How would you *fix* battle content?

[Kirutsuki]

Hard disagree here....

I wouldn't say mitigation in of itself is a big issue. It's more-so the self heals.
It just makes healers feel unneeded for 90% of the games battle content. So there is a need to for an adjustment.
My brain goes to at the very least lowering how much self-heals each tank does to themselves.

Mitigation I would say is harder to change cause in alot of end-game content the fight itself would have to be adjusted also.
I think War and DRK have 5 mitigations, Pal has 7 and I think GNB has 4???

So while I think it might be true that these are needed in high end, there's nothing stopping from giving that one mitigation button to a healer job in form of a a shield.
So instead of WHM having 2 stacks of Divine Benison, it now has 3. And that mit button could be like a 2nd berserk or something.

But yea, mostly it's the self heals that just make things incredibly dull for healers. I would understand like one self heal that's on cooldown for those panic moments.
But 7, or 8?

[Alice_Rivers]

There are a few factors I can think of off the top of my head for normal mode:-
1: Tank-Healer balance doesn't exist, tanks are healers for all intents and purposes.
2: Tank mechanics don't exist, at all. They used to have to manage positioning but that's gone, enmity functionally doesn't exist, "busters" are a joke and so tanks become glorified striking dummies.
3: There's nothing interesting about mobs, they haven't mechanics to play out, they don't do damage, why do they exist?
4: Bosses aren't interesting either, just go to the safe spot, rinse and repeat. The two times they've broken from that model in DT they did so in the most annoying ways possible (Strayborough first boss and Yuweyawatta last boss) those aren't exactly interesting either (though I don't object to the return of Ruby Weapon, it could stand to be randomised with more variants) they're just annoying.

So what to do? Well lets start with tank/healer balance. Given M6S and other high end content that actually does place demands on tank kits and has been known to stress healers, I'm hesitant to hit tanks too hard but there is room for adjustments, does BW for example really need to heal for every enemy hit? No. It can top out at three, that's still 1200 potency per aoe GCD (4800 over the duration) then there's the question of does it need to be 400 potency per hit? If it came down to 300, 900 for aoe, 3600 over the duration is lower than healer single target GCD at least and then plays more like a mitigation than an actual heal. I would even be open to suggesting it should have different potencies for single and multi-target attacks so it could remain 400 potency per hit on single target GCD and do 300 on multi target ones that way it's functionally unaffected for raids. PLD's HS regen could be a 150/200 potency instead of being (in WHM terms) a regen plus aquaveil, consider that for a moment, one tank oGCD has the same value as a healer's full GCD PLUS an oGCD isn't that a bit much? I don't object generally to PLD having small heals here and there, they're supposed to be white magic practitioners after all. I'm sure similar tweaks can be made across the tank kits.

Tank mechanics too, starting with busters: Busters need to HURT, not "wups, you didn't mitigate so you lost 30% of your HP" but more like "you threw in a big mit? I guess I'll spare your life then" These are supposed to be threatening, they even have a threatening red animation, then healers would be needed to clean up lest tanks die after the buster. Positioning and enmity should be self explanatory, but as has been suggested in other threads by other people, giving bosses attacks against other players that need to be blocked/mitigated/prevented by the tank gives tanks something to think about during fights and helps justify their "self or party member" abilities. I imagine tank players could come up with more and better ways to add gameplay to tanks.

Making mobs an actual threat to the party would also help to address how bland dungeons are, a start to that would be to make them cooperate, if one type doles out vulns, another paralysis and a third type then does major damage suddenly there's the potential for the party to take major damage. Personally I'd remove their cast timers too, make even their most threatening attacks instant. Another way to handle this and combat the formulaic feel of dungeons is to actually integrate them into the story with sections relevant to the story they're part of. Stone Vigil Hard for example, has a story of Ishgard trying to reclaim the fort after your first clearing of it and it's gone wrong, the closest we get to integration of that story is the second boss fight. Why not have a section where you have to assist a group of Ishgardian soldiers fight their way out of the fort? You can even get better rewards for having more of them survive. Vanaspati too, you could have a section where you're protecting people from monsters or helping them evacuate...

[Alice_Rivers]

Further to my above thoughts, savage punishments being rubbish can also be traced back to tanks being unduly strong and a lack of imagination from the devs, if tanks weren't functionally immortal then having damage snowball with each failed mechanic would work and would allow for healer skill expression, this could be fixed in part by cutting down tank HP numbers in addition to adjusting their kits and then rebalancing tank exclusive damage down to account for it (or not of course, force more mit and healer play as long as tanks CAN survive any one given hit, it's okay with me) as far as people who say "you can't balance tanks around normal because jobs are balanced around ultimate" that's entirely true, and it should be that jobs and ultimate are balanced against eachother and that normal and extreme are balanced around jobs.

[ShadowyZero]

the further this thread goes you supposed healers have now lost the plot an your displaying entitlement to be lazy an just make everyone suffer with you cause you cant be arsed to pay attention or learn or cause you just want to hate on tanks cause your kits suck majorly an you are just bitter cause the devs have ignored you an you know what i can see why they ignore you now lol your just emotional children complaining just to make your ego's feel better lol its little wonder your movement collapsed too many entitled ego's in one room you essentially bite yourselves good job lol

[Alice_Rivers]

you cant be arsed to pay attention or learn

Pay attention to or learn what? To heal? What? What is there to heal? We did learn, that's the problem, we learned not to heal because that's what the game went out of it's way to teach us. You appear to have a problem with those of us who actually want to do our jobs, that is to heal, to have to pay attention.

