Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Volgia]

Or better yet, use add phases or specific key mechanics as the real enrage timer with the rest of the fight being more focused on surviving and setting up the burst phase rather than min maxing all the DPS things all the time.

Removing enrage entirely opens up a whole different can of worms unfortunately.

God I want this so bad. Raids where your role shines instead of all of us focusing on whacking the boss, but I feel like that's been left for Ultimates (TEA comes to mind with managing your DPS with the dolls). Otherwise every encounter is really starting to feel samey, just dance around the boss and find the safe spot and hope you can keep your uptime so you don't die to enrage.

[ForsakenRoe]

God I want this so bad. Raids where your role shines instead of all of us focusing on whacking the boss, but I feel like that's been left for Ultimates (TEA comes to mind with managing your DPS with the dolls). Otherwise every encounter is really starting to feel samey, just dance around the boss and find the safe spot and hope you can keep your uptime so you don't die to enrage.

This is why I like the Unreals: they give us visions of times long past. Thordan has disengage moments for the melee, tanks repositioning the boss based on the eye's movement, big ol' add phase with multiple mechanics to deal with, extended heal checks via the comet preys/dragoon dives/the whole final sequence. It shows us how raids USED to be, and how many interesting design choices we've lost over the years in favor of the current design

[Turtledeluxe]

First, we can blame SE's insistence on having each tier give +30 ilvls over the previous for this. If it were up to me, I'd make crafted equal to the previous BIS, so that instead of us having 630 Abyssos gear and immediately throwing it all in the Glam Dresser in favor of the new 640 gear, the new gear would ALSO be 630, so you could use it to fill holes in the BIS (eg, a tank has Crit SS ring, and Det Tenacity ring, new crafted comes out and the ring is Crit Det, you swap out both rings for the new one). This would take our ILVL bloat per expansion down from 90, down to 60. Crafted gear would lose some value but lets be real it has very little value anyway after the first day, so with the 1 week timeframe to get prepped for the next savage tier, the value already craters by the end of said week. Even then though, pentameld potential means that Crafted would still be 'better' in some ways than the previous tier's BIS

As for the damage talk, we don't need to have more damage output, just more interesting ways to deal that damage.

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Gear bloat is a problem but it's tricky to address imo bc let's be honest, people expect a certain ilvl increase at this point and a certain power creep as new content releases (the game also has a pretty sigficant reward issue in this regard for some people). I think that's fair. But I would also point out your level and base skill potency are in the formula for DPS. It's not simply gear stats and that is it. Maybe gear stats need to be looked at, maybe the ilvls need to be lower (I'm skeptical), there are many potential solutions to the Alliance Raid issue that go even beyond what kind of gear you can buy at the time that wouldn't be popular because they are in the roulette.

But in terms of this discussion and dps, I'm just basing what I'm saying on posts here (600 pages worth, I can't read them all but what I've seen) and even the thread up near this one (make healer a DPS with heals). I know some just want a solid rotation and I agree, but I also think there's a large portion of players who associate fun with DPS. And I think developers are designing jobs around that philosophy, whether it means making DPS more accessible (lowering skill ceiling to DPS), making DpS compulsory, outright buffing potency to shift the latest raid/Ultimate balancing.

Imo the 2 minute meta / job Design / potency buffs / skill timers etc over the last two expansions are all exposing this philosophy too..that dps is nearly a free for all with the least amount of strategy and skill required than ever for most classes, and has even robbed players of job expression and robbed teams of moments of synergy. Healer itself is a victim of this trend (not in terms of buffs, yet, but certainly design).

[Connor]

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But in terms of this discussion and dps, I'm just basing what I'm saying on posts here (600 pages worth, I can't read them all but what I've seen) and even the thread up near this one (make healer a DPS with heals). I know some just want a solid rotation and I agree, but I also think there's a large portion of players who associate fun with DPS. And I think developers are designing jobs around that philosophy, whether it means making DPS more accessible (lowering skill ceiling to DPS), making DpS compulsory, outright buffing potency to shift the latest raid/Ultimate balancing.

I do agree that the devs design everything around ‘dps accessibility and output’, which ultimately is how we’ve ended up with a load of overpowered oGCDs and only the absolute minimum dps abilities possible. Can’t have bad dps if it’s just 1 button. I mean, you can, but SE doesn’t seem to think so lol.

