Adapting healers in other games into FFXIV for fun: Taion/Tactician

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't vibe -at all- with "they played BLU too safe, so let's finish its mutation into boring two minute metaland so we can spend the next four years bitching about how horribly designed it is".

The issue is not that they 'played it too safe', its that they didn't play it safe, which is good. Playing it safe would be to introduce it as another 2min job. However, we could have had one of two things, 'playing it not-safe in addition to safe', ie, what I put before where it can be broken strong or 'able to participate with other players in standard content too'. Alternatively, remember that it was introduced in 4.55. Before the 2min meta came and standardized everything into stale homogeneity. Though I'd agree on 'it being safe' design wise, in that they 1:1 copied how it works from the other MMO, not realizing that the two MMOs function very differently at their core.

And yeh, MMO gameplay loop is usually that the point of doing things is to increase how strong your character is (or to get some new item to show off with). So it's no surprise to me that 'current raid' is the 'content that matters'. An absolutely tiny amount of people do Deep Dungeon solo runs, and out of that tiny amount, an even tinier amount does more than one run, as most do the title run and then never go back. Opening DDs up to BLU would give a spike of player attention to that content, but then after it's not 'new' anymore, it'd drop off and return to what we have now. In a sense, every other job is more 'evergreen' in a sense, new patch comes out, new content for any job. BLU doesn't get that, BLU has to wait for a BLU specific update patch to get new content. IDK about anyone else but I view that as a very inefficient design choice in terms of dev time and such.

More puzzle raids would be nice but it boils down to the UWU issue: UWU's difficulty and 'length' was tied up in the fact that the world-first racers were doing it wrong because of the Woken mechanic. With that 'puzzle' solved, the prog time of the fight is literally halved, possibly more, for every group who does it later with guides. Any puzzle fight added will have a similar fate, I think. This isn't to say 'don't do it, its a waste of time' per se, just to acknowledge that this is the eventual outcome and design with that in mind. I've made a post somewhere (don't remember where) about an idea for a Halicarnassus style fight where each role has to deal with an add of some sort, using their role actions. A Healer-tethered add which has to be GCD healed through, a debuff to Esuna, Reposing it once it's in position to lock it in place and stop it from moving, for example. But that's just one fight.

The first step towards 'more puzzle fights' is for SE to stop pussyfooting around their players in hard content and add some more Interrupt-checks, and some Esuna-debuffs. Heck, one simple thing from the other MMO that we can steal is a debuff that explodes for damage when it's cleansed or times out. If you ignore them all, you die at the end. If you cleanse one, it hurts like hell. So the healers have to stagger out when to cleanse a debuff from someone. Additionally, it could be put in as 'the fightwide gimmick', and mixed into other mechanics as the fight goes on. The comparison that comes to mind is Curtain Call, but that is based on moving away from your thorn rather than Esuna-ing a debuff. I guess taking the responsibility of 'when to pop' away from everyone and throwing it on the healer is just too stressful, though. Another thing we can steal from other MMO is heal-absorbs, ie if you have 30k of heal-absorb on you, the next 30k healing received does not work and instead reduces the absorb. An 'anti-shield' if you will. Macrocosmos wouldn't even help, as while 50k of damage and 50k of absorb both need the same healing pushed to solve, the latter isn't 'damage' and so Macro doesn't power up from it. Benediction would solve it though, and shields would still apply, as the heal still 'works', it just hits the absorb instead of the HP bar.

whew managed to steer it back to healer talk at the end