Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Ixon]

This is just blatantly untrue. Both current EX's have been completed without healers due mostly to tank self healing.

P1N and P2N have been solod by WAR/PLD/GNB due to their self healing.

P1S and P2S have been done by an all warrior team. Why do you think that is even possible?

Non-existant/very low DPS checks as well. Yes the self healing keeps them alive, but DPS checks are supposed to be in place to give reason for needing DPS in the first place.

[MellowMink]

The idea that it’s okay to dismiss valid and persistent healer complaints about lacking DPS variety or healing complexity while playing as a healer for 99% of instances and the entirety of solo content by simply pointing to four extremely specific instances as if that’s the only thing that healers ever want to play is actually incredibly disingenuous and rude.

It feels like the director is sometimes looking for an easy out in these questions, and it’s kind of disheartening to see “You think you want it, but you don’t” types of responses from Final Fantasy XIV designers when I thought they wanted to avoid those problems that many players had with toxic World of Warcraft community-versus-designer conflicts.

I really hope that this can somehow be propagated up to the director; I feel like he should take a little bit of time to write a more serious response to concerned healers that doesn’t sound like he’s being dismissive or wants healers to stop complaining about continued problems.

[SeverianLyonesse]

As I have stated previously, the issue is two-part: Tanks and Healers built up power-creep due to the necessity of wanting them to "feel" stronger with each expansion, and the scaled down difficulty of overall content as they wanted to appeal to as many of the incoming player base as possible. These changes are great for the casual and newer players in simple content like Normal Modes and Dungeons, but hurts the fun and engagement of it's more veteran/hardcore players even in it's Savage tiers. The trick now is how do you make jobs fundamentally more of a challenge and more engaging to veteran players without taxing the skill floor and without making more casual/newer players a complete hindrance in a majority of content. As a tank, it does feel nice to have such a powerful kit that I can carry any party in 4 to 8 man content with, but in the same vein, it feels wasted and boring in current Savage content. This is doubly so with healers having a lackluster DPS rotation to fill in the gaps.

I am still of the mind that they should scrap or combine 1/3rd of healers healing kits, replace them with engaging DPS options, while scaling down tank sustainability and increasing DPS checks in some fights to help bring back the feeling of the trinity, thus allowing tanks and especially healers to feel more like the roles they are supposed to be. However, I do not think any changes to that degree will happen till after the next Ultimate, as I believe Yoshi and the devs are worried they might break something within the jobs and the next Ultimate that was already put on hold for so long.

I agree with all of this. I just have to reiterate that I don't see how self-healing feeds into the tank fantasy "feeling stronger." I know in a roundabout way stuff like Aurora is just another passive mitigation buff, but it still isn't playing into the job fantasy of being "tankier," i.e. having thicker skin or a bigger butt. So the fact that it is stepping on healers' toes *and* doesn't really resonate well with the tank job fantasy tells me that it's probably bad design.

[Ixon]

I agree with all of this. I just have to reiterate that I don't see how self-healing feeds into the tank fantasy "feeling stronger." I know it a round-about way stuff like Aurora is just another passive mitigation buff, but it still isn't playing into the job fantasy of being "tankier," i.e. having thicker skin or a bigger butt. So the fact that it is stepping on healers' toes *and* doesn't really resonate well with the tank job fantasy tells me that it's probably bad design.

I'd have to take a strong guess, but back in ARR you had just PLD and WAR right? PLD was mostly mitigation and blocking of damage while WAR was mostly a SOAKER of damage with Defiance granting more HP and higher healing received. In HW we got DRK, which was just edgy PLD with it's main focus being on magic damage mitigation and TBN, a shield. They leaned a little more into WAR being more of a soaker of damage(that also had great synergy with it's Fell Cleaves and Bloodbath that became iconic with the job, turning into Nascent later), and gave Clemency to PLD which I think thematically makes sense with it being all Holy spells and all that. From there they sort of had their "identities" or main focus and just added more homogenizations while trying to keep them thematically different. When GNB came in, they kinda just threw in what was left; general mitigation, heal and shield on 2 of combo(rather than flat healing on 3 of combo like WAR or DRK), a regen that no other tank had, and a parry ability(Camouflage) cause we heard some DRK's missed Dark Dance. This ideology that they made fed into the tank thought of "needing to protect an ally" where PLD could flat heal, or cover, and provide mitigation; WAR providing healing through hitting things, DRK gave a shield and was still the "magic defense" tank with Dark Mind, and GNB with mitigation and a regen. All of this which got expanded on in EW.

