How can tanking and healing be made more broadly useful in more "role-specific" ways?

[Shurrikhan]

<I am not asking what the player can do in present design to increase the breadth and/or depth of nuance in their gameplay. I am asking what changes to design can improve on that breadth and/or depth.>

Let me preface this by begging that this not turn into another healer-dps or tank-dps thread. This will all work off the assumption that by common sense, one spends only as much time as is necessary on any task that does not directly contribute to completing the encounter: in XIV's case, all encounters are ended through damage, thus damage is primary, and mitigation and restoration derivative. It also works off the observation that by the game's design, this means that relatively little/few of either one's (1) considerations or (2) globals are optimally spent in derivative tasks, which can annoy at least a significant portion of players, who would rather be healing or "tanking" (there's a vague term for you) more often and/or more significantly.

How can we adjust the game design, without relying on gimmicks or absurd scaling, to allow for a greater sense of "healing" or "tanking" within those "roles"? And what adjustments, compensatory or improvements in their own right, should DPS feel in order to make that vision cohesive? To put it another way, how can we better mechanically embody the idea of support — be it defensive, restorative, or offensive — and lend interest and urgency to team gameplay through short-term goals outside of just our own rotational windows, without having to overtune damage taken or undertune healing doable? How can we generate greater and more interesting value from/in derivative tasks (whatever doesn't directly contribute to finishing the encounter)?

:: To be clear, let's consider new content types as being a last resort to be used to create that design, e.g. only when two design concepts, philosophies, or paradigms are incompatible.

Go as ham on this as you like; this is just food for thought. If you have to re-engineer enemy behavioral scripts from scratch, that's fine. If you have to introduce new systems entirely, that, too, is fine.

Related Food for Thought questions, by way of example:
- Should there be synergy between healer DPS and healing, e.g. White Mages building up Essence of Earth/Wind/Water, spendable for support, self-buffing, or burst offense or restoration?
- Should almost all attacks be interceptable, as per T10's charge and mechanics repeating on it?
- Should enmity have more influence and nuance than just a target-determining value?
- Should there be some value system other than merely enmity than tanks would tend to have high outputs of, such as damage-based-suppression?
- Etc., etc.
<What kinds of systems can make our derivative toolkits more interesting and more deeply integrated into gameplay?>



_______________________________________________

SOME IDEAS SHARED HEREIN SO FAR:



Without Conflict (yet):

1. Adjust damage inflow as to be less scripted, in the interest of creating greater frequency of consideration for derivative tasks (e.g. more adaptation, cautionary preemption, and reaction, and probably more globals viably or optimally spendable on derivative tasks).
   
   
2. Make adjustments to tank or healer kits themselves as to better blend in DPS from the start, allowing for greater flexibility but also impactful decision-making, and more integrated mitigation for tanks.
   
   
3. Create encounters for which DPS is not the primary output (e.g. an encounter won by healing a mob or object to full health, or simply through party survival).
   
   
4. Break from certain restrictive norms in boss design as to allow for (1) more interesting fights, all told, and (2) greater caps to derivative outputs, in more varied ways. If the dragon has three heads and four limbs... he's free to use, at whatever separation provides most interesting gameplay, all three heads and four limbs. Enemies do not necessarily target only the top of their enmity table. Tail-slaps can be about enmity rather than just CDs.
   
   
5. Create encounters in which healing or mitigation themselves can push fight times similarly to DPS.

   For example, in a fight with frequent add spawns that are not necessary to kill, being overwhelmed kills you, but killing more than necessary makes the fight take longer, which -- especially if these adds or the boss become increasingly powerful or mana runs out -- may also overwhelm you. Stronger healing throughput available, therefore, can increase the amount of damage doable to the boss by decreasing the number of adds that have to be killed, especially if your party is not the lone source of damage doable to those adds, such as by including periodic environmental mechanics, friendly fire damage, or fight-specific gimmicks.

