Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[Absurdity]

If Bloodwhetting cut your damage by 50% to give you that healing, that MIGHT be different, as then it'd be something you use at need but that directly impacts your ability to do damage, so it would be a choice of "Do I really need this right now?" If Nascent cut your damage by 50%, only healed the target (not also you the WAR), and prevented generating Beast Gauge for its duration, it would still be there as a powerful tool in needed situations (healer DCed and you have the WAR and 1 DPS alive to finish the last 5-10% of the boss health before the Enrage) but not be overpowered as it is now.

This would be fine if they changed up the job's available mitigation. Right now Bloodwhetting is basically a mandatory defensive even if you don't necessarily need the healing, being forced to cut your damage by 50% to not die would just be bad design.
It's why I think Nascent Flash and Raw Intuition in Shadowbringers were the vastly better designed abilities.

You had to choose between either 20% mitigation or self-healing based on your actual dps output. Nascent would often be the superior choice if you knew what you were doing (beating out even the eHP provided by TBN) but you had to think about how much damage you were about to take and how much damage you would be able to deal yourself in the next 6 seconds.
Raw Intuition was always the safer choice since using Nascent could end with you outright dying or healing for so little that you just made your healers work more by using it.

[Shurrikhan]

I would break it down:

You can have tools restricted by cooldowns that are not a loss, but the cooldowns need to be longer or have some additional resource cost attached to them. FFXIV does not dish out damage all that frequently, so something like Bloodwhetting having a cooldown of 25 seconds is insane because you might as well just have it up permanently for how it's available for literally every mechanic. Maybe you give it an MP cost. As pretty as the MP bar is on the UI, having it actually do something is more important than having a window decal.

This I could mostly agree with, though I would rather just have more damage taken (and perhaps even more defensive button-presses, given further intake increase accordingly) than give tanks even fewer tank button-presses per average minute.

You can also have tools that have some sort of opportunity cost, and they don't always have to be flat GCDs like Clemency. In fact, I kinda wish Clemency perhaps costed Oath Gauge, to give Oath Gauge more things to actually be used on. But when it comes at the cost of gauge, you have to ask about what the alternative is, and having those choices can be a good thing. Clemency specifically and other of Paladin's tools would need adjustments to make that work, but the point stands.

I wouldn't mind that, but the reason for Clemency not costing gauge is simple enough: it'd be redundant with Intervention, which heals for the same amount atop granting, what, 43% more eHP (for the first 4 seconds, less after).

Like if Equilibrium increased the amount of HP Warriors receive from all healing sources by 25%, then they could interact with that themselves through other actions, or give the healer a boost.

My issue with alleged "self-synergies" is that they so often get reduced to mere bundles (a la FoF-Goring-Req-Confiteor, all effectively a single button of 4 button-presses), at which point the extra button can often feel like mere bloat. Within limitations, that'd be fine, though.

Pair that with an action that converts a major chunk of their HP into a barrier, and you have a really unique combo where the Warrior lowers their actual HP, gains a barrier for what they lose, and that in turn increases the healing they'd receive to get them back up.

Sounds fine, even if a bit redundant with the benefit of TBN to avoid debuffs (albeit in a more [original] "shrug it off" flavor).

I know we collectively recoil at the idea of self-harm mechanics,

I feel like it's only the babysitters (healers with shit parties who feel like they're doing everything themselves) who actually recoil at self-harm mechanics (and even then, only outside of their job). For my part, I'm fine with them as long as they don't devolve into simply a maintenance loop (healers keeps Regen on you to make you slightly OP, without which you're slightly UP, etc.). So, in any other game, I'd be pretty optimistic about their results.

And I'd still like to see DRK play around with that (or would, if it weren't simply a less flexible version --with virtually no novel affordances-- relative to using MP for that, which leaves me instead at an impasse even if I think HP spending is thematically cooler).

[Renathras]

I would break it down: ...

Agreed. Knocking it out of the park, my man. The Genshin part aside (not sure how well that would fit here, but...), the rest is spot on.

