Paladin: Reworking Niche Skills

[Rithy255]

Snip.

I think sure you can have war have cooldowns that strictly increase its health at a baseline to replace mitigations but it would be kinda just weird to have a tank that has 6 billion hp while the other tanks have Mitigation.

Let me be clear though I'm not opposed to warrior having more base HP, I think it should have a 20% Max health passive, while its mitigations are weaker (but still present in a form) so that it does have more of a separate identity without just insane HP increases to match the ever increasing Mitigation tanks have been getting.

I think Warrior having a Larger health pool at base and choosing between strong self heals or mitigation (such as old nascent vs old raw int) would actually make the tank more dynamic then having cooldowns that only serve the purpose to increase wars base health, as that pratically falls under the same use case as shields.

Warriors Base health being higher should in part serve as a way to make the mitigations less effective, Warrior could get away with having a weaker 20% and 40% if it were too, I do not think they should be replaced with exlusive hp gains, I also think If you add some defensive complexity in situational choices between Mitigation and self healing (This is why I like a Dark knight that could mitigate both magic/physical but it would be a choice and would depend on fight knowledge, similarily a warrior would have to mitigate, but require healing in high damage tank buster situations, but also could self heal through autos and handle themselves in some situations).

I think in order to have tanks be more unique they need stronger niches and differences in how their mitigation kits feel, You do need all tanks to compete at a baseline while doing this as you can't have one tank just be absolutely awful in a piece of content just because it can't mitigate a certain thing Example: Old PLD that couldn't block Magic mitigation, it felt awful (so I've heard anyway I didn't play in HW lol)

For me I think some similarities must exist, sure a Warrior with a mass amount of HP extension cooldowns could work I just don't think it would actually make the job anymore interesting, rather then having a active mitigation vs heal choice in your own kit; I also think tanks like PLD should become a strong support choice, DRK as I've said should switch between magic/physical, GNB can be a slightly higher dps maximiser job Ect. I think having more active instances where tanks should protect a party member and more rotational complexity alongside some more kit diversity is the direction to take tanks without making them feel awful to play.

A side note is I think role action cooldowns like Rampart, reprisal and even low blow should become job skills instead, even if they remain the same or very similar I think making these cooldowns look more unique would actually help a lot, I do hope they could add some small benefit, Lets say PLDs reprisal instead is a 60s CD 10s dur aoe mitigation on the party for 10% and increases healing by 5%, Drk gets reprisal (cuz it used to be its skill), that lasts for 15s instead of 10s, Warrior gets some intimidating Shout that maybe reduces enemy damage for 15-20% but is on a longer cooldown like 90s (so wacky and different) But you get the idea right? Role Actions serve no purpose is the main point, Even fundamental skills should have a unique animation depending on the job role actions will not make sense ever unless they have some level of customizability in a lot of cases it just looks odd rampart doesn't even look good on most tanks because it was designed as a PLD skill, same goes for reprisal.

[Mikey_R]

Exactly.

When a Gunbreaker presses a 40% mitigation to get +67% eHP and only need 60% of the normal amount of healing given their new eHP, that also gives the numbers for Warrior:
- Buff gives +67% max HP, starting as healed.
- Self-healing provides 40% of total healing needed given the new HP pool, so that healers have to cover the 60% as above.

It's not rocket science, and it's not like plenty games haven't provided self-healing based tanking, or even dodge tanking, or whatever.

If you have the defensive give HP rather than mitigation, you have to be aware of the fact that, once the buff runs out, it gets rid of the extra HP, which means you don't need to fully heal off the damage. That 40% healing from Warrior could be all that is needed, or means the healer only has to put in 10% of the healing to keep the Warrior topped up once the buff ends.

Whilst we can compare eHP values and make them equivalent, we also have to take into account what happens when the buff is used (which is just a self heal over max HP) and also when the buff disappears (current HP doesn't change, but max does).

In theory, you could change it so that the % of HP remaining with the buff is kept the same once the buff falls off, but I also suspect there will be other considerations to take into account.

[Shurrikhan]

I mean, "increases current and maximum HP" is just a barrier that's rechargeable instead of potentially nullifying a debuff (still depends on whether 0ing the damage would nullify it, which is case by case, and less common this side of EW's first expert dungeon [Smileton, I think it was called?]), but I don't think losing the excess at end of duration is that punishing as long as any normal barrier would have long since been fully drained anyways. It'd at worst be like a regular barrier against an attack whose debuff can't be nullified even if 0ed.

Compare TBN and ToB (WAR's Thrill of Battle)... if ToB had the same CD and same % of HP.

[theunhappypotato]

please leave paladin alone its fine as is

[Mikey_R]

I mean, "increases current and maximum HP" is just a barrier that's rechargeable instead of potentially nullifying a debuff (still depends on whether 0ing the damage would nullify it, which is case by case, and less common this side of EW's first expert dungeon [Smileton, I think it was called?]), but I don't think losing the excess at end of duration is that punishing as long as any normal barrier would have long since been fully drained anyways. It'd at worst be like a regular barrier against an attack whose debuff can't be nullified even if 0ed.

Compare TBN and ToB (WAR's Thrill of Battle)... if ToB had the same CD and same % of HP.

I might not have explained it too well, so I will try an illustrate it differently.

You have 2 tanks, one is mitigating damage, one will increase HP.

Assume they both start at 100K HP and take some damage, one mitigates by 20% and the other increases HP by 25% (which are equivalent eHP).

