#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Post]

3 out of the 5 suggestions on the front page of this 'strike' involve making the game harder and taking away things from other roles, so...

Yeah, I wish the OP would move the good thread In referring to up more front and center. I'm harping on that because others have mentioned that along the way as well. The stuff in the ***manifesto*** is not what I'm referring to and is at best a quick post trying to at least point out that stuff doesn't feel great right now.

I'm referring to this thread, linked at the bottom of this thread's OP in an edit: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-healer-issues

[Erakir]

From my experience, Living Dead was practically never used in a duty with only 1 healer, due to the lack of the difficulty to bring drk to even activate it.
So the content a DRK usually did use it always had 2 healers whom both could heal the DRK to full.
Imo it wasn't a sole healers duty to top the DRK up, but a shared one.

Simply saying is as from my understanding, your comment was done from a single healer scenario, not a duo.

You are correct, in 8 man parties it wasn't really an issue, and thus DRKs didn't really see lack of use due to lack of invuln in raids.

However, prior to SHB, it was fairly easy for any healer to solo top a DRK off. This changed. People were still somewhat hesitant because... Random healers and not knowing how LD works to begin with.

But it was much, much, much easier to do as a solo healer than it suddenly became. Something no other tanks really had to worry about in comparison.

If LD had become 50-60% max hp needed in SHB, there's a solid chance it never would had gotten healing attached, as we'd still be in the /shrug just gotta pump some heals mindset.

[Kayokane]

I'll keep posting 'strawmen' arguements as I think of them, it helps give a spring board for the deeper issues hidden under the straw.

[Post]

Dude, I miss HW DRK a ton. I remember going from dying in the over world doing Amal'ja dailies at 50 with a full set of Dreadwyrm/Ironworks BiS fending to being nigh invincible in dungeons like the Vault and The Arboretum as DRK just from learning how to play it and mitigate properly.

I don't consider myself a slouch or anything, but the room to improve on DRK was the greatest that any tank by that point of the game had BY FAR and it felt really rewarding to get better at it.

[WeakestZenosEnjoyer]

Hey, I never said I wasn't in favor of that. I'm all in favor of making healer more interesting. I'm not in favor of this mentality coming up that tanks are evil and need to be gutted. I'm more than happy to support healers being made more interesting without having to gut anybody else.

How do you make a role interesting when their role in the party is already being covered by a completely different role?

Drastically overhaul the way battles are designed to introduce more frequent healing or tone down tank sustain, I'd be happy with either personally but one sounds much more realistic. I'm saying this as both a healer and a former tank main, tank sustain is wildly inconsistent with the pace of damage and one must give.

[Kazmarek]

How do you make a role interesting when their role in the party is already being covered by a completely different role?

Drastically overhaul the way battles are designed to introduce more frequent healing or tone down tank sustain, I'd be happy with either personally but one sounds much more realistic. I'm saying this as both a healer and a former tank main, tank sustain is wildly inconsistent with the pace of damage and one must give.

I dunno, that's not on me to figure out. I don't have a problem with the current state of things.

[Kayokane]

Another issue with tank invulns (not directly DRKs LD, but it was affected by this) remember the animation delay that Hallowed and Super had, I'm pretty sure they fixed Super's pretty quickly, but I hear Hallowed is still on CD to this day. Benediction also has that, so sometimes the DRK would die while Bene's effect was playing around them.

[Eorzean_username]

Let's just remember that the only reason Living Dead on DRK was given a massive healing on attack, was because healer were unwilling to heal the drk. It wasn't aboit being unable to do it, seeing as healers are constantly complaining about having too many heals for how much damage goes out.

You do not seem to understand what actually occurred in the past regarding Healers and "Living Dead".

In fact, Healers that actually comprehended the mechanic (either by leveling a DRK themselves, or being informed externally, since it offered no clarity whatsoever to non-DRK players, otherwise) were divided into 2 categories:

• White Mage — Resolved entire mechanic in 0.75s by using Benediction
• Astrologian and Scholar — suddenly had to slam the brakes on whatever else they were doing, and dump as much Healing Potency as they could into the ~7.5-8s window that they had left to fix it once it became clear the DRK was "coding".

This basically provided a type of Healing demand — unpredictable random massive spike damage ~equal to an entire HP bar — which FFXIV explicitly does not design its Healers to "handle", and in a time-frame that FFXIV also does not typically expect Healer toolkits to be able to comfortably-resolve.

It was a mechanic that would be at home in the faster GCDs and burstier Healing toolsets of WOW, for example, but it was an awkward burden in FFXIV.

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FFXIV almost-always divides its encounter damage into predictable bursts, interspersed with mostly-trivial piddle, and FFXIV also explicitly makes GCD Heals underwhelming, especially in terms of Healing-per-Unit-Time, and especially vs. single-targets — since FFXIV has engineered itself for Healers's "purpose" to mostly be about undoing AOE damage.

There is a significant difference between the Healing patterns of the vast majority of the game's content, and situations encountered with that 1 specific Action which had an extreme and sudden Healing demand attached to it.

Especially when the problem was allowed to fester for such a prolonged time — about 7 years, actually — because players would, if possible, just pair a DRK comp with WHM, allowing Benediction to just cancel the entire Living Dead mechanic for free, vs. forcing AST/SCH to hemorrhage disproportionately-heavy Damage / Resources to try to fix it.

