Encounter Design needs to be overhauled at a fundamental level

Can I be real? I don't like the idea of healers having to just sit back and heal. The healing kits, with the exception of AST, have nothing that interesting in them. You press a button, health bars go up, done. AST has a couple of gimmicks where you have to put it before hand, and that can be sort of fun. Imo, I love the idea of being a combat medic, that to me is what a healer should be. I hate the idea that healers should just be there to kiss booboos while everyone else gets to do big explosions. What I would prefer is the DPS half of my kit to not be 1 button spam, and for it to not feel like something I do when I have nothing else better to do, Im a soldier with everyone else and I want to feel like that. Yes, I'll patch you up, as is my job, but combat medics have guns too.

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Originally Posted by Akiudo

however you have to realize that "base behaviour" of the boss is not "completely separate to the plethora of 'Don't stand in the bad' mechanics that define the actual difficulty of XIV's encounters." as you called it

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Except, there's a little thing called how these mechanics interact. Especially in the scope of XIV.

In XIV, don't stand in the bad mechanics often result in death. Meaning healers use Swiftcast Raise. Irregardless of what the boss is doing (Otherwise, they often leave the person on the floor until Swiftcast is ready).

Otherwise, all Tanks and Healers are spamming DPS skills.

Adding more Tank and Healer duties to the base boss, doesn't change this. It still doesn't interact with the other mechanics, they're still going to insta-kill at the same rate.

The only difference is, instead of Tanks and Healers spamming only DPS skills, they're now also using Tank and Healing skills. The number of GCD's being used stays the same (Since, time between "Buster" skills and mechanics are not changing), the focus on pumping out maximal numbers of GCD's stays the same (Thus, positioning to account for the mechanics to run out of).

The only difference being, that there is now a minor level of thought going into "Do I press a damage button or a heal button" or "Do I press a damage button or a mitigation button" - With potential to create some overlap to allow for more dynamic gameplay at the higher levels (I.e. Stuff like a Tank going "Oh, some DPS need healing, I better pop a defensive CD so the healer has more time to heal them up before the next mechanic" or a healer going "Oh, the tank has popped a defensive CD, I'll use this time to pump out some extra damage while healing is less required")

Overall mechanics will continue being the same, irregardless and fight difficulty will still hinge upon those mechanics because at the core, the base mechanics of bosses will continue to be simple. Merely having healing GCD's be necessary instead of some damage GCD's won't notably increase difficulty. Especially when a LOT of the bad players already play "Pure Healer".

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Originally Posted by Billythepancake

Can I be real? I don't like the idea of healers having to just sit back and heal.

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Though, the general idea is for the balance of such a thing to be that healers don't simply heal 100% of the time. Hence why I suggested Tanks get more onus on mitigating their own incoming damage.

There can be a balance between damage and healing skills for healers, it doesn't have to be pure damage like current or a pure heal rotation.

It merely requires damage to be tuned appropriately, so heals are useful and needed to top off players throughout the fight, but without being so direly needed to take over the entire gametime of a healer.

Additionally, in such a scenario where more frequent healing is being used, there offers more space for gameplay designs such as the Lily system that can cause healing and damage to be intertwined.

You forgot "dont get knocked off the platform lololol" on 90% of fights.

Because we fight almost everything on magical floating space platforms now, for reasons.


In terms of how you can work healers, its not all that hard.

Move towards more overall healing % being on GCD's at a lower power, then the OCD's are chock full of modifiers for those.

Use this cooldown to make your next heal add a regen component.
Use this cooldown to lower the cost of your next heal.
Use this cooldown to make your next heal crit.
Use this cooldown to make your next heal instant cast.
Use this cooldown to increase the potency of your next heal
Use this cooldown to deal damage equal to a cast of your GCD damage spell on your targets target.
and so on, based on the class.

Toss in a majority of their damage from OCD abilities with short to moderate cooldowns (bonus points if you code them like sympathetic spells in other games, where if cast on an enemy it hits that target, and if cast on an ally, hits their target) designed to be regularly weaved in, moving decisions towards "what am i weaving between casts next" and the generic stone/ruin used as a GCD filler spell when leveling or not having to heal.

I agree with the observations but I would go the other way for adjustments.

