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

[Shurrikhan]

I didn't say Tanks were Healers. That was my point. You were arguing we can't add a Support role, as it means other roles wouldn't be allowed any support buttons. My counter was that we already see Tanks and DPS having healing abilities, Tanks and Healers having DPS abilities, and even DPS having and Healers having some Tank abilities/defensive CDs (Aquaveil, Shade Shift, Third Eye, etc).

I argued solely that...

1. Having a discrete Support role would mean that no one else could have more support features relative to Support than, say, non-Healers have healing actions relative to Healers or non-Tanks have relative to Tanks. Which is literally less than a fifth. The maximum amount, 100%... vs. <20%. That's a huge step.
   
   Again: Why polarize what's permitted to solely the 0-20% of support options/actions/gameplay on non-Supports vs. the 90-100% on Supports? What is the benefit of that huge gap, especially given that you can just have a DPS, a co-Healer, or a co-Tank that has a majority of its value come from supportive buffs?
   
   
2. To classify that role separately as Support means that you then need to adjust matchmaking for the purposes of obligating Support, which means that (A) those tools then feel like a given rather than a bonus and (B) you will necessarily encounter whatever issues in overall supportive power may exist between a Support in a 4-man group vs. a Support in an 8-man group (i.e., literally doubling the value of its AoE buffs unless they are fundamentally redesigned).
   
   I believe those issues should be dealt with anyways, but assuming equal difficulty, the value of a role-flexible job also increases as party size decreases by nature of that flexibility when it matters most, while the value of something that is only a "Support" by nature of its dependence on others to achieve its value... rests on a far finer edge.

Which means I can't be advocating it since I'm saying that it isn't necessary and I haven't actually advocated for the specifics of the Support role nor the other roles once Support is split off. You're doing that all on your own.

Then you are including a distinct matchmaking category... that would nonetheless lie somewhere between "indistinguishable from DPS [or Healer or Tank]" and "is far less varied from other Roles than the existing Roles are to each other".

Again: Why? Why bother?

....which is why I put the "?" there, since I couldn't remember.

And yet you were happy to include it among a list of alleged precedents for / hints at a possible "Puller" role in XIV despite having no memory of what that skill actually did?

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EDIT:

Don't get me wrong; I'd love to see more hybridization of roles. Given the possibility and the ability to make synergetic supportive changes, I would gladly replace the whole 1:2:1 ratios of matchmaking among set Roles with simply whether a party has enough total Enmity control, sustain, burst and overall damage, etc. (within a sufficient ratio overall and per kit such that they aren't constantly wasting far more of one output to make muster towards another more immediately crucial one) and just have actual Jobs instead of Role+Gimmicks. You don't need to sell me on any of that.

I just don't think whether one's rDPS comes from damage done yourself or damage done doing damage via someone else is enough to make a DPS a different role. It's still functionally just Damage-Dealing. I don't see whether one's mob control and eHP-increases and damage-nullification comes from directing actions towards yourself and buffing self vs. directing them towards another synergetic ally and buffing them as reason enough to call the given job doing that a "Tank" or some a different role. It's still functionally just Tanking. Etc., etc.

[ForsakenRoe]

idk if it's the energy drink I'm drinking or if I just need to go sleep, but none of the past few posts have made any sense to me whatsoever

wtf does 'DPS having and Healers having some Tank abilities/defensive CDs (Aquaveil, Shade Shift, Third Eye, etc)' mean, are we saying we should delete Aquaveil now, because it breaks the trinity too much? I guess mitigating damage, in any form, on any target, is now the purview of the tank role, and only the tank role, god forbid SE prunes the concept of 'externals'

all I'm getting from this past page or so is that healers should heal, healers are not supports, tanks are not supports, supports should have some healing capability, oops we made the supports have enough healing that they can now replace healers completely, it goes round and round and it never ends. IDK about anything else but I can 100% guarantee, even in this sludgy-brain state I'm in: If Vermedica gets added to the game, healer role dies. It's gg, done. The sacrifice of a few GCDs here and there to AOE heal, in comparison to the 'roughly 4k extra DPS' you'd get by being an actual DPS instead of a healer, it's not even close. If that skill ever came out, the only thing keeping the healer role 'alive' would be the game hard-enforcing it, ie roulettes, or mechanics that target specifically healers. But even then, the 'it targets both healers' can sometimes be worked around, just look at Hyd's water stacks. One Healer, One Tank parties mean that one goes on healer and one goes on tank

edit: i am so sorry, evidently the brainsludge is stronger than i first thought. at 95%, the difference between a healer and a RDM is actually more like 5k, so yeh pls don't add Vermedica SE, we don't need that can of worms. actually it's less a can and more a 200 litre barrel of worms