Healing itself is just a part of "sustainability" and is in my opinion, the equivalent of mitigation or a shield when it comes to being tanky. Whether I tank a small amount of damage from mitigation or a shield, or take a large amount of damage that I heal myself up for, it's all apart of sustainability. Roadhog from Overwatch comes to mind in that regard. Though we have reached a point, through my reasons stated above, that it is too much and causing negative side effects on the healer role. They COULD shift the healing more towards Clemency, where your sustainability would be at a cost of your DPS so you would only really do it in an emergency, thuis relying more on your healers to stay alive. However, there is such an overall disdain for Clemency that I do not think they would go in that direction.

[ForteNightshade]

I would agree with your elaboration, with the exception of "further reduced to DPS" because they still have a suite of mitigation abilities and also care the most about positioning. Also, XIV is already a DPS-driven game--all of the jobs are already "reduced to DPS." The problem is that tanks get DPS mini-games while healers get single-button DPS spam.

I also think the "flavor" is quite irrelevant, since there are many different ways to give a tank flavor than self-sustaining through self-heals. If they in fact do need more to do outside of DPS, perhaps the raid design should focus more on forcing them to single-target DPS- or healer-busters. But I think healing themselves--on top of being, as you observe, mostly unneeded--is treading too much on the already quite narrow role of healers.

And blah blah I've already talked at length in this thread about how the self-sustain is really just the devs' way of making the game relatively fail-proof because XIV cares more about reeling in new casual players than challenging their skill. But I still think Arthur hit on perhaps the one thing that is the biggest culprit for healer irrelevancy.

The problem still isn't tank sustain though. Say they took away every self-sustaining tanks have this tier. What changes? They can't meme on P1N or old EXs; content that is largely irrelevant in terms of balance. It wouldn't impact a Healer's gameplay. You wouldn't have more to heal in P1N or even P1S if Bloodwhetting didn't exist. We know this because, hilariously, the speed meta is actually double Dark Knight—the tank with zero sustain. What needs to be addressed is the one button spam "rotation" healers have. Taking away tank healing won't accomplish that.

This is just blatantly untrue. Both current EX's have been completed without healers due mostly to tank self healing.

P1N and P2N have been solod by WAR/PLD/GNB due to their self healing.

P1S and P2S have been done by an all warrior team. Why do you think that is even possible?

This isn't unique to Endwalker though. Xeno used to do "Man-modes" all the way back in Heavensward. Tankcob was a thing before Warrior had Bloodwhetting. And you're ignoring those all Warrior savage comps were with fully BiS players, 99% players who barely killed it before enrage.

It's all entirely irrelevant for the reasons I stated above. Delete Bloodwhetting, Aurora, Clemency, Corundum and Equilibrium and what happens? Tanks can't solo Normal modes nobody cares about and Healers remain bored spamming Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis because the outgoing damage is still laughable. All you've accomplished in this scenario is reducing tank gameplay and nothing else. Healers aren't healing more in Savage if Bloodwhetting didn't exist. Top groups don't even want Warrior because it's damage sucks relative to Dark Knight. The biggest irony is come 6.1, if LD is properly fixed, Warrior and Paladin will be reduced to prog tanks and abandoned instantly thereafter at the higher levels. They're self-sustain doesn't matter because the outgoing damage is pitiful.

[KizuyaKatogami]

The problem still isn't tank sustain though. Say they took away every self-sustaining tanks have this tier. What changes? They can't meme on P1N or old EXs; content that is largely irrelevant in terms of balance. It wouldn't impact a Healer's gameplay. You wouldn't have more to heal in P1N or even P1S if Bloodwhetting didn't exist. We know this because, hilariously, the speed meta is actually double Dark Knight—the tank with zero sustain. What needs to be addressed is the one button spam "rotation" healers have. Taking away tank healing won't accomplish that.



