What new class and or battle mechanics do you wish 4.0 will bring?

[loreleidiangelo]

snip

I won't comment on the "I like not just being a raid frames heal bot", because honestly, that's a subjective thing and I could make the argument that that's EXACTLY the kind of playstyle I like and neither of us would be wrong. I guess the clearly defining aspect here is that one playstyle seems more in line with what the healer role IS, whereas the other seems more like a hybrid design and in a trinity game like this one that's making for some VERY uncomfortable balance issues ATM. (I mean...the devs STILL think that buffing Astrologian's shields are what will make them competitive with SCH, lol.)

I'm sure people are tired of the WoW comparisons, but here's how my healing is scaling currently in that game: basic heal (Healing Wave/Surge on my Restoration Shaman) heals for about 10% of a tank's overall HP value (about 15-20% on a DPS). Note that in WoW, there IS no "basic heal II" equivalent - this would be like FFXIV healers only having Cure/Benefic. My AOE healing spell, which doesn't even hit all the players in a raid, is scaled about the same. I have a re-raise on myself only that I can use once every 30 minutes. I have no other form of in-combat resurrection. I have one big raid-wide heal that heals for about 30% of everyone's HP, assuming they're in range...this move is on a THREE-MINUTE cooldown. I have a move similar to Diurnal Aspected Benefic, a front-loaded small heal with a fairly decent HoT component; 9-second cooldown (this makes sense, you don't spam A.Bene in Diurnal Sect either). I have another 30-second cooldown HoT, as well as a VERY small-radii ground-target HoT that obviously only effects players if they stand in it. This HoT actually has a cooldown as long as its duration, which is unusual in WoW, but it's not very powerful (about 5% of tank HP, and 10% of DPS HP). Lastly, thanks to my artifact weapon (which is something only JUST added with Legion), I have a ground-target AOE heal that heals for about 5% of a tank's HP and about 10-15% of a DPS's HP, on a 45-second cooldown. Note that no healing class in World of Warcraft has a blanket throughput boost in the vein of Divine Seal, Synastry, Fey Illumination, unless MW Monks do because they're the only healer I haven't played. I HAVE a throughput boost, called Cloudburst Totem, that stores all the healing I do during the 8 seconds that it's up, and explodes after the duration to heal the party for 20% of the total healing it stored, but there's nothing scaled as obviously high as XIV's 30% healing-up buffs. (Cloudburst is maybe a 10%-20% raidwide heal, if you go absolutely HAM on the AOE heal spam during it, which will tank your mana really fast.)

The end result of a.) this particular heal scaling, and b.) the amount of recovery moves that are restricted to cooldowns actually means that bolstering raid-wide HP after an unavoidable damage blast (like Ursoc's Cacophony in Emerald Nightmare, the current WoW raid out ATM) is actually a multi-GCD affair, and requires ALL the healers in the raid to assist, because shortly after his Cacophony the boss will actually do a charge similar to Imdugud's charge in T10 and everyone needs to be topped off for that (it hits for about half of everyone's HP in the soak group). Meanwhile, the main tank is getting his face shredded by the boss itself right after Cacophony, so your primary tank/single-target healer needs to be on the ball to get the MT topped back off so he doesn't die right after.

I guess this sounds awful to some people, and I feel like my explanation isn't really doing it justice, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that I actually have to WORK to get those HP bars back up in WoW, whereas in FFXIV any sort of damage like that is completely trivialized by Medica II/Indom/Helios-Medica spam, and as a result of that, when it takes maybe 2 globals from a single healer, or 1 global from both healers IF that to get party HP above comfortable levels, healers are just kinda left twiddling their thumbs in this game. As I said in my original post, this is great for people who struggle to juggle their UI and healing buttons...extremely boring for people who are veteran healers who thus have to fill the time with spamming the same 3-4 DPS spells.

I mean, if I were to be frank, I think the only way the devs really COULD adjust the meta is by scaling down how much HP tanks have (requiring them to use their mitigation/tank stances more) and how much of the HP bar healer spells actually refill (requiring more globals to get parties out of the "danger zone", so to speak), because anything other than that is serious ability/mechanical reworks and I doubt they have the patience or the budget to bother with that. On the other hand, I don't think the devs actually THINK their meta is broken (see: baffling adjustments to Noct AST), so realistically what will happen is absolutely nothing and future healing jobs will always be funneled into this "WHM-type or SCH-type" pipeline. (Future tank jobs funneled into the "DOES IT HAVE FELL CLEAVE OR NO" pipeline, lol.)

[Brightshadow]

http://ffxiclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Blue_Mage

With some changes to allow combos off spells. and don't give us a class quest BLU that would be awful any BLU knows that the main concept of BLU is hunting and using monster magic.

[ADVSS]

yeah but raids are totally truncated in 14 as opposed to wow how many healers are healing in wow raids as opposed to in 14? So yeah you may not heal as much but the responsibility is probably split x fold between x more healers, i doubt youre going into raids with just 2 healers.
and blu would have to be made a bit differently than traditionally to fit in 14 i can see some job quests made out to learn signature moves like white wind, and i can see them making it a tank cause the whole idea of a blu is to get hit and survive the attack to "harness its power" albeit literally meaning to permanently learn it, in 14 itd probably have to be different imo

[loreleidiangelo]

yeah but raids are totally truncated in 14 as opposed to wow how many healers are healing in wow raids as opposed to in 14? So yeah you may not heal as much but the responsibility is probably split x fold between x more healers, i doubt youre going into raids with just 2 healers.

