Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Reynhart]

I wonder how the community would react to a raid boss that has an enrage timer, and also hits enrage if you do more than a certain amount of dps during each phase. I'd wanna see that.

Leviathan and Ifrit EX say hello
And, IIRC, several turns were changed in Coil because of "bad phase transition".

And enrage is really the lazyest mechanic...

If you mitigate just enough to not die, you'd end up causing excess healer stress.

Actually, the meta says the exact opposite. Mitigates more than you need to survive and you're probably sacrificing too much DPS for it.

Also you're part of a group of 8 people, "ego" would be not caring about doing everything you can

I still fail to see what lunatic decided that "doing everything you can" meant "doing as much DPS you can" when you're a tank or a healer and designed fights around this.

Ofc it matters most if you are failing checks, but more often that not, DPS have to work harder to compensate for low DPS tanks and healers.

So, having a bad tank can end in you failing the DPS checks and thus losing the fight...wouldn't have it been more in line with the concept to design fights where a bad tank would just...not survive ? In the end, it's the same result, you lost because you had a bad tank.

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

Neither of those are end game raid bosses though, and those issues are caused more by unsyncing than actually doing them at level. I want to see an end game raid where the boss enrages if you do too much damage every phase, rather than pushing phases.

[aleph_null]

I also failed to specify what I thought was a given for this conversation: damage mitigation is inversely proportional to DPS (in most cases).

I think one thing to note is that stacking mitigations has diminishing returns, so after certain points it won't be noticeable at all to the healers. Most of the time stacking two cds is enough with a few exceptions like final punch/beam in a8s or holy scourge + chastening heat in a12s (and in these cases most people would use their invulnerability cds). More dps is almost never a bad thing, while more mitigation may be wasted if it doesn't reduce the number of heals you need to get. (maybe you can argue that more dps is wasted if it doesn't reduce the number of gcds you need to kill the boss lol)

[Reynhart]

(maybe you can argue that more dps is wasted if it doesn't reduce the number of gcds you need to kill the boss lol)

Wasted, no, but since tankbusters are the only things that do significant damage and affect cooldown usage, if your tank can't reduce the number of TB by its own DPS increase, then it's not a big deal in the end.

And if you hit enrage, here's what you need to check :
Did people die due to failed mechanics ?
Did one of your DPS sneakly AFK auto-attacking for a little time ?
Is your offtank in tank stance even when not tanking anything ?
Is your main tank actually doing its basic WS rotation (Seriously, even a 5 year old could do it...) ?
And much much much later...is your main tank properly stance dancing ?

[SpookyGhost]

I also failed to specify what I thought was a given for this conversation: damage mitigation is inversely proportional to DPS (in most cases). With a modicum of similar skill, a tank who opts to hone their skill around mitigation and minmaxes their cooldowns for optimal sequence and usage on a given encounter such as to take virtually no damage very likely won't do as much damage as the tank who opts for the minimum amount of mitigation required to survive in favor of Big Numbers (Praise Fell Cleavus).

Personal DPS and group DPS may work in tandem, but they're still way different from eachother. If making your numbers go up causes your healers combined DPS to go down by more than you're gaining then you've effectively lost damage and made the healers' lives harder. I know everyone likes to believe that the DPS meta means that tanks literally just focus solely on pumping up their DPS, but in reality it's a balance between mitigating damage and dealing it to find an equilibrium that allows for the highest possible gDPS. The only place you'll see players play seemingly risky to an extreme is in speedkills where everything has been thoroughly mapped out, a good example being: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0AyFjeIcaM

Now, let me make something clear: If you feel like you're not being rewarded for PROPERLY mitigating in the current meta then you're wrong. The literal only difference between a PLD or a DRK tanking in content that hits extremely hard and content that hits not so hard is that you have to turn your tank stance on for larger periods for the hard hitting fights (or the full fight, barring tank swaps). WAR is the exception, and only because IB is tied to their tank stance - however, due to WAR's CD kit being more tightly packed and versatile, it doesn't really need IB (though I do miss timing IBs, that was fun). Basically what I'm saying is that even if they made stuff hit wayyyy harder, your CDs would still be used exactly as they are now you'd just be doing less damage because you'd be forced into tank stance more often - maybe you'd see more tank swaps to keep CDs rolling as well but that's about it. The only way they could make mitigation different and more fun is if they went the active mitigation route that WoW and other MMOs took and while I'd be all for that it would take a massive overhaul of a lot of things and I don't see them doing it unless people just stop playing tanks all together for some reason.

