Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[loreleidiangelo]

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

So Discipline Priest has either a.) magically been deleted from the game from the last time I checked or b.) somehow isn't a shield healer anymore, according to you. Care to elaborate on this?

As for "homogenization", there's what? 3 healers out of 6 who have some variant of the "slow cheap heal" and "fast expensive heal"? XIV basically has those too; your "heal" and your "heal II", and your "sustain/small damage on tank heal". Except I'd hazard I could find a lot more different about Chain Heal and Prayer of Mending than Helios and Medica, and Holy Shock vs Holy Word: Serenity compared to Essential Dignity and Tetragrammaton. Or Blessing of Protection vs Guardian Spirit, compared to...uh, we don't even have equivalents to those spells in this game, lol.

In truth, had SCH remained as it was in 2.0 with its clearly-defined niche, WHM got their regens nuked or taken away and maybe some more power put into their burst healing, and AST was introduced as a pure HoT healer with buffs we wouldn't be having this discussion. But SCH got a CD-reliant Medica and an almost-Cure III with better range and WHM got Lustrate with a CD and a more conditional Adloquium and AST is just an awful rip-off of both of them so here we are.

To me it's less about which abilities are DIRECTLY the same between healers and more about how healer kits in XIV don't have any niches because boss design is rather bland (tank/raid busters or totally avoidable mechs gg).

[Zarabeth]

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.

I make sure to always compliment tanks who do their job. As a healer there's nothing worse than a tank who can't (or doesn't even try to) hold hate. I always give my commendations to tanks who do their jobs well.

[Kaonis]

It's a mix of things. Firstly, the lack of AI. Mobs in this games have no AI, everything from the toughest raid boss to the weakest rabbit run off of a script of timers. In boss designs this means the big hits are predictable, so every healer/tank knows when to use their abilities to mitigate the big hits. Healers are also pretty powerful and able to full heal someone from the brink of death without much issue, more so when you know when it's coming to save the big CD's for. Outside the big predictable hits there isn't a whole lot else of meaningful damage. For a lot of fights the regens/fairy/oGCD heals are enough to keep the tanks healthy until the next predictable tank buster. And this leads to healers with a lot of down time.

For tanks, it's much of the same issues compounded with gear. Until recently the only tank secondary stat was parry, and it was nearly worthless with little return and parry not being an effective mitigation tool. So the only good options tanks had gearing up was to take DPS stats. Even with tenacity now, most of the sub stats a tank can grab are pure DPS related. Compared to SWTOR (which I tanked a bit in) you had 3 separate stats for mitigation; evasion, shield proc rate, and shield % damage reduction. When I tanked there, damage was less predictable and so tanks would do what they could t mitigate as much damage as possible, coupled with the fact that healers weren't as powerful.

And this is in raid content, for dungeons it gets to be much more of a contrast as things hit pretty weak in there. Before SB, especially, healers could let regens/SCH fairy heal for most of a dungeon while they DPS, more so if the tank did the 'intended' pulls in a dungeon. The only time I had to focus solely on healing in a dungeon back in HW/ARR was when the tank pulled every mob they could, and sometimes I could still manage an odd AoE inbetween heals.

[Remedi]

So Discipline Priest has either a.) magically been deleted from the game from the last time I checked or b.) somehow isn't a shield healer anymore, according to you. Care to elaborate on this?

As for "homogenization", there's what? 3 healers out of 6 who have some variant of the "slow cheap heal" and "fast expensive heal"? XIV basically has those too; your "heal" and your "heal II", and your "sustain/small damage on tank heal". Except I'd hazard I could find a lot more different about Chain Heal and Prayer of Mending than Helios and Medica, and Holy Shock vs Holy Word: Serenity compared to Essential Dignity and Tetragrammaton. Or Blessing of Protection vs Guardian Spirit, compared to...uh, we don't even have equivalents to those spells in this game, lol.

In truth, had SCH remained as it was in 2.0 with its clearly-defined niche, WHM got their regens nuked or taken away and maybe some more power put into their burst healing, and AST was introduced as a pure HoT healer with buffs we wouldn't be having this discussion. But SCH got a CD-reliant Medica and an almost-Cure III with better range and WHM got Lustrate with a CD and a more conditional Adloquium and AST is just an awful rip-off of both of them so here we are.

To me it's less about which abilities are DIRECTLY the same between healers and more about how healer kits in XIV don't have any niches because boss design is rather bland (tank/raid busters or totally avoidable mechs gg).

Discipline has been changed to the battle priest archetype, now their toolkit is more centered towards the dmg=healing type (I don't remember that passive skill) ppl whined enough that discipline was "stealing" their healing that they changed the playstyle lol, so yeah they failed to actaully implement and balance an absorb type healer, wanna also know why? because it was only 1, there's a reason why AST can shield and regen, it can be either of the existing healer so that content can actually be designed towards the need for mitigation.
That said FFXIV healers do play differently in their planning and their utility, yes they might have the same base toolkit but so what?

