Would tanks be okay if SE swapped the damage between tank and healers?

[Shurrikhan]

Simple consideration that I hope has been mentioned before but that I will repeat anyways to be safe:

Which role can actually lose damage? AKA, which is always providing in-role value regardless of damage dealt?

Common sense would hint that the role which suffers lower lows should also have higher highs / that the one whose damage is more penalized in practical contexts should have the higher theoretical maximum damage.

A tank, by nature of just being alive and targeted by the enemy, roughly halves the healing required from enemy attacks. No miti skills or no self-heals needed; that's just from existing. At ilvl 710, even ignoring Tenacity, tanks have about 47% passive mitigation.

And because our health pools are roughly equal portion greater, we're also putting out about half more in natural regen. A 180,000 hp tank puts out about 1200 more HPS passively than a non-tank of equal ilvl. Effectively speaking though, remember that bonus is also worth ~47% more in effective HP. All this... passively.

Each tankbuster survived that a non-tank could not? That's a Swiftcast, GCD, 3k MP, and 25% or 50% of a non-tanks output for 90 seconds, and 100% of the non-tanks' output between the death and being given action again (at least 4s due to animation lock). Or 5.5 more seconds of uptime in place of the Swiftcast, often risking further deaths or requiring yet further delays to the arrival of that raise.

Both roles then have "free" output via tanking/healing CDs atop all that, but what healing value is the healer putting out between those CDs without a loss to damage? (Note here that every DoT and HoT in this game is snapshotted and is therefore best considered to have been done in the GCD it's cast.) None.

Now, what value is the tank putting out between CDs? Even just passively, they put out more %DR than any active defensive skill save for Superbolide and Hallowed Ground. Yes, passively.

Which, then, seems like it should have higher damage striking dummy damage?

[Shurrikhan]

This was your mistake. No one will advocate for their own reduction in power.

Right, so instead we have to placate them with costly workarounds (buff everyone else and buff all content), that end with... exactly the same result (a relative nerf to the singular at-issue job or effect).

Sometimes I wonder if we really need to increase the rewards for/of making significant use of at least one job per role (and ideally at least 2 jobs within a given main role) just to temper the bias a little bit.

_______________

E.g.,
Perhaps, once you buy a piece of weekly gear or acquire a piece of Savage gear, you can then use uncapped tomes to buy that slot for each other role. Overcapped weekly tomes or runs after acquiring one's coffer giving more than their lost weight in uncapped tomes. Weekly challenges that reward significant amounts of tomes. And some nerfs to Hunt tomes drops to spread players out a bit.

Granted, we also get people who level every DoW, DoM, DotL, and DotH within a week of the expansion's release but can't help but take every opportunity to rebuke even the slightest threat to their favored job's excess power, so encouraging spreading one's time certainly doesn't guarantee any spread of interest... /shrug

[Connor]

Maybe I’ve missed something but I don’t understand what this would actually change? And I don’t mean that in a like a rhetorical passive-aggressive sense lol just asking for more clarity. Healer dps potencies would go up, making them deal more overall damage which I guess might make people take them more.

But at the same time isn’t the reason people aren’t playing healers that the gameplay is so boring? Even if they were higher dps than tanks I don’t think that would encourage more people to suddenly start playing, since most players probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.

Unless maybe it’s more about ‘healers having the same breadth of attacks as tanks?’ Which I guess could work, but wouldn’t devs have to retool our healing kits to accomodate for the new attacks? Removing a bunch of healing skills, moving the potencies into one/two standard heals then the rest dps? I imagine like an inversion of what we have now lol. SE seem to enjoy hiding behind their ‘ability cap’ excuse (‘we can only add if we also remove’), after all, or some weird scapegoat lol (spaghetti netcode).

I imagine they’d use that kind of reasoning for why don’t already have expanded dps options on healers (despite having them in the past lol). And, I’m not saying any of this against expanded dps options. I’ve played Scholar since ARR so it’s not like I wasn’t still playing it when Cleric Stance or the 50 million DoTs were still around. Though I was a Bard main and also played Summoner so I was already used to dot management. Personally I’m not really bothered what dps healers do overall as long as they’re fun to play, but maybe that’s partly because I’m a PS5 player and thus remain somewhat beyond the corruptive reaches of certain ‘tools’ lol. I mean, I’d like an ideal world where ‘healers’ do ‘healer stuff’ like buffing/debuffing/esuna/etc, but that’s obviously never happening

[Shurrikhan]

Likely because Tanks often are required to deal with additional gameplay elements in raid encounters such as tank swaps and what have you - however having a tank exclusively because they HAVE to be there creates a bit of a problem (not having a 2nd tank for that 1-2 tankbusters means death for others) but so the other tank otherwise sitting around with even less to do then healers I "suspect" is why they have somewhat better damage then healers - that said I've seen White mages passing tanks these days due to glare.

In a majority of fights, tanks, objectively speaking, deal with fewer role events than healers, even if healers' events are often less distinct.

And, in a majority of even raid/trial fights, if we were to also include tanks' passive mitigation among what we bother to log, Warrior and Paladin, especially, would frequently provide more sustain than a typical healer (as you'd have to multiple the damage taken from TBs and autos by ~89% to undo the ~47% mitigation tanks provide passively, and attribute that difference to the tank[s] being attacked).

