Please finally fix Tank, DPS and Healer roles SE

[Atelier-Bagur]

I wouldn't call them useless. As I said in the thread about the Ultimate clear, they are still a safety net, and most groups still need them to fix mistakes. Their LB3 is also used to cheese mechanics like Immolation in Mt. Ordeals EX. Tanks and DPS still cannot replenish health with the same efficiency that healers do, but this is not needed for a group composed of highly skilled players.

But this is also prevalent in normal casual group content though. It already has been proven multiple times how lack of healers is more efficient to complete content due to the imbalance. I understand that obviously not everyone is a pro gamer, but the whole point of having balance patches is to keep each role and job fair for every comp without compromising the other. Skilled players shouldnt compromise other skilled players.

Just imagine how healers feel, knowing that your job is actually this gimped that efficient runs of current hard content doesnt require you at all? I mean you just admitted yourself that highly skilled players dont need healers in your last sentence. You dont find that odd? You dont find that be a serious problem with the balancing of this game?

[Gemina]

But this is also prevalent in normal casual group content though. It already has been proven multiple times how lack of healers is more efficient to complete content due to the imbalance. I understand that obviously not everyone is a pro gamer, but the whole point of having balance patches is to keep each role and job fair for every comp without compromising the other. Skilled players shouldnt compromise other skilled players.

Just imagine how healers feel, knowing that your job is actually this gimped that efficient runs of current hard content doesnt require you at all? I mean you just admitted yourself that highly skilled players dont need healers in your last sentence. You dont find that odd? You dont find that be a serious problem with the balancing of this game?

Some people get the wrong impression on some of the things I say around here. When I say healers are not useless, I am not saying that there are no problems with them, and they are fine. I even acknowledged in another post here that they have the lowest responsibility of the three roles in the game. Especially in NM content.

However, the thing is that I have fewer issues with the healers themselves. I find that it isn't really healer design that is the problem so much as I do that the other two roles step on their toes and cover the responsibilities that really should be exclusive to them. Resurrections, raid wide HoTs, raid wide mitigation, possibly even raid wide offensive boosts; but above all, HEALING. It's not that content doesn't require healing. Healers are currently capable of covering all of these tasks. These skills are not missing from their bag of tricks. But because the other roles can do them too while also covering their own responsibilities it makes healers redundant, and it isn't right.

This is a major reason why when players say give healers more offensive buttons to push, I go against that. If you give healers more offensive power, what happens is leap frogging, and that redundancy transfers over to the DPS role. Because you get healers with nearly the same offensive kits as DPS jobs, but also a crap ton of utility to go with it. I think a lot of players fail to see this. The way to truly fix this is and achieve balance among the three roles is to nerf tanks and DPS jobs of their utility. This can then be used to their advantage to give tanks and DPS jobs more skills and diversity that apply to their respective roles and responsibilities in the group.

[DixieBellOCE]

Some people get the wrong impression on some of the things I say around here. When I say healers are not useless, I am not saying that there are no problems with them, and they are fine. I even acknowledged in another post here that they have the lowest responsibility of the three roles in the game. Especially in NM content.

However, the thing is that I have fewer issues with the healers themselves. I find that it isn't really healer design that is the problem so much as I do that the other two roles step on their toes and cover the responsibilities that really should be exclusive to them. Resurrections, raid wide HoTs, raid wide mitigation, possibly even raid wide offensive boosts; but above all, HEALING. It's not that content doesn't require healing. Healers are currently capable of covering all of these tasks. These skills are not missing from their bag of tricks. But because the other roles can do them too while also covering their own responsibilities it makes healers redundant, and it isn't right.

This is a major reason why when players say give healers more offensive buttons to push, I go against that. If you give healers more offensive power, what happens is leap frogging, and that redundancy transfers over to the DPS role. Because you get healers with nearly the same offensive kits as DPS jobs, but also a crap ton of utility to go with it. I think a lot of players fail to see this. The way to truly fix this is and achieve balance among the three roles is to nerf tanks and DPS jobs of their utility. This can then be used to their advantage to give tanks and DPS jobs more skills and diversity that apply to their respective roles and responsibilities in the group.

As much as we go back and forth bickering about elitism and such, this is a very consistent argument that is only missing one variable.

