#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[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.

[Neft]

EDIT:

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.

as someone who mained healer from ARR-SHB then tank from SHB to now.

your tanks could solo stuff as far back as SHB maybe even farther back for high skill floor players, the issues now is that mitigating if you know 50% of your rotation can be done by effectively anyone making it more apparent.

at one point on one tank to solo a boss for NEW content while hitting the mechanics i was seeing for the first time, i had to push my class nearly to it's limits, but towards the end of SHB and start of EW it became vastly easier.

Dark knight can still be tricky to solo a boss with and sometimes depends on how good you are at balancing your timers depending on level and other times it depends on the bosses health.

but regardless being able to solo a boss while level sync'd should not happen, period.

that said, its not just tank mits and such that are the issue, i've also managed to solo bosses as pictomancer without kiting in certain level syncd dungeons.

and as for healer i stopped playing it long ago, because it started to genuinely feel bad to play, i felt like i was useless and not needed and this can be proven at literally any dungeon.

you can clear literally every fight in the game almost without a healer.

the only absolute exceptions are current end game high ends and anything that forces level sync - but even then i wouldn't be surprised if someone makes an FC raid with all dark knights or paladins or warriors or something and runs the high end dungeons down without a healer.

its probably possible assuming they can meet the dps checks and do the mechanics flawlessly

[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

[EusisLandale]

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

Yeah, about the only way I see things "improving" for healers is if they just rename the role to support and slap of bunch of buffs into it and make that their main job. Just roll Bard and Dancer into the group as well while they're at it, especially since once upon a time Bards had the healer LB and prior to even getting info on it before it was added in people had been hoping for Dancer to be a healer.

[Supersnow845]

Yeah, about the only way I see things "improving" for healers is if they just rename the role to support and slap of bunch of buffs into it and make that their main job. Just roll Bard and Dancer into the group as well while they're at it, especially since once upon a time Bards had the healer LB and prior to even getting info on it before it was added in people had been hoping for Dancer to be a healer.

That’s basically what I want to happen going forward.

The majority of the playerbase actively hates the healer portion of the holy trinity because they see it as solo point of fail (because everyone has their horror stories of a cure 1 spammer in a random dungeon who walled them). Adding DPS complexity to the healers to turn them into some sort of “green tank” where your core role responsibility is secondary to just pressing a simplified caster rotation won’t work because it still leaves the situation that people would rather not have a healer than rely on healers as a fail point

At this point take the 4 healers, SMN, DNC RDM and BRD, give them all about DNC level complexity, add 3-4 healing oGCD’s to each of them and some big buffs or equivalent debuffs (like technical step level) then just make the part composition 2 tanks, 3 DPS dealers (melee, BLM/PCT/MCH) and 3 supports

Our continued support of trying to actually make the healer role “required” unfortunately just stands in opposition to the vast majority of the playerbase and it isn’t working

[EusisLandale]

That’s basically what I want to happen going forward.

It's not so much that I want that to happen, but something I see as the only way out at this point. I wouldn't be opposed to it either though, given that that's actually just about how I started out in MMOs. Back in the early days of WoW I loved being the group's mana battery as a Shadow Priest, sure it wasn't the best damage but nobody else would've been able to function if I couldn't do that job right. Then they just turned it into a pure DPS because "nobody likes being support"

[Gemina]

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

Like I said to the last poster I responded to, it is understandable that you feel this way. We are now going into a third expansion where healers have been treated poorly and neglected, with each expansion being worse than the last. This is all the more reason to strike. It gives you the power to truly say you're just not going to do it anymore. It's your ability to stick it to the players and developers you have just spoken of. The only other option you have is to take it, like you have been taking it for the last two expansion. You continuing to play the role and continuing to sub only shows your support for the direction they have gone. The strike allows you take a stand while still keeping your sub intact.

I have read many of your posts, and have had many conversations with you, both in agreement and disagreement. Either way, I have always valued your contributions. I know how long you have found the state of healing unfavorable to those who truly value what this role should bring to the table. You don't have to do it any more. Liberate yourself.

I know it's a long shot. Strikes have always had a low rate of a favorable turnout for those who are striking, but they have worked in the past and it's because enough people participated to make an impact. When the house rules, sometimes the only way to win is not to play.

[Loggos]

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

Yeah I often get this feeling as well. Healers seem to be a crutch. There's a reason why people are so excited when they can finish content without healers, i.e., "the crutch", and let the "real" jobs, that bring the action (dps and tanks), do the task. And often faster too if they know what they are doing.

Obviously just anecdotal but look at how much Xeno gloated about it being ~man mode~ to clear the dungeon without us feeble silly healers and how we are not f___ing needed.
I know ~man mode~ is his shtick and he has created this whole exaggerated persona around being a WAR main, so I think he's often provocative primarily to get a reaction out of people.
But I do think in a way it describes a wider sentiment in the community regarding the presence of healers in content and how not needing us is a badge of honour and an expression of their superior skill.
In some way (from their perspective), we actively stand "in their way" of that "badge of honour" and their skill expression.

I think this is also facilitated by the speed run mindset and unfortunately in those scenarios healers often slow a good team down because they lack damage.
But, in a trinity-based game content should be designed in a way that the fasted clear can only be achieved with all three roles, meaning bringing the healer is an advantage over bringing another dps or tank.

Only then healers can really be equal, and not just exist as a necessary but annoying crutch to DPS and tanks that they'd like to cast away as soon as they can.

[GoatOfWar]

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

Many tanks have a strong dislike towards Warrior and how everything in the game needs to be warped around it tbh. The entire first tier defined by Holmgang? No problem. Dark knight is better at dealing with bleeds? Unfair, insta patched. Warrior gets Aurora as a bonus effect on Equillibrium and Shake it off turns into an ogcd medica 2 with shields and mit.
Warrior continues to do every tank mechanic on it's own or makes room for strats that are impossible without holmgang? That's cool. Another tank doing 4% more dps? Insta patched.
Warrior doing more hps than a healer during Harrowing hell, which was the hardest hitting raidwide of the expansion. When Drk has 2 mits that do not interact with it at all? Yeah that's fair though.

I remember doing Uwu and my cotank wanted to do everything by herself, i actually didn't get to do any tank mechanic besides add phases during the 3 primals.
She'd always have either holmgang up or would just mit and heal back up. But then you're also not allowed to do more damage?
I'm genuinely just done with support gameplay until some drastic changes are implemented. It's not fun to feel like a jobber for some overtuned job.
The further simplification of tanks and lack of any directional changes in DT were enough to make me switch to melee dps.