Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[zipzo]

Honestly tanks feel quite like that too in XIV. All the same basic tank with a gimmick added, every tank has % damage reduction CDs, a tank stance that is virtually the same (25% max HP roughly equals 20% mitigation), an agro combo, damage combos, a ranged agro move, some AoE damage/agro moves, some damaging oGCDs, damage steroids (Zerk, IR, FoF, Requiescat, Blood Weapon, Delirium), an invuln, a big "nuke" skill (Fell Cleave, Holy Spirit, Bloodspiller), some kind of self-healing, and some kind of on-demand short mitigation (TBN, IB, Sheltron). They only differ by their gimmicky mechanics which are mostly about the way they are DPSing (WAR having very bursty phases once every 2mins, PLD alterning between magical nuke phase and regular physical damage combos, DRK using MP and Blood to basically manually increase their potency-per-GCD instead of having steroids). They don't really feel unique when compared to each other. They could honestly all branch off from the same starting class. SE doesn't really like to take risks in order to create something truly unique, whether it be new content, or new jobs.

But I still really like tanking in this game, and I really like the tank/healer DPS meta. I've tanked in every trinity-based MMO I've played, and I really enjoy being able to dish out respectable damage while tanking efficiently. I don't want it to change.

While I won't speak for healing, I think the trade-off of unique-ness in order to slightly homogenize the tanks ultimately is still a more enjoyable circumstance in FFXIV due to other factors, namely, enmity management, and the introduced element of being required to put out respectable "tank dps". It is this expectation for tanks to do relatively good damage that has led to that homogenization because they want the tanks to be relatively close to one another in damage output. In this sense, you could say that FFXIV's current design is a bit lazy...it's not as if it's impossible to have balanced DPS numbers among 3 tanks while also at the same time keeping a unique identity to all 3 in terms of their play style, it's also a very difficult undertaking that it seems square seems unwilling to approach. Additionally, it's worth noting that tank DPS balance is completely ignored in WoW. The difference in damage numbers between the tanks in WoW, if existent here, would make the community cry.

The conversation starts to tip over in to WoW though, and my opinion changes. Even when the tanks differ wildly in terms of their playstyle, the act of tanking in itself sans the ever-present pressure to provide competitive tank dps, nor the need to care about enmity (threat, in WoW), is vapid and boring. Tanking is downright brain dead in it's current form in WoW. Keeping aggro is a non-factor, and the only responsibilities that press you is the need to position the boss properly and avoid the same things the rest of the raid DPS (any kind of AOE or mechanics-based damage) does.

There's a very clear balancing act here that I think both games are failing to walk, in that sense, for tanking.

Now, for healing, I think a design where the healers feel compelled to moderate healing spells from start to finish seems more fitting in terms of what you imagine a healer does...which IMO makes the WoW model seem slightly superior.

So it's give and take for me. I think tanking is massive orders of amounts more fun in FFXIV, but at the same time I find the healing dynamics of WoW to be slightly more engaging in the sense that you are actively doing your chosen role of choice for the entirety of a given encounter, making healing feel much more interactive as a role. This as opposed to FFXIV where it feels like you are only a healer intermittently, and then the rest of the time you're trying to play catch up to the bottom of the meter (or maybe even higher, who knows).

In the end, I main a tank, so the rest is history...