They take a hit of 50K. The tank that mitigates damage takes 40K and the other tank takes the full 50K, leaving the tanks at 60K and 75K respectively.

If we now want to heal the tanks to full, you have to heal the mitigation tank by 40K HP, however, you only need to heal the HP increase tank by 25K as, once the buff that increases HP wears off, the max HP of the tank goes back down to 100K and any extra healing over that amount during the buff is potentially wasted.

This is then important when you have a tank that can self heal. The tank heals some of the damage, which means they healer has to heal even less to keep the HP at 100% after the buff ends. If we go by what Carighan said, that the tank provides 40% of the healing of the new HP amount, the new HP amount in this example is 125K, which, 40% of that is 50K. Once the buff runs out, assuming you have used the extra healing, you will be topped off once the HP buff runs out. Even if the HP healed is relative to the base HP, that is still 40K and so, still fully heals the tank without healer intervention.

Of course, values can be tweaked but I do think it is important to highlight how everything interacts with everything else and how that can affect balance.

Just to comment on shields, the shield adds some HP, but once it is gone, it is gone, however, the max HP increase still has the extra buffer during the same buff time, if you heal into it.

[Valence]

Is this the good old discussion about mitigation vs HP increase on one hit on one hand, and mitigation vs HP increase on successive big hits?
Mitigation is king when it's about sustained damage that starts going over HP thresholds, this is why a ToB based tank will shine on sparse outbursts of incoming damage, but as soon as it drags on sustain, or goes over their thresholds, they're suddenly losing a lot of steam and require more healing to keep up.
This also doesn't exist in a vacuum since there is party healing and support that will also apply and that's why mitigation has been king as soon as SE tried increase outgoing party wide damage in Abyssos+ (notably with the party wide dots).

[Carighan]

I love how the community immediately goes into full "REJECT ALL CHANGE"-mode and finds the most trivial and absolutely meaningless mechanical changes that'd happen (like oh no, if you increase your max HP you might be left without depleted health at the end).

You all realize you're discussing sub-0.1%-effect minutiae, yes? Like, not a single game and not a single one of their devs that had tanks based on HP and healing in the past will ever have spend one minute worried about that, that's how entirely meaningless it is. You can bet on it. And in fact once applied to production servers, these things turn out to give some - albeit again, absolutely trivial - flavor to their classes.

It's this reflexive "Something trivial about this change must be bad!!!11!"-attitude that is probably why the devs never do any class changes at all except homogenization. Any identity, uniqueness or flavor is rejected by the community. A community that funnily also contantly grumbles about the homogenization, never bothering to look into the mirror to see who loudly rejects any alternative all the time.

We're not even discussing some arcane theoretical crazy ideas. These are things other games have done. Some parts rejected, others refined, others kept as-is. All work has been done, all the SQEX devs need to do now is take what other games have shown to work fine and transplant it into FFXIV's combat system (which yes means actual work, surprisingly, management is probably allergic to that I imagine).

[Mikey_R]

Is this the good old discussion about mitigation vs HP increase on one hit on one hand, and mitigation vs HP increase on successive big hits?

This is about how much healing it takes to heal a tank to full after hit whilst also considering the HP buff timer and what happens when it runs out.

I love how the community immediately goes into full "REJECT ALL CHANGE"-mode and finds the most trivial and absolutely meaningless mechanical changes that'd happen (like oh no, if you increase your max HP you might be left without depleted health at the end).

Not once did I say it was a bad idea, I just wanted to point out the differences.

This is not that niche scenario we are talking about, this is just a basic comparison against 2 tanks at the same starting point taking an attack that does, at base, 50% of their HP and the consequences of healing that HP back to full, since, mitigation is not just about taking the hit, but the result that comes after. Pretty common scenario.

This is also why I highlighted how broken it would be for a tank to heal 40% of the damage done. To put this in a different way, if Warrior heals too much now, then your idea heals too much, which is why I said values can be changed.

Yes, they can take things from other games, but they still need to tune it to the FFXIV model. You mention refining, but this is what that process looks like. What does it look like to take the damage, what does it look like to heal the damage, how are things going to look when the buff runs out etc. All of these things need to be taken into account and values tweaked by noticing what the strengths and weaknesses are and tuning them to a point where it feels somewhat balanced.

[Carighan]

The differences are super super minor though. We're talking about something on the level of 1 heal of difference (and oGCD at that) ever 180s, and the current 180s skills already are slightly different in this regard.

[Shurrikhan]

Is this the good old discussion about mitigation vs HP increase on one hit on one hand, and mitigation vs HP increase on successive big hits?
Mitigation is king when it's about sustained damage that starts going over HP thresholds, this is why a ToB based tank will shine on sparse outbursts of incoming damage, but as soon as it drags on sustain, or goes over their thresholds, they're suddenly losing a lot of steam and require more healing to keep up.
This also doesn't exist in a vacuum since there is party healing and support that will also apply and that's why mitigation has been king as soon as SE tried increase outgoing party wide damage in Abyssos+ (notably with the party wide dots).

ToB is also mitigation, though? Anything that causes your resultant health to be higher (less of pre-mit HP to be lost) after the blow is mit.

There's just flat and percentile, capped and uncapped, and the differences in their (effective) duration. In XIV, all flats are capped and all percentiles are uncapped, but they don't have to be.

When we look at sustain as a whole, that then also includes flat and percentile self-heals, as long as one has the eHP to survive the individual blow and enough time thereafter to activate the heal.