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

[Erit]

Because punishing the successful to satiate others doesn't come across at all as the petty vengeance of the spiteful, no siree.

I am obliged by both self-interest and common conscience to reply with "unask the question," because the foundational premise is faulty. Trying to balance the entirety of the game around minoritarian content is what got us into this mess. Trying to balance the entirety of the game around minoritarian content is not going to now get us out of it. Increasingly pushing savage, and now Ultimate, raiding as "the done thing" has the same problem as the upward trend in map sizes not being matched by a similar trend in total content to do in those maps; eventually, the paper wears so thin it tears. Eventually, you have appealed to the savage and ultimate raiders as much as you possibly can, and left the rest to rot long enough they fall off, and then you have a problem of economic proportions.

More prudent to balance the minoritarian content with reference to the entirety of the game, and stop trying to continually escalate the scale and scope, and consequentially the scuff, of everything.

But this has been long ignored, and will likely continue to be so.

[Supersnow845]

Because punishing the successful to satiate others doesn't come across at all as the petty vengeance of the spiteful, no siree.

I am obliged by both self-interest and common conscience to reply with "unask the question," because the foundational premise is faulty. Trying to balance the entirety of the game around minoritarian content is what got us into this mess. Trying to balance the entirety of the game around minoritarian content is not going to now get us out of it. Increasingly pushing savage, and now Ultimate, raiding as "the done thing" has the same problem as the upward trend in map sizes not being matched by a similar trend in total content to do in those maps; eventually, the paper wears so thin it tears. Eventually, you have appealed to the savage and ultimate raiders as much as you possibly can, and left the rest to rot long enough they fall off, and then you have a problem of economic proportions.

More prudent to balance the minoritarian content with reference to the entirety of the game, and stop trying to continually escalate the scale and scope, and consequentially the scuff, of everything.

But this has been long ignored, and will likely continue to be so.

How can you argue to stop continuing to push scaling too far in scope when we are in this mess entirely because tanks scaling in literally every conceivable sense has been so dramatically scaled that it’s actually pushing out another role

Tanks aren’t “successful” as you put it, they are literally just being given the healer roles responsibilities with no strings attached, that sort of balancing doesn’t help anyone

[ovIm]

How can you argue to stop continuing to push scaling too far in scope when we are in this mess entirely because tanks scaling in literally every conceivable sense has been so dramatically scaled that it’s actually pushing out another role

Tanks aren’t “successful” as you put it, they are literally just being given the healer roles responsibilities with no strings attached, that sort of balancing doesn’t help anyone

Asking for any role to do less DPS will never be something people would embrace willingly. Also, would that not go against what Healers want, healing? I often read that Healers don't want to DPS, its why they play healer. Then why advocate for making Healer DPS even more mandatory than it already is?

Instead of forcing a higher/different DPS discrepancy, it would be better if the game actually brings in unique Healer mechanics that cannot be resolved by other roles. Make overhealing do something (like fill a boss debuff bar, that bursts into a short stun, idk) or bring in burst heal checks that require dedicated healer healspells.

And no, I have no idea what else those mechanics could be. I am not a Game Designer, after all. That would be something to figure out for Square Enix.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Asking for any role to do less DPS will never be something people would embrace willingly. Also, would that not go against what Healers want, healing? I often read that Healers don't want to DPS, its why they play healer. Then why advocate for making Healer DPS even more mandatory than it already is?

Instead of forcing a higher/different DPS discrepancy, it would be better if the game actually brings in unique Healer mechanics that cannot be resolved by other roles. Make overhealing do something (like fill a boss debuff bar, that bursts into a short stun, idk) or bring in burst heal checks that require dedicated healer healspells.

And no, I have no idea what else those mechanics could be. I am not a Game Designer, after all. That would be something to figure out for Square Enix.

Healers doing DPS was kind of part of the role even all the way back in ARR. It's been part of the game's core design.
But it used to be a reward for playing well as you could replace unneeded heals with attacks... But they've slowly moved away from that and have been making DPS the primary job of Healers, without giving them DPS... Outside of raidwides and tankbusters, you only need to heal if someone stands in a completely avoidable AoE.

[Shurrikhan]

Asking for any role to do less DPS will never be something people would embrace willingly.

I would, if its excess currently breaks the relative value of other roles and/or makes the game inadvertently easier than intended.

Then why advocate for making Healer DPS even more mandatory than it already is?

100% of GCDs spent towards contributing damage is already 100% of GCDs spent towards contributing damage. You literally can't go more dps-focused than is already the case among modern healers. It has also been a part and parcel of the healer role since 1.0. As it is in virtually every MMO that doesn't treat large swaths of idle time for fear of MP starvation as a fun and desirable mechanic.