[ShadowyZero]

Pay attention to or learn what? To heal? What? What is there to heal? We did learn, that's the problem, we learned not to heal because that's what the game went out of it's way to teach us. You appear to have a problem with those of us who actually want to do our jobs, that is to heal, to have to pay attention.

first it started with complaining about not being able to DPS then it turned to rage about not having a diverse kit, now healers are blaming other roles do you really not see the absurdity? this absolutely ludicrous lol its batshite insane when you start blaming other people an other roles/jobs you've lost the plot an you've demoralized what you were arguing for from the beginning an now people will not take this seriously cause people acting like this are pushing them away an those people would of supported your cause but by all means keep acting a fool let us know when that turns into results we'll be waiting to hear back from ya

[Alice_Rivers]

The only people I blame are the job/content design devs for either making my job irrelevant or worse giving my job to other roles and stripping away gameplay from the principle recipient of mine. It's not the fault of WAR players that it is the posterchild of healer irrelevance, though I do find their defence of it frustrating. That said, I have never once complained about not being able to dps or that I don't have a diverse kit, I have all the dps tools and healing tools I want, all I have ever advocated for is that I get to USE those tools. Further, per my posting history, I have historically been more than happy to adjust content rather than hammer tanks into the dirt.

I don't see why making an entire role a burden on the party is a good thing for anyone.

[ShadowyZero]

I am playing a multiplayer game and as such I expect multiplayer content and I'm in a party I expect teamwork to some degree.
And when I see a tank solo a boss, that tank just ripped all the fun out of my game experience and I certainly didn't learn anything from the actual boss fight cause I died to a mechanic I had never seen before.
And to get better I would have to experience the boss, but the tank just didn't let me do that either.

While I agree encounter design could be one way of approaching it, it still wouldn't fix the main issue of certain tanks just having too much.

i am glad you have been sensible in your replies thank you for that, i feel like if more talked out with points like this you could get thru to the right eyes and ears.

i do need to still counter argue you here an thats by saying that no is going to cater to you or anyone else for that matter it doesnt matter if this is multiplayer the other person or people in a group might not feel the same way that you do an thats the risk you take signing up for duties or joining random parties not everyone will do things the way you want them to do them. there is no harm in asking the tank if they could restart the fight but if they say no or say nothing back then you have the option to either leave an find some of your fc mates or friends to run it with you so you can do things how you want too or you can stay upset an mad over it an accomplish nothing.
let me preface by saying it can get absurd the amount of damage that i on a tank can sustain when in some situations not ALL of them should have been a death but this is not the fault of my job's kit or role but its the developers who designed the fights/encounters for making it that way. would i like to die more often when i play on tank ? yea of course as it would teach me what to do an watch out for or to ask a healer for some doctoring when such an event occurs it would make things more challenging too i hear this from the tank side that they get bored not dying sometimes or being challenged in some way

[MayuAmakura]

I think some of issue with battle content is that many things in this game don't matter at all. What this game needs (but will never be implemented):

- Make stats actually matter and gear progression different. Make armor count.
- Make that armor is not working if you are turning your back towards an enemy, thus taking full damage.
- Make aoe abilities a bit harder to land
- Turn off that stupid 2 min meta
- Make abilities have 1 second cooldown instead of 2.5 sec.

But someone said that console players would struggle with this. Specially with 1 second cd on abilities instead of 2.5.

[Connor]

Is there any point in threads like this anymore when literally everything is ‘too expensive’ for them now lol? (Sarcastic not literal). It costs them all their money just to colour those AoEs orange, guys!

We might get a new spicy AoE every 120s in 8.0 but ffxiv will literally never see the kind of drastic battle system changes it (frankly) needs at this point. So instead the gameplay is on a perfectly angled slope downwards…with zero friction (lol).

The game at this point is already so massively devoid of any actual substance that literally every other (mmo)RPG has. There’s:

- Very little diversity between jobs and playstyles
- substats that aren’t crit/direct hit may as well not exist
- MP bar exists despite having effectively no use for any job. The only thing it really acts as now is a Raise spam limiter. Why even bother keeping it if it’s going to be so entirely pointless that it barely even functions as a finite resource?
- No real buffs, debuffs, or otherwise creative/unconventional abilities. Every ‘non-attack’ in the game has the exact same (120s) cooldown, does effectively the exact same thing ‘increase damage dealt by target by %’, and could activate entirely automatically and literally nothing about the gameplay would change. And the ‘defensive’ stuff is either absolutely useless like Warden’s Paean or a fully channelled Improvisation. Why have the abilities exist if they’re going to be literally useless 99% of the time? Collective Unconscious is the exact same; why tf is it still a channel when the one thing you can’t do is channel it because of the dps loss. And ‘you use it when the boss literally disappears’ is poor justification for any ability lol.
- Healer role that’s barely existent and largely non-functional
- Tank design combined with lazy encounter design allows them to just entirely do the healer’s job for them.
- (Maybe Debatable) throwing jobs into the trash heap every time the next expansion drops and focusing the entirety of their focus on those new jobs, then doing the remainder as an afterthought. That’s how it feels anyway lol.

I can think of a million more but like there’s literally 10000 things they need to ‘fix’ for the battle system to become actually enjoyable again and not ‘just bearable’ lol. But with how frankly awful their response has been to player feedback time and time and time again, I have absolutely no goodwill left to give them anymore.