#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Kayokane]

I think more then anything I just want healing to be less of a flowchart with more randomly distributed damage/dispellable debuffs you have to actually react to instead of just seeing the mechanic/cast bar, popping your cooldowns, then calling it a day.

Making boss auto-attacks non-trivial and consistently active during mechanics would also further put stress on both the healer and tank alike. There's just way too many breaks where you're at the leisure to top everyone off and/or pre-shield before the next instance of damage occurs.

I would say more dispellable debuffs would be nice, especially stuff like Pallas Athena and T.G. Cid's Crush helm, where you have to time the dispel for maximum effect. The increased use of bleeds and poisons making basic regen more useful was also pretty nice in the 2nd raid tier this expac.

As for randomly distributed damage, as long as it didn't feel like arbitrary damage for the sake of busy work, I guess it would work.

[Gemina]

I shared an interesting example of something like that before with the level 76 instance battle where you're fighting sin eaters in lakeland.

You start with Alphinaud and Alisaie by your side. If you're a healer, Alphinaud runs off, and you have to heal up the injured soldiers to save them from sin eaters. If you're a tank or DPS, Alisaie runs off, and you defeat the sin eater while Alphinaud heals the NPCs. Later, when you fight against the large sin eater, if you're a DPS or healer, Thancred and Minfillia show up with him tanking the boss, and you help take it down. If you're a tank, Y'shtola and Urianger show up and you have to tank the boss.

I remember that now. See, it shows they are capable of flexing this kind of creativity and it really goes a long way. Hopefully we will see more of this in near future.

[Hazama999]

A part of the reason why DPS tools are discussed is because having a more dynamic set of attacks to cycle through ensures that no matter how easy the content gets, there's always something for you to interact with rather than be stuck glaring things to death for such long periods of time.

I am aware of the fundamental change it would require, and that's precisely why I lamented that.

I understand that giving healers more damage options is the more logical, accessible way of dealing with this, but at the end of the day, it's... just not healing, so ultimately it will never sit quite right with me.

[SamLeens]

There will be 2 new DPS jobs, I'm pretty sure we have seen the same issue during Stormblood (RDM&SAM). DPS ques were actually horrible!
Honestly, this situation could play into the cards for the strike. And I slowly understand why some people seem overly scared.

I don't think the "strike" really accomplishes anything except unnecessary drama.
Yes, Stormblood was a dream for me. As a tank and healer, i always got in instantly everywhere. But we also have the option of going in with an ai, and even if the content takes longer, people still get in and can play normally.
i have 4 healers and tanks that i can level up. Since i don't play DDs, the 2 new jobs don't bother me and i don't know why anyone should be worried about this supposed "strike".

[SamLeens]

Don't worry. Nothing will happen to your queue time. A wise fella once said:

you say that to a healer. i mean, i know my queue time will be fine. thanks anyways.

[BattleBunnyQuinn]

Do harder content.

The vast majority of you are calling healing in this game easy because you're comparing it to tanks and DPS in content where enrages don't exist for the DPS to fail and tanks have to go out of their way to die. Yes, healing is boring when you don't have to think. You don't get to practice doing difficult content in alliance raids the way DPS do because your difficulty comes from the content

So let's talk about each of the points in your manifesto:

Self-sustain and healing abilities given to other roles:
- The basic personal healing abilities are necessary to make DPS and tank roles function at all in solo content
- Yes, Warrior does a very good job replacing the role of a healer in basic dungeons because it's designed to be casual content. Instead of complaining that Warrior can do it, try getting three friends who want to DPS and being the healer for them
- RDM and SMN having raise has been a contentious topic for as long as we can remember. I won't address it here

Over simplified DPS rotation:
- In general, we don't get to have a complex DPS rotation on healers because the complexity comes from healing. You are encouraged to optimize your healing to increase your damage. If you can get away with only ever using those oGCDs mentioned later, you have optimized well, and you are rewarded just like a Ninja who pulls off the perfect burst window
- Astrologian's DPS complexity is on par with that of some of the most difficult DPS classes because of the impact of cards and the decision-making that comes from randomness
- White Mage benefits from optimizing lily usage, and getting the perfect timing to use rapture as a cure, a burst movement, a double oGCD window, and an effective mana regen is a very rewarding feeling