If we want any less than 100% offensive uptime on healers, the relative incoming damage has to go up, which acts as a relative nerf to tanks, healer, and dps self-sustain.

And if we nerf all by increasing outgoing damage, unless that outgoing damage is primarily AoE, then the rDPS advantage of dropping healers just becomes all the more prominent... unless you increase healer damage to make up for the lost GCDs.

There was a way of mitigating these costs to simultaneous output to reduce the relative value of eking out every last offensive GCD possible that XIV launched with, oddly enough. At that time, 25% offensive uptime could still net healers some 40% of their damage and 90% damage could be achieved even with just some 75% of uptime. It functioned primarily off of, simple though it was... multiple DoTs. You know, from when we had several times more healing to do and yet also had at least as many rotational attacks.

Instead of forcing a higher/different DPS discrepancy, it would be better if the game actually brings in unique Healer mechanics that cannot be resolved by other roles.

Why would that necessarily be better, though? Would the game be better for only healers being able to resurrect others? Would the game be better if no non-tank could be shielded/DRed through a minor tether or charge mechanic?

I'm not saying it can't be, but... why is death by composition check necessarily better than there being multiple means to achieve a given end (be it eHP, damage, or whatever else)?

Perhaps I just need some other but still vivid examples from which to imagine what you want to go for here, since most important "healer-specific" mechanics are relegated to, say, an Esuna-able Doom, which is far from engaging, imo. The first hasn't made much sense to me, and the second seems simply a matter of degree rather than type.

[Supersnow845]

Asking for any role to do less DPS will never be something people would embrace willingly. Also, would that not go against what Healers want, healing? I often read that Healers don't want to DPS, its why they play healer. Then why advocate for making Healer DPS even more mandatory than it already is?

Instead of forcing a higher/different DPS discrepancy, it would be better if the game actually brings in unique Healer mechanics that cannot be resolved by other roles. Make overhealing do something (like fill a boss debuff bar, that bursts into a short stun, idk) or bring in burst heal checks that require dedicated healer healspells.

And no, I have no idea what else those mechanics could be. I am not a Game Designer, after all. That would be something to figure out for Square Enix.

We are at this point because square won’t implement these things, how long do you think healers have been begging for a semblance of gameplay

We have no damage rotation, we do the least damage WHILE also being the most punished for others mistakes (remember we when a flawless party could allow a healer to eek our more damage than the tanks. Now the tanks who couldn’t care less about anyone do more damage by built in potency), our healing is done by the other roles and our complaints are constantly ignored

If you think having your damage nerfed because tanks have no need to care about the party with respect with their DPS how do you think healers feel, we’ve been nerfed every single expansion since SB. We are players as well, when do our concerns get precedence over the people who want tanks to do the healers role for them

Something has to give somewhere and healers have nothing left to give. Does anyone consider the fact that healers never agreed to be nerfed relative to tanks in EW and DT

[Carighan]

Asking for any role to do less DPS will never be something people would embrace willingly. Also, would that not go against what Healers want, healing? I often read that Healers don't want to DPS, its why they play healer. Then why advocate for making Healer DPS even more mandatory than it already is?

Yes, a far better solution would be, as I said in the previous post, to ensure that just like tanking and damage dealing, the encounter design (both in dungeons and in raids) ensures that the role of healing is required.

Because make no mistake: The raw potential healing output of healers is extremely high. If we actually spend GCDs on healing 100%, the output is a bit crazy. Far far far in excess of what tanks+DPS can provide. By an entire order of magnitude.

But this also hints at the problem: Fights deal an entire order of magnitude too little damage to both the group and the tank. This is why the healing healers could provide is so unnecessary, because no damage exists to use that healing on. I don't see SQEX changing their design approach sadly, but it would be the "correct" solution to just require more healing. Not something like "50% more raid damage" or even "double the damage to the tank". No, we're talking "every auto-attack also hit 2 random non-tank raid members for 30%-50% of their HP", "all raid fights now have a consistent 5% HP per 3s bleed on the entire raid", "apply a DoT to the tank that has to be Esuna'd every 9s seconds that lasts 60s and stacks", etc etc. Which would probably just annoy a lot of current players because of how disruptive a change it'd be. It would work, however. And be the "proper" solution to the dilemma.

Sadly, OP is also correct in stating that just swapping the damage output of tanks and healers - which btw makes no sense, both aren't DPS, so why isn't their damage roughly the same? - would be a workable bandaid solution. And knowing SQEX's approach to job design, it's rather likely that if they take this problem serious for 8.0, they'd do something like this.

[Erit]

How can you argue to stop continuing to push scaling too far in scope when we are in this mess entirely because tanks scaling in literally every conceivable sense has been so dramatically scaled that it’s actually pushing out another role

Tanks aren’t “successful” as you put it, they are literally just being given the healer roles responsibilities with no strings attached, that sort of balancing doesn’t help anyone

I too can present incoherent arguments resulting from a deliberate disuse of reading comprehension, but I'll spare you the example.