[RichardButte]

That said FFXIV healers do play differently in their planning and their utility, yes they might have the same base toolkit but so what?

They do feel much more "samey" than WoW's healers, by a long shot.

Some of WoW's healers have no real AoE heals at all, but make up for it in faster, mana-efficient heals that they can use to restore the whole party very quickly. A Resto-druid plays completely differently from a Disc priest, which plays completely different from a Holy priest, which plays completely different from a Mistweaver monk, etc.

Also, thanks to the 1sec GCD in WoW, healers can press their buttons a lot more often so damage can be more consistent and less spiky.

In XIV, damage is either "a tickle" or "75% of your HP" with almost no in between. This is designed around the 2.5sec GCD which dictates that healers can only do so many actions per second.

XIV healers all have the same basic healing spells (small heal, large heal, AoE heal), and while some of WoW's healers have at least the small and large heals, the differences in playstyles from there on in are much larger and more varied than XIV's healers.

[Remedi]

I repeat samey because you have a basic toolkit to not be a burden in the most cases, which is the same for wow too, but they have different quirks to them when played to their fullest and lest not to forget, wow has no pet healer class either.

edit: btw remember when druids could only casts hots? that was not that great

[Awful]

Wow bosses are not as much scripted bosses there usually use skills when their Cds is up (some have a 10 sec timer of when they decide to use skills)
also they have much less mechanics x phases then FF14
Bosses here are puzzles or dance if you will, you need to figure out how it work and then you are good to go
on wow most of the time it's a question of numbers and how few healers you can manage a boss fight.

that is one of the reason why the end game raiding of the 2 games is very different and shouldn't be compared as much as ppl do

Yep this is very true, bosses are very scripted in FFXIV if you've got to X phase you can reach it or as was in Creator Savage you can skip it whereas WoW you just gotta make sure your healers/tanks/DPS are all doing well and doing adequate damage and healing.

Not to mention tanking in WoW is all active mitigation and FFXIV is all pro-active CDs that you can pop ahead of time with abilities like Addle/Reprisal/Feint, all the tanks are pretty similar as well, they all have gauges, a tank stance, with something extra to distinguish themselves. Tanks in WoW is mainly play style and they're all different with talents/artifact weapons/traits and tier set bonuses.

They're both vastly different they share the same ideas as a core MMO but how tanks and healers are handled are so very different as well as raid comps when it comes down to it.

[loreleidiangelo]

I repeat samey because you have a basic toolkit to not be a burden in the most cases, which is the same for wow too, but they have different quirks to them when played to their fullest and lest not to forget, wow has no pet healer class either.

edit: btw remember when druids could only casts hots? that was not that great

SCH's fairy is basically the heals that a Disc Priest does via Atonement, tbh. It's more usable insofar that it has a great extra kit, but Embrace heals for about what Shadow Word: Pain heals on an Atoned tank in WoW.

Either way, my complaint isn't that XIV healers have "a basic toolkit", it's that they have a TON of overlap in their cooldowns and abilities that makes them great picks for any situation. There's nothing inherently wrong about that, so no need to be defensive, but it IS homogenization in the name of "balance". Every healer has answers to single target burst healing, oGCD healing, AOE sustain healing, mana management, etc... They don't have any particular strengths or weaknesses except what players in this game classify as "utility" (which is mostly just "any ability that isn't a healing one or a DPS one"). That's why AST was targeted out for almost all of 3.x - the devs tried to make a scenario where AST DIDN'T have the answers for heavy damage scenarios in order to make their party buffs have some kind of tradeoff, but healers in XIV were so spoiled already with WHM being a powerhouse and SCH being given a bunch of WHM tools in Heavensward so no one bothered to try to make it work, they just hollered for AST to get the same level of healing as the other two. Then when that happened, AST dominated the raid scene because there was no counterbalance to its insanely good utility.

I just think that WoW doesn't have that much of the same problem, likely because of how their damage in raids comes out and how the healers are designed. Holy Pally doesn't have an answer to redonk back-to-back AOEs, but they make great tank healers because of stuff like Blessing and Lay on Hands. Disc Priest doesn't have an answer for constant AOE damage either, but has pretty good tank shielding/healing too and has the bonus of doing moderately decent damage too. Resto Shaman doesn't have an answer to mana problems, and Druid doesn't have an answer to any sort of burst healing requirements whatsoever, but those two classes are pretty good at raid healing, just in their own unique way (Shamans through powerhousing, Druids through consistency). To be honest, healers like Disc Priest and Holy Paladin would never have a space in FFXIV content above casual dungeons (maybe 24-man raids), because this game is pretty much all about the health-spiking unavoidable AOEs, and damage on the tanks tend to come in the form of infrequent low-damage autos and easily mitigated tank busters, which makes single-target sustain a lot more valuable than single-target burst healing, which is those two class' niche.

[zipzo]

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?

No, because it would still be lacking any sort of enmity/threat management element that it used to have.