This isn't unique to Endwalker though. Xeno used to do "Man-modes" all the way back in Heavensward. Tankcob was a thing before Warrior had Bloodwhetting. And you're ignoring those all Warrior savage comps were with fully BiS players, 99% players who barely killed it before enrage.

It's all entirely irrelevant for the reasons I stated above. Delete Bloodwhetting, Aurora, Clemency, Corundum and Equilibrium and what happens? Tanks can't solo Normal modes nobody cares about and Healers remain bored spamming Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis because the outgoing damage is still laughable. All you've accomplished in this scenario is reducing tank gameplay and nothing else. Healers aren't healing more in Savage if Bloodwhetting didn't exist. Top groups don't even want Warrior because it's damage sucks relative to Dark Knight. The biggest irony is come 6.1, if LD is properly fixed, Warrior and Paladin will be reduced to prog tanks and abandoned instantly thereafter at the higher levels. They're self-sustain doesn't matter because the outgoing damage is pitiful.

But wouldn’t healers be healing more in say, dungeon pulls of said tools got taken away. Not really advocating for either side but i’m curious on their thought process on if they knew already things like dungeon pulls were easy to heal, why continue to give tools that make it even more irrelevant. As it is Warrior can basically solo heal dungeon pulls. I don’t remember it being like that in ShB but maybe i was out of the loop

[ForteNightshade]

But wouldn’t healers be healing more in say, dungeon pulls of said tools got taken away. Not really advocating for either side but i’m curious on their thought process on if they knew already things like dungeon pulls were easy to heal, why continue to give tools that make it even more irrelevant. As it is Warrior can basically solo heal dungeon pulls. I don’t remember it being like that in ShB but maybe i was out of the loop

Barely. Warrior is an outlier here, I'll admit, but dungeon mobs are embarrassingly weak. The only real difference between say, Warrior and Dark Knight is you'll actually throw a couple oGCDs on the latter whereas you can almost ignore the former. ShB was largely the same, just not quite as one-sided. Probably the only noteworthy change is Warrior wouldn't be able to entirely solo bosses.

[Kolsykol]

I really hope Criterion will be good, but I also think a rework for dungeons is needed to streamline them a little.
What I mean is that I think the difficulty should go up with the levels, it feels like it's all over the place atm but overwhelmingly on the '' you can't die unless you do it on purpose '' side.

[Atelier-Bagur]

But wouldn’t healers be healing more in say, dungeon pulls of said tools got taken away. Not really advocating for either side but i’m curious on their thought process on if they knew already things like dungeon pulls were easy to heal, why continue to give tools that make it even more irrelevant. As it is Warrior can basically solo heal dungeon pulls. I don’t remember it being like that in ShB but maybe i was out of the loop

IMO dungeon mob pulling difficulty really only depends on how well the tank knows how to use their mitigation tools and from my time healing is probably the only "true" occasion where I do need to use my full healing kit to to its fullest. I had a couple of mess ups here and there either because of my own fault or because tank wasnt doing its half of the role well enough and I think the devs lean too much into that situation which is why we get more "healing abilities" rather than giving us more dps options. I think healing in general needs to cull a bit of their toolkits in favor of dps'ing or useful buffing to make the difficulty of balancing heals and damage more exciting and rewarding consistently.

[Ixon]

Barely. Warrior is an outlier here, I'll admit, but dungeon mobs are embarrassingly weak. The only real difference between say, Warrior and Dark Knight is you'll actually throw a couple oGCDs on the latter whereas you can almost ignore the former. ShB was largely the same, just not quite as one-sided. Probably the only noteworthy change is Warrior wouldn't be able to entirely solo bosses.

For fun I did a test with a healer friend of mine where we did the entirety of the lvl90 dungeon,Dead Ends, with me on GNB, them on SGE, with two DPS. I only used Aurora and Heart of Corundum the whole dungeon and my healer still did not have to GCD heal(minus Pneuma or E. Diagnosis for Toxicon procs). I'm sure if I was on WAR I would only need Bloodwhetting, not to mention there are accounts of solo WAR lvl90 dungeon runs.