You know, the way this game is designed in 2025, mitigation is king, and 75% of the mitigation skills are not even controlled by the healers.
When people die to a heavy bleed, a lot of the time that's because they failed to mitigate it properly. When healers struggle to keep you alive in a mass pull, that's because you sucked at mitigation half the time. And another quarter of that is when the DPS is so bad everyone runs out of mitigations and healing.
I remember when doing O4S, that people who did that content early on all understood that healers can't outheal Almagest (at least, not easily) without mitigations, and that when people die to Almagest ticks a lot of the fault lies with the entire party, not just the healers. Even in high-end statics these days good players know that mitigation is more important than the actual healing throughput. But the bizarre reaction to P8S kinda just stunlocked me. That bleed wasn't even that rough if you mitigate it properly. Far less intense than Almagest. And yet, everyone just blamed the healer? When it's the tank's job to mitigate the bleed properly?
Yes, good players know that the tank should've done more. But this reflects an unhealthy trend with the game. Deaths in FF14 prior to the barrage of DDR body checks are often not solely the fault of healers. In Heavensward, you sometimes eventually get to a point where everyone just dies to autos and raidwides because the healers run out of MP... but we don't blame the healers, because we knew that mistakes causes the boss to get damage ups and so increases the stress on healers to a point where they could not outheal it anymore (back when MP was actually a resource that you had to manage...). Instead of body checks, the game punished mistakes more indirectly and gradually, in the form of a slow burn that made surviving harder and harder.
People did blame healers back then even though they might be the actual problem, but I think Square Enix has changed how content and the role are designed to remove as much responsibility from healers as possible, even in Stormblood (remember Disable?). It seems to me that the root of the problem is that most players are just simply not aware enough that their own mistakes ultimately lead to the healers getting overwhelmed, but Square Enix's medicine is to make healing trivially easy and let DPS and tanks handle much of their work instead. Does this even make sense? I mean think about it. The problem is that there is a lack of clarity that your mistake caused your death. The problem isn't that healing is too hard. But their medicine reveals that they thought that the problem is that healing is too hard.
Cleric Stance is another great example of this by the way. If you don't take unexpected damage, Cleric Stance isn't a huge deal at all. But if you start dropping mitigations randomly or eat some unexpected mechanic, the healer could be in a situation where they anticipate that you would survive for 5 seconds, switching into Cleric Stance, then you die because you did something stupid, but it might not register to you that it's your own fault because you see the healer casting a Stone in Cleric Stance as you die.
Perhaps, ultimately, this chain of causation is too much for the average player to understand. But SE could have tried to make this intricate system digestible to the average player. Instead, they opted to gut healers and put body checks everywhere so that healers no longer have any real stakes in the party's survival.
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When people die to a heavy bleed, a lot of the time that's because they failed to mitigate it properly. When healers struggle to keep you alive in a mass pull, that's because you sucked at mitigation half the time. And another quarter of that is when the DPS is so bad everyone runs out of mitigations and healing.
I remember when doing O4S, that people who did that content early on all understood that healers can't outheal Almagest (at least, not easily) without mitigations, and that when people die to Almagest ticks a lot of the fault lies with the entire party, not just the healers. Even in high-end statics these days good players know that mitigation is more important than the actual healing throughput. But the bizarre reaction to P8S kinda just stunlocked me. That bleed wasn't even that rough if you mitigate it properly. Far less intense than Almagest. And yet, everyone just blamed the healer? When it's the tank's job to mitigate the bleed properly?
Yes, good players know that the tank should've done more. But this reflects an unhealthy trend with the game. Deaths in FF14 prior to the barrage of DDR body checks are often not solely the fault of healers. In Heavensward, you sometimes eventually get to a point where everyone just dies to autos and raidwides because the healers run out of MP... but we don't blame the healers, because we knew that mistakes causes the boss to get damage ups and so increases the stress on healers to a point where they could not outheal it anymore (back when MP was actually a resource that you had to manage...). Instead of body checks, the game punished mistakes more indirectly and gradually, in the form of a slow burn that made surviving harder and harder.
People did blame healers back then even though they might be the actual problem, but I think Square Enix has changed how content and the role are designed to remove as much responsibility from healers as possible, even in Stormblood (remember Disable?). It seems to me that the root of the problem is that most players are just simply not aware enough that their own mistakes ultimately lead to the healers getting overwhelmed, but Square Enix's medicine is to make healing trivially easy and let DPS and tanks handle much of their work instead. Does this even make sense? I mean think about it. The problem is that there is a lack of clarity that your mistake caused your death. The problem isn't that healing is too hard. But their medicine reveals that they thought that the problem is that healing is too hard.
Cleric Stance is another great example of this by the way. If you don't take unexpected damage, Cleric Stance isn't a huge deal at all. But if you start dropping mitigations randomly or eat some unexpected mechanic, the healer could be in a situation where they anticipate that you would survive for 5 seconds, switching into Cleric Stance, then you die because you did something stupid, but it might not register to you that it's your own fault because you see the healer casting a Stone in Cleric Stance as you die.
Perhaps, ultimately, this chain of causation is too much for the average player to understand. But SE could have tried to make this intricate system digestible to the average player. Instead, they opted to gut healers and put body checks everywhere so that healers no longer have any real stakes in the party's survival.
Continue reading...