Tanks and healers.

[Aramina]

The first thing we must remember is that you cannot impose how you want someone else to play ...

True, but they CAN be removed if the other people in their group don't like the way they play.

[Sorciechan]

Well, good for you, if you want to, but if you lose aggro simply for the sake of "thrill and reward" (and, I'm not sure what reward you're getting, other than shaving on 1-2 mins in the dungeon), I would suggest you weight your options on what's more important: your own idea of thrill and reward or your party staying alive long enough to finish the dungeon within the time limit. And, it's your own choice to leave, but I don't think making a playstyle convoluted for the sake of it is good gameplay.

Really, I didn't even know dpsing tanks were too much of a thing outside of raiding. You'd think tanks would already have too much to worry about with keeping aggro and mitigating damage on high attack with bosses. Then there's the speed runners...
Imagine how nuts that would be with a tank pulling aggro on everything, then deciding to switch to sword oath. ><

Also, inb4 eventual flaming and closing of thread, cause, yeah, the flamebait.

[Altena]

While I already decided to make the switch from tank to SAM (like every 2nd person), if SAM wasn't coming out I would probably still switch back to a melee DPS.

I don't like the WAR changes.
Penalizing for stance dancing.
Dumbing down stack building by removing the ability to use Vengence/Zerk/Intuition.
Bloodbath RIP.
The switch back to STR as the main modifier..
Removal of the raid utility on Path.

All of these convince me to put my WAR gear in storage, and convert my relic into a katana.
Pushing DPS on tank was the only thing that made me enjoy tanking in this game.

People can say "but you don't know how it truly plays", while no, I don't have hands on time with SB. They essentially removed a lot of the things I liked about WAR.

PLD looks amazing, DRK looks quite solid.. But WAR got a rather large nerf...
Not just in damage and utility, but in playstyle as well.
And no, I don't care how many Fell Cleaves I can do in a row. What I do care about was the ability to choose to use defensive cooldowns for an offensive purpose (build stacks).


WAR rant over
-----

As for the cleric stance dance topic..

I am in two minds about it.
I like the concept of a healer stance dancing, however Cleric was rather clunky to deal with.

As an Australian who plays this game with 250ms on a good day, it can feel horrible to use.

So without going too far into it, I like the concept of cleric dancing, however I feel the way it is implemented in the game could have been a lot better. So I am pro-change on this matter. Not because of it being "easier" but because it won't feel as clunky to DPS on a healer.

Hopefully some healers who were not comfortable with DPSing will also feel encouraged to try with these changes as well. I know that those who are of the "healers should only heal" mindset won't, which is whatever, but I do hope it encourages those who want to try but are too scared to.

[VanilleFang]

This game isn't that hard in the first place. Let them do as they please, live and let live.

That's almost contradictory. The game is easy so people have a reason to do nothing? If the game is easy (which it IS) isn't that more a reason for people to try and find a way to make it more exciting/challenging on themselves? Stance Dancing kind of had that "danger" aspect to it. DPSing in general is brain dead, even more so than healing, on a healer so with these up coming changes there is literally no reason that healers shouldn't be dpsing outside laziness. I'm not happy when people try to enforce their playstyle on me by wasting my time.

[Ayer2015]

True, but they CAN be removed if the other people in their group don't like the way they play.

Party members making elitist dictatorial comments CAN be removed as well.

[KisaiTenshi]

As for the cleric stance dance topic..

I am in two minds about it.
I like the concept of a healer stance dancing, however Cleric was rather clunky to deal with.

As an Australian who plays this game with 250ms on a good day, it can feel horrible to use.

So without going too far into it, I like the concept of cleric dancing, however I feel the way it is implemented in the game could have been a lot better. So I am pro-change on this matter. Not because of it being "easier" but because it won't feel as clunky to DPS on a healer.

Hopefully some healers who were not comfortable with DPSing will also feel encouraged to try with these changes as well. I know that those who are of the "healers should only heal" mindset won't, which is whatever, but I do hope it encourages those who want to try but are too scared to.

I feel the correct mechanism would have been to either have CS as a "combo breaker". eg Cast Holy, Aero/AeroII/AeroIII and while the debuff is up on the target hit CS to repeat the last attack again instantly and double or reset the debuff timers. That way from a play balance aspect, to get the "full damage" threshold you need to use CS immediately after the big booms, and if you forget,or don't bother, then you're only doing half the damage.

That IMO, would make it have the intended effect. Stone would just be full power normally but not affected by it, so single target's casts aren't complicated.

The entire stance dance mechanic is clunky because it causes too many mistakes in being toggled. If it was a simple matter of holding down the shift key(or shoulder button) and hitting a cast, it would work right, and then released when the shift or shoulder button is released. But there in lies the problem, it's THE thing that is creating the button bloat in the first place for healers.

By removing the stance dancing, then healers can actually decide if that cast time is better spent healing or dps'ing rather than having this CS mechanic that wastes one cast cycle to get in, and can't be reset within two cast cycles, thus you lose 4 cast cycles in doing it. So a healer that is constantly having to switch in and out is actually failing on the "always be casting" meme, because they are spending half their time waiting for CS to switch.

