#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[OdinelStarrei]

I can't say for what others have in mind regarding logs being too bad or too good.
But my personal thoughts from reading what you said is that those few logs I've stumbled across through out this thread has more or less been from statics that know every mechanic.
And we all know, that a group that knows a fight in an out won't take as much damage meaning less opportunities for healers to heal.
So maybe a log from a Party Finder pog group could give a better view when a group isn't cordinated and well oiled.
Give the numbers of how a group with accidents might look like.

There's not going to be a lot of logs like that in more recent expansions, because if there is a group that has an accident, you don't clear.

The party just instantly dies. You're not even allowed to salvage most encounters. If someone "makes a mistake" in P9S limit cut, how exactly are we going to salvage that pull? That's the first fight. We're not even talking about P10S or P12S.

Sure, we have things like "DeathCOB" as our fringe outlier, but even content outside of savage, things like Criterion or Delubrum Savage make it a point to demand mechanical consistency above all else, because the consequence is a wipe that the healers cannot recover from, not because they don't have the resources, but because the fight mechanics will force death. I'm not promoting zombie'ing through fights, but I am saying there is a reason people are kinda over getting body checked every 2 minutes.

[Evergrey]

The party just instantly dies. You're not even allowed to salvage most encounters.

That's also one thing, a lot of the danger evolves around 1-shot mechanics and if too many fail one there's not enough time to recover from it.
If instead a fight have less 1-shit but more heavy hitting attacks instead.
It's been a while since I played any other MMO on a regular basis so can't really come up with any good comparisons.
But in those the bosses mostly hit more frequently and the fights aren't designed to always be foguth in a more or less stationary position like FFXIV boss arenas.

Regardless, maybe it's not the lack of healers to do during downtimes in a fight that's the major issue, but that the fights themselves are designed in such a way that there aren't much for the healer to do.
Bosses hit in a slow fashion, almost each and every hard hitting ability has a several seconds castbar.
The fights leave little for accidents to happen for healers to heal up.

Before we didn't have stuff like Tankbusters adding a visual marker on a player, and many of the boss's skills weren't marked either.


Edit:

From my own perspective, a tanks self healing is (or should at least) be a "oh, crap" button for when something hits too hard or missed to pop a defensive, giving a healer some time to top them up again.
But since the fights leave so little to accidents, a tank can easily use those "panic" buttons to sustain themselves.

[OdinelStarrei]

That's also one thing, a lot of the danger evolves around 1-shot mechanics and if too many fail one there's not enough time to recover from it.
If instead a fight have less 1-shit but more heavy hitting attacks instead.
It's been a while since I played any other MMO on a regular basis so can't really come up with any good comparisons.
But in those the bosses mostly hit more frequently and the fights aren't designed to always be foguth in a more or less stationary position like FFXIV boss arenas.

Regardless, maybe it's not the lack of healers to do during downtimes in a fight that's the major issue, but that the fights themselves are designed in such a way that there aren't much for the healer to do.
Bosses hit in a slow fashion, almost each and every hard hitting ability has a several seconds castbar.
The fights leave little for accidents to happen for healers to heal up.

Before we didn't have stuff like Tankbusters adding a visual marker on a player, and many of the boss's skills weren't marked either.

This is honestly why something like Barbariccia EX were so well liked, it's probably the most unanimously praised fight in EW, an opinion I share. Rather than relying on debuff overload, or a really precise positioning for every member of the team, Barb was fast, there was always something happening or to plan for, damage was frequent, and one player making a mistake usually did not cascade into an immediate unrecoverable situation. But the underlying mechanics were straightforward to understand, there was no need for a twenty page toolbox or a 15 minute YT video. The fight builds upon itself, and I even think tanks have a solid time in there. There's a lot of good there. I think every role got their time to shine in that fight somehow.

But I will highlight that it's not "too many" people failing a mechanic leading to a wipe. It's one person doing something major, or sometimes minor incorrectly, and the result is the entire party exploding instantly. It's okay to have those things in fights. But when it's every fight, I feel that it starts breaking the trinity somewhat, outside of the more common issues detailed in this thread, because you didn't wipe because "the tank didn't get aggro" or "the dps check was failed" or "the healers were out of MP", you failed because Player 5 was out of position on mechanic sequence 4, or Player 2 didn't read their partner's debuff correctly and did 999999 damage to the group.

I feel that it promotes really frustrating and darwinistic perspectives for progressing through content.

[Evergrey]

This is honestly why something like Barbariccia EX were so well liked, it's probably the most unanimously praised fight in EW, an opinion I share. Rather than relying on debuff overload, or a really precise positioning for every member of the team, Barb was fast, there was always something happening or to plan for, damage was frequent, and one player making a mistake usually did not cascade into an immediate unrecoverable situation. But the underlying mechanics were straightforward to understand, there was no need for a twenty page toolbox or a 15 minute YT video. The fight builds upon itself, and I even think tanks have a solid time in there. There's a lot of good there. I think every role got their time to shine in that fight somehow.

