Tanking feels unimportant

[Xtrasweettea]

Well after what I seen on a twitch stream they should just adjust the dungeons as free for alls at this point, where just any types of roles can go in and get it done just to cut down on DPS queues. Someone queued without a tank, 3 dps one healer and cleared an expert dungeon no problem.

This isn't new. Heck, this isn't even unique to this game.

Whenever a group of players get to a point to where the resources for keeping the group alive in a tankless group the same or less than the resources for keeping the group alive in a group with a tank, tanks will start being excluded in content. The same goes for groups that have more than one healer. If one healer (or no healer) can keep the group alive with the same amount of resources or less, Healers will start being excluded.

It all comes down to preventing down-time and allowing most of the population to participate in content (which is usually DPS).

[Yorumi]

But how fast do the dungeons go by in that game?

about the same as the dungeons here honestly. No one actually wanted to run dungeons in that game and basically did them to get a weekly value. You could argue it's similar here but it got so bad in that game they literally turned it into a single player game. The problem is when you cannot guarantee a tank and healer in the party you cannot do any interesting mechanics or even let the bosses do anything remotely approaching meaningful damage. You only think dungeons are easy now. Imagine if the monsters you can solo in this game had their hp raised about 10 times and that was it. You fight them with 4 dps and they do no more damage, if not less, than they do now and that's a dungeon boss. It was mindnumbingly stupid.

That game and GW2 taught me that even a bad implementation of the trinity is better than no trinity. It's kind of like you don't actually know what you have until it's gone. As much as I think they do need to do something with this game I'll take what we have with no changes a million times over the mess than SWTOR became.

[Maeka]

Or, we could go the opposite direction and make Duty Finder entirely useless and implement Savage Dungeons that you can't queue up for, and those are the only dungeons that yield anything worthwhile to the player. *eyeroll* One of the reasons I quit WoW. Group Finder content is entirely useless, so why do it? I don't feel like sitting around trying to beg people to let me into PUGs. What is this, 2008?

[BarretOblivion]

Neat. How often is that taken advantage of? Maybe more often in savage/ex but I still fail to see how that is better than an instant press of the button with no requirement. With how predictable the timing is on attacks, what difference is there? I’d like an example or two cause I’m just not seeing it other than really long AoE animation(but even those tend to have snapshots).

Besides this is more on how to adjust the skill if Clemency was removed, something I would think most PLDs would seem to want going by this and other threads. Or we can leave Veil as is(and keep a reason to blame healers)

It has a benifit. Again 1 whole minute of time which means proper planning can lead to using it more in fights than other tank party mitigations because you can actually prep the thing and have it one cooldown faster than other AoEs.
Its not my fault PLDs don't take a second and actually read thier skills and think of its applications.

[MerlinCross]

It has a benifit. Again 1 whole minute of time which means proper planning can lead to using it more in fights than other tank party mitigations because you can actually prep the thing and have it one cooldown faster than other AoEs.
Its not my fault PLDs don't take a second and actually read thier skills and think of its applications.

That would also require you not to be healed at all during that time and for your healers to understand they shouldn’t be popping their shields for this instance, you’ll have Veil already primed.
Not my fault someone thought of one application and is acting smug about it. Pleas share more with the class of how often you get the full minute out of it.

But hey I guess Veil is balanced around that skill level and if things are balanced around that skill level, why do we have Clemency if no one at that skill level willingly seems to use it? If anything I would think this helps with the idea of “Axe Clemency and retool Veil”.

Like okay Veil is so good but how are you supposed proc it? Not with Clemency it sounds like going off some threads, that eats into your DPS.

Snip

Actually because you brought it up, I personally hold up GW2 as a reason I would prefer no Trinity than a half baked one. Back when I played it sounded like the inverse of SWTOR; bosses that hit hard, interesting mechanics and you were expected to have a certain team comp. And the Community did, just not the expected one. Back when they had the stat system(The one where you put points into a key stat and got new abilities based of said stat) it was expected to put them into Power, all of it. Didn’t matter what, all into Power. Damage Race-Rocket Tag everything cause why bother with Mechanics when you could rush damage. They’ve changed the system last time I checked in but I’ll have to ask if anyone can remember that cause I vividly recall the Power debates threads.

I see mirrors of that in this game.

[Quor]

Actually because you brought it up, I personally hold up GW2 as a reason I would prefer no Trinity than a half baked one. Back when I played it sounded like the inverse of SWTOR; bosses that hit hard, interesting mechanics and you were expected to have a certain team comp. And the Community did, just not the expected one. Back when they had the stat system(The one where you put points into a key stat and got new abilities based of said stat) it was expected to put them into Power, all of it. Didn’t matter what, all into Power. Damage Race-Rocket Tag everything cause why bother with Mechanics when you could rush damage. They’ve changed the system last time I checked in but I’ll have to ask if anyone can remember that cause I vividly recall the Power debates threads.

I see mirrors of that in this game.

You're not really wrong in that assessment, but there's a reason (and a history) for it. Back in ARR, no encounter had an "enrage" timer so to speak. Some things had a soft-enrage style situation (T1 comes to mind with the stacking power buffs, Shiva too) and other things kinda mimicked it to a certain degree (T2 with the timer) but for most content in the game, you could win via attrition if you so desired. This saw quite a bit of shake-up as time went by, as players adapted to the content in ways that SE hadn't anticipated. An early one was the prevalence of using multiple BRD's in a group, saving only one spot for a melee dps (usually MNK for the int debuff) in order to use melee LB. But the lack of enrage mechanics as we know them meant players could take a slower approach, and given the prevalence of people who played dps (thereby inflating the number of bad dps by virtue of it being the most populous role) you started to see a meta emerge where dps was excluded in favor of a safer approach.