The problem with Bloodwhetting/Nascent is that the CD is so short, it can effectively be up all the time. It's not a situational ability like Clemency nor a long CD situational ability like Passage of Arms or even Shake It Off, and it incurs no penalty nor cost to use. If anything, NOT using it is penalizing yourself since it's free healing and free mitigation that is up so frequently you never really need to "hold" it in anticipation of anything.

I also don't think it's really fair comparing 1-2-3 heals (which are baked in over the course of a fight but won't save you themselves if things are going really bad since they're too small and too slow to do so) to things like Nascent or even Clemency.

[Self-harm mechanics are a bit more of a complicated thing since they have to be balanced carefully otherwise they don't work well. For example, if DRK was the only Tank that had to harm itself to do damage, the obvious result would be no one taking DRKs to parties anymore. Unless they did bonkers damage, in which case it would become a mandatory include. Neither of which are good... so then it would have to be ALL the Tanks that do it, and at that point, we're talking just another form of homogenization, not to mention it would alienate Tank players that don't like being edgy self harmers.]

[Aravell]

You could have tank self-sustain exist, but come at a cost of personal DPS, like with Clemency. Tools to help you survive in a pinch, or when solo, but relying on your healer is more efficient when possible.

That's basically how Stormblood tanks worked. They had heaps of survivability, I've soloed bosses on WAR back then too, but all of it came at the cost of a ~20% damage reduction, so relying on the healer was much more efficient in terms of party dps.

But a lot of tank mains seem unified in hating that they lose dps to survive and have to rely on the healer if they want to do damage, so I doubt SE would change it that way.

Side note: It's funny to me that tank mains are asking for healers to be busy healing and using Esuna on the rest of the party, but under no circumstances make the tank have to rely on the healer in any way.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, it's pretty funny that a lot of things suggested by people to fix the healer role is something we already had in Stormblood but was removed in Shadowbringers.

[Shurrikhan]

That's basically how Stormblood tanks worked. They had heaps of survivability, I've soloed bosses on WAR back then too, but all of it came at the cost of a ~20% damage reduction, so relying on the healer was much more efficient in terms of party dps.

But a lot of tank mains seem unified in hating that they lose dps to survive and have to rely on the healer if they want to do damage, so I doubt SE would change it that way.

Side note: It's funny to me that tank mains are asking for healers to be busy healing and using Esuna on the rest of the party, but under no circumstances make the tank have to rely on the healer in any way.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, it's pretty funny that a lot of things suggested by people to fix the healer role is something we already had in Stormblood but was removed in Shadowbringers.

I can't think of any tank mains I've met for whom that was true, whereas I've encountered a couple dozen who feel like the change was for the worse.

I think the biggest problem was simply that self-sustain was tied to too many other things: it was your Enmity stance, and therefore had to be at even more significant dps cost for Enmity "management" to be a mechanic, and it was usually locked behind your max-eHP increasing "training wheels" stance.

Had it just been a simpler choice between damage and further self-sustain, and the latter could be less undertuned relative to the rDPS produced by just doing more tank damage directly --not to mention the costs of changing back into tank stance being crippling to short-term throughput for all but WAR-- then it probably would have been considered fine and vital to the role. Instead, it was a garbled mess until its end (and, again, still most tank mains I met thought removing it outright was the wrong choice).

[Aravell]

I can't think of any tank mains I've met for whom that was true, whereas I've encountered a couple dozen who feel like the change was for the worse.

I think the biggest problem was simply that self-sustain was tied to too many other things: it was your Enmity stance, and therefore had to be at even more significant dps cost for Enmity "management" to be a mechanic, and it was usually locked behind your max-eHP increasing "training wheels" stance.

Had it just been a simpler choice between damage and further self-sustain, and the latter could be less undertuned relative to the rDPS produced by just doing more tank damage directly --not to mention the costs of changing back into tank stance being crippling to short-term throughput for all but WAR-- then it probably would have been considered fine and vital to the role. Instead, it was a garbled mess until its end (and, again, still most tank mains I met thought removing it outright was the wrong choice).

There's been a few (assumed) tank mains that's popped up in discussions about healers saying that they don't want tanks to rely on healers at all but they're totally fine with everyone else needing to be healed more. Quite a few have suggested that the DPS should take more damage from DPS-targetted mechanics, but when the topic of tanks having to rely on healers comes up, quite a few have vehemently opposed it.

