Final Fantasy XIV's Trinity System is Broken

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Healers in WOW are about 40-60 DPS to healing at best 5-95 DPS to healing at hardest content

They overwhelmingly heal more than we do. They also have more complex DPS options

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It always cracks me up when people go all.. ''Sage is just like Discipline priest''
But it is as close to a Discipline priest as a Bottle of Coca cola is to a cup of tea.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

That's not all. I've been doing mentor roulette on various DPS roles lately. Sometimes the tank has died, and I've had aggro as the top DPS. I've eaten whole tank busters and healed myself up with Second Wind and Bloodbath. I've sometimes mitigated them with Feint, Shade Shift and abilities like that.

I've also had the tank die during pulls sometimes, so as the top DPS I've just hit Bloodbath and any DPS mitigation and Second Wind and lived.

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Bloodbath is just a bloodwhetting light, less of a problem in the current meta but still a very extreme version of selfheals. And there is a big difference between having a nonstandard team that completely excludes one role being technically possible but suboptimal, and that nonstandard team being optimal and trivially easy. In the first situation you can have a discussion if it's really intended to to be run like that, but that would not directly affect player's perception of their place in a group. The second situation very much does affect player's perception of their place in a group. If 4 melee dps players using bloodbath is shown to be the optimal way to run dungeons, without making it an absurdedly high difficuly challenge, that will also be a target for acute balance concerns.

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Originally Posted by aiqa

Bloodbath is just a bloodwhetting light, less of a problem in the current meta but still a very extreme version of selfheals. And there is a big difference between having a nonstandard team that completely excludes one role being technically possible but suboptimal, and that nonstandard team being optimal and trivially easy. In the first situation you can have a discussion if it's really intended to to be run like that, but that would not directly affect player's perception of their place in a group. The second situation very much does affect player's perception of their place in a group. If 4 melee dps players using bloodbath is shown to be the optimal way to run dungeons, without making it an absurdedly high difficuly challenge, that will also be a target for acute balance concerns.

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The main reason it's annoying to not have a tank is because of enmity shifting around which is really annoying and I think that is the primary reason. Tank busters can be taken by DPS on some bosses but are a risk, especially when not full HP, but they could take along a red mage to make sure. Bosses also die a lot faster with 4 DPS, so often the boss will die before it manages to kill all 4 of the DPS. It does depend on the dungeon too. They started syncing dungeons better due to what happened in Heavensward with Antitower, Lost City, Sohr Khai, Xelphatol and Gubal Library, which allow your item level to grow far more than modern dungeons do.

However, I think Bloodbath is something that risks taking the spotlight from healers in content with such low healing requirements. Bloodbath was very literally taken from Warrior and given to the DPS as it used to be a Warrior ability that has now been replaced with Raw Intuition/Bloodwhetting on a far shorter cooldown and far greater effect.

the thing is, the trinty been dead for a long time. its more like a box in games anways

you have the tanks, the damage dealers, thesupport heavy and the medics not just healer-tank-dps.

But i feel like alot of these issues can be fixed by making fights not about just damage done to it, and encourage people to do their job role more than dps focus healers need the support abilitys they have add in ff history.. we are hitting 100 yet we still have no support abilitys to buff up our party as a healer outside ast cards

One of the big issues that no one wants to admit is, the community simply isn't good enough to get what they are asking for. We've had bosses hit harder in previous expansions and you couldn't heal it. We've had DPS checks in previous expansions and you couldn't make it and you also have emnity checks in previous expansions and you couldn't hold it. This goes as far back to the original Steps of Faith if anyone remembers that. It was tough, required teamwork and hit hard. Nerfed within a few weeks because it was easier to nerf it than to improve.

Yoshi unfortunately has catered to the complaining that the community done when stuff was too hard for them and now we are where we are today. Stuff gets nerfed, jobs get gutted and the gameplay becomes bland. The common Johnny is here to play for the story and the majority of them make up the biggest revenue for Square. They have to cater to them.

Now people are asking for bosses to hit harder, more bleeds ect which is fine, except a lot of the community wont be able to heal it, you may be able to but you have to look at the bigger picture, it's no longer about increasing numbers. What is needed now is to reimplement punishments for failure. DPS checks, heal checks, mechanic checks and enrages even for normal modes need to return. It's absolutely no issue to wipe as long as people are learning something.

When you spoon feed people they learn nothing, level up and move on to harder content and they keep coasting until endgame and you get stuck with them and now any sort of challenge in any content automatically signals cries of nerfs or worse yet, they drop the game because it's either too hard or too easy for them.

