Fed Up with Square Enix, Final Fantasy 14's Healers Are Going on Strike

The... low difficulty of the game? I wouldn't say that. There is challenging content and for non experienced players it's very easy to accrue vulnerability stacks in the casual content.

There are layers to the problems with healing. But in general it is the predictable nature of the damage intake and the existence of off-GCD heals that can cover the healing necessities.
This leaves healers as effective DPS with a simplistic rotation and off gcd healer.

There are naturally a number of GCD heals aswell that go unused and you may receive grief by not playing in the optimal way.

It is true, healing needs to be re-pondered in FFXIV. But, let's be honest even WoW struggles to balance it after 20 years. It's hardly a simple task. But, it can definitely be improved.

It is a fair shout to call for a redesign, but it's certainly not gonna happen for Dawntrail launch, which is in like a week or two.
Hopefully they make sweeping changes for the next xpac. I would like to see changes to tanking to also make it feel a bit more like playing a tank than a DPS.
We'll see.

I don't play this game, but I do like playing as a healer in other games. It's nice to see this game has 4 healer classes, even tho the healers aren't happy atm. In other games I've tried, there's either one or none. And when it's just one healer, you might not like that play style. So I prefer if games had more healer classes like this. Only reason I don't play this is because I can't do monthly subscription.

This is officially the most petty garbage I have ever seen. Because a developer didn't show every single class in a gameplay demo they are throwing a giant hissy fit? Between this and the Stellar Blade costume meltdown it's no wonder gamers are so widely mocked right now. Snowflakes much?

@Nem F the MSQ and normal dungeons are particularly easy. Healing has been a growing problem for years. Dispelling became a rare use and the increase in hybrids with heals and buffs like Dancers, or in some cases a far better Rez utility like Red Mages. The complete dumbing down of Healing such as the utter destruction of the Astrologer class from its original awesomeness. I gave up Healing in Endwalker. It's a thankless job with limited group support outside of playing tetris with the heal bars. Even Sage being a DPS-ey Disc Priest style healer is terribly boring with extremely limited DPS mechanics. All the excitement in FF is purely in the DPSers.

Oh tell these minority healers to ***** off. I main AST and I'm not striking with these snowflakes and their temper tantrum. I bet these are ex-WoW players too as we never had this issue before as FFXIV community has no time for this bs.

I also play every jobs in FFXIV with all max gears, I'm sure there are a lot of us that can and will switch jobs to fill in the gap while they throw a temper tantrum.

I'll gladly do so.

Lol wtf this is hilarious I'd like to see where this leads

Being a healer sucks and that's why I never wanted my shaman in wow when I played it to be Restoration. To hell with all the players who told me to make my Elemental shaman a healer.

@Zenos Seconded

LOL that explains why I get a lobby the instant I hit the button as SCH. And why my party gives me their commendations even if I die and can't rejoin the boss fight 😂

Don't know that they're on about honestly, being healer is only less stressful than tank.

@CutchuSlow fwiw if you want to play the game but don't want to sub, you can play the entire base game and first expansion totally free with a level cap of 70 per job, but you can even do all the jobs (except for ones in later expansion areas or that start over lv70 ). It's a massive amount of free content. Just pick ONE platform. If you do free trial on one platform like ps you can't also do free trial on PC or xb. And once you pay for any content ever you can never get free trial with that account again. But if you don't have paid content you can get hundreds of free hours of content from free trial which is less "trial" and more "free access to like 30% of the game"

100 pages! Wow game is doomed.

Or 99% won’t notice. Or care.

Like every social media drama

@NEStalgia I own the full game on 2 PS accounts. And had to make a third square enix account on PC to play the trial. The trial also has some limitations, like you can't start a group, you have to be invited. So if you wanted to play with another trial user, you can't. And once you upgrade to the full game version, you can't go back to the free trial.

The reason I have the full game on 2 ps accounts is coz I originally bought it on PS3 and when I got the PS4, there was a free upgrade option. And then I played a bit before I lost interest. Made a new ps account coz I didn't like my old psn name. At the time you couldn't change it. And there was a limited time that ff14 was free to keep the full game. So I got that, played for a bit and lost interest again. I didn't play long, coz I was playing alone and would have preferred to play with a friend. And you can't really play with friends if you're on the trial version, unless you have a friend that has the full game version.

Gamers entitlement, it's no wonder the gaming community is seen as group of whiney children, this right here is a great example,.. bunch of idiots

@CutchuSlow Ahh yeah, you've run the gambit already then 😂. Yeah FWIW even with paid versions the game is kind of a good coop but also awkward. Much story content is truly single player and you must disband your party to play it at all, and when in a party most quests don't share objectives unless it's killing monsters. So it's kind of a single player game that you can kind of play next to someone and pair up in raids for. Two players not in a party following each other isn't really that different from actually forming a party outside raids. Only difference is seeing a party member on your map. Only if you're in the same zone.

I don’t understand why people in the comments are mad at them. All they’re doing is a protest to make sure their feedback is heard, rather than lost in emails and tweets. They’re not disrupting the game or any other players, so why aren’t they entitled to try and get an organisation to hear them? People here are really weird about gaming initiatives to catch a developers attention. They’d rather the complaints just go unheard and nothing ever changes.