As for there being a simpler choice between damage and more self-sustain, the choice did exist back then. Remember that only WAR had sustain locked behind their tank stance (Inner Beast, Equilibrium), and that was fine because only WAR had a smooth swap between tank and dps stance. The other 2 had sustain that wasn't locked behind their tank stance, it just costed damage. PLD had Clemency that they can use at any time and it just costs a GCD (you could recoup the MP used by Clemency through Sheltron). DRK had Abyssal Drain and Souleater for sustain, neither of which required Grit up, so it really wasn't as convoluted as you mentioned.

[Shurrikhan]

DRK had Abyssal Drain and Souleater for sustain, neither of which required Grit up, so it really wasn't as convoluted as you mentioned.

Souleater (originally) didn't heal outside of Grit, and wasn't a choice regardless by StB (Delirium was removed and Power Slash was a waste outside of tank stance) and Abyssal Drain didn't heal without Dark Arts (DA, not Abyssal Drain, being the at-cost sustain but competing in AoE only with Dark Passenger, a 30s CD) --which stacked with AD's own cost to consume over a third(?, iirc?) of your MP-- while your SyS MP gen was roughly doubled in Grit.

So, Power Slash couldn't be an actual high-damage-alternative to the sustain of Souleater... because it was your Enmity option. Abyssal Drain couldn't be a sustain alternative to Unleash, because it was also your burstier MP spender and higher damage / non-Enmity option. ST sustain was a non-option, and AoE sustain had competing options only once per 30s. But to be able to use DA-AD often you needed either CDs... or Grit, since your SyS MP gen outside of tank stance barely over half of what it was inside tank stance.

...It was still, at the least, pretty muddled. Sustain options were held back by Enmity options which were quickly rendered defunct by the way tank stances synergized/worked with tank stance to make those actions basically useless outside of tank stance.

There's been a few (assumed) tank mains that's popped up in discussions about healers saying that they don't want tanks to rely on healers at all but they're totally fine with everyone else needing to be healed more. Quite a few have suggested that the DPS should take more damage from DPS-targetted mechanics, but when the topic of tanks having to rely on healers comes up, quite a few have vehemently opposed it.

The only "tank mains" I've seen "vehemently" opposed to any reductions to tank sustain or healing or those like MikoRemi who'd just be vehemently opposed to their favored job being less than overpowered; so, WAR mains / people who happen to OTP a tank, more relevantly. There's quite a large gap between wanting tanks still to have agency (which would only be aided by the ability to pull out additional sustain, even if at cost to dps) and being reluctant about even the slightest reduction to tank sustain or have that sustain reformulated (see the many WARs asking for Bloodwhetting/Nascent to return to the ShL version).

For my part, again, I like tanks hitting tank buttons and making tanking-related decisions. Stormblood at least left that as a prospect, even if it badly garbled all that by insisting on a DoA / irredeemably dull yet bloated implementation of Enmity (in place of anything that'd feel like actively thwarting the enemy's aggression against one's party). Accordingly, I like tanks having frequent-ish defensives instead of just a per-2-minutes trickle of actions or the like.

[ty_taurus]

Here's a really wacky thought that just came to me, and I'm not necessarily promoting this idea, but it's a comparison that I had never made that's an interesting thought to consider:

Actions labeled as "spells" almost always come with an MP cost, unless they cost some other sort of resource like the lily heals. Well, in the Persona games, magic attacks cost that game's equivalent stat of "SP," but physical attacks cost a small percentage of the user's HP. For the sake of discussion, what if all weaponskills cost a percentage of the users HP to activate, something like 2-3% per weaponskill or something? For solo purposes, you could rework Second Wind into a GCD heal that has no cooldown, thus it costs the user DPS to use in a group setting, but is there to help physical DPS jobs maintain their HP when flying solo.

To address mechanics where the party's HP is reduced to 1... There's a character who consumes HP to use his skill in Honkai Star Rail where if he has less than the required amount, he can still use the skill and it will cost as much HP as he has, but leaves him at 1 HP, and it can be spammed at 1 HP without consuming any HP. You could set up weaponskills to work like that so it's not a disruption of your rotation.