Older players from this game will often tell you things were better back in the day, and they are right. Yes, we most certainly had plenty of Jank, missing QoL and Job balance but the gameplay made up for it. Would I go back now? For the job design and casual DF experience absolutely, but the lack of QoL would be very rough. We need to get both of these elements right.

Yeah it seems like the community has developed a wipe allergy on normal mode but the idea of a wipe shouldn't be so unforgivable and game-breaking as it's treated atm. It should be a normal aspect of the FF14 experience. After it happens you get up again and try once more.
If the idea of practicing normal-mode fights being good, valuable, and part of the game could make a return then perhaps this could also remove some of that fear of mistakes because they'd actively be encouraged and supposed to happen.

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Originally Posted by Asako

One of the big issues that no one wants to admit is, the community simply isn't good enough to get what they are asking for. We've had bosses hit harder in previous expansions and you couldn't heal it. We've had DPS checks in previous expansions and you couldn't make it and you also have emnity checks in previous expansions and you couldn't hold it. This goes as far back to the original Steps of Faith if anyone remembers that. It was tough, required teamwork and hit hard. Nerfed within a few weeks because it was easier to nerf it than to improve.

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The problem with that duty in particular was language barrier. It would have been fine if the game had proximity voice chat, but it doesn't, and 100% of games that have it become toxic when playing with people you don't know. It had specific mechanics that had to be done to pass it, and people would just sooner vote abandon than read.

I want to see more things "like" steps of faith that require doing the mechanics successfully to win it, not simply burning the boss down before it reaches the goal. You know, like "tower/fort/hamlet defense" things where you have 24 players, one group of 8 per "entrance", and it has specific times where even if you are "doing good" the defenses are destroyed by like an enemy's cannon or something and you have to move inwards. As long as you can survive for, 20 minutes and keep all the enemies from breaking through you win.

Unfortunately the game's present design wouldn't allow for this to work, because a hamlet-defense game requires a working trinity. Steps of Faith was fun if you had people who knew the mechanics, but nobody wanted to explain the mechanics, and DPS players just don't understand what mechanics are, just "don't step in lava". Healers and Tanks in Steps of Faith had no actual purpose other than to use the canons or the restraints. The Dragon didn't stop and follow the tank, it just moved forward. If you died it was faster to just "revive from start" and run back to where the dragon was. What "steps of faith" should have been was something that let any combination of players, but it also should have been like a 24-player duty. Doesn't it seem silly that we're defending ishgard... with 8 people?

I want to see a return of some content that encourages exploring, rather than the "nerfing dungeon to 25% of it's original size" Did you know that Toto-rak was much, much much larger? Because it was a puzzle dungeon. We've seen some of this come back in the form of the Variant Dungeon, but that's still, barely, what used to be in the game.

But what has happened with party setups is we keep being pushed towards instant-gratification mechanics (just keep hitting 1-2-3, and look for floor lava) rather than there being anything the player has to do. Remember Stone Vigil? Remember when you had to fire canons during a boss fight? Yep, gone. These were prime mechanics for letting the healer do something other than heal.

Likewise mechanics in Dzemael Darkhold, also a 1.0 dungeon. They've nerfed the 1.0 dungeons to the point that they're no longer exploration/puzzle dungeons. What I want to see is not a "variant" dungeon but a progress-persistent, huge, dungeon that your progress is gatekept by finding the keys dropped by the bosses. Everyone in the party has to fight the boss, but once you've fought a boss you never have to fight it again to progress (or you could if you want to farm it for drops) because you have already unlocked the door. But perhaps that's too much to ask from FFXIV's tiny dungeon maps.

Imagine for a minute that you need certain jobs to pass certain dungeon mechanics. (Not the boss room mechanics) dungeon rooms that only open to certain jobs, loot behind them only for the job, and you need the key from that room to progress to the next one. Sastasha actually had some of this mechanic. So did Qarn. Where extra loot rooms were available if you just did the mechanic correctly.

I just dont want to cast broil for 30 seconds and then reapply a dot.. and repeat over and over and over and over again. My brain is literally melting from running scholar in any content that is not ultimates.
Even if i do have to heal. its gonna be an ogcd anyways so im still not losing uptime on broil casts lol. i really hate where the role has gone

Oh shoot, a graph! NOW we are talking!

