Please finally fix Tank, DPS and Healer roles SE

[GrimGale]

The "healers should heal and DPS as an afterthought" mentality doesn't take into account the fact that there is always going to be healing downtime. Hell, healing downtime is a natural result of getting good at healing. The better you are a managing and understanding your healing kit the more free time you're going to create out of fulfilling the "fill up HP bar" section of your role.

With WoW as an example, despite the game's intense healing triage/attrition model where healers are expected to pump healing constantly, healers see a nice variety of kits, from Monk's healing while punching the enemy to augment their heals, to Discipline Priest's attunement, to Druid's Heal-over-time and transform to cat mode.

Healing should be a healers primary function, but we can't allow that to justify a barren and shallow damage kit.

Keeping your party alive is the healer's skill floor.

Keeping your party alive while doing good damage/supporting the pary is the healer's skill ceiling.

[Renathras]

Personally I don't want them touching WHM. I think WHM is fine as is, and I definitely don't want them making it more complicated. I really like how simple WHM is because in normal content I can watch videos when running an expert dungeon for the 500th time, and in harder/new content I can watch the boss and other players more to focus more on learning the mechanics. I would like to have more healing mechanics in harder content though.. More healing, esuna watches, etc. I don't think healers need more complex dps skills, 'cause then why even have the healer class? They'd just be casters then. I'm really happy with how the game is now as a WHM main, but if other healer mains aren't happy then I'd much prefer the fights be made with more healing mechanics rather than the healer skills being made more complex.

Preach. 100% agreed.

It completely gobsmacks me that "need to focus on healing" means the damage rotation MUST be boring...for people who actually engage with it frequently, always as an argument from people unskilled enough to -not- engage with it frequently.

I think it's because damage rotations are fun to you, so you don't realize how NOT fun they are to others. WHM being given RDM's damage rotation wouldn't be fun for everyone, it would be boring (or worse, tedious) to others. This isn't a "real healers" argument, btw. You can be a Healer and like damage rotations and you can be a Healer and not like damage rotations, same thing for Tanks. You think Healer rotations are "boring" and if they had more buttons and interactions, then everyone would like them, but what you aren't understanding is a lot of people don't find dealing DPS ever NOT boring, no matter what Job they're on. They play non-DPS Jobs because they just don't find that gameplay compelling or interesting.

The only Job in this game I actually find the DPS rotation not boring or tedious is GNB. No idea why, it's just my personal feeling. All other Jobs I find the DPS rotations either boring or tedious. People just like different things, and a lot of people don't find 1111 boring (or no less boring than 12048774291)

Yeah this is why I also said, if were going to keep the current healer design then nerf tank mitigation and adjust game mechanics where damage is more constant to warrant using all of your healing abilities.

Agreed.

If SE actually read any of this feedback, I'd have to wonder what they would be thinking. We've had healers that want to do more DPS and then are enabled to do so by giving tanks more self-healing and mitigation... so now they can expend more GCDs doing damage. Now they want to spend those GCDs healing after SE just spent an expansion tweaking tanks to have these self-heals.

And that's not even counting the age-old argument of "< insert job here > is better than < my job >, can you make < my job > more like < insert job here >!" Then they do that... and people complain that all the jobs are similar.

Mhm. Agreed.

As a healer main the last thing i want is more DPS button to press..
It's better to improve the 3 buttons we have..than adding x new buttons to press..
You can make combos and skill alterations w 3 buttons,
to prevent same button spam u know
(depth is better than many shallow skills)

Cant speak for other healers..but
as AST you have 6 possible dmg ability to interact with
along with 4 possible self buffs... but some have long CD/RNG.

Very much agreed.

I feel for some Jobs, like SCH, which used to have more and had some of it taken away from them, but other Jobs haven't changed much, and are arguably better. WHM is roughly comparable when you dig into it to ARR and even SB versions of it (traded an AOE DoT for an AOE nuke with an effective 1 min CD, and a DoT every 18 sec for a GCD instant cast heal every 20 that leads to said AOE nuke). We also already have enough buttons. Heck, WHM could have Assize made into a DPS button and you have your 3 DPS buttons that can interact. Dia ticks have a chance to proc an Assize or something and it's a GCD. I dunno, don't need more dps buttons and I'd much rather see the focus be on healing.

If I wanted a DPS rotation, I'd play a DPS Job.

