It's past time, Yoshi-P...

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Originally Posted by Ayer2015

I still say WoW's Mythic+ system offers one of the best casual end game system. Progress in difficulty as far as you can or desire to.

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As much as I'd love to be able to say "going to do +12... as just DPS... *sunglasses*", and have that be a viable (though far from ideal) option, Mythic+, in its simplicity, has been one of the first bits of living proof that casuals and the hardest of hardcore can still be ideally challenged by the same content. It's almost a meme-level counterexample to any point at which someone claims that casual and hardcore content cannot overlap, or are fundamentally different, rather than differing first and foremost in scale (and the rest being derivative).

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Originally Posted by Tridus

I mean, stuff like freecure and ehanced benefic II suggest pretty strongly that SE thinks we should be using Cure and Benefic. For some reason they then gave us a system where there's no particular reason to do that most of the time at endgame. Either they didn't intend for what we got and it's just too late to fix it for Stormblood, or the left hand and the right hand need to have a conversation..

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This may actually even be less an issue of broad design philosophy as just (1) a way to improve the hidden efficiency of Cure I and Benefic I in mana-intensive situations (which have only grown progressively fewer since ARR), or (2) specifically toolkit design issues, primarily due to the undertuned size of those bonuses, and their being overly dependent on RNG.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

Excellent job on both the personal attacks and completely misunderstanding my point.

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At least it seems to have worked as you finally understood that the current design is not a flaw just because of your subjective opinion on it.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

An addendum that is entirely beside the point I was making, and I will hope that noting such here will make it clear to certain people that again, it is not related to my statements above: The current healer meta is, in my opinion, dull. Periodic bursts of damage that are healed up in one or two GCDs in 8-man content, or damage so low and steady that all I have to do is maintain an aspected benefic on the tank in 4-man content =/= engaging healing content. I main AST because at least I have the addition of managing cards, but even that's just a couple GCDs here and there. The vast majority of my time is spent spamming a single damage nuke and occasionally refreshing a dot. Not exactly exciting.

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I understood your point from the very first post you made, which is why I expressed my incomprehension over the fact that you play a game which doesn't fulfill your preferences. You then got triggered for whatever reason and went "I don't need to justify myself to you! REEEEEEE! This game is flawed! Expectations!" (to summarize). And then I had to repeat myself three times while throwing some childish sarcasm at you because nothing else worked.

FFXIV has some similarities with other games, but it's not WoW, it's not Rift, it's not Wildstar. And it never will be. You already know it. You know that asking for such a drastic change is completly ridiculous. Yet, you still made the choice of playing the game and its healer jobs (no, sorry, just AST it seems when it comes to Stormblood) despite the fact that you don't like that system. People won't pity you for playing a game with an aspect you dislike, because you made your own choice of playing it regardless. And the game won't change one of its core design just for a few people like you who can't detach themselves from WoW-clones. In short, I have absolutly no idea what people like you expect when voicing their displeasure in such a way. You're pretty much just venting for the sake of it (edit: nothing wrong with that btw, as long as you present it that way).

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Now, there's one thing that I have to question you about: what is the most difficult content you've ever done in FFXIV? The way you speak about what you do when healing and your lodestone profile scream that you have absolutly no experience regarding anything past expert roulette.
I hope I'm wrong and that you're posting with an alt or something, because if that's really true, then you just lost all credibility for obvious reasons.

So please tell me you already play the current available content which would fulfill your needs about healing being more focused on... well, healing. (Otherwise I'm clearly being trolled and wasted some time already. If that's the case, well, good job. I completly fell for it.)


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@everyone: I want to remind you all that if you are looking for content which focus 100% on healing when you play AST, SCH or WHM, you can already find it in FFXIV. All you have to do, is head to Wolves' den.
You'll also be happy to know that there's a new mode about to hit on thuesday, which is definitly for people who would like some PvE elements instead of strict head-to-head combat.
Yes, it's PvP. But it's still content where you can express your true nature of a "pure healer" without anyone telling you anything about it. In fact, if you are a great "pure healer" you'll actually be praised. How awesome is that.
Fly my pretties, and show the world how you heal.

It looks like the thread has ran off on a tangent because some people mistaken the idea of role differences with difficulty, just like how some people are clearly mistaking playstyle preference and playskill abilities.

It's not about making things more difficult. It's about making tanks focus more on enmity and mitigation than on dps. Gearing choices and rotations of a tank should first and foremost be enmity and survivability considerations, and that doesn't necessarily have to make the game harder.

