It's past time, Yoshi-P...

[Shurrikhan]

Now, there is a valid complaint that in this Extreme/Savage content, the healers and DPS are forced to dish out as much DPS as possible. But if they change that, then they make the game not fun for the vast majority who are NOT doing the Extreme/Savage content.

I, for one, do not want my experience tarnished because of the hardcore crowd who feel the game is "too easy". I like the fact that a large portion of the game's content is easy. I play for some relaxed fun, not to be sitting on the edge of my seat. I'm just not into that kind of stuff. Call me a carebear, casual, noob, whatever you wanna call me. Go ahead, it's fine. I'm not a pro, and I never claimed to be.

That’s fine if that’s what you like, but you can’t speak for the rest of the playerbase. Not everyone likes the braindead content; not everyone likes the trend that harder content has, as of late, of getting progressively easier. I don’t care if they leave dungeons the same (they’re dungeons—I do them to cap weekly tomes and that’s about it anymore), but I really wish they would keep Extreme and Savage at that harder difficulty that “the hardcores” like and want. But, there again, when the “hardcores” ask for things to be harder in content that they primarily do, they are attacked by the other side of the community about how the developers should not be “wasting resources” to “cater to the 1%”—just see the threads made about Ultimate.

I’m not really sure what you mean by the first part of this quote—some clarification would be nice, if you don’t mind. Are you just talking about how Extreme/Savage fights don’t have the more intensive healing/tanking that some hardcore players would like, and instead are still more copies of “heal occassionally, put a regen on the MT, now DPS”? If that’s the case, I can agree with making Extreme/Savage fights require more intensive healing to make the jobs more engaging. Rather than it just be “Regen MT, spam Stone IV/Malefic III/Broil II”. But, to do this, they should probably also consider making easier content demand more healing, which I don’t really see as being a bad thing either.

This is about where my own hopes sit, too, on the difficulty spectrum. But, ideally, this shouldn't even need to be an equilibrium or best approximation sort of issue.

At present, dungeon and raid difficulties are likely made up of individually arbitrated potency values, specials recast times, and health pools, based around an eyeballed common-sense estimate to fit with precedent or surrounding dungeon/raid design, but that's not to say that the same couldn't be output through a given formula instead. And if that is possible, a huge number of opportunities become affordable.

Consider some of our earlier balances or perspectives into dungeon design:

• Hefty required healing (as opposed to avoidable damage) makes the healer feel a more complete "role", but in turn diminishes (1) unskilled healers' ability to perform their derivative role, (2) the sense of direct applicability of healers (albeit only when leaving virtually no time to DPS at all), (3) the ability for player compositions to skillfully avoid the need for a dedicated healer, as once tuned for, design essentially dead-locks healers into gameplay, which can ultimately reduce opportunities for ingenuity, alternative gameplay improvements, and for reduced queue times between the two.
• Making one given choice of playing in or outside of tank stance optimal in a vastly overwhelming portion of gametime makes the mechanic feel like a gimmick, but removing tank stance diminishes (1) tanks' freedom to open with non-enmity skills, which contributes to variance and strategy, (2) tanks' ability to calculate for and synergize with healer or melee-positional outputs, (3) may likely simply tilt the balance of global usage from primarily utility weaponskills, of which there are typically multiple, and therefore carries variance, to primarily enmity combos, whereby choice or utility are further restricted.

But if a dungeon or raid were able to scale particular mob output and stat values compositionally (relative to your party's composition, or even manual choices of composition-derived difficulty), those tipping points disappear. Rather than facing some negative consequence for each benefit of rebalance, you can play entirely towards or within the strategies that would only benefit in their gameplay from the rebalance. If you take 3 DPS at 1 healer into a dungeon, by default mobs' unavoidable strikes' potency maxima are reduced, as are enemies' CC-resistance, but new burst-requiring mechanics may appear or, where already existent, may be heightened. It becomes, in a sense, a new gameform, despite playing with all the same rules, just by manipulating the mob values involved.

[Maeka]

I will admit that it is a little easy, sure... the newest 4-man dungeon, I did blind without even reading up on the bosses, the mechanics were... rather easy (though the spriggan part of the 2nd boss confused me for a bit, but it is tuned so that the other 3 could completely handle it even if I had zero clue what I was supposed to do, I did eventually notice that I could lay mines and blow the statues up, but that was near the end of the fight).