The intent by design was for stance changes to allow these roles to be able to play the single player content without needing to be in a party like some other games. If you play a healer in other games, you're generally helpless on all the field content. But from a design intent it should never have been available in the dungeon, which Yoshi-P always wanted to get rid of it. But to get rid of it requires changing how healers DPS in solo content. So unless you want absolutely nobody taking up the healer role, that compromise needs to exist.

Like we're all waiting to see how the changes actually work out, but my prediction is that changes to the healing and tank roles won't go over well, and there will be some gnashing of teeth over "the meta" but ultimately we're more likely to see nerfs, not buffs post-V4.0 if things are too powerful for the content.

[Hamada]

That's probably true, but that tends to be more of a gear thing than a competence thing.

Seems like PotD is training people to use the skills without the teamwork, or matching gear.

It isn't, if you have a good/excellent tank esp war (well way game is now, no idea what SB will do) with 2 good DPS, you can literally require zero healing on some pulls. For SCh this means all healing comes from fairy, for WHM it means stunlock > dead ( 3 spread holy) for ast, well they have a bit of work to do since they do not have tools like that, they would most likely need to toss out a regen after the first gravity or something. The asking healers to DPS comes from one reason only, this game does not require a lot of healing and people just don't want people to be standing around.

[Coatl]

Going to bring up WoW here, don't freak out. I promise its relevant XD

I've heard all about it. Healing in WoW is spontaneous and way more reactive, as bosses crit a lot more often and for a lot more damage. There really isn't the time to even think about DPSing as all your resources were spent trying to keep people alive. It's an entirely different mindset to FFXIV, but it's interesting to compare how different healing is there.

Then i compare that style of gameplay to current dungeons, Not specifically XIV, but MMO Dungeons as a whole. Where trash packs melt in 10 seconds or less and the meta has devolved into MOAR DPS MOAR DPS because the rewards all happen at the very end of the dungeon.

FFXIV dungeons are boring and are too easy, especially on healers. This I believe is the root of the problem. If tank is skilled at using proper cooldowns you can actually probably play healer with one hand. Coupled with how easy it is output good DPS as a healer, it's not surprising that people have come to demand more from their healers. The question is, should they have to do more? My thoughts; Eh, not really.

This discussion is an exercise in futility.

The only discussion not worth discussing is that discussion itself! Disagreement and differing of opinions is only one of the outcomes of open-ended discussions like these. And while people may come here without the intention of changing their viewpoints, they can at least come out of this understanding the other a bit better.

[Sylve]

I've heard all about it. Healing in WoW is spontaneous and way more reactive, as bosses crit a lot more often and for a lot more damage. There really isn't the time to even think about DPSing as all your resources were spent trying to keep people alive. It's an entirely different mindset to FFXIV, but it's interesting to compare how different healing is there.



FFXIV dungeons are boring and are too easy, especially on healers. This I believe is the root of the problem. If tank is skilled at using proper cooldowns you can actually probably play healer with one hand. Coupled with how easy it is output good DPS as a healer, it's not surprising that people have come to demand more from their healers. The question is, should they have to do more? My thoughts; Eh, not really.



The only discussion not worth discussing is that discussion itself! Disagreement and differing of opinions is only one of the outcomes of open-ended discussions like these. And while people may come here without the intention of changing their viewpoints, they can at least come out of this understanding the other a bit better.

I was actually referring to WoW as it was nearly 10 years ago. During the Mists of Pandaria expansion, Healers and Tanks were literally not even required in dungeons because the entire dungeon could be cleared in 3 minutes with a team of DPS.

Tanks used to be able to critted by bosses and trash mobs back during vanilla and Burning Crusade, you actually had to allocate stats to making sure you couldn't be crit. But then they just baked it into the classes.

On topic, Overgearing dungeons is a huge part of why healing is so boring in 4 mans.
The other part is people in general wanting to get in and out in as little time as humanly possible. Thats what needs changing. An additional mode that is far more difficult and couldn't be overgeared, but also far more rewarding for the additional time and effort spent in clearing it would go a long way to alleviating healer boredom. But people would probably avoid it like the plague because its "more efficient" to speedrun the easy version.

[KisaiTenshi]

On topic, Overgearing dungeons is a huge part of why healing is so boring in 4 mans.
The other part is people in general wanting to get in and out in as little time as humanly possible. Thats what needs changing. An additional mode that is far more difficult and couldn't be overgeared, but also far more rewarding for the additional time and effort spent in clearing it would go a long way to alleviating healer boredom. But people would probably avoid it like the plague because its "more efficient" to speedrun the easy version.

I'll agree here. I hate the idea of "speed running" content due to overgearing, that's the antithesis of enjoying content. If you want to speed run, use PF, especially to farm things. If you want to play it normally use DF and take whatever PUG's you get.

I'll also argue that healing is more boring than tanking. Tanking at least has combos. WHM Healing, your only combo is Cure-Cure II - Cure III. And it's random, and how often do you need to do C1-C2-C3? Pretty much never. It would be different if Cure III(4y) was like Assize in range(15y), but it's not. Medica II has the largest range at 25y, followed by Medica at 15y. So Cure III only ever makes sense to use in mechanics that require everyone to stand in the same spot like behind snowballs or some primal mechanics.