Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[RichardButte]

Healing in WoW is a bit more "evened out" overall, I feel, and it's actually why I'm shelving my healer for a DPS in XIV instead.

Healing in XIV has two situations: either "Maytag Repairman levels of boredom", or "OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT!!!" and there's usually not all that much of a gradient between the two.

In WoW, damage is more gradual, but also more consistent, meaning a healer can generally be constantly pushing buttons to be HEALING instead of dealing damage. This, in turn, makes designing raid encounters all around easier because factoring healer DPS into the equation is probably the biggest nightmare the devs have had with XIV.

And it compounds upon itself: if a healer doesn't need to heal, it's because their raid group is experienced enough to know the mechanics and avoid all of the avoidable damage, which in turn frees up a LOT more of the healer's mana and GCDs to devote to DPS.

This means that good groups will do a LOT better and so-so groups will do a LOT worse, making the raiding difficulty "curve" into more of an "S" shape than a parabola.

And I hate to say it, but the other key difference is WoW's 1sec GCD vs. XIV's 2.5sec GCD. This means that damage in XIV generally NEEDS to be spikier due to the amount of time between each spell a healer can cast, otherwise the damage won't even be worth healing up.

The end result is that everyone is sitting at full until suddenly someone is at half health or below and you need to fix that immediately or else the next hit will kill them.

It's a level of whack-a-mole that I've not seen in other MMOs' healing systems and with healer DPS being super simplified in SB, I'm hanging up my globe for something more fun.

[zipzo]

...

Great insight, although unfortunate conclusion in the end, I hope one day healing becomes more in line with your enjoyment factor again

[Sylvina]

I get complimented by tanks all the time because I heal and rarely dps. I do my best to keep everyone alive because I realize that DPS can out dps me for the most part. (I'm a WHM). If I have time, I'll toss out some DPS, but never at the expense of another player in the group. Letting others die because I'm going Holy Happy is just silly to me.

Tanks should be complimented for staying in TANK role and holding aggro too. I don't get the constant insistance on tanks doing the DPS job, regardless of the balance requirement that tank dps be within a certain percentage of dps dps.

[Sylvina]

You may or may not like it, but it all comes down to "people nowadays are unable to accept that they couldn't progress in the story solo and should group with other people in order to wander in the overworld".

Aka "people nowadays can't be bothered to play a MMO and want to interact the least possible with others".


It has been proved that the group model is an economical failure when at the scale of WoW or FFXIV, but it's not about game balance. Tanks could do 1/10th of the damage DPS do and game balance would be good if DPS took 10 times the damage tank take from auto attacks.

So you're ok with tanks taking 20 minutes to kill a single mob which a dps finishes off in 3 seconds?

[Sylvina]

Isn't WoW an example of how this isn't necessarily true? DPS do massive orders of damage more than tank classes in optimal settings even for the tank, but soloing as a tank in WoW is not considered to be a slog, in fact many think being a tank out in the world is basically god mode (massive AOE damage because of tanking tools, and high survivability).

I dunno I arrived at my conclusion with math and logic so I don't think WoW actually does that to the degree you say. I played a DPS in WoW and my parses did not exceed the tanks by that much usually. I was doing 300k dps and the tank was sitting at around 100k.

[Kuwagami]

?

Yeah because there is no in between "tanks do 3/4th of dps's job" and "tanks do 1/40th of dps's job".

Not to mention you didn't understand what I was talking about. In a MMO where tank dps is neglictible, all the "I solo the entire game" thing doesn't exist. Tanks can't really kill mobs alone, dps get killed if they try, etc..

God forbid you should group with people in a MMO's overworld map. Ain't got no time to socialize.

[alimdia]

Wrong. A WAR doesn't get any defensive buffs except increased spell healing, and most healers use oGCD's to heal, not spells. A WAR in Defiance on trash makes me sigh because he's sacrificing damage in exchange for literally nothing. Defiance might as well not even exist for SCH.

It's not as useful as the other two, but not "literally nothing" either.

The tank's HP is a buffer, that buffer determines how much the healer can DPS before having to heal. The +healing effect works on embrace, whispering dawn, regen and aspected benefic, I dare say those are the main heals in big pulls.

[Kacho_Nacho]

I think people are forgetting WoW's parties are made up of three damage dealers, one tank, and one healer. Whereas FFXIV has only two damage dealers, one tank, and one healer. This means that in FFXIV, tank and healer damage are more meaningful to the party's success.