Now, there can be some wiggle room with different Jobs - much as I like current SCH, it DID lose a lot of abilities going from HW to SB and then SB to ShB, so having some of those would make it more what it was. But that's not true of WHM or AST - particularly AST which didn't lose damage buttons so much as lost...well, healing and buffing buttons.

The three buttons are a dot (refresh before falls off), an aoe (use on x or more targets) and a single target. I don't really think there's any way to make that anaemic selection engaging without adding some more to interact with it. Since healers already had more damage options, returning them shouldn't be dismissed.

SCH. SCH had more damage options.

As far as I can tell looking at old data, AST has always had the barebones DPS kit of the bunch as it does now (nuke, DoT, AOE), and WHM traded a DoT for Afflatus, which is a superior system anyway. Seriously "another DoT you have to use exactly every 15 sec" is in no world better than "a movement and MP management heal with choice of single target or AOE every 20 seconds that also awards a damage neutral damage return attack that can be used in buff windows for a damage gain".

There are also plenty of ways to make the buttons interact more and be fine. I've proposed them several times in the Healer forum. Whether you would call it "engaging" or not is the issue, but that comes down to personal taste. Though I have long supported SCH getting its SB kit back, so... /shrug

My opinion has mostly been, "If healers can do 90% of their healing with well-managed oGCDs while providing damage - it is probably a reasonable balance."

Healers with less experience probably would need to expend more GCDs on healing and less on damage, but that's the benefit of learning how to play the job better. And of course, some healers can rely solely on oGCDs. But it is a bit disconcerting if healers can be removed entirely.

I...disagree. The problem with this is that it leads to the "1 button (actually 3-5, depending on which Healer Job) damage rotation" that high end players get annoyed with. If the oGCDs were less powerful requiring GCDs to be used, it would shift that somewhat. If there were no oGCDs at all, it would shift that entirely. Take ARR WHM. It had one oGCD heal, Benediction, on a long CD. That was it. The other oGCDs were Presence of Mind, Divine Seal (basically Temperance without the mitigation), Shroud of Saints (Lucid that also reduced agro when...that mattered), and Fluid Aura (which wasn't a heal at all). The end result was casting GCD heals and GCD mitigation (Stoneskin; remember when WHM had a castable BARRIER spell?), which was more fun for people in general and how WHM was mostly played by the playerbase.

I don’t mind more complicated BUT it has to be more interesting on the healing side and NOT a complicated DPS rotation.

Yes yes… I know that the Healer job developer is actually the Magic DPS dev… maybe they should do something radical and hire a healer specific developer.

I would love to see healers get more buffing abilities rather than more DPS. Let the DPS do their thing and let the healers keep them alive and help them do more DPS.

Yes. So much yes.

With how many people get stressed about the idea of healing as it is, I just can't see how making healers more complicated, at least in normal content, is a good idea. Yes, there will be a group of healers that really like it, but i'm willing to bet there will be a larger group that will not want healers to be harder to play. Despite what people may say, any change to how something players, even if it's not technically 'harder' will be perceived as such by someone having to adjust how they play.

It does seem odd how many people don't understand this.

It's just funny to see people crack because of this specifically. As if this just happened overnight, when we know what's been happening since Stormblood.

Yeah, but you have to remember that people playing Healers that want to DPS liked SB because they did DPS and had more DPS buttons. They don't want to play the iky red icon Jobs, but they...well, I'll say no more. The point is, they didn't complain about "all Tank (0 Healer) Ultimate clears" back then (even though there was one somewhere in there) or Savage clears because they weren't on a crusade to change Healers at the time because they got to do their DPS while playing the green icon Jobs.

That I can agree on. Tanks shouldn't be able to survive for entire fights without a healer present. That breaks the trinity completely, and without enrage timers, DPS become pointless as well. I think the problem is the threads I see keep saying a variety of things from fixing healers, making them do more dps, tanks are too strong, etc, when I agree, a simple change would be to reduce the tank self-healing by a good amount and see how that looks.

I agree for the most part, but I disagree that healers are the least important role for normal content. In 90% of normal content, DPS simply aren't necessary at all, and no healing means you're going to wipe constantly.

Agreed, on both counts.

