#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[AlaineIV]

People have given solutions all in this thread and the other threads. Go read the first post. It even has links to suggestions.

The thing is there really isn't a healer "problem". People have been doing dungeons without healers sinces Heaven's Ward. It's a niche thing. For instance: TOP being cleared with no healers is a fight design issue, not a class issue. A standard PF or static for Savage/Ultimates will use 2 healers preferably 1 shield healer, 1 pure healer.

Statics that go for 1 healer/No healer clears use excel sheets to plan mits, run specific tanks/caster for off heals when required. Its purposefully done that way.
Hell, Picante Sauce Man EX was cleared WITH NO Tanks. You didn't see the tanks complain about not being used there.

While I will admit healers are in a interesting spot, they are not designed "worthless".

[PercibelTheren]

i just dont understand why are people so afraid of failure, and things going slow

I kind of understand it, but also not really. I'm a chronic people pleaser. I hate feeling like I'm not pulling my weight, or worse, like I'm actively being detrimental to the party. Years of multiplayer games also taught me that people will yell at me for a single misstep.

That is one aspect of this community I like - they don't do that. Sure, there are a few dillweeds who think being nasty to a clueless sprout will help matters, but most of what I've met with was genuinely helpful advice. I learned that I don't need to be afraid. Failing is fine. At best, the wipes and near-wipes are funny, at worst they're slightly annoying but most people seem to just roll with them.

This is why I'm so surprised that this community is somehow so adverse to the concept of taking those anxious sprout newbies who have never played an MMO, super casual players or people with different disabilities and helping them get better at the game. Instead, what's being done is the equivalent of sitting them in a corner and giving them some crayons while everyone else is being taught to paint.

Having a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling is not a new concept. Other games have successfully done it. But this is the first game I have ever seen where the community at large seems vehemently opposed to it.

[PercibelTheren]

Been. part of ff14 before shadowbringers because of a friend. I understand your viewpoint, but I know ff14 was know for nice and good community. I stick by it and recommend anybody try. Cause this game isn't world of warcraft, eve online or even runescape. Not even Dota or League of Legends. So please think was your first entrance of dugeon have understanding players that accept your difficulties or not. I am asking to be the helpful player you meet ingame not just person you find here complaining and not providing fun.

Nobody is asking for Sastasha to be hard. Also, how do you know the person isn't helpful in game? Or that the people upset at the state of healers aren't? I see lots of people joining PFs that say something like "helping my friend do the fight" and they're almost always very nice and supportive. Heck, that's how I got into Savage as well.

There are plenty of nice, experienced players willing to guide those who need a bit of extra help. The problem is that there's no good way to organise it. The Mentor system is deeply flawed and the Novice Network is a garbage fire.

[Rolder50]

People have given solutions all in this thread and the other threads. Go read the first post. It even has links to suggestions.

Are you crazy? You can't expect people to read!

[Falkyron]

Well too bad, it needs to be nerfed. It doesn't make any sense on a lore or functional level. It's just a made up ego trip by players who are terrified of dying.

I literally never heard "too angry to die" until this thread in 2024. Never heard it in game. And it is a piss poor defense of the nerf.

The phrase itself has existed for a long time; it's been a meme for the greater part of a decade that originated from outside the game and integrated into the community. I'm not responsible for your lack of awareness of the term 'too angry to die'.
It's a part of their lore as the Warrior's power source. They unleash a core fighting instinct hidden within creatures that grants immense resilience and the ability to ignore pain, including limiters their bodies have to protect integrity, in exchange for instability they have to learn to overcome. This instability is so chaotic that it can cause Warriors to continue killing even after all their enemies are all slain.

So let me correct you. It is not an 'ego trip by players', and your smug assertion so is ignorant. The concept of them shirking off wounds that would be hampering or even fatal is canon to the class and their meditative concept. It makes sense for a part of their identity to include healing. The mechanical representation of the inner beast would be shrugging off damage to fight onward.

You don't even have to dig up any lore books on FFXIV to learn this. It features prominently in the Warrior questline. If you give a damn, you should play it through and pay attention.

[Kazmarek]

Never mind. There's no helping people who don't want to help themselves. If you all really want to just be completely and utterly helpless, angry, and miserable, that's your right as a human being. Hopefully one day you'll learn self-respect.

[Kazmarek]

This instability is so chaotic that it can cause Warriors to continue killing even after all their enemies are all slain.

Wait hang on one last post because this is incredibly funny to me, what if they added a button to warrior that did a lot of damage to everything in the area. Mobs, the boss, and of course, party members. Give healers something to heal since they're so bent on not having anything to heal already.

[Eorzean_username]

My gut feeling is that most players would prefer something like SMN + 4/5 healing buttons versus 14/15 healing buttons + 4/5 DPS buttons.

I know this is a bit delayed, but I've been wanting to respond to this, since it's a very interesting question in the current context.

And as far as "gamers in general", as a nebulous whole population on planet Earth, I think that your instinct may well be correct.

But the problem here is that, while we don't have "hard numbers", there is definitely some segment of the FFXIV Healer population that quite literally and very confidently will assert that they'd rather have the latter of your two options. Anecdotally at least, I've seen such affirmations come up multiple times, not just in discussion sites, but also just conversations flying-around in-game.

I think that such opinions may also be a "visibly" larger portion on the JP side of the discussions, but I don't have enough personal experience with JP viewpoints to be able to state that confidently. It's an impression that I've seen carried-over by players who have taken part in or observed JP discussions, though.