It's just an idea that is interesting to think about. How would the landscape of FFXIV look if that were implemented?

[Shurrikhan]

Here's a really wacky thought that just came to me, and I'm not necessarily promoting this idea, but it's a comparison that I had never made that's an interesting thought to consider:

Actions labeled as "spells" almost always come with an MP cost, unless they cost some other sort of resource like the lily heals. Well, in the Persona games, magic attacks cost that game's equivalent stat of "SP," but physical attacks cost a small percentage of the user's HP. For the sake of discussion, what if all weaponskills cost a percentage of the users HP to activate, something like 2-3% per weaponskill or something? For solo purposes, you could rework Second Wind into a GCD heal that has no cooldown, thus it costs the user DPS to use in a group setting, but is there to help physical DPS jobs maintain their HP when flying solo.

To address mechanics where the party's HP is reduced to 1... There's a character who consumes HP to use his skill in Honkai Star Rail where if he has less than the required amount, he can still use the skill and it will cost as much HP as he has, but leaves him at 1 HP, and it can be spammed at 1 HP without consuming any HP. You could set up weaponskills to work like that so it's not a disruption of your rotation.

It's just an idea that is interesting to think about. How would the landscape of FFXIV look if that were implemented?

I... can't say I'd be a fan. First, doing it everyone would make it feel that much less special on jobs that would otherwise have a unique thematic attachment to HP-spending. More than that, though, it just makes no damn sense; we're not psychic manifestations for whom our actions would spend how long we could last for, unlike if, say, Living Shadow were revised to have something of an old Blood of the Dragon mechanic. And above all... would anyone want to feel like there's a max battery power on their ability to do anything at all, let alone like they're literally punching their own fingers/hands/arms/stumps off as if out of incompetence?

I'm trying to imagine the XIV landscape with it, but... I'm pretty immediately repulsed, tbh, so it's hard to imagine fine details.

[Aravell]

It was still, at the least, pretty muddled. Sustain options were held back by Enmity options which were quickly rendered defunct by the way tank stances synergized/worked with tank stance to make those actions basically useless outside of tank stance.

I think this is fair, tank stances back then didn't really offer a whole lot for the cost. It would be more interesting if tank stances actually enabled a wider array of defensives rather than just being an enmity toggle, they could also stand to be more unique among tanks, such as:

PLD - Iron Will: Raises your shield defensively. Increases the global cooldown by 0.5s and increases autoattack delay to 6s while increasing block chance, blocks now generate oath gauge.
WAR - Defiance: Channels your inner beast defensively. Increases max HP and incoming healing received while reducing crit rate. Beast gauge actions now restore a proportion of damage as health.
DRK - Grit: Channels the darkside defensively. Halts MP regen and uses MP to reduce damage taken. All weaponskills now regenerate MP.
GNB - Royal Guard: Channels aether inwards defensively. Reduces damage done by 15% while reducing damage taken by 15%.

Every tank would have a unique loss that hits them differently instead of a flat "reduces damage", every stance could change certain actions to have a defensive effect instead, like PLD's Blades combo could become a Shields combo that applies a shield or something like that. By limiting the defensives that tanks have outside of tank stance, they have the option to turn on tank stance if they need the defensives (this would assume that they designed tank stances to be a seamless toggle rather than a GCD like old Shield/Sword Oath). I think that the short CDs should be available outside of tank stance for more active mitigation gameplay while keeping the option of entering full defense available should one mess up their timing.

Changes like that would also circle around to helping healer gameplay as tanks trying to do optimal damage would actually require some amount of attention.

It's just an idea that is interesting to think about. How would the landscape of FFXIV look if that were implemented?

Honestly, when reading this, I just thought about the weird server tick thing where you can instantly kill a mob with 2 BLUs hitting Missile at the same time. There's the small chance that a player would hit a weaponskill at the same time as something setting their HP to 1, and depending on how the server reads that, the self-damage could come right after being set to 1 HP, which would kill them instantly. Funny stuff.

As for the idea itself, the intent seems to be to create healing busywork? I personally think it's not a good idea, it's vaguely reminiscent of the idea that everyone should do less damage as their HP falls, which encourages overhealing. This kind of change would probably cause newer healers to overheal a bunch.