Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[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.