Having raided in both games, I can assure you that the number of healers has nothing to do with heal scaling and difficulty in WoW. 1 healer per 4 players is pretty average for both games, it's just that XIV's healing is skewed in such a way that one healer's abilities are hitting all 8 players in a raid, leaving the other healer with significantly less to do. They're also hitting players for about as much HPS as 2-3 minute cooldowns in WoW, meaning that it takes a lot less GCDs from a lot less healers to get raid HP bars back over the "safe" limit.

Just so it doesn't seem like my scope is limited to WoW, I've also healed in SWTOR, TERA, and Wildstar, and neither of those games had the insane healing throughput that FFXIV has, either. TERA admittedly was probably the most "healing lite" of those games, just because emphasis was put more on dodging/blocking than actually taking damage, but even then the DPS abilities in TERA for healers were used more for utility (defense down on mobs, one move healed any players it hit and damaged any mobs it hit), and less about pew-pew.

[ADVSS]

snipped sorry.

I have to take your word for it since im not experienced with other mmorpgs as much, would you rather heals act like flare or holy where theres diminishing potency after the second party member+ down the line hit in a radius?

[Kaurie]

I would rather something faster, rather than a charging skills type combat mechanic.

Demon Hunter the Final Fantasy Edition could be fun xD

[Jhett_Magnum]

Considering if they went back on there word about the two jobs per expac:
Combine BLU & DNC
RDM
SAM

An overhaul of the cross class system or just take it out.

[FaileExperiment]

Some of the things I'd like to see:

1) "Smarter" skill chains, and less abilities overall: By smarter, I mean things like needing three buttons to do a DRGs TT,VT,FT combo. If one leads to another, just have one button that changes state. MCH is a little different, but I'm sure that it could def have much tighter design.

2) Let me look at my screen, not my cross bars. Many classes are so cooldown or combo dependent that I end up staring at my cross bars more often than not, looking for procs. I'd rather watch those gorgeous animations and look out for aoe damage. Basically, I think the general combat flow would benefit if it were designed to be more natural. Once I know where my skills are mapped, ideally I should be able to hide my crossbar and still play optimally.

3) Remove damage from "non-damaging" skills. The whole rotation method of DPS is one that I think is outdated, but a small part of that problem is skills that, to play optimally, you need to weave in. I think skills whose main purpose is some kind effect (stun, slow, silence etc.) should just do no damage, that way I don't feel pressured to include it your rotation just because it increases your DPS. It would give those skills more purpose, since you'd only use them when you actually needed the effect.

4) Get rid of rotations in general. Maybe the playerbase will always find an optimal way to play... but I think I would rather each damaging skill be more situational. So it would become less about remembering what order to use your skills in, and more about what skill is best to be used right now, in that particular moment. And I think this would in part be accomplished by:

5) More varied skills and triggers. By this I mean, let's get channeled skills, charged sills with power levels, button mash, two or three press abilites etc. Really there's so much more that we could have besides Instant and Cast. Not only would that inject some life into the combat gameplay, it would also give you decisions to make about when to use certain skills beyond "is the cooldown up" and "can I stand still for the cast time".

6) Less timed buffs. For this I mean that currently, the order that you activate buffs can have such a large impact on your overall DPS, and is a large part of the "rotation" type of combat. I'd personally like to see buffs de-emphasized. I'd rather using a buff always feel like a reward, instead of a "penalty" because you used it at the wrong time, or a certain skill's cooldown wasn't up to take advantage of it. This includes skills that give you a timed buff of some sort. I'm not sure I see the point to it besides making me use that skill every X number of seconds. And in that case, do you really need that skill? Remove the buff and make the skill worth using on it's own.

Anyway those are just a few of my personal ideas.

[loreleidiangelo]

I have to take your word for it since im not experienced with other mmorpgs as much, would you rather heals act like flare or holy where theres diminishing potency after the second party member+ down the line hit in a radius?

As long as larger-scale raiding continues to be set up like the 24-man raids, where they're more accurately "three parties" rather than "one raid", I think AOE healing spells hitting everyone is actually fine. I just feel like they should be doing LESS, so that both healers have to do a bit of work for a few globals to get HP bars back up. It's an unpopular opinion, probably, and would be really hard for a lot of people (especially SCHs) to get used to, but I think it's a necessary long-term solution that would allow SE to work on making more unique tank and healing jobs, rather than everything being a "WAR/SCH" type or a "PLD/WHM" type.

[Chukkaque]

I would like more of the 'Action" button things they did in the new Alexander raid.
Reminded me of FF13 so that was pretty neat, could add something like that Paradigm system
but like shift to defensive if you're about to get a hit/debuff and offensive to break
certain parts of a boss or something like that or supporter to remove rebuffs for those who has gotten a debuff.

Class- Dancer/Healer.

This is awesome. Something like PotD for this content would be solid. Being able to have party members all shifting to different classes like in XIII. If a huge attack is coming in having 3 people flip to a defense roll to reduce damage and leave a healer for AoE healing. Its something that I think would be great! Anything that encourages on the fly job swapping.