#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Eorzean_username]

Can someone give me a genuine TLDR of what this thread is about? Because imma keep it a stack, I'm not reading 304 pages of this to find out what is going on.

Please excuse the fact that this is as close as a TLDR as you can get from me, partially because it's just not a simple topic.

Many dedicated Healer Role players — whether strictly "Healer Mains", or just frequent "switches" between Healing and other Roles — are no longer having fun in the game, a problem that has been escalating for years on end without any perceived developer action (and in fact, repeated comments from the developers dismissing the concerns).

As for the reason that Healers aren't having fun, that's a complicated sum of a large number of factors that have all reached, basically, "critical mass":

• Healer Damage rotations have been repeatedly-"pruned" and simplified since Stormblood, reaching rock-bottom at Shadowbringers with the reduction of Healer Damage rotations to strictly "apply 1 dot every 30s, and then spam one single key for the next 27.5s, and then repeat", for the duration of entire encounters. This has become mind-numbing.
• Healers cannot fall-back on "Healing rotations" to engage them instead, because the design of content, the pacing of enemy actions, and the excessive and legitimately "bloated" Healing tool-kits that keep getting added each Expansion have rendered the need for actual "healing" to be near-zero — in the sense that simply continuing to spam your 1 damage key while cycling-through your gigantic bag of OGCD Heals will be sufficient to clear almost any content in the game.
• It's true that the most difficult content, or even just chaotic and mishandled "lower-tier" content, can force Healers to use their GCD Heals, and their overall kit, more aggressively (or at all). But this creates a problem where Healing is the one Role that becomes actively less-interesting the more experienced that you are with a piece of content, and the better that your fellow Party Members play — once you are no longer panicking or "repairing chaos", then you're back to simply having nothing to do except 1 30s dot, spam 1 filler Spell for 27.5s, repeat.
• On top of all of this, the developers — struggling to find ways to add any "new ideas" to Jobs over time — have repeatedly expanded the amount of not just personal, but also Party-wide, Healing, Barrier, and Mitigation that is available to Tank and DPS Roles. This has reached the point today that it is not only possible, but actively more-efficient, to complete "lower-tier" content without any Healer present at all, and leads to the experience of the Healer Role feeling "literally useless" in large portions of the game's content, because other Roles — especially specific Tank Jobs — can, functionally, replace Healers entirely.
• All of this can be compared to prior states of FFXIV's design — such as Heavensward or Stormblood era — where even Dungeons, Normal Raids, or Alliance Raids would apply enough damage, and Jobs would have limited enough "solutions", that essentially all "tiers" of content justified having the Healer Role present, even if the actual mechanical challenge was not necessarily overbearing. This is pointed-to as proof that it's entirely-possible for FFXIV, as a game, to be in a design-position where Healing still matters, even for "casual content" (or however you want to refer to it).

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Now, understand that different Healer Players are more or less upset about different parts of this, and some Healers legitimately don't care at all about any of it.

So there is not a single, unified opinion about "what is most-wrong", or even if there is anything "wrong" at all, because all Healers are ultimately individuals with their own preferences and priorities.

For example, some Healers don't mind having less to Heal these days, as long as they could have a less-tedious and less-monotonous Damage rotation.

Other Healers aren't concerned about their Damage rotation, and just want content to require more active and more challenging Healing again, especially damage-patterns which can't be solved by an over-abundance of OGCD Heals, or even just tools provided by other Roles.

Regardless, however, the situation has reached a point where members from all types of "Healer personalities" have reached a consensus that none of them are having fun, and so some of them are attempting to make a symbolic protest about what they perceive as continued dismissal and neglect of their concerns by the FFXIV designers.

The form that this symbolic protest is proposed to take, is to deliberately-refuse to play Healer Jobs in the upcoming 7.0 Dawntrail expansion — in the hopes that this registers at least some sort of "dip" in the Healer population in developer statistics-gathering, and thus, sends some sort of clear message which 5-7 years of increasingly-accumulating "Forum Feedback" have failed to achieve.

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There is generally (generally) no delusion that there are enough people aware of this idea to actually "shut-down content", or anything bombastic like that.

But the hope is that a sufficiently-loud "roar" might serve to actually startle the developers into realising that Healers really, seriously mean it when they say that they're not having fun any more, and that many Healers have not been having fun for a long time, now.

And if even that fails, well... at least Healers will be able to take it as a clear message that this game truly isn't for them any more.

One could argue that this is a decision which should have been accepted a long time ago, but for many people, the 7.0 Media Tour Job previews served as the "snapping point" which transitioned them from "unhappy, but still stubbornly-hopeful" to "genuinely feeling doomed".

And since most people here seem to genuinely-like the game, and have genuinely-good memories of enjoying being a Healer in FFXIV in the past, many people want to at least "try" to wake-up the developers before giving-up on the game completely.

