FFXIV Healer Strike and the 'How would you fix it?' line

[Talianore]

I don't know if it's salvageable since to make healing relevant means they need to implement a lot of balancing changes and nerfs to tank sustainability. I don't think the devs have the desire to kick that hornets nest.

[ForsakenRoe]

Healers just wanna have fun.

Spending 70% of our time pressing Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dois is the opposite of fun. We have been asking for engaging gameplay since Shadowbringers, and what we got was a measily single damage button every 2 minutes. This, on top of "Go play ultimates if you want to heal", is beyond insulting to anyone who has healer as their main role

This is the crux of the matter. It's indeed beyond insulting to be told to do harder content if I want to have fun with healing, not only because I already DO the harder content, but also because it then puts the burden of 'carrying the engagement factor' on the fight's design, rather than the Job's design. And by the law of averages, not every fight can knock it out of the park. There's going to be the occasional stinker, like P6S or P7S, and when they inevitably appear, the healer job designs can't carry the fight and make it 'enjoyable'. P7S was egregious for this, as it had 6 minutes of effectively nothing (once you had learned what to do), before the fight actually bared its teeth with Inviolate Purgation. On loop, like a broken record player, you'd do those 6 minutes in prog, because the whole 'challenge' of the fight was backloaded into the last half.

Telling someone that 'your role is only meant to be fun if the fight is one of the five hard fights per 8 months, or the players in your party are very bad at the game' is one of the takes of all time. Because sometimes, not all five of those fights even offer the fun that is promised

I don't know if it's salvageable since to make healing relevant means they need to implement a lot of balancing changes and nerfs to tank sustainability. I don't think the devs have the desire to kick that hornets nest.

They might not 'want' to, but they need to at some point, and the longer the wound festers the harder it'll be to treat when it inevitably becomes a necessity. Leaving Bloodwhetting untouched for all of EW has burned into people's minds that 'that's what BW does', if it had been adjusted to function like PLD's spells (heals once on cast, not once per enemy hit), then people would complain at the time yes, but not as much as they would if it were adjusted today, because they've had 2-3 years of feeling like unkillable gods in dungeons, so it's become 'the new normal' for them

I wonder if part of the issue might be that they have an outdated idea of what a 'healer' is, in regards to multiplayer games, and especially in the MMO scene. Have we seen any multiplayer games that use the trinity (Tank, Healer, DPS) since the release of A Realm Reborn, which clearly state (through gameplay, class design or developer interviews) that 'the Healer's responsibility is to heal, and only to heal'? Because the way the FFXIV healer kits are designed now (ie since SHB), you'd think that were true here, with the damage actions being provided 'only to get through the story' (which some players genuinely believe to be the case)