#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Alice_Rivers]

Would healer mains be happy if you gave healers the same damage output as tanks?

My "wild" take is give healers and tanks the same damage (though give healers more dps buttons), while increasing their mitigation skills while reducing tanks stacked mitigations and even nerfing the passive mitigation on tanks if possible.

Maybe then healers can clear with no tanks and we go full circle to a tank strike! But I like tanks and healers both having strong support options, I don't really just want to nerf tank support abilities and call it a day personally.

I think some healers might be happy if we did the same damage as tanks. However, as was eventually agreed (by most) in the tank forum thread 1 and thread 2, just nerfing tank sustain is not the answer. I hold, per statements in those threads, that reducing tank sustain is part of the solution in that tanks should die when unsupported by a healer but that a bigger part of the solution is to make NPC damage output actually valid. I've done enough duties to see tanks steamroll everything in their path, in EW I've actively challenged a WAR main friend of mine to heal the entire party for me and they can which is insane and completely beyond the purview of tanks in my view. I've also had the reverse, where tanks pull W2W with no mits and sometimes missing entire gear slots and I have to tank by proxy, is that satisfying? Does it come with a sense of achievement? Hell yes! Should it be a thing? No. Content should put out enough damage to justify both tank and healer kits, we were told that in DT that was going to be a thing, alas, we have been lied to again.

Some of the most fun I have in this game is in Stone Vigil and Pharos Sirius, Bardam's mettle and Doma Castle also have their moments, because they do allow tanks to pull more than their kits alone can handle and healers then actually have to heal and it's great. I want to see NPCs actually be a threat to tanks, I wanna see trash mobs have vulns and stuff again so tanks (and healers) can't just stand in the middle of the pack and shrug everything off, I wanna see tank busters have another 50-100% damage on top of what they do now, maybe up to 200% make tanks mit for them or die and make them a real concern for healers in the process. I know some people will say "Oh WoW healing" I don't know if I want WoW healing, I've never played it, but I do want my dps filler to be a filler and a reward again for being good at healing, not for healing to be my reward for the tank being incompetent.

[Rithy255]

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I'll give my view on where I want tanks and healers which maybe vastly different from the norm, because I unironically play tanks because I enjoy supporting my team in more ways that aren't just "press mitigation button and aggro boss" (though I'll admit its fun to have aggro and feel like the "main character" its not why I in particular play tank), I do know the common response will be "so why not play healer then?" this is mostly because none of the healers are melee and don't really appeal to me, with ff14's design I doubt they will ever make a healer role that appeals to me.

But the way I see it is I want Tanks and healers largely to fill that "Support" role, Not to say tanks or healers should just replace one another but I think some cross over in mitigation, healing ect. Is healthy, I just think currently tanks are too good at mitigation that they don't really need any help from healers, I'd honestly remove skills like Rampart, weaken guardian ect. In trade for strong mitigative abilities for skills like aquaveil ect, giving healers more to do in terms of damage and having a pretty much equal damage level to tanks.

Theirs some cases where self healing tools need to be toned down, I'll point out warrior takes this too far pretty much every cooldown it has, has a heal attached to it, which is fine if its one or two skills but not when its warriors entire defensive kit, even holy blades healing on paladin could be removed/weaker, but at the same time when I'm tank i really enjoy contributing to my team by using cooldowns such as passage, veil, intervention to save a ally or give the MT a regen and mit, I think it would be a shame to remove these aspects I like about tanks.

I guess I'm unironically advocating for Tanks and healers to be more closer in design, but I think actually making tanks more weaker at tanking and self survivability but still decent at supporting would give healers more to heal and mitigate in all forms of content.

Last thing is I don't think healers would be as upset about this clear 4 tanks 4 dps, if healers could also do it with 4 healers 4 dps. Maybe I'm wrong on that though.

[ForsakenRoe]

Last thing is I don't think healers would be as upset about this clear 4 tanks 4 dps, if healers could also do it with 4 healers 4 dps. Maybe I'm wrong on that though.

Personally, I would be upset about such a thing occuring. Tanks should be required to survive the Tankbusters. Healers should be required to keep the party's HP above zero. DPS should be required to have enough damage contribution from the party to beat the fight in time. All three roles should be as required as one another IMO

As for the Tank stuff, I've been thinking for a while about Critical Hits vs Tanks. Back in HW/SB, attacks could crit us. In fact, in those older contents, they still can. You can see this with certain 'guaranteed to Crit' attacks like Diabolos Hollow, or TBs like Shinryu EX's Tera Slash. We had a tool to prevent Crits from getting us, Awareness, but it had a pretty long CD. It especially harmed PLD, because the game checks to see if the attack is a Crit before it checks if it's Blocked, so a Crit would pierce Sheltron. It also wasn't great for WAR with their Raw Intuition (guaranteed parry from front), but that was a much longer CD

So I thought a while back, what if we had an additional effect added to Barriers, wherein 'if you have a Barrier applied, the attack cannot Crit'? The more I think about it, the more interesting the idea seems to me. SCH and SGE would be able to negate the crit using Adloquium/E.Diagnosis, and WHM/AST have Benison/Celestial Intersection on pretty short CDs, giving all of the Healers a way to quickly handle negating the Crit. Additionally, because WHM/AST's tool is not only 'available pretty often' but also an OGCD, it makes their 'Crit Negation' tool more valuable compared to using an Adlo/E.Diag, thereby giving Pure Healers a niche where they excel over Barrier Healers (a bit ironic, since it's Barrier related), which helps to prevent SCH/SGE being so strong a comp

IDK, I think that 'removing problem entirely' isn't always the best solution. Rather than removing the problem entirely (Crit autoattacks hurt), I think it feels better sometimes to have the problem, but give the players the tools to overcome the problem. Crit Autoattacks hurt, and Crit Tankbusters do a ton of damage. But if the player can use something to 'outplay the developers', eg by using a Benison to block and negate the Critical aspect of the hit, it feels much more satisfying to the player, than the developers simply saying 'ok it's not a Crit anymore'