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If you then assume that the developers are consciously trying not to upset anyone — no matter how unrealistic that sort of approach is in actual practise — then it puts the design situation in a position where assumptions about gameplay engagement that seem "obvious" can actually be incorrect for some portion of the Healer population, who genuinely would prefer to receive nothing but Panhaima 3, Quantum Physick, Supercollective Unconscious, and High Cure 1 as their 8.0 upgrades, even if there's mathematically or objectively absolutely no need for them in the course of most encounters in the game.

Because, for some FFXIV Healer Players, their Job identity literally is just, "I can Heal things", and they consider an expansion to only be providing them interesting upgrades if those upgrades provide more Healing.

It's hard to remember now, but there was actually a vocal backlash from some Healers during Heavensward about Level 51-60 providing offensive upgrades, complaining that they wanted Healing tools, not DPS tools. I think that the debates that combusted from the HW design led to a lot of the Stormblood design decisions for Healers, which in retrospect you can now see as just a "middle-step" along the way to what the developers really wanted to do, which finally "finished" in Shadowbringers.

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But you can't just assume "Well, then the developers are doing the correct thing", because it needs to be remembered that there were also a lot of Healers during Heavensward who reacted to upgrades like Broil, Aero 3, and Assize with excitement, and prided themselves on being able to turn into avatars of destruction while inside Cleric Stance. Even today, there's endless memes about the thrill that even the most "casual" White Mage gets from activating Afflatus Misery.

I think that we're still seeing the fallout of the fact that SE basically, in ARR and HW, provided players with a very different approach to MMO Healer design — or at least in-combat functionality — compared to traditional MMOs, even WOW. And for some of the audience, that design felt fresh and interesting and fun.

But for other parts of the audience, it felt like a betrayal of the expectations that they had been conditioned-into when imagining what it means to choose a "Healer Class".

And so, following the sustained HW backlash from a certain portion of Healers, SE slowly seemed to acknowledge, "I suppose people are correct. Our Healers don't feel like other Healers in other MMOs," and then ultimately seemed to decide, "And that difference is a bad thing."

But by that point, SE had already built the fundamentals of their entire system around a certain vision for Healing in FFXIV. And rather than properly-dismantling that system and rebuilding it from scratch to support "real Healing", SE instead just took the corner-cutting approach of removing Healers DPS tools, no longer giving them new DPS tools as expansion upgrades, and began a habit of giving them more and more Healing tools — all as a naïve attempt to imitate what made "Healers feel like Healers" in other games.

I think that the compounding effects of that have been a slow downward-spiral ever since, and at this point, I'm not exactly sure how it can be effectively-resolved without either keeping one portion of Healers perpetually-disappointed, provoking the other portion of Healers that like it this way, or refactoring the entire combat system to an extent that I don't think CBU3 has either the resources or the appetite to engage in.

Wait hang on one last post because this is incredibly funny to me, what if they added a button to warrior that did a lot of damage to everything in the area. Mobs, the boss, and of course, party members.

Now, see, this is productive. That would be unironically entertaining and on-theme.

It would never fly in modern FFXIV design, because anything that could generate "blame" is clearly seen as taboo to CBU3, but that's the sort of creative Action design that MMOs used to liberally-experiment with in the more "Wild West" days of the genre.

[Falkyron]

This obsession with warrior and its self and party sustain is very misguided
Video-> Even Dark Knights can clear the latest (Highest Item Level requirement) normal dungeon dungeon with no healer help

This is just normal content, and as an ultimate raider I would absolutely die in savage and ultimate without healers, very very few players can clear without a healer and the few clears are under very extreme conditions using very specific tailored mitigation spreadsheets and often painfully constant clemency and vercure uses.

I don't understand this wanting to control if a party can clear a normal dungeon entirely based on your own button presses however...

It should be noted that your party needs to perform their part towards this success as well. They need to not take unnecessary damage, relying on sustain from Phoenix and Arcane Crest, and they need to burn down the packs fast enough to let your mit do its thing without you burning through it. I'm not downplaying your good job performed at tanking at all, but I'm complimenting your friends on the great team effort. Most parties can't do what you four did. I know I could, but I also know if I had to throw three random people who want to do the dungeon from the player pool, we'd have a hard time.

Similarly, I have healed groups where we went in as three DPS and my Sage or White Mage, skipping bringing a tank. White Mage is quite excellent at the task in some dungeons for Holy's contributions, and Sage is great in the scenario where tankbusters are in play, as they can heavily mitigate them. People acting like non-standard group formats lean just to be purely anti-healer are confused.

[Falkyron]

Wait hang on one last post because this is incredibly funny to me, what if they added a button to warrior that did a lot of damage to everything in the area. Mobs, the boss, and of course, party members. Give healers something to heal since they're so bent on not having anything to heal already.

Since Frenzied Berserkers in tabletop games are so hilarious I'd be all for it for my own groups, but I could definitely see how people would grief with it. It would be fun if Warriors had a cooldown to enter berserk ala other Final Fantasy titles, losing the ability to stop attacking or use mit/GCDs, gaining a regen, and attacking at double speed til it stops... but they turn and run at an ally if all the enemies die. I'd LOVE to watch a friend squeal in panic and run around a boss arena while my Warrior tank chases him for 10-15 seconds!