What if Tanks were treated like Healers?

[ForsakenRoe]

Not really?

He just picked a healer for each tank and tried to flavor the tank as a direct analogue.

Less "What if tanks were designed like healers" and more "What if X healer had melee auto attacks".

ah you right, now that you put it that way I see it

[ty_taurus]

ah you right, now that you put it that way I see it

[Lyth]

Basically, it's just a question of, is this job design philosophy something tank players would support, tolerate, or reject?

Hm, fair enough.

Individual preferences aside, I think that tanks tend to just have a different outlook on their role than healers do. You can't really separate tanking from doing damage, and part of the aesthetic appeal comes from being the person in the front who is actually trading blows with the boss. There's also a historical precedent from ARR/Heavensward where good tanks actually overlapped with Ranged DPS in terms of damage output through the power of STR pentamelds and STR accessories. The end result is that tanks in this game are surprisingly invested in both their dps output as well as maximizing their uptime (to the point where melee will often be knocking elbows with them over tiny wedges of safe space around the boss). I haven't seen a 'tanks are only there to absorb damage' argument since maybe early Stormblood. There is no tanking equivalent for 'Sylphie'.

Healing has a greater diversity of views around the role's function, which naturally leads to a split in the community. There are a subset of players involved in raid content who enjoy maximizing their damage output. It can be interesting studying timings around mitigation in a fight to try and maximize healer uptime. You're also being compared to a subset of players who aren't necessarily trying to optimize their damage so much as they want to shepherd the party alive to see enrage at baseline. It's relatively straightforward to make yourself look good with a bit of effort, even without begging your co-healer to solo heal the instance for a gold star. Big fish, small pond.

At the same time, Healing is the closest thing that this game offers to 'support' gameplay, which is its unique strength. Even if you had a healer that focused on enhancing their teammates indirectly (think of abilities like Expedient that can be translated into uptime, or even resource donation actions), I'm sure that there would be some interest for that sort of 'buffer' gameplay. I don't think that it's a simple binary of 'Healers who want to push their damage' vs. 'Healers who want to relax and take it slow.' But the lack of design direction isn't necessarily a bad thing on its own. The problem is the fact that the game designers only know how to make WHM and SCH clones, when there are so many other ways of designing a healer (just look at how other games do it). Where is the Melee-range support with proximity buffs? Where is the physical-ranged Chemist who lobs potions to mix and match healing ground effects? Could you use Aura to speed up a target's rate of resource generation? Could you use Float to move while you cast? Could you use Warp to transfer the raid group to a different part of the arena? The rotations are part of the problem, sure, but there's so much unexplored design space within the role outside of pure healer/shield healer.

But to get back to your question, I think it's unlikely, because tanks as a whole are a lot more competitive about their personal dps output than healers are (and some DPS, for that matter). Tanks rejected nerfs to their gear progression in Stormblood (time to bring out the i270 STR accessories). Tanks rejected nerfs to their damage relative to other roles in Shadowbringers (can you imagine tanks ever meekly accepting rebalances to allow healers to surpass them in damage output? Not a chance.) And I'm fairly certain that tanks would outright revolt against having healer game design changes being foisted on their role. You can't begin to draw a comparison.

[Reimmi]

Much like the healer problem, i'd be okay with this if tanks had to manage mitigation and threat much more than they do right now. The healer situation would be fine if there was actually enough damage in a fight where you *can't* stand there and press 1 button for 90% of a fight, and gcd heals weren't something you can feasibly optimize out of a fight, forcing mana to be a concern for healers etc

[vetch]

I don't say this to demean or to brag, I say it as a matter of objective fact: to make content 'fun' for players of a higher skill caliber, it would have to be so hard as to exclude players of a lower skill caliber. You wouldn't want to be gated out of content because it's too hard for you to keep up, would you?

Yes I would, and in fact this has been a primary premise of video games for 40 years; you have to learn the game to proceed through the game. This is a good thing, because being challenged at or near your skill level is necessary for intellectual stimulation.

You cannot design an interactive battle so easy that there's no one who can't complete it. But trying to tune the duties so they can be cleared by the worst players, then requiring all players to play them over and over and over for levels, gear, & tomes breeds resentment in everyone who's not being engaged. To capture both groups of players, both types of content are required.

Square almost got it right with Criterion dungeons, but they missed the important fact that the better players don't want to do harder dungeons in addition to their crappy boring expert roulette grinds, they want to do harder dungeons in place of them, for actual progression rewards.

The only way to keep 'casual content' 'casual accessible' is to have the healing requirements be less threatening which... is exactly the situation we're in now. And the justification of 'well if you want to have fun, there's Savage/Ultimate for you' has been tried, tested and proven to be a stupid stance to have. 'Increase HPS required' does not fix the issue of 'EX roulette is not fun for the veterans who know how to play healer well'

Increasing damage buttons doesn't either, because I don't switch to healer to press different damage buttons. I'm resigned to the fact that there will be downtime but I'm completely indifferent to whether there are 2 or 12 damage spells to hit during it. If I'm in the mood to play a healer, I want to triage. I want to make decisions and alter my actions moment to moment based on variances in the gamestate. Black Mages get to do it. Why are they the only ones?