Memes are fine when used as a general means to be funny, and are not meant to be taken seriously. When they are used as a form of an argument/rebuttal, especially when someone puts a considerable amount of thought into their post, they take on a more condescending tone that shows a lack of respect for the person it is aimed at. Also, Stormblood isn't some holy grail of an expansion. This expansion had a ton of issues with gameplay, story, relic quests, encounter design, the whole nine yards bub.

The irony to me is how many people hated and complained about it at the time now insisting it was the height of gameplay. It's a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side". WoW has the same issue. Cataclysm expansion hit and people pretty much all hated it at the time. Years later, people talk about it like it was good. I think the only old expansion that they didn't later say was somehow good now (so far) was Warlords of Draenor. So...I guess that one was REALLY bad, lol

While I understand that the self-sustainability is most likely for either solo instances, or to carry the dead weight of a garbage healer, or both, I do feel like it's pretty unbalanced in group content.

I mean, don't get me wrong, it's nice when I have an 8-man group where 3 people are just so determined to eat the floor and my co-healer is a medica 2 mage, but I can see how it's annoying for more skilled groups.

Idk. I just seem to always get the bottom of the barrel players that can't tell their head from their butt. So when I do get players who are able to use their kit effectively, it's a nice breath of fresh air.

I do wish, though, that in general, people would only use their self-sustain as a back up. I get you want to use your full kit, but if your healer(s) is competent, then let them do their job. Let them worry about healing, you focus on tanking/dpsing. If the party is struggling and constantly dying and the healer is spending their whole time hardcasting rezzes (been there), then please use it.

It should be a back-up, not a go-to.

I think the main problem with that is that much of the self-sustain is either automatic (all four Tanks have a self-heal as part of their core 1-2-3+ rotation; WAR and DRK it's the third hit of their combo, GNB it's the second hit which also makes a little shield, and PLD it's the Holy Spirit/Circle they get as the stinger -4 of their 1-2-3 combo) or a costless (or essentially free) oGCD which is also a short duration oGCD. GNB Heart of Corundum is a 25 second CD. Note their 90 sec CD Camouflage that is their "bigger CD" doesn't heal them, it only mitigates. As does the standard 60 second Rampart. Same with their 120 sec "biggest (non invuln)" CD of Nebula. Isn't it weird how their WEAKEST CD is also the one that can fill up a good chunk of their health bar and be used again 18 seconds later?

Holy Shelltron (can be used twice with full Oath Guge), Bloodwhetting/Nascent (30 sec?) also have a personal heal. This would be like asking Tanks to NOT use their most available, shortest CD defensive ability.

They should probably flip the script and make their long CD mitigations the ones that heal, which would reward strategic use more. The short CD ones should be more for "active mitigation"/responding to attacks (which they are with the boosted mitigation for the first 4 seconds rewarding good timing of the abilities as if the player is raising their shield to block an attack); it's just those are ALSO the abilities that give them big healing for...god only knows what reason.

Instead of nerfing tanks, they could always make it so damage is more frequent to the point where spamming damage always isn't the meta for healers anymore, i think healers would be alot more fun if they were about managing mana and keeping the party alive through more constant damage and squeezing in damage when they can rather than squeezing out as few heals as possible

That, too, but part of that is nerfing Tanks since their mitigation and self-healing is so high right now, it would negate a lot of that.

[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.

[Semirhage]

I think it's because damage rotations are fun to you, so you don't realize how NOT fun they are to others. WHM being given RDM's damage rotation wouldn't be fun for everyone, it would be boring (or worse, tedious) to others. This isn't a "real healers" argument, btw. You can be a Healer and like damage rotations and you can be a Healer and not like damage rotations, same thing for Tanks. You think Healer rotations are "boring" and if they had more buttons and interactions, then everyone would like them, but what you aren't understanding is a lot of people don't find dealing DPS ever NOT boring, no matter what Job they're on. They play non-DPS Jobs because they just don't find that gameplay compelling or interesting.

Then. You don't. Have to do. It.

Downtime "needs" to be a tedious, boring repetitive chore because "some people don't like damage rotations". So pressing one button over and over and over and over and over again is so much better, best game design ever. Nobody's holding you down and forcing you to not be a Glarespammer in the world with actually entertaining downtime kits.

But that's the line that MUST NOT be crossed. Because the skill ceiling must be ankle-height, so Sylphies can have "fun" spamming Glare. Over and over again.

[Renathras]

Then. You don't. Have to do. It.