The proposition is to make it so that gearing and rotation choices are made based on enmity and survivability goals, not on pure dps potential. How it can be achieved is up to the devs. It also doesn't necessarily mean that tanks will have to do less dps. If you think so you need to shed your dps meta mindset and realize that dps is just a result of potency tuning, and any and all designs can be tuned to provide high or low dps.

Content can still be "easy", for those who are worried about casual play. And tanking can still be "hard", for those with the strange notion that high tanking dps is somehow good playskill.

Not a full solution, but what if SE were to tighten iLvl caps? Using Expert, for example. Ala Mhigo was rough my first time in my i290 gear, as was Shinryu normal. Now I can stomp both with impunity. While some of that can be attributed to experience, I have to think my i338 gear has a weeeee bit to do with it.

So I wonder, if there was a tighter iLvl limit, would it help make it feel more chalenging?

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Originally Posted by Zfz

It looks like the thread has ran off on a tangent because some people mistaken the idea of role differences with difficulty, just like how some people are clearly mistaking playstyle preference and playskill abilities.

It's not about making things more difficult. It's about making tanks focus more on enmity and mitigation than on dps. Gearing choices and rotations of a tank should first and foremost be enmity and survivability considerations, and that doesn't necessarily have to make the game harder.

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With regards to the bolded statement, the only way to improve on tank enmity and mitigation rather than just focus on “tank DPS” would be to scale content and make it “harder”/more difficult—make things hit harder, make tanks actually have to use their tank stances for mitigation/aggro, and be more proactive with their cooldown rotation.

As it stands now, even in Neo, tanks just need to pop a cooldown for the harder attacks like Aero, Earthshakers, or Double Attack; they don’t even need to be in their tank stance for it. With aggro resets, tanks can easily grab hate back from the WHM heal spam post-Almagest with MT-Provoke and OT-Provoke/Shirk. If you have a NIN in the group, Shade the MT, Smoke the WHM, and the MT never has to think about entering Shield Oath/Defiance/Grit. Consistent Provoke-Shirking on the OT’s part only makes it even more easier.

DRK, as flawed and in-need-of-help as the job is now, can hold aggro easily by just spamming Unleash over and over again without even being in Grit because of the enmity multiplier on the skill. But such a gameplay is incredibly boring, hence why a lot of tanks turn to their own personal DPS and stance-dancing. Because outside of their regular cooldown rotation, there isn’t need for much else, and I can understand their need to make the job more engaging.

Honestly, the only content where tank stance is needed is in dungeons with mega-pulls. Other than that, holding aggro is incredibly easy with a diligent tank, even more so if DPS and healers are mindful of their own enmity generation and control it as needed with enmity quellers and dumps; and things just don’t hit hard enough to warrant staying in stance 100% of the time.

I've been mulling over things, and I've had a potential idea for how SE could approach if they did actually decide to change it.

You know how in certain solo duties you get that "Breaking limits in a way only a Warrior of Light can" (for example, providing a 100% uptime powerful regen on tanks and DPS, and I'm not sure what on healers)? What if they retuned the DPS of healers and tanks to be garbage, made it so mitigation and healing was much harder, but in order to allow progression in solo content, that buff just shows up more often? With it being retweaked to allow for more damage from tanks and healers too. That would allow them to crush this "DPS meta" without breaking solo duty. Should they do it? I'm on the fence, as much as I'd love to see it, I fear it may end up being detrimental to the game. But, if they DID decide to pursue it, this is how they could do it.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

the only way to improve on tank enmity and mitigation rather than just focus on “tank DPS” would be to scale content and make it “harder”/more difficult

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I disagree. As a very simplistic example, we can make tanking enmity equivalent to tanking dps, i.e. by removing the damage penalty and making different stances suitable for tanking different things, then removing enmity bonuses and changing "enmity vs dps rotations" to "single target vs aoe rotations". Give tanks a moderate innate enmity bonus if you want to make life easier for leveling and entry level content.

You think there's only one way because you're thinking of minor adjustments, minor tunings based on the existing framework. I'm talking about a change to the core design itself.

Or more elaborate design changes can be made such that tank damage output becomes a derivative of enmity established on targets, instead of having enmity being a derivative of damage done on targets.

Mitigation can be elevated into mostly a strategic decision, i.e. gearing choices, and keeping the scripted cooldown schedules for the sake of assisting with encounter design. Secondary stats could work differently for tanks, with Tenacity giving passive mitigation, SkS reducing cooldown time, Crit giving a chance of randomized mitigation effect (e.g. one out of 3 different mitigation effects like "10% less damage for 5 seconds"/"shield worth 10% of healing received within 5 seconds"/"parry and block mitigates extra 25% damage for 5 seconds").