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

I want to see a return of some content that encourages exploring, rather than the "nerfing dungeon to 25% of it's original size" Did you know that Toto-rak was much, much much larger? Because it was a puzzle dungeon. We've seen some of this come back in the form of the Variant Dungeon, but that's still, barely, what used to be in the game.

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Impossible because the game runs on hand outs. rewards for everything rewards for nothing. and it throws out so many rewards it destroys every other aspect of the game to.

deep dungeons are a perfect example here. they try to encourage exploring by throwing in those sacks to be found in random rooms. yet they give players so many sacks and rewards that all that happens is the market boards get flooded with stuff and crashes the value of rewards so heavily that players completely ignore them and literally just activate the portal and go go go.. also destroys the economy for craters and gatherers, because suddenly something can cost 100k to make but be worth a whopping 1or2k on the markets.

the same thing happnens in dungeons even at the highest end. where a treasure chest is literally right there in the corner of that room but gets ignored because its contents aren't worth taking 3 or 4 seconds to run over and open..

Retainer ventures and stuff aswell when they add new stuff to the Retainer pool it destroys the economy omy because suddenly things that take a fair bit of time and effort to craft nose dive to literally a couple of hundred gils because there's thousands of retainers flooding the game with them.

the biggest issue the game has is its dumbed down and simplified everything so much there is no room for fun or rewarding gameplay and its so afraid to even slightly punish players for mistakes and equally afraid to reward them for playing well. melee positionals are a good example here. missing them is no big deal. you wont even notice.. but that ultimately means landing them carries no weight or impact. at best like 2 extra potency per second...

debuffs are another, fail a mechanic get vulnerability.. but its such a small thing you can often get 5 6 7 stacks and still be fine...the down side here is its not really you that gets punished but your healer dfor your mistakes.. but at hte same time not really because its still just 1 aoe heal whether you have 0 stacks or 3.

Same thing with stuns and silences. Had there damage taken away because they weren't being used correctly and simply being spammed for a minor dps increase. Which is now also what they're doing with gap closers it seems.

The problem here though is how often do you ever actually need to stun anything or rush anything. You don't because again to afraid to punish players for failing.

to make the game fun and rewarding things need impact and weight, and virtually every aspect of the game lacks that. and any form of complexity has been stripped away for fear of players making mistakes...

the thing is though you cant have a deep and engaging combat system thats fun to play with. if the game doesnt have deep and engaging systems for players to interact with...

and i know yoshi has said that he regrets dumbing the game down so much and wants to change directions but honestly i think its too late. this lazy mode gameplay has been so ingrained that anything that deviates will get so much backlash.. all you have to do is look at any instance where there even the smallest hint of an increase in difficulty to see it.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Impossible because the game runs on hand outs. rewards for everything rewards for nothing. and it throws out so many rewards it destroys every other aspect of the game to.

deep dungeons are a perfect example here. they try to encourage exploring by throwing in those sacks to be found in random rooms. yet they give players so many sacks and rewards that all that happens is the market boards get flooded with stuff and crashes the value of rewards so heavily that players completely ignore them and literally just activate the portal and go go go.. also destroys the economy for craters and gatherers, because suddenly something can cost 100k to make but be worth a whopping 1or2k on the markets.

the same thing happnens in dungeons even at the highest end. where a treasure chest is literally right there in the corner of that room but gets ignored because its contents aren't worth taking 3 or 4 seconds to run over and open..

Retainer ventures and stuff aswell when they add new stuff to the Retainer pool it destroys the economy omy because suddenly things that take a fair bit of time and effort to craft nose dive to literally a couple of hundred gils because there's thousands of retainers flooding the game with them.

...

and i know yoshi has said that he regrets dumbing the game down so much and wants to change directions but honestly i think its too late. this lazy mode gameplay has been so ingrained that anything that deviates will get so much backlash.. all you have to do is look at any instance where there even the smallest hint of an increase in difficulty to see it.

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If there are no rewards, people won't run them, but if the rewards are random, and frequently garbage (I'm sorry but gacha-style rewards are garbage) then people are just going to run them for the experience to level and then never touch them. This game already "Bloats" your inventory with the raid drops as it is. You would think that the game would just have a separate "raid token currency" like it does with the beast tribes, so players don't end up with all this junk when they're dropped into a roulette.

Fixing the game economy is an entirely other discussion. I'd make the argument that the way to fix that is to just make the marketboard, retainers and housing work at the data-center level rather than the way it works now which would require visiting every server on every data center to find the best price. But it would also require crafters to actually "craft", to supply NPC vendors with the items they sell to players. Not this "collectible" system which exists to level the crafter but does nothing for the game economy. Imagine for a moment that only crafted HQ gear was available, and tomes/tokens gear was level 1 glamor gear only. it would unfortunately only reward people for buying the maximum retainers, so maybe it's best left as it is.