But yet I don't want them to turn it too far that I'm wiping multiple times per dungeon, because I don't see that as fun, and the playerbase in general just does not have the patience for it. I hate it when people drop group, or try to votekick people or what-not. It slows everything down and adds pressure I don't like.

As it is, I really did not enjoy Shinryu story-mode all that much, not because of my own failings, but mainly because of the common player I was running into. I had to wait until I could get in with a party of veterans (by Qing right after the reset) to actually clear the thing. I didn't find wiping 10+ times on it very fun. I also remember the first few times I did Ala Mihgo or that laboratory, the last bosses in both of those were a bit annoyingly difficult if you were at leveling gear when you first got there, back when people were still learning it.

I think part of the problem with most dungeons being too easy, is that the item-levels are jumping too high too fast. You do Ala Mihgo when you've got about 290 and it's OK for difficulty... oh but wait, now Omega and the newest dungeon drops 315-320. Go back into Ala Mihgo and you steamroll the place because you're 30 I-level above what you're supposed to be for there.

[Maeka]

Yes, I get what you're saying, I'm just weary of changing it too much.


If you leave it the way it is now, many people find it fun enough that they keep playing, even though some people grumble about being too bored. Sure, that's a bad thing, hey I said I agreed before that it's a bit too easy.

But yet, if we try to fix it and wind up doing it wrong, then you end up screwing the game up for a portion of the playerbase and wham, you might end up losing a bunch of subs overnight and I can't say that would be good for the game either.

It's a fine line that they're walking with this, and if they're going to do something I REALLY hope they are careful with it. And again. Item Level Creep.

It's too freaking high. That, or we need better I-Level restrictions on some of the older dungeons (Kugane Castle and Ala Mihgo mainly). Yes, I will agree that these two are just too ridiculously easy. A tank should not be able to pull 3 groups and survive. Bosses should not be dying almost before they get to complete their full AI script, and invulnerability phases should not be required to prevent a boss from dying too fast to complete it's full list of mechanics.

However, I don't see the current healing model as being the sole culprit. Item Level Creep (or the I-Level Sync is too lax either/or) is a part of it too, I feel. Healers doing too much DPS is also a part of it, I mean, the amount of damage they do per ability.

If you took Kugane Castle or Ala Mihgo, and shaved off, say, 20% of a healer's DPS output per-ability and shave off, say, 15 I-Level off the maximum I-Level allowed for the zone... you'd bump up the challenge significantly. The tanks would be taking more damage (due to having 15 less I-level) and the healers would be putting out less damage resulting in bosses and trash being alive longer.

Perhaps give healers a trait that makes them do 20% more damage while solo (being with chocobo counts as being solo), and then cut their DPS output by 20%. That way solo play as a healer is not affected, healers can still throw their DPS without breaking the fights and making them cake easy.

[Ayer2015]

I still say WoW's Mythic+ system offers one of the best casual end game system. Progress in difficulty as far as you can or desire to.

[Shurrikhan]

I still say WoW's Mythic+ system offers one of the best casual end game system. Progress in difficulty as far as you can or desire to.

As much as I'd love to be able to say "going to do +12... as just DPS... *sunglasses*", and have that be a viable (though far from ideal) option, Mythic+, in its simplicity, has been one of the first bits of living proof that casuals and the hardest of hardcore can still be ideally challenged by the same content. It's almost a meme-level counterexample to any point at which someone claims that casual and hardcore content cannot overlap, or are fundamentally different, rather than differing first and foremost in scale (and the rest being derivative).

[Shurrikhan]

I mean, stuff like freecure and ehanced benefic II suggest pretty strongly that SE thinks we should be using Cure and Benefic. For some reason they then gave us a system where there's no particular reason to do that most of the time at endgame. Either they didn't intend for what we got and it's just too late to fix it for Stormblood, or the left hand and the right hand need to have a conversation..

