#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Connor]

I’d say 8.0 is still like, a year and a half away, this thread reaching 2000 pages is chillingly plausible lol.
What else are healers supposed to during the 3 years of downtime/filler spam they get every fight lol

[NamiRocket]

What else are healers supposed to during the 3 years of downtime/filler spam they get every fight lol

Heal on my holy priest instead.

[Carighan]

Heal on my holy priest instead.

I love how GW2 has the opposite thing where multiple spec-setups that aren't a designated healer (which only Druid is) end up being healbots. And here we have 4 designated healers, none of which ever spend GCDs healing if they can avoid it.

[ForsakenRoe]

Heck, even the 'Healer' role in a minigame for OSRS, which is very hamfistedly implemented because OSRS isn't built around the trinity, can feel more engaging than Healer here.

At Level 1 in the role (of which there are 5), you heal for 5 HP each time you use your healing potion flask on an ally. Each 'heal' instance can only occur once per 'tick' (actions are processed once per 0.6s), effectively giving you a GCD of 0.6s. Your flask can only hold 4 charges of 'healing', and must be refilled from a pool at the south of the arena when it runs out. The last wave of the minigame has a boss that summons adds (once per 6s, with a maximum of 4 adds active at once), each of which can hit you for up to 7 damage. Additionally, the boss itself can hit you for up to 13, and attacks everyone at once. For players who come in unprepared in terms of defences, trying to just get one run on each role done for a certain reward (a chestpiece we call the Fighter Torso, that boosts your melee damage a little bit), it's easy for them to get torn to shreds by the rapid attacks in the final wave.

In addition to all of that, though, the Healer STILL has to do damage to enemies. Their job is to target enemy Healers and feed them poisoned food to poison them (and spamming it causes instant poison damage, to speed kills up). The 'correct food' also cycles once per minute, and so you have to watch out for what is called out by the Defender role player as the correct item to use. Additionally, the Healer has to call out what they're seeing is the correct bait for the Defender role to use for their part of the fight (baiting Runners into traps)

Point is, even in an MMO that doesn't have a dedicated Healer role in 99% of the gameplay (it's literally one minigame), healing gameplay in that one instance feels far more hectic and engaging. And I think there's several aspects that feed into why that's the case.

Number one is that the healing flask is singletarget, and the damage occurs to all players, making it AOE. We in FFXIV have so much access to, not only AOE healing, but strong, cheap, accessible-often AOE healing, that it's easy to counteract the incoming damage even if it is AOE in nature.

Secondly, our 'damage rotation' in OSRS has the bare minimum of 'dynamism' to it, by reacting to which food is the correct one to poison the enemy. In FFXIV, it does not matter what enemy we fight, we press Glare. There's no 'choose between Stone/Aero/Water based on what element is empowered currently' or similar, it's just 'press this one button, and press it a lot'.

Thirdly, there's been constant reductions in interplay between us, and our allies. In OSRS, the Healer calls out what the Defender uses for Bait, the Defender calls what the Healer uses to poison the enemy. The Collector calls what style of attack to use as an Attacker, and the Attacker calls what Egg colour is safe to pick up as Collector (to then fire from a cannon to help whichever role is struggling, I guess D/H/A/C would be like Tank/Heal/DPS/Support). In FFXIV, however, the more healing and mitigation that non-Healer roles get, the more it feels like they can simply replace the Healer entirely. We see this occur in EX roulettes already, with players running 1 WAR and 3DPS to speed up the runs. In OSRS, while it is possible for anyone to use the Cannon and use Red Eggs to damage and kill any straggling enemies (eg a Runner got past the traps), not only does it require a Collector specifically to load the cannon (only Collectors can pick up the eggs without them exploding), but the cannon also doesn't replace any of the other roles because you need all four roles to do steps to prepare the 'final weapon' to tackle the last boss, and not having a role means the fight is simply impossible

TLDR point and click medieval cookie clicker game figured out how to make Healers feel relevant and required back in 2007

[Lorika]

TLDR point and click medieval cookie clicker game figured out how to make Healers feel relevant and required back in 2007

You can go even more back in time. the first GW for exemple. After all the healer, monk, could heal while attacking or using conditioning healing (in fact there was, at some point, a farming meta build with monk, with which you were almost naked with very low HP but you were constantly healing and protecting yourself while attacking)

But around 2010, a lot of dev tried to get rid of the holy trinity, or to render it less immportant (GW2 being more or less the lead of this trend)
They didn't want an heavy setup like on the old school MMO (like on Lineage II were a full xp group of 10 person with 1 tank, 1 off-tank, 1 healer, 1 buffer, 1 crowd controller and 5 DD.... And with a buffer that only buffed every 30 minutes and after that was sitting for mana recovery until the next buff session).

Right now, was i'm seeing, is FFXIV leaning more and more on the GW2 style.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Heal on my holy priest instead.

Got to admit, I laughed.

[Absurdity]

They should consider having bosses have an invisible add that handles doing the autoattacks, such that when the boss starts a castbar it doesn't stop autoattacking the MT for 5 seconds at a time. I remember P3S had such a thing, where whoever was 2nd on threat would get autoattacked by the little black orb thingys while #1 on threat would get attacked by the main boss, so it'd be something similar to that

That would certainly help at least a bit. You can see glimpses of it in M4S phase 2 where there are actually longer stretches of the boss just auto attacking both tanks and them actually dropping quite a bit.
Granted it's still pretty easy to handle with things like Bloodwhetting and Rampart completely free to use on autos (since you never need the latter for the buster), but that's more than the rest of the fight asks of you.

[ForsakenRoe]

That would certainly help at least a bit. You can see glimpses of it in M4S phase 2 where there are actually longer stretches of the boss just auto attacking both tanks and them actually dropping quite a bit.
Granted it's still pretty easy to handle with things like Bloodwhetting and Rampart completely free to use on autos (since you never need the latter for the buster), but that's more than the rest of the fight asks of you.

Yeh, one part that comes to mind is during Chain Lightning, where the boss stops autoattacking to 'cast' Chain Lightning to start the telegraphing process, but while the 8 jumps are revealing where each safespot will be, she's autoattacking. One of the few times where micromanaging the faerie's position as a SCH feels rewarding (moving it into range to Fey Union the tank for that part)

[Capstone]

They should consider having bosses have an invisible add that handles doing the autoattacks, such that when the boss starts a castbar it doesn't stop autoattacking the MT for 5 seconds at a time.

Good old UCOB.

[Maltothoris]

Don't forget the crits too. So far in all my years, nothing more fear into tanks than add phase Twintania with her crit rate and her higher damage during nael quotes.