SE nipped that in the bud via the addition of enrage mechanics, but that leads us to the meta we have today where dps beats all, since a shorter fight means fewer mechanics that can possibly kill someone. This is the line SE has to walk; every role needs to be kept relevant, and the only way to keep a dps job relevant is via it's dps. As we all saw with NIN (and earlier in HW with WAR before the removal of the SP debuff) having some kind of powerful raid utility practically guarantees a spot in the raid. SE addressed this partially via the inclusion of certain role-specific mechanics, as well as other stuff like lowered LB gain with duplicate jobs, but that didn't change the fact that a WAR could universally lower boss damage by 10% at all times, while a NIN could universally boost raid damage by 10% for ~1/6th of the fight. Those debuffs were simply so strong that you never wanted to be without them.

This presents an interesting conundrum; how do you design jobs to be unique without adding stuff to them that will overshadow other jobs of that role? That's not the only problem too. As myself and others have discussed in a variety of threads, there are certain limitations to the system that FF14 has. It's not an action-MMO like BnS or Tera or something. It's a trinity-based party-centric game where solo power is granted on the basis that it allows the completion of solo duties as needed by the story, and that's it (which, to be fair, is to be expected with a Japanese-designed game with a large social element). So arguments for solo viability go right out the window, as do any kind of massive reworks of the underlying game systems. SE has no desire to completely revamp the game - at least not at this stage in it's life cycle - and there is still a demand for more jobs to be added, which further complicates the issue.

Of course, the sad part is that all of the "flavorful" stuff is on the chopping block when you distill everything down to damage done. If it isn't a direct boost to damage in some way, then people don't care, or else they care too much (as was seen with AST when groups would sit for minutes on end waiting for that Expanded Balance with an extra Balance in the tank).

One option is to take a "DRK-like" approach to non-damage skill usage. 5.0 TBN is a great example of a tank-centric feedback loop that rewards proper usage and doesn't punish the player via "lost" damage. If Clemency were given something similar then not only would usage of the skill go up, but it wouldn't be seen as unnecessary filler. Just spitballing an idea here, but maybe using Clemency on a player would add half of the healing done to the next Confiteor, stacking up to three times (these are just general numbers) but the idea being that Clemency would then become a replacement for Holy Spirit under certain circumstances with the expectation that there would be a big payoff at the end with a skill every PLD player would normally be using anyway. You lose some damage on the front-end sure, but make it up in the back end and - if properly executed with your group - make up more overall raid damage because of a few healer GCD's that have potentially been saved. Adjust the numbers right and you can create some situations where a PLD would be better off with the usual HS spam and others where Clemency+Confiteor results in more damage.

That kind of a feedback loop would be fun, and it would (hopefully) reward on-the-spot thinking and adjustment, in addition to careful planning (i.e. only the MT and OT will be taking damage over the next few GCD's, which would be a perfect situation for an OT PLD to cover the healing on IF they had a big damage reward waiting for them at the end).

My idea isn't perfect, I know. But one thing it does have going for it is that it ticks all the necessary design boxes.
Does it maintain job uniqueness and flavor? Yes.
Does it result in a loss to damage? Not if done appropriately.
Does it further homogenize the jobs? Aside from taking some inspiration from DRK, no. It encourages a uniquely PLD-style of gameplay.
Does it require completely new system infrastructure to be created? No.

Adding similar tank-centric feedback loops would be a good start, but how to go about doing that I can't say. WHM has an excellent one with the Blood Lily system, and while simple the TBN feedback loop is useful, powerful, and encourages the player to think about more carefully about how they approach it's use as a tank. In a perfect world, I'd see more suggestions like this. Not just about the feedback loop, but about not only maintaining but emphasizing job uniqueness instead of the bland "like a dps but tankier" approach that crops up so much. It's possible to reward non-damage actions in meaningful ways that engage players in a way that buffing potencies never will. As jaded as I can be sometimes, I know these forums have the capability to innovate some amazing stuff.

edit: amended for clarity RE: which version of TBN

[DRKoftheAzure]

@Quor

Are you talking about Stormblood TBN or Shadowbringers TBN? Because those are 2 VERY DIFFERENT skills...

[BarretOblivion]

That would also require you not to be healed at all during that time and for your healers to understand they shouldn’t be popping their shields for this instance, you’ll have Veil already primed.
Not my fault someone thought of one application and is acting smug about it. Pleas share more with the class of how often you get the full minute out of it.

But hey I guess Veil is balanced around that skill level and if things are balanced around that skill level, why do we have Clemency if no one at that skill level willingly seems to use it? If anything I would think this helps with the idea of “Axe Clemency and retool Veil”.

Like okay Veil is so good but how are you supposed proc it? Not with Clemency it sounds like going off some threads, that eats into your DPS.

What part about healer shields for the party do you not understand???? Those will proc it, healer AoE's will proc it. Just prep use it before the raid wide AoE or spam, decent healers will use shields for the party and would you look at that, viel is proc'd.

[FirstnameLastname]

What part about healer shields for the party do you not understand???? Those will proc it, healer AoE's will proc it. Just prep use it before the raid wide AoE or spam, decent healers will use shields for the party and would you look at that, viel is proc'd.

Shhh, don't tell him about coordination and teamplay.

[Quor]

@Quor

Are you talking about Stormblood TBN or Shadowbringers TBN? Because those are 2 VERY DIFFERENT skills...

I figured it was obvious (since SB TBN didn't have a feedback loop) but I'm referring to ShB TBN. Where it provides a free Edge or Flood via Dark Arts if the shield gets broken.