What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ty_taurus]

I see no reason we can't at least go back to the relative healing requirements of Stormblood by increasing enemy damage dealt (especially) outside of the existing bursts.

And I don't disagree. I'm not saying we can't increase outgoing damage at all, but increasing it to a level that is still forgiving and manageable to the average player will barely make a dent in the major problem with healer design, especially with how OGCD-focused healing has become. It'll be like pouring a single bucket of water into a kiddie pool. You've made the ground wet, but you still can't really play in it.

[Shurrikhan]

And I don't disagree. I'm not saying we can't increase outgoing damage at all, but increasing it to a level that is still forgiving and manageable to the average player will barely make a dent in the major problem with healer design, especially with how OGCD-focused healing has become. It'll be like pouring a single bucket of water into a kiddie pool. You've made the ground wet, but you still can't really play in it.

So, I imagine there are few different thresholds here.

If you're looking to make healing more interesting in the old min ilvl ARR sense of even casting Regen sometimes being risky because the tank could die in the next 1.5 GCDs' time if you don't Cure II... yeah, that can't happen.

But, that's like a 9/10 level of extremity... while we're currently at less than a 1/10 outside of Ultimate and a select few moments in very few Savage fights.

My thought is that we can get to where you're habitually saving an oGCD or two and occasionally pre-healing (starting your cast before a tankbuster hits, so you heal just after it damages)... somewhere around a 5/10... without parties being noticeably affected. And that would be more than single bucket of water. It wouldn't be any Olympic pool, but it would at least be a small standing one.

Again, we're probably in agreement regarding what all needs to happen, but I don't think we should shy so rigidly away from there being an occasional death if a healer blanks out for 3+ GCDs in a row at the wrong time. And so long as we're not babying the playerbase to that degree, we can actually manage some significantly increased interest from the healing itself.

It still won't be enough to make healing kits/gameplay as a whole interesting to most players at a whole without also giving more interesting ways to fill downtime, but leaving the healing requirements as low as they are now would also hurt the interest in/from those downtime tools, since they'd seem to come with zero risk or priority conflicts to reconcile.

I feel therefore we should look to increase it nearly as much as we can get away with, and then maybe even go a bit harder on the gas next expansion once we've pulled the average player's head out of the ass of modern normal content alone, and design our downtime tools ambitiously but with those damage intake thresholds in mind.*

*This doesn't mean shying from skill ceiling because of that added danger, but simply having that expectation that not every fight will nonetheless allow healer pairs to hit each and every one of their offensive marks, and with a typically larger difference in healer DPS between the damage of early prog and optimized run and a much larger difference in the effort required for the healer pair --or even the whole party-- to get there.