The problem of tanks having enough in-house healing to obviate the role of healer is not solved by turning tanks into healers and healers into DPS with party support. That is so bewilderingly ass-backwards it makes me wonder if you're only defending the notion as a gimmick.

The solution, one that I'd be in favor of if we assume a frictionless spherical cow, as it were, is for the tank jobs to not have as much in-house healing. In fact, I for one would approve of a return to the older style where the big challenge of tanking was managing aggro, and then every expansion would give more tools for that rather than a continual escalation of our damage rotation. But it's unlikely I'll live to see that world, because for that to work and be financially successful CBU3 would have to abandon the increasingly tattered pretense that they don't want there to be a "correct" way to play a given job and actually have content sit people down and say plainly "cook or get out of the kitchen." Which they're already kind of doing with the newer jobs, but that internal contradiction still makes me laugh when I think on it.

The reason tanks have so much healing and support kit is because it turns out a lot of "healer mains" are dullards who can't even press Cure II correctly while a lot of tanks are tryhards. If everyone who wanted to heal was forced to demonstrate they are not in fact a dullard—a threshold that is better determined by people smarter than I—before being allowed to inflict themselves on the duty finder, such that tanks no longer could set their watches by how often they've had to save a run with their own healing kit, chances are good we'd be in a much more interesting timeline. Do the same for every role while you're at it, hell every job if budget allows. It doesn't have to turn everybody into a tryhard, but everyone should have at least been made to go through the motions at least once and grasp the theory on how to do things properly.

This is a dichotomy failure birthed from the death of trust. DPS only fixes the issue if you deal so much damage that the enemy dies immediately after their first auto-attack, if not before. That is not going to happen, so something else needs to be done to solve this.

[Shurrikhan]

I too can present incoherent arguments resulting from a deliberate disuse of reading comprehension, but I'll spare you the example.

The problem of tanks having enough in-house healing to obviate the role of healer is not solved by turning tanks into healers and healers into DPS with party support. That is so bewilderingly ass-backwards it makes me wonder if you're only defending the notion as a gimmick.

Didn't you just say you'd spare the thread intentional disuse of reading comprehension?

No one suggested turning tanks into healers. The person you have quoted merely pointed out how they ALREADY frequently replace healers (because it's an rDPS gain at little to no added risk).

No, giving the role whose damage is actually hurt by doing their role a duly higher damage ceiling so that parties aren't so rewarded for replacing them would not make healers more interesting, but the OP didn't ask anything about that. It was instead, though more nicely worded, whether most tanks' egos would be too fragile to put the game's broader health ahead of feeding their own main character syndrome.

...I suspect we have the answer now.

[Erit]

Didn't you just say you'd spare the thread intentional disuse of reading comprehension?

I did. You have not.

No one suggested turning tanks into healers. The person you have quoted merely pointed out how they ALREADY frequently replace healers (because it's an rDPS gain at little to no added risk).

In advocating for the primary reason to bring healers to be that their DPS outstrips tanks, by reason of tanks having enough healing that healers are a DPS loss, you are advocating to lean on tank healing to the degree than healers do not need to be doing it and thus become DPS with a different icon color.

You are, by degrees, advocating to turn tanks into the healers and healers into DPS with party support.

You'll notice that it takes a very rigid party composition to completely obviate healers, as well. If a group has people that want to play literally anything but that composition, well, turns out you need at least one healer.

No, giving the role whose damage is actually hurt by doing their role a duly higher damage ceiling so that parties aren't so rewarded for replacing them would not make healers more interesting, but the OP didn't ask anything about that. It was instead, though more nicely worded, whether most tanks' egos would be too fragile to put the game's broader health ahead of feeding their own main character syndrome.

...I suspect we have the answer now.

Alternatively, and I know this is a wild proposition that you may find utterly incomprehensible, we stop using DPS as the only metric of worth and as a consequences see encounters designed with more in mind than how to best troll peoples' rotations as a difficulty measure. I haven't done Ultimate myself, but I have seen footage, and some of the mechanics in there would be genuinely amazing to see in normal content, albeit with the consequences for failure adjusted.

Because it turns out, punishing the people who are having fun simply because other people are not is the petty vengeance of the spiteful, and indulging in it as a design philosophy is fundamentally unable to lead to good outcomes. You want to fix healing? Fix it, by all means. But that means fixing healing, not souring the experience of another role. I'd be all for lessening the healing from tanks, or even outright removing most of it—Paladin can keep Clemency as a thematic nod—with the concession that healers be expected to know their stuff and execute upon it.