Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[Shurrikhan]

While what I am about to say may not always be the case, consider that turning off tank stance might mean you're making your healer have to work harder to keep you alive and thus may well be reducing their own dps contribution for an overall net gain of zero, just to improve your own personal dps.

Yes, as I said in the post before last, that happens. It's no so black and white. It'll also depend on your tank. It's more efficient to have the PLD heal and you Gravity spam as long as the PLD won't overcap on TP (assuming he will otherwise eventually TP starve at optimal crowd DPS). There are some very, very fine plateaus with RNG (Crit heals) atop them. When bristling with mana in a massive pull of weak mobs, the same is true of DRK and it's Abyssal Drain. But it's also rare that simply modifying the order in which cooldowns were used by healer and tank wouldn't already allow for the same window of healer opportunity for a Warrior or DRK, especially paired with a non-SCH, making the extension provided by tank stance redundant. And if you have a 7-Decimate spam ready to go, there's nothing your healer can do to compete with that contribution.

The point was "when" the gains are likely to be more for you than for the healer, one should adjust accordingly. It goes both ways, which is what's fun about it, imo. It's one of the (few-ish) things I really, really like about tanks and healers in this game, especially in speedy dungeon runs.

[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...

[loreleidiangelo]

[...]

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

I'm not a tank main, but out of curiosity - what responsibilities do you think tanks have in this game that isn't just "hold aggro and position the boss correctly, use cooldowns when appropriate"? I think the things you listed in WoW as being vapid and without depth are pretty much a non-entity here in XIV too, but I suppose if your caveat is that you can at least maintain decent numbers here DPS-wise then that's fair enough. Just curious to get a tank's perspective on how the two games differ, especially since tanking design in WoW is sometimes praised on the tank subforums here.

[zipzo]

I'm not a tank main, but out of curiosity - what responsibilities do you think tanks have in this game that isn't just "hold aggro and position the boss correctly, use cooldowns when appropriate"? I think the things you listed in WoW as being vapid and without depth are pretty much a non-entity here in XIV too, but I suppose if your caveat is that you can at least maintain decent numbers here DPS-wise then that's fair enough. Just curious to get a tank's perspective on how the two games differ, especially since tanking design in WoW is sometimes praised on the tank subforums here.

It's the added responsibility of maintaining respectable DPS and (probably the bigger one) threat/enmity management.

Tanking lost it's soul in WoW the moment threat management stopped being a factor in tanking (in my opinion, which many will disagree with I'm sure). To me, threat management was the entire bread and butter of tanking gameplay. You could easily separate the wheat from the chaff based on which tanks could hold threat on a boss through whatever type of open burst your raid could put out, or the tank that could manage to keep aggro on a group pull, while picking up stragglers or patrols without losing party members in the process.

The way it is now, CC is unnecessary so it's simply a matter of AOE tanking everything, and since all tanks possess some form of mass AOE and threat is a literal non-factor anymore, it takes the entire element of managing threat out of the equation. In WoW, the only way to gauge a good tank from a bad one is basically how quickly they can move through a dungeon I.E. do they know the pulls and pack skips. That, to me, is vapid.

BTW FFXIV in this comparison is for tanking in DPS stance. Tanking in tank stance makes enmity pretty simple, while still not nearly as brain dead as it is for WoW, it's rather ignorable to a degree.

Tank damage is probably the secondary factor. Just the sheer presence of that responsibility, makes the role more demanding in terms of what your peers expect of you, thus, properly executing your role's responsibilities comes with a higher accomplishment factor (in FFXIV).

This is how I, personally, would evaluate the tanking situation between the two games.

[ximxim]

Probably, those who trash talking about how lame the DPS of tank and healer contribute is because they (DPS) are trying to throw the fault of their own DPS rotation to tanks and healers.

This community is getting toxic and toxic everyday... what lame excuse saying that healers and tanks do not need high skill play while DPS only have one job which is DPS and they can't even do it right HAHAHAAHA!!

[Windwalker]

Tanking in fun fun fun, easy to farm gear with. Rush in there, grab a pack of mobs and just mow them down. Im never in Tanking stance while dealing with bosses, only using it while gathering packs of mobs. Makes the run a bit faster. As a tank you notice what your team is doing, what abilities they don't use and if they mess up on mechanics. A dps job is to keep your tank goaded while actually using the abilities you have, seen so many dps who have no idea what they are doing, no matter how many times you tell them to do certain things. Theres also the issue of people never using sprint, spam that shit to make the run faster and keep up. I seen one badass healer once in my hundreds of runs while leveling tanks, a whm who spammed holy and did some amazing dps, halved the time of the run.

