For those who main/semi-main a DPS (e.g. DNC, RDM) but like Healers...

[Shurrikhan]

I will die on the hill of my stance.

Support could, and should, be its own role.

May I ask why? Having a discrete Support role would seem to imply that others aren't allowed to tap with any significance into that capacity, denying any chance at a sort of spectrum across various jobs (regardless of role). That seems more likely a net loss to me compared to just broadening what is possible under the three existing roles.

[Shurrikhan]

I'd look at BLM for that kind of stuff, especially for 'decision making' part. The first thing that comes to mind is 'what does a healer have to solve the classic healer issue of 'I need to move'?' As a WHM right now, our mobility is to blow a Lily on a heal we potentially don't need. That's 'good' in that the lily heal has multiple uses, that being healing, and mobility. But it's also not so ideal, in that parse-obsessed types might use the heal for the mobility aspect, not have it at a time when the healing aspect is needed, and then their cohealer is left to pick up the slack.

I feel like it's worth pointing out that Lilies offer no advantage in healing above GCD heals. Their advantages are solely the everything else: instant-casting, offensive opportunity-cost refunding, and zero MP cost. So it'd be less that the WHM using Lilies for mobility is "chadding," but simply instead that they're wasting much of its MP efficiency (as, if that Lily's healing was at all relevant in those 20-60s, they'd have to make up for it with a GCD heal later).

Triplecast is a DPS increase but is also used for mobility

While this was absolutely true until pretty recently, BLM no longer has any casts longer than a GCD, so Triplecast being a DPS increase would require that it needs additional time (beyond what's granted by swapping elements) to weave in essential oGCDs.
Edit: Ignore; read the wrong column in the job guide. Using Triplecast for DPS still saves... 36% to 44% of a single GCD. Which is negligible compared to its allowing casts where you could otherwise get nothing, but still technically a dps increase (even if much less so than when it could spare up to 80% of a GCD back in HW).

<Thundercloud, Firestarter>

The question for me would just be whether that RNG-dependence would be better / more engaging / more fun than simply an additional low-cost-to-hold GCD-CD or (more frequently viably recastable) DoT.

Holding these things can often be a damage loss, but the gained damage by keeping uptime during a high-mobility requiring section of the fight makes it worth it.

And I think that's worth respecting, rather than worrying about --to use your term-- "parse-obsessed" types who'd tend to have worse parses for their fixation on maximizing potency over raid-buffs.

I'm reminded of some folks' insistence, for instance, that we can't have potency on gap-closers because then they might be used for damage instead of gap-closing, all while ignoring that a single GCD of uptime lost from having wasted one's needed gap-closer would be worth nearly a dozen times the potency that'd be gained for banking charges for raid buffs and therefore a damage-loss anyways.

I don't know what other 'more work = improve team performance' you can have, other than 'more complexity in DPS rotation, for a minimal gain in potency'.

At present, little to none. I think that's the problem though.

For instance, imagine if most casts and AoEs indicated how dangerous they actually were and what kinds of debuffs they might inflict, and then we just had a ton more of them. And add a ton more technically-avoidable damage aside from that, be that reflect auras or whatever else. While that damage would be avoidable, often an explicitly mild AoE or reflect aura wouldn't be worth dodging or stopping attacks against if you had a healer; you'd do so almost only if heals were behind or needed to ready for something big.

Similarly, consider all the OHKOs or Vulnerability Stacks that cause one to eventually end up being OHKOed; while those have a short span of added engagement when a single Vuln stack player comes to need a preemptive shield to survive the next hit, once you hit some further number, the only action left to a healer to support that player... is just to Raise them. I would prefer instead that Raise have greater relative cost (i.e., if MP were actually/frequently used for more than just Raise and attacks and maybe other GCDs weren't so pricey) but we healers had more means to prevent the death in the first place.

Being able to support intelligent greeding, prevent or reduce knockbacks, and to keep players from dying would, despite all being strictly within the domain of "healing," be ways that healers could have a greater impact on rDPS.

[Post]

Fire IV and Despair are definitely still 2.8 and 3.0 sec respectively above the 2.5sec GCD. I'm no BLM main but I think those are still most of its casts over a fight, too.

Not to mention Flare when that's used (almost never during bosses anymore).

[Shurrikhan]

Fire IV and Despair are definitely still 2.8 and 3.0 sec respectively above the 2.5sec GCD. I'm no BLM main but I think those are still most of its casts over a fight, too.