6. [Fight-specific] Atrophy mechanics (whereby one's damage potential is reduced based on their percentage HP, making healing a more viable damage-support tool relative to continuing to dps until healing is urgent, given that the heal itself would otherwise be wasteful).
   
   
7. Create more active mitigation tools at resource costs shared with DPS, but made more broadly viable (than, say, TBN) without needing to rely on indirect damage-regeneration (so, again, not quite like TBN)?
   
   
8. Make certain tank mitigation tools, or install some new mechanic across them as to, allow for scaling with the tank's stats, rather than solely with the enemy's stats.

With Conflict:

1. Somewhat nerf tank enmity generation and/or base mitigation and healer throughput, forcing them to spend more globals or modification (e.g. through stances) away from direct contribution.
   [Noteable Conflicts: Would the increase in effective difficulty in casual play instill as great a value flexibility for or quality of later combat designs as it would cause frustration upon implementation for unskilled players?]
   
   
2. Increase the frailty of tank DPS stances (such as to the eHP or defense of your average melee).
   [Noteable Conflicts: Would merely delay the points at which a swap is possible, but also, in doing so, reduce the breadth of tank toolkits in many fights and the depth of their play.]
   
   
3. Universal Atrophy mechanics (whereby one's damage potential is reduced based on their percentage HP, making healing a more viable damage-support tool relative to continuing to dps until healing is urgent, given that the heal itself would otherwise be wasteful).
   [Noteable Conflicts: Overlying mechanics that seem to exist only to force role requirements tend to feel arbitrary and disempower the sense of natural choice in the surrounding game, making for a worse overall game experience, even if they may advantage certain role interactions.

[Kaethra]

Run non-PUG content. That's how. Not only do you have to perform your role more profoundly, but you have to utilize your class's strengths.

Game design is fine in the fact that it gives people of varying skill and cooperative ability content they can find challenging. You can't turn the roulette into needing hardcore tanking/healing. They're for the bottom rung of group content. Changing game design and class design would exclude thousands of players.

[MoroMurasaki]

If I'm misunderstanding please feel free to call me out but I think what the OP is asking for isn't more "hardcore" content necessarily but just content in which tanks and healers have less time/freedom to DPS. Even in Savage/Ultimate tank and healer DPS is very much a thing that is expected, more difficult content doesn't necessarily mean more tanking and healing but just being more skilful with their application.

From a healing standpoint I think a lot of my freedom to DPS comes from the scripted nature of a fight, especialy on SCH and AST but also on WHM to an extent. Adding randomness to an encounter could easily make certain bosses require more attention and specifically topping off health bars because as it stands right now there is a ton of time I'm happy to leave a full party under 50% because I know nothing awful is coming and I might as well wait the ten seconds for Thin Air to cone up to cast a Medica II and save myself 1600mp by casting Stone instead.

This sort of play is encouraged but wouldn't become possible if there was the potential for unscripted raidwide damage, though cast bars could still give a bit of warning.

There is very little else that I can think of to add healing necessity that wouldn't exclude the even-more-casual-than-me players without also being really arbitrary in nature like oneshot mechanics and consistant HP degradation that would force an HPS increase.

For tanking I have even less to say.... More enmity resets? Remove enmity mitigation from other roles?

Again there are certain things that could increase the necessary tankiness of a tank (stacking vuln up becoming really frequent, nerfing AoE enmity generators) but this feel like arbitrary difficulty increases that would just serve to force someone's hand instead of making tanking engaging. Maybe something where you can only hold an enemy for so long/have so much enmity on it before it hits a sort of tiny "enrage" and does big damage (think Temple Bees) or goes to poke someone else because it's bored of you?

I dunno, excuse my ramblings. I think these things could be fun though, thanks for making this thread.

[Reynhart]

From a healing standpoint I think a lot of my freedom to DPS comes from the scripted nature of a fight, especialy on SCH and AST but also on WHM to an extent.

