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

[EponaTBHSMH]

There was an expansion or a savage tier where WHM could outdamage tanks and other healers were really close to tanks in damage, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it was Shadowbringers? Did it really change anything back then?

[Supersnow845]

There was an expansion or a savage tier where WHM could outdamage tanks and other healers were really close to tanks in damage, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it was Shadowbringers? Did it really change anything back then?

Tanks and healers were about equal in damage all through ShB. A good healer in a good party would likely beat the tank by like 5% but in a PF group a tank would usually do about 10% more than a healer

[Carighan]

It's weird that they changed that. And I mean, it makes sense, tanks have 5-7 tanking tools but rarely require them outside of specific, designed, designated, fight moments (like tankbusters and AoEs and so on). The other 10-15 abilities can be damage rotation abilities.

But similarly, healers got an even larger repertoire of healing tools, usually 10-12, and yet only need them in equally or even more rare situations in raids. And again, specifically designated. And since their hotbars are already filled with healing abilities they do not need, they only get 2-3 damage abilities (Sage excepted, who has barely more).

It's weird. And I don't like not healing as my healer, I'd rather get more healing to do than get a ton of damage abilities though 1-2 extra would be nice. But I also do not like not tanking as my tank. I ought to have to actively fight for emnity while constantly worrying about reducing incoming damage to stay healable. Like, my gameplay should be about tanking, not dealing damage, that ought to be the filler I do in-between, and hence naturally the minority of what I do.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Given the epidemic of healers that do no healing. Increasing the damage would simply give an excuse for them to not to their job even more.

The epidemic is caused by SE doing their best to drive people who like playing more supporting roles out of the Healer role, leaving more people who go with Healer for lower wait times.

A combination of giving them more to do and better tools to use in their downtime would bring people back into the role... But SE's solution seem to exclusively be to make them more redundant as they cater to the people who just want Healer queues instead of healers.

[Supersnow845]

The epidemic is caused by SE doing their best to drive people who like playing more supporting roles out of the Healer role, leaving more people who go with Healer for lower wait times.

A combination of giving them more to do and better tools to use in their downtime would bring people back into the role... But SE's solution seem to exclusively be to make them more redundant as they cater to the people who just want Healer queues instead of healers.

To be fair I don’t blame people who tune out and spam glare in daily’s. It is 100% what the games tank balance teaches players to do

You can’t make a role unless at their primary job for 6 years then get surprised when the average player of said job can’t do that role properly

[Shurrikhan]

A combination of giving them more to do and better tools to use in their downtime would bring people back into the role... But SE's solution seem to exclusively be to make them more redundant as they cater to the people who just want Healer queues instead of healers.

Aye, it's one of those cases of a path forward being pretty straight forward, and yet utterly refused.

(So, those discussing broader game health, there's this idea I heard from somewhere else that I'm not a fan of but before even discussing its merits, I have to ask... would tanks completely lose their shit if some 5% of their damage were given instead to healers so that it's not an outright rDPS gain to replace healers with yet more tanks?)

I am obliged by both self-interest and common conscience to reply with "unask the question," because the foundational premise is faulty.

Which premise? That tanks are increasingly replacing healers because the devs refuse to give enough outgoing damage and insist on giving enough total sustain to tanks that healers are increasingly a redundant lower-rDPS inferior alternative to just taking more tanks? That balance at this point has more to do with tip-toeing around egos than taking simpler, more direct solutions for the game's broader health? That making it less rewarding to get rid of healers still won't be a sufficient solution (but not one mutually exclusive with any other change, either)? Which?

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

Role A, which already provided greater unique and general value than Role B takes further of the unique and general of Role B. Role B wanting it back either part they had before (rDPS or the unique ability to meet healing checks) is "petty vengeance of the spiteful". Noted.

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

Mate, we can't have decent breadth or challenge outside of Extremes, Savage, and Ultimate specifically because of the imbalances that are far, far larger outside of those pieces of content, not because of what little content hasn't been problematic. Nor does the difference in balance between, say, dungeons and Savage have anything tf to do with open world's map sizes, in spirit or otherwise.

More prudent to balance the minoritarian content with reference to the entirety of the game

By all means then, balance Ultimate "with reference" FATEs, dungeons, MSQ scenarios, or whatever the hell "the entirety of the game" is supposed to be as it would somehow pertain to balance despite disparate content types. What do you honestly expect will come of that? Concretely, what is the imagined benefit? And why do you honestly think it would, if "balanced" in that manner, occur as imagined?

