#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Oizen]

I wasn't around pre Endwalker. Can someone enlighten me as to why WAR/PLD are in this situation? Were they underperforming in high end content or not being played enough? What's the motivation behind making them healers?

Because ultimately I'm curious if they were nerfed-- what exactly would be the consequences.

So early on the design was GNB/DRK are the DPS tanks with low party sustain, and WAR/PLD were lower damage but bigger support tools. Including better party mitigation, party healing, and just generally stronger targeted short mits on allies.
Nascent double dips its healing and shares mitigation for both the WAR and their target, while Heart of Corundum is all or nothing you or your target, PLDs is kinda similar.

A combination of a streamer screeching and an overtuned damage check in abyssos caused them to close the damage gap, which indirectly just make PLD and especially WAR super tanks with superior buttons and damage.
They seem to like the tank healer direction given they buffed shake it off to have heal over time mid patch. Though I'd argue it was never healthy to begin with

[Turtledeluxe]

So early on the design was GNB/DRK are the DPS tanks with low party sustain, and WAR/PLD were lower damage but bigger support tools. Including better party mitigation, party healing, and just generally stronger targeted short mits on allies.
Nascent double dips its healing and shares mitigation for both the WAR and their target, while Heart of Corundum is all or nothing you or your target, PLDs is kinda similar.

A combination of a streamer screeching and an overtuned damage check in abyssos caused them to close the damage gap, which indirectly just make PLD and especially WAR super tanks with superior buttons and damage.
They seem to like the tank healer direction given they buffed shake it off to have heal over time mid patch. Though I'd argue it was never healthy to begin with

Ah, so the usual source of problems regarding job management in this game.

[Mortex]

Ah, but we're not in ARR or Heavensward now, are we?

No we are in a time of the game were you as war can do it all. Best invuln, best sustain and good dmg. But instead of taking a step back and maybe consider warrior could be a problem and in some aspect the other tanks (not drk) also you come around the corner and try to tell us”hur dur I need to be this busted as a job or I might need a healer for clearing this dungeon and can’t solo that entire thing”. And we as a healer have the most brain dead experience while you have a war power trip.

[Mortex]

100% agree and the core identity of jobs should and do change over time.

Though, with warrior the change has seen a ton of praise and I'd hate healer woes to take away from other players experience. Especially with the increasing mindset of healers aren't needed. And yes, at the same time healers shouldn't be forced to suffer to make other roles happy either.

So the identity of war is “too angry to die” the problem is final does it In the most dumb way possible by making war heal all the time. Even a berserker in any good fantasy medium will feel the pain and drawback after some time but war just shakes his shoulder and his entire blood and his organs will be back in his body. There are some really cool ways for a berserker to work but this ain’t it chief.

[aiqa]

I wasn't around pre Endwalker. Can someone enlighten me as to why WAR/PLD are in this situation? Were they underperforming in high end content or not being played enough? What's the motivation behind making them healers?

Because ultimately I'm curious if they were nerfed-- what exactly would be the consequences.

I don't have a good idea on why WAR selfhealing was improved over the years, but for PLD it was quite sudden.

PLD always had some team support, even in ARR. But before EW those were limited to mitigations, a far more situational shield, and a GCD heal. Before EW PLD lacked any ogcd/inherent selfhealing, and even now it has very little before level 82. The idea was that the few percent (4% on average) extra mitigation from block would be PLD's version of selfhealing, but (imo) that was lacking and a litlte selfhealing was warrented. Then came the PLD rework and selfhealing went of the rails. Still not at the level of WAR, but close. The devs never gave a reason for it, but I assume they took WAR as a target and tried to get PLD selfhealing in the same ballpark.

Without any ogcd/inherent selfheals PLD didn't feel very good. And I wouldn't want removal of all tank ogcd/inherent selfheals even though PLD could still tank in all content without them. But there is a middle ground between no selfhealing and what tanks get now.

