#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Moomba33]

Not a main healer here, but I'm wishing you guys luck in getting some attention and a response from SE.
I have a friend who played through the last few expansions on AST since it was their favourite class, and all the solo duties were a tedious experience for them. Healers really need better gameplay for when there isn't any healing to do.

[Asari5]

no healers in statics? so you wanna say we prog savage without healer?

[Bloody_Kenny]

no healers in statics? so you wanna say we prog savage without healer?

In a balanced trinity, that would be impossible... But, we are in FFXIV, and knowing what those WAR mains can do... Well...

If anyone will manage to clear week 1 without Healers the first tier of Arcadion, this will further proof to all naysayers that Healer role is completely messed up.

[Bright-Flower]

This. In real life, people who ignore a strike due to reasons they are pretty much shunned upon by the others who commit to the strike completely.
If you want a strike, do it 100%. Don't make expections for friends and such.
That just really looks bad.

I wouldn't really look at th is 1 to 1. For starters, this is a video game not workers striking for fair pay and safer working conditions etc. Nobody should be shunned or bullied for deciding to queue as a white mage, or to help their friends get through a story trial etc.

Second, there's no picket line to clearly and publically see people crossing it anyway. So who's even going to know unless people are constantly checking their friends lists and policing each other based on who's in what duty as what job etc.

I"m not saying not to do a healer strike. If people want to unsub or just not queue as healer to protest, go right on ahead. That's perfectly fair. But I wouldn't really expect the social aspects of this to play out like a real world strike at all.

[Evergrey]

I wouldn't really look at th is 1 to 1. For starters, this is a video game not workers striking for fair pay and safer working conditions etc. Nobody should be shunned or bullied for deciding to queue as a white mage, or to help their friends get through a story trial etc.

Second, there's no picket line to clearly and publically see people crossing it anyway. So who's even going to know unless people are constantly checking their friends lists and policing each other based on who's in what duty as what job etc.

I"m not saying not to do a healer strike. If people want to unsub or just not queue as healer to protest, go right on ahead. That's perfectly fair. But I wouldn't really expect the social aspects of this to play out like a real world strike at all.

I'm just looking at it as people here who support it really feels like it's a big deal to them.
So I thought I'd just look at it as a more or less real strike.
Where those who take part of it wants to do their part to prove a point.

[Bright-Flower]

When it comes to some jobs having too much healing/mitigation, I think I agree overall.

I think that say, dancer is fine with its little heal and shield. But then yo u have say, warrior and paladin. My paladin can solo a lot of dungeon bosses without a healer and even potentially keep dps alive through use of clemency and other tools if the healer dies and the dps aren't flubbing too many mechanics. It's a tricky line to balance. Because on the one hand, it's cool that palaidn has a LIMITED aiblity to heal. But while it can be cool to say, keep the party alive as a paladin for the last chunk of a boss fight if the healer(s) go down, it feels like it's gone a bit too far for some jobs. A healer going down in a dungeon should be more impactful than 'oh I guess I just need to slow my dps a bit so I can throw out some clemencies on the dps' etc.

And I 100% agree healers need more dps buttons. They don't need a full, complex dps rotation the way a DPS job does. But they need more than 'dot, nuke, aoe, and maybe a couple other buttons on short cooldowns.'

For spending very little time healing though, I have an honest question for healer mains. Coming from someone who heals only in casual content. Dungeons, alliance raids, normal mode trails/raids etc. Are you really spending THAT little time actively healing in high end content? In the casual content I do, the healing is usually pretty relaxed...until people start making mistakes. Which happens a lot in casual duty finder content. People flub mechanics and need raises, and then healing once they're up so they don't die to the next aoe. People take non required damage all the time. Tanks doing wall to wall dungeon pulls don't always use their cooldowns optimally, or the aoe dps is lagging behind and said cooldowns are running out before the mobs are dead, or someone stood in the wrong place a couple times and has vuln stacks etc. In my pesronal experience, the idea of 'you barely ever have to touch a gcd heal' is not a universal truth but a sign of a clean run. And when doing raids/trials with randoms there's rarely any coordination on who's doing what or when except for the occasional raise macro. 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?

To be clear I"m not questioning healer mains on this. This is just someone on the outside who heals casually in casual content asking an honest question, I'm not saying healers are wrong or that I know better, because I really dong as again I only casually heal in casual content.

[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.

[Post]

And yet, we've had more interesting healer design challenges in the game before, much earlier in its life.

Brayflox challenged SCHs to heal a boss that stacks poison without an Esuna.

t1 remains one of the hardest hitting bosses on tanks in the game, relatively speaking, requiring melee DPS to bait the bosses to swing just to stop auto attacking the tanks and catch up, as well as challenging healers and ranged to stay spread for platform coverage (and enough heals able to reach everyone).

T5 asked healers to heal through a healing debuff tankbuster, allowing clever players to make use of Lustrate (then %hp healing) and Stoneskin to circumvent the effect, and light party stack aoes that would interrupt your heal if not surecasted or properly timed.

Ifrit EX likewise dealt incredible, withering tank damage and unhealable group damage if not controlled, and gave healers tricky movement to consider that would be moot in today's environment due to heal range and mitigation buffs.

Leviathan dealt burst damage to one tank and steady damage to the other, punishing any direct heals (including AoE) on one with a reduction in their range stacking until healers could not cast on others at all if improperly managed.

T8 allowed healers to decide to dispel a constant tank DoT or just manage it with throughput, managing Allagan Field with group tower strategy and shields aside.

T9 would sneakily target one player with an extra Meteor Stream for the healers to catch, only truly threatening one players' life if the group was on point.

T10's Prey (origin of the raid term, too) actually required shielding specific players on reaction, something we don't have in an era where supposedly they design with both types of healers in mind.

A2s was probably the only fight that Deployment Tactics on the removed Eye for an Eye was relevant.

Mhach 2nd boss and A11s require shields in advance to save players getting their HP dropped to 1, something removed by bosses not auto attacking for a very generous period while and after casting now.

T13, A12s, and hell, a11n, all target specific non tanks and blast them repeatedly in a short time frame that requires serious attention, and we managed that crap fine when we only had GCDs and one oGCD heal. We're way more equipped for that kind of thing now, especially with every tank having a solution to it at least every 25 seconds.

They can and have made healing have more interesting, or at least more varied, problems to solve. Some of the steps taken since then, like AoE heal range, make it harder to revisit some challenges (solo healing Thordan Unreal should not be as easy as it is), but they're not currently being limited by their GAME engine, of all things.