What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ForsakenRoe]

Just make Closed Position a Kardia Clone, lower the CD on Curing Waltz/Improv and tack on a Regen to Technical Step and DNC could probably be a fairly effective Healer.

I've asked this in the past: If Curing Waltz had it's CD lowered to be spammable like Medica, it's range increased, and Shield Samba reduced to 30s CD to mirror Soil and Kerachole, what justifies it being flagged as a DPS, when it's able to do more HPS (and at zero MP cost) than an actual healer? The answer, I think, goes back to what I said before: The majority of it's OGCD kit is damage-focused in nature. Though as pointed out, that's because it's bloated by 4 different kinds of Fan Dance. To argue that 'oh in that situation, it'd be a healer because of how much HPS it can do' would directly contradict any notion that we can't have an involved damage rotation on healers, and also would prove how 'extra' all these OGCDs they keep giving us are, since 'CW with a 3s CD' would not only 'keep up' with every HPS check in the game right now, it'd likely be 'too strong', 600p every 3s would be insane

I don't really do much thinking about this particular topic but maybe later tonight I'll come up with 'dancer but actually as a healer' for the hell of it

[Shurrikhan]

I've asked this in the past: If Curing Waltz...

Ngl. I just wanted DNC to be its own damn thing. Like, pairing movement itself (relative to target, partner, or just previous positions within player-activated brief windows) and attack animations in such a way that everything acts similarly to a multi-leveled and integral Mudra-Ninjutsu with control over what section or degree of the preparatory actions / releasable effects banked would be released via at least a couple different capitalizing skills.

A truly versatile support, even less rigidly or solely a healer than an ARR or even Stormblood SCH was in a two-healer party.

[Renathras]

You have to remember that WAR pre-4.2 was a completely different beast to what it seems to be now, it wasn't always 'ungabunga press the funny button for X free fell cleaves and a side of fries'. People who liked that gameplay (cough) had to move elsewhere when it was removed. And then after they moved somewhere else, (like how I moved to DRK) THAT got 'ungabunga press funny button for X fell cleaves bloodspillers' too. Eventually, every job they move to loses it's 'spark' in this way, and then there's nowhere to jump ship to, so what then?

As you are well aware, this is the reason I think some Jobs should be changed but not all of them - Healers of course, but this also apples to other roles. I also think it better to add new Jobs than replace existing ones, even if that might mean copying some. For example, I 100% like new SMN better than old SMN and think it more fits the class fantasy on the tin. However, I also think many people like WoW Affliction Warlock DoT mages. The solution to me would have been to add the new SMN to the game either as Summoner or as Evoker, and to take the existing one and split it off (either new Job or new class split from ACN) into Green Mage. Take the half of SMN's kit that had to do with actual summoning - which was basically just Bahamut and Phoenix, at the end of ShB - and take the DoT mage half and make an actual DoT mage out of it. They essentially made an all new Job with SMN, so there's really no reason for them to delete the old one, just remove Baha/Louis from it and give it Shadow Flare as a level 90 capstone.

There's a "sunk cost" where we're where we are and have to build from there, not some arbitrary point in the past, but adopting such a policy going forward makes sense.

So WAR is and going forward will be the Unga Bunga Tank - which it's been since, at latest, ShB and more realistically, sometime in SB - make DRK the convoluted as hell Tank - since it always kinda was and even now kinda is, etc. That way, people don't have to jump to different things and can be guaranteed the thing they like now will kind of stay that going forward.

...granted, things need to be somewhat distinct before that - if all the Healers went forward as they are now, they'd go forward all the same.

.

The people playing WAR now probably wouldn't all quit over it. Many, or even most, probably would not. The people who would have quit WAR over such a change are likely the people who already quit WAR (mostly for DRK) between 4.2 and 5.1 anyway. The ones still playing WAR would mostly be fine with it.

NOT.
ALL.

But many and probably most wouldn't be too much bothered by mass Fell Cleave and retaining their "healing, mitigation, AND damage king" crown, as those things are more important to them at this point.

