[Discussion and Feedback] Incoming damage vs. Utility

[Rithy255]

So my thoughts here are, a couple routes could be taken:

• Party/Raid-wide mits can be reduced in kits that aren't healers
• Potent aoes are dished out by bosses more often. Essentially creating heal checks that happen way more often.
• both of the above

What are your thoughts on this?

Barely any DPS Jobs (outside role actions) have "party mits" in the first place, I like party mits and utility personally not every DPS should offer them outside role actions, Tanks? It's already kind of their job to provide support and utility outside of taking hits, tanks are already "boring DPS" as it is, I think they need to actually focus more on tanks utility while also making their combat less stale.

Your second point here is the actual issue, Theirs not enough damage in fights in general, but more then that healers have too much OGCD's, both Healers for one shouldn't be able to keep 100% DPS uptime, The Trade off on DPS having utility advantages should be A: Makes the healers life easier B: can save healer GCD's for attacks, Obviously in current design Utility isn't that useful as it should be, but that's down to healer design, DPS higher actually doesn't matter as much as people make it out It only really matters in Speed clears of in situations where the DPS check is harsh, The problem is DPS wins by default with how little you really need utility currently. I'd argue making it so healers having to GCD heal also helps healers quite a lot gameplay wise, because it would be cool to actually fit in DPS while you have to make a choice when to heal and when to damage.

Even if you took all the "raid" wides out, Healers would have still way too much OGCD options. Personally I want to play a game where Jobs actually help each other... a team based game. But that can only really happen if we focus on fixing healers first, If almost every DPS became a selfish job then no DPS would be a selfish job which just sort of makes the game bland when we're already in a very bland state currently.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Barely any DPS Jobs (outside role actions) have "party mits" in the first place, I like party mits and utility personally not every DPS should offer them outside role actions, Tanks? It's already kind of their job to provide support and utility outside of taking hits, tanks are already "boring DPS" as it is, I think they need to actually focus more on tanks utility while also making their combat less stale.

Your second point here is the actual issue, Theirs not enough damage in fights in general, but more then that healers have too much OGCD's, both Healers for one shouldn't be able to keep 100% DPS uptime, The Trade off on DPS having utility advantages should be A: Makes the healers life easier B: can save healer GCD's for attacks, Obviously in current design Utility isn't that useful as it should be, but that's down to healer design, DPS higher actually doesn't matter as much as people make it out It only really matters in Speed clears of in situations where the DPS check is harsh, The problem is DPS wins by default with how little you really need utility currently. I'd argue making it so healers having to GCD heal also helps healers quite a lot gameplay wise, because it would be cool to actually fit in DPS while you have to make a choice when to heal and when to damage.

Even if you took all the "raid" wides out, Healers would have still way too much OGCD options. Personally I want to play a game where Jobs actually help each other... a team based game. But that can only really happen if we focus on fixing healers first, If almost every DPS became a selfish job then no DPS would be a selfish job which just sort of makes the game bland when we're already in a very bland state currently.

As I'd mentioned in other threads, the majority of issues with the healer role aren't from the jobs themselves and are more a compounded result of numerous changes they've done to the game claiming to make it more "accessible" paired with oversimplification done intentionally to make the role easier to play because they apparently thought at some point that people didn't play healer role jobs because it was hard. Almost like they never did any research into MMORPGs in general including the 2 other SE entries FFXI and DQX and realize that Tank and Healer jobs/classes are always minorities in the player base unless said job is found to be horrendously OP like the Accretian Mercenary in RF Online which upon kitting out top tier gear I could tank 400 players + a pile of support NPCs during their big 3 faction war events and not die once during the entire thing even when they dropped a tactical nuke on my head.

[Rithy255]

I think considering the 1 Tank, 1 Healer in dungeons, 2 DPS / 2 Tank / 2 Healer / 4 DPS raids shows that they're aware that DPS is just generally going to be more popular. I think it's a pretty fair spread for games, Ranged jobs are actually in a pretty similar boat to tanks/healers as they're more rare then melee, considering how much melee options we got (and we're getting more lol) It's no wonder why DPS is heavily favoured even though we got twice as much.

In DT If you combine tank and healer it's a ratio of 8 Support Jobs vs 13 Dps Jobs, So of course DPS is going to be played more theirs just more playstyles (literally aswell tanks/healers bassically have the same playstyle at this point), a lot of people want to level a Few DPS most likely even if you main tank/healer esp considering theirs three different DPS categories.

Honestly though this is a Lose/Lose situation, because if anything the current state of healers drives away more people then not, from other games I've seen tank is usually a even less popular role then healer but In ff14 it seems more common then healer, is that because tank is well designed? No It's because tank is semi tolerable but even tank has it's own issues.

