Would you consider greedy DPS Mechanics on Tanks/Healers good or bad?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

The only time I semi-regularly see Pacification happens is when ST Amon summons first set of slimes that he'll detonate should any of reach him. First set gives pacification, while the second set gives silence. They happen less IMHO because how squishy these slimes are and clueless DF'er mostly consist of two type of players that contributes to the mechanic resolution: player that attack anything close to them, and the player who attacks anything that moves.

The silence from WoD 5-headed dragon on the other hand usually happens more often because while people know to spot and kill anything that moves, there are lesser who knew how to prevent the next set of slimes to spawn & join together creating larger un-killable slime (by standing on top of the poison puddle until they disappear, presumably this is why we get poison resistance buff should we kill the first slime that spawns).

Back to pacification... ah yeah uhh, I guess PotD trap? lmao. Either way I agree they're 'forgotten' in essence...

[dspguy]

Personally I'm okay with them but there is an overemphasis on damage in this game that bugs me. I'd also like to see more randomized mechanics that force downtime on random players so that outputting damage isn't the end all be all of the game. We need to find a way to diversify gameplay so that people can't obsess over their score on a third party site.

That right there sums up much of my problem with the game. There is no way to get around "DPS above all" as long as bosses have enrage timers. Personally, I think enrage timers should go away. If you survive the mechanics, just loop them around. It would remove the need for jobs to be so balanced - which means that no one gets real utility.

To be fair, they've removed much of the need for utility entirely. There was a time when physical DPS would run out of TP or healers would run out of MP. There were jobs that could rectify that - BRD, if I recall, had TP, HP and MP songs. And AST had a card that could also regen TP or MP. I'm not saying those were the best abilities, but with removing TP and making it almost impossible to run out of MP (not counting rezzes), there's no need for that sort of utility.

Every fight has one goal - beat the boss before an arbitrary timer. As long as that remains, we can't expect much to change.

And we won't see randomized mechanics because of the aforementioned enrage timers. And the few battles that have a "this or that" mechanic isn't the randomization that I think some people might be talking about. Some fights are scripted as:

Mechanic A -> B -> C or D -> E -> F -> unused C or D -> G -> Enrage

I'd like to see bosses with G->A->C->G->F->A->C Maybe you don't even see D or E. Maybe you see Mechanic G 5 times.

[Ath192]

That right there sums up much of my problem with the game. There is no way to get around "DPS above all" as long as bosses have enrage timers. Personally, I think enrage timers should go away. If you survive the mechanics, just loop them around. It would remove the need for jobs to be so balanced - which means that no one gets real utility.

To be fair, they've removed much of the need for utility entirely. There was a time when physical DPS would run out of TP or healers would run out of MP. There were jobs that could rectify that - BRD, if I recall, had TP, HP and MP songs. And AST had a card that could also regen TP or MP. I'm not saying those were the best abilities, but with removing TP and making it almost impossible to run out of MP (not counting rezzes), there's no need for that sort of utility.

Every fight has one goal - beat the boss before an arbitrary timer. As long as that remains, we can't expect much to change.

And we won't see randomized mechanics because of the aforementioned enrage timers. And the few battles that have a "this or that" mechanic isn't the randomization that I think some people might be talking about. Some fights are scripted as:

Mechanic A -> B -> C or D -> E -> F -> unused C or D -> G -> Enrage

I'd like to see bosses with G->A->C->G->F->A->C Maybe you don't even see D or E. Maybe you see Mechanic G 5 times.

Yeah I'm a big proponent of making RNG battles where a boss may have a set of 15-20 mechanics but only executes 9 or 10 of them in a relatively random order. It would make for a fresher design. At least for easier fights, once you get to ultimates it would exponentially increase the prog time. Perhaps the same mechanics always play out but in a random order within each phase.

yeah the damage being everything is an extremely complicated problem. The issue is again ultimates, they are designed to test your skill and well quite frankly executing your rotation to perfection is that skill. So if you remove enrage timers then all of sudden you are allowed to make mistakes, which shouldn't be allowed to happen too much in an ultimate.

But if one single ultimate has a tight enrage timer, then all jobs have to be balanced to be viable, thus landing us in the same predicament, unless SE finally decides not all jobs are viable for ultimates and all other content gets enrages removed so all jobs are viable. In order to make up for this easing of difficulty in savage without enrage timers they could probably increase the frequency and complexity of mechanics.

At the end of the day they have to do something, because even if their combat "experiments" like we've speculated here turn out to be terrible, its better to take that risk than leaving us permanently bored like we are now.

[Aravell]

They didn't get rid of MP while keeping TP for any reasons specific to MP or TP themselves. They simply combined Gamewide-Gauge #1 and Gamewide-Gauge #2 into one thing and essentially removed resource concerns from all non-rez-capable classes, with the caveat that, because they're in the same role as Raise-capable classes, certain non-Raise-capable casters will also have to hit a bloat-button on CD (Lucid).

I'm pretty sure that they removed TP as part of their crusade against anything in the game that could cause friction between players.