For the record, it's important to get the right perspective on what I'm saying. I'm not saying that I like doing lots of DPS as a tank. I am saying that I enjoy the pressure of needing to meet a DPS threshold as a tank. There's some nuance there but these are two different things. One is simply the enjoyment of big numbers in a role not necessarily intended (traditionally) to put them out, the other is the enjoyment of pushing the class to it's limit DPS-wise even though that isn't prime directive #1.

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?

I would not have been one of those people contributing to said stink. The enmity "mini-game" (if you will) is something I've always loved about tanking. My only theory is that this is a concept that more veteran older MMO players like, but newer more modern MMO tank players would prefer it to be a non-factor so they can focus on killing the mob and collecting mobs. That's a complete theory with nothing to back it up but anecdotal experience in discussing MMO mechanics with other players/guildees/groupies or what have you in all games or forums. Threat management was incredibly important in WoW from vanilla until late Cataclysm or so when it became a non-factor, so several expansions. I don't know what specifically the design team's perspective is on threat management mechanics in the MMORPG space, but it clearly wasn't a priority to maintain it within the game. This killed tanking for me in WoW on all fronts.

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).

#whynotboth?

I do not reject the assertion that positioning and CD usage is an important element of tanking...but tanking is flat out boring when those are the only elements of tanking. Those things + threat/enmity are what makes tanking fun for me, because it deepens the complexity of your role, which ultimately gives a higher feeling of accomplishment when you do it well.

The healer mana comparison is a good one. Threat/enmity can vary in its importance depending on how whatever game's developers want to balance it, same for healer mana, but for the most part, yeah.

The way I see it, enmity/threat is a bit more of a role-defining job than you seem to think of it though. Think about it...so you're a tank? What's your job? Get the mob to attack you.

Why should the mob attack you? What makes you special? This is where enmity/threat comes in. You are executing a chain of attacks specially designed to piss said mob off more than any other player in the raid, even players doing more damage than you. Reason? You have the shield, you need the mob to attack you so that other less durable fighters aren't taking the fury. So how do you get that mob to attack you, of all people?.

If the paragraph above doesn't make threat/enmity out to be a role-defining element of tanking, I don't know what would. Snap aggro abilities in MMORPG's are often even referred to as a "taunt". So, you're just yelling something offensive at the mob, or something lol.

To me, proper CD usage and positioning are the 2ndary elements of tanking. These two concepts are easy to learn and very simple to execute in the short term. Maintaining good threat/enmity on bosses in high burst situations with little waiting on the DPS part, or maintaining the attention of many mobs in huge pack situations, these IMO are more role-defining and also more fun than the concept of using CDs at the right time and positioning.

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.

Np. At the end of the day I'm not 100% neutral myself as I've recently stepped away from WoW for a veritable list of reasons, one of them being that I think tanking is just in the gutter as a role there. I can do my best to compare them objectively though.

[Remedi]

SCH's fairy is basically the heals that a Disc Priest does via Atonement, tbh. It's more usable insofar that it has a great extra kit, but Embrace heals for about what Shadow Word: Pain heals on an Atoned tank in WoW.

Either way, my complaint isn't that XIV healers have "a basic toolkit", it's that they have a TON of overlap in their cooldowns and abilities that makes them great picks for any situation. There's nothing inherently wrong about that, so no need to be defensive, but it IS homogenization in the name of "balance". Every healer has answers to single target burst healing, oGCD healing, AOE sustain healing, mana management, etc... They don't have any particular strengths or weaknesses except what players in this game classify as "utility" (which is mostly just "any ability that isn't a healing one or a DPS one"). That's why AST was targeted out for almost all of 3.x - the devs tried to make a scenario where AST DIDN'T have the answers for heavy damage scenarios in order to make their party buffs have some kind of tradeoff, but healers in XIV were so spoiled already with WHM being a powerhouse and SCH being given a bunch of WHM tools in Heavensward so no one bothered to try to make it work, they just hollered for AST to get the same level of healing as the other two. Then when that happened, AST dominated the raid scene because there was no counterbalance to its insanely good utility.

I just think that WoW doesn't have that much of the same problem, likely because of how their damage in raids comes out and how the healers are designed. Holy Pally doesn't have an answer to redonk back-to-back AOEs, but they make great tank healers because of stuff like Blessing and Lay on Hands. Disc Priest doesn't have an answer for constant AOE damage either, but has pretty good tank shielding/healing too and has the bonus of doing moderately decent damage too. Resto Shaman doesn't have an answer to mana problems, and Druid doesn't have an answer to any sort of burst healing requirements whatsoever, but those two classes are pretty good at raid healing, just in their own unique way (Shamans through powerhousing, Druids through consistency). To be honest, healers like Disc Priest and Holy Paladin would never have a space in FFXIV content above casual dungeons (maybe 24-man raids), because this game is pretty much all about the health-spiking unavoidable AOEs, and damage on the tanks tend to come in the form of infrequent low-damage autos and easily mitigated tank busters, which makes single-target sustain a lot more valuable than single-target burst healing, which is those two class' niche.

I think you should go back and watch everything wow has right now because some of your infos are outdated