All of these classes have much higher complexity scaling as your content gets harder, so do harder content

Homogenization of healer jobs:
- White Mage is still the best at pure healing, and yes, it matters in harder content
- Astrologian played optimally makes you feel like a setup god. Getting to plan something in advance by 20 seconds just to watch everyone's HP bars immediately refill to full is wonderful. And yes, I miss Nocturnal Sect. If you wanted a strike to get that back, I'd be there.
- Scholar has the best shielding bar none, and that shielding is something necessary to pull of very unique strategies in harder content, often letting you cheese huge amounts of LB meter or ignore mechanics altogether. UWU LB cheese is beautiful. e10s Updog is adorable. Any time you see one of those mechanics that sets everyone's HP to 1, spam out a couple succors for huge LB generation
- I don't play Sage, but people seem to like it

Excessive oGCD heals:
- I just disagree. These are important for making DPS enjoyable as mentioned above

Lack of threat level in nearly all forms of content
- Do harder content

[OdinelStarrei]

this is probably the best response to everyone saying how if we posted reasonably and responsibly and did things "the right way" and put things in a better format... we wouldnt have to be so "silly"

that post was the most reasoned one I have seen, and it laid out examples, and options. 4 years ago.

four years.

this post started a thread, it wasnt buried 50 pages in to a thread. four years ago.

I think things have been tried the right way, the non silly way, many many times.

I think that's why I'm pushing to have the entire text placed into the subfield below the opening post. I can only hope that I can catch Gemina at some point to see what they think about what I said. Something I noticed from JP is anger that we are not proposing solutions to the problem, when we really have proposed serious solutions to problems. But after awhile, you get tired of trying of being an armchair game designer, especially when the developers are as silent as they are for the support role. Like I said earlier, I think putting the entire post in hb tags would alleviate this complaint significantly, as Recon does propose many fixes for our current problems within the post, while explaining why it has come to this point. I really want it to have maximum visibility, that news article I read only mentioned the first few posts, and I fear context will be lost without it being shoved in people's faces. HB tags are really useful for stuff like that.

I'm not going to base my entire enjoyment of a battle system on the encounters. Job design lasts for multiple years of an expansion for it's players, while encounters are progged, farmed, and killed within weeks, if not days. If we have a failed fight, or god forbid, a failure of a tier, that's too much at risk for combat enjoyment. Square Enix has gone out of their way in harder content to increase the amount of things that will instantly wipe the entire party when even a single thing goes wrong, leading to healers and to a lesser extent, tanks, being unable to salvage or learn how to crisis manage as the party is instantly vaporized. As long as supports are disproportionally affected compared to DPS by the fact that learning the game and playing competently actively makes it less fun, we will never escape from this mess. If the job isn't inherently fun without being propped up superficially by encounter complexity, the design is flawed. We had this in Stormblood, it's not unheard of even in this game.

I have also been considering what I can do after DT's release, and I was thinking about booting up my recording software again and recording some dungeon runs. In Shadowbringers, I was getting a bit tilted that people were dumping on DRK sustain during boss fights, when someone said it couldn't solo a boss from 10% if everyone died. So I recorded gameplay of myself on Quezalcoatl, killing it solo, from 100% to 0%, without the need of healers or DPS, mainly to prove a point about hyperbole. I know that's a minor thing, but I was thinking, with DRK now having a fixed LD and Excog on Shadowed Vigil, perhaps I can do something similar. Take the tank with the "worst sustain" through every DT dungeon at launch with 1T3DPS, so it can be proven that it isn't just WAR being broken. The fundamental foundations of the content just makes healers irrelevant. I'm not good at the game, I'm a washed up ex-raider, but maybe a playlist of videos like this a little after launch would be useful to someone.

[Supersnow845]

snip

Why should a job only be semi tolerable in the hardest content in the game, only about 30% of people attempt savage, why is the healer role just “not for those people”

As for all of your savage points they continue to whittle down the difficulty and the optimisation of these every single expansion leaving us nothing to do.

