Gear and Progression: A Discussion

[Kalise]

So, in the world of MMO's, end-game progression is a gear treadmill. You do dungeons to get geared up to do raids to then progress through more and more difficult raids.

By doing this, your character gets stronger and better at its role the better gear that you acquire.

Now, the question I propose is thus: Is FFXIV doing it right?

The main thing that's noted whenever gear comes up, is the inevitable talks surrounding Tank and Healer damage outputs. There's always a keen eye on the DPS outputs of these roles and people are very quick to ensure that they don't get too high.

However, part of this leads back to the inherent notion that players, including Tanks and Healers, want to see improvements to their character when they get better gear.

This becomes an issue, when encounters deal set amounts of damage (With mechanics also meaning that the brunt of it happens at telegraphed times) so that once you overcome it at the minimum level of gear, then there's no point to having more healing or defence because the outcome is a binary case of you live or you don't. If you're living through it, more heals/defence won't let you "Live more".

On the flip side, damage scales infinitely. Every point of damage you gain means something. As it directly correlates into time needed to kill a boss. This means, that once you reach the point where you live through all mechanics, all that's left to scale your character is damage.

To which the we get back to Tank/Healer damage outputs. These roles ultimately look for ways to increase their damage. Be it by gearing for stats that increase damage instead of defensive stats or be it by trying to minimize the amount of time spent healing so you can toss out more damage spells.

Now, is this a problem and if it is, is there a solution?

According to Yoshida it appears to be, hence changes put in to limit the damage potential of Tanks and mentions of "Tank damage being too high"

Not to mention, players of these roles might also argue that they kind of just feel like they're playing DPS instead of playing a Tank/Healer (But with just lower damage compared to an actual DPS)

Though, it would be cool to hear your thoughts on if this progression of everyone just looking to amp up their damage output is a problem or not.

If it is a problem, what could be done to alleviate it?

What would make Tanks feel like it's worthwhile to gear for more defense? What would get Healers to focus more on healing and less on squeezing out DPS?

An initial thought might be to just ramp up damage and/or reduce healing output, so that it's less likely that a Healer will be able to rely on oGCD's for the majority of their healing output. However, this merely just delays the issue eventually, people will reach a gear level where the tank isn't in danger and healers will get to a point where they just want to squeeze in damage spells when they can.


Percentage based or scaling damage also won't work, since that would just actively make Tanks not feel like they're progressing as they get gear.

Tying Enmity modifiers to defensive stats is a possibility, if things are adjusted so that in order to keep aggro (Even with taunts and detaunts) you'd need to be stacking defensive stats. Though, this has some issues too, one being that well, it just wouldn't feel good for Tanks, there isn't any sort of feedback of getting stronger like seeing damage/healing numbers get bigger. Also two, it's another binary state that limits progressing here, you either have aggro or you don't. If you're keeping aggro, you don't need more enmity.

An idea would could be something like Stagger from FFXIII? A Tank specific mechanic to let them boost the damage a boss takes after stacking up a specific amount of "Stagger" that they can improve the rate of stacking by utilizing role stats. If given visual feedback for improvement, then this could be an alternative to raw damage output that still leads to the one infinitely scaling variable, the TTK of a boss.

Then for healers... A suggestion I've heard is to give them buffs/debuffs to apply in lieu of damage to fill in the periods of time where spending GCD's on heals aren't necessary. Though, what these buffs/debuffs could be are tricky to think of, given that they need to be worthwhile to cast (I.e. They need to end up not only scaling from their stats, in a way that feels rewarding as you progress in gear, but also accomplish to the main objective of progression, which is making bosses die faster)

Let me know if you have any ideas or if you have any thoughts about the comments I've made here.

[TabrisOmbrelame]

I think the problem lies in quit a number of mechanics of the game.

First it's the gap in DPS between Tank and DPS, let me explain :

The gap actually isn't really high enough to make tank wish to stay in Tank Stance

The Enmity will grow faster for a DPS that hit more than the Tank (If not using Tank Stance) but it will only grow at the speed of this difference, and sometimes that will not happen.

For Exemple :

Let's suggest that the tank make an great enmity opener and generate 200k Enmity and then drop the Tank stance.

If the Dps do 2k more dps than the Tank (Regardless of the value) Then it's

200.000 / 2.000 = 100 sec. So it will take approximatively 100 Second for the dps to keep up on Enmity.