I'm all for more job flavor, but (A) let's not pretend that someone else wanting your favorite job to be only as valuable as any other in their favorite content type is some sort of vindictiveness or that (B) the difficult content is necessarily as accepting of imbalances as purposely content easy. In both cases, decent balance is a requirement for the content type's potential to provide an engaging space for all jobs, not something opposed to that engagement, as the "flavor" otherwise instead becomes variance merely in viability. That's true for both jobs within the same role and those roles as taken against each other.

[GoatOfWar]

There was an expansion or a savage tier where WHM could outdamage tanks and other healers were really close to tanks in damage, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it was Shadowbringers? Did it really change anything back then?

In Shb they basically did the same.
I think something they could do is give all the healers some party buffs to where their Rdps matches the tanks in their Adps.
Which is baaaasically how it worked in SHB with the exception for whm obviously. We didn't have Sage yet.
I think it might be time they go back to this design. Healers being good at Rdps and tanks being good at Adps- requiring those buffs they bring. The tanks would inadvertedly do less damage than healers, if there were no healers. Making 0 healer comps suboptimal (which is the goal)
The problem is how do you accomplish this without further homogenising the healers and leaving any healers out?
I am personally kinda okay if Sage was the personal dps healer, if it had a more complicated dps rotation, and i guess i'd give white mage a single target buff akin to eye of the Dragoon. (Rest in peace)

[Alice_Rivers]

In Shb they basically did the same.
I think something they could do is give all the healers some party buffs to where their Rdps matches the tanks in their Adps.
Which is baaaasically how it worked in SHB with the exception for whm obviously. We didn't have Sage yet.
I think it might be time they go back to this design. Healers being good at Rdps and tanks being good at Adps- requiring those buffs they bring. The tanks would inadvertedly do less damage than healers, if there were no healers. Making 0 healer comps suboptimal (which is the goal)
The problem is how do you accomplish this without further homogenising the healers and leaving any healers out?

You would have to seriously buff healers raid buffs beyond those of actual dps which I think most would call unreasonable. Even I think it unreasonable, dps jobs are supposed to be dps specialists, the only healer that has any business competing with dps dps buffs is SCH given it's tactician lore. It's a bit of a stretch for WHM to give some kind of 'Blessing of the Elementals' but it shouldn't be at the level of competing with the dps buffs of a dps job and it's not going to outweigh taking an actual dps or even a tank if it doesn't.

Now, if they make healers do tank dps, then you get AST and SCH in the viable compositions on account of their party buffs but that doesn't help WHM and SGE who really should do better personal dps on the grounds of not having party buffs and that should be fine because it gives some limited individuality in the healer role.

[GoatOfWar]

You would have to seriously buff healers raid buffs beyond those of actual dps which I think most would call unreasonable. Even I think it unreasonable, dps jobs are supposed to be dps specialists, the only healer that has any business competing with dps dps buffs is SCH given it's tactician lore. It's a bit of a stretch for WHM to give some kind of 'Blessing of the Elementals' but it shouldn't be at the level of competing with the dps buffs of a dps job and it's not going to outweigh taking an actual dps or even a tank if it doesn't.

Now, if they make healers do tank dps, then you get AST and SCH in the viable compositions on account of their party buffs but that doesn't help WHM and SGE who really should do better personal dps on the grounds of not having party buffs and that should be fine because it gives some limited individuality in the healer role.

But the healer buffs are already better than, or equal to half the dps job buffs?
I'm not really sure why this is a point of contention for you. It worked perfectly fine in Shb.
Healers had lower personal dps than tanks (the stat that matters more anyways) but their Rdps which includes buffs were necessarily higher. Without the healers, your composition would do less damage than you would if you had them.
This was largely why Whm was so hard to balance though. Team effort vs personal dps is hard to balance. The team has to play into a burst so it wouldn't really be fair if a healer would do the same without having that element of cooperation.

That is not to say Whm can't have it's personal dps increased.
But some degree of teamplay should be required i think. And as i already proposed, an Eye of the Dragoon esque buff would work perfectly. ''Blessing of the wind'' Or whatever, increasing haste perhaps.
Alternatively, you could have a more complex dps rotation that plays into the burst like the tanks currently do. Where most of your damage profile is in your burst.
I'm just not sure if that fits the Whm job identity tbh.

[Alice_Rivers]

I think they're about as good in percentage terms but vastly inferior when you account for the dps that a dps job contributes vs a healer, then it climbs exponentially as you stack party buffs from other dps. I don't think it's a bad thing though to have a difference between 60/120 second spike jobs and sustain jobs, tanks and healers make sense to be sustain jobs.

If we want to go down the route of healers as a broader support role, which I could possibly get behind as an evolution in the modern FF14 design direction, that could work. Having more buffs/debuffs/area effects and such but then bosses would have to be vulnerable to those things.