[ty_taurus]

idk if it's the energy drink I'm drinking or if I just need to go sleep, but none of the past few posts have made any sense to me whatsoever

I'll clarify my point. Adding "Support" as a 4th role is an arbitrary change that resolves nothing. If the goal with adding the "Support" role is to simply move Dancer, Bard, Red Mage, and maybe Summoner into that category, then we've changed nothing about the game except made the DF more annoying to matchmake with. If the goal is for this 4th "Support" role to feature Astrologian and Sage being reworked into having real gameplay while still being able to heal, then you'll create a balance nightmare where they'll either invalidate the Healer role by virtue of having enough healing and more damage, or be invalidated by the Healer role for not having enough healing to replace the Healer and not enough damage to replace the DPS. If the goal is to simply rebrand "Healer" as "Support," then it's just a petty attempt to 'protect the sanctity of REAL healers' or some other nonsense because the idea that anything labeled as a "Healer" could possibly heal and be fun at the same time is not only blasphemy, but would also deceive new players into thinking they were getting into something really dull and lifeless.

[Renathras]

It might be the energy drink, Roe.

The point I've been making is we already have a lot of bleed through between the different roles. Having a fourth Role aspected to Support wouldn't change that. Agreed on Vermedica, though. Even with a prohibitive MP cost, it would just be insane. Maybe in SB or HW it would have worked, but not in EW's encounter design/damage profiles.

Though I have to ask:

"all I'm getting from this past page or so is that healers should heal,"

Where on earth did you get that from? Semi?

EDIT:

Well, since you apparently think you know me better than I do, I'll let you respond to the rest of your post for me.

Simple question:

If they added a Support role to the game, would you refuse to play it?

...you might dither and say all sorts of things, but somewhere in your response is probably going to be the concept, if not the words, of you'd try it out, and if you liked it, you would play it.
So saying you don't want to play Support is incorrect.

Again, what you advocate for Healers IS for something that is typically called Support in games that have Support as a role.

I really don't get this resistance by people to say they'd like to play a Support role. I mean, I have a theory, but it's just that. I play Healers. I main Healers. I like Healers. I like filling up people's health bars in the field or in combat, I like being able to Raise people when they get demolished by a SS Rank's massive one hit kill AOE attack. That's what I like.

I ALSO like playing Tanks.

I ALSO like playing DPS if they have relatively simple and unobtrusive, not-obnoxious (to me) rotations.

One can like other things. It doesn't suddenly delegitimize one's views or opinions or anything. It's not like you're admitting to being a heretic or something to say it.

Hell, one reason I'd like Support as a role IS BECAUSE I WOULD PLAY IT TOO. I LOVED the Synergist Job in FFXIV. I liked Everquest Bards. I don't understand why this is something no one will say. My theory is that some of you may think if you say it, I'll pounce on it or insist it means you have no legitimacy to argue over Healer design. But I freely admit I play all roles, I just happen to like Healer the most and it's the one I'm on 95% of the time because it's what my mind is more focused on, what I like best, and what I'm more geared towards, and because I don't really like a lot of the DPS Jobs and don't typically like tanking for people I don't know, so it is my home and main role.

It's okay to admit you like Support classes. It's not going to land you in jail or something.

[Shurrikhan]

idk if it's the energy drink I'm drinking or if I just need to go sleep, but none of the past few posts have made any sense to me whatsoever

wtf does 'DPS having and Healers having some Tank abilities/defensive CDs (Aquaveil, Shade Shift, Third Eye, etc)' mean,

The flow of argument was as such:

I said that for a job to be worth reclassifying as a Support, one would generally expect it to have a hell of a lot more support actions available to it than the average non-Support; in effect, this would limit any job that's not explicitly a "Support" to as small a number of support actions as there are healing actions on non-Healers or tanking actions on non-tanks, etc.

Ren then quipped that if you can no-heal Ultimates, then everything is effectively a Healer anyways (despite my emphasis having been already on gameplay, not output relative to bottlenecks that he already agrees are problematic). ???


I'm not against having role-crossover. I don't want to see Aquaveil or Clemency or the like removed.

My claim was that by having a discrete Support role, you essentially take what could have been a spectrum of support capacity (which is nonetheless free to go as deep as we like) and polarize it instead into solely "Support (has some 12-24 support skills)," and "has 0-3 support skills" -- i.e., into solely their extremes.

Like healing and tanking before in the changes from 1.x to ARR, whereby Roles increasingly replaced Features, it'd rip the gameplay of support out of being general availability (available regardless of 'Role' to whatever degree fits the job's theme)... to a Role-restricted capacity.