You can fully manage your own MP all by yourself, Mana Shift helps but isn't normally needed. Meanwhile, you cannot manage your own TP entirely by yourself. Invigorate isn't enough to plug the drain, you need Goad to continue functioning, it would be like if every caster was big MP negative and Lucid Dreaming is changed into something you use on other people, so you need other people to manage your MP so that you can play the game.

That right there sums up much of my problem with the game. There is no way to get around "DPS above all" as long as bosses have enrage timers. Personally, I think enrage timers should go away. If you survive the mechanics, just loop them around.

If you do that, how exactly would they stop you from infinitely raising people and just zombie through all forms of content no matter the difficulty?

If enrage doesn't exist, the only way to slow down or halt progress would be to stuff harder content (extreme and above) with more and more instant wipe body checks.

[Shougun]

I think enrage prevents silly strats, but that isn't the worst thing, I think most important element is that it ensures the DD role is needed (dps checks in general). Otherwise you would probably see even more all tank or mostly tanks and a healer comps. No enrage and a boss that can self heal though, that's uh... Pretty bad combo lol.

[Mikey_R]

@ Mikey: That said, Mana Shift came at cost to one's own MP and used a % of current MP instantly, while Goad had no cost and gave a flat amount over time. Goad was therefore on paper --and often enough in practice-- far simpler/foolproofed an ability. I can see why one would prefer the design of Mana Shift over Goad.

Whilst i did not explicitly mention it, I did kind of elude to the fact when I asked about why BLM was named specifically as being the one Mana Shift was fun with and not the other casters, basically coming down to BLM having infinite MP and SMN and RDM already being MP negative, so why cut into that further with Mana Shift.

There is an argument there that you could use BRD/MCH MP refreshes, but couldn't you then just use the refresh to restore the MP directly from that. There is also a case there where, you can gain the benefit of both Mana Shift and MP refresh, but did anyone need that much MP restoration? If people are dying that frequently, you would probably wipe eventually anyway, just due to attrition.

So, whilst in general yes, there is a cost, in the scenario of the BLM using it, there is no cost.

[Valence]

I think enrage prevents silly strats, but that isn't the worst thing, I think most important element is that it ensures the DD role is needed (dps checks in general). Otherwise you would probably see even more all tank or mostly tanks and a healer comps. No enrage and a boss that can self heal though, that's uh... Pretty bad combo lol.

There is something they used to do a lot more before which was adds to burn down as a DPS check, and sometimes not just trivial stuff. O7S for example comes to mind not only with the pentagram adds (if you fuck up but want to recover) but also with the little planes tethered to DPS, but that's an example among many.

[Rithy255]

Friction and risk vs reward is always a good thing.

Healers & Tanks really do not have "risk vs reward" anymore, Healers can heal and do damage at the same time so theirs no risk in actually "fitting extra damage in over healing" similar with tanks where tanks don't really stance between dps/tanking, nor do your defensives serve much purpose outside "press when funny tank buster".

When you look at it it's actually why the healers and tanks feel so boring in the first place, they've got all these skills that aren't dps related that take up space but have the same use case, Tanks do not need serval defences all on long cooldowns, Healers do not need tons of OGCD heals, a few of these skills are fine but when it takes up a lot of your room your going to lack in the DPS department.

At the moment not only do tanks & healers lack "greed skills" but they also just are lacking in interesting dps kits in general, I think the "solution" would to be to introduce a little bit of friction and more damage related skills, doesn't need to be tons I don't think we need to revert to old versions of job design but jobs do need to start actually having unique interesting things to manage a bit more often, even if that's just more dps skills such as combo paths on tanks or extra dots, procs ect, to manage on a healer.

[technole]

I bring Silence up because it is commonly seen in World of Darkness, specifically the Slime adds for the Five-Headed Dragon will cast a raid-wide Silence if they aren't killed fast enough, every time it happens and I am on a Healer or a Caster, it's just "Cool, cool, I guess I am not doing anything for the next 10 seconds...", it's not a big deal by any stretch, it's just annoying, and there is very little you can do to prevent it other than targeting the Slimes and hoping enough people also do it.

The only time I miss the silence on the CoD add is when I die as a tank, but that's likely because healer died on the platform, whom probably got gazed by red DPS being selfish. The chain reaction of being greedy, along with no ranged silence being available on that side. You do this fight enough you know what mechanics align to every gaze expiration and when to look away. 1 minute? Oh that's going to be right after the donut/cross aoe.

[dspguy]

If you do that, how exactly would they stop you from infinitely raising people and just zombie through all forms of content no matter the difficulty?
If enrage doesn't exist, the only way to slow down or halt progress would be to stuff harder content (extreme and above) with more and more instant wipe body checks.

Put a rez limit on players per battle. Put in a mechanic where if you have rez sickness at that time, you aren't rezzable again for the rest of the battle. The idea is if you can survive the mechanics (individually), then there shouldn't be this arbitrary timer that dictates when the battle ends. Honestly, enrage timers are an absurd notion anyway. Some dragon is just going to decide "yeah, 9 min and 37 seconds is long enough for me - I'll just use this insta-wipe ability now. But not before that."

There are many possible solutions. If necessary, keep enrage timers on Ultimates just so people can feel special about it.