This may actually even be less an issue of broad design philosophy as just (1) a way to improve the hidden efficiency of Cure I and Benefic I in mana-intensive situations (which have only grown progressively fewer since ARR), or (2) specifically toolkit design issues, primarily due to the undertuned size of those bonuses, and their being overly dependent on RNG.

[Zfz]

It looks like the thread has ran off on a tangent because some people mistaken the idea of role differences with difficulty, just like how some people are clearly mistaking playstyle preference and playskill abilities.

It's not about making things more difficult. It's about making tanks focus more on enmity and mitigation than on dps. Gearing choices and rotations of a tank should first and foremost be enmity and survivability considerations, and that doesn't necessarily have to make the game harder.

The proposition is to make it so that gearing and rotation choices are made based on enmity and survivability goals, not on pure dps potential. How it can be achieved is up to the devs. It also doesn't necessarily mean that tanks will have to do less dps. If you think so you need to shed your dps meta mindset and realize that dps is just a result of potency tuning, and any and all designs can be tuned to provide high or low dps.

Content can still be "easy", for those who are worried about casual play. And tanking can still be "hard", for those with the strange notion that high tanking dps is somehow good playskill.

[HyoMinPark]

It looks like the thread has ran off on a tangent because some people mistaken the idea of role differences with difficulty, just like how some people are clearly mistaking playstyle preference and playskill abilities.

It's not about making things more difficult. It's about making tanks focus more on enmity and mitigation than on dps. Gearing choices and rotations of a tank should first and foremost be enmity and survivability considerations, and that doesn't necessarily have to make the game harder.

With regards to the bolded statement, the only way to improve on tank enmity and mitigation rather than just focus on “tank DPS” would be to scale content and make it “harder”/more difficult—make things hit harder, make tanks actually have to use their tank stances for mitigation/aggro, and be more proactive with their cooldown rotation.

As it stands now, even in Neo, tanks just need to pop a cooldown for the harder attacks like Aero, Earthshakers, or Double Attack; they don’t even need to be in their tank stance for it. With aggro resets, tanks can easily grab hate back from the WHM heal spam post-Almagest with MT-Provoke and OT-Provoke/Shirk. If you have a NIN in the group, Shade the MT, Smoke the WHM, and the MT never has to think about entering Shield Oath/Defiance/Grit. Consistent Provoke-Shirking on the OT’s part only makes it even more easier.

DRK, as flawed and in-need-of-help as the job is now, can hold aggro easily by just spamming Unleash over and over again without even being in Grit because of the enmity multiplier on the skill. But such a gameplay is incredibly boring, hence why a lot of tanks turn to their own personal DPS and stance-dancing. Because outside of their regular cooldown rotation, there isn’t need for much else, and I can understand their need to make the job more engaging.

Honestly, the only content where tank stance is needed is in dungeons with mega-pulls. Other than that, holding aggro is incredibly easy with a diligent tank, even more so if DPS and healers are mindful of their own enmity generation and control it as needed with enmity quellers and dumps; and things just don’t hit hard enough to warrant staying in stance 100% of the time.

[Zfz]

the only way to improve on tank enmity and mitigation rather than just focus on “tank DPS” would be to scale content and make it “harder”/more difficult

I disagree. As a very simplistic example, we can make tanking enmity equivalent to tanking dps, i.e. by removing the damage penalty and making different stances suitable for tanking different things, then removing enmity bonuses and changing "enmity vs dps rotations" to "single target vs aoe rotations". Give tanks a moderate innate enmity bonus if you want to make life easier for leveling and entry level content.

You think there's only one way because you're thinking of minor adjustments, minor tunings based on the existing framework. I'm talking about a change to the core design itself.

Or more elaborate design changes can be made such that tank damage output becomes a derivative of enmity established on targets, instead of having enmity being a derivative of damage done on targets.

Mitigation can be elevated into mostly a strategic decision, i.e. gearing choices, and keeping the scripted cooldown schedules for the sake of assisting with encounter design. Secondary stats could work differently for tanks, with Tenacity giving passive mitigation, SkS reducing cooldown time, Crit giving a chance of randomized mitigation effect (e.g. one out of 3 different mitigation effects like "10% less damage for 5 seconds"/"shield worth 10% of healing received within 5 seconds"/"parry and block mitigates extra 25% damage for 5 seconds").

