#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ty_taurus]

Wouldn't unsubbing to the game be a much more effective "strike" for SE to notice? You're still subbed to game providing valuable revenue for SE. You gotta hit SE where it hurts, not simply inconveniencing the portion of the playerbase that have nothing to do with this.

There's value to unsubbing, if you feel the game is not making you happy anymore, but there are things you can do while subbed to show dissatisfaction with something. By not participating in things you're not happy with, you naturally influence the internal metrics like Druid said. But it's ultimately a choice that you get to make.

[KisaiTenshi]

Satasha in particular is a funny case because of clam skip. That dungeon actively encourages just hitting the wall despite the lack of AoE. It also needs to be the first tank dungeon too so it can't hit super hard and you can have only Rampart for mit if you're still leveling.

As you progress through ARR, it's difficult to wall pull Brayflox, it's really difficult to wall pull Stone Vigil (those ice spirits have hands). There's something lost at higher levels that makes walls normal and [looks at Raw Intuition, looks at healer kits being 80~% heals] I wonder what could do that? They stop letting us manage how much we pull too by putting up unnecessary walls so we can't even try to push our bloated kits and now people queue healer to skip in queue, not because, you know, they enjoy healer.

There is some irony in that "they made it so that healers have less to do because they put walls up that prevent tanks from pulling the entire floor to the boss room."

Back in 2.0, people would raise hackles if you pulled wall-to-wall until about 2.3. Before that it was everyone complaining about the Demon wall in Amdapor Keep and not being able to have the DPS to clear it without buying the darklight gear. Labyrinth was ALWAYS a faceroll, but you had to at least follow the mechanics for Behemoth and Phlegethon and not just stand around ignoring it.

There are multiple ways Square-Enix could resolve issues with the healer design in XIV:
1. Remove all healing from Tanks and DPS, including pots. (This would require adding a "healer NPC" to every solo instance)
2. Put self-heals on oGCD's that have 3-minute CD's on all players. (This would require solo duties to have healer NPC's)
3. Scale self-heal oGCD's inversely towards the number of players (eg 100% during Solo, 25% during light, 12.5% in full party, and 4.1% in Alliance raids)
4. Lock all MSQ-required content to level and ilevel-sync if anyone in the party has not cleared it; Lock alliance raids to ilevel of the gear it drops. (While this won't make "healing more required", it will discourage "queuing as healer for a faster queue, and then neglecting to heal.")
5. Split GCD heals and GCD DPS to have separate CD's, where healing GCD's are different for each job, and DPS CD's scale depending on how many DPS players are in the party. So if there is only 1 DPS, then they do 100% of their DPS, if there are two DPS, they do 50%, 5 DPS, 20%, etc. Meanwhile Tanks do a set 10% and Healers 5% on DPS actions outside of Solo. Solo instances then do 100% of DPS. Healing then works the same way, DPS self-healing only heals 5%, tanks 10%, and healers 50% (2-healer parties) or 100% (1-healer parties.) So DPS on a DPS behaves as it is now, but self-heals can only be used once every 20 seconds with a potency of 100 when in a 4-man party, or once every 40 seconds for a potency of 100. On the healer it's reversed, where the DPS recast is 2 seconds solo, but 4 seconds in light parties, and 10 seconds in full parties.
*I fully expect people to balk at this*, but clearly if we want some kind of self-heal to remain available on DPS and tanks, then changing the recast time or potency (or both) makes more sense based on party configuration
6. Make mob spawns scale against maximum potential DPS of DPS job s in the party configuration. This might encourage "certain jobs" being preferable for certain dungeons, but that gets into the entire job identity discussion. Is it better to have two DPS that hit faster, but not as hard, or is it better to have two DPS that hit heavy, but require long casts. Shouldn't the healer have more to do if the party configuration is the long cast jobs? Wouldn't shield-healers make more sense to prevent interruption of the casts?

Like if we can't have more things to heal, at least make it possible to buff the DPS so they can complete long-cast attacks.

Also, I had to go back like 30 pages to find this, so this thread is growing super fast.

[mellii]

I wonder how affective the strike will be as a tool to affect metrics. I could see it affective at generating discussion or as getting people annoyed that the queues are long (and trying to get them on your side that way. but for that people would have to sympathy with people that have a longer queue time now, which seems unlikely given some response in the thread).

But considering it is at the same time as 2 new dps jobs release on a new expansion, I don't know how affective it will be for influencing the metrics, considering it is a time where square enix expects a big change in the role distribution anyway in the metrics. Because for a change in metrics being affective with a strike the data would have to show with a high likelihood "that is because of the strike". But in this situation I just see that as extremely unlikely

[ty_taurus]

Idk what this talk about solo instances needing a healer NPC is about. Solo instances give all players a regen that covers whatever damage they take in solo. You only fail when you get clipped by multiple dodge-able mechanics back-to-back. You don't need to heal yourself at all.

[lunarblossom]

I've never used the forums before but this was brought to my attention and I wanted to share my support. I switch between playing rpr and whm so I will not be touching whm for a long while. I really enjoy playing as healer and I hope the devs can take steps to make it feel like the role is not no longer needed.

