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

[kikix12]

Problem: DPS winning fights.
Solution: Non-DPS'ing winning fights.
Explanation: A battle where survival ends up winning it. This can be done in two ways. One, where the party surviving for a specific amount of time wins. How they survive doesn't matter, but deaths would increase the time while the enemy would do a lot of off-aggro or AoE attacks, hence it would be healer-centric. Only tank can significantly mitigate damage, so healers role would be more important.
It could also depend on the amount of damage completely negated (by doing a mechanic correctly thus canceling skill, moving out of AoE's properly, using damage-mitigation skills etc.). This would be more tank-centric, as their damage mitigation is superior, but healer would still need to be present to keep the tanks in health, and prevent the DPS from dying. Dying means less dodges, after all. Adds can be used to occupy the DPS's, with adds being normal "DPS wins" mobs, so that high DPS would still be necessary.
These can be mixed and matched, even making a boss that can be won against with either of the three or select two.

Story-wise, it is caused by the boss noticing that no matter how much he tries, he cannot win, hence he surrenders. A reasonable thing and most people don't want a deathmatch just for the sake of having a deathmatch, with no chance of victory...


Problem: Healers and tanks having little reason to go out of their regularly scheduled heals/mitigation skills, as the ratio of DPS to healing/mitigation is more important.
Solution: Make having high health more important.
Explanation: With decrease in HP, comes decrease in damage output. The character gets held back by wounds and the like. Keeping a tank at 50% could cut its damage by 40%, for example, even more at lower levels than that, so "brute-forcing" their way through avoidable attacks would not be a good idea for tanks, while healers doing heavy DPS while keeping the party at low HP until a scripted "nuke" comes would be a horrid idea, as well.


Both of these would be better suited as selectively-used mechanics, for some bosses/mobs, rather wide-spread thing. It would be one thing if the game was made like that from the start, but as it is now, it would cause quite an exodus, I guess. Especially since going by a thread I made in the past, majority of people really don't want to put even a sliver of thought into this game.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Lack of triage and the absurdly high healing potencies play a huge factor into why healers have so little engagement with their actual role. When you can set up at 10k regen tick, it crosses far into ridiculous categories. Likewise, the predictability of fights impacts them both. Nothing can truly be addressed until the devs embrace less scripted, high triage based fight design. I'll go one better and argue tank immunities are also part of the issue. I suspect their intent had been for emergency use, but we don't run content like that. All immunities have become is removing an annoying mechanic from the fight. Unfortunately, I can't say how well received high triage would be, especially at the lower levels. On the one hand, it would go a long way in forcing players to actually improve at their main role. On the other, well, whenever I let my co-healer solo in DF they tend to panic.

[Shurrikhan]

Lack of triage and the absurdly high healing potencies play a huge factor into why healers have so little engagement with their actual role. When you can set up at 10k regen tick, it crosses far into ridiculous categories. Likewise, the predictability of fights impacts them both. Nothing can truly be addressed until the devs embrace less scripted, high triage based fight design. I'll go one better and argue tank immunities are also part of the issue. I suspect their intent had been for emergency use, but we don't run content like that. All immunities have become is removing an annoying mechanic from the fight. Unfortunately, I can't say how well received high triage would be, especially at the lower levels. On the one hand, it would go a long way in forcing players to actually improve at their main role. On the other, well, whenever I let my co-healer solo in DF they tend to panic.

By "triage" here, do you mean something like staving or cautionary heals (i.e. for an incoming damage of unknown proximity or strength), as opposed to known requirements or exacted heals, or is it just being used as another word for healing? (Just trying to be sure before I tally the idea.)

Problem: Healers and tanks having little reason to go out of their regularly scheduled heals/mitigation skills, as the ratio of DPS to healing/mitigation is more important.
Solution: Make having high health more important.
Explanation: With decrease in HP, comes decrease in damage output. The character gets held back by wounds and the like. Keeping a tank at 50% could cut its damage by 40%, for example, even more at lower levels than that, so "brute-forcing" their way through avoidable attacks would not be a good idea for tanks, while healers doing heavy DPS while keeping the party at low HP until a scripted "nuke" comes would be a horrid idea, as well.

So like a raid-wide Atrophy (or, Reverse Vigor) mechanic? While as a gimmick that'd do little for healing or tanking, that would definitely be interesting to see some time. I just worry that it would change little in the aspects of "maintain HoTs / ensure Fairy's existance; DPS between".

[Reynhart]

But from the same theoretical, following the pretext that your healers have to put out their fixed maximal output (and mana is a non-concern), I'm wondering how this differs in any way from a typical enrage timer, except that the impact of individual mistakes must somehow be softened for this to work. In either case, damage is your primary form of survival, all else just multipliers (derivatives) thereon, by extending the maximal encounter time.

Extending the maximal encounter time, that's the big difference. On the old STR vs VIT debate, wearing VIT accessories would give a much easier time beating the "enrage" by giving below average DPS more time to do damage as a tradeoff for what you personally lose, as is using your tank stance. Right now, if your DPS are below average, by being more tanky, you actually reduce your chances of winning because of a totally arbitrary time limit that doesn't goes with the flow and always makes you wonder why the monster deosn't use its "kill'em all" attack right at the beginning...

