Would you consider greedy DPS Mechanics on Tanks/Healers good or bad?

In a way, we do have “greedy” parts of healer job design currently: the decision of whether or not to use GCD heals/shields. But now it’s only to a minor degree, if you use your other tools and both healers are playing well then they don’t feel very necessary outside the more difficult heal checks in later Savage floors or in Ultimate.

This is fun when I get to plan ahead and make sure enough healing is getting done do can I can safely attack more. It’s annoying when my Party Finder cohealer is a new player that heard on the internet that they “shouldn’t” press their gcd heals/shields, and I have to do the majority of the healing because they won’t gcd shield/heal and are not good yet at using their other ways to heal and mitigate damage.

So IMO the idea is fun, although depends on the other players in your party, but to me that’s fine in a cooperative game. Ideally it would be noticeable in game how I’m personally performing so my reward isn’t “if someone is running a third party program then I can see a bigger number on some web site.” If someone is trolling and not doing their part then I can avoid playing with them, and I really hope the devs do more to actually teach players how to play in raids.

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Originally Posted by Voryn

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Yeah, it sucks being on the receiving end of a co-healer that's decided you should just do all of it. I honestly thought making lossless healing would've helped with that when they introduced it in EW, but I've come around to thinking it may have just made it worse and taught some players to avoid dps-lossy healing at all costs. I do think a lossless style isn't a bad idea for one job in the role to have, like SGE since its whole schtick was supposed to be healing + attacking simultaneously, but it just may not be the best norm for the role.

Back with original Cleric's Stance, I didn't play healers much, however, I always felt it was too punishing if you happen to make a mistake or not use it at all. Reducing healing, increasing damage AND swapping MND and INT was too much.

However, onto tank stance, which I have much more experience with.

Everyone seems to have this expectation that it was a trade off between a defensive build and a DPS build, by the end, it was not. Starting in ARR, the game and the playerbase were still very new and inexperienced, tanks were still at the point where, for the most part, it dodn't matter that you were in tank stance. However, towards the end of ARR, more and more higher end groups were playing around with tanking in DPS stance, though it didn't really catch on in the wider playerbase. Once HW was released, and the infamous Gordias raid, more emphasis on tanks and healers maximising damage, which meant they needed to be in DPS stance as much as possible. This was easily achieved with Warrior and to a lesser extent Paladin, mainly for the fact they had enmity increases on their DPS combos. Dark Knight got by with high damage and rising on the wave Warrior created.

Come SB, tanks in DPS stance was expected. Every DPS had an enmity reduction and the role of tank stance was, use at the start of a fight, swap to DPS for the rest. You then relied on your other party members to press that enmity reduction button so they didn't take enmity off of you. Guess how often that happened in random groups. However, rather than the DPS taking responsibility, it was the tank's job to correct for it and in the process, massively reduce their DPS. Tanks would complain about the DPS and the DPS would just say the tanks should do their jobs. It was a mess.

Then, with defensives being really strong, that you were in no danger from dying if you mitigated properly (which, for most content, was just mitigating the tank buster), there was really no upside to tank stances at all. Not to mention how janky some feel to swap (Warrior, again, getting the best deal). Any time you had to swap into tank stance, or use the enmity combo, it was just a punishment on tanks, which was largely caused by someone else being lazy.

Keeping enmity just above the party? How are you measuring that? You cannot accurately stay 'just above' when the scaling for the enmity bars changes throughout the fight. I have done many posts on the tank forums over the years explaining why, in my opinion, the tank/dps stances did not work how people thought they did and why SE came to the conclusion to make them as they are now. You aren't rewarded for using DPS stance, you were punished for tank stance.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

I enjoyed mana shift as a BLM - back when MP actually ran out if you misused it.

The only thing I didn't enjoy was TP and goad - the concept of your player getting too physically tired to attack was a bit too much for me.

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Mana Shift is fine, but Goad bad, despite the fact they are basically the same thing. Run out of TP, Goad, Run out of MP, Mana Shift. Explain to me why you enjoyed one, but not the other as it seems to be a contradiction.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Once HW was released, and the infamous Gordias raid, more emphasis on tanks and healers maximising damage, which meant they needed to be in DPS stance as much as possible. [...]

Come SB, tanks in DPS stance was expected. Every DPS had an enmity reduction and the role of tank stance was, use at the start of a fight, swap to DPS for the rest. You then relied on your other party members to press that enmity reduction button so they didn't take enmity off of you. Guess how often that happened in random groups. However, rather than the DPS taking responsibility, it was the tank's job to correct for it and in the process, massively reduce their DPS. Tanks would complain about the DPS and the DPS would just say the tanks should do their jobs. It was a mess.

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The folks on the healer boards gave me a quick rundown on what healer dps was capable of when that particular raid happened a while back, but it sounds like tanks were also having something similar going on, then? It seems like they've struggled to figure out what to do about support dps ever since and ended up with where we are now.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Mana Shift is fine, but Goad bad, despite the fact they are basically the same thing. Run out of TP, Goad, Run out of MP, Mana Shift. Explain to me why you enjoyed one, but not the other as it seems to be a contradiction.

