a Healer's play-experience, at all, until and unless it directly affects them personally?

The answer is, "Nothing". As long as Healers keep showing-up and quietly dragging you (and themselves) through content, no one really cares if Healers are enjoying it. Show up, sleepwalk-through, roll on loot, move on.

"Oh, you spent the whole time spamming 1 attack key for 6 minutes? Haha that sucks, anyway, see you tomorrow, right?"

...But suddenly, if Healers threaten to stop doing that — oh, now you want me to feel very concerned about losing your "support".

Nah. Somehow, I think I'll survive.

That's especially true if the idea is to only stop queueing as healer in Duty Finder but it's okay for healers to continue healing for their friends and statics. That's contradictory ("well actually I do like healing but I don't like healing for you") and ineffective.

Lordy hells, seriously?

It's not contradictory at all.

If a restaurant chef goes on-strike, then comes home and still cooks dinner for their family, no one with an ounce of sanity inside their head would consider that "contradictory".

Amazingly, people are willing to do things for people that they have a close relationship with, that they're not willing to do for total strangers — especially when it's voluntary, unpaid, and unpleasant.

This is not because they "actually like doing it", it's because they are willing to put up with doing it due to the complex emotions that are involved in how human beings process their relationships with other human beings.

That's taking out dissatisfaction on those who have nothing to do with why the dissatisfaction exists.

You seem very confused about our relationship.

I don't owe you queuing as your Healer.

Having me spend my play-time showing up as your Healer is not a human-right, like medical care or drinking-water.

If you perceive someone saying, "Hey, this isn't fun, I'm going to stop doing it" as "taking it out" on you, personally, then you're indicating that you view Healers not as other people or players, but just tools who exist to enable your own game experience.

Then those who enjoy being healer mains need to help them understand what it is that makes healing so appealing to us and how current design lacks some of the core qualities.

Oh right, that worked out fantastically for... (checks notes)... 5 solid years, I'm sure the pay-off for patiently repeating the same thing ad-nauseum is just around the corner, if we just politely stay-quiet and keep doing it. Excellent reasoning. We're really making progress now!

[Bright-Flower]

The healing in high-end content is an "Excel Sheet gaming". You just spread your oGCDs so they cover every damage instance. And for early runs, like week 1-2, you throw a GCD shield before every AoE, just to be safe. It is kinda engaging during prog, but the closer you get to the end of the fight, the more boring it becomes, as CDs line up so you already know what tools you will be using in advance. So basically when your Excel sheet is done, all you have to do is to press 1-1-1-1-1 for 90% of the fight.

Raids are designed in such a way now that the points where people fumble the most are usually mechs that either body checks themselves or there is a body check right after, so there is nothing your healing ability can save. Even if you throw the most quickest Raise on the Wild West, the chances that the person will rise in time for the check are really small.

The only content where healers' excessive healing can fix something is casual content. Mechanics rarely work in the "either you all do it or you all will die" way there, the worst you can get is a vuln up stack. So your GCD healing can actually carry people who fumble there. But as was told, if the role is only fun when your teammates are bad at the game - something is wrong with the role.

Thanks for the insight.

[Jojoya]

we dont NEED other players support. that actually doesn't matter in this situation.

if the internal metrics say healers are being played less. or that there is a drop in healer players, that is the only thing square enix will notice.

whether or not the rest of the playerbase is happy about it isn't actually material to the action at hand.

but you keep acting like it is, when its just not at all the point.

you missed the point and went to "you're pissing off other people and being laughed at" which.... like... goodness, you do a great job missing the point in every single thread you go into, huh, kiddo?

Talk about missing the point.

It's hard for a movement to succeed without outside support. Those players you say don't matter should matter a lot to you. They can help the cause - or they can break it.

So you go on strike. There are presumably no healers out there. But other players want to play Dawntrail and don't really care what you think about healing. Enough of them switch to healer that everyone can play through Dawntrail without you.

Do they still not matter to you then? They just killed the leverage you were relying on.

[TheDruidOcelot]

snip

here's the thing. we're going on 6 years of bad healer gameplay, and healers BLEEDING numbers slowly and steadily throughout those years.

if people actually wanted to pick up healer, at this point, they would have.

there was a tiny jump in EW with sage, that rapidly declined. farther down than pre-ew numbers.

If enough people thought healers were fine enough to play healer themselves, they already would be.

but there's not.

the gameplay isn't fun, there's no incentive to play them (ex- tank specific mounts & titles), and i really TRULY doubt that anyone who already didn't want to play a healer will suddenly want to play healer.

we've had healer instant queues for SIX YEARS. If SAM mains wanted to try healer, they could have. and might have. and didn't stick with it.

we've had this dialogue ongoing for years, on the forums, on other sites, in game... for over half a decade now. nobody plays healer who doesn't want to play a healer.

i don't think dps mains will put their money where your mouth is. They haven't shown any indication in YEARS that they would ever stick with healing, or playing healers except to get their "got everything to cap" achievement.

(and i WILL find it funny if dps mains pick up a healer class, realize how painfully boring it is to play and immediately drop it, proving my point. same goes with people flooding into trusts, )

[Jojoya]

Also what if the content creators themselves are having trouble grasping the issue? We only have 2 big healer mains in Rinon and Zepha so it would hard for probably the rest of them to comprehend it.

Even if they don't all main healers, several do have a tendency to play healer when pugging.

They also listen to the healers in their own statics. They're not unaware of the concerns.

But the point isn't to have them speak for healer mains. The point is for them to gather stories from healer mains then share those stories in their regular podcasts and other content that the developers watch. Perhaps they gather audio clips from healer mains talking about their experience. Perhaps they read the written comments of healer mains.

[Kayokane]

honestly some folk honestly just need to go to x or twitter or whatever social media platform you use and just ask the content creators their thoughts on the issues, that is likely the best way to get more to talk about it.