As such, I argue that there are possible designs to do what I said.

However, all this may be moot because devs seem happy about where the tanking design is at the moment. So this discussion is mostly academic.

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Originally Posted by HoodRat

With the things I've seen people say on this game's forums, it's hard to tell what's serious and what's not.

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Believe me, I know. :D

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Originally Posted by Zfz

I disagree. As a very simplistic example, we can make tanking enmity equivalent to tanking dps, i.e. by removing the damage penalty and making different stances suitable for tanking different things, then removing enmity bonuses and changing "enmity vs dps rotations" to "single target vs aoe rotations". Give tanks a moderate innate enmity bonus if you want to make life easier for leveling and entry level content.

You think there's only one way because you're thinking of minor adjustments, minor tunings based on the existing framework. I'm talking about a change to the core design itself.

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I have to agree here. Core changes greatly delimit our options in this regard. And even beyond them, there's always the question of whether we even need enmity-enhanced tools, as opposed to any other utility or output made available as the nth combo choice, or whether enmity should even be such an unvaried and long-term resource in the first place.

Personally, I'd greatly prefer something that helps sell the idea of a tank just being a greater center of enemy focus -- the most "in your face" of the party -- not just in terms of his or her own personal (enmity) modifiers, but likely also by siphoning off the other's perceived threat to take as his or her own. The extent of that can certainly vary, but simply ensuring that you have x long-term resource lead before attempting something, which (especially with the advent of Shirk and tanks' extant inability to siphon threat, such that you can fight the party's threat rather than just the enmity table's 2nd place) has never been any more interesting, if even ever as interesting, as Darkside's mana drain was in Heavensward. It's a very basic, very stale, and poorly representative way to handle the concept of a tank.

Put simply, though, there's a lot we could do to try to let tanks better embody the idea of being the center of attention if we think outside the limitations of our current enmity system, if only to explore other ideas. Would tanking be somehow "diminished" if rather than simply stacking a derivative value to "higher than #2", mobs were actually capable of refocusing their attention based on unique AI, and you as the tank were often required to intercept their attacks, rather than just holding their attention completely as to deny that complexity (a la meat shield)? Heck, would the overall concept of mitigation be diminished if DPS actually played a more significant part in it, not just through the all-or-nothing killing of enemies, but by being able to suppress, divert, or even kite them?

(You have a skill called Diversion, yet it functions as the exact opposite of its namesake. You have a skill called Shirk, but because of how Provoke works it ends up nothing but derivative-value-padding.)

Sidenote:

One concept I've seen tossed up in the past is to use secondary stats as internal resources with multifaceted use (with Dodge, Block, and Parry being linked to or included among these resources). For instance, let's say we simply have the stats Will (Det+General Miti), Break (Crit+Resist), and Speed (Attack Speed+internal resource regen speed). Now, generally, Will would be expended proportionate to the potencies of one's attacks, averaging out to a neutral regen/loss rate, but it also works against enemy attacks proportionate to the % of HP they'd reduce you by: the larger the hit, the more Will expended to keep you alive, which then has an impact on your damage following the blow. Tanks, at least in tank stance, would have a higher maximum defensive Will expense rate, but given their higher HP margins, they can also get more, defensively, out of that Will stat. Parry, Dodge, and Block, similarly, have strength influenced by current Will, and chances influenced by Break, while their ppm regen according to Speed, just as the regen rates of Will and Break themselves. Now, that would take a lot more internal calculation, but that is an example of where tanking and damage have obvious compromise.

Another such example might be something like a Stagger system, e.g. suppressive fire: just as DPS might then be able to wail on a dangerous enemy to reduce the charge rates of its spells or specials or reduce their potencies on use, tanks would in turn suffer for being the butt of enemy attacks, in rough proportion to how much their advantaging their team by being that (much more efficient) damage sponge. While a DPS could also tank for a time -- and with a certain portion of the threat of enemies being relegated to Stagger, allowing gradually increased damage against you, perhaps even better than they can now -- their smaller health pools, and being therefore more affected by Stagger, would make them more susceptible not only to gradually increasing damage against them, but greater loss to their own damage output, whereas a tank (roughly to what extent his damage is always diminished in exchange for having that higher HP, or his burst diminished for having burst mitigation tools) is more resistant to the output-damaging effects of Stagger.