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It does seem like it doesnt it? However, it stands from a belief that a Mana pool is a finite resource where you must choose your spells wisely and tactfully as a mage to not deplete your mana unnecessarily. In this scenario you can choose to cast very powerful spells that will deplete it quickly or less powerful ones that will make it last longer. FFXIV doesn't have much of this but think Raise for example.

Where as TP was a stamina bar, and I did not enjoy it because it was basically used for standard physical moves that consumed a set amount of stamina unless you tried to sprint, in which case GGWP. So Stamina for me is taking it too far because it's a level of realism I don't much enjoy in my character as it limits basic attacks and movements. YOU COULD, arguably, add TP for more special moves or utility moves that deplete a bar but that would be essentially MP, not TP (Stamina) DRK has this concept built in to it.

If you don't see a difference thats fine, I was just sharing why they are different from me. But it's a matter of perspective. I don't equate magic spells with = swing sword move.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

Personally I'm okay with them but there is an overemphasis on damage in this game that bugs me. I'd also like to see more randomized mechanics that force downtime on random players so that outputting damage isn't the end all be all of the game.

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So long as the win condition is, "get the enemy's HP down to zero," outputting damage will always be a top consideration. And there's nothing wrong with this, per se.

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We need to find a way to diversify gameplay so that people can't obsess over their score on a third party site.

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This. The problem enters when jobs and encounters are so heavily scripted that it becomes feasible to work out what maximal damage entails and to actually execute it.

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For a game that doesn't allow plug ins it is crazy how it became consumed by balance and homogenization as well as uptime. All these are in service of players being able to enjoy a consistent experience and rank each other on a third party site.

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I suspect SE cares very strongly that every job be "viable," but when combined that with infrequent patches (updates), that leads to very "conservative" job designs. I'd bet they'd be more willing to take some creative risks if, say, they could update action potencies weekly or daily without taking the game offline.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

It does seem like it doesnt it? However, it stands from a belief that a Mana pool is a finite resource where you must choose your spells wisely and tactfully as a mage to not deplete your mana unnecessarily. In this scenario you can choose to cast very powerful spells that will deplete it quickly or less powerful ones that will make it last longer. FFXIV doesn't have much of this but think Raise for example.

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I wasn't a heavy caster user back in SB, so I wonder how often casters ran out of MP? I don't every remember running out of MP, which is why I ask. However, you specifically mentioned Black Mage. Whether this is because you only used Black Mage or you only enjoyed using Mana Shift as a Black Mage I do not know, however, Black Mage is the only caster I can say for definite that has an effectively infinite MP pool, so the cost to the Black Mage is essentially zero.

Mechanically, Mana Shift and Goad were virtually identical. You use it on someone else, they get a resource. Yet, you liked one over the other. Has nothing to do with TP being bad or anything like that, just the pure mechanics behind the 2 actions where one is bad and the other isn't. To me, it is just odd.

Casters ran out of MP when raising too much or just outright dying and being raised, like today, except recovery was a lot harder due to an extremely poor regen outside of Lucid uses (or party support refreshes). MP rotations were rarely MP neutral as well, especially in HW.

In dungeons and heavy AoE scenari, they did run out of MP on a regular basis especially with pulls taking too long, much like physical classes did with TP due to the steep cost behind those moves. BLM was an exception, but other jobs were affected by this to various degrees. BLM was literally valued for being a mana battery with manashift, especially appreciated by BRDs for Foe Requiem maximization.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

So long as the win condition is, "get the enemy's HP down to zero," outputting damage will always be a top consideration. And there's nothing wrong with this, per se.

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The *few* instances where this isn't the wincon are fun to me just for the variety, like the second boss from Bardam's Mettle, and the Wraith adds in Delly Regina Savage that you need to *heal* to max HP rather than damage... even if that makes Benediction hilariously overpowered in that instance alone, even the first boss of Fell Court of Troia feels exciting just for being unusual, since while it is effectively just a trash pull, the fact the little heads can overlap their hitboxes means you can pull them together really efficiently.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Casters ran out of MP when raising too much or just outright dying and being raised, like today, except recovery was a lot harder due to an extremely poor regen outside of Lucid uses (or party support refreshes). MP rotations were rarely MP neutral as well, especially in HW.

In dungeons and heavy AoE scenari, they did run out of MP on a regular basis especially with pulls taking too long, much like physical classes did with TP due to the steep cost behind those moves. BLM was an exception, but other jobs were affected by this to various degrees. BLM was literally valued for being a mana battery with manashift, especially appreciated by BRDs for Foe Requiem maximization.

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Melee ran out of TP when sprinting and using too many ranged attacks. TP regen wasn't high either and TP rotations were not TP neutral either. Basically, they boil down to giving resources to people when things have gone wrong.

And again, we are going back to Black Mage, did Summoner or Redmage not want to use it? Probably not, especially if the Summoner or Red Mage are the ones raising. We have already established that they are MP negative, so no reason to keep eating into that. So, in the vast majority of cases, Black Mage was the only one that used it, and it had, in effect, infinite MP, so there was no cost to the Black Mage for using it. Just like Goad had no cost to the Ninja or any other jobs.

Again, they are essentially the same mechanically, so it makes no sense to enjoy one but not the other, especially when it was specifically enjoyed as a Black Mage.