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Furthermore, the complaints were about the difficulty of spontaneously handling DRK Living Dead for non-Benediction Healers — again, because FFXIV has evolved its Healer designs to be unremarkable for single-target heavy burst healing, especially on SCH.

An AST/SCH comp, for example, would not actually struggle to deal with Living Dead in a planned-out healing plan, because sufficient charges of Aetherflow / Essential Dignity / etc, would simply be reserved for it.

But "Surprise Living Dead" could be a serious time / resource issue.

And these issues were especially-exacerbated when you had only a single Healer (eg, Dungeons, Deep Dungeon, etc) — because alone, that Healer suddenly needed to dig their DRK out of a hole equal in size to the DRK's entire HP Bar, without a co-healer helping.

That sort of thing was a significant and uncomfortable ask for SCH, for example, especially if the DRK went Zombie Mode while Aetherflow was already dumped on other uses.

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Actually, that's another issue — FFXIV's lethargic and carefully-spooned-out pace of incoming damage lends itself to using OGCDs to snooze through it all, because it doesn't really matter if your Party is at 25% HP if they're not going to take any damage for the next 30 seconds anyway.

Players are either "Dead" or "Alive", and if you know an encounter's pattern, then "Almost Dead" is basically safely-equivalent to "Alive".

Now compare this to Living Dead, where "mostly healthy" wasn't good enough. Even if no further incoming damage was arriving, that Dark Knight still needed a fixed amount of healing equal to their maximum HP, or they'd just die instantly anyway, even if they were at 50% HP.

And you had < 10s to do it.

That is a very strange sort of mechanic in the context of FFXIV's overall healing-system, and it left AST/SCH trying to dig themselves out of an uncommonly-deep hole compared to what FFXIV Healers are engineered to handle.

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Now, compare that to other Tanks.

WAR Holmgang or GNB Superbolide is about to expire? Who cares, even if they're at 25% HP they'll be fine, as long as you know the pace of incoming damage. The important thing is that they already-ignored whatever "super-damage" they had used their Invuln to evade.

DRK had the unique issue of first getting knocked to 1 HP by "super-damage" (or just cumulative damage of some sort), and then going into "Medical Emergency Mode", where they absolutely required their entire HP Bar worth of healing in order to not just experience "Improved Death" 10s later.

If you had a WHM around — this mechanic didn't even exist, you just canceled it with Benediction and DRK's Invuln was basically like any other Tank.

If you did not have a WHM around — this mechanic became a significantly-heavier burden compared to other Tank Invulns, to the point of being actively-annoying for everyone involved.

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Oh, and another thing, pre-6.10 Living Dead could actually just fail to do anything productive at all if your Healer was too aware and too helpful.

• You'd first put up Living Dead, acting as 10s of "insurance policy".
• If you were reduced to 0 HP at any point during those 10s where your "insurance policy" was active, you'd enter "Walking Dead", restarting as a new 10s timer.
• During the 10s of "Walking Dead", you basically had Holmgang active — can't be reduced below 1 HP — except with the additional bonus of, "You must receive 100% of your max HP in total healing before this effect ends, or you'll die anyway".
• Except the problem is, if you did receive the requisite amount of Healing — for example, if your over-eager Astrologian tried to do her job well, and immediately started dumping Essential Dignities into you...
• ...then Walking Dead would just end as soon as you reached the Healing threshold. No "Undead Rebirth", nothing, just... poof, gone.
• Meaning that if you were healed too well, your Invuln effect would just vanish before its maximum potential duration of 10s had elapsed — and if you had a WHM around, that could mean that you were only "invulnerable" for < 1 second total.
• ...Which means that you might, for example, get insta-smooshed by the next follow-up Tankbuster that you were expecting to Invuln-through.

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...So yeah basically everything that you said is "confidently incorrect".

Living Dead was changed for a lot of reasons, but, "Healers refused to heal their DRKs" is pretty low on the list of actual explanations.

"Did not like Healing their DRK out of Living Dead" ?

Yeah, that seems factual. It was annoying for a lot of reasons, and inconsistent with the behaviour of other Tank Invulns.

"Refused to Heal their DRK out of Living Dead" ?

Other than rare "drama story" cases being exaggerated for memetic reasons... No.

[Rolder50]

Maybe, just maybe, more max level healers would have some clue what to do, if the game actually expected them to know what to do an earlier stage. The leveling process should be teaching you how to play your job, but as it is, a healer can get to max level with a single button (cure and equivalent).

[lulunami]

Just to inform those that did not play ARR 2.0 at the start, Scholar had these damage spells:

- Bio
- Miasma
- Bio II
- Aero
- Miasma II (AoE DoT)
- Shadowflare (ground AoE)
- Thunder
- Bane (AoE DoT spreader to 4 enemies)
- Ruin
- Ruin II
- Blizzard II (forgot about that one, thanks Pandurah)
- Energy Drain (forgot this one too)



12 damage spells available to SCH at the start of ARR 2.0. Over 10 years ago.

Somehow, you still healed more back then in ARR than you do now. I am not saying playing this game is that hard, since it is still an MMO. Just give healers more game play than an AFK gacha game.