While the above could be sorted by putting out more AoE damage than tanks (let alone DNC, MNK, MCH, etc.) could meaningfully contribute against, there's the still the matter than damage has come at zero cost to tanks' sustain (be it via mit or healing) performance since Shadowbringers, and yet tank damage remains higher than healers. That is not particularly sensible. Presently, the only one whose damage can be penalized... also has a lower damage ceiling.

Maybe I’ve missed something but I don’t understand what this would actually change? And I don’t mean that in a like a rhetorical passive-aggressive sense lol just asking for more clarity. Healer dps potencies would go up, making them deal more overall damage which I guess might make people take them more.

But at the same time isn’t the reason people aren’t playing healers that the gameplay is so boring? Even if they were higher dps than tanks I don’t think that would encourage more people to suddenly start playing, since most players probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.

So, first thing, a reminder: Having higher maximum damage is not mutually exclusive with having more interesting offensive gameplay Whatsoever. Nor is it mutually exclusive with anything else save for... not buffing maximum damage. That out of the way...

A lot of associations about a given job or role trickle down from on high. Far more so than makes sense, given the additional players affected and the manner of those effects. When it's known that the hardest content in the game can be cleared faster without healers, it does not make healing particularly inviting. It looks increasingly instead like a trap, like welding training wheels to one's bike.

[Conando]

I see no point in doing what amounts to a knee jerk reaction to something an extremely small part of the player base has been doing since the beginning.

[TouchandFeel]

I disagree with the idea of swapping them so healers do more damage than tanks, but I do generally agree with the feeling that they should perhaps have more parity between their potential damage output.

In my experience, in an MMO that has established roles that jobs or classes fall into, any roles that fall into what could be deemed as having a function outside of dealing raw damage that is meant to support group-play/party functionality (healing, tanking, buffer/debuffer, crowd-control, etc.) needs to be designed in either one of two ways. Either their role and the supportive functionality that it brings is absolutely necessary for the success of the group or it is intentionally made not necessary and is simply more supplemental to provide a slightly easier or alternate way to succeed.

Unfortunately where FF14 currently sits isn't fully within either of those, especially for the healing role. It had started off much more in the expected position of a trinity based MMO where the functions of each role were far more necessary.
Just looking at the healer role since 2.0, the need for a healer to provide healing used to be far higher due to some of the content being a bit more unforgiving and other roles, particularly tanks, having far less tools that minimalized or at times negated the need for external healing. As time went on a lot of content became far more forgiving in terms of general difficulty in order to be more accommodating to more casual players, which honestly is a large part if not the largest part of any MMO player-base population. So that in of itself isn't really that isn't really a bad decision on their end as long as there is also more difficult content made available for players that want a challenge.
Where it really went off the rails is that in addition to that, too many tools were provided to other roles that minimalized or trivialized the need for healers. The most egregious example is the sheer amount of self-sustain that some tanks now have. If a tank has enough self-healing that they can potentially be their own healer in content, especially current content, then that pretty much neutralizes the need for a healer role at all unless they bring something else necessary or valuable to the table, which they currently don't.

So if I would point to anything that could be done to help make the situation talked about in this thread less of a problem, it would be to perhaps increase the potential damage output for healers where it would be close to or equitable to tank damage if the healer is focusing pretty much purely on dps and not healing that much. Also to rein in the self-healing on some of the tank jobs because frankly it has gotten a bit out of hand.

As for making healer game-play more fun, that is a discussion for a different thread in a different part of the forums.

[Ramiee]

It's just bad design for healers to have a worse solo experience then tanks when 90% of the game is the msq where you will be solo for pretty much all of it.
You know what most white mages do?
Once they hit 50 they switch to SAM or RDM then at 60 they switch to DNC. Its boring to solo as a healer because you have no damage mechanics and it takes too long to kill things.

If the Devs want more healers they need to make healers have DPS mechanics and tank level damage and they need to stop taking advice from people who play healer as a second job or only at endgame because this isn't what creates mains.
If SCH didn't suck to play id be playing that because it was my first job, but because CBU3 only focuses on raiders the job is painful to play.

[Conando]

Another thing I would like to add is that healers are not competing with tanks for DPS in speedrunning content. They are competing with ranged DPS and, no, they will never be taken over a DPS because they will never do more damage than a DPS.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I would rather have Healers be brought up to the level of Tanks when it comes to base damage, the only loss to DPS Healers should have compared to Tanks is having to stop to heal occasionally rather than just being objectively weaker while also having the DPS loss from having to occasionally cast a heal...

And if SE suddenly pretends to care about balance, as the current state of affairs is literally brought about by a lack of balance, then only maybe taking some damage away from Tanks to compensate for the increased Healer damage and have the two meet halfway.

[All_Nonsense]

How would you suggest fixing healing without negatively affecting tanks because right now half of the tank mains I talk to seem to think being a more effective healer than the healer is a core tenant of tank gameplay

Pay me billions of dollars like FF14 has made and I'll work it right up for you. It's not a problem we should have to solve or suffer for, it's the devs'. Why are we wasting our energy asking the dev's to make tanking unfun to play because healers don't like their roles anymore? Anyone remember the tanking shortage back in the day? It was so bad that there's achievements with MOUNTS attached to tanking high level duties. Far worse than any healer strike. Let's go back to that then. While we're at it, let's remove all utilities from all DPS jobs and make every single job in the game a boring husk so the healers can press cure 2 a couple extra times.