[Supersnow845]

I actually wouldn’t mind the healing on the requiescat phase if PLD still played like it did in 6.0 when you only healed for 5 GCD’s in a very specific phase of your rotation

It’s the fact that when they reworked it they made Holy Spirit something you cast an extra like 5 times per minute as part of your core rotation then added thay ridiculous regen to holy Shelton which they can also share with no downside with intervention

The original requi phase healing was a good substitute for healing on the 1-2-3

[RhodesToRome]

So I've read through quite a few of the replies on this post, but obviously not all of them. While I've been going through the comments I've also simultaneously been looking up people's characters to see what kind of content they are engaging in. And, to no surprise, the vast majority of the players complaining here are not doing high end content (Savage, Ultimate, and Criterion Savage). Maybe some Extremes here and there, but for the most part they do not seem to be raiding. There are high end raiders with concerns as well, but I feel that their concerns are a bit different, and are coming from a different perspective, compared to the majority I've read here.

Now this brings up an interesting question concerning the casual player. Is it a valid criticism on their part that they do not feel engaged playing the Healer role while they are doing the more casual content like Roulettes and Story? You could say that the game is designed that way. In order to cater to the broadest scope of players possible, the developers have intentionally put up as few road blocks and pain points as possible in everyday content. Opting instead to funnel the player towards raiding if they desire something more challenging and rewarding.

But as the jobs obtain more tools and become stronger over time, as the lines become blurred as to what a Support or a DPS is capable of, I can definitely see where a more casual player can start to feel bored and disinterested. After all, why would healing be interesting when you can primarily rely on powerful OGCDs to heal damage that already feels negligible? Why would healing be interesting when others Jobs are able to sustain themselves without you? Why would healing be interesting when any content, outside of the high end, provides absolutely no friction or challenge to the player?

As someone who has healed Savage and some Ultimate, I do not share most of the sentiments voiced in this post. I may have some gripes concerning the design of raid content and the Jobs, but overall I am still satisfied and I see a purpose for all of the roles in a raid setting. Personally, I don't think a re-work or re-imagining of the Healer role (or any other role) is the answer to a lot of the complaints I've seen here. I think the solution lies in the battle content itself. There needs to be more friction and challenge in casual content. I want to see healing checks. I want to see actual damage checks. I want a dungeon boss' attacks to do more than tickle you. I want dungeon trash to actually be a threat. I want to see more interesting encounter design. I'm not suggesting that we turn the knob to the complete opposite end and scare away these players from attempting anything, but there needs to be an outlet where the average (and below average) player can utilize the powerful tools they've been given and feel like they're contributing and feel good about it.

[HighlanderClone]

And, to no surprise, the vast majority of the players complaining here are not doing high end content (Savage, Ultimate, and Criterion Savage).

1) Healing should be fun for everyone, not just the high-end. Jobs should still feel relevant in "easy" content. Dungeons were easy in HW. But healers felt critical back then. The mechanics in damage output in HW dungeons aren't higher than EW dungeons. In fact they are actually often much lower. But healing was way more important back then. Healerless HW dungeon runs can't be pulled off by random midcore players.

2) You didn't seem to have done high-end content before ShB. You probably don't have first-hand experience with how much more optimization there was in HW/SB healing, and how much more skill you required back then. These were all gutted. I firmly believe that a lot of ShB healers do not realize how much more engaging healing was at the high-end prior to ShB; a lot of the nuances aren't discussed at all, such as Miasma 2 optimization (and contrary to the popular rhetoric this was an important single-target tool in the scholar's repertoire at the high-end in SB).

3) I agree that encounter design should be reworked as well, but job design is still the principal problem because we have very simple points of comparison: HW dungeons required far more healing during that era, while EW dungeons do not. Both were not mechanically complex at all. The job kits on healers back in HW also meant that there were many things you can do to optimize your job even if all the mechanics were simple, which added to the fun.

If you want to look up my logs feel free to pop into the Discord and I'll prove to you my rank 4 AST in SB.