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As for something more in line with Taurus's earlier point... At the end of the day any "Support" still has a particular output/function that the majority of their actions are designed to produce/fill, be that tanking, healing, or solely damage-dealing; all that changed is that you're now dependent on groupmates exploiting your sources of potential throughput in order to make them actually happen. (Otherwise, what you're describing is simply Role-less or Flex, not that something is especially supportive.)

Siphoning Dancer's personal damage capacity further towards its indirect damage production wouldn't make it not a DPS; it's still just a DPS... with a small featural bonus of 200-400 finnicky AoE healing per minute.

Which then brings us to the issue of simply trying to balance indirect output. AST currently gets about a quarter of its offensive value through indirect means. Let's say we change it to a "Support" that gets two-thirds of its offensive value through indirect means. Indirect contribution is naturally going to be more complexly varied than direct means, and trying to balance it then for a remotely typical player will often require its being overtuned for perfect play.

While I don't think that makes it outright impossible to tune, it does make it that much harder. And the actual impact of that change, anyways, is likely going to be mostly pretense; you'll have just taken a further portion of AST rDPS so that it's stuck instead to other's bars for a while before being given back to AST later, with the total simply becoming more dependent on others' playing at least as well as that AST and likely causing the AST to feel lower-tuned for the average player or all the more obligatory at the highest end of play.

[ty_taurus]

Simple question:

If they added a Support role to the game, would you refuse to play it?

...you might dither and say all sorts of things, but somewhere in your response is probably going to be the concept, if not the words, of you'd try it out, and if you liked it, you would play it.
So saying you don't want to play Support is incorrect.

Again, what you advocate for Healers IS for something that is typically called Support in games that have Support as a role.

To be honest, I don't really think it actually matters what I say. You seem to have decided what my response will be already. Either I say I won't play it and you'll assume I'm lying to one-up you, or I say I would and you'll take that as a personal victory. In reality, the truth is more complex.

First of all, I'm not looking to play a role on principle. What I care about is what the job is and how it plays. I have nothing against a support role. I have everything against someone who insists that I must prefer a support role because my idea of fun gameplay isn't an icepick lobotomy, and there's no way a "real" healer could be anything but.

I said it before, and I'll repeat in hopes that it sticks this time. What I want is a job, preferably Sage because I like Sage's style and aesthetic, that meets the following criteria:

- Offers enough healing throughput to function as a party healer in all forms of content regardless of difficulty.
- Spends no more than 30% of total action usage on Dosis III or any other hotbar action in any type of content, including while soloing.
- Roughly 80% of total action usage should be spent on no less than 10-12 hotbar actions.

The bolded values are based on data taken from Gunbeaker and Black Mage in current savage records and are soft reference points. Gunbreaker is a tank that spends about 30% of its GCDs on its 1-2-3 combo, and as a caster, Black Mage does have a playstyle that revolves around a lot of Fire IV spam and also casts Fire IV as nearly 30% of their actions. Both jobs also spend about 80% of their casts on around 10-12 actions between them, hence why I am using these numbers as a basis. Obviously, the actual design of the job matters a lot, but those are the credentials I want to see before I start actually looking at the design.

Give me that, and I don't really care what role you want to call that job, whether that be "Healer," "Support," "Flight Attendant," "Cinnamon Roll," "Vacuum Cleaner," or "2003 Ford Thunderbird."

[ForsakenRoe]

The point I've been making is we already have a lot of bleed through between the different roles. Having a fourth Role aspected to Support wouldn't change that.

I feel like it wouldn't change... anything? To the point where making a seperate Support role is just not gonna be anything, gameplay wise. If all it does is stuff that we have already thanks to role-bleed like tanks having selfhealing, it's gonna just be either a healer in disguise, or a RDPS where even more of it's damage comes from raidbuffs (and therefore sucks ass to solo as), I don't see how it changes anything about the game. Also, in the case of the second, it's gonna be even worse to balance around, since it's so dependent on those burst windows for it's damage contribution. Rather than looking at why we can't have Support (we could), the question I ask is 'what does a Support role do for the game', and the answer seems to be 'actually, not much tbh'

I guess it ties back into the WeskAlber poll, kinda. If there were a support role, I would maybe try it. And maybe I would enjoy it enough to main it instead of healers. But that doesn't necessarily mean I want to play support, it might just be that I despise the gameplay of healers so much as they are, that Support is 'the lesser of two evils'. I imagine at least a few people answered that poll in the same way: I'm a healer main, if I answered that poll, I'd answer the healer section and say WHM is 'my favorite'. But that doesn't mean I am completely satisfied with WHM as it is, it's just the one I dislike the least. In that vein, if I HAD to answer one job per role, I'd say PLD, RDM, DNC and probably NIN. That doesn't mean I like any of them, it just means I don't like the alternatives for that role, more