The player variable.

The skill floor and skill ceiling of gameplay in XIV is miles apart, and that is a core gameplay issue that over the years had just kept widening as the story content of the game never ramps up in difficulty outside of very special cases.

The difference between a good and a bad tank is night and day, a tank that knows how to play the game will never require healing, where as a tank that does not understand their kit will die, even if you sit there and heal them non stop.

The same can be said for Healing and DPS alike, the issue with the game is the skill variance.
If the game did more to raise the floor up a bit closer to the ceiling, and players were forced to use their job's entire kit during the story, there wouldn't be as big of a gap.

[Gemina]

As much as we go back and forth bickering about elitism and such, this is a very consistent argument that is only missing one variable.

The player variable.

The skill floor and skill ceiling of gameplay in XIV is miles apart, and that is a core gameplay issue that over the years had just kept widening as the story content of the game never ramps up in difficulty outside of very special cases.

The difference between a good and a bad tank is night and day, a tank that knows how to play the game will never require healing, where as a tank that does not understand their kit will die, even if you sit there and heal them non stop.

The same can be said for Healing and DPS alike, the issue with the game is the skill variance.
If the game did more to raise the floor up a bit closer to the ceiling, and players were forced to use their job's entire kit during the story, there wouldn't be as big of a gap.

I think here is where we finally agree on something, as in an earlier post in this thread I mentioned that over 50% of the tanks I have grouped do not know how to mitigate properly and eat up my resources very quickly. On the other side of that coin are the tanks that are nigh unkillable. DPS players are likewise in that they can quickly eat up healer resources as well if they can't stay out of the bad.

Unfortunately, this actually serves for the devs to keep things as they are as the lowest common denominator can and likely will dictate the direction they move in. It's a juxtaposition. Force difficulty on the casual playerbase, and many of them will just bail, but those who stay will get better at the game. However, I believe that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction as this point. If things don't change in 7.0, then SE is going to start losing players from the skilled side of the playerbase. The game is simply far too saturated with content that poses little to no threat level at the normal difficulty. And while there are more difficult duties to participate in, the problem with this is that players of all skill levels are incentivized to participate in NM duties via MSQ progression and roulettes.

[DixieBellOCE]

I think here is where we finally agree on something, as in an earlier post in this thread I mentioned that over 50% of the tanks I have grouped do not know how to mitigate properly and eat up my resources very quickly. On the other side of that coin are the tanks that are nigh unkillable. DPS players are likewise in that they can quickly eat up healer resources as well if they can't stay out of the bad.

Unfortunately, this actually serves for the devs to keep things as they are as the lowest common denominator can and likely will dictate the direction they move in. It's a juxtaposition. Force difficulty on the casual playerbase, and many of them will just bail, but those who stay will get better at the game. However, I believe that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction as this point. If things don't change in 7.0, then SE is going to start losing players from the skilled side of the playerbase. The game is simply far too saturated with content that poses little to no threat level at the normal difficulty. And while there are more difficult duties to participate in, the problem with this is that players of all skill levels are incentivized to participate in NM duties via MSQ progression and roulettes.

And here we are in complete agreement.

The game is so catered to the 'i dont want to play an mmo' players that the games casual combat experience is at the skill level of something like minecraft dungeons.

If the MSQ ramped up, with each expansions NORMAL content getting harder, even if only by a little, the average player at endgame would be able to do extreme/savage content without much of a learning curve between the difficulties.

As it is right now, the difficulty of the game compared to ARR/HW on release, is so easy that you could clear dungeons/raids by pressing 1 button over and over again.
Hell, in Asphodelos, there was a party on JP servers that AUTO ATTACKED the raid boss to death in P2N.

[Renathras]

The skill floor and skill ceiling of gameplay in XIV is miles apart, and that is a core gameplay issue that over the years had just kept widening as the story content of the game never ramps up in difficulty outside of very special cases.

This is honestly a big piece of things, too. It's why making super hard content super hard is okay, but trying to make sweeping changes across Job design as a whole or whole game changes to encounters is far more tricky.

