Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[Araxes]

There is just a lot more to do for a Healer in Wow and for Tanks the Same. Thats why noone espects them to do sick DPS. I recently started to Play WoW again because of the Destruction of FFXIV pvp with 4.0 and its so much more chilled there when it comes to Raids or Dungeons. It kinda feels like all the toxic Players from WoW moved to FFXIV.

[zipzo]

There is just a lot...

Healers I would agree have a lot to do usually in WoW, but I would disagree fervently with tanks being in a similar state. Tanking is, as of now in Legion, the most boring and low maintenance role in the game.

Furthermore, WoW tanks do not have a branching set of actions dedicated specifically as the "DPS combo" or the "Enmity combo". It's just one set of skills. So not only do they not have much to do because threat management doesn't exist and positioning is easy, but they spend the entire fight hitting the mob with their optimal DPS abilities, with all of their defensive CDs usually being oGCD to boot.

There is literally 0 reason a tank shouldn't be focusing on their damage in WoW, in my opinion, and in practice this actually does happen at the higher level. There are some pretty impressive tank parses, and I would argue that tanks literally can do ~2/3 of a normal DPS in WoW when they actually try, and top tank DPS parses prove that.

[RichardButte]

Healing in WoW is a bit more "evened out" overall, I feel, and it's actually why I'm shelving my healer for a DPS in XIV instead.

Healing in XIV has two situations: either "Maytag Repairman levels of boredom", or "OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT!!!" and there's usually not all that much of a gradient between the two.

In WoW, damage is more gradual, but also more consistent, meaning a healer can generally be constantly pushing buttons to be HEALING instead of dealing damage. This, in turn, makes designing raid encounters all around easier because factoring healer DPS into the equation is probably the biggest nightmare the devs have had with XIV.

And it compounds upon itself: if a healer doesn't need to heal, it's because their raid group is experienced enough to know the mechanics and avoid all of the avoidable damage, which in turn frees up a LOT more of the healer's mana and GCDs to devote to DPS.

This means that good groups will do a LOT better and so-so groups will do a LOT worse, making the raiding difficulty "curve" into more of an "S" shape than a parabola.

And I hate to say it, but the other key difference is WoW's 1sec GCD vs. XIV's 2.5sec GCD. This means that damage in XIV generally NEEDS to be spikier due to the amount of time between each spell a healer can cast, otherwise the damage won't even be worth healing up.

The end result is that everyone is sitting at full until suddenly someone is at half health or below and you need to fix that immediately or else the next hit will kill them.

It's a level of whack-a-mole that I've not seen in other MMOs' healing systems and with healer DPS being super simplified in SB, I'm hanging up my globe for something more fun.

[zipzo]

...

Great insight, although unfortunate conclusion in the end, I hope one day healing becomes more in line with your enjoyment factor again

[Kacho_Nacho]

I think people are forgetting WoW's parties are made up of three damage dealers, one tank, and one healer. Whereas FFXIV has only two damage dealers, one tank, and one healer. This means that in FFXIV, tank and healer damage are more meaningful to the party's success.

[loreleidiangelo]

I think people are forgetting WoW's parties are made up of three damage dealers, one tank, and one healer. Whereas FFXIV has only two damage dealers, one tank, and one healer. This means that in FFXIV, tank and healer damage are more meaningful to the party's success.

At the risk of sounding blunt, I think that has very little to do with it. I think the "tank and healer DPS meta" abomination we see in this game mostly arises from a few key factors:

-The devs all think we're noobs and that the actual basics of tanking and healing need to be as fail-proof as possible. This is evident in the egregious power contained within both roles' kits. Tanks get a fire n' forget button that is basically a permanent free mitigation cooldown and a massive enmity lead all at once. You could say, "mob damage is just based around that extra 20% damage reduction!" but it's clearly not because tanks are doing whole chain-pulls in dungeons and ditching Shield/Def/Grit like a bad date once they get enough baseline threat. They don't struggle because they use cooldowns, which is precisely what I mean when I say that tanks are designed to be as fail-proof as possible - Shield/Def/Grit are literally cooldowns for people too bad to use cooldowns. Just squat in those stances even if you're terrible and the healer can keep up, which leads to...

Healer kits suffer from the exact same problem! All of them have ridiculously high throughput not just on their basic heals, but on their "emergency" cooldowns too which are really more like "spam these as often as you can so you can dps more" because their CDs are so short that odds are if an ACTUAL emergency happens to arise you still have something left in your bag to deal with it. 15-second Lustrates (assuming you try to spread them out), 2-minute Thin Air (the WoW equivalent is 3 minutes and is in a game where healers have no mana restoration capabilities whatsoever outside a once-per-fight mana potion or certain trinkets), and 60-second Earthly Star are just redonkulous in the grand scheme of relative HP, and on TOP of that healers have pretty good innate mana restore and their basic heals are also pretty powerful all things considered. Don't even get me started on regens, and how completely overpowered they are on two jobs who come packed to the brim with burst heals as well.