BUT, we all know that DPS can manage enmity, some classes can even do it by a lot, like DRG, Ninja, Ranged Physical or Caster, and for some of this, the longer the fight, the more efficient it is (-50% of actual)

So yes, by Calculating just that, It's not interresting to play in tank stance for Enmity. But a Tank is supposed to stay in tank stance in the greater line of the job if we look at the description of a Tank.

The Tank stance actually generate 2.8x the Enmity of an attack, so if I hit my enemy with a 10k Damage, it will do 28k Enmity. So in order to keep up in enmity, the DPS must do 2.8x my dps at least.

And for going even furter, If I make my Third attack Enmity Combo (as a DRK), that got a value of 5.5x, then you got something like this : 10.000 x 5.5 x 2.8 = 154.000 (That's pretty much what I see in reality)

The DPS need to make 15x my dps, but it's impossible.

So on one part we got a Exceptionnal tool for enmity, really powerful for that... BUT It's really too much and just one or two usage of it is enough... So Tank stance isn't really interesseting to use, and even the enmity Combo have only one purpose : Doing your opener.

And if we consider that people wish to add more STR on gear for making mor DPS as a Tank, we are going in the wrong direction. Tank transform, little by little, in DPS. That's not tanking anymore. Not like what I used to see in other MMO. The same goes for Heal. The Trinity is actually in a Broken State.

So what can we do for making everything on the balance ?

First Choice : Rework the Enmity system. Reduce the enmity generated by Enmity Combo and by Tank Stance, Add Effect on Enmity Combo that make it usefull for an other purpose (See below). Reduce the effect of Enmity tool for DPS Greatly (Diversion only Cut it by 20%, CD is Longer. Ranged physical CD reduce total Enmity by 10%...). As a Counterpart, Tank stance don't reduce Damage output.

The Third Combo of Enmity could reduce the auto attack damage of the target by 5% or something better. But not with much %.

OR

Second Choice : Let the DPS make their job. Great amount of DPS. Fire Power of everyclasse will increase greatly. The DPS needed for getting the boss down only depends on the DPS. the Gap in STR between tank and Dps is even larger. (DPS will be able to do 3-4x the DPS of the tank with a 100% in FFlog, If I have to use something)

With this, we can say that Tank get back their identity to maintain Enmity.

For the Damage part, Every part we touche affect more than we could think. Tank mitigate less damage passively, Healer heal less with Targeted heal and oGCD are longer.... Many thing to say.

Of course, everything sayed here is a rework for making every role with their own identity. The Classes Identity is different and it's not our subject here.

[Kalise]

I think the problem lies in quit a number of mechanics of the game.

The thing is, even if you rework Enmity in the way that you say, it still wouldn't really change much. Heck, even if you made it so that Tank stance was a necessity in order to generate Enmity, it still doesn't change the fact that a Tank will want to stack damage. Since damage = more Enmity as well as faster boss kills. All you really do is mean that their DPS doesn't get as high. Same if you reduce all the Str on their gear (Honestly, that'd just mean that BiS Tank gear would be Crafted gear all melded for STR...)

Again, same thing for healing. You reduce healing output and nerf oGCD's they'll still be trying to spend as much time as possible dealing damage (As well as getting more damage from their main stat)

Like, irregardless of how you tune the numbers, the only thing to realistically gear for, is more damage. The optimal way to play, is to try and push out as much damage as possible (I.e. Using DPS stance, using higher damaging combos, as a healer using damaging spells during downtime).

Even if you buff DPS so that a Tank/Healer is only contributing 1% of the overall damage, it's still optimal to push towards doing 1.1% of the overall damage than it is to stack stats you don't need (I.e. Stacking defence when you already survive the encounter. Stacking Piety when you already have infinite MP with also access to a plethora of MP regen tools etc)

It's a problem that most (If not all) games come across at some point (Usually in the highest level content when everyone running it is essentially full BiS), that Tanks and Healers will try and push out more damage and so will gear and play in a way where they can push out more damage. Even with penalties such as low base DPS and Tank stance reductions, at some point, scaling non-Damage stats becomes irrelevant and you just wanna push out more damage, to beat enrage timers faster, to clear content faster and to have meaningful progression with gear and playstyle.