For players I don’t think it’s much as they exclusively find dps fun, it’s that they’ve convinced themselves that dps’ing is the only way they’re going to experience ‘fun’ in ffxiv. Buffing/debuff can never be fun, healing/tanking as roles can never be fun, nothing except more dps complexity can amount to ‘fun’.
Which, is a pretty natural conclusion to come to given how combat design has went over time. Anything that’s not purely offensive is heavily limited, ancillary to the intended ‘goal’ (you don’t need healers to complete content but you do need dps), buffing/debuff is non-existent thanks to 120s meta and the Stormblood synergy fiasco, and healing/tanking can’t have their own unique roles to fill because that’ll get in the way of their precious deeps. The devs have practically made it so we’re basically not ever allowed to have fun - you enjoy your dps’ing or you find a different game.

[ForsakenRoe]

Imo the 2 minute meta / job Design / potency buffs / skill timers etc over the last two expansions are all exposing this philosophy too..that dps is nearly a free for all with the least amount of strategy and skill required than ever for most classes, and has even robbed players of job expression and robbed teams of moments of synergy. Healer itself is a victim of this trend (not in terms of buffs, yet, but certainly design).

Id actually disagree with that, as healers HAVE succumbed to the 2min meta. WHM wants to prep Misery, even by purposely overhealing if need be, to put one inside raidbuffs per 2min. SCH always hits Chain at 2min, unless the whole party is agreeing to delay for whatever reason (cough Superchain 2A), SGE pools Phlegmas for 2min (ok that one's not so bad), but AST makes up for it in spades. What used to be 'mess with cards once per 30s, drawing one, burning one with RR, spreading and holding it for later, etc' has now turned into 'play one at 1min, then pool the rest till the 2min window. At 2mins, use three cards, two minor Arcanas, and Divination, all within 15s', it's absolutely ridiculous. And the more ridiculous part of it all is that, after the hectic part, you get to just spam Malefic over and over until the next hectic burst. 15-20s of keyboard gymnastics, and then 100s of just pressing the same button over and over.

There are some people who think 'bigger number = more fun' but I don't think it's a good idea to design around that. Like, we could have a new DPS that deals 500p per GCD, but only has one GCD and no other button. It'd deal more damage than any other DPS by a fair margin, and a few people would play it because 'its the best damage' but a lot would not because pressing one button over and over, gets very stale, very quickly. So for healers, my suggestion would be to just add one or two buttons to each that are used for their main filler rotation. Then, this allows for more interaction between damage and healing, like having the damage build a gauge, or grant cooldown reductions to healing tools, etc.

For example, we start out by giving back two DOTs to SCH. Miasma, at 24s duration, and Shadowflare at 15s duration. We also give it back Quickened Aetherflow, so spending an AF reduces the CD on Aetherflow by 5 sec. That is just a first step, though, once people are used to that, we then introduce more interactivity, eg we give SCH a new gauge element, which fills as the DOTs tick. Once it is full, you get access to a spender (Meltdown, maybe) that deals damage and grants one Aetherflow. So now, the DOTs ticking is indirectly fuelling additional Aetherflow-based healing. And using those extra AF-heals, is additionally making the SCH get the CD 'Aetherflow' back sooner, meaning even more stacks, and more MP economy coming in

[ty_taurus]

Id actually disagree with that, as healers HAVE succumbed to the 2min meta. WHM wants to prep Misery, even by purposely overhealing if need be, to put one inside raidbuffs per 2min.

There's a pretty wild idea I've had in the back of my mind for a while now that I haven't talked about, but it's about a way to get around the issue of buff windows for healers. Because that's something that comes up often in discussion when talking about what things we can add to the healers, as most things we can think about will inevitably result in more pressure to burn or spend those resources (whether gauge resources, stacks, or what have you), and creating an environment where there's a lot of pressure to dump a lot of resources into buff windows creates potential concerns for healer gameplay.

But here's the wild idea, and I'm not saying I'm fully in support of this, but it's something that would be interesting to talk about... What if healer DPS abilities dealt unique damage instead of magic damage? Unique damage is what limit breaks are calculated off of and is unaffected by buffs, meaning healers would see no DPS increase from dumping resources during buff windows. It obviously has some ramifications on the built-in support that astrologian and scholar offer. With the current astrologian cards in mind, though, you could also do something like melee/ranged DPS +6%/+3% or increases your own unique damage by 12%. You'd still want to give cards to the DPS in group settings, but something like that could improve astrologian's pitiful DPS output when soloing. Essentially, by making healer DPS entirely unaffected by buffs, we have more freedom to add whatever we want without fear of it having a negative impact on that healer's DPS mentality, but we also lose any semblance of skill expression in reserving those resources for buff windows that we have currently. Consequently if Unique damage creates any sort of problems mechanically, like allowing healers to ignore vulnerability down buffs from something like adds that are tethered together when they're meant to be tanked apart, we could add a 4th type: "Light damage" or something like that which is the same as magic damage but is just ignorant of buffs.