But I will highlight that it's not "too many" people failing a mechanic leading to a wipe. It's one person doing something major, or sometimes minor incorrectly, and the result is the entire party exploding instantly. It's okay to have those things in fights. But when it's every fight, I feel that it starts breaking the trinity somewhat, outside of the more common issues detailed in this thread, because you didn't wipe because "the tank didn't get aggro" or "the dps check was failed" or "the healers were out of MP", you failed because Player 5 was out of position on mechanic sequence 4, or Player 2 didn't read their partner's debuff correctly and did 999999 damage to the group.

I feel that it promotes really frustrating and darwinistic perspectives for progressing through content.

Mm.. a lot of the higher tier fights (I've only done savage pandemonium 1-5 so can't speak for all) really required the group as a whole to know what to do and where to stand, or else it can really crumble fast.
Which is counteractive when I think that a Healers toolkit is designed around a fight where accidents happen.
But since every fight is static with its rotations and mechanics are more or less all marked out, accidents are less likely to happen.
Unless ofc new to a fight and learning said boss patterns.


Edit:

The simplest solution I can think of would be to make that a boss's auto attacks at least would hit for harder.
And that is the bare minimum to give healers something to heal up during a boss fight.

[OdinelStarrei]

Mm.. a lot of the higher tier fights (I've only done savage pandemonium 1-5 so can't speak for all) really required the group as a whole to know what to do and where to stand, or else it can really crumble fast.
Which is counteractive when I think that a Healers toolkit is designed around a fight where accidents happen.
But since every fight is static with its rotations and mechanics are more or less all marked out, accidents are less likely to happen.
Unless ofc new to a fight and learning said boss patterns.


Edit:

The simplest solution I can think of would be to make that a boss's auto attacks at least would hit for harder.
And that is the bare minimum to give healers something to heal up during a boss fight.

I'm glad you are receptive to the statements I'm providing.

This whole situation is based on a fundamental mismatch between the toolkits of the support jobs and the encounter design itself.

If the fights are static, and the support kits are also static, I think it can cause players to become bored very quickly, because there is no variance, and further more, there is not allowed to be any variance, as that usually leads to a wipe via said body check.

If the fights are going to be mechanic puzzles, with no room to salvage mistakes, players who have "solved" all the puzzles should still be allowed to have fun. I think we have gone way too far into the "spreadsheet meta" of fights, and I support that statement with the increasing frequency of situations where a player will know "i stand here for X mechanic" but doesn't actually understand how said mechanic works because it is SO fixed and inflexible. When healers (and tanks, but we're in the healer thread) have learned everything, we end up hitting a threshold of performance where we can't improve any further outside filler damage, because the game has removed aspects of the role that could promote a more impressive showcase of skill/crisis management/job knowledge.

For example, tanks nowadays specialize in helping a single member mitigate damage to an sizable extent. Oh no! Our Dragoon is being attacked by a targeted, unavoidable attack that will drop them to such low HP they will die to the next raidwide! (Alexander 12 or Omega 7 prey marker for example) Tanks should team up and help that person.

That's not damage, that's not a rotation, that's tanks doing something unique and interacting with the party in a way that only tanks can do. There's not enough of that right now. Instead we just dump all our cooldowns on the telegraphed buster and that's that. Make sure everything is ready for 2 minute burst by the way.
I think that some knowledgeable healers feel that their role is under attack from all directions right now. Tanks heal too much. Bosses don't hurt enough. Everything is a mitigation check. Anytime someone makes a mistake, we have to reset or in situations where mistakes are allowed, healers have significantly less agency and impact, with a gameplay loop that doesn't support the toolkit that has been provided. And there are fewer mechanics outside of fixed stack markers or "set HP to 1" that are designed for healers specifically as of late. What happened to those Shinryu heads that you had to heal to kill? Why aren't we getting more stuff like Fountain of Fire from Pandemonium 3? That was cool!

Are you a party of tanks, healers, and DPS fighting a boss? Or are you just eight players doing synchronized swimming with flashy lighting effects?

If something becomes significantly less fun the better you are at it, or the better your group is, I don't think that is healthy design. I feel that people will just become ambivalent, or worse, really bitter. And well, here we are.

[Absurdity]

I feel that it promotes really frustrating and darwinistic perspectives for progressing through content.

A feeling I absolutely share. It leaves no room for the party to make up for weaker players, either everyone executes mechanics perfectly all the time or you get 0 progression done, let alone actually see enrage.

[Gemina]

This is honestly why something like Barbariccia EX were so well liked, it's probably the most unanimously praised fight in EW, an opinion I share. Rather than relying on debuff overload, or a really precise positioning for every member of the team, Barb was fast, there was always something happening or to plan for, damage was frequent, and one player making a mistake usually did not cascade into an immediate unrecoverable situation. But the underlying mechanics were straightforward to understand, there was no need for a twenty page toolbox or a 15 minute YT video. The fight builds upon itself, and I even think tanks have a solid time in there. There's a lot of good there. I think every role got their time to shine in that fight somehow.