That isn't the issue. Stop moving the goalposts.

You were asking why PEOPLE FELT Healer DPS kits couldn't be fun for you (had to be "boring" from your perspective). That's the answer to the question.

"You don't. Have to do. It." doesn't answer or change how people feel and why they feel it.

I answered the question you asked. The question you asked wasn't "Do you have to do it or not?". The question you (effectively) asked was "Why do Healer players not want more DPS abilities?"

I answered that question.

EDIT:

Btw, the answer is "How about we just have consistent damage on the raid so that there isn't 'downtime' in the first place?"

What do DPS do during "downtime"? Oh, that's right: They don't have downtime other than phase transitions (which, ironically, is the time Healers actually do the whole healing/mitigation thing since you're ALLOWED to cast GCD heals/barriers during that time and not be "bad" due to a 300 potency DPS loss...

[ZephyrMenodora]

That isn't the issue. Stop moving the goalposts.

You were asking why PEOPLE FELT Healer DPS kits couldn't be fun for you (had to be "boring" from your perspective). That's the answer to the question.

"You don't. Have to do. It." doesn't answer or change how people feel and why they feel it.

I answered the question you asked. The question you asked wasn't "Do you have to do it or not?". The question you (effectively) asked was "Why do Healer players not want more DPS abilities?"

I answered that question.

EDIT:

Btw, the answer is "How about we just have consistent damage on the raid so that there isn't 'downtime' in the first place?"

What do DPS do during "downtime"? Oh, that's right: They don't have downtime other than phase transitions (which, ironically, is the time Healers actually do the whole healing/mitigation thing since you're ALLOWED to cast GCD heals/barriers during that time and not be "bad" due to a 300 potency DPS loss...

Actually love watching healers let tanks die on mass pulls because they feel they aren't allowed to cast a GCD heal. Happens more than I care to see. If your tank isn't super over-geared and/or your DPS in the group isn't burning fast enough, cast your heal. No one in the group actually in the game and not the vacuum of the forums cares about another Glare.

Just a pet peeve I'm tired of.

Watched this happen just this morning so fresh on my mind.

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

Personally I don't want them touching WHM. I think WHM is fine as is, and I definitely don't want them making it more complicated. I really like how simple WHM is because in normal content I can watch videos when running an expert dungeon for the 500th time, and in harder/new content I can watch the boss and other players more to focus more on learning the mechanics.

But you could still do that even in WHM were twice as complex... because you only need a tenth your kit for normal content and at most half for Extremes anyways...

Meanwhile, if you made the other healers capable of more optimization yet left no advantage over WHM for their doing so, you just end up with WHM being a must-pick for all but the top few percent of players, reducing overall healer choice.

No, an accessible core and high ceiling for every job is the better approach, as it leaves every player far more to work with to the extent they desire; to ask for a job to be capped short just so that a narrow span of players can play at an advantage over everyone else in getting as much for less effort is just asking for a very obvious imbalance issue.

If someone wants to put in less than half the effort of someone doing even just 95% of the optimization possible to a given job, what's the problem with their getting a "mere" 80-90% the performance of that harder-working player? They'd still be getting far more output per unit effort --far more bang for their buck-- regardless of the job, just by choosing an earlier point on that curve of decreasing efficiency.

[Aravell]

Yeah, but you have to remember that people playing Healers that want to DPS liked SB because they did DPS and had more DPS buttons. They don't want to play the iky red icon Jobs, but they...well, I'll say no more. The point is, they didn't complain about "all Tank (0 Healer) Ultimate clears" back then (even though there was one somewhere in there) or Savage clears because they weren't on a crusade to change Healers at the time because they got to do their DPS while playing the green icon Jobs.

There was no 0 healer ultimate clears back in Stormblood. If you're talking about the all tank clear of UCoB, that was in Shadowbringers, GNB was required to have enough throughput to kill. Even if you're talking about savage kills, the best that was managed back then was solo healer kills.

[Ransu]

And this is my main problem. Healers are useless in this game's meta, which its weird for a game that uses the role trinity.

Lets be real for a minute. Your average and even to a point above average players are not going to be doing things like that group that cleared TOP without a healer or even just your average savage fight. Tanks having self healing is absolutely a problem, but healers are not useless in the current meta. Only the extreme of the extreme are pulling stunts like that.