[ZephyrMenodora]

I wonder how affective the strike will be as a tool to affect metrics. I could see it affective at generating discussion or as getting people annoyed that the queues are long (and trying to get them on your side that way. but for that people would have to sympathy with people that have a longer queue time now, which seems unlikely given some response in the thread).

But considering it is at the same time as 2 new dps jobs release on a new expansion, I don't know how affective it will be for influencing the metrics, considering it is a time where square enix expects a big change in the role distribution anyway in the metrics. Because for a change in metrics being affective with a strike the data would have to show with a high likelihood "that is because of the strike". But in this situation I just see that as extremely unlikely

I have seen on Twitter people posting pics of all-healers in need already, so it's possible the strike already is having an impact. Usually its mostly tanks in need with some healers in need.

I think the real issue is that their design for healers in Dawntrail is complete. They aren't going to make any significant changes in a month, and I have no idea how they would rework healers in any significant way mid-expansion. Maybe they can pull it off, but I'm sure healer design has an impact on encounter design and class balancing in general, with a lot of encounters already designed. I think even if the Strike works, we won't see too much change until 8.0.

I have already seen some adverse reaction from Warriors on social media to not wanting to give up their immortality, so part of these changes likely would need to hit the Tanks and DPS sustain skills.

[Eorzean_username]

Actually we are not workers, SE is not our employer, we have no employment contract with SE, and we receive no renumeration for our 'work' as healers.

This isn't a literal labor-law situation, and I don't think anyone is confused about that.

However, language and communication sometimes requires people to adapt words to best-match a concept which may not have a precise word for it yet, or in order to provide a less-convoluted way of quickly referring to something.

In this case, "strike" is a commonly-used and well-accepted colloquialism for "people mutually-refusing to do something".

Furthermore, if you abstract-out your thinking even slightly, queuing for a Duty as Healer absolutely is a form of "contract" with "the designers", wherein you agree to:

• Enter the instance in a timely manner when your queue notification arrives
• Participate in the content to the (hypothetically) best of your ability
• Coordinate with your Party as-necessary to complete mechanics
• Provide all necessary services of the Healer Role

In exchange for complying with these expectations, you are rewarded with compensation such as:

• Approval to continue your Quest Storyline
• EXP
• Currencies
• Equipment
• Cosmetics
• (etc)

Potentially, some people do this "solely for fun". However, I suspect that if Duties were not required for Storylines, and both baseline Duties and Roulettes offered absolutely zero rewards besides "gameplay experience", then queue times would probably reach the order of days or months.

ie — Duty Finder is obviously perceived, and used, as a compensated service, in which Players agree to do something in exchange for a promised reward. Furthermore, this is implicitly expected to be done on a regular schedule, in order to ensure the overall functioning of a wider system.

This is close enough to a system of "work" — if not formal employment, then at the very least, "gig work" — that it is not unreasonable to apply labour-related terms to contextualise it.

In fact, it's something of a commentary on how dreary the experience has become for many Healers in FFXIV that they intuitively jumped to "labour" terminology when deciding how to refer to the situation.

even if you consider tomes/exp as renumeration, you can argue we are paid to do nothing.

Fantastic, it has even more in-common with a lot of real-world jobs, then.

[NanaWiloh]

I wonder how affective the strike will be as a tool to affect metrics. I could see it affective at generating discussion or as getting people annoyed that the queues are long (and trying to get them on your side that way. but for that people would have to sympathy with people that have a longer queue time now, which seems unlikely given some response in the thread).

But considering it is at the same time as 2 new dps jobs release on a new expansion, I don't know how affective it will be for influencing the metrics, considering it is a time where square enix expects a big change in the role distribution anyway in the metrics. Because for a change in metrics being affective with a strike the data would have to show with a high likelihood "that is because of the strike". But in this situation I just see that as extremely unlikely

People have pointed out the dps ques will get longer. And those healer quiting healing response is too join the dps players and suffer, not understanding they would be adding to the problem. More dps higher que times for all dps common logic. I want healers changed but I am not going to do something that will burden dps with higher que times.

[Naple]

no because doing that doesn't change the internal metrics of what percent of subscribed players play what job/role. which is what we are trying to affect. just unsubbing won't actually affect those metrics, because the ratios will stay roughly stable.

every healer who stops playing healer and swaps to dps or tanking is not just a -1 to healer population its a +1 to either tank or dps. which is more noticeable in the metrics than just a -1 healer.

also, just because we're sick of how healers play, doesn't mean we have 0 reasons to enjoy the game at all. personally, i'm enjoying finishing levelling gnb on my alt and getting ready to go through dawntrail as a reaper.

The ratio is just one metric. Don't forget about the sheer amount of subs, that's an absolutely more valuable metric to SE than anything else in the game. If every healer main unsubbed from the game, you'd be damn sure SE will try their damned hardest to get those players back urgently.

To me, this healer strike feels like a half measure. If you're ok with a slight inconvenience, then fine. Just don't expect any notable change in the foreseeable future. I also don't have confidence that this strike will last long enough for SE to care. How long will players strike for?

[LyraShu]

People have pointed out the dps ques will get longer. And those healer quiting healing response is too join the dps players and suffer, not understanding they would be adding to the problem. More dps higher que times for all dps common logic. I want healers changed but I am not going to do something that will burden dps with higher que times.

And I don't want to play a boring job -shrug-