The reason people want to go faster is because they want to improve and not fall asleep in the dungeons. WoW is a borefest in comparison to FFXIV. Where everyone mindlessly spams 3 buttons.

[RichardButte]

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).

This is fairly spot-on.

I honestly wouldn't even mind the huge chunks of healing downtime if healers had some interesting methods of doing damage instead of just usually one DoT and one damaging spell.

I wanted to main AST because I wanted the cards as an added complexity to healing (just to have SOMETHING else to do), but I've actually grown bored with that as well.

[loreleidiangelo]

It's the added responsibility of maintaining respectable DPS and (probably the bigger one) threat/enmity management.

Tanking lost it's soul in WoW the moment threat management stopped being a factor in tanking (in my opinion, which many will disagree with I'm sure). To me, threat management was the entire bread and butter of tanking gameplay. You could easily separate the wheat from the chaff based on which tanks could hold threat on a boss through whatever type of open burst your raid could put out, or the tank that could manage to keep aggro on a group pull, while picking up stragglers or patrols without losing party members in the process.

The way it is now, CC is unnecessary so it's simply a matter of AOE tanking everything, and since all tanks possess some form of mass AOE and threat is a literal non-factor anymore, it takes the entire element of managing threat out of the equation. In WoW, the only way to gauge a good tank from a bad one is basically how quickly they can move through a dungeon I.E. do they know the pulls and pack skips. That, to me, is vapid.

BTW FFXIV in this comparison is for tanking in DPS stance. Tanking in tank stance makes enmity pretty simple, while still not nearly as brain dead as it is for WoW, it's rather ignorable to a degree.

Tank damage is probably the secondary factor. Just the sheer presence of that responsibility, makes the role more demanding in terms of what your peers expect of you, thus, properly executing your role's responsibilities comes with a higher accomplishment factor (in FFXIV).

This is how I, personally, would evaluate the tanking situation between the two games.

At a cursory level (and I freely admit that I might not be getting enough context here), it seems like WoW tanking is actually pretty similar to XIV tanking, except that in XIV you arbitrarily have the ability to "turn off" your tanking for a moderate increase in DPS. Does that mean that if WoW introduced something similar (aka old gladiator stance for Warrior?) that you'd find tanking in that game enjoyable again?

For what it's worth, when tank enmity underwent a rough patch a few weeks ago in regards to how Stormblood changed damage modifiers, there was a pretty big stink on the forums about threat issues, which seems to tell me that the players in this game don't really want these hugely epic battles to maintain top enmity on mobs. I get that the tank community isn't one collective Borg voice, but what are your thoughts on that specifically?

From my noobish perspective, to me good tanking has always been about excellent positioning and cooldown usage more than threat bars, so to see enmity wars held up as a kind of challenge mode for tank mains is a little strange to me. I guess an apt comparison would be healer mana, and its management - it's part and parcel of being "good" at the role, but hardly what defines it (IMO, of course).

Sorry for all the lengthy back-and-forth. I just like both games, and it's rare to see anyone willing to discuss them objectively on any subject.

[Remedi]

wow tanking is akin to what PLD in 2.0 was as in your dps rotation is your threat rotation, now you can manage it with various tools, there is a thing called making use of threat leads on FF that it doesn't exist on wow, also of note the active mitigation of wow is not exactly what we do against TBs here.
Also of note bosses on wow don't really have TBs in the same way we have them, neither bosses in general make right use of split dmg technisques correctly, they are immunized or split with the least amount of ppl that have either powerful self Cds (hello rogues).

I wouldn't really consider wow healing to be that better compared to FF14, if you think that FF14 jobs are homogenized because they have an efficent heal, a strong heal and an aoe heals, well that's the same in wow, take notice that they weren't able to make work of a shield healer something that we have, that alone makes the healing scene different enough from them to not beign really comparable, not to mention that on mythic healers are the class you cut the most to get trough dps checks, because once you have enough healers to bypass the healing check they are effectively useless

[Claire_Pendragon]

It's been said time and again, confirmed by the devs themselves, that dps check design doesn't take tank and healer dps into account. Stop blaming the tank and healers for your own inability to learn your job.

Right and Wrong.

They have done both, and said both.
Its why 3.0 was so hard. They expected more DPS push in savage from healers (less so from tanks, since tanks were alrdy doing dps in tank stance, but it was still considered.)
Also, most ppl werent used to the changes to DPS yet, so by the time the community got the swing of things, SE already tried to make things easier.