How can tanking and healing be made more broadly useful in more "role-specific" ways?

[Shurrikhan]

<I am not asking what the player can do in present design to increase the breadth and/or depth of nuance in their gameplay. I am asking what changes to design can improve on that breadth and/or depth.>

Let me preface this by begging that this not turn into another healer-dps or tank-dps thread. This will all work off the assumption that by common sense, one spends only as much time as is necessary on any task that does not directly contribute to completing the encounter: in XIV's case, all encounters are ended through damage, thus damage is primary, and mitigation and restoration derivative. It also works off the observation that by the game's design, this means that relatively little/few of either one's (1) considerations or (2) globals are optimally spent in derivative tasks, which can annoy at least a significant portion of players, who would rather be healing or "tanking" (there's a vague term for you) more often and/or more significantly.

How can we adjust the game design, without relying on gimmicks or absurd scaling, to allow for a greater sense of "healing" or "tanking" within those "roles"? And what adjustments, compensatory or improvements in their own right, should DPS feel in order to make that vision cohesive? To put it another way, how can we better mechanically embody the idea of support — be it defensive, restorative, or offensive — and lend interest and urgency to team gameplay through short-term goals outside of just our own rotational windows, without having to overtune damage taken or undertune healing doable? How can we generate greater and more interesting value from/in derivative tasks (whatever doesn't directly contribute to finishing the encounter)?

:: To be clear, let's consider new content types as being a last resort to be used to create that design, e.g. only when two design concepts, philosophies, or paradigms are incompatible.

Go as ham on this as you like; this is just food for thought. If you have to re-engineer enemy behavioral scripts from scratch, that's fine. If you have to introduce new systems entirely, that, too, is fine.

Related Food for Thought questions, by way of example:
- Should there be synergy between healer DPS and healing, e.g. White Mages building up Essence of Earth/Wind/Water, spendable for support, self-buffing, or burst offense or restoration?
- Should almost all attacks be interceptable, as per T10's charge and mechanics repeating on it?
- Should enmity have more influence and nuance than just a target-determining value?
- Should there be some value system other than merely enmity than tanks would tend to have high outputs of, such as damage-based-suppression?
- Etc., etc.
<What kinds of systems can make our derivative toolkits more interesting and more deeply integrated into gameplay?>



_______________________________________________

SOME IDEAS SHARED HEREIN SO FAR:



Without Conflict (yet):

1. Adjust damage inflow as to be less scripted, in the interest of creating greater frequency of consideration for derivative tasks (e.g. more adaptation, cautionary preemption, and reaction, and probably more globals viably or optimally spendable on derivative tasks).
   
   
2. Make adjustments to tank or healer kits themselves as to better blend in DPS from the start, allowing for greater flexibility but also impactful decision-making, and more integrated mitigation for tanks.
   
   
3. Create encounters for which DPS is not the primary output (e.g. an encounter won by healing a mob or object to full health, or simply through party survival).
   
   
4. Break from certain restrictive norms in boss design as to allow for (1) more interesting fights, all told, and (2) greater caps to derivative outputs, in more varied ways. If the dragon has three heads and four limbs... he's free to use, at whatever separation provides most interesting gameplay, all three heads and four limbs. Enemies do not necessarily target only the top of their enmity table. Tail-slaps can be about enmity rather than just CDs.
   
   
5. Create encounters in which healing or mitigation themselves can push fight times similarly to DPS.

   For example, in a fight with frequent add spawns that are not necessary to kill, being overwhelmed kills you, but killing more than necessary makes the fight take longer, which -- especially if these adds or the boss become increasingly powerful or mana runs out -- may also overwhelm you. Stronger healing throughput available, therefore, can increase the amount of damage doable to the boss by decreasing the number of adds that have to be killed, especially if your party is not the lone source of damage doable to those adds, such as by including periodic environmental mechanics, friendly fire damage, or fight-specific gimmicks.

6. [Fight-specific] Atrophy mechanics (whereby one's damage potential is reduced based on their percentage HP, making healing a more viable damage-support tool relative to continuing to dps until healing is urgent, given that the heal itself would otherwise be wasteful).
   
   
7. Create more active mitigation tools at resource costs shared with DPS, but made more broadly viable (than, say, TBN) without needing to rely on indirect damage-regeneration (so, again, not quite like TBN)?
   
   
8. Make certain tank mitigation tools, or install some new mechanic across them as to, allow for scaling with the tank's stats, rather than solely with the enemy's stats.

With Conflict:

1. Somewhat nerf tank enmity generation and/or base mitigation and healer throughput, forcing them to spend more globals or modification (e.g. through stances) away