Thread: DualShocker Interview - 3.5 pt 2 next week, supposedly

Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Then Paladin will continue to warm the bench for yet another raid tier. They can buff Paladin's defenses through the moon. The only pertinent questions people at endgame care about are:

- Can Warrior and Dark Knight survive the incoming damage?
- Can both the healers heal either whilst maintaining high DPS relevant to the reduced damage Paladin takes?
- Does Paladin provide better utility?

If the answer to the first two questions is yes and the last no? Many raiders won't care what Paladin does. It's deemed inferior because damage is all that matters in FFXIV. White Mage suffers the same issue right now in that it's designed to be a raw burst healer yet no fight requires burst healing. And it's two counterparts can easily cover whatever incoming damage there is while providing vastly superior raid utility. The devs either have to devise a means of punishing players who value DPS above all else or overhaul the design of both jobs and give them equivalent utility.

To me, this suggests that the game might be better off without the raiding tier since it is the raiding meta that is distorting the rest of he game. I'm not suggesting that raiding should, or will be dropped, but so many points in discussions come down to whether or not the proposed change will work for raiders. To me, that says that much of the core eleent of the game is predicated on raiding, and honestly, I think that's unhealthy for the game as a whole. We've been suffering this DPS meta for almost the entire life of FFXIV since ARR. It's time to go in another direction IMHO.

Originally Posted by Theodric

[...] and every enemy has at least one special ability to watch out for.

In fairness: This is already the case. It's typically a telegraphed AoE and if you do a mass pull, you'll often have dozens of them flung right at you. Getting hit by one just... usually doesn't matter. Healers can pick up the slack easily.

The whole "insta-death" paradigm that's not just in higher floors of PotD, but also in Savage is a symptom of healer power - nothing else but death matters, because only death has a considerable cost to erase. And at times, even death only matters because of the stat debuff that might prevent you from beating enrage.

Personally, I don't think punishing people with an instant:"You're out." card, i.E. death if they make a mistake is particularly fun design. I much prefer it the way most games do it: You can get hit multiple times, but replenishments for your HP are scarce. Alas, healers again - They're too powerful to allow for that.

Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

We're suffering this DPS meta because the devs do not offer an alternative.

More precisely: We're suffering this DPS meta because the game revolves around lowering health bars to 0 in order to win a fight and the only way to do that is to deal damage. Damage is what matters, the only thing that matters. Everything else is fluff - You do it if it's required, to the degree it is required, but afterwards go back to damage, because only damage will further your win.

It's a common metagame - Every shooter, every fighting game, most bullet hell and strategy games as well as tower defense games have the same. Probably a lot more. They have different ways on how to deal that damage, but on the meta level, all of these games are identical - there are health bars, hit points or whatever and you want to reduce those to 0 to win the round/game.

As such, I have a hard time considering it inherently flawed. It just has grave consequences for the trinity design: Two parts of said trinity are only as relevant as they are required. They are fluff. And for a player, it sucks if your chosen identity is essentially fluff.

There is no systemic fix for that - You can invalidate damage as win condition to put the importance on mitigation/healing, but that only shifts the issue around: Now you only deal as much damage as required and then go to mitigation/healing, whereas previously, you'd mitigate/heal as required and then go to dealing damage. That's not making things better.

All you can try is to require so much healing/mitigation, that the respective roles cannot do much else, because they're so busy just fulfilling that role. That doesn't fix the issue, mind you - DPS is still king. But at least the players of these roles would not feel or be urged to DPS, because realistically, they can't.
For that to happen however you'd need drastic nerfs and far higher complexity - As it stands, mitigation is largely something passive, you only actively mitigate when a tankbuster comes in by pressing a single CD. It would have to change to something highly active.
Likewise, healers would need far higher complexity in their healing, because just nerfing their potencies alone would result in nothing but a boring Cure spam. That gets rid of the downtime that makes people urge them to DPS, but it's not engaging. Maximizing your AoE healing output should require far more than medica II, then spam medica I. Maximizing single target healing output should require far more than putting a regen on them and spamming Cure II. Then, maybe, we can also stop having healer checks be all about unforgiving timers, because as it is, whether it's a prey mechanic, a tank buster or AoE nukes, it's all only about knowing the timer for the mechanic by heart and pressing the solution heal for it, otherwise death/wipe happens.

Originally Posted by Zojha

More precisely: We're suffering this DPS meta because the game revolves around lowering health bars to 0 in order to win a fight and the only way to do that is to deal damage. Damage is what matters, the only thing that matters. Everything else is fluff - You do it if it's required, to the degree it is required, but afterwards go back to damage, because only damage will further your win.

And only in this game are the requirements for "everything else" so minimal that "how much damage can you do" becomes the most important question for both tanks and healers as WELL as dps.

FFS, SE, just design encounters that require tanks and healers to do their jobs.