This is so very true. And probably applies to tank too. You know that you can drop your stance for x amount of time because you'll always have a CD ready for the next big hit, and that, in the mean time, damage is only scrath compared to much the healer can heal you. Which also might show that healers are a bit too powerful.
If you take out enrage mechanics and imagine a healer with infinite MP, the party would survive indefinitely. For me, that's a problem.

[MoroMurasaki]

This is so very true. And probably applies to tank too. You know that you can drop your stance for x amount of time because you'll always have a CD ready for the next big hit, and that, in the mean time, damage is only scrath compared to much the healer can heal you. Which also might show that healers are a bit too powerful.
If you take out enrage mechanics and imagine a healer with infinite MP, the party would survive indefinitely. For me, that's a problem.

I'm not sure I understand the last bit of your post - if you aren't being killed by enrage and you aren't being killed by your healer running out of MP then what is supposed to be killing you? I mean obviously mistakes happen but I don't think that's what you're referencing.

I guess I would just ask in a situation with a fight with no enrage, no MP issues and no grievous errors why shouldn't the party survive endlessly?

[Shurrikhan]

Run non-PUG content. That's how. Not only do you have to perform your role more profoundly, but you have to utilize your class's strengths.

Game design is fine in the fact that it gives people of varying skill and cooperative ability content they can find challenging. You can't turn the roulette into needing hardcore tanking/healing. They're for the bottom rung of group content. Changing game design and class design would exclude thousands of players.

I'm not asking what the player can do to better experience additional nuances of play in the present game. I am asking your ideas as to design concepts that can allow for such nuances to be deeper and more widely available across play, especially as they apply to the strength of derivative outputs or "cross-role" play.

If you are under the opinion that any and all means of increasing derivative outputs' usefulness would be damaging, whether at cost of existing outputs or not (emphasis on not), then so be it — no improvements possible.

If I'm misunderstanding please feel free to call me out but I think what the OP is asking for isn't more "hardcore" content necessarily but just content in which tanks and healers have less time/freedom to DPS.

I'll revise the OP for clarity in a moment. Content needn't be the only change; it's not what's asked for if looking at the query directly. Rather, what new systems or concepts in design can allow for more than concerns than just DPS, or shaving off as much enmity or healing as possible as to be able to DPS.

Let me be very, very clear here: this is not some defense of "pure" healing or tanking, nor is it asking to jump content difficulty just so that the existent healing and mitigation toolkits can see more prominent use (given that virtually all mitigation is CD based, the latter is scarcely even possible). I am asking what systems can be implemented to make the decisions going through a healer's or tank's (or even DPS's) mind can make the considerations of support (defensive, offensive, or curative) feel deeper and more pervasive, in terms of decisions makeable and globals spent thereon.

The real question in my humble opinion is 'how can the DPS role be made more broadly useful?' Tanks and healers are already plenty useful in both role specific and general ways.

And that is one of the only two questions being asked (all others being restatements for clarification).

How can we adjust the game design, without relying on gimmicks or absurd scaling, to allow for a greater sense of "healing" or "tanking" within those "roles"? And what adjustments, compensatory or improvements in their own right, should DPS feel in order to make that vision cohesive?

So, any ideas?

[Derio]

I think it comes down to the nature of each fight. To where once you learn it, the fight becomes easy to the point where the tank knows when he can drop tank stance and go offensive before (insert mechanic here) happens. Same can be said for healers when there is a break in the damage in.

For them to make it where the roles are used more would possibly raise the skill required for those roles, which in turn could make people want to play those roles even less, especially if you were to make those adjustments in the casual areas of dungeons.


Tanks tank and healers heal and in-between that they are dpsing. Its simple.

What the OP is suggesting wouldnt necessarily want people to tank or heal more. Perhaps more individual tank or healer specific actions within an instance, or exclusive healer and tank action time events but even then that would be them just sitting there button mashing while a cool animation plays out.