That said, let's go back to the trinity conversation. My point in the last post was that perhaps there could be dungeons that the goal isn't "clearing it" but exploring it, thus you can only open certain doors or paths with certain jobs. You could only clear certain enemies or bosses with a certain job in the party. If you wanted to solo it, you would need to re-visit it with every job once to clear every path and get every reward. And if you wanted the rewards again you could NG+ it, but you have to get all the rewards from it before you can reset it.

Take for example how Totorank originally was:
https://i.ibb.co/xD2GBgH/Totorak-map.png

Versus now:
https://i.ibb.co/dDD0XGz/p2uigwfsj2t81.webp

IMO - even if you abolish the trinity system and turn all kits into dps + unique skills to a job, that doesn't change the fact that they failed to design healers (and tanks to a certain degree) engaging and unique enough within their own role - like imagine every caster having the exact same core rotation or design, ppl would rage!
And even higher incoming damage won't really solve anything as you'll be shifting your glares into just cure spam...

I'd personally get rid of the trinity at this point and distribute tank/healing/support skills evenly across jobs that would suit them thematically while having all jobs build as dps at it's core design philosophy.
While this would work in premade runs, matchmaking via dutyfinder very difficult.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

That said, let's go back to the trinity conversation. My point in the last post was that perhaps there could be dungeons that the goal isn't "clearing it" but exploring it, thus you can only open certain doors or paths with certain jobs. You could only clear certain enemies or bosses with a certain job in the party. If you wanted to solo it, you would need to re-visit it with every job once to clear every path and get every reward.

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The thing is it's very much a case 9f not seeing the forest because too busy looking at a tree.. it's all about the bigger picture..

The start of your post you said if there are no rewards people won't run the content. True. But it all ties in together with the economy and other stuff those rewards have to seen as valuable to be deemed as worth it or be an incentive.. and this is where deep dungeons provided the perfect example. In the first days the value of rewards from those sacks is very much worthwhile and everyone would run to every corner of every room. To explore and find them. But after the initial days when the markets are flooded with all the rewards they'll value plummets and so does the incentive to explore those rooms. The rewards for doing so are deemed not worth it.

How are you going to incentivise players to run and explore that content without valuable rewards..

Rarity is valuable. That's why when there's a shiny new mount you often see people showing it off because it's rare and perceived as valuable.. but then they inevitably add unsliced and let everyone have it effortlessly and you'll almost never see anyone use that mount ever again because everyone has it its perceived as common and worthless..

Rng is no bad thing as long as you can mitigate extreme bad fortune. Somehow. Ex primal for example have rng rewards but also mitigate bad fortune by providing a token you can save up and trade in. The biggest issue there is players grind the hell out of it because often it's basically the only thing to do that patch.

Everything is connected then trinity system the economy the reward structure not just items but gameplay. The jobs you can't really stand out to much for playing well becausendevs are so afraid to punish players who don't. Which is why something like landing a positional has no weight or Impact. Because can't punish a player for missing it. And by extention can't reward a player for hitting it.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Everything is connected then trinity system the economy the reward structure not just items but gameplay. The jobs you can't really stand out to much for playing well becausendevs are so afraid to punish players who don't. Which is why something like landing a positional has no weight or Impact. Because can't punish a player for missing it. And by extention can't reward a player for hitting it.

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People who played 1.0 (or even other games with other kinds of dungeon design) have experienced more interesting things to do. But just about every MMORPG out there focuses on DPS. Even the gacha games do this. You can have a healer and a tank in the party, but all that happens is the opponents kills the healer first, the tank can only grab one of the incoming hits.

All-DPS content is exceptionally boring because that means the dungeon only needs to be designed for boss burn, everyone makes a bee line to the boss room, and then uses whatever nuke they brought into the dungeon. Basically it replaces strategy and choreography with brute force.

Moggle Mog, and the post-HW story with the Warriors of Darkness are the only fights in the game that insist on you fighting the opponents in a specific order or you fail the fight. That said nearly dungeon and trial in the game is a single boss, and a few trash mobs that sometimes appear in the boss room. That part of combat design probably needs a revamp, boss+2 adds that can't stand next to each other, and the adds explicitly ignore the tank, thus giving the DPS something they have to actually focus on, and the healer to use their single-target heals.