The root problem is that healers are far too powerful, which means the only way, for the devs, to make players lose, is to use mechanics that healers can't act upon (= one-shot and vulnerability debuff). Encounters are designed with healers seen as a problem to circumvent.

Thus I would suggest to reduce healing potency, mana regen and enemy damage. Also add more diversity in healers toolkit.

It would also increase the leeway for the battle designers : boss fights all behave the same and are boringly slow since it relies mainly on one-shot to make players lose. Lower damage would allow faster-paced fights.

(as an aside : fights with constant ko/raise/ko/raise/etc. don't look epic at all, like a bad parody of a DBZ fight...)

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On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if 6.0 healers and tanks actually become green and blue dps. These jobs would get full-fledged dps rotation (and buffs skills for Ast for example), less cure abilities, and some mechanic like "higher auto-regen for each healer alive in the party" because what we're currently doing isn't very different than the auto-regen in a FPS game.
And that would be their excuse to finally add a 4th hea... green dps.

These suggestions read like a WoW game with some single player RPG stat mechanics. Basically, you're asking for more damage to be output by a boss in order to force healers and tanks to take on additional responsibilities while dps keep as they are. This would potentially create a high skill divide that can no longer exist in savage and below modes with FFXIV's population as it is now. If you're keen to notice people complaining about their roles, you should be keen to notice people complaining about how hard savage is.

I think you need to accept the game for what it is, and aoe dodging simulator from 2010.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Considering the current state of the game, where Healers are severely lacking in number these days, BECAUSE they had their responsibilities and engagement ripped out thanks to dumbing down of filler DPS duties with no change in healing responsibilities. I doubt that is the case.
We even have a thread over in the Healer section that is getting more and more full of long term healers who've quit healing to go play DPS jobs because they offer more engagement.

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Its a gameplay issue which does not require to radically change entire game content. We dont need to make healers heal 100% of time, some people including myself like the FFXIV approach to healing classes, where they are able to deal damage almost equal to the tanks damage.
People complained about healer changes not because they dont heal all the time, but because their dps stuff has been simplified.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

So... Why is it that we need to let braindead healers and tanks continue to function? We don't let braindead DPS get away with doing nothing, with various DPS checks (E8 and Cinder Drift both have phases where the boss just spams AoE until death. E7 has the adds that need to be killed before they explode and wipe the party. Even way back in ARR content we had things like Ifrit that required killing of the nail before he nuked everyone)
If people perform poorly, they either need to learn, or get kicked.

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Ok but your suggestion is to make things harder than they currently are which is never going to happen. SE devs focus is completely different, they want all people play their game, including those playing on console which tend to be more casual than pc players.
With really strict policy on the third party apps you cant crank the difficulty up, just look at orborne monastery alliance raid and see how many people had a problem playing it and how many more avoided playing those 70 lvl raids by lowering down their ilvl. Not you give a tank a responsibility to do and share that responsbility with healer and make it 2 times harder for them.
I could see like through glass endless number of parties failing to finish raids because dps would just stand in stupid and die, healers would go green dps mode and let tank die, and tanks never using CDs. That would be a hot mess.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

If a Tank dies, the OT will get hit.

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Not really, OT will be at the bottom of the list, unless he is playing with turning on and off the tank stance, which i almost never seen people doing.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

It's not going to inject frustration into the game to make people actually have to play it.
As it stands right now, passive damage taken by tanks is pretty much covered by applying a Regen and Shield to them. Meaning that for the other GCD's between "Busters", healers spam nukes.
Simply increasing damage frequency to replace some of that nuke spam with GCD heals, shouldn't make things more frustrating, unless someone is only playing healer so they can spam nukes all day (Though, from what I gather from healer reactions, that's the exact opposite of what they want to do)

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Thats the thing for normal difficulty content, but healer does not only heal a tank, he heals dps that tend to get hit by a lot of stuff. Healers job is as easy as good their team is, but god forbid having a team with a tank that never uses CD is undergeared and casters DPS who are having their feets made out of concrete.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Though, that's what this sort of change is supposed to address. Going forward with encounter designs that specifically include more damage, allows for the class design team to focus on creating more parity in classes ability to function in the role. As opposed to now where their entire balance decision revolves around making sure all the jobs do equal DPS.
More emphasis on mitigation and healing means more focus on balancing mitigation and healing. More making Tanks actual tanks, not Blue DPS and more making healers actual healers not Green DPS.