This is such a great take. And while this isn't kind of difficulty healers are asking for in normal mode content, this encounter is a great example of how contributions are equal across the board, and everyone feels rewarded when victory is achieved. However, even the NM version of this fight when it was released was simply chaotic fun and is the last encounter I can recall where players actually stuck around after to talk about it and pass on congratulations to everyone for a job well done. Barbariccia set a golden standard, and I wish we had more fight like her. I also don't recall anyone complaining how difficult she was, and if there were those voices, they were drowned out by how fun the encounter was designed.

[PercibelTheren]

There's not going to be a lot of logs like that in more recent expansions, because if there is a group that has an accident, you don't clear.

The party just instantly dies. You're not even allowed to salvage most encounters. If someone "makes a mistake" in P9S limit cut, how exactly are we going to salvage that pull? That's the first fight. We're not even talking about P10S or P12S.

Sure, we have things like "DeathCOB" as our fringe outlier, but even content outside of savage, things like Criterion or Delubrum Savage make it a point to demand mechanical consistency above all else, because the consequence is a wipe that the healers cannot recover from, not because they don't have the resources, but because the fight mechanics will force death. I'm not promoting zombie'ing through fights, but I am saying there is a reason people are kinda over getting body checked every 2 minutes.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of bodychecks, either. I think a major part of a healer's skillset is not panicking when everything goes south, going into triage mode and pulling the group through the situation. Most Endwalker fights don't let you do that, though. One person screws up, everyone dies. This is why I'm much more in favor of stuff like soft enrages (like P5S) and other "punishments" for failing a mechanic, like vuln stacks or debuffs that can be Esuna'd.

[GreenLeafy]

This thread feels like an epithomy of everything that's been going more and more sour about the game as the years have gone on. Canary in the coal mine for the gameplay and encounter design stagnation in the last couple expansions and increasingly aggravated and polarized community splits.
Optimize, homogenize, simplify the fun and quirk out of everything and make the fights as scripted as ever. Referring to the huge bulk of your game's instanced encounters - dungeons ,trials , 8 and 24 man raids - as purely casual with the weird expectation and conformity that as such they should just be as braindead as possible is by far one of the worst takes anyone can have on the matter too. Thats the meat of your PVE gameplay for your entire playerbase, aside of the ones who would want to face an extra challenge in savage/extreme/ultimate. Half of that content is obligatory to go through either for MSQ or for your daily roulettes and you WANT that part to be a boring slog? Same mechanics for the past decade repeated ad nauseam and a core job loop that puts you to sleep? Is your point to play the game in earnest and have fun with gameplay that tickles your brain at least a little or to only half-pay attention while watching a series on your second monitor ?
Saying its ok to not use 90% of your kit as a healer for content also feels terrible. It shouldn't be the norm. Why do I receive abilities if I only get to use them once in a blue moon because there isn't enough damage output from bosses in majority of content and everyone already just heals or shields themselves in some capacity anyway. Or saying that the chaos of people performing poorly and eating mechanics and dying is acceptable to make up for bland encounters lol - just expect and hope everyone in your party is bad just so you have something to do because the devs didn't give you anything. Its just undercooked design across the board. And for healers , as stated by so many people here beforehand , that has been the case for years.

[GreenLeafy]

I don't get the fervent defense of keeping the absolutely overtuned self-sustain for something like a WAR tank either. Its supposed to be a group game where you work together to overcome the challenge. Gleefully excluding an entire third of the trinity thinking you're superior is insane.
The criticisms from these players are born from the fact that they care and have had fun on the game and to only see it stripped as the years go on is just disappointing alongside the fact that their pleas have clearly just been falling on deaf ears. Coming in here to ridicule their feedback is unnecessary and just outright mean.
I don't even know that anything of this scale and capacity will even be adressed in a satisfactory manner with the way they've treated the feedback too. Believing the words of , oh DT will provide more interesting encounter design , is wild expectation after seeing LL previews of fights that just cram more half arena boss swipes and cardinal direction cone aoes. Hell , even the graphical update on the 2nd benchmark barely got adressed even though half of the complaints still remained from altered facial features or terrible low quality face tattoo textures and there's a 100+ page thread on JP forums with extremely detailed showcases of what's wrong.
With everything of how they've treated feedback for DT and how forums are progressing it feels like the developers are mostly just ok with letting the community rip each other apart about their misgivings whilst they themselves continue to make these questionable choices with the idea of pursuing the potential of attracting more players with more shiny VFX than actual good gameplay. Everyone else beforehand who doesn't just accept the reskinned slop they're given can just leave or get witch hunted out for speaking against it is the vibe I keep seeing being tossed around. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Going down the path of simplifying and homogenizing ,apparently for encounters/job gameplay/and even smth like facial meshes , to cut corners and make things easier to pump out more repetitive bland content quicker and I imagine also script your NPC bots to run dungeons with you easier instead of making good gameplay for human players is certainly a direction they've picked. ������
I honestly think YoshiP just wants to move on from XIV and tackle his side projects instead hhahaha.