-Damage in XIV is delivered in a really weird, bombastic kind of way. It's either virtually nothing, where you can afk and let Eos do the work, or it's 75% of your parties' HP bars with another AOE on the way. This means that every healer has to be bursty AF when it comes to heals, or else they can't survive in a raid environment. This also means that tank cooldowns have to do incredible lifting on relatively short CDs, because the boss is basically either only autoing or doing a super-move that will hit you for more than your max HP if not mitigated. (This same concept also brute-forces shield healers into comps, or else you'd just stack double-regen healers as they're way more efficient per cast).

What this means overall is that there's not really any room for unique styles of tanking and healing, such as parry-based or evasion-based tanking, or HoT-based/lifesteal based sustain healing - it's really easy to predict how future jobs will be designed because they all need to be equipped with the kit to handle telatively infrequent but hard-hitting unavoidable AOEs.


-Fully-scripted encounters hurts the hell out of overarching raid design. Healers have no need to conserve mana and tanks have no need to squat in tank stance in raids because everyone knows exactly when the damage is going to come out, and exactly how much it's going to hit for (barring unlucky crits). When your OT knows that Twin Bolt is coming out at THIS precise time and he needs to stack with MT, just bust a CD and maybe toggle tank stance and you're g2g, no need to mix it up or adjust. When the healers know there's a 4x D.Wave in phase 6 of OS3 they know to have Indom/Star/Assize/Thin Air+Presence or whatever up to deal with it, and THAT means that they can use those abolities at x time earlier in the fight because they will 100% be off CD by then.


To close, I should point out that I feel like it's too late to put Pandora's folly back in it's box. I actually HATE the tank and healer DPS meta with the fire of 1,000 suns, but at this point even someone like I can acknowledge that it's this huge plethora of issues that contribute to it, and that for the developers to "fix" it they'd have to do a near-100% overhaul of most of the mechanics in this game, including scripted mob patterns, all boss attacks, and nerf the power of tanks and healers pretty handily - which I suspect would definitely NOT be worth the backlash. I'd love for it to happen, but it's just so unlikely at this point.

[Kacho_Nacho]

At the risk of sounding blunt, I think that has very little to do with it. I think the "tank and healer DPS meta" abomination we see in this game mostly arises from a few key factors:
*snip*

Interesting analysis!

My take is that the designers don't think we are all noobs. They think the new players are new players. So, they made all the roles easy to learn at the beginning.

Understandably, this has made things too easy for the more experienced players. But, I have to side with SE on this point. Do we really want to see new players get overly frustrated with healing and tanking in the early part of the game?

Now, as far as damage dealt to the party/raid, a big factor is the long global cool down. Everything happens in 2.5 second increments which leads to these feast or famine moments. Not much can be done without changing standard global cool down.

As far as fully scripted encounters, isn't that true for every MMO? Every fight is scripted and a big part of the learning curve is in figuring out the script and how to respond to it.

Can this be fixed? Sure! Just have to add some RNG to what attacks the boss or mob uses. Let the bad guys mix it up a little.

[Remedi]

As far as fully scripted encounters, isn't that true for every MMO? Every fight is scripted and a big part of the learning curve is in figuring out the script and how to respond to it.

Wow bosses are not as much scripted bosses there usually use skills when their Cds is up (some have a 10 sec timer of when they decide to use skills)
also they have much less mechanics x phases then FF14
Bosses here are puzzles or dance if you will, you need to figure out how it work and then you are good to go
on wow most of the time it's a question of numbers and how few healers you can manage a boss fight.

that is one of the reason why the end game raiding of the 2 games is very different and shouldn't be compared as much as ppl do

[Awful]

Wow bosses are not as much scripted bosses there usually use skills when their Cds is up (some have a 10 sec timer of when they decide to use skills)
also they have much less mechanics x phases then FF14
Bosses here are puzzles or dance if you will, you need to figure out how it work and then you are good to go
on wow most of the time it's a question of numbers and how few healers you can manage a boss fight.

that is one of the reason why the end game raiding of the 2 games is very different and shouldn't be compared as much as ppl do

Yep this is very true, bosses are very scripted in FFXIV if you've got to X phase you can reach it or as was in Creator Savage you can skip it whereas WoW you just gotta make sure your healers/tanks/DPS are all doing well and doing adequate damage and healing.

Not to mention tanking in WoW is all active mitigation and FFXIV is all pro-active CDs that you can pop ahead of time with abilities like Addle/Reprisal/Feint, all the tanks are pretty similar as well, they all have gauges, a tank stance, with something extra to distinguish themselves. Tanks in WoW is mainly play style and they're all different with talents/artifact weapons/traits and tier set bonuses.

They're both vastly different they share the same ideas as a core MMO but how tanks and healers are handled are so very different as well as raid comps when it comes down to it.

[Madepossible]

Healers can put some dots on and broil 2 but I rather want a healer that does healing and keep the party alive than a healer that is too focussed on DPS. Remember the main job is Healing. If the dps is lacking and you meet enrage, the DPS classes fail at their job and should improve. Tldr; Don't blame the healer or tanks to cover up your shortcomings as a DPS.