Not to mention Flare when that's used (almost never during bosses anymore).

Whoops, you're right. I had looked at the wrong column on the job guide. Not sure why they still write 2.5s for everything instead of just "GCD" or the like. It still grants... a whopping one-third of a GCD in saved uptime if burned purely for relative attack speed instead of mobility.

[ForsakenRoe]

Being able to support intelligent greeding, prevent or reduce knockbacks, and to keep players from dying would, despite all being strictly within the domain of "healing," be ways that healers could have a greater impact on rDPS.

On one hand , this sounds cool in theory. Giving a DPS a shield/CD that allows them to more effectively greed by standing in something on purpose, etc. But the problem then becomes 'what if a DPS starts to 'expect' the healer to give them the greed-enabling thing, and animosity builds because it is not used?' I had the idea of throwing bonus movespeed on the Arrow (as well as it's damage increasing effect) in my AST card rant, which would enable bonus greeding, but the key aspect to that card is that it's RNG, you can't guarantee you'll even get a single one in a fight, so the DPS has no way to get angry at a healer for 'not using the thing that lets the DPS greed better', because it's not in the healers hands. Additionally, reacting to 'oh I was given Arrow, so I can afford to greed an extra GCD here' puts more skillcap onto the DPS player too (hopefully).

As for saving DPS from their rapidly building vuln stacks, that is doable as Shield healers, because you can dedicated Adlo them if needed, but for a WHM or AST, you're digging into Intersection/Benison charges and they have a 30s CD (and it's possible you burned them on the tank). Maybe a Lily spending GCD that applies a shield, or a stance you could swap to that changes your regens into shielding, could come in handy for a situation like that (cough)

It still grants... a whopping one-third of a GCD in saved uptime if burned purely for relative attack speed instead of mobility.

I got told one of my redesigns would cause issues with 'hitting enrages' because of a difference between 'full opti' and 'playing the current rotation, in the new design' being about 160p per min, by my quick maths a third of a GCD for BLM would be like 185

I wonder why people go crazy for numbers in this game even if they sound small, like I vaguely recall the whole 'TBN is a DPS loss' thing in SB being mathed out as 'it can potentially be a 7p loss, if it pushes a Souleater off the timeline', maybe it wasnt exactly 7p but it was a very insignificant value and yet it caused a mentality that you should NEVER use TBN, hence why it felt like lots of DRK were so squishy

[Sebazy]

I will die on the hill of my stance.

Support could, and should, be its own role. Rift had this, and it to this day baffles me that no other mmo replicates it.

IMHO the issue with this is the 4/8 man party size, there isn't really room to have a dedicated support role with this group size at this point. You can't really ditch the tank, going to 1 DPS isn't really viable either. IMO the clear solution here is that healers should really be the support role. We have a ton of 'spare time' given how few GCDs we actually spend on healing at the end game and it's a good route to explore that doesn't involve pushing us further down the green DPS path.

So why hasn't this been done? IMO SE don't have the manpower within the job design team to come up with sufficient kits and they most certainly don't have the ability to tune a bunch of varied and innovative kits into some semblance of balance. I'm 100% confident that healers are where they are today because it's quick and easy to balance them in the only metric that actually matters, DPS.

[Shurrikhan]

On one hand , this sounds cool in theory. Giving a DPS a shield/CD that allows them to more effectively greed by standing in something on purpose, etc. But the problem then becomes 'what if a DPS starts to 'expect' the healer to give them the greed-enabling thing, and animosity builds because it is not used?'

This seems like a reason not to give those aforementioned added AoEs debuffs that would require damage-absorption to nullify, sure, but otherwise... I don't see an issue with that. I'd honestly prefer if coordination were more often rewarded, rather than having the ceiling further reduced just to remove any chance at errantly expecting that a PuG would do what one's speedrun static would.

As for saving DPS from their rapidly building vuln stacks, that is doable as Shield healers...

I literally mentioned this ("a preemptive shield to survive the next"). But, again that only goes so far: "once you hit some further number [of vuln stacks], [eventually] the only action left to a healer to support that player... is just to Raise them."

I got told one of my redesigns would cause issues with 'hitting enrages' because of a difference between 'full opti' and 'playing the current rotation, in the new design' being about 160p per min, by my quick maths a third of a GCD for BLM would be like 185

If you made it an unavoidable and pure loss (with no compensatory advantage), I'd agree with them that it should be compensated for, such as by an additional 5 potency per filler and 20 extra direct potency per DoT under the present lack of GCD-healing. But if it was avoidable or, especially, offered at least double the added sustain in turn, I'd have to say, screw 'em. I don't remember reading any such redesign, but I was among those who faulted the design for so trivial a reason, then that goes for me as well.

