#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Absurdity]

If people think this is stupid please I genuinely want to know what I should be doing instead

I'll tell you exactly what they want you to do, they want you to shut up and eat the slop or leave.

Because they're perfectly happy with getting served utter mediocrity, at best, from their holy grail FFXIV. If you're not happy with pretty VFX sparkles, and god forbid you see the bafflingly terrible gameplay for what it is, then you're just a hater and should disappear.

No it isn't. Check the healer thread on this forum.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/419013

So far every single post from AnnRam in here and in similar threads has been dripping with sarcasm so you're probably wasting your time, they already know.

[lulunami]

Sadly healing design peaked at Heavensward expansion. Healing has been downhill ever since for me personally. There were more interesting healing and damage dealing opportunities for healers back in ARR 2.0/HW 3.0 than EW 6.0.

Tanaka > YoshiP

[Sacae]

None of this is going to matter as the Japanese side of the forums seems to prefer a "healers should heal" mindset. Instead of arguing here, you should be convincing people over there.

[Kissune]

None of this is going to matter as the Japanese side of the forums seems to prefer a "healers should heal" mindset. Instead of arguing here, you should be convincing people over there.

We want the same thing :P We want healers to heal too, we just... don't have to. Tanks do our job for us, one of our bloated ogcds cleans up the leftovers they forget.

[Pallero]

None of this posting means anything if all of you are still going to pay for the expansion pack and the subscription. Personally i'm not going to pay for either going forward.
Forum posts can only come from players actively paying for the game so all the feedback comes from players who aren't voting with their wallets, so probably 90% of this "strike" thread means you're going to pay the developers the exact same amount of money as before and nothing has a reason to change.

[Sacae]

When I've seen western players ask Japanese players about this on the forums, they tend to get responses indicating that Japanese players prefer the current situation because it generates less stress. They don't seem to want complex kits, and would rather focus on doing mechanics while healing when needed.

There's a pretty big cultural divide between the fanbases, and the development team are always gonna side with their home audience. Those are the people y'all need to convince.

[Kissune]

None of this posting means anything if all of you are still going to pay for the expansion pack and the subscription. Personally i'm not going to pay for either going forward.
Forum posts can only come from players actively paying for the game so all the feedback comes from players who aren't voting with their wallets, so probably 90% of this "strike" thread means you're going to pay the developers the exact same amount of money as before and nothing has a reason to change.

...Y'know, people have come onto this thread a lot to tell us that 'oh well they won't care unless you stop playing' or 'if you bought the expansion they already won'. And yeah, that'd be 100% true if we were striking against, y'know, shareholders. But this is a message to the devs. And maybe this is 'naive' of me, but... I have this strange idea that the devs actually want to make a game people enjoy. They say over and over that they listen to feedback, that they take the community's thoughts in mind. We've been ignored for a while, a thread discussing healer issues has been live since 2020. This isn't about striking the game, this isn't about 'voting with our wallets'. It's our way of saying that healers are unfun enough that at many healer mains are leaving over it. They use playrate data, we've already shown that. The whole entire reason AST got yet another rework is bc it's the least popular healer. So they clearly do care if people aren't playing the jobs they design. They're clearly quite passionate for this game. I, personally, would be unhappy as a dev if players were organizing a strike over the way I designed it. By taking ourselves out of the pool of healers, which likely won't see a drastic increase in dawntrail considering the double dps release, and the fact that the AST rework only really makes the job palatable to people who already enjoyed the gameplay of the other healers and simply want to jump to the class with their preferred aesthetic. Healers aren't really getting anything new and interesting, and they're losing even more agency due to tank/dps sustain being massively buffed across the board. It's really hard to attract someone to the role with the fantasy of 'you only have to do anything when people fuck up'. Obv there will always be healer mains who like it, but they were gonna play regardless. We're not gonna convince every healer to strike, and I already see a lot of 'cool only the bad healers are striking' from places like the Balance. People will think what they want, but the goal is to worsen the healer shortage more than it already is, to maybe become obvious enough for people to realize there's a problem.

