Please finally fix Tank, DPS and Healer roles SE

[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.

[GrimGale]

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.

It means that you can optimize a role away.

It means that in this fight, healers are a crutch, not a necessity. One third of the trinity which supposedly is made so that players have a reason to group up together, relying on the strenth of their jobs to fill in the gaps in for a well balanced team, is redundant in Current, highest end content.

Can you do the same with DPS classes? Can you optimize them away? How about tanks?

It doesn't matter that only a few people can do no-healer runs. It means that when you truly optimize your team composition to the extreme, healers are no longer necessary. It means that in order to get the most of out of this content you have to exclude a whole Role.

[Sebazy]

A big part of this stems from Yoshida and his team failing to understand the intricacies of their own game at times. Remember when Yoshida claimed that WHM was doing all the healing whilst SCH was doing all the damage in ARR and HW?

Additionally, Yoshida-san described a scenario where White Mage and Scholar are paired up to heal. Scholar is primarily a barrier healer and lacks the ability to cure to the extent that a White Mage can. As a result, the White Mage is stuck doing most of the heals while the Scholar can DPS away.

Except that isn’t a quote from HW or Stormblood. That’s a quote from an interview in the lead up to Shadowbringers. ( https://twinfinite.net/ps4/ffxiv-sha...ers-interview/ )

It’s the same story as Warriors faced in ARR. Except with healers I guess the backlash was never unanimous enough to get him to realise that he was wrong. Thus he clung onto this false belief and our slice of the trinity pie has continued to suffer for it.

[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...

.

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.

[Iedarus]

I'd say nerf it anyway. WARs are never going to have everything, and quite frankly, to hell with the fools who want it to. Drop those 400 potencies on Bloodwhetting and Nascent Flash to 300, make their heal procs be per weaponskill use and not per hit, and remove the HoT on Shake It Off. There, we've dragged WAR's healing back down to a manageable level.

I don't know what the hell the team was thinking with having WAR heal off every enemy hit. I sure wish Holy Circle had the same mechanic. Just kidding, I don't want any more homogenization, but it does beg the question why the unga bunga great axe tank has more self sustain than the tank with the shield.

[RyuDragnier]

I don't know what the hell the team was thinking with having WAR heal off every enemy hit. I sure wish Holy Circle had the same mechanic. Just kidding, I don't want any more homogenization, but it does beg the question why the unga bunga great axe tank has more self sustain than the tank with the shield.

Because WAR has always been SE's "Golden Child". Whenever they want something, they get it.

[ForteNightshade]

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.

This is missing the point though. While the overwhelming majority of parties will keep the standard comp, seeing things like this demonstrates just how little value healers contribute relatively their trinity counterparts. Pulling up a random P5S run, I have 175 casts of Glare and 111 casts of every other ability combined. Yes, including Dia and Assize which are damage buttons. 61.1% of my contributions to that clear were spamming a single DPS button. A mere 13.2% of my casts were towards healing, and this is me both playing sub-optimally and counting Assize and Rapture casts as always healing necessary when I can assure you, they weren't. This is a rare run where I used Solace and even Medica II.

So my contributes as a DPS were nearly five times higher than as a healer. That's the issue people have with the healer design in this game right now, be it from the kits themselves or the encounters. You aren't a healer, you're a gimped damage dealer regardless of the content you do.

Because WAR has always been SE's "Golden Child". Whenever they want something, they get it.

Okay, this may have been true in Heavensward but it stopped being years ago. Warrior has spent the last two expansions as the worst tank in high end content and even been actively locked out in Abyssos. Dark Knight has more than three times its clear rates for both Ultimates, and Dark Knight/Gunbreaker dominated throughout all of Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

They've had to buff Warrior five separate times this expansion. If that's "Golden Child" status, Dark Knight must be a living legend.

[fulminating]

#justsaltyearththings

[RyuDragnier]

Okay, this may have been true in Heavensward but it stopped being years ago. Warrior has spent the last two expansions as the worst tank in high end content and even been actively locked out in Abyssos. Dark Knight has more than three times its clear rates for both Ultimates, and Dark Knight/Gunbreaker dominated throughout all of Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

They've had to buff Warrior five separate times this expansion. If that's "Golden Child" status, Dark Knight must be a living legend.

DRK is only taken because of damage. DRK was the worst tank in SB, the worst tank in ShB, and is the worst tank in EW, period. The only saving grace for DRK is the damage, and nothing else.