Hence, why it would be more suitable to provide non-Damage focused stats a utility that provides damage in a sense. So that there's a shift from wanting to stack raw damage, into wanting to stack these other stats that won't increase your personal damage output (At least, not in the same way as stacking damage) but will help your party/raid deal damage instead. So that there's less focus on the Tank/Healer pumping out damage and being basically DPS but with damage mitigation/healing buttons to use when necessary and more focus on them being a supportive part of a team, protecting them and facilitating their ability to do their job: I.e. The Tank holds aggro and stays alive so that the DPS and Healer don't get straight up destroyed, the Healer props up the Tank and spot heals the DPS as enemies toss out AoE's and randomly targeted damage and then the DPS are free to do their thing of pew pewing down enemies.

For healers it's slightly simpler, as all you really need to do, is give them something else to fill in downtime other than damaging skills. Or you could even rework their damaging skills so they also provide other (Stat scaled) benefits so it's less about spamming them for damage and more about "When you don't need to heal, you're still supporting your team" kind of thing (Though, improving the number of skills they use during downtime would be beneficial, so it's not just Stone/Ruin/Malefic spam). The main issue for Healers is trying to come up with a good way to provide visual feedback from this solution, to make it feel akin to a DPS seeing bigger numbers as they deal damage.

For tanks it's a bit trickier, since well, all of their skills deal damage and their main mechanic to keep in mind, Enmity, is based on dealing damage. Which is why I suggested the Stagger thing, since not only could that be kept completely independent from damage scaling, but it could also be a way to make using Tank stance and the Enmity combos more enticing without having to gimp their ability to actually use DPS stance (For solo/OT) or their other combos, as you could provide them with a bonus towards Stagger generation for using them (Heck, you might even see high tier raids start to utilize an entire kit of a Tank, building up the Stagger then swapping to DPS stance and non-Enmity combo's to wait until phases and DPS CD's align before triggering the effect)

[Seraphor]

If Tanks and Healers want to DPS, then embrance it and tie DPS increasing mechanisms into their role.

Have skills or traits that deal more damage when you have more emnity.
Have the a job gauge increase when you heal and be spent on offensive skills.

Maybe the DRKs emnity combo could generate more blackblood.
Maybe WARs Berserk could increase crit rate in line with enmity.
Generate gauge in shield oath and spend it in sword oath.

Lilies generated with healings spells could increase the damage of Holy.
Gravity's damage could be modified based on how many aspected benefics and helios' have been used in the last 30s.

[Kalise]

If Tanks and Healers want to DPS, then embrance it and tie DPS increasing mechanisms into their role.

It's not really that Tanks and Healers WANT to DPS, it's just that, it's the only thing for them to do once they don't need to deal with encounter damage.

Embracing it and giving them more ways to enhance their DPS, further shrinks the disparity between support role DPS and actual damage dealer DPS, with potential to invalidate all DPS classes by way of making them just flat out worse than just picking a bunch of Tanks/Healers who do the same damage but have more survivability/healing.

Which is the crux of the "Tanks do too much damage" argument. Given that they already do approx 2/3 the damage that DPS classes do. Increase their damage much more and the lower tier DPS classes would be inferior to just running an additional tank...

While at the same time, not really giving these players what they want. Tanks and Healers play these classes because they want to Tank or Heal. If they wanted to DPS, they'd play one of the many DPS classes.

I've mained tanks for over 12 years, never has it been because I wanted to push out raw DPS (Even if that was the case in several iterations of several MMO's). But because I want to Tank. I want to be the front lines of a party, going toe to toe with the boss, being in control of positioning the bosses, timing defenses to mitigate abilities, picking up adds that go after allies (Also, in some games, interrupting and CCing enemies is a Tank focus mechanic to prevent certain AoE abilities from occurring). Why? Because I find that infinitely more fun than standing around trying to spam out the max DPS rotation and occasionally moving for mechanics (Which is why a lot of bosses that have little to no tank mechanics are lame af...)

[Grimoire-M]

Personally, I don't have a problem with the current system where tanks and healers try to dps as much as possible. It suggests that healing throughput and tank cooldowns need to be nerfed, tanks need to take more sustained damage while main tanking in order to put more pressure on using tank stance rather than a cooldown in specific situations and most of all, DPSing on healers and tanks needs to have more of a cost. The problem is the barrier to dpsing as much as possible is quite low, especially given their current scripted fight design. But I don't think nerfing aggro would solve the problem either. We don't want either extreme. A patch where tanks have to sit in tank stance and only use aggro combo and healers only spam cures is not interesting, nor is a situation where healers are spamming Broil as much as possible. We want a middle ground, and one that encourages interesting dynamics between the Healers and Tanks in your group.