I wonder why people go crazy for numbers in this game even if they sound small, like I vaguely recall the whole 'TBN is a DPS loss' thing in SB being mathed out as 'it can potentially be a 7p loss, if it pushes a Souleater off the timeline', maybe it wasnt exactly 7p but it was a very insignificant value and yet it caused a mentality that you should NEVER use TBN, hence why it felt like lots of DRK were so squishy

And that blinders-on mentality gets a whole lot easier to enable when roles feel no incentive to be aware of each others' outputs or any of their exchangeable outputs feel inherently redundant.

But, that's exactly what we facilitated with the Shadowbringers changes: Rather than rebalancing the value of tank stances, we simply removed tanks' any and every meaningful ability to exchange offense for sustain. Rather than rebalancing the relative value of increasingly bloated healing oGCD counts, we simply nuked healers' maximum rDPS on the assumption that they'd get nearly full offensive uptime, thereby gutting their ability to exchange their sustain for others' offense. Rather than maintaining or improving upon the vigor of risk-reward for Casters and Melee (or giving Rangers more to optimize in their own way in turn), we reduced melee's hurdles to uptime and gave most Casters greater and greater relative mobility (less and less actual time spent casting).

And then we wonder why it'd occur to so few Shadowbringers-onward tanks that their <40 offensive potency lost to manage ~1300 potency's worth of sustain might very well be worth it?

[Renathras]

I will die on the hill of my stance.

Support could, and should, be its own role. Rift had this, and it to this day baffles me that no other mmo replicates it.

Agreed. It just makes so much sense and it's really strange that other MMOs haven't followed suit.

I think it was Ghostcrawler (or whoever was the lead WoW dev at the time) who once said if they ever added another role, it would be Support.

May I ask why? Having a discrete Support role would seem to imply that others aren't allowed to tap with any significance into that capacity, denying any chance at a sort of spectrum across various jobs (regardless of role). That seems more likely a net loss to me compared to just broadening what is possible under the three existing roles.

Can't speak for the other person, but a couple things to consider:

1) It's nice to break things into discrete roles so they can actually focus on those things. BRD - is it supporting its party or doing damage? It does lousy damage and meh support, so it's the worst of both worlds. What about AST? Well, it ends up being a Healer with a few throwaway buffs that are all "lets someone else do more damage". Having an actual Support role would allow Jobs to flesh out support capabilities, which means they could be included in encounter design with the expectation a general party would have them, just as there's a general expectation now that a general party will have a Ranged Physical or two Tanks.

2) Having distinct roles doesn't mean there's no overlap allowed. I mean, CLEARLY there isn't such a prohibition now. PLD and RDM have heals. GNB has a DPS-esque rotation and has had higher damage. AST and DNC have party buffs. WAR is an omni-role Job. Look back at games that did this, and there was some bleed over as well. For example, in Everquest, Cleric was an out and out pure healer (though also having utility against Undead), while Shaman was a healer/support hybrid. Pantheon is looking to do a similar thing as well. In practice, the way it works is that you look at it more like a square with a sort of "role archetype" in each of the corners, and every other class somewhere on a spectrum between them.

3) It also helps because you have less infighting over what roles do. Should DPS have more support? Less support? Should Healers be Supports or Healers? Who has the "rights" to the Healer role/Jobs? Are encounters balanced around having buffs or not? If you have a GNB/WAR/AST/SCH/SAM/NIN/DNC/BLM vs a DRK/PLD/WHM/SGE/DRG/RPR/BRD/RDM, which is the encounter designed around, the party with tons of buffs and boosted damage to high damage Jobs, or for the party that will be doing only 80% or so of that damage, making it trivial to the high damage party or impossible for the low damage party, depending on where the tuning is. Those arguments all (mostly) go away once you actually design around having a Support role and how that factors into a standard party.

4) It provides a clear cut option, that encounters and content is designed to factor in, for players who want and enjoy a more support, less outright healing, playstyle and focus. Everquest classes like Enchanter and Bard filled this niche, as have classes in games like Guild Wars' Mesmer. And given how popular such classes have historically been, it suggests there's a good chunk of players that WANT that role.

IMHO the issue with this is the 4/8 man party size, there isn't really room to have a dedicated support role with this group size at this point.