[Turtledeluxe]

Id actually disagree with that, as healers HAVE succumbed to the 2min meta.

Yes. What I meant there is that healers haven't generally been given excessive potency buffs, it has been moreso affected in terms of its actions and rotations.

Also I totally agree with your what if scenario even if just to get the ball rolling as you said. This is the kind of risk taking the game is missing imo as it gets older and new classes are introduced that are only bloating the same generic dps landscape. It's tricky to balance everything given the gulf between a not skilled player to an expert player and I get that. As someone said earlier I'm not sure if it is a resources issue (in terms of do we have sufficient talented developers to radically update the combat and jobs), a design philosophy, or both. It's also probably the age of the game itself causing their approach to combat and Job design to be "simplify and delete" vs "reinvent and add". Everything you introduce has repercussions for multiple game modes and content, not to mention the range of player experience and skill levels.

Which, is a pretty natural conclusion to come to given how combat design has went over time. Anything that’s not purely offensive is heavily limited, ancillary to the intended ‘goal’ (you don’t need healers to complete content but you do need dps), buffing/debuff is non-existent thanks to 120s meta and the Stormblood synergy fiasco, and healing/tanking can’t have their own unique roles to fill because that’ll get in the way of their precious deeps. The devs have practically made it so we’re basically not ever allowed to have fun - you enjoy your dps’ing or you find a different game.

100%. The ever expanding array of classes doesn't help either and likely only drains resources that would help with undoing the damage that has been done so far. Yoshi P's own statement here direct concedes in a way because he's straight up telling you he doesn't actually care about a job being engaging (both individually or in terms of group strategy) as content is intended to determine how engaged you're going to be. It's not "not engaged? Try another class" it's "not engaged? Try ultimate".

[Absurdity]

Believe it or not, those tankbuster dots really screw with WAR's kit. Healing is their entire schtick, and having something on you that eats up all of your healing puts you in a pretty bad way. Obviously it's not great for the other tanks either, but definitely feel it definitely has the greatest impact on WAR due to the way it's designed.

Just nerfing the job itself has a high probability of just outright destroying it, since it's so reliant on its own sustain. It would need to be completely redesigned, I think. That being said, making tankbusters more frequent would kinda solve the problem anyway.

The DoT busters affect Warrior in particular due to, as far as I understand it, their tick damage being based on how much damage the initial hit does. Dark Knight isn't doing much better either in that regard but TBN's low cooldown allows it to mitigate more DoT ticks.
Warrior has worse flat % mitigation than other tanks so as a result the DoTs eat up all of it's healing. You could absolute nerf it's selfhealing if it had stronger mitigation in exchange but then we run into the issue of job homogenization again.

Right now Warrior's defensive kit is at least slightly different from the rest, it is great at dealing with high damage single hits but weak at dealing with DoT busters and changing this would just make it more like all other tanks.

[ForsakenRoe]

For P10S specifically, I find that the WARs that suffer from the steppy-TB the most are the ones that use Bloodwhetting to mitigate the stomp, the ones who save it until after the stomp seem to have way easier times dealing with the damage that comes later (plus the autoattacks that happen at the same time). Given that you'd be using other %mits, the 10+10% from BW suffers a lot of diminishing returns, knocking it's effectiveness on the stomp down quite far. EG, if you were to use just Vengeance BW on the stomp, that BW is actually mitigating 10% of 70% (so 7%), then another 10% of 63% (so 6.3%). Effectively losing 6.7% mitigation effectiveness overall (if my maths doesn't suck)

Is there any other bleed-TB in this tier? I'm a healer main so I don't remember (tank selfsustain is too strong)

[Aravell]

For P10S specifically, I find that the WARs that suffer from the steppy-TB the most are the ones that use Bloodwhetting to mitigate the stomp, the ones who save it until after the stomp seem to have way easier times dealing with the damage that comes later (plus the autoattacks that happen at the same time). Given that you'd be using other %mits, the 10+10% from BW suffers a lot of diminishing returns, knocking it's effectiveness on the stomp down quite far. EG, if you were to use just Vengeance BW on the stomp, that BW is actually mitigating 10% of 70% (so 7%), then another 10% of 63% (so 6.3%). Effectively losing 6.7% mitigation effectiveness overall (if my maths doesn't suck)

Is there any other bleed-TB in this tier? I'm a healer main so I don't remember (tank selfsustain is too strong)

Ascendant Fist in P9S has a bleed, P11S doesn't have a bleed buster, don't know about P12S.