#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Silver-Strider]

I'd say nah. The simplest reason no-healer runs aren't more widespread is that they're much more difficult to pull off, and even when they are, it's not as efficient. Only a very small % of the playerbase is capable of doing those kinds of runs.

Difficult, yes.
Efficient, not so much. It's the same concept of learning the fight with RDM/SMN for Rez utility during prog and switching to a BLM for the extra DPS once it's on farm. If you can get away with dropping one or both healers to clear content, there's no reason not to other than having that extra safety net but that's not a matter of efficiency, that's a matter for peace of mind more than anything.

[OliviaLugria]

I understand your point but there has to be some middle ground between "Healer dying automatically meant the whole group had to wipe" and "It doesn't really matter if the Healer is alive"

Ya... great... do that.

[PercibelTheren]

I know there are those who advocate for the removal of ALL healing from every job that isn't a healer, I consider that an extreme position, others have pointed out that if dps couldn't heal at all then pretty much every solo duty would have to be retested to ensure they could finish it. So I do think there is room for a point where a party that actively uses what limited heals it has should be able to do a bit, like surviving a raidwide and/or a stack so that if you play well you might beat 15-20% of a boss absent a healer depending on how mechs and raidwide damage play out. That way it's not overly punishing if everyone's doing well but the healer slips up, though if a healer really can't do that much (especially at level 80+) kicking them should be the team's right.

I think it's fine for DPS to have enough healing to short-term tide the party over the next raidwide or so while the healers are being scraped off the floor. They just shouldn't be able to keep everyone alive indefinitely. This is honestly also my gripe with Warrior. If it wants to have crazy self healing (even though I think it should be toned down), that's fine. It's the fact that WAR can literally do a healer's job while also tanking that I find problematic.

[ForsakenRoe]

What if players could use Phoenix Downs in normal content?
They could even make the Phoenix Down a General Action like sprint or limit break. It could have a long cast time that can't be swiftcast, just to make sure it's not better than a Healer res in any way. For good measure, have it cost 50% of your HP to use, and have a three minute cooldown.

All they need to do is make PD's stackable (they're currently not), useable in combat (IDK if they are or not atm), and have whatever CD they believe is 'balanced' (heck it could be 30m, resetting upon wipe, so that in Savage etc you get one per player, per pull). Healer Res/Caster Res would remain 'better' because A: it's repeatable (ie a Healer can cast their res multiple times over the course of a fight), and B: it has range (to PD someone you have to be standing on them, and if they died to EG a puddle, you can't reach them with a PD until the puddle clears).

Plus, Phoenix Downs are like, THE 'res' item, they have the whole franchise's precedent behind them

I think it's fine for DPS to have enough healing to short-term tide the party over the next raidwide or so while the healers are being scraped off the floor. They just shouldn't be able to keep everyone alive indefinitely. This is honestly also my gripe with Warrior. If it wants to have crazy self healing (even though I think it should be toned down), that's fine. It's the fact that WAR can literally do a healer's job while also tanking that I find problematic.

The more I think on it, the more convinced I get that converting a lot of Tank actions that currently do healing, over to doing some kind of barrier effect, would massively help here while still allowing the Tank to feel like they have some agency over their own HP. For example, instead of Heart of Excog on GNB giving a 900p heal, why not let it be a very short duration barrier effect, to make the mitigative effect of the action stronger, while not detracting from the Healer role? Why not have Shake it Off's Regen effect (added to aid WAR in 'mitigating damage over time effects') be a Panhaima style layered barrier effect (which would also help with mitigating damage over time effects)? Why not have Holy Sheltron do the same, instead of a 1000p total Regen (which it can give to other players!)

[Hyperia]

For dps and tanks to heal in solo duties, give them the full heal button that is used in the monster hunter event and put a cool down on it.

That will address the self healing needs for solo instances but it does bring up the topic of potions in general.

Why don’t we bring back strong healing and mana potions that can be used out of combat without CDs for overworld (unavailable for use in instances) healing?

It would help everybody, especially the crafter and gatherers.

[Somnolence]

All they need to do is make PD's stackable (they're currently not), useable in combat (IDK if they are or not atm), and have whatever CD they believe is 'balanced' (heck it could be 30m, resetting upon wipe, so that in Savage etc you get one per player, per pull). Healer Res/Caster Res would remain 'better' because A: it's repeatable (ie a Healer can cast their res multiple times over the course of a fight), and B: it has range (to PD someone you have to be standing on them, and if they died to EG a puddle, you can't reach them with a PD until the puddle clears).