[loreleidiangelo]

I think people are forgetting WoW's parties are made up of three damage dealers, one tank, and one healer. Whereas FFXIV has only two damage dealers, one tank, and one healer. This means that in FFXIV, tank and healer damage are more meaningful to the party's success.

At the risk of sounding blunt, I think that has very little to do with it. I think the "tank and healer DPS meta" abomination we see in this game mostly arises from a few key factors:

-The devs all think we're noobs and that the actual basics of tanking and healing need to be as fail-proof as possible. This is evident in the egregious power contained within both roles' kits. Tanks get a fire n' forget button that is basically a permanent free mitigation cooldown and a massive enmity lead all at once. You could say, "mob damage is just based around that extra 20% damage reduction!" but it's clearly not because tanks are doing whole chain-pulls in dungeons and ditching Shield/Def/Grit like a bad date once they get enough baseline threat. They don't struggle because they use cooldowns, which is precisely what I mean when I say that tanks are designed to be as fail-proof as possible - Shield/Def/Grit are literally cooldowns for people too bad to use cooldowns. Just squat in those stances even if you're terrible and the healer can keep up, which leads to...

Healer kits suffer from the exact same problem! All of them have ridiculously high throughput not just on their basic heals, but on their "emergency" cooldowns too which are really more like "spam these as often as you can so you can dps more" because their CDs are so short that odds are if an ACTUAL emergency happens to arise you still have something left in your bag to deal with it. 15-second Lustrates (assuming you try to spread them out), 2-minute Thin Air (the WoW equivalent is 3 minutes and is in a game where healers have no mana restoration capabilities whatsoever outside a once-per-fight mana potion or certain trinkets), and 60-second Earthly Star are just redonkulous in the grand scheme of relative HP, and on TOP of that healers have pretty good innate mana restore and their basic heals are also pretty powerful all things considered. Don't even get me started on regens, and how completely overpowered they are on two jobs who come packed to the brim with burst heals as well.


-Damage in XIV is delivered in a really weird, bombastic kind of way. It's either virtually nothing, where you can afk and let Eos do the work, or it's 75% of your parties' HP bars with another AOE on the way. This means that every healer has to be bursty AF when it comes to heals, or else they can't survive in a raid environment. This also means that tank cooldowns have to do incredible lifting on relatively short CDs, because the boss is basically either only autoing or doing a super-move that will hit you for more than your max HP if not mitigated. (This same concept also brute-forces shield healers into comps, or else you'd just stack double-regen healers as they're way more efficient per cast).

What this means overall is that there's not really any room for unique styles of tanking and healing, such as parry-based or evasion-based tanking, or HoT-based/lifesteal based sustain healing - it's really easy to predict how future jobs will be designed because they all need to be equipped with the kit to handle telatively infrequent but hard-hitting unavoidable AOEs.


-Fully-scripted encounters hurts the hell out of overarching raid design. Healers have no need to conserve mana and tanks have no need to squat in tank stance in raids because everyone knows exactly when the damage is going to come out, and exactly how much it's going to hit for (barring unlucky crits). When your OT knows that Twin Bolt is coming out at THIS precise time and he needs to stack with MT, just bust a CD and maybe toggle tank stance and you're g2g, no need to mix it up or adjust. When the healers know there's a 4x D.Wave in phase 6 of OS3 they know to have Indom/Star/Assize/Thin Air+Presence or whatever up to deal with it, and THAT means that they can use those abolities at x time earlier in the fight because they will 100% be off CD by then.


To close, I should point out that I feel like it's too late to put Pandora's folly back in it's box. I actually HATE the tank and healer DPS meta with the fire of 1,000 suns, but at this point even someone like I can acknowledge that it's this huge plethora of issues that contribute to it, and that for the developers to "fix" it they'd have to do a near-100% overhaul of most of the mechanics in this game, including scripted mob patterns, all boss attacks, and nerf the power of tanks and healers pretty handily - which I suspect would definitely NOT be worth the backlash. I'd love for it to happen, but it's just so unlikely at this point.

[Madepossible]

Healers can put some dots on and broil 2 but I rather want a healer that does healing and keep the party alive than a healer that is too focussed on DPS. Remember the main job is Healing. If the dps is lacking and you meet enrage, the DPS classes fail at their job and should improve. Tldr; Don't blame the healer or tanks to cover up your shortcomings as a DPS.