Quote Originally Posted by DaKitten View Post
So I had a couple of questions revolving around the FFXIV Healer Strike thing I saw, what was it all about? What do healers really want?

I mean I mained SGE through EW and ended up really liking it but admittedly it is a unique healer from what I have seen, is there something wrong with the other healers I am missing?
I don't necessarily agree with the strike, but I understand at least some of the context. If your involved, feel free to correct me.

Healer has been in a really weird state for a while. Its DPS rotation is extremely simple, to the point of actively being boring, in order to allow healers to abort to healing in a pinch. But in 90% of content, healing is so simple that you never will do so. This leads to healing being really unsatisfying outside of savage. This is by and large the biggest complaint about the role: we aren't allowed interesting things to do in fights besides healing, and healing isn't important in most content. Compounding this is changes to jobs that constantly remove non-healing sources of complexity (ex: Astro cards got changed twice, the first time somewhat understandably, to make them simpler).

On top of that, healing is not actually necessary even in savage, with many parties finding ways to clear with 1 or even 0 healers after a bit of time. This I think is less of a core problem, because the vast vast majority of players who do that content will do it with 2 healers and the healing in them is still more dynamic, but it is a problem some people taking part in the strike mention, so its important to bring up. Basically tanks have so much self healing now that if your a good tank you don't strictly need a healer in a lot of content. This is true for every role (basically the game is designed so that if one part of your group is a potato, the others can pick up the slack) but because healers are the 'most' optional due to providing the least DPS if everyone is playing well, they are the ones who get cut in these hyper-optimized runs.

There is also a bit of weirdness with how healing is so oGCD focused rather than being about resource management and moment to moment play in other MMOs. Especially in easier content, you just smack an oGCD button every few seconds and everyone should live. We constantly get new healing buttons every expansion which do subtly different things and have interesting ramifications in higher end content, but don't do much when your in 'mash heal button to keep tank alive during pull' mode in dungeons or the 'don't even bother pressing heal buttons except after tankbusters or raidwides' trials. Dawntrail made healing in dungeons require more buttons, but its still kinda a 'faceroll on the keyboard' moment.

That said, we were told before Dawntrail launched they had plans to change their philosophy for healing overall, that would not make it into dawntrail but instead be ready for next expansion, so I am fairly sure they got the message a long time ago (these complaints have been around for a long time) and the healing strike is a wee bit dramatic. But it definitely is based on real stuff.