Also, I think I would resent having to do as much rotation work as an easy DPS like SMN only to still do 60% of the damage of one.

[Derio]

Tanks already got that after HW to SB.

SMN got that this expansion in EW.

AST/DRG are next on the chopping block.

[Renathras]

To capture both groups of players, both types of content are required.

Square almost got it right with Criterion dungeons, but they missed the important fact that the better players don't want to do harder dungeons in addition to their crappy boring expert roulette grinds, they want to do harder dungeons in place of them, for actual progression rewards.

Increasing damage buttons doesn't either, because I don't switch to healer to press different damage buttons. I'm resigned to the fact that there will be downtime but I'm completely indifferent to whether there are 2 or 12 damage spells to hit during it. If I'm in the mood to play a healer, I want to triage. I want to make decisions and alter my actions moment to moment based on variances in the gamestate.

...

Also, I think I would resent having to do as much rotation work as an easy DPS like SMN only to still do 60% of the damage of one.

Think I agree with basically all these parts.

People playing Healers don't do so because they want to be a third-rate DPS with a DPS rotation and none of the damage. If people want a DPS rotation, they want DPS damage, otherwise they're doing far more work for far less benefit, and when people play Healers, it's because they DON'T want to generally do damage, and 2 or 12 damage buttons doesn't really make much difference anyway other than annoyance factor.

I also agree that they missed the mark with Criterion, which is sad because it's close to the mark in a lot of ways. They honestly should have just made several versions of it (as they did), but that do slightly different things. For example, there could be a "hallway" roulette (where it randomly picks the path for that run, just like some parts are random like which door Nanamo goes to and some stuff for the middle boss) just for that purpose, while having harder difficulties for people that want more of a challenge which give more tomes relative to the rough estimated completion times or something. This way, everyone wins.

Instead they made harder modes with an exclusive mount and...nothing...else. They went the wrong way with it, going for exclusive one-time reward instead of repeatable roulette style content of a harder stripe.

I dunno, just feels like it was a "close but no cigar" thing.

[Eorzean_username]

People playing Healers don't do so because they want to be a third-rate DPS with a DPS rotation and none of the damage. If people want a DPS rotation, they want DPS damage, otherwise they're doing far more work for far less benefit, and when people play Healers, it's because they DON'T want to generally do damage, and 2 or 12 damage buttons doesn't really make much difference anyway other than annoyance factor.

It's probably more complicated than this, if you look at games like WOW or SWTOR or (etc), where Healers have "a lot" to potentially do during Healing down-time, and many of them take some amount of pride in doing so — despite often contributing even less DPS, proportionally, than XIV Healers do.

As has been said elsewhere, players sometimes "like" things "just because they like things" — and trying to tie it too closely to an excessively-scientific logic, reasoning, or egalitarianism can sometimes end up of veering way off course.

eg: Does Holy Paladin in WOW receive a significant numerical payoff from mixing it up in Melee range with their DPS tools? As of right now, no... not really.

But it's still there, and they still do it, because it feels cooler than standing back and lobbing purely-ranged healing.

Same for the pretzel-charts of shapeshifting that a Resto Druid might engage in to try to really maximise their Mythic+ contribution — it's usually not coming anywhere close to a "real DPS", but there's no reason not to once all the correct HOTs are rolling, and so they have fun(?) doing it anyway.

(And so on)

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I think that people are too quick to characterise what "Healers", collectively, want — in all directions — possibly because Healing / Support roles seem to attract a very diverse group of mindsets compared to, say, Pure DPS roles (who are usually content to just focus on their own business and maximise damage).

This may, in fact, contribute to the what-seems-to-be intense confusion that the XIV design team is constantly contorting themselves into when trying to further or adjust Healer design — They want to make "everyone" happy, while also ensuring that "everyone" is welcome in "every" piece of content... something overambitious in the best of cases, but especially-difficult when dealing with how broad the range of mindsets are in Healer/Support-attracted players.

[dspguy]

If they wanted to make tank like healer, they'd remove combos entirely. Keep a ranged attack, an AOE and a single target attack. If you do certain things like... keep hate and stay alive, every 60 seconds you get to use Primal Rend, Confetor, etc.

Or, make healer more engaging... give them more to do. Tanks essentially have a DPS-lite combo to maintain. Give healers something similar.

[Katish]

There is no tanking equivalent for 'Sylphie'.

I'd argue there is one or something close enough, but it works in reverse, tanks who do not press their mitigation buttons.
This is apparent even more so on wall-to-wall pulls if doing dungeons and the tank isn't pressing their mitigation or during raids where the tank is all like yeah I'mma take this tank buster without mitigation, it requires healer concentration which eats what could have been the healer personal damage numbers.

I see the sylphie argument not limited to just healers ( healers that only heal) but rather it's not performing your job correctly. Healers are supposed to healer, no duh, but they have to contribute to damage as well. Where a tank has to worry about damage, but also has to contribute to mitigation and mitigating their own tank busters. Which leads to a tank 'Sylphie' or at least fits to some other term but the Sylphie ideology is there.