#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[WeakestZenosEnjoyer]

It's so painfully obvious, the reason feedback is ignored is because everyone still levels and plays healers anyway. People bringing up duty finder waiting times as if they matter is hilarious.
I'd love to see healers have some changes made that people have suggested, but the sheer number of "I support these changes but I'll be leveling my healer anyway" posts reveal it ain't happening.
Even within the few people who are actually aware of and say they support the strike, there are plenty that aren't actually doing anything.

If healers were plentiful as a baseline I might agree with you,

they're not, the strike itself might not have that much of an effect but by that logic neither will the gotcha "thanks for the healer queues nerd" people matter. It's also gotten huge amounts of attention from people like you, which is extremely valuable at reaching the developers, the people that very much do matter.

It hasn't started yet and it's been a decisive victory at drawing attention to long running issues.

[IDontPetLalas]

Think the circular problem with all jobs is that people want to be able to learn a job and do well at it quickly, largely because it doesn't feel fun to learn a job right now in the current game. There is such a deluge of media putting pressure on being good at the game due to saying "this savage is not really hard", or "Extreme isn't very hard", yet the job itself is not very hard to learn. So if everything is easy, what exactly is difficulty to begin with?

From observation, difficulty is from social pressure. When people are doing savage, they are almost always spending weeks in advance finding a group to do it with, or having to plan the vast majority of their free time around doing it. The only savage that is ever relevant is the current savage, and there is a limited time to complete the savage and get all the items one wants from it due to the lockout.

So I suppose a view point to take on this entire thing is that because someone decided to include content so difficult that it takes massive amounts of time to complete and put pressure on the entire community to struggle and complete this content on a cyclical basis, it made the community ask for a break in the form of simplifying jobs, which the game designers took as "simplify jobs, make fights tighter" in terms of end game, because they have some kind of mathematical quota they want to keep or who knows what on completion time.

Like if savage was not present and creating social pressure, it would probably put more pressure on making jobs interesting and fun to learn, which is a lot more flexible in terms of individual peoples time. It's not like if someone goes to a fighting tournament and took six months to get to the same level as the guy on the other end of the table, who took two weeks, anyone would care.

So this "community" asked for simplification, but somehow no one is ever able to identify exactly who asked for it. I'm not criticizing you by the way, and you have some very good points, I'm just somewhat dubious, and more of the opinion that Square might have misinterpreted feedback and taken the easier solution given the number of job designer that they have and the pressure that they have to introduce new jobs. The "quota" that you refer to is likely more due to their development methodology (SDLC) which is planned out so far in advance, that it makes it very difficult to involve changes or feedback from the community.

[Donto]

If healers were plentiful as a baseline I might agree with you,

they're not, the strike itself might not have that much of an effect but by that logic neither will the gotcha "thanks for the healer queues nerd" people matter. It's also gotten huge amounts of attention from people like you, which is extremely valuable at reaching the developers, the people that very much do matter.

It hasn't started yet and it's been a decisive victory at drawing attention to long running issues.

Attention has no worth, the player base still has to decide that they are willing to give up leveling and playing any healer roles.
For what it's worth, I hope you are right. I hope that the baseline number of healers is low enough that it can drop below whatever amount the developers deem acceptable, and they feel pressure to make real changes. I would be very pleasantly surprised if it happens.

[Eorzean_username]

Attention has no worth, the player base still has to decide that they are willing to give up leveling and playing any healer roles.

You're not making unreasonable points, but then also remember examples such as Kaiten being removed while (I'm pretty sure) Samurai was already the most-played Melee DPS.

Population data definitely seems to have an influence (for example, "Babe, wake up! It's been 3 months! Time for the Monk rework!"), but apparently CBU3 can also absorb mysterious invisible feedback rays about Kaiten from active and subscribed Samurai, so banging pots with spoons enough to get onto the radar of broader social-media / "gaming journalism" / "content" "creators" might have as much of a chance of working as anything else.

At the very least, it might alter the Producer/Director's coping mechanism from "Let's offer them platitudes and try to ignore it, Healers are usually very polite and will just stay inside their complaint threads" to "Oh no, this is creating bad press".

[Bonoki]

Remember when Cosplayers at Fanfest were holding "Bring Kaiten Back" signs? Maybe healers need to do that but say "Give us more damage buttons".

[TsubameMikage]

Deep dungeons, I feel they never really caught on, or at times when they did was because they were the best option for levelling at the time.

And by making them leveling focused, they lose a lot of their draw when you've already capped out your characters - which most of us had by the time it was released. Deep dungeons need more rewards as part of their progress method.

Grand company squadrons. They can definitely make that AI actually workable now if they can make the trust system AI dungeon runs that they do now. Squadron command dungeons are pretty nightmarish unless you're on tank so you can just solo it.

But they have iterated on this - this is just the Trusts systems in the early stage. They definitely need to go back and upgrade the squadrons with the new trusts tech, though.

Field operations need some work. I think it's just hard to get invested in a new exclusive system of doing things when it only applies to this one part of the game. I think that's the main problem that people say they feel Field Operations are missing.

They also, like deep dungeons, are just narrow in scope in benefits. I love the idea of an open world alive with content and players, but it needs to tie into the rest of the game better as you said.

Criterion dungeons are the latest example of a new side thing introduced then left in the dust. No one knows what to do with them.

And, again, none of them off any substantive benefits to doing them. Complete them once? You're done - that isn't evergreen content.

They have a lot of nice potential hooks for making these systems evergreen - but they haven't made the effort to do so.

[vetch]

But they have iterated on this - this is just the Trusts systems in the early stage. They definitely need to go back and upgrade the squadrons with the new trusts tech, though.

A perfectly offensive suggestion. I wouldn't care to have all the mechanics stripped out of the old optional dungeons too, to be compatible with a 'Squadron 2.0' running the garbage Trust AI system. Absolutely not. Leave them alone.

[Donto]

You're not making unreasonable points, but then also remember examples such as Kaiten being removed while (I'm pretty sure) Samurai was already the most-played Melee DPS.

Population data definitely seems to have an influence (for example, "Babe, wake up! It's been 3 months! Time for the Monk rework!"), but apparently CBU3 can also absorb mysterious invisible feedback rays about Kaiten from active and subscribed Samurai, so banging pots with spoons enough to get onto the radar of broader social-media / "gaming journalism" / "content" "creators" might have as much of a chance of working as anything else.

At the very least, it might alter the Producer/Director's coping mechanism from "Let's offer them platitudes and try to ignore it, Healers are usually very polite and will just stay inside their complaint threads" to "Oh no, this is creating bad press".

I hope you find the mysterious invisible feedback rays that you need so the dev team actually listens this time. I'm going to stop playing any healers.

[Kes13a]

Attention has no worth, the player base still has to decide that they are willing to give up leveling and playing any healer roles.

we can still level healer, we just are not participating in group content such as roulettes.

[Trunks]

Here we are again. "Healers screaming into the void" is the free space on the FFXIV Expansion Bingo Card. Thinking about this old post:

One thing that does amuse me a little on this topic.

I did a 'lol who needs tanks' Titan HM in 2.0 on WHM using Medica II to build a comical agro lead over a group compared mostly of the EU 1st BCOB team's DPS. Medica II got changed to prevent this a week or two later.

People started using Summoner's Titan to tank RamuhEX removing the need for a tank there. This also got nerfed a week or two later.

Figure out a way to do an Extreme or Savage without Tanks and you can bet it's going to get nerfed ASAP. Do the same with no healers and SE don't seem to bat an eye lid at it.

Writing has been on the wall for healers for, like, 7 years. A lot of the issues are just knock-on effects from them having no idea how to make tanking gameplay engaging. Instead of giving tanks an actual job to do (and indeed, taking away their one job), they designed them to take over healers' jobs with a plethora of healing and mitigation, while at the same time removing everything from healers other than the healing and mitigation.

We have two nominally separate "roles" that are fulfilling the same group responsibility (i.e., keep everyone alive), just with different levels of capability. Once you step outside of ultimate / savage, that overlap becomes redundancy. Yet only one set of jobs in this pool has been gutted down to two buttons. It was obvious that AST was going to get reduced to a WHM clone - it's the same thing that happened to PLD not so long ago, and DRK, and SCH, and so on.

I've (mostly) been "on strike" since 2019. There is no reason to hold out hope, because this is fundamentally what their vision has always been and they have doubled down again, and again, and again.