Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Jpec07]

So really, this whole discussion about roles and what a tank is vs. what it should be is really murky. I don't think anyone is denying the fact that in how things are currently formatted, tanks do have ample opportunity to contribute to group damage--what's at question is a matter of preference and philosophy as to whether or not that's something that should be as heavy a focus for tanks.

It helps in this context to consider what makes a successful encounter as a whole, and what the goals of the group are as a whole. In order to successfully challenge an encounter, a group needs to mitigate enough of the damage being put out to survive, while also dealing enough damage to kill the boss. So we have two goals that are shared by all party members: party survival and party damage output. In modern MMOs, most encounters are designed around the idea that if you can survive, you can finish the fight, and so really, the challenge comes to party survival.

Now, party survival is all about mitigating damage, either by (1) avoiding avoidable damage, (2) soaking unavoidable damage, and (3) healing the damage that is taken. If these three items are done right by all party members, no one will die, and the raid will very likely meet with success. And this is where the trinity system comes into play.

Most bosses these days will only attack a single target with unavoidable damage. This makes sense, because in combat, in most cases, you can't really fight eight people at once. So tanks exist to fill the role of the person who takes the most damage. They specialize in abilities that minimize the amount of damage they take personally, and so are typically very hard to kill, and bring a lot of personal mitigation to the fore (usually by 2 and 3 above). This is their primary responsibility, and allows other members in the group to focus on their damage output--unless they cannot fully mitigate the unavoidable damage they take. If they cannot (and most encounters are designed such that they cannot), this is why we have healers.

Healers are party members whose abilities focus around ensuring that tanks and other party members stay alive, reversing the damage they take. Healers do have some ability to do damage, but they take on the primary responsibility of making sure everyone stays alive. This, again, allows other members of the group to focus on maximizing their damage output, so they don't have to worry about mitigation.

So tanks and healers both have primary responsibilities that contribute to the success of damage dealers. Tanks' primary responsibilities are holding enemies' attention and doing what they can to minimize damage taken (in many ways, they control enemy damage output), while healers' primary responsibility is to make sure party members don't die, so that everyone else can focus on their own tasks--killing the boss. And in a puritanical trinitarian MMO world, this would be all that these roles do: tanks control damage, healers heal damage, and DDs kill the thing doing damage.

But what if there's downtime in an encounter? What if there is a period where a tank doesn't have much outgoing damage to control, or where a healer doesn't have much to heal? Then they fall back to the second group goal of killing the boss. Encounters in FFXIV are designed this way; they have a lot of downtime, and a lot of opportunities where outgoing damage is low enough to allow healers and tanks to fall back on that second goal of killing the boss.

For career tanks and healers from other games, this might seem counterintuitive. "It's not my job to kill the boss!" Well, actually, since that's the goal of the group, that's your goal as well. Anything you can do to afford yourself to maximize your own damage output is in fact part of your job description--so long as it doesn't compromise your primary responsibility. So tanks, when there isn't a lot of incoming damage for you to control, or when you can control it very easily, your goal is then to maximize your output. Healers, when there isn't a lot of incoming damage for you to mitigate and reverse, your goal is then to maximize your damage output. Sure, when there's heightened incoming damage, both will need to fall back on their primary responsibilities, but if not? That's when you pop your offensive CDs, switch stances, and go to town.

Many tanks and healers don't like that idea, because they have this notion that incoming damage is spiky and unpredictable; and in some games, that's true. In some games, tanks do need to spend every waking moment in their tank stance with their cooldowns active, because they have no way of knowing when the boss is going to throw a nuke in their face. In some games, healers do need to focus primarily on healing, because the incoming damage would wipe the raid if they let up even for a second. But those games are not FFXIV. Here, if you focus exclusively on healing, even if you're trying to keep everyone topped off, you're very likely to have periods of time where you're just standing there. Here, there are periods of time in almost every boss fight where you won't be taking enough damage to justify staying in your tank stance. Here, the challenge of most encounters comes in the form of predictable, scripted, often-avoidable mechanics.

In those other games, counting a tank's ability to deal damage or a healer's ability to deal damage doesn't make sense. The encounters in those games don't afford them the opportunity to focus on other things. But in FFXIV, unless the encounter design paradigm is changed, it absolutely does make sense to include their ability to deal damage into the equation. I agree that it would be nice if the damage control aspect of tanking was more engaging/challenging, but that's not how the game is currently designed.

As a corollary to this, though, it is by no means acceptable to judge another person's skill based upon your own experiences. If a turtle tank and a non-damaging healer are part of a group that regularly meets with success, and they enjoy their gameplay, then who are you to judge them? Yes, your way of playing may make encounters faster, but at the end of the day, what matters is whether or not they have fun, and whether they KO'd the boss to rifle through their pockets. All a group needs to do in most cases is survive long enough to kill the boss, and if they can do that, then they're doing it right.