#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Sharindel]

The amount of healing required at certain points (M6S adds for example) is a nice surprise, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the amount of GCD pressure it's applying will harshly drop off as we get more gear

Good, but it do not really change the overall problem. The problem is, that it not fun to play healer in every other aspects as raiding.
Raiding in Japan is only done by 50% of the players (Source: Lodestone Successes), in North America and Europe it is far less, about 10-20%. So lets be generous and say 30% of all the players who play this game never see a savage raid from inside. Personally i give up raiding, since it is only aoe bullet hell and i really don't like to do raiding that is mostly a strickt order who to solve it. But that is another discussion! Back to the problem, lets say 70% never see a savage from inside! Who they should have fun with healers?

All 4 healers are not fun to play, if you do the story or some solo content (nearly non existence in 7.0), you simply have about 1-3 spells to do damage and only one is the main spell. That is not fun! In group content it is even worse, because most tanks are so good in self sustain that you simply need no healer! You are only there to wipe the floor when someboby spills something aka. somebody make a mistake. On bosses you are only there to solve aoe damage. That is also not very fun to play! So you can have only a little bit of fun in raids, most player never see raids from inside!

So raiding is sad to say, no metric for fun in a job! The whole design must change! 50% of the healing skills in all healers are mostly useless and only a variation. And worse! The unique class mechanics are also useless, why there is no white mage who must constantly use there lilies by planting them, aoe healing towers, hots grow lily power when they are in action and than you use the full lily as a huge big bang aoe when needed or to have fun as a damage spells. And when you grow much more lilies you get your personal limit where you can do a party ress or a huge damage or a super duper hot or a mass sleep. And that would not lead also to fun in solo, it would also lead to choices you can have in raiding.

So raiding as a overall metric and design principle for classes is fucking useless and sorry, that i use your post as an argument for that.
I hope you have fun in the raids, but i am not sorry to say, that i really really dislike the raid metrics and overall raid design.
All the bosses in FF14 are now IKEA bosses. Comes with a plan to assemble and you must follow the exact order or you are fucked! That is totally lame! I want chaos like honey b. lovely random mechanics.

[CinaedhVik]

Did M6S' amazing encounter (at least until gear trivializes it) end the healer strike or are we going to see 1000 more pages of "give me something more to do in raids"?

[Azurarok]

How is one tier of raids supposed to justify healer design

[Supersnow845]

Honestly I can’t even tell if that person is asking a question, insulting people on the assumption they will cave their ideals to one fight or insulting for the reverse, that the one fight obviously saved design and people should be compromising their ideals

[Maltothoris]

Look it is fine but for one, it's only the adds that really test the healers and that will diminish over the following weeks and in my experience, the only hard part are when the jabberwockys come out cause one healer has to tuck themselves into a corner which puts them outside healing range with the tanks. As gear and buffs come along, the challenge will not be as hard.

[YukioKobayashi]

How is one tier of raids supposed to justify healer design

Whats the real problem with the healer design?
The healers kit is really efficient in what its meant to be. Simply just a healer, not a dps, not a tank. The problem was that there wasnt a single piece of content which made full use of it. (There still isnt but the raidtier is a step in the right direction)
Seeing experienced astro's using long neglected skills like Synastry and Benefic2 during the addphase in M6s gives hope that future content will actually require some more healing and not 95% Malefic/Combust casts.
Im pretty sure healers will be happy having only 1 halfcast dps spell and a dot if they keep going that direction.

[Talianore]

Shame, I would've like it better if we get more debuffs (that can be cleansed by our kit). Maybe it could even create a more unique healer job that specializes in cleansing debuffs (and have weaker healing).

That's a pretty cool concept, but it wouldn't work for this game sadly. They would have to go back and either add debuffs, make the current debuffs esunable or make the current debuffs that you can dispel a lot more detrimental. Right now, you can safely ignore the majority of dispellable debuffs in the game, which isn't great, but them's the breaks. In addition, with a healer that has a niche like that, it would be overlooked for jobs with more powerful heals, unless they made encounters so debuff-heavy that the job would then become mandatory in at least PF.

[ForsakenRoe]

Shame, I would've like it better if we get more debuffs (that can be cleansed by our kit). Maybe it could even create a more unique healer job that specializes in cleansing debuffs (and have weaker healing).

AST had weaker burst healing, but could extend the duration of the HOTs, when it first released. It had trouble clearing The Vault, a levelling dungeon. It was promptly buffed. There can't be a job with 'weaker healing' because there's a minimum required from them, and challenge content like Ultimates are meant to strain the jobs to that limit. Rather, one healer having a better method to clear debuffs than others as a utility would be a better way to go about it, but that existed with SCH and SE removed it.

The bare minimum SE could do is something like making Synastry transfer Esuna casts, so that you can Synastry one Tank, and use Esuna on the other to clear both of them of a debuff at once (eg the P12S TB that applies a vuln comes to mind), but they won't even do that. I expect they're terrified of making a healer feel 'mandatory' like the P3S incidient, but they don't seem to notice how much SCH's kit can handle compared to SGE so IDK what they're thinking

Whats the real problem with the healer design?
The healers kit is really efficient in what its meant to be. Simply just a healer, not a dps, not a tank. The problem was that there wasnt a single piece of content which made full use of it. (There still isnt but the raidtier is a step in the right direction)
Seeing experienced astro's using long neglected skills like Synastry and Benefic2 during the addphase in M6s gives hope that future content will actually require some more healing and not 95% Malefic/Combust casts.
Im pretty sure healers will be happy having only 1 halfcast dps spell and a dot if they keep going that direction.