The question is, what would a Support role do, that justifies it being a slot on the Duty Finder matching formula, which does not cannibalize the current jobs (ie, it can have raidbuffs, but if the cost is that we have to remove some buffs from eg DRG or MNK, then that's unlikely to go down well)? I can't imagine anyone would be happy about losing skills they have, so that leaves Support kinda where it already exists: It's either referring to a DPS that contributes more to RDPS via buffs than other 'pure DPS', or it's another name for the healer role since we don't actually heal all that much, relatively speaking. With the definition varying from person to person. Also, we use the term 'support' in raiding to refer to tanks and healers, as a grouping, for callouts. For example, if a mechanic marks either all 4 DPS to go in, or all 4 non-DPS (ie, rubicante EX's cross flame exaflare mumbojumbo), saying 'non-DPS' is jank, so we say 'supports in', so... that would get confusing too, possibly

- Offers enough healing throughput to function as a party healer in all forms of content regardless of difficulty.
- Spends no more than 30% of total action usage on Dosis III or any other hotbar action in any type of content, including while soloing.
- Roughly 80% of total action usage should be spent on no less than 10-12 hotbar actions.

[ty_taurus]

You know, I'm still quite curious if the three components I described about the kind of job I want to play still qualifies as a Healer or if that would be considered a different role.

[Shurrikhan]

You know, I'm still quite curious if the three components I described about the kind of job I want to play still qualifies as a Healer or if that would be considered a different role.

If it's still the heal-y-est a job can go (especially, in terms of healing tools/agency/skill expression) insofar as would be set to a separate category in a matchmaking system... sounds like it'd still be a "Healer" to me, especially if you want any Tank or DPS to have any significant access to supportive tools and therefore "Support" would be an ambiguous/conflicting role title.

[ForsakenRoe]

You know, I'm still quite curious if the three components I described about the kind of job I want to play still qualifies as a Healer or if that would be considered a different role.

As we previously worked out, as long as the majority of it's oGCDs are healing-based, then yes it counts as a healer I'd say. Though WHM is a special case because the devs want it to be the 'GCD based healer' for identity reasons or something

Look at...most media, really. But today, specifically Overwatch. The most 'healy healer' is Mercy, and you can still go Valkyrie mode on the enemy with the ult and pistol if you choose. They're all called supports now, but back in ye olden times apparently the supports were broken up into subroles, one of which was healer. Which contained... Every support except Symmetra. So I guess in order to make sure that 'I'll go support' translated to 'I'll be the healer' 100% of the time, they reworked Sym, and just axed the subroles idea, leaving the remaining healing heroes as 'Support'

Can look at WOW too, most healers have the potential to spend 'quite a lot of their GCDs' on doing damage, and it's key to on some. Not just Disc, even, I mean to beat M+ timers and such. HPal gets Holy Power from melee strikes (it can get some from healing beacon target with direct healing with a talent, but that defeats the purpose of the beacon), Monk applies it's smart-HOT (autobounces to nearby ally if the current ally is topped) AND extends the duration of it's HOTs (it has more than one) by using the 3 on it's 123. RShaman now has a talent that finally lets it do good AOE damage, by making their Healing Rain (GCD Asylum, 10s CD) deal DOT via 'Acid Rain' talent, and it has totems, Flame Shock, LavaBurst resets, Chain Lightning, etc. Druid has FIVE DOTs it can apply, as of DF, Rake and Rip in Catform, Moon/Sunfire in Boomkin/normal form, and a talent called Adaptive Swarm which also helps heal (it bounces between enemy and ally). And then there's Priest. IDK Priest stuff so much nowadays, but I know it's got Holy Fire and ShadowWord Pain as DOTs, SW: Death as 'deals damage to self too, unless in execute range', Power Word Chastise as a stun/damage CD, that reduces CD when you use Smite. They're all considered 'healers' still though. None of them are referred to as 'Supports', in fact, the one spec that IS, was only just added, and is in fact a 'RDPS heavy DPS spec', in Augmentation Evoker.

Closest thing to a 'heal only' healer now, by the metric of 'how many different damage GCDs does the class have' is PrEvoker, who have Disintegrate, Living Flame, Flame Breath. Deep Breath is a 2min CD so that kinda doesn't count

tl:dr yes, I would say that a design that has 80% of your gameplay using 10-12 of your hotbar buttons, and not having overbearing amounts of Dosis equivalent spam, would count as a healer still. Because when the proverbial hits the fan and the party needs healing, it'd still be your class that drops everything to keep them alive.

9 different skills on here, this is what you'd be using per minute 'optimally', add in POM, Assize, Asylum to keep up with healing, Benison and Aquaveil at various times, that's like 13-14 hotbar slots. Does this meet the specified criteria, I wonder? I know that Glare slice of the pie is getting awful close to 30% but it's less than 30% I swear, it's like... 28 iirc