I wonder how many of these silly-billys realise that most people will do their MSQ first run of a dungeon with Trusts so they don't have to rush and can actually take in the dungeon. I wish you could mix - have two players and two trusts - but otherwise I'll never feel the daftness of this, I mean heck these are probably the Healers that refuse to DPS and slow everyone down anyways.

I have finished the last 2 expansions with NPCs for the required dungeons and don’t do group content unless it’s absolutely required to finish the MSQ.

In the early days I played healer and did a lot of group content, but now I play FFXIV mostly like a mainline offline Final Fantasy that happens to have other players in it.

I'm a healer main in Final Fantasy XIV. My profile picture is actually the FFXIV White Mage symbol.
This is nothing. Nothing will happen. There was a "healer strike" in the run up to Shadowbringers in 2019 (it may even have been organised by the exact same people), making the exact same points and nothing actually happened.
They do have a point about tanks and damage dealers having a lot of healing abilities (and it's worth remembering that Xeno is playing as a Warrior, a tank whose entire schtick is healing themselves and is thus busted in dungeons due to how those heals- especially blodwhetting work). This is a point Xeno makes in his video about the healer strike. I know when I've queued into a dungeon if I see a WAR it's going to be an easy run.
Besides that, this is typical of the healer section on the official forums. They assume that healing should be designed for the scenario where you and your static are reclearing this fight for the 5th, 6th, 14th time and everyone is doing every mechanic perfectly on muscle memory. Healing in XIV is designed around the idea that you have melee damage dealers who can't see an AOE without standing in it, ranged damage dealers who stand as far away as possible (and thus dodge all your AOE heals) and tanks who think getting their vulnerability up stacks (debuffs that increase how much damage they take) to double figures is a good idea.
Healing in XIV is about being there so other players can survive their mistakes, and as a result if your party doesn't make mistakes you don't have a lot to do. If you're with bad players, even the simplest dungeon can be an incredibly hectic and feel like you're constantly fighting fires. And it can be very satisfying to pull a party to a clear despite their many mistakes. I really enjoy that when repeatedly running the same instance as a healer, every run is different because you have to adjust to how good your party is- that unpredictability makes it my favourite role in the game (as well as many of my favourite Final Fantasy characters being White Mages, so in XIV I want to be a White Mage)
But ultimately, this strike will accomplish nothing because the official forums are a tiny minority of the player base and most healer mains are not on the official forums.

@NEStalgia ok thank you

Whenever I played MMOs, everyone cries for healers. Then the devs inevitably add other ways to heal, so that everyone can heal to some respect. Then nobody plays a healer.

@PegasusActual93 "Between this and the Stellar Blade costume meltdown it's no wonder gamers are so widely mocked right now"

Don't forget all the death threats towards developers. Remember how ND and Laura Bailey + her family got death threats just because of 'that scene' in TloU 2.

I even see a person in Bluepoint news who called Sony & Bluepoint as "arrogant & clueless" just because they didn't 'tease' their unfinished project.

The level of unreasonable acts from todays gamers is just ridiculous and worrying.

First off, the forums for FFXIV are filled with the worst of the worst. Second, this isn't going to be widespread but if it makes the few healers who will strike feel important - ok. Third, duty queues won't be an issue because since Shadowbringers, all MSQ dungeons can be done with an NPC party. So, I don't need a healer. Done.

Had no idea this was even a thing.

I reactivated my account and went back in this week. Clear the cobwebs before the expansion hits. I'm excited.

I have basically solo most of the game story. Duty Finder as needed. The party is what it is.

I stopped playing around 6.2 with a handful of 90s and everything else at least 80. To me, healer was always the most fun because I treated it as a DPS with bonus heals. Sure, the DPS was low, but it was still fun.

I always felt like "difficulty" was such a gray area in this game. None of the roles are difficult if you don't play them at their best. You can be lazy with any role and still get the job done if you really wanted. Why should healer be any different?

Balancing the jobs so that 'lazy' players can still have fun while the try-hards can go nuts without being OP HAS to be near impossible.

@jmac1686 This is what I was thinking. I love my AST although not my main I still play it religiously and I am not not going to heal and if I get into a a dungeon they have made it so that NPCs can be used as a replacement. All the high tier stuff is going to have a healer and people will play like this was never a thing. Plus Xeno is as toxic as they come and he hates healers and mages but pretty much anything that isn't a Warrior.

@Wiceheid I don't play this mmo. But I appreciate your explanation. I also like your approach from easy runs to hard with you mitigating the chaos. Sounds fun.

@ShadowofSparta Technically they disrupt other players because without healers you can't start duties on duty finder, if there isn't healers then the queue on duty finder will be a lot longer that it already is for DPSs at least.

Tbh, I don't know why they gave so many healing abilities to some classes like WARs as example, sometimes I play as WHM and some dungeons with a good tank that uses his mitigations properly you barely need to heal them and I just spam Holy and Glare/Dia all the time...

I thought that maybe devs wanted to make dungeons more doable if you have a bad healer in your party... That happens a lot of times too even with all the options that other classes have to heal themselves...

@Wiceheid exactly this.

And this is just being blown out of proportion from this website as it's always the vocal minority that gets the spotlight. Majority of FFXIV players don't use, visit, or even post in the official forum. I honestly didn't even know this was a thing till Push Square pushed it.