Sort of, it's at 3 heal/mits vs 6 damage (and two of them are the same button but for st/gt and another one only ever turns on after hitting another one because EW changed how procs worked and needed to make up the damage loss from it)? So kind of exaggerated but also not really. Cure Waltz, Shield Damage, Improvisation vs Fan Dance 1/2 (st/gt), Fan Dance 3 (distinctly different), Devilment, Flourish+Fan Dance 4

Hm...are you talking all abilities, or just oGCDs?

You’ve mentioned not liking RNG, so I don’t know if the supportive aspects of Dancer will save that for you.

Oh, you're probably right about that. I like knowing mostly how Jobs function and what they bring to the table, and DNC (and up until recently, BRD) have been a couple of holes in my knowledge, mostly because I just really really don't like that kind of gameplay and so haven't gone hands on with them (again, until recently in my push for omni-80). Also, lol at "the rabbit of shame".

I also knew about Curing Waltz (and the shared one...Tactician on MCH, Troubadour on BRD...and something on DNC?), but didn't realize Improvision was a thing. Regen + Barrier with choice of a channel for stronger shields or a slick maneuver for fixed percent barrier. Didn't realize it had that, as well.

I can see why you like DNC, though. It has a lot of support options while still having a changing/non-fixed damage rotation, which seems like something you'd enjoy a lot. More even than RDM, whose healing is more secondary and buffing is less pronounced (Magicked Barrier and Embolden), and with less variable rotation (just Stone/Fire procs, and some of those you can control with Acceleration and Holy/Flare use).

It does make me wonder, though, if a Healer Job was to be changed to suit you, if it might be that procs would be more important than DoTs. Like, several different duration DoTs is more GCDs to pres that aren't Broil, say, but the pattern is ultimately identical the entire fight. On the other hand, old MCH's 1-2-3 (pre-ShB?) were procs (which you could exercise SOME control over with Reload and Quick Reload), leading to more variation. I've said before SGE should play a bit more like MCH, and I wonder if something like that would help with the "less boredom" bit. Chances to generate Adderstings, chances to generate the -2 and -3 of the "combo", chances to reduce the CD of Plegma, etc.

I've asked this in the past: ...

If it was spamable, the potency would have to be smaller and it would have to cost MP. All the spamable Healer AOEs cost around 1k MP and have 300-400 potency (or less and a HoT/sheld). All the instant cast ones have a CD or Job resource, and often both. Rapture has a 20 sec resource, and Indom and Ixochole have 30 sec individual CDs + a resource that has an average of one per 20 sec.

So spamable Curing Waltz would be either a 30 sec CD with half the total potency, or a spamable cast with a ~1k MP cost and no more than 2/3rds the potency (assuming both dance partners being close together/600 is the current potency, that is).

I've said before RDM would have fit the SB era healer model if they had just given it Vermedica (at the time, all Healers were borderline DPSers anyway, it'd just have several elemental nukes instead of one nuke and three DoTs), but a part of me wonders if DNC was initally being designed as a Healer and they changed course part-way into it, deciding they CAN'T have an expansion that doesn't release a new DPS Job. <_< I'm not saying that DID happen, but the thought has occurred to be before, both with some of the Job's design and with how they were reluctant for so long to actually specify what role it was going to fill.

Though Dance Partner and Kardia don't quite work unless you want to Dance Partner the Tank for most of a given fight...

It might be interesting to consider versions of DNC that could make a spot in the Healer Role. They'd need to meet some requirements, though, but it's not impossible. I'll have to look into it more myself to think about it, though...

[ty_taurus]

Oh, you're probably right about that. I like knowing mostly how Jobs function and what they bring to the table, and DNC (and up until recently, BRD) have been a couple of holes in my knowledge, mostly because I just really really don't like that kind of gameplay and so haven't gone hands on with them.

What I will say about the RNG elements of Bard vs Dancer is that Bard's are more "surprising" because they are automatic procs off your songs. Dancer's procs only occur off your own actions, so they're not really "surprising" in the same way with the exception of Esprit generation. Even with the RNG, the job still feels quite structured most of the time, but the burst window can be a little more hectic due to all the potential Esprit generation that can occur.

