Any support utility ideas other than heal & shields?

[elioaiko]

As much as I would like more utility and things to do aside from dps and timing my healing CDs, I doubt that SE would add more because they already view tank and healing as "difficult" to the general playerbase and as a result, are simple to play with little to no real challenge behind them.

Most of the playerbase doesn't care about having more to do than rolling their faces on the keyboard. The minute they add a little complexity, you will see posts and complaints about how difficult it is to play x role.

Even AST, who has had its complexity ripping away from it over time, is still getting complaints along with lower play rate because it's perceived as "too hard" (though I'd say playing AST is more of a chore nowadays).

But to really tie it together. The encounter design is really inflexible when it comes to designing usefulness into a role. It's pretty superficial now.

Tanks just need to have on tank stance to keep aggro as opposed to pre-ShB where you have to do tons of frontloaded damage in order for the SAM/BLM to not get wrecked by the enemy from ripping aggro.

Weapon resistances are gone (though I\\'d say for the better). DRG was a huge problem since it was the only job that brought piercing and BRD and MCH needed it to be competitive. So bringing jobs that require it no longer exist.

Buff timers have all or mostly been changed to fit the 2 mins timer that fights are flighted around. No flexible with odd phase changes and buffs to work around it.

MP assistance. Casters had Mana Shift, Ranged had Refresh. I kinda baffles me that they took this away from ranged. But I guess it's because MP management is non-existant now. It's not fun to manage if your kit doesn't allow it, but having teammates chip in to help you after a death was nice.

FF gets praise for good job balance when in reality, jobs are more or less the same with different flavor gameplay. Having uniqueness in a job/role leads to imbalance as something might be OP or DoA because of the nature of it. And nerfing/changing it just makes it the same as others.


The devs want jobs and roles to be ease of access and the punishment is that every job has to be equal or you'll see people complain their main jobs being weak or strong jobs being broken.

To add insult to injury, the devs themselves have literally said that the game will not have the same complexity as HW (which was the point in time where jobs felt unique from most people that played HW on release) with DRK as an example.

Tldr: devs don't want it, so won't. But we should ask for it anyway.

[ForsakenRoe]

But why did they settle on this? Why do the devs slavishly stick to this? MMO is a living breathing ongoing thing and should be able to grow and change... right? Why won't they grown and change and add different types of encounters?

Some of it might work, but some would just be ridiculously strong. For example, take Float. Think how many fights have some sort of design, that uses ground dangerzones to make the fight hard. P2S is a good example. The reason Limit Cut is 'hard' is because you can't use the whole arena. If you COULD, it'd be a joke to handle. Hence, it's added into just O2S as a gimmick, as part of the fight's design. If Float was added to WHM as a skill, it'd be as a Mitigation tool like Zephyr in WOW, 20% reduced damage from ground-AOEs. You'd still get the DOT from standing in the bad on P2S, but it wouldn't be as hard hitting. And if there's a mechanic like A11, where he sets the entire arena on fire for a phase, Float would be good there to help deal with the environmental damage. Just, it shouldn't be able to completely nullify things, that'd just make WHM as 'locked slot' as AST was in P3S because of Macrocosmos

[TurntReynolds]

redistribution - like pain split in pokemon. Take the healthy health from someone who's mostly fine and give it to someone who's critically injured

As a tank main, I can't say I'm personally excited to have my HP siphoned just before a TB hits & having that HP go to the dragoon who stood in an AoE with 3 vuln stacks.

I already don't like how easily healers can grief with rescue (intentionally or not), and I'm not sure giving them more tools that have griefing potential would make the role any better.

I mean, with the new HoT and their pre-existing sustain, it might just be preferable to run more WARs in the healer slots than risk having jobs that have more than 1 way to possibly grief a party.

[Renathras]

There has been talk that we don't want to see just another heal and shield skill because we have so many of those already. Personally, another ability with only a combination of healing, shielding, and mitigation is getting not particularly exciting or fun when we have plenty of those already. Assuming we can disregard balance, what kind of support utility ideas that you want a healer to have instead?

Anything that isn't "more damage", honestly.

Get rid of that ridiculous "healers are green DPS" rubbish.