[Len_]

So at the start of Endwalker, my friend (a white mage) and I queued into the Dead Ends. He disconnected on the final boss, right at the start. This was in the time period where if you got disconnected, you'd be waiting an hour+ to get back into the game. So he's gone, the two dps go down. The boss is at roughly 60%. I tell them I think I can do it, and ask for permission. They tell me to go for it, so I did, and I finished the instance.

This is all to ask you, genuinely, have you ever done it yourself? Soloed a boss on a tank? Because there was not "zero effort" that went into that example. I was considering my options, I had to carefully pick which mit to use where, where to use my invuln, how to use my heals. I was genuinely focused and had to actually think about that attempt. So I want to ask you, not as a "gotcha," not to be rude, but genuinely, have you ever done it yourself?

Personally no, I have nothing to prove to myself by wasting my time killing a boss at .5% DPS during a random dungeon so I will always reset if it's faster because my priority is speed. What I HAVE done as a tank is solo healed every boss of Dead Ends on several occasions keeping both DPS alive. I wouldn't say it was hard. It was kind of a thrill. Reminds me why I used to be a healer back in ARR.

[Punslinger]

I swear you don't want to take more damage in anything lower than savage with random healer barely able to click on more than cure1, and you don't want to confuse most people with more damage buttons.

This is Sylphie Fallacy #26: "I already encounter Healers who fail and let people die all the time! If you add any additional challenge to FFXIV Healing, it will just make everyone suffer even more! For the good of everyone else, Healing must be so easy that your daily Healer Roulettes can be accomplished by your 6-year-old as a time-out punishment."

If you really have played since beta, then you'll remember that healers had more damage buttons and fewer healing skills in ARR, and yet, somehow, as if by magic, content got cleared. You'll also know that healers with more than two brain cells to rub together should never be casting Cure 1. Ever.

Also, adding more DPS buttons does not make the healing part harder. Sylphie can ignore ten DPS buttons just as easily as she ignores two.

Again. And I guess that gonna be a lot of repeat.
But it's only an illusion.
When you are not doing 123, you are doing a forced 12131213124. Is that better? I don't think so. There is nothing engaging in any other jobs. You are only doing what you are supposed to do in the right order.
When I played dragoon back in HW I had a rotation that didn't repeat for 1min+. Now it's 12345 67854 and repeat, ogcd are fluff, you click them because they are there.

This is Sylphie Fallacy #33: "Pressing more buttons doesn't add difficulty, all you want is the illusion of choice!"

So then let's give every job the healer treatment, then. Let's bake all of BLM's damage into two spells: Fire and Thunder. BLM will do the same DPS it currently does, but all they have to do is the same 2111111 rotation that healers do. No Xenoglossy, no Fire/Ice phases, no Leylines, nada. After all, all those buttons they're pushing is just the "iLlUsIoN oF cHoIcE" right?

Or maybe, just maybe, difficulty in MMO combat is executional, not strategic. Optimal rotations are theorycrafted immediately after an update. Boss strategies are posted on YouTube. If the difficulty in this game were primarily strategic, then people would avoid spoilers and go into every fight blind, but that's not what happens, is it? Your job, no matter what your role is, is to do the fight mechanics without error, while also doing your rotation well enough that your DPS is sufficient to clear the fight before the enrage timer. Now, DPSing as a healer requires you to press two buttons. Which means healing is playing FF14 on easy mode, because the entire "rotational execution" half of the difficulty has been lopped off.

[Milkbeard]

snip

/\ 4 posts up.
This is the best summary of the current state of the healer role.


I would argue that playing a healer is indeed more difficult in ultimate content and thus feels more engaging. However, the state is what it is: even if you execute every DPS move correctly and use oGCDs exactly when you're supposed to, it ultimately amounts to pressing Glare approximately 267 times if you are the highest parsing White Mage for Dragon Song Reprise (DSR), one of the hardest fights. This is a completely different story in casual content where the game is more forgiving and doesn't require nearly as much precision.

Some will argue that we should nerf or subtract from other roles, but I disagree. They can add DPS rotations and make content that doesn’t require healing from a healer require it, just like in ultimates. I’m not suggesting we need the rapid-fire ground telegraphs that high-level play demands, but aspects of group damage, soaking, and tank busters could be incorporated into trials and roulettes without ruining people’s gaming experience.

I like red mage's addle and magick barrier. I like knowing that in the final phase of DSR my whole team could die if I don't mit the final ahk morns. Deleting that would be a tragedy in my opinion. There is nothing wrong with cross-role actions. That's what healers want, don't they? To dps?

[AnotherPerson]

Can someone give me a genuine TLDR of what this thread is about? Because imma keep it a stack, I'm not reading 304 pages of this to find out what is going on.