However, tank damage is too high currently, and to start addressing that, tanks need their offensive stances nerfed. Since tank GCDs are almost always going to be damage GCDs, they should have lower throughput in comparison to healers by default in order to encourage using Tank stance as a way to free up healer GCDs for damage, which I would agree is all the more reason to buff healer damage, but toning down Tank DPS modifiers a bit will help bridge that gap. That also means using tank stance should be less of a penalty, but it should retain its defensive boost, to make using that better in the long run.

Tanks should still be rewarded for stance dancing too. Of course, that starts with Grit and both PLD Oaths becoming oGCDs like WAR. That doesn't mean that DRK has to change, just that their damage bonus has to remain less pronounced with both Darkside and Grit up.

For PLD, I think reducing the penalty on Shield Oath and only making it apply to physical damage is sufficient, conversely rewarding them for sitting in tank stance during their Req windows. I'd like to see Sword Oath get a change where it actually boosts physical damage by a minor amount while the bonus auto attack potency is toned down massively.

For WAR, Deliverance is actually fine. What they need is some lifesteal while in Defiance to act as their own self-sustain buffer. This can be made weaker for AoE skills specifically as well. DRK doesn't need lifesteal, they have built in damage reduction. WAR has no passive mitigation without healer input currently, and passive sustain would fulfill a similar purpose, at least for auto attacks.

Furthermore, all tank cooldowns that explicitly reduce damage should be nerfed in potency, and lock you into tank stance for their duration (Note that this would not affect Shieldtron/TBN/Convalescence or any of the parry cooldowns). To compensate for this, they now stack additively with tank stance. For WAR this is a big mitigation nerf but that's kind of warranted at the moment. As another way to compensate for this, the lockout period will be removed if any attack they mitigated would have been lethal otherwise, and in the case of any personal cooldown, should reward an appropriate resource to the tank, that can then be translated into more damage later. IB refunding some of its cost would be an example of this. For something like Rampart, it could simply generate Oath/Blood/Beast Gauge proportional to the amount of damage dealt to you at the end of its duration, based on a percentage of your health.

With Shirk in the game, the off tank can translate the extra aggro they generate via stance to the main tank if they want to use a defensive cooldown, but it's unlikely that would matter. Instead, I'd argue that new abilities should be added next expansion to all tanks that share cooldowns with these skills, in order to encourage the off tank to use their time to DPS while they're free to, or in the case of PLD, perhaps make it easier for the main tank to tank in DPS stance.

In terms of theming, WAR is the aggressive/lifesteal berserker, PLD is the protective/supportive holy knight, DRK is the dirty/shadowy punisher. That does mean PLD/DRK should be better as straight walls than WAR, but they both go about it in different ways. That means reworking Shake it Off on WAR and giving them more ways to replace some of their cooldowns with more offensive utility (such as adding the old Berserk back in and making Inner Release a raid DPS buff). Give DRK a slew of personal debuffs to inflict regardless of stance, including their own offensive raid debuff and Slashing. Add more spells to PLD's utility belt, none of which need to include an offensive buff other than maybe Slashing, but could include another holy-themed DPS skill or two and maybe a change to Intervention allow the other tank to steal your cooldowns & stance for their full duration/effect, while fuelling your gauge in the process.

[Seraphor]

It's not really that Tanks and Healers WANT to DPS, it's just that, it's the only thing for them to do once they don't need to deal with encounter damage.

Embracing it and giving them more ways to enhance their DPS, further shrinks the disparity between support role DPS and actual damage dealer DPS, with potential to invalidate all DPS classes by way of making them just flat out worse than just picking a bunch of Tanks/Healers who do the same damage but have more survivability/healing.

Which is the crux of the "Tanks do too much damage" argument. Given that they already do approx 2/3 the damage that DPS classes do. Increase their damage much more and the lower tier DPS classes would be inferior to just running an additional tank...

While at the same time, not really giving these players what they want. Tanks and Healers play these classes because they want to Tank or Heal. If they wanted to DPS, they'd play one of the many DPS classes.

