Adventurer in need: Originality

[Acidblood]

As it stands now, it seems like SE is going the route of complexity for healers being linked to knowledge of a given fight, much like tank complexity works. I've seen many tank players lament the "simplicity" of the combos that tanks have, and asking for something more "challenging" but that misses the mark. The complexity for a tank is having arguably the most intimate knowledge of a fight such that you know exactly when to use your various cooldowns and how close you can cut something to snag an extra GCD in a way that no DPS will ever think about it. The combos are kept simple for a reason; they're not the main challenge or focus of a tank job. DPS jobs have combos and rotations as their main focus. Healers - on the whole - seem to have moved more towards the tank style of "encounter complexity" as opposed to "rotational complexity." And this likely was done at least in part to avoid the situation of "AST/SCH are more complex to play than WHM so playing them successfully should thus be more rewarding" which saw an entire healing class largely sidelined for most of SB.

Then with the possible exception of Savage SE has utterly failed... I got E3N for Raid Roulette the other day as a Tank, I had never tanked it before and was a bit nervous, I needn't have been though as the only Tank thing I had to worry about was a very clearly marked 'tank buster' every other minute (which wouldn't have killed me even without mitigation, but I like being kind to healers).

Doing the same fight again as a BLM though, I had to get my timings, cooldowns, and movements right for a whole bunch of mechanics lest I screw up / drop my rotation (or die!) and have to start over... so it was far more involved than tanking (and as a result, far more enjoyable).

Additionally, I still remember tanking Midas (A5-8) normal mode back in HW and almost every fight as a tank I had to worry about mitigation (I would have died otherwise), positioning, tank swaps, Cover as PLD, etc. So even comparing tanking now to tanking (or healing) back in 3.X it feels less engaging on an encounter level than it used to.


NB: As for WHM being side-lined, that was (is) due to people’s obsession with DPS (driven by hard enrage and FFlogs); WHM was plenty capable of clearing the content, it just couldn't quite post the rDPS, or boost others rDPS the way AST and SCH could.