In general I believe all support abilities should be limited to resources or CDs, including resurrection.

The problem we have now that in endgame scenarios incoming damage is scripted and can be accounted for with limited resources.

Yet in casual content people can stay in bad, die and this requires unlimited healing and unlimited resurrections to essentially corpse drag them.

Also since unlimited healing exists at all, healers doing this content primarily don't learn how to optimize their limited healing resources as they simply don't need them to pass such content.

The fact that healer kits need to have support for two wildly different scenarios is part of a problem and I am not sure what can be done given that SE is deadly afraid to raise the skill floor which prevents meaningful changes.

Only idea I have is to make all healing and rez limited, then allow more spammable variant actions for all casual content.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Phoenix Down's tooltip at least says "*Cannot be used during battle."

But on other threads on other Jobs ressing, I think the solution is giving Melee and Ranged Phys a role action revive, that has a long CD (3+ minutes) and also bringing back Enrage timers to normal difficulty content. So if you have to ress a million times you don't just eventually win by outlasting the boss...

[Post]

For dps and tanks to heal in solo duties, give them the full heal button that is used in the monster hunter event and put a cool down on it.

That will address the self healing needs for solo instances but it does bring up the topic of potions in general.

Since some point in HW, every solo duty has given the player a super blessing of light buff that just grants a constant Regen that gets stronger the lower % of your max health you have. No specific job needs a potion action for these duties.

NPC roleplay quests don't get this buff because they have heavily stripped down toolkits that usually include a means to restore HP.

[Tigore]

@ Sharknado

Don't get me wrong. I don't mind if it's a clear from when the healers drop down at 5 - 20% boss HP left. The situation I was talking about was real life distractions with the healer character dieing at around 60 - 80% boss HP. At that point, Nascent Flash is proving to keep my MCH up indefinitely unless I do something really stupid.

Now I do admit that only looking at tank and DPS self heals wouldn't fully solve the problems either. The bosses need to actually do damage to the party to make the healer role needed. The dance mechs are nice to do once in a while, but it also creates huge variance in party damage when done too much. If everyone is on point and avoids it, the boss just did zero damage for maybe 10 - 20 seconds. If everyone gets hit, the healer is in emergency mode using Medica 2 HoTs with maybe Asylum too. Some of the mechs may need to be shifted to gradual damage we can't avoid so that it is needed in more predictable amounts.

[sharknado]

The bosses need to actually do damage to the party to make the healer role needed.

Paradoxically, it will not happen, unless they 360 on their design approach. With their current vision, all normal content will not have any single point of failure.

The dance mechs are nice to do once in a while, but it also creates huge variance in party damage when done too much. If everyone is on point and avoids it, the boss just did zero damage for maybe 10 - 20 seconds. If everyone gets hit, the healer is in emergency mode using Medica 2 HoTs with maybe Asylum too. Some of the mechs may need to be shifted to gradual damage we can't avoid so that it is needed in more predictable amounts.

They have some fear of doing anything other than 3D no-scope dance/chessboard mechanics. However, Tender Valley has one trash pack with ticking damage. That must have been a "radical" design decision.

In Tender Valley on a perfect run as WAR I had more healing than WHM and the WHM had no hard-cast heals. When something goes wrong then the healer gets 2x tank healing if not more. All because as you mention - 90% of damage taken is in spikes from avoidable mechanics. They won't change existing content, it will be hard to move upcoming instances to be different but you never know. Depends on whether they are interested in feedback and take the correct one instead of dropping the issue with some healer-lock mechanic in the next savage. Still, if we get a more WoW-like design with constant damage we end up with the same problem - they don't want a single point of failure in normal content so the damage will be low enough to handle by non-healers Maybe a new variant/criterion dungeon? That isn't obnoxious 3D chess mechanics, it has actual rewards, DF...?

Allegedly 8.0 is about jobs. Curious how much of this is true and what it will imply to their design decisions. AST is closer to WoW Mistweaver aggressive reactive healer than WHM and AST got a rework recently. Will they make healers more aggressive for more aggressive content? The bigger the change the more content will have to be altered and more work on actual design and balancing.