As such, I argue that there are possible designs to do what I said.

However, all this may be moot because devs seem happy about where the tanking design is at the moment. So this discussion is mostly academic.

[Shurrikhan]

I disagree. As a very simplistic example, we can make tanking enmity equivalent to tanking dps, i.e. by removing the damage penalty and making different stances suitable for tanking different things, then removing enmity bonuses and changing "enmity vs dps rotations" to "single target vs aoe rotations". Give tanks a moderate innate enmity bonus if you want to make life easier for leveling and entry level content.

You think there's only one way because you're thinking of minor adjustments, minor tunings based on the existing framework. I'm talking about a change to the core design itself.

I have to agree here. Core changes greatly delimit our options in this regard. And even beyond them, there's always the question of whether we even need enmity-enhanced tools, as opposed to any other utility or output made available as the nth combo choice, or whether enmity should even be such an unvaried and long-term resource in the first place.

Personally, I'd greatly prefer something that helps sell the idea of a tank just being a greater center of enemy focus -- the most "in your face" of the party -- not just in terms of his or her own personal (enmity) modifiers, but likely also by siphoning off the other's perceived threat to take as his or her own. The extent of that can certainly vary, but simply ensuring that you have x long-term resource lead before attempting something, which (especially with the advent of Shirk and tanks' extant inability to siphon threat, such that you can fight the party's threat rather than just the enmity table's 2nd place) has never been any more interesting, if even ever as interesting, as Darkside's mana drain was in Heavensward. It's a very basic, very stale, and poorly representative way to handle the concept of a tank.

Put simply, though, there's a lot we could do to try to let tanks better embody the idea of being the center of attention if we think outside the limitations of our current enmity system, if only to explore other ideas. Would tanking be somehow "diminished" if rather than simply stacking a derivative value to "higher than #2", mobs were actually capable of refocusing their attention based on unique AI, and you as the tank were often required to intercept their attacks, rather than just holding their attention completely as to deny that complexity (a la meat shield)? Heck, would the overall concept of mitigation be diminished if DPS actually played a more significant part in it, not just through the all-or-nothing killing of enemies, but by being able to suppress, divert, or even kite them?

(You have a skill called Diversion, yet it functions as the exact opposite of its namesake. You have a skill called Shirk, but because of how Provoke works it ends up nothing but derivative-value-padding.)

Sidenote:

One concept I've seen tossed up in the past is to use secondary stats as internal resources with multifaceted use (with Dodge, Block, and Parry being linked to or included among these resources). For instance, let's say we simply have the stats Will (Det+General Miti), Break (Crit+Resist), and Speed (Attack Speed+internal resource regen speed). Now, generally, Will would be expended proportionate to the potencies of one's attacks, averaging out to a neutral regen/loss rate, but it also works against enemy attacks proportionate to the % of HP they'd reduce you by: the larger the hit, the more Will expended to keep you alive, which then has an impact on your damage following the blow. Tanks, at least in tank stance, would have a higher maximum defensive Will expense rate, but given their higher HP margins, they can also get more, defensively, out of that Will stat. Parry, Dodge, and Block, similarly, have strength influenced by current Will, and chances influenced by Break, while their ppm regen according to Speed, just as the regen rates of Will and Break themselves. Now, that would take a lot more internal calculation, but that is an example of where tanking and damage have obvious compromise.

Another such example might be something like a Stagger system, e.g. suppressive fire: just as DPS might then be able to wail on a dangerous enemy to reduce the charge rates of its spells or specials or reduce their potencies on use, tanks would in turn suffer for being the butt of enemy attacks, in rough proportion to how much their advantaging their team by being that (much more efficient) damage sponge. While a DPS could also tank for a time -- and with a certain portion of the threat of enemies being relegated to Stagger, allowing gradually increased damage against you, perhaps even better than they can now -- their smaller health pools, and being therefore more affected by Stagger, would make them more susceptible not only to gradually increasing damage against them, but greater loss to their own damage output, whereas a tank (roughly to what extent his damage is always diminished in exchange for having that higher HP, or his burst diminished for having burst mitigation tools) is more resistant to the output-damaging effects of Stagger.