[Discussion and Feedback] Incoming damage vs. Utility

[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

[Lyth]

Coffees are ideally not used on the GCD outside of pre-pull opener for this reason. Treat them like tinctures and single weave them in where possible.

[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.

[EverQuest]

The issue is that raid wide damage is effectively useless in ff14

It’s not really about the mit or healing.

Essentially unless it sits you to 1hp and forces a heal it’s all but meaningless

If you look at like wow it’ll do a raid wide then spawn like a ton of swirly boys so you could get punished after.

In ff14 typically there’s no more dmg going out to anyone not a tank afterwards. So as long as you didn’t die from the hit you often have ages between the next one so as long as you’re not eating dirt there’s really no risk

Once you reach like savage or ultimate raid wides are kinda like filler mechanics giving you a reason to even justify having the mit and healing to begin with.

If anything raid wides should be like set through the fight at X times say like every 15 seconds of the fight regardless of what’s going down bam a 30 to 50% dmg raid wide goes off you’d bet your ass people start respecting it, but with how they are now it’s kinda whatever it’s not really a problem it’s just there

[Jeeqbit]

If you look at like wow it’ll do a raid wide then spawn like a ton of swirly boys so you could get punished after.

In ff14 typically there’s no more dmg going out to anyone not a tank afterwards.

That's not true. SE very specifically builds up fights to where it will teach you what each cast does, then do them one after the other to test the party, such as reducing people to 1 HP or doing aoe markers and then doing a raid-wide. But the reason that is never a threat is because all you have to do is press 1 heal and it's sorted and at level 90 a Warrior can just press Shake It Off so the healer doesn't need to.

This happens in normal content, especially normal raids and trials, but again it just isn't much of a threat because they are easy and often the combination of a raid-wide followed by aoe markers wouldn't wipe the party just due to item level increases and DPS having enough health.

But it is something that gets people in high-end content, especially the latest extreme trial where I've flat out seen raid-wide aoes wipe the party because the healers did not top everyone off from the previous mechanics and I've had to shift around my Reprisal and Shake It Off depending on the healers' healing habits and what gets the party most often.

If anything raid wides should be like set through the fight at X times say like every 15 seconds of the fight regardless of what’s going down bam a 30 to 50% dmg raid wide

I'd love if all bosses got Counter Stance from the S rank Pale Rider. All the damage dealt to the boss is countered with the same damage back to the player, so players have to take damage in order to deal damage. That's great and it led to dead players everywhere because they are not used to healing that sort of damage. It would mean we would be able to strategically stop DPS if healers needed an easier time at a certain point in the fight.

[RitsukoSonoda]

That's not true. SE very specifically builds up fights to where it will teach you what each cast does, then do them one after the other to test the party, such as reducing people to 1 HP or doing aoe markers and then doing a raid-wide. But the reason that is never a threat is because all you have to do is press 1 heal and it's sorted and at level 90 a Warrior can just press Shake It Off so the healer doesn't need to.

This happens in normal content, especially normal raids and trials, but again it just isn't much of a threat because they are easy and often the combination of a raid-wide followed by aoe markers wouldn't wipe the party just due to item level increases and DPS having enough health.

But it is something that gets people in high-end content, especially the latest extreme trial where I've flat out seen raid-wide aoes wipe the party because the healers did not top everyone off from the previous mechanics and I've had to shift around my Reprisal and Shake It Off depending on the healers' healing habits and what gets the party most often.

I'd love if all bosses got Counter Stance from the S rank Pale Rider. All the damage dealt to the boss is countered with the same damage back to the player, so players have to take damage in order to deal damage. That's great and it led to dead players everywhere because they are not used to healing that sort of damage. It would mean we would be able to strategically stop DPS if healers needed an easier time at a certain point in the fight.

I still see people fairly often struggle with directional shields that result in counter attacks if you attack from the wrong side of the enemy resulting in heal spam and deaths.

Healer in the past IMO felt like a sort of breath of fresh air after playing DPS and Tank jobs for awhile because the healer role gameplay was noticeably different from the other 2 roles. It still is to a certain degree however the overall changes to the game make it feel unnecessary at times or leave you feeling like a playground monitor in a schoolyard during recess. This I feel is the main cause of people constantly trying to push the idea of turning healers into green DPS jobs. However I feel like that would just cause more damage to the overall state of the game.