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There honestly are a lot of other things, it's just kinda what one takes from them. Part of the issue is FFXIV has a somewhat rigid combat system that has gotten more rigid over the years. Only Healers, RDM when things have gone south, and DRKs care about MP, making stuff like that old spell Casters had to give people MP or the AST Card (Ewer) pointless. Likewise, with TP gone, all the TP buffing and giving abilities are defunct.

With the tight tuning on rotations, Spell Speed and Skill Speed can be actively detrimental rather than buffs outside of the Healers who only spam one spell anyway so it doesn't disrupt their rotation.

Out of combat regen is so fast, neither HP Regens nor MP Refreshes as party utility (e.g. in Everquest or FF11) are necessary or useful. Everyone can teleport, so teleport or portal or summon type spells are useless.

Persistent buffs no longer exist in FFXIV, so stuff like Protect or Stoneskin (for...reasons...; seriously 30 min duration but would break in the first moments of combat anyway) is gone and things like them out of the question.

Silence/Interrupt/Stun can be useful, but Stun and Heavy can be disruptive to tanks (imagine PvP AST's Gravity that hits enemies with Heavy if that worked with PvE AST Gravity when the tank was trying to get two packs in a wall to wall pull and the first one was so slow the DPS drew agro). Slow from Arms' Length could be nice, and that's kind of what old Eye For An Eye was, but...that was removed as well outside of the Arms' Length self-buff for Tanks and Melee and Ranged.

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Everything being based on 2 min burst windows and combat applications with VERY few exceptions (NIN teleport, run speed, increased fall distance, and Ranged Peleton; even Rescue requires the target to be in combat) makes for pretty strict limits on the kinds of support you can have.

[Venur]

redistribution - like pain split in pokemon. Take the healthy health from someone who's mostly fine and give it to someone who's critically injured

Could be the everquest version. Even out everyones in the group at the same % health. So your criticaly hurt tank gets in a safe range then boom AoE heals to top everyones back.

A timed buff with cheat death mecanic could be considered.

A self cast 5 second invulnerability coupled with AoE taunt (force your tank to time hi taunt off the healer).

[ForsakenRoe]

A self cast 5 second invulnerability coupled with AoE taunt (force your tank to time hi taunt off the healer).

Wait, an invuln and forced taunt on a healer? Unless every TB from thereon has a bleed attached, that's getting used for cheese 110%

[glamazon]

All of this makes me think they are strangling their golden goose. The more streamlined and homogenized combat becomes the less fun I have. Yes there are a ton of other things this game offers that I like and appreciate but do I want to pay 15 dollars a month for it when I came here originally for the battles and classes?

[Venur]

Wait, an invuln and forced taunt on a healer? Unless every TB from thereon has a bleed attached, that's getting used for cheese 110%

Pretty much how it is used in MMOs that has those kind of ability.

FF14 has no skill used to cheese any mechanics ?

[ForsakenRoe]

Pretty much how it is used in MMOs that has those kind of ability.

FF14 has no skill used to cheese any mechanics ?

Well, yes, but my point is like, take the stupid corner thing tanks were forced to do in O11S, invuln in a corner and bait large aoes there, because the ranged were too lazy to do it/learn. With a move like that, it'd be the healer forced there (cos 'uptime'), and they'd probably call it 'braindead strat'. And the ranged still wouldnt learn the mechanic that their moveset specifically is suited to deal with best

Though something I'd like to see Provoke knocked down to a 10s CD, that way they can force tankswaps way more often potentially. Or something like 'boss auto applies a stack, each stack makes you take 50% more damage from subsequent autos' so you have to swap at like 3 or 4. That's more an idea for the Tank section of the forums though

[Renathras]

The problem with some of those suggestions is inconsistency. For example...

One thing is AST's RNG weirdness being one of the issues with it being a true "buff healer". That is, you have no REAL control over which buff to use, unlike, say Stoneskin or Protect; imagine if Divine Benison was either a shield, damage reduction, or regen. Would kind of make it far less useful. RNG is kind of the nature of the Card reading thing, but it's also what makes it difficult to balance and subject to wild swings - even IF all the Card were roughly equally desired.

But I feel it's also important to point out: This is why we can't have nice things.

The optimization requirements make it where we can't have variety and everything is shoehorned into a milky morass of homogenization. The very nature of things is that those which are more interesting and distinct are also likely to not be balanced and not necessarily be consistent or always useful/applicable. By placing such constraints, it leads to the result of things being...well...boring.

The fun and diversity optimized away.