I've mained tanks for over 12 years, never has it been because I wanted to push out raw DPS (Even if that was the case in several iterations of several MMO's). But because I want to Tank. I want to be the front lines of a party, going toe to toe with the boss, being in control of positioning the bosses, timing defenses to mitigate abilities, picking up adds that go after allies (Also, in some games, interrupting and CCing enemies is a Tank focus mechanic to prevent certain AoE abilities from occurring). Why? Because I find that infinitely more fun than standing around trying to spam out the max DPS rotation and occasionally moving for mechanics (Which is why a lot of bosses that have little to no tank mechanics are lame af...)

I didn't mean that part literally. As the topic has already discussed, tanks and healers naturally end up focusing on their dps output. And you didnt address the rest of my post, which was to work with that rather than against it.
You wouldn't need to increase tanks DPS at all, just make it so acheiving their own optimal DPS requires using their tank skills.

[Kalise]

I didn't mean that part literally. As the topic has already discussed, tanks and healers naturally end up focusing on their dps output. And you didnt address the rest of my post, which was to work with that rather than against it.
You wouldn't need to increase tanks DPS at all, just make it so acheiving their own optimal DPS requires using their tank skills.

But then you're just making their "DPS" skills redundant if to do optimal damage, you'd use tank skills.

Then of course, it will still bring about concerns with Tank damage, given that Tanks are still looking at trying to get more STR on their Accessories because the defensive stats on them don't feel good to obtain when their impact is so minimal.

It's also implied that there would be a DPS boost, especially since you mentioned stuff like high Enmity boosting certain skills potency, but that still doesn't actually make "Tank" skills worthwhile either, because you can get high Enmity by just doing a ton of damage in DPS stance.

Then of course, even if you did make it so that Tanks used their "Tank" skills for damage output... They still have the issue of feeling like just DPS but with defence buttons to press rather than actual Tanks. Which, again, is not why people play Tank/Healer.

[kashi11]

I love being able to DPS as a tank, it's so satisfying to have a quantifiable metric with which to measure yourself. People are always going to min/max, and since healing and mitigation will always be binary, you either survive or you don't, people will find the minimum threshold for survival then push DPS. You could Nerf DPS into the ground, and unless you literally did 0 damage, people would still find a way to squeeze out extra dps. You also can't make it so enemies do more damage, or give tanks less health, because it's the same thing, just delaying the problem. If you scale incoming damage too high, people at minimum ilvl won't be able to survive. There is nothing you can do but embrace the fact that DPS is an engaging form of optimization. Make it feel rewarding to keep players happy. If you design around tank and healer DPS similar to some suggestions above, like enmity boosting damage modifiers (I think this should scale based on % in the lead) , or mitigating damage building a stagger gauge, and other such ideas are the direction the game design needs to go.

[Seraphor]

But then you're just making their "DPS" skills redundant if to do optimal damage, you'd use tank skills.

Then of course, it will still bring about concerns with Tank damage, given that Tanks are still looking at trying to get more STR on their Accessories because the defensive stats on them don't feel good to obtain when their impact is so minimal.

It's also implied that there would be a DPS boost, especially since you mentioned stuff like high Enmity boosting certain skills potency, but that still doesn't actually make "Tank" skills worthwhile either, because you can get high Enmity by just doing a ton of damage in DPS stance.

Then of course, even if you did make it so that Tanks used their "Tank" skills for damage output... They still have the issue of feeling like just DPS but with defence buttons to press rather than actual Tanks. Which, again, is not why people play Tank/Healer.

Take a look at my actual suggestions in my earlier post.
They dont have to be exclusive, use the tank skills to empower the DPS skills.
You dont gain nearly as much emnity by simply "dealing damage" btw, try competing for aggro with the dps combo, then watch as your soar above the OT with the emnity combo.

DRK for example, the dps combo would still deal more damage, but the emnity combo would generate more blood, translating into more dps via bloodspiller.
Neither option is the best option all round, because you'd still want syphon strike for the mana regen, it would just encourage you to throw in an emnity combo now and then for the blood.

Or WAR, if Berserk's crit boost was based on emnity, you'd be encouraged to use the emnity combo to boost your emnity, before hitting Berserk and going into the dps combo.

The problem is that the emnity skills are just emnity skills, and become useless once you have that emnity, meanwhile the dps weaponskills are the ones with additional utility... why is that?
It should be the other way around for a tank.