Healer needs to appeal to healer players, Tank needs to appeal to Tank players at the of the day, The solution of making them "dps" doesn't fix that because DPS players want to play DPS not boring slow DPS, I'm obviously not saying healers/tank's shouldn't DPS (I actually like that they contribute a good amount of damage) but what makes doing DPS fun on tank/healer is that you're meant to be doing other things while also dpsing, with healers people can argue that you have to still heal sometimes, but throwing out a ogcd here and there isn't really cutting it for healer, what I'd find fun is having some DPS procs and extra skills but also having to actually make a choice between gcd healing or not, Tanks aggro management, stances can go, but the replacement being a even easier dps rotation? being super tanky and kitchen sinking all CDs on tank buster just isn't fun, I can only hope they give tanks more interactive abilities with the party, beyond just having different rotations to make that more fun.

This even effects DPS players, "phys ranged" on the job page says they're meant to provide support (when they don't really offer that much outside of raid buffs or one extra party mit), Beyond that they're so common that they have to switch to tank/healer a lot just so they dont have to wait 20 minutes for a single duty (I do this myself when I want to play something like BLM but it's just too much of a hassle to wait).

[Jeeqbit]

Tank and Healer jobs/classes are always minorities in the player base

That's true, but I think the reason they feel pressured to make tanks and healers simpler is because if people want to play them for aesthetic or lore reasons, they are forced to be a tank or healer. There are no role specs in this game like there are in others. If there were role specs, then all the people not confident at tanking and healing could potentially just pick the DPS role instead and accept tanking and healing being more sophisticated.

healers have too much OGCD's, both Healers for one shouldn't be able to keep 100% DPS uptime

I actually don't think 100% DPS uptime is necessarily a problem. Using your attacks 100% of the time and heals being something that you weave is fine as a concept, but if it's going to be that way then SE should go 100% through with it and put Cure, Cure II and Medica as OGCDs with a short cooldown time and then increase the healing requirements in duties that lack significant heal checks or add some other attacks similar to the Summoner rotation to make it a little more exciting than 1 button.

I'd argue making it so healers having to GCD heal also helps healers quite a lot gameplay wise, because it would be cool to actually fit in DPS while you have to make a choice when to heal and when to damage.

It was a lot like that in ARR and Heavensward, but there was a certain behaviour among players to try and do as little healing as possible so that they could DPS. On White Mage for example, you could apply regens (if needed) and then DPS while Scholar just let their pet and Whispering Dawn heal. If you left Cleric Stance, your DPS was useless anyway so you may as well have GCD heal before re-entering it. Once they removed Cleric Stance, the focus on DPS over healing sort of pressured SE to go in the OGCD direction so that players weren't fighting against the system and using the few OGCDs they had available, leading to now where all the healer cast times were reduced to 1.5 seconds so we can weave all our heals and attacks properly.

You can argue that this DPS healer mindset was "because there was a lack of things to heal" but things really did hurt more in the past, healers (including myself) just really pushed it to the limit and you'd often see people complaining about healers doing DPS too much. I can't say I've seen such complaints in recent memory with how the game is now.

No matter what SE does, there will always be healers trying to get 100% DPS uptime tbh, so allowing them to do that while just weaving heals could work. Cleric Stance is a good alternative though, because it forces you into a choice: tank dies so you can DPS, or you heal and cannot DPS. But obviously SE decided that solution is too difficult for some players.

from other games I've seen tank is usually a even less popular role then healer but In ff14 it seems more common then healer, is that because tank is well designed? No

Tanks used to be less popular than healers (so they added tank mount achievements), but what happened was in Shadowbringers, tanks were made less complicated to play (no enmity combos or stance dancing, just doing DPS gains the attention of enemies), while healers had many of their attacks (particularly DoTs) removed causing a shift. On top of that, the new job in Shadowbringers was Gunbreaker, which many people wanted to play (but did not want to be a tank), so it caused people to learn to tank.

[Sebazy]

You can argue that this DPS healer mindset was "because there was a lack of things to heal" but things really did hurt more in the past, healers (including myself) just really pushed it to the limit and you'd often see people complaining about healers doing DPS too much. I can't say I've seen such complaints in recent memory with how the game is now.

To back this point up, it's actually pretty crazy when you look back at fights like Clownka and just how hard he used to smack tanks down with auto attacks alone during the floor intermissions.

You see the intermission and next floor coming, no mechanics for a moment? Sweet time to slurp some coffee, but then reality came crashing down like Kefka's boot on your tank and you're having to Bene them out of oblivion as they are screaming over TS.

Good times

[Rithy255]

Snip

Healers pushing their limits with dps in "high end" is how I think healing should work in my eyes, walking the rope of enough healing and enough DPS is actually fun, "new" healers can just GCD heal for the most part it wouldn't even be a difficult thing for them either.

Thing is people will complain either way if they have to gcd heal or not, I think healers are at their best when they're making active choices instead of just being "dps who throw out a heal" if you disagree with that, that's fine. People are always going to disagree with design choices, I just believe in a world where we actively have gcd healing more often it makes the game a lot more fun for every role not just healers.

At the end of the day I think healers should be actively gcd healing and while balancing doing Damage, Risk vs reward is actually good for higher end duties, It's good that healers would be challenging themselves more then they are today, This again goes back to making tanking more fun as you should actively use your CD's and utility on DPS jobs would actually matter way more.