Quote Originally Posted by Duelle View Post
Options are a good thing. Until they overpower other choices or create imbalances.
At which point you've again reduced options. They must be viable to be options.

Quote Originally Posted by Duelle View Post
You're not addressing the elephant in the room, which is the fact that DPS don't have actual responsibilities here as they do in WoW. In WoW I can expect a DPS to do things like interrupt enemy spellcasting or help remove enemy buffs (mages with Spellsteal and hunters with Tranq Shot back when they had it come to mind). Here, if I'm not the one interrupting casts with Spirits Within or stunning the mob with Shield Bash, it generally never gets done. The fact most raid fights ignore that aspect of fight design has not helped.
And if you haven't guessed by any of my other posts, I think it's a given that XIV should require more from our dps. DPS shouldn't be a role free of any larger responsibilities. Granted, it's not like there's not potential for it. As a DPS, I will often gather mobs, draw from the healers to the tank, may kite key powerful mobs such while keeping them in the AoE area and where they can easily collect enough tank enmity to be drawn back at the time of our choosing, and will save stuns for abilities that could require tank repositioning to such a point as will cost us melee more damage through lost positionals than I would lose from holding onto that stun (including de-sync) or would cost the tank or healer themselves more dps for having to take the extra damage when not an indicated/dodgeable AoE. As you say, though, the issue is that the need for such is so infrequent that such opportunities seem inexistent.

Again, I'll go back to imbalances. Subtle contributions to raid damage are not all they're cracked up to be, and I say that as someone who saw the recent return of lolRet (which gives away about 10% of their total DPS via damage buffs to three party members, except their damage is then trash which then causes people to not want them in groups; ever wonder why I don't want to see SE do that to Red Mages?).
I've played lolRet, and post-lolRet, and pre-lolRet. But that issue comes from a lot more that just that part of their arsenal is invested in raid contribution. You know, the difference between why some Legion Rets have been rerolling, yet Ninjas and Bards don't throw down their controllers when seeing that they couldn't do Monk dps. Otherwise, you'd need only attach that Blessing of Might damage to the Ret's Skada/Recount and most of them would be happy.

So by your logic Rogues should lose Tricks of the Trade, any paladin spec that's not holy should lose Flash of Light, hunters should lose Misdirection, druids should lose Barkskin, etc.
I'm saying that's where the end of that slope your suggesting ends up. And very similar trimming has already shat on a few classes' playstyles, including among those you've just listed.

What I'm in favor of is the jobs being able to focus on their role without external and unintended bullshit getting in the way.
This I get. I really get it. For instance, I can imagine just how many weeks it'd take for an addon to come out that dictates who the Ret should next give his Blessing to if those were to go oGCD. That'd be a ridiculous annoyance. But Word of Glory? Sheath of Light? Did either of those increased options or capabilities ever prevent the Ret from dpsing as he liked?

This means that a tank joining a group is going to be there to take hits, focus on positioning the mob and hold aggro. A healer is there to restore HP, remove debuffs and apply whatever utility they have if needed. DPS is there to deal damage and make use of utility as applicable (stuns, interrupts, etc). Anything beyond that is window dressing when compared to why the roles are present.
My point here isn't to forbid tanks from spending most of their time being as "tank-like" as possible. My point is that when you center a class specifically within a role, to the neglect of all else, (1) that class then faces situational inviability, lest the undermechanics that would compete for its spot are taken out back and shot (e.g. CC, to compete with tanks), and (2) you hugely risk the balance of throughput for the various of the game, and even go so far as to say it doesn't matter, "'Cus trinity. Amen." Why take a tank when you can outright avoid damage, and that tank is dedicated to meat shielding? Unless you're looking at the tank role as being viable insofar as it improves performance by the rest of the raid (in other words: the tank as raid DPS), you play a balance between either having your undermechanics and having your ("nepotized") 'roles'. I'm saying: treat that balance with care, and be careful what you ask for when you say, "I want bosses to hit for more % tank HP," etc.