Also, Improv is interesting, but the current implementation of it is kind of annoying. The action "Improvisation" changes to "Improvised Finish" while you're channeling, but you lose Improvised Finish if you break the channel. Double weaving it is quite sticky at times because you can't queue Improvised Finish until the action updates. I play with a wired connection, and even with that it's easy to clip your GCD, and sometimes I just can't get it off quickly enough and I lose the barrier when I try to queue the next GCD too soon. It's not a terrible thing, just a mild annoyance on an otherwise situational tool.

It does make me wonder, though, if a Healer Job was to be changed to suit you, if it might be that procs would be more important than DoTs. Like, several different duration DoTs is more GCDs to pres that aren't Broil, say, but the pattern is ultimately identical the entire fight. On the other hand, old MCH's 1-2-3 (pre-ShB?) were procs (which you could exercise SOME control over with Reload and Quick Reload), leading to more variation. I've said before SGE should play a bit more like MCH, and I wonder if something like that would help with the "less boredom" bit. Chances to generate Adderstings, chances to generate the -2 and -3 of the "combo", chances to reduce the CD of Plegma, etc.

There are a handful of playstyles I enjoy in RPGs. I like gamblers. I like agile characters or classes that look flashy while they fight. But my favorite playstyle is as a healer that dismantles enemies and denies them victory. I want to ensure my team wins by breaking the kneecaps of our enemies. I like to bait enemies into thinking they can get a kill and then surprise them with unexpected healing, barriers, or crowd control. I also want to be able to threaten opponents that think they can bully me just because I'm a healer. I don't need to do a lot of damage, I just need to do more than they expect.

For FFXIV, prior to Shadowbringers, I pretty much played Scholar and Astrologian exclusively. I did level White Mage and Bard, but I never used them, and I played Summoner on very rare occasions if I needed to DPS for whatever reason, like playing with someone else who can only heal, but that was very rare. Both Scholar and Astrologian were jobs I adored. Scholar was historically the job that catered to everything I liked in a healer. It blocked damage, had a few different debuffs that weakened enemy damage output, had a few situational debuffs that weren't very useful but felt rewarding to use when they did work, like disease, and it was a DPS-focused healer which plays into that aspect of being a healer you can't bully. Astrologian was very different. It really lacked offensive power, which normally wouldn't have meshed well with me, and I did find it kind of slow and boring when playing alone, but I really liked the in-the-moment decision-making it had to do with its cards. Even if it was messy and inconsistent, I liked constantly having to figure out the best way to utilize every card. And even outside of the cards, there were things that felt satisfying to do as Astrologian. I regularly look back on Heavensward dungeon pulls where tanks didn't have egregious amounts of self-healing and putting both the single target and AoE regen on the tank, hitting them with Wheel of Fortune from Collective Unconscious, and then using Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition, giving them an extra 20 seconds on all three HoTs and stunning all enemies, then just blowing them up with Gravities. And Wheel of Fortune's regen was very powerful back then. That stacked Regen would carry the Tank's HP effortlessly.

If you didn't see my more recent Sage theorycraft and are interested, I shared it earlier on this miro board here. There's also a White Mage theorycraft there as well, but that one was more based on an experimental thought about a different approach to the lilies. As for the Sage build, The move Soma needs to be reworked, and I haven't settled on what that rework should be yet, but it's intended to be the level 100 capstone. Phlegma is still melee, spoiler alert. You've mentioned not liking that before but sorry, I don't see a problem with it, especially with Icarus as an ability. But that's basically what I want in a healer right now.

[Icecylee]

Hm...are you talking all abilities, or just oGCDs?

The initial offhand comment was piggybacking off the idea of classifying jobs based on their primary ogcd usage, so yeah that was strictly just ogcd and not including GCD cooldowns or normal weapon skills.