Also I don't know what the comment "some people enjoy navigating mechanics" is meant to mean. Even if you skip a lot of mechanics, you still have to do mechanics, so if you have some fetish for moving out of AOEs then you still get to do that... except the boss will have a higher chance of dying by doing less of those. Even if you are addicted to mechanics, you are one in a group of 8, you'd need to find 7 other people who are super into doing all the mechanics of a fight and seeing enrage to really hold any weight.

Actually, the meta says the exact opposite. Mitigates more than you need to survive and you're probably sacrificing too much DPS for it.

There's a difference between mitigating the amount you need to mitigate to survive comfortably and get healed back up and mitigating just enough to not completely get squashed by the tank buster. The former is what good tanks do because being in tank stance neuters your DPS, and if thats the mitigation you can afford to drop and still survive comfortably then you do. If you need tank stance then you use it, but if you don't then you... y'know... don't.

I still fail to see what lunatic decided that "doing everything you can" meant "doing as much DPS you can" when you're a tank or a healer and designed fights around this.

The goal of any boss in any game is to make it's HP go to 0. The only way to do that is to deal damage to it. As a tank your job is to keep aggro and mitigate damage, as a healer your job is to heal people. As a tank you actually have less of an excuse for not maximizing your DPS than a healer does as the healer has to go out of the way to hit the boss, but as a tank you HAVE to hit the boss. Even before we had everyone out of tank stance, tanks were optimizing their rotations (especially WARs) and finding spots where they were just taking autos to drop stance. Anyway, if you as a tank or a healer can contribute to making the boss' HP go to 0 then you should - maximizing that is your goal as a group so that the boss dies and you get loot. The only way to stop this from being a thing is if you make tanks literally do 0 damage and only deal "aggro" and get rid of all the healer DPS spells, which I'm pretty sure would put everyone off both for life if for no other reason than they'd have to party with people to get anything done at all.

[Reynhart]

If making your numbers go up causes your healers combined DPS to go down by more than you're gaining then you've effectively lost damage and made the healers' lives harder.

But making your numbers go down is supposed to cause your healers combind DPS to go up. That's how tanks should contibute to raidwide DPS.

The goal of any boss in any game is to make it's HP go to 0. The only way to do that is to deal damage to it. As a tank your job is to keep aggro and mitigate damage, as a healer your job is to heal people. As a tank you actually have less of an excuse for not maximizing your DPS

Yes, your role is to mitigate damage, and the amount you mitigate will change the amount the healer have to cure and the smoother the fight goes. People tend to make a really bad shortcut, saying that killing faster is actually the highest mitigation, which is oversimplification at best, totally wrong at worst. The problem is still the same, fight actually don't challenge tanks on "keeping aggro and mitigates damage". Enmity is literraly a non-issue, and you could have a spreadsheet saying what CD you should use at what time for every fight in the game.

[SpookyGhost]

Enmity is literraly a non-issue, and you could have a spreadsheet saying what CD you should use at what time for every fight in the game.

Correct, this game was built for the literal lowest common denominator and since that's been the case since 2.0 I don't see them suddenly making fights like any other RPG in the universe because those guys at the bottom want fights where they can memorize exactly what will happen at exactly what time. Theoretically they could throw a bunch of active mitigation tools at us in 4.0 and change their whole design philosophy, I just don't see it happening. Personally I think they should cut out raiding entirely so that people stop getting confused and thinking XIV actually has some kind of hardcore/midcore edge. It is literally one of the most casual MMOs on the market and I don't find that to be a bad thing, but I feel like their focus is split and that makes the game seem really weird from a hardcore/midcore perspective. Also:

But making your numbers go down is supposed to cause your healers combind DPS to go up. That's how tanks should contibute to raidwide DPS.

So in your vision of XIV, healers are still DPSing, but tanks aren't. Surely if we're being purists the healers shouldn't DPS at all, the tanks should focus solely on mitigating incoming damage, positioning the boss, and aggro, while the DPS do all the actual damage dealing. While I think tank DPS and especially healer DPS was a happy accident, it only seems bad and wrong if you're fixated on the idea that "a tank MUST ONLY do this" and a healer "MUST ONLY do that". In XIV, because of this, you have tanks that need to balance DPS and mitigating damage as well as healers who need to balance DPS and healing damage. I agree that tanks could have more involved with mitigating and healing, but I really think they'd need to change a whooooole lot for it to actually work.

[Shurrikhan]

I still fail to see what lunatic decided that "doing everything you can" meant "doing as much DPS you can" when you're a tank or a healer and designed fights around this.

Unless you mean an SE developer from some point along the way in getting to this particular tank/healer/dps balance, it's no lunacy. The "roles" of healers and tanks are singular checks; there is no analog portion to lived/did_not_live, saved/did_not_save. The only analog portion is how well they managed to contribute generally while meeting those "role" function. (Or really, how well they contributed generally, which was largely through indirect means.)