The super TL;DR is essentially, the better you get at the game, the better your party is, and the more you and your party's ILVL increases --> the less you end up healing. Both high-end and casual effectively suffer from "Healing gets less interesting as you get better and there isn't anything else to replace it". Sometimes there is a lack of incoming damage to the point where healers feel unnecessary or better/possible to just replace the healer for another role that can either contribute to heal/dps in more effective amounts, which defeats the point of the healer role itself. Dawntrail triple down on this aspect while showing no signs of change and people are just tired from having feedback ignored for 5 years (each expansion saying they're going to make healing harder but not properly delivering on gameplay, with remarks about finding engagement in harder content), and they had enough. Xeno's clear wasn't the origin point, but it certainly led to people realizing they're looking at another 2 years of the same gameplay they are already dissatisfied with. People have various opinions on direction that healer gameplay should take to improve, but there is a collective agreement that healers simply aren't fun and making a symbolic protest. This thread is akin to an attempt to get SE's attention by garnering support of healers who are also dissatisfied with the changes made by playing DPS/tank. A lot of them are also just moving on if there are no changes to the role as a clear message the role is not for them anymore.

The majority of the thread was:
1. people expressing support
2. People discussing about the issue - also people from overseas (JP) showing up to give their feedback about the topic
3. A couple people trying to derail and deride the thread by making provocative remarks, downplaying the issue, and creating misinformation to stop the strike for their own reasons. The led to some heated and emotional talk and the moderators deleted some of the posts that were not particularly conducive to the topic.

The two main complaints that stem from this thread is feedback that is one targeted to casual and one targeted to high end being ignored.

For casual - Healers want something more to do because they only perform their main role by luck now (based on how good your party is affects how much you heal). Sometimes, the content does not give them enough to heal when other roles can cover such a large majority of the healing (sometimes a good party can forgo the healer in content that expects a healer, hence 1 Tank and 3 DPS becoming more common), and it has only been getting worse with each passing expansion - dungeons are used as an example here because everyone does dungeons and therefore everyone is affected by the changes in gameplay. Many people suggested various feedback for many years - from increasing either damage options on a healer's toolkit by making the downtime more engaging, increasing the various amounts of damage so other roles cannot cover it so they can heal more often/give various support utility that only a healer can do in general use, or nerfing non-healer role sustain. The first is non-intrusive to other roles while the latter two meet opposition from other roles by making the game's difficulty to clear content harder (affecting the worst party groups like the healer who have trouble keeping up alone vs. players rioting they don't want their healing output nerfed when queueing with a bad healer). Some healers don't necessarily want increased DPS options either, so there's no one unified answer. However, it's been clear to many healers that there is just a lack of engagement for them in some form of manner, and they're just tired from it all.

The high-end healer complaint is mainly about asking for more DPS options because healers are expected to DPS to help meet enrage checks and most of the time are maximizing efficient healing to do more DPS, the DPS side becomes very monotonous and boring (which then also applies to the entire game for these healers because content only gets easier outside high-end content). This also is a side effect from healing and mitigation being mapped out like a spreadsheet design when doing harder content. Encounter being more dynamic only has a limited effect towards this as it doesn't change how healing is played if you don't have enough damage to heal, may it be due to you + the party getting better at the game or ILVL increases. Though both tank and DPS are encroaching on healer role with how much survival and sustain they can output on their own with their choice of encounter design also can raise concerns when encounter design doesn't really want a healer to be healing in the same degree it wants them to dps.

[Len_]

there's nothing you could have done as a party to terminate that pull and reset.

You can't even leave the dungeon. I think that's a huge problem that you can literally be held captive by a griefer tank. The devs should definitely let you leave even if you're dead.

[PercibelTheren]

You can't even leave the dungeon. I think that's a huge problem that you can literally be held captive by a griefer tank. The devs should definitely let you leave even if you're dead.

It has happened to me multiple times that the tank tried to solo the boss, took 10 minutes and then...dropped dead with the boss at 2%. So much wasted time just because some schmuck wanted to play god.

[Bloody_Kenny]

Speaking about tanks (well Warriors) soloing bosses, the earliest example in my memory would be Patch 2.0. Yeah, right, start of ARR, when we only had Amdapor Keep and Wanderer's Palace as end-game dungeons. My friend, who mained WAR, just asked us to let him solo the first two bosses of Wanderer's Palace. And he did that, and back then it was actually impressive considering WAR's kit and how bad it was at release. Nowadays, it's nothing special at all.

[Turtledeluxe]

Using heal checks instead of just balancing the jobs with the encounters feels like putting a band aid on a severed arm imo.

I can understand nerfing other jobs not being the main goal and not being particularly fun to talk about or imagine, but I view it as essential. One way or the other. Encounters need to be designed to nerf the sustain of any job enabling healer bypass OR jobs need to be directly nerfed and encounters should be designed to account for the changes (if that's even necessary).

Reporting griefers also won't don't jack and you know it.

[Elun]

Hello I just followed an in-game spam link requesting I "join the conversation" so I am

1) You can do dungeons without a healer, without a tank, or without DPS, because they are easy content that is designed to be easy for everyone
2) You can do ultimate raids without a healer, without a tank, or without DPS, because nerds do nerd things when we get bored
3) I am looking forward to all the instaqueues I'm gonna get as WHM in DT ez tome cap

Not saying healers *shouldn't* get some new fun buttons but holy this seems way too excessive/overdramatized

I have now joined the conversation have a wonderful rest of your night