Specially in the case of tanks, damage dealt can still help, but it needs a ceiling, it needs to be kept within the range of DPS expected from a tank (no freak occurrences like triple Fel Cleaves), and it needs to be treated as a non-factor in the big picture when it comes to putting together a raid. Things like "don't take <insert tank> because their damage is low" should NEVER come into consideration, because that's not what the tank is there for. On the other side, class and encounter design should aim to prevent that topic from coming up when putting a raid group together.
Why should anything be a non-factor? If a dps can tank an add and group it for faster dps at the cost of a healer GCD or that dps's self-heal oGCD, should that also be irrelevant? Should that exchange just be impossible? Should it be irrelevant for DPS to dodge (cus frankly, healer outputs in this game are high enough that should a ballast cost a dps a damaging GCD or a mere healer GCD, and that healer has shit dps capabilities anyways, why wouldn't you stand in an AoE that has no lingering enfeeblement to your dps -- see how role fixation still has the same dps-fixation you hate, and now manifests in "shit play" because that becomes optimal with no counterpart)?

Admittedly, if both the tank and the healer are staying 90% in DPS stance in a current / progression encounter, that's undertuned. It messes with aesthetics and expectations. I'll give you that. I don't think tanks should have the expectation of doing nothing but gathering enmity and popping mitigation — they are player, with tank skills, alongside whatever other 'role(s)' of skills — but, I think it's fair to say that you'd want to feel mostly like your job's take on a given role (which should be potentially varied, not just more (Dark-/Earth-/Wild-) Rampart equivalents), rather than just a dps-machine. And, granted, in that kind of content, composition is a given (see forced tank swaps and class irrelevance). But if you as a matter of course take damage-dealers out of that tank-healer equation, you're going to offset compositional viability and role throughput in ways that may be unintended for all content, which invites arbitration, or else shifts optimal playstyle to optimal role composition entirely (unless again you take out any undermechanics that can could compete with those slots, guaranteeing their use, as generally idle as they may be). Increasing healer/tank needs without looking at the larger picture can lead to as many other meta changes as "bad" as you feel our current one is.

I'll agree that it can be lackluster at time in terms of feeling our particular role. But know that every role plays a part, and that the relative value of every role is dependent on the other two, and that unless you consider all three roles as skill-set augmentations on a common base, you are inevitably pushing jobs towards homogeneity. When you take out healer dps, you take out the counterpart to optional shielding, which is counterpart to any tank that isn't meant to have equal mitigation to the "turtle" tank, thereby leveling out the capabilities, niche, and to large degree the feel, of every tank.

tl;dr - Number tuning to make roles feel more enjoyable, better scaled, more reactive, more integral, or identifiable, etc., sure. Carefully. But don't aim just to make a role a role for role's sake, or you lose equivalency, and thereby compositional choice, and badly limit job identity.

And to make things clear, I'm not opposed to classes having utility (hell, my suggested RDM build is testament of this). Utility adds flavor and can be nice to have depending on the situation. Utility, however, should never eclipse the main role of a class. And utility never makes up for for lower damage/HPS/TPS. Again, look no further than Ret if you don't believe me (many of which still want Greater Blessing of Might removed from the game and that "missing" 10% DPS rolled into their own abilities).
And this is where I feel obliged again to say: Utility is dps. If it's a slow, it's still dps. If it's a heavy it's still dps. If it's a damage buff, is it still dps. Everything is dps. The only difference is that utility requires a shift in play to make the most out of it (hit its theoretical contribution). It has variable contribution, but in a different manner than the contribution-potential variance given by composition. When you slap T&S everything as a matter of course, or even burn everything down asap to avoid mechanics as a matter of course, you do not get to experience shifts in play that those undermechanics would otherwise provide. Narrow 'role'-fixation kills utility. Dead utility causes fixation on direct-contribution ("DPS" - in the breed of triple Fel Cleaves).