Actually, the meta says the exact opposite. Mitigates more than you need to survive and you're probably sacrificing too much DPS for it.

That depends on what you call "just enough to not die". From the tankbuster? Or from the AA that follows within a second of it? Because if it's just the tankbuster, you're likely wasting valuable healer resources—mana, back when that was a larger concern, but more importantly cooldowns. And worse, if they stop trusting that you've left just enough HP for that +/- 5% damage range and have to start shielding you as a result, pre-healing for what HoTs could have managed otherwise, or entering Cleric Stance less often, then it's a pretty severe blow.

As gear strength increases, heals further eclipse the "potency" of mitigation, but as long as you're still fighting hard-hitting enemies, an Inner Beast may well end up with the indirect potency of a Fell Cleave.

The part the bugs me is how quickly the eclipse occurs. It's for that reason I'd like to see a lot more non-percentile or mixed mitigation types in tank toolkits, so that even when a boss is hitting for comparatively less healer uptime loss and reduced total mitigation possible, it doesn't so quickly rebalance tanks to attack mode. Admitedly, there are still no "options" in ideal play between whether and when a tank uses his tank stance or his dps stance apart from composition and setup at best, but at least we'd see the other side of play more often, and would likely be swapping more frequently.

Correct, this game was built for the literal lowest common denominator and since that's been the case since 2.0. I don't see them suddenly making fights like any other RPG in the universe because those guys at the bottom want fights where they can memorize exactly what will happen at exactly what time. Theoretically they could throw a bunch of active mitigation tools at us in 4.0 and change their whole design philosophy, I just don't see it happening. Personally I think they should cut out raiding entirely so that people stop getting confused and thinking XIV actually has some kind of hardcore/midcore edge. It is literally one of the most casual MMOs on the market and I don't find that to be a bad thing, but I feel like their focus is split and that makes the game seem really weird from a hardcore/midcore perspective.

This actually seems off to me. If anything, it's typically the lower-end players I see complaining as a matter of course about the "DDR" fights and their level of memorization required. While I don't doubt they'd then have even more trouble with anything that required analysis rather than spreadsheet rotations if it were abruptly introduced, I do think that if that shift was gradually introduced, similar to through concept-accretion in leveling (better than ours), they'd be some of the biggest fans of/for that change (from sudden or almost trope-like shifts among sequenced abilities that one must ultimately just memorize individually or by procedure to... I'll leave that to your imagination).

I honestly think it comes down to a particular design rut more than it does "catering to a lowest common denominator". That lowest denominator gives up on the stuff much too soon to be an appropriate target audience, and would often seem to like something that can better blend ambiance or peripheral play and tunneling, however the hell that might work.

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

Yeah, I would argue that the people that most enjoy the ddr esque fights would be the majority of the hardcore raiding audience, since having routine, predictable attacks makes it much easier to make plans around the content. The most egregious fight I remember being Final DDR Rave Mix to a T was turn 9, and that was ferociously popular with people that like plans, since even the slightest deviation was an irrecoverable wipe.

[Brian_]

Well, since it does pertain to their statements about rotational difficulty in relation to content design, SpookyGhost is both right and wrong.

The Creator is significantly easier than Midas. A large part of that is that while there is sometimes minor variation due to phasing, the creator is substantially more "DDR" than Midas. In Midas, there was actually a lot of variance and RNG which forced reactionary adjustments and changed the dance for each individual randomly. Some prime examples -- A6S Blaster pre-nerf, Brawler attachments, Swindler heights and enumerations, A7S ball phases, A8S balls, A8S gavel, etc. At least on my server / data-center, A11S is becoming increasingly clearable through PF / RF but A12S remains as a wall. Why? Because A12S is more similar to Midas in that on top of the dance, there is a still some individual variation with stuff like inception.

So, yes, in order to cater to the lower common denominator, SE stripped a lot of the meat and muscle from the DDR bone and made things a stricter dance rather than a stream of read-and-react mechanics. A9S has basically no RNG. If this was Midas, they would've done something like make 4 power-units spawn in random locations instead and require randomly determined players to activate them. Outside of simple charge reads, A10S also basically has no RNG. If this was Midas, stuff like the trap activation would be more varied and entirely random. Outside of sword reads, a simple optical read, and a test of your ability to count dots, A11S also has no impactful RNG.

As SE said, they felt that players were having too hard of a time juggling mechanics while sustaining an optimized rotation. So, they dumbed down the mechanics and made fights significantly more DDR.