Howso?

1T/1H/1D/1S; 2T/2H/3D/1S or 2T/2H/2D/2S, whichever is decided on. WHY isn't "going to 1 DPS really viable"? Considering the Support Jobs would likely be pulled from the DPS roles (BRD, DNC, SMN, RDM, and possibly NIN would all make sense as founding members of the Support role; especially if we look back at HW era foundations of these Jobs, like NIN having Goad or BRD having "better" buffs or SMN having things like Titan as a utility Egi along with Riase and a vaguely passable cure with Physic back then).

The proposed solution that Healers should be the support role is not "clear". It's something that people who like a more support role are more in favor of, which is also a reason that having a Support role as an actual thing makes sense.

It's _A_ route, but not necessarily a good one or the best one. Especially when breaking out a dedicated Support role could achieve that so much better.

.

I do agree with your second paragraph, though (think I've said so before and we kind of agreed on the point)

[Shurrikhan]

Agreed. It just makes so much sense and it's really strange that other MMOs haven't followed suit.

I think it was Ghostcrawler (or whoever was the lead WoW dev at the time) who once said if they ever added another role, it would be Support.



Can't speak for the other person, but a couple things to consider:

1) It's nice to break things into discrete roles so they can actually focus on those things. BRD - is it supporting its party or doing damage? It does lousy damage and meh support, so it's the worst of both worlds.

But you could as easily have it get most of its value from rDPS from supporting actions and still leave it as a damage-dealer... because it ultimately would be -- just a damage-dealer the majority of whose rDPS comes from buffing.

The only difference from swapping its label is that upon declaring it a separate role, (A) we are basically barred from giving any other DPS anywhere close to its level of utility without likewise rebranding it and (B) we are obliged to always bring a support now that it's a separate role that's separately matched (which in turn exacerbates its issue in greatly varying value between light parties and full parties).

Given that it's still ultimately rDPS contribution and the backbone of the job to fill with will still almost certainly be direct damage-dealing (else it'd be even less able to solo content than a healer would be)... I don't see the point in rebranding whatever jobs you want to add further support (options) to; just... add the support functionality and that's all that's necessary.

Having distinct roles doesn't mean there's no overlap allowed. I mean, CLEARLY there isn't such a prohibition now. PLD and RDM have heals.

And do they have anywhere close to the healing output available to actual healers?

If a healer can get by on without MP and only a fifth of their kit, that's a separate issue. But even a single Medica II is, given the Maim and Mend trait, effectively 1300 AoE cure-potency; that's more than a Clemency to each ally. And they've more than enough oGCD potency to be unlikely to even need to spend the GCD.

Or, look at the difference in defensives available between a tank and a non-tank.

Now, imagine that level of distinction in support capacity between a "Support" and anyone else.

And what of a Support that has higher tanking capacity among Supports? Of a Support that has higher healing capacity among Supports? Do we then define the Supports as Support-Tank, Support-Heal, and Support-DPS?

Again, I just don't see the advantage over leaving support as a spectrum that any role may dip into to whatever degree seems fitting to the given job, especially since the only way to uniquely leverage it mechanically as its own role is to make its exact tools obligatory, which would then require homogeneity across the role. If left optional, we'd see just as much use from simply leaving DPS, Healers, and Tanks alike capable of support to whatever degree befits their job.

[Renathras]

But you could as easily have it get most of its value from rDPS from supporting actions and still leave it as a damage-dealer... because it ultimately would be -- just a damage-dealer

That's the point.

That's not what people who want Support roles really want.

And do they have anywhere close to the healing output available to actual healers?

0 Healer TOP clear.

Seems to suggest they do in every way that's relevant. All the extra healing by Healer Jobs is, apparently, overkill and not needed.

Again, I just don't see the advantage...

I suppose this is where we just have to agree to disagree, then.

Looking at how many people want to turn Healers into Supports, it's pretty clear people want a Support role and don't want a Healer role, as such. Might as well just add one.

.

I think the biggest thing is it would mean changing the combat model and encounter design to be far less rigid. For example, "puller" was a kind of support in Everquest, and even in Vanilla WoW. Something completely absent in modern FFXIV design (though it always has kind of been with FFXIV design other than NIN having that one ability to Shirk to a Tank...and maybe BRD? Quelling Strikes, was it?). I think the argument, at its core, is how different a game would have to be to support it, but also how that game would be fun to people.

I'd settle for the Support people to stop trying to kidnap the Healer role, personally.