Other stuff

While the idea of just... constantly adding more jobs anytime they want to do notable changes to how something plays is... *nice*, in theory... It's probably important to recognize that the job design team is *already* struggling immensely with the number of jobs we already have and there's no way in hell they'd be able to keep up with nearly doubling it to just even get back to the baseline of "stuff vaguely similar to the HW/StB era, + whatever we have now", even without factoring in that some (MCH, AST, DRK) were wildly different even between HW and StB. It's just not practical for everyone to get what they want. Best they can really do is try and cast as wide a net as possibly by making every job as different as possible and hope there's at least one that could appeal to potential players. Similarly they've got a long history of showing they're not really against radical changes if they think it might make something better (even if they often don't seem to understand what exactly it is the player base wants from them) so "but what if we lose this one particular playstyle" just... doesn't really feel like an actual concern.

[Renathras]

...

Whether you agree with it or not, you know me, "4 Healers"; I'm not at all opposed to changing some of them to suit you.

What is kind of interesting/cool to me is this post. I like seeing how people think and feel about things, which is easy to lose in our various squabble posts. Specifically, and I've had the inkling before, that you and I, while similar in how we think (something I have said before), are...completely opposite in what we like. XD

I don't like gamblers, I like certainty and general control.

I do like agile characters, but not really flashy fighting, per se. Like I'm content with an archer that just shoots arrows at people.

And my favorite playstyle as a healer is...well, WHM's description: "Those who would walk the path of the white mage are healers without peer, possessed of the power to deliver comrades from the direst of afflictions—even the icy grip of death itself." Powerful, efficient, able to salvage chaotic runs and uplift allies. The things you guys say you like about prog are what I like about Healers.

What I always liked about SCH since I picked it up in ARR wasn't the DoTs - I liked it in spite of that - or the janky Faerie macros (which I didn't even know were a thing until SB), or Lustrate ignoring Cleric (which I'm not even sure I realized at the time); no, what I liked was the shields. Something Alka Zolka says in the level 50 quest, I believe it is. That he had never felt so well protected and shielded in combat, able to shrug off blows and fight with surety. The entire reason I leveled it up was literally seeing people using Sacred Soil in the 8 man MSQ dungeons (Castrum and Prae) and thinking how it's such a cool idea to be able to place a protective area on the field for my allies. I was still playing WoW back then, and the closest thing to it was probably Shaman (the one Healer class I didn't really ever play) Totems (or PLD auras, but those weren't field effects). I didn't play Shaman much, but just leveling one, I always loved the idea of setting up a little basecamp with my totems out in the world or in dungeons. If I hadn't already had the others leveled by the point I picked up, and had I not 3 of my 8-10 person friends group already playing Shamans (Shamen? Shapersons?), I probably would have tone for it a lot more.

I think it's one of the reasons I still like SCH better than SGE, since between Soil and placing a Faerie, it feels a lot more...grounded...somehow. I can't really describe it, but it seems like it's actually anchored, at least some of the time, which I like, while SGE feels a lot more floaty. Shield casts on the move, Kerachole popping off as you run from place to place, and so on.

While you like debilitating enemies and giving them surprising strength, I prefer my resolve be proven by protecting and restoring allies. Louisouix holding the barrier against Bahamut or the Orbonne trio against Ultima. Every time an NPC casts a barrier in a cutscene, I want to do it instead. I still remember being irked when AST instead of WHM got Y'shtola's shield from the Red Banquet escape.

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These are fundamental distinctions in how we like to engage with content as Healers, but it's also why I think different Jobs SHOULD be made to engage in those different ways. I know none of you care for the idea, but that's why I support it - like I've said before, so everyone (well, most everyone) can find a playstyle they enjoy within the role.

...so "but what if we lose this one particular playstyle" just... doesn't really feel like an actual concern.

It would more if yours was the one on the chopping block. Suppose before ShB, everyone was proposing the ShB changes (the ones we got), and you were desperate to convince people not to make the changes, or to AT LEAST leave one of the Healers (probably SCH) alone, and someone had said to you "so 'but what if we lose this one particularly playstyle' just... doesn't really feel like an actual concern". How do you think you'd have felt? If the majority was saying they wanted the ShB dumbing down changes, and you were arguing to just leave one Healer - not even caring which - untouched by it.

I don't think many of you understand that, but it shouldn't be hard to.