WHM IS UNMATCHED IN PURE HEALING- yeah but where do you even use it, WHM is last in useful throughput healing, even SCH is near twice as strong as it

AST IS EQUAL TO THE MOST COMPLEX DPS- yeah that’s why they are ripping all its complexity out

USING A LILY AS ALL THREE THINGS IS AMAZING- yeah when we didn’t have weave windows on glare and didn’t generate them faster than we could ever realistically spend them

SPAMMING GLARE MORE HECAUSE YOU OPTIMISED YOUR GCD HEALING AWAY IS LIKE A NIN DOING ITS BURST WINDOW PERFECTLY- no it’s not because my reward is more glare spam

The classes aren’t fun in casual content and all our avenues to optimise in savage are getting whittled away, why does SCH need more recitations, why does it need a WHM mode.

Nothing makes sense in the design of healers

[ForsakenRoe]

Do harder content.

The vast majority of you are calling healing in this game easy because you're comparing it to tanks and DPS in content where enrages don't exist for the DPS to fail and tanks have to go out of their way to die. Yes, healing is boring when you don't have to think. You don't get to practice doing difficult content in alliance raids the way DPS do because your difficulty comes from the content

Done Ultimates as a healer. There is no 'harder content' I can try, so don't try that line. Tying the difficulty entirely to the content means that jobs are 'boring' in lower level content that we're still 'required' to do. For example, I'm relatively attuned to the amount of damage a Savage fight does Week 1. As such, an EX roulette isn't going to threaten me or my party. But I still have to do the EX roulette to cap my tomes. I and others are simply asking for the jobs to have more optional complexity, such that if the content falls flat, the Job is fun enough on its own to 'carry' the bland encounter. As it stands right now, if the fight sucks (eg P6S, P7S, most of P11S), the job can't carry it. P7S was awful to prog because it was 6 minutes of absolutely sod all, then suddenly Inviolate Purgation throws 4 debuffs on everyone and you all die. Now do 6 minutes of sod all again, to try and practice more of the debuff vomit mechanic. And as a healer, that's 6 minutes of 'press Broil/Glare/Dosis/the other one'. Having an extra DOT to juggle isn't going to suddenly break the healer role, we had it before in SB. Potencies can be balanced to make any gain from this complexity 'so low that it's effectively optional'. I've previously posted maths that shows ways for these 'optional complexity' methods to be less than a single filler spell worth of potency gained, per minute. We can drop so many GCDs already as a healer and still clear, my first clear of P11S had me using 32 Succors IIRC.

It could equally be argued that Tanks should have a one-button-spam fiesta rotation, 'because the complexity comes from mitigating damage'. Have all of the mitigation tools have bonus effects when timed correctly, as with the 25s CDs. After all, it's not the Tank's role to deal damage, that's the DPS's role. Healers are somehow unique in the disdain the developers show for the role, and it needs to change

[Gemina]

I am aware of the fundamental change it would require, and that's precisely why I lamented that.

I understand that giving healers more damage options is the more logical, accessible way of dealing with this, but at the end of the day, it's... just not healing, so ultimately it will never sit quite right with me.

I've always been a healer who favors needing to heal over needing to do damage. Obviously, current requirements are so low that it is a moot argument at this point. However, even with increased healing requirements, I have come to realize that such a simplistic healer rotation is too far at this end of the extreme. They need something more. It needs to be on the GCD, and not locked behind other abilities with long CDs.

I definitely think there's some leeway in the damage profiles, and tricks that could allow for more healing without actually increasing difficulty, but I'm doubtful of how far that envelope will ever get pushed. That's also why i like content like field ops most. There's a lot more chaos and its easier for people to take damage from things. Red Choctober is a great example.

There are many mechanics that could be taken from the Bozja critical engagements. The Hunt for Red Choctober being one of them. Even dungeon bosses should be allowed to be capable of winning. Right now this is a ridiculously rare occurrence, and almost requires players to make an effort to actually lose. There are multiple reasons why this is the case. Many of which emphasize the current issues with our healers feeling needless in duties. Another issue is the long trek that is required to get back to a boss that defeats the party. The shortcut/check point should be located just outside the boss's quarters. This would go a long way to making wipes not be so bad.

Encounters don't have to be TOP level of difficulty to warrant a healer either. They just have to be innovative enough to place mechanics that warrant a healer's attention. Giving bosses Zeromus' Abyssal Nox mechanic is a perfect example of something they could do.