Originally Posted by Naunet

And only in this game are the requirements for "everything else" so minimal that "how much damage can you do" becomes the most important question for both tanks and healers as WELL as dps.

FFS, SE, just design encounters that require tanks and healers to do their jobs.

Fixing healers is kinda easy - nerf healing potencies, up healing requirements, possibly do something about how brutally effective their DPS is while in Cleric Stance, boom. But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game. (It also doesn't affect magic damage, so rip pretty much every major raid boss ability in the game.)

And how exactly would you make offtanks "tank more" instead of sitting in DPS stance? Endless dual bosses a la T1? Constant add waves to manage? There's only so much you can do to try to regulate how much damage tanks do...even WoW, which IMO has a lot better trinity balance still doesn't really find ways to make off tanks do a whole lot outside of swaps and adds.

Sorry if I seem like I'm attacking you, since I actually agree that the slow distillation of the trinity into "who can deeps moar" also bugs me, but I've struggled to find a solution for tanking woes for some time now that would work outside of a straight tank re-design. Things like, dropping fire n' forget tank stances in favor of making those same effects be maintenance buffs that tanks have to use certain combos to keep up, etc, to make them feel more like they're tanking and less like they're DPSing. And I don't really know how well that would translate here, all things considered.

Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game.

Paladins and the Parry stat would actually benefit from a high number of constant high damage blockable/parryable attacks. Single hit/Double hit Tankbuster-centric design of raids is the nemesis of RNG based Mitigation.

30% chance of 20% mitigation is a 30% chance of survival vs 1 100% HP tank busters but becomes 6% average mitigation versus 100 1% HP attacks.

Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly?

In theory it's fairly simple: Both tanks need to be engaged by opponents, i.e. have aggro from something (basic tank function 1) and they both need active mitigation tools that are required to survive (basic tank function 2, reliant on tank function 1).

First one is easy: Additional enemies that one tank alone can't cope with. There's nothing else you can do, it's the definition of tanking, so no way around that if you want to make an off-tank tank instead of being a DPS (or redundant). Second one is the harder one.
A classic from fighting games would be timed mitigation: Hit the button "just" before the enemy hits and you parry/block/whatever, potentially with a combo system to work off that. Neat idea for bosses, but doesn't work as well on trash. Dodging telegraphed attacks is a form of active mitigation as well, but not tank specific - In fact, due to positionals, we generally don't want tanks to move much. You can try something akin to Inner Beast, i.E. stack management, or maintenance buffs as you yourself have suggested. They already try to work with proccs (like Reprisal). I'd say short cooldowns, short durations and timing is the key to crack that. Tank busters would be a lot more frequent, but hit less hard and the mastery in tanking would lie in mitigating as much as possible to give the healer more breathing room with their mana - Too many mistakes -> Out of Mana -> Wipe. Good tanking -> Spare Mana -> Balance cards for everyone? Something like that.

Good players "will" end up having downtime in those fluff roles (otherwise worse players can't play them), so it's going to go back to damage either way. To preserve the role fantasy, best you can do is to gimp their direct damage abilities and give them damage support buffs instead. But that opens the can of worms that is solo play...

But that's just the mitigation side - One can also make the aggro side more complex in a similar vein, but that requires non-tanks to be able to survive the occasional hit in case your tank isn't all that great. Juggling the two could lead to a decent dynamic that can keep players busy at least.

Anywhoo, reducing the DPS focus is all about raising the bar for healing/tanking. And there's ways to do that. Whether it's wanted or not is a different question - Some people enjoy being glorified DPS with short queues. But that's a different topic >_>

Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

And how exactly would you make offtanks "tank more" instead of sitting in DPS stance?

Well I dunno. Those other MMOs must be doing /something/ right, because "how much damage does my tank do?" is about as far from my mind as "what breed of pig would look the best in my yard" when I'm raid leading in WildStar. It's simply not a consideration, nor has it ever been a consideration in the other MMOs I've run raids in. Except for this one. :/ And though WildStar's raids are certainly amazing, they do also boil down to "get a boss's HP to zero" - just as EVERY MMO out there does.

So yeah, I'm a little unsure as to what to change in FFXIV because honestly there's just not that much of a difference... the mechanics are vastly more complex and engaging in WildStar I guess. But even in MMOs with similar levels of raid complexity, you don't really see this meta cropping up to such a degree as it does in FFXIV.

Originally Posted by Naunet

So yeah, I'm a little unsure as to what to change in FFXIV because honestly there's just not that much of a difference... the mechanics are vastly more complex and engaging in WildStar I guess. But even in MMOs with similar levels of raid complexity, you don't really see this meta cropping up to such a degree as it does in FFXIV.

Honestly, I think the existance of WAR and SCH in general are to blame. There shouldn't be a tank or healer that are designed to DPS. Imagine the game where your two options were DRK and PLD, would DPS be considered as much?