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The thing about balance is that its a matter of choice for the most part done by the players themselves.
You could balance tanks a healers to do their jobs the same way, but then players will find something that will make certain job better than everything else.
And for example you are going to make deffences of all tanks equal, DRK, WAR, GNB, PLD will have the same deffence options, what is going to happen? People will play GNB because of higher dps and PLD because of support dps and there will be no point playing war or drk over those two.
With those changes you are putting more variables into equation.
Right now all tanks are playable, because their own deffences are more than enough to cover damage mitigation.

Im all for more challenging content, however i want it seperate to the normal, a middleman between normal and savage/ultimate should be implemented.

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Originally Posted by Barraind

Move towards more overall healing % being on GCD's at a lower power, then the OCD's are chock full of modifiers for those.

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The issue here is that simply moving healing throughput to GCD's doesn't really achieve much.

The game will still mostly be just "Boss uses Tankbuster" Healer presses ST heal skill to heal tank to full. "Boss uses Raidbuster" Healer presses AoE heal skill to heal everyone to full. The rest of the time will simply be "Keep Regen on Tank and mash nukes".

Since the issue isn't how much healing oGCD's provide, but how frequently damage is done that needs healing. With it basically being limited to "Buster" skills, especially due to how lethal avoidable damage is.

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Originally Posted by Genz

I agree with the observations but I would go the other way for adjustments.

The root problem is that healers are far too powerful, which means the only way, for the devs, to make players lose, is to use mechanics that healers can't act upon (= one-shot and vulnerability debuff). Encounters are designed with healers seen as a problem to circumvent.

Thus I would suggest to reduce healing potency, mana regen and enemy damage. Also add more diversity in healers toolkit.

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Though, this would only really suffice for the avoidable damage. But if people are avoiding the damage (Which they should, as it's not too hard except in Savage+) then you're back to the same position of only having the core behaviour of the boss to deal with. Which is, only damaging attacks on set timers (I.e. "Busters") and fluff damage mostly if not entirely dealt with by rolling regens.

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Originally Posted by VirusOnline

If you're keen to notice people complaining about their roles, you should be keen to notice people complaining about how hard savage is.

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I see more people complaining about how easy Savage is than how hard it is.

I see more people complaining about how healing is only fun in Ultimate than how hard Savage is.

This is to say nothing about how Tank/Healer responibilities are merely being shifted away from "Muh DEEPS" into something actually appropriate for the role. DPS aren't being changed because "Muh DEEPS" is exactly what DPS should be prioritizing.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

This is to say nothing about how Tank/Healer responibilities are merely being shifted away from "Muh DEEPS" into something actually appropriate for the role. DPS aren't being changed because "Muh DEEPS" is exactly what DPS should be prioritizing.

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Except doing damage is everyone's role. The first ability every job/class gets is a damaging ability. A healer is a DPS that specializes in healing while a tank is a DPS that specializes in surviving while a regular DPS is just a DPS that does not specialize in either of those two.

This isn't like WoW where every class has a spec for damage. Damage is baked in to the role itself as all jobs have only one role. And the point of every combat is to beat the enemy.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Shifting the healing power towards GCD's doesn't mean deleting oGCD's. It just means that instead of oGCD's being like 1200 potency and nigh full healing a Tank in one go, it will be less potent like ~400 ish potency heal to use as a bonus to throughput.

If anything, shifting the healing power towards GCD's and reducing the overall potency of oGCD's can result in MORE weaving potential, as CD timers for oGCD's can be reduced since they aren't in danger of completely trivializing all damage dealt in an encounter by simply healing through every attack for 0 MP and 0 GCD cost.

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That's fair.

Incoming damage being so low is definitely a factor though. I shouldn't be able to comfortably heal an entire 8 man raid on a handful of cd's and a lily heal every 30 sec. It's not that the oGCD's trivialize the damage, it's that the damage itself is trivial. I've had progression, messy or high end fights where I'm digging into every GCD I have, so it is possible for GCD's to be useful. But I agree the balance could be better.