This is true now, and only now. Once we get more gear, how many Benefic2s will we cut from use during that phase? Will we be able to drop using Aspected Benefic on each of the Tanks, and instead just handle the same job with one cast of Aspected Helios? Will we even need the GCDs, or will we be able to just rotate our 60s CDs (Star/CO/CU) and handle it? We also get more damage from gear, so things die faster, resulting in less time that the Tanks are getting hit too.

And that applies in THAT content, but ONLY THAT content. The EX roulette we're going to be doing to get our tomes is not going to have that kind of healing pressure, ever. So, we're stuck with the boring rotation, and the justification of 'well, for the 20% of the playerbase that actually does the hard content, it's very intesive on healing required so the rotation HAS to be this basic'. Not great for the 80% who don't do that content then, is it? If the solution doesn't affect all of the content types of the game that suffer from the problem (the problem being 'people are saying healing is not engaging'), then it's a pretty bad solution. And even worse, this 'solution' of increasing healing requirements in Savage, doesn't help the place that needs it most: Lower skill-level content. There's more people saying that 'healing isn't engaging' and referring to things like EX roulette or Maps, than there is saying it about Savage and Ultimates. Why are we 'solving' the problem by addressing the place that needs the fix less, and ignoring the places that need it most? It's backwards thinking

Instead, I think that SE should consider making a slightly more indepth damage rotation for the healers (I've written ideas on how I think this could be achieved, which would add only 2 button binds for SGE, 1 for SCH, 0 for WHM and actually saves 1 button on AST), which also, if designed in such a way, can also help alleviate healing pressure/feed into our healing capabilities. For example, a WHM idea I wrote, is this:

- Dia reduced to 12s, potency rescaled. New button 'Water', later upgrading to 'Banish', with a 15s CD, dealing 40p more than your current level of Stone/Glare (at max level, it'd be 370p with current numbers).
- Dealing damage/casting healing spells builds a new 0-100 gauge. Healing builds gauge far faster (eg Glare gives 1, Dia gives 5, Cure2 gives 5, Regen gives 10, Medica3 gives 15, Cure3 gives 20, Holy gives 2 per enemy hit)
- Spend 50 gauge on a new damage neutral AOE healing action. Said action grants 3 of what I call 'Elemental Petals' to the Job Gauge, one for Wind, one for Earth, one for Water. It also gives some MP on use.
- When you have a Petal of an element, that elemental spell is upgraded for one cast. Glare becomes Quake, Dia becomes Tornado, Banish (new 15s CD attack) becomes Flood.
- The damage of these actions totals up to refund the damage lost by using the AOE healing action, similar in design to Lilies/Misery.
- These three Elemental spells have 50% AOE falloff, so they can be used in AOE situations (eg M6S adds, or just dungeon runs), taking our AOE rotation from 1 button (Holy), to up to 5 (Holy, AOE heal, Quake, Flood, Tornado)

With such an idea, players have more access to burst AOE healing, which can be pooled as needed. They have access to powerful AOE damage moves to help with things like the M6S add phase (eg targetting the Jabberwock add with the moves to prioritize killing it first, and hitting the other adds with the 50% splash damage). They would have access to another instantcast healing action (the gauge spender), and a new instantcast damage button. They would have a shorter duration on Dia which means more uses per minute, leading to more instantcasts in the rotation. And finally, the player would have the optimization potential, to use their healing actions in such a way that their burst window lines up with the refund actions, and they'd use something like Tornado, Flood, Misery, Glare4, Glare4, Dia, Banish, Glare4, Quake. Out of all of those listed actions, only Quake would have a cast time, allowing for incredible mobility even during your burst window. In fact, If Dia was 12s and the new Banish was 15s CD, it'd work out that across the whole 2min rotation loop, 60% of the spells cast would be instant! Something for hardcore/optimizers to optimize, very easy to get into (even easier than current WHM, arguably), it'd have something for everyone

And all for the cost of only 2 hotbar spaces! 2 spaces which we can very easily reclaim, by simply merging Cure1 into Cure2, and Medica1 into Medica2

[Aravell]

I'd argue that the M6S adds phase isn't even actually hard to heal. The difference mainly comes from it requiring a competent shield and pure healer both (at least for an early clear with no gear), not like most other content that only requires a competent shield healer and the WHM can just go through the motions.

[Qyoon]

Honestly it's been like that for years, i don't think SE cares since they are not even communicating about this.
Last patchnote made it clear, when it comes to balance, in their opinion healers are fine as they are.
Only reason i play sage is because i like it and waiting for a dungeon is short.
I take it as a subpar dps that happends to have heal abilities to make the hotbars look full.
While in reality most of the game content can be cleared with only 4 to 5 buttons.