And if you ever look into the reason for the gap, there are a lot of inputs, but a big one is that for all people say "read your tooltips" and "FFXIV Jobs are braindead easy", it really isn't true since the vast majority of those people look up Balance instructions on how to play their Job because the game just doesn't teach how to do it well. They didn't just "read their tooltips" and know how to play their Jobs to get a 99 parse or even a 50 parse.

The game at no point teaches you what an oGCD or weaving is - despite this being an ESSENTIAL skill. Understanding JUST THAT is enough to get green, if not blue, or better in casual content (that compares you against the whole playerbase) because of how many people don't understand this. I started in 2.3 and didn't know what The Balance was until 5.0, but I didn't learn about the difference until sometime in SB when I was watching a YouTube guide for SCH (maybe from Momo, don't remember now) and trying to solo PotD and I notice that the Pacification debuff didn't block some of my abilities but the "No Actions" debuff blocked those but not my others. It was then I figured out the difference between a "Spell/Weaponskill" and "Ability" and how things like Fey Illumination that make a distinction between "Healing Actions" and "Healing Spells" actually MEAN something by that. No where in game does it actually say this, and while the Actions & Abilities shows "Spell", "Weaponskill", or "Ability", the game doesn't tell you what the distinction is. For all of HW and most of SB, I thought Regen and Tetragrammaton were the same thing (Instant Cast), just that Tetra was "more responsive" (in my own words). It wasn't until an entire expansion later I realized there were actual different classes of abilities that govern this, and I only learned that through outside of game resources and soloing PotD where I could pay attention to debuffs and put 2 and 2 together.

And it's not just me: I've posted this story before on Reddit and on YouTube in comment discussions, and WITHOUT FAIL, those posts get a lot of upvotes and people saying "Oh my god, this just clicked with me! Thank you!" who also didn't understand the difference.

The game also never teaches you ABC (Always Be Casting - I learned this when I was playing WoW back in Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King), which is an automatic green parse in general content if you just DO THAT. It doesn't teach you buff alignment, it BARELY teaches you proper rotations on Tanks/Melee/MCH (and only because of the combo system, and not even the optimal ones in the case of MNK or Jobs with extra combo things going on like GNB), optimal CD use, drift, how many oGCDs you can weave between abilities, etc etc.

And all that stuff isn't even OPTIMIZATION. If you DID know all that stuff (but just that stuff), that wouldn't even get you a purple (and maybe not a blue) vs high end players.

And the thing is, no one at the top does their own rotation theorycrafting. People might play around the edges, but most people are just going to The Balance and then doing what they say MORE OR LESS, with the very top (97+, let's say) being the only people doing any serious theorycrafting on their own, and most of that just to augment the information they got from The Balance.

.

It's always easy to forget after the fact how little we once knew. Most people that play seriously don't remember a time when they didn't know what an oGCD was or how significant that knowledge is. While something like ABC people can intuitively puzzle out, things like BLM Transpose lines? Yeah...

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Given many of these are basic, fundamental concepts, and a lot of FFXIV players, FFXIV is their first MMO or serious at all (non-hyper-casual single player) game experience, that matters quite a lot.

[DixieBellOCE]

snip

Its like how recently i discovered that Temperance only affects your personal healing output.
For a good 4+ years i always thought that it was just an incoming heal buff for the entire party (Granted i don't really play WHM much due to how boring it is).

The fundamentals of ABC are something learned in every MMO, and that alone, with things like sidecasting and proper OGCD management can turn even the most basic casual player into a relatively good player in a few hours of practice.
The 'Ability' and 'Weaponskill' variations are something the game needs to explain a lot better early on, basically as soon as you unlock your core kit around level 15.
The mini series Square Enix released to 'help new players' could have gone a long way if it was actually used as a tutorial on how the basic game mechanics work.

On the comments about 'The balance', There are always going to be people out there smarter and more qualified top make rotations and do all the math for gearsets/GCD speeds ect ect.
I make an effort to learn 'why', instead of just straight up copy pasting what they do, and i feel that helps a lot when theory crafting your own rotations.

I have said this before, but the game does a very poor job of preparing players for the endgame. You can get through the entirety of the story pressing one button, and that to me, is a complete waste of development time. The game should progressively get harder (not super hard, just enough to challenge the average player to get better as they progress), and by the time you hit the endgame, you will have atleast a basic concept of what is required and understanding of the toolkit available to you.