Solution: Non-DPS'ing winning fights.

We can fights like this, but they would be gimmicky like that boss in Bardam. I doubt we could apply this to lots of fights

Explanation: With decrease in HP, comes decrease in damage output.

That would actually have the opposite effect. Having more HP doesn't make you easier to heal. So, you'd want enough HP to survive but not too much HP so that healers would have to use several spells to put you out of the debuff window. Unless you tie the damage to the actual max value instead of the ratio of HP, which would be very weird after reverting back to STR for AP.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

By "triage" here, do you mean something like staving or cautionary heals (i.e. for an incoming damage of unknown proximity or strength), as opposed to known requirements or exacted heals, or is it just being used as another word for healing? (Just trying to be sure before I tally the idea.)

A little of both. Initially, I meant it more towards consistent out going damage that necessitated more frequent healing. Coupling it with a degree of unpredictability (i.e., cautionary heals) would add another layer of gameplay because now abilities like Assize are valued more for their healing. You may actually want to hold it back instead of blowing it off CD. Of course, how much damage would need to be adjusted based on any healer potency changes.

[NocturniaUzuki]

Forgive the perhaps unrelated introspection, but I've come to the realization that, after reading many of the responses on this thread, some of my own previous (and often controversial) arguments have been clarified.

Why am I so "obsessed" (as some people have called it) with unconventional gameplay?
Why am I so frustrated by the DPS-centric mindset?
Why do I think that the old Spear card was the best AST card in the game?

The answer to all of those really just comes down to my disdain for the predictability of FF14:

Much of the reason I run old content on MinIL is because a) I don't know the fights, so it feels more unpredictable, and b) most other people don't know the fights, so they get hit more, making my job as healer more adaptive.

I run content with freeform comps because I have adapt to the situation. If I'm healing, the aggro is often going all over the place as well, again making it unpredictable.

I dislike the DPS-centric mindset because it is essentially the product of the predictable nature of the game. "Why save your cooldowns for the sake of safety when you know everything that is coming? Just use it all to increase your DPS."

"Faster clears are always better." Except that the longer the run takes, the more chances there are for the unpredictable to happen.

Why am I so obsessed with 4-player Royal Menagerie? Because it's one of the few fights with a fairly hefty amount of randomness.

Mathematically, the old Spear is proven useless, from a DPS perspective; however I always argued that math could not account for unpredictability. Ultimately, when battles become very unpredictable, the question of safe versus aggressive healers becomes far more pronounced. And reducing cooldowns becomes a very potent tool for raising the odds of being prepared when in a very unpredictable situation.
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Annnnnnnyways, to try to pull this introspection a bit more on topic, the question of pursuing a less predictable form of gameplay I think depends largely on how the playerbase will respond to it. While players are quick to complain that things are too easy, and suggest that elements of randomness could alleviate this problem, I'm not sure how popular it would be, overall. How many players are prepared for the inevitable excess of wipes the introduction of randomness would create? It seems to me that the playerbase is strongly centered on predictability now, after so many years of it. The addition of randomization would certainly prove to be a challenge, especially for players with stronger memory, but weaker decisive reactions. Perhaps such bosses could be introduced as a new type of dungeon. Or perhaps trials could become the more randomized battles, while raids remain predictable. That in turn could cause a serious split in the playerbase, though.

In terms of ideas for new approaches, I'll throw another upvote on the Bardam's Mettle system, which was mentioned earlier. I very much enjoyed the second boss. However, it was still very scripted. Throwing in randomization would make it a lot harder. As kikix12 said, you can also do

A battle where survival ends up winning it.

. Memories of Cromm Cruiach from Vindictus spring to mind...

[Kaethra]

Healers in WoW can do damage but they lack powerful damage tools like Holy.

WoW is a bad example. In PUG content I was easily able to be 2nd on damage (Tank being first) as a Holy Paladin, doing a healing rotation. I was like a mini Ret Paladin in Legion.


Back to the subject though. Like I said before. Run some of the harder content like Savages and Extremes in SB. You'll see a more profound use for Healing and Tanking roles. The PUG content is easy because you're throwing 4 random people together with varying amounts of experience and aptitude.

[NolLacnala]

You can't make healing and tanking more intensive because the vast majority of our playerbase can't handle it. DF healers could barely handle a11 normal Eternal Darkness. And when DF tanks try to into positioning, you end up with Calofisteti 99.9% field cleaves. And that's not even mentioning both roles vs. Hashmal.

Until we kill the "Expert roulette is endgame" mentality, nothing will change.

[Sylvina]

I would say get rid of tank stances, or do SOMETHING to kill the terrible "Tank boss only in dps stance" meta.

[Reynhart]

You can't make healing and tanking more intensive because the vast majority of our playerbase can't handle it.

If we had that mentality in real life, we'd still be using training wheels on our bicycles. Yes, people will fall...and then they'll learn.