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

[Shurrikhan]

I mean, when we say "more damage" we generally just mean total contribution, no? I don't think we particularly care, in terms of metrics, whether it's from giving buffs (rDPS), exploiting buffs (aDPS), or both (cDPS).

Or rather, if someone wants to get through solo content faster as a healer (odd pick, but /shrug), then they'll prefer less come from rDPS and more come from nDPS (base damage), but that's about it.

[GoatOfWar]

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.

That is the idea, yeah.
But if you don't want Whm to fall behind you're going to kinda have to choose between a bit more complex, burst oriented rotation or for there to be an element of cooperation.
I personally think Whm should have a single target buff that it shares like Eye of the Dragoon used to work. It would be different from the existing raid buffs. But it would also buff your own dps periodically.
I think if any healer is going to be the selfish dps it should *probably* be Sage but i have no idea what they should do with the job at this point. I'd completely overhaul the job from the ground up and give it a tank-like dps rotation with some twist. They've always had trouble balancing between Rdps/Adps jobs within roles though so ehhh... I guess i don't see it happen.

[Aravell]

One problem I see with funnelling most of a healer's damage into buffs is that it doesn't fix them being absolutely insufferable to play through solo content on (basically the entire MSQ).

Personally, I'd want to see all healers do at least decent damage on their own and the buffers can have their damage supplemented by buffs while the ones without buffs can just have slightly higher direct throughput so it more or less evens out between them both.

[Carighan]

One problem I see with funnelling most of a healer's damage into buffs is that it doesn't fix them being absolutely insufferable to play through solo content on (basically the entire MSQ).

Yeah but I would not want this to be a hindrance to better job design. Since this is an MMORPG, I'd rather have jobs working well in groups and raids first, and then worry about how to prop the designs used for that up for a possible solo experience.

[Supersnow845]

Mages Ballard is the closest buff to what’s being proposed of a long semi permanent buff (being 1% damage up), it’s up 1/3rd of the fight and on average provides about 400 DPS. Mages is not the burst song so accounting for the burst a 100% uptime mages Ballard would provide about 1400 DPS

Right now tanks are about 3000 DPS ahead of healers so this theoretical “always up” buff would only really need to be 2-2.5% to realise the roles

It’s not a particularly interesting solution but it’s not really that outlandish, it not like healer would be providing permanent 20% up buffs

[Wayfinder3]

it doesn't really matter which role does more damage. Tanks don't NEED to do more damage than healers to pull their weight. that said, if the only reason to make this change comes from something less than one percent of the community actually does. Thats really not a good or smart idea. Personally, i kind of think every job by this point should just do the same damage with the role variance being the only thing that should be adhered to. 2 tanks 2 healers 1 melee 1 ranged 1 caster. so long as thats represented, the last slot should be reserved for a dps. i don't care if red mage and black mage do the same damage because at the end of the day, why does it matter. the raise doesn't matter, play what you want. I've kind of given up on the idea that the devs will ever balance ranged and melee properly vs utility and this extends to tanks and healers too. so they should go nuclear and make everything do roughly the same damage and then black mages crying that the other casters have utiltiy can just slot in in the 4th slot with any of the other casters and call it a day. bring double ranged if you want, who cares....

[Aravell]

I don't know what other people's arguments are, but for my part, I'd argue that healers doing more damage than tanks makes perfect sense mathematically.

Healers take a damage loss during prog where they may have to cast their basic GCD AoE heals, or maybe the tanks aren't mitigating properly and the healer has to cast GCD heals to keep them alive. Every GCD spent on topping people up is a loss of over 200 potency for every healer.

Meanwhile, tanks don't take any damage loss when doing their job. They can press Rampart and not lose damage, they press Divine Veil and they don't lose damage, they press Oblation and, oh look, no damage loss. The only time the tank would lose damage is when things are going so wrong that the PLD has to use Clemency.

With that all laid out, what possible reasoning is there for a role that can do maximum potency output in any given situation to just arbitrarily do so much more damage than a role that cops a heavy damage loss when they need to fulfill their main function?

[Carighan]

I don't know what other people's arguments are, but for my part, I'd argue that healers doing more damage than tanks makes perfect sense mathematically.

I would argue that since they're both non-damage jobs, their damage should probably be equal.

But you're right, now that I think more about it, that in a vacuum, healer damage should be higher. After all, they lose a non-trivial portion of their damage uptime to reactionary gameplay, namely, well, healing. Meanwhile tanking is baked into the damage rotation via resource generation for tanking skills that are exclusively oGCDs (Shield Bash on Paladins for dungeons being the sole exception actually >.>) or via direct health generation from using skills. Emnity is automated or on oGCDs. So yeah it'd make sense if healer damage output were in theory 20%-25% higher to account for the less effective ability to deal that damage in a fight. But both should roughly come out the same in actual damage done, as neither is a DPS job.

[Ayan_Calvesse]

it doesn't really matter which role does more damage. Tanks don't NEED to do more damage than healers to pull their weight. that said, if the only reason to make this change comes from something less than one percent of the community actually does. Thats really not a good or smart idea. Personally, i kind of think every job by this point should just do the same damage with the role variance being the only thing that should be adhered to. 2 tanks 2 healers 1 melee 1 ranged 1 caster. so long as thats represented, the last slot should be reserved for a dps. i don't care if red mage and black mage do the same damage because at the end of the day, why does it matter. the raise doesn't matter, play what you want. I've kind of given up on the idea that the devs will ever balance ranged and melee properly vs utility and this extends to tanks and healers too. so they should go nuclear and make everything do roughly the same damage and then black mages crying that the other casters have utiltiy can just slot in in the 4th slot with any of the other casters and call it a day. bring double ranged if you want, who cares....

Strongly disagree - if all classes do the same damage then you will see a strong skew toward a "meta" which once known will just cast out any other class and ultimately result in further class homogenization and saying the raise doesn't matter really seems at risk of sounding rude a naïve assumption; further the logic of tanks doing more damage then healers I feel is largely because of the fact that the only reason OT's are required in groups is due to tank swap mechanics; if a OT is not needed for a tank swap then they are essentially a filler dps whereas "most" groups in high end content are not getting by with only 1 healer so both are constantly doing something.

[Ayan_Calvesse]

I would argue that since they're both non-damage jobs, their damage should probably be equal.

But you're right, now that I think more about it, that in a vacuum, healer damage should be higher. After all, they lose a non-trivial portion of their damage uptime to reactionary gameplay, namely, well, healing. Meanwhile tanking is baked into the damage rotation via resource generation for tanking skills that are exclusively oGCDs (Shield Bash on Paladins for dungeons being the sole exception actually >.>) or via direct health generation from using skills. Emnity is automated or on oGCDs. So yeah it'd make sense if healer damage output were in theory 20%-25% higher to account for the less effective ability to deal that damage in a fight. But both should roughly come out the same in actual damage done, as neither is a DPS job.

I think that only works logically if you discount the impact that healing has on current fight design as many mechanics require both healers to be healing; by contrast most fights do not require most tanks to be constantly tanking and thus the function of the OT is largely minimal - which is my "theory" as to why tanks have higher DPS then healers to allow them to contribute to the fight in a significant fashion while they await the once in a few moment OT mechanic that is the only reason you bring them rather then another DPS to begin with.