Not to mention the game would be better today had such concerns been listened to. If SCH had persisted in its SB incarnation all the way up to now, that is.

At least, I think so.

[Icecylee]

It would more if yours was the one on the chopping block. Suppose before ShB, everyone was proposing the ShB changes (the ones we got), and you were desperate to convince people not to make the changes, or to AT LEAST leave one of the Healers (probably SCH) alone, and someone had said to you "so 'but what if we lose this one particularly playstyle' just... doesn't really feel like an actual concern". How do you think you'd have felt? If the majority was saying they wanted the ShB dumbing down changes, and you were arguing to just leave one Healer - not even caring which - untouched by it.

I don't think many of you understand that, but it shouldn't be hard to.

Not to mention the game would be better today had such concerns been listened to. If SCH had persisted in its SB incarnation all the way up to now, that is.

At least, I think so.

This response amuses me because you are acting as thought almost every single person in this conversation other than you *hasn't* already had their preferred job/playstyle on the chopping block before, and seen it taken out. Sometimes more than once! We've all been there.

But for the record I was saying that based on the actions they have taken ever since yoshida took over as director of 14 way back during the dark ages of... what was it, 1.10? whenever it was post launch, that "preserving what we had before" does not really been to be a major concern when they're deciding if they should change any given thing or not. *I* personally know it sucks seeing the thing you enjoy most getting tossed out sucks, but like, I can recognize that the devs and the players aren't always thinking about these sorts of things the same way, or giving them the same relevance. Especially with as spread thin as the design team is.

[GrimGale]

Adding 10 more levels to each expansion and grafting more and more stuff onto a job's kit is unsustainable. It's time for some lateral progression, i. e, offer the player some choices regarding their job kits with talent trees. That gives the devs the ability to maintain a core skill set and allow the players to pick and chose how much they want to add to that, either new skills or passives.

[ty_taurus]

Adding 10 more levels to each expansion and grafting more and more stuff onto a job's kit is unsustainable. It's time for some lateral progression, i. e, offer the player some choices regarding their job kits with talent trees. That gives the devs the ability to maintain a core skill set and allow the players to pick and chose how much they want to add to that, either new skills or passives.

The ability to change jobs is effectively FFXIV’s skill trees. In WoW, you’re locked into a class, so it makes sense that each class should offer a variety of options, but your ability to swap being the high damage black mage, the red mage with instant revives, or the summoner who has no cast times effectively is three branches to the “caster class.”

It’s not impossible to create skill trees, but ensuring each job feels not only balanced, but also has identity and feels fun to play is possible with our current format. In fact, it should actually be easier with linear job design to achieve this, but the size of the team has not changed, and it doesn’t seem like they have any additional time to work on the job list that has since doubled since ARR. if ARR is our indicator for jobs receiving 100% time and attention to design, then we are quite literally at the point where each job only gets 50% attention—half-effort job design.

[TheDustyOne]

So long as Square set some ground rules on skill trees (like never having us choose between damage and utility, damage will always win), there's potential for skill trees to allow us to choose between the different gameplay styles we liked in the past, as well as offering us new ones in the future without having to gut our current playstyles in the process. It could let us choose between DoT Scholar or Broil Scholar, Elemental Mage or Glare Mage, Nocturnal Astro or Diurnal Astro, etc.

It'll never happen, but one can dream, and I think Grim's right in that adding 10 more levels and continuously tacking on abilities is reaching its breaking point. People who enjoy current DRG are likely to get something very different next expansion because there's not much more they can do to that kit. Even PLD when this expansion launched only got upgrades to already existing abilities and had to consolidate Confiteor into a 4 button combo simply from lack of hotbar space, all it ended up doing was replacing a 1-2-3 in the rotation because there really wasn't much you could do to improve that kit without having to remove other actions. And all I expect for healers is yet another oGCD with a 2-3 minute cooldown and Glare IV.

I would agree though that the different jobs should be the different "skill trees", since it allows Square more design space in how they can vary up the jobs and playstyle without having to work within a shared base kit. As much as I can dream of skill trees for jobs, it'd lead to another SCH/SMN situation that made it annoying to balance, only now on EVERY job.