[Jandor]

Tanks are there to provide a target, take the hits, and deal damage.

Healers are there to keep everyone alive and deal damage.

DPS are there to deal damage.

The real question in my humble opinion is 'how can the DPS role be made more broadly useful?' Tanks and healers are already plenty useful in both role specific and general ways.

[Zojha]

The real question in my humble opinion is 'how can the DPS role be made more broadly useful?' Tanks and healers are already plenty useful in both role specific and general ways.

That's a trick question because DPS are already the only truly "useful" role, because the win condition is entirely dependent on getting the enemy's HP to zero. Tanks and healers are not useful in their own right, they are artificially made useful (and mandatory) via un-avoidable damage. And because that damage is capped, being "useful" beyond that goes the way of DPS.

You can of course pull the same trick with any other role and have for example a dedicated CC role that exists solely to cancel out casts that only they can cancel that will wipe the group if you don't - Same principle, you get your mandatory role gimmick and then DPS the rest of the time. And then make another dedicated De/Buff role that provides protection against another guaranteed wipe mechanic that you introduce based on those de/buffs - Think +70% shadow/fire/water resistance or similar. Same thing, mandatory role gimmick, rest DPS. Or you can make a gardener role that exists to plant flowers in the duty and the duty fails if not enough of them bloom. Same thing, mandatory role gimmick, rest DPS.

And because of that, DPS don't really need anything else. They are already at the "Rest" stage by default. And for tanks and healers, that means that the only way to make them more useful outside of DPS is to either create additional gimmicks, or increase the demands of the gimmicks they already have - everything else is gonna boil down to "More Damage", whether directly or indirectly.

[Reinha]

Healing and tanking has been handled very differently here than in WoW (which I'll use as an example), and I think the key to making tanking and healing less about dps is making them less overpowered in their own role and having less predictable encounters. Fights could have a degree of randomness regarding damage taken, damage could keep coming between mechanics and healing/tanking toolkits could be more limited and require active usage.

In WoW there are random damage hits on party members, heavier boss autoattacks, boss crits with a bigger impact, short cooldowns and random targets for aoe heals (consider a 10-15 second cooldown for Medica and Medica II hitting only 4 random targets), short cooldowns for basic tank mitigation (consider Inner Beast or The Blackest Night replacing tank stance and having to hit it every 10-15 seconds to survive basic damage) and less powerful tank buster cooldowns (shorter duration, less damage reduction). Tank swaps occur more often and the cooldown on Taunt (Provoke) is shorter. Healing in WoW is much less powerful than here and you actually use your single target heals on people, because aoe healing targets random people or eats a quarter of your MP and you don't have the means to recover MP as well as here. Heals are less powerful and Medica II equivalents are considered "raid cooldowns" (usually a 3 min cooldown) which get coordinated with other healers for certain mechanics. Having a raid wide cooldown on resurrections makes it more punishing to die in raids, so healers have to be on their toes for people's mistakes (small mistakes are often recoverable with some healer attention).

Healers in WoW can do damage but they lack powerful damage tools like Holy. Tanks do a decent amount of damage with their regular rotation (mitigation and damage are not mutually exclusive), but can increase damage with talent choices and gearing. Slowing multiple enemies and kiting them is also a thing which can be done to survive big pulls and make tanking more engaging.

What keeps the roles accessible to less than average players are the lack of near-death damage spikes and the focus on sustained mitigation and healing, and also the not very demanding dungeons and raids at the easiest difficulty. Danger in this game occurs when people aren't topped off in time for a big hitter, but in WoW danger occurs when people get lower and lower on health as the healers can't keep up with incoming (random and unavoidable) damage because they didn't find the balance between mana-heavy strong heals and cheap single target heals. I find that the latter approach can give a gradual increase in difficulty across different content and train people for end game, whereas the former kind of danger is either deadly for the unprepared or totally insignificant (like a dungeon tank buster which can be taken without mitigation and no damage follows it).