Do I, personally, expect this thread to change the game? No. I really don't. But I'm hoping it can be a start into pushing the game into one where an entire third of the trinity isn't suffering from problems people list for years, with the only solution being 'lets strip more nuance, lets add more buttons that do largely the same things you could do before'. There is a world where healers can have nuance, depth, and complexity while also not being wholly unapproachable to the point of scaring people off the game. This is something that other games have done. Do I have the exact, perfect solutions to it all? Of course not, I'm not a game designer. I am a player who has issues with her preferred role and playstyle being driven further into redundancy and pointlessness, and this is a good way to express it.

If you want to naysay, go ahead. But I ask you to consider what the actual goal of this strike is, and why 'just stop playing the game lmao' would only be a solution if the only things the devs cared about is making a profitable game. Bc believe me, if that's all they cared about, there are many, many different ways this game could be worse. The word 'gacha' comes to mind.

Worst case scenario, I am going to just leave the game. I preordered DT already, and I'll be playing dps for raids and such. If the game proves to be unfun, I'll leave. If 8.0 doesn't look promising, or the 7.X fights don't make real good use of the sheer mit/heal bloat we got, I'll just call it quits. It'll suck to abandon the game that I've put thousands of hours of love into, but it is what it is. If I can't enjoy healing, I can't really enjoy the game. I've always been a healer main if I could, but when healer mains don't heal and they don't do damage... I mostly just feel like an accessory. I'm just holding out for MH Wilds at this point.

[Tint]

None of this posting means anything if all of you are still going to pay for the expansion pack and the subscription. Personally i'm not going to pay for either going forward.
Forum posts can only come from players actively paying for the game so all the feedback comes from players who aren't voting with their wallets, so probably 90% of this "strike" thread means you're going to pay the developers the exact same amount of money as before and nothing has a reason to change.

The idea is to bring the duty finder and raid scene to a hold by not queuing up as a healer. People will get mad when the duty finder never pops and eventually stop playing.

This has a better effect when healers still pay for the sub and queuing up as a dps themself, clogging up the duty finder even more.

But of course nothing of this will happen because healers want to play the game themself and will heal for their friends and raid groups.

At least they should settle for striking every satuarday evening or so, bringing the duty finder to a hold at the most busy time of the week.

[Flay_wind]

They do not want "healers should heal" either.
Japanese side of the forums prefers tanks to be immortal killing machines, since i remember actually seeing them asking for more tank self sustain and in DT they got exactly that. But their forums are not that active in general.

Just checked.
PLD. People are asking for even more mitigaion on the upgraded sentinel. 1000 potency shield is too low and should match DRKs upgraded Nebula 1200 heal. In those exact (via google translate) words. And people ask for more damage.
DRK. Sad that Plunge is gone. Sad that Salted Earth is still garbo. Also please make Salted Earth 120s. That's more or less it.
WAR. Why Stormpath is not on a hud? Why Holmgang is clunky. Also hooray for 2000 pot self heal. Also am i tripping but someone legit suggested using Vengeance for the spikes counter attack?

[Absurdity]

When I've seen western players ask Japanese players about this on the forums, they tend to get responses indicating that Japanese players prefer the current situation because it generates less stress. They don't seem to want complex kits, and would rather focus on doing mechanics while healing when needed.

There's a pretty big cultural divide between the fanbases, and the development team are always gonna side with their home audience. Those are the people y'all need to convince.

Someone compared the way JP plays the game to going to a fastfood restaurant, at the time it sounded ridiculous but it seems more and more accurate.

They don't care about getting good gameplay, since JP does everything through duty finder they want to be able to queue in, kill the boss, collect their loot and quickly get out again. Just like you go into some fastfood chain, quickly get your food and leave again.
Which means they prefer to have as few potential failure points as possible, since that could disrupt their fastfood experience.

It's why healers have such an abundance of oGCDs, rarely anything to actually heal and the worst dps kit imaginable. Can't have healers get overwhelmed by anything and potentially fail.
It's why tanks get ridiculous selfhealing and more mitigation than they ever need. Can't have the tank die because they didn't manage their cooldowns properly or the healer couldn't keep up, that would be another potential failure point.

To me it sounds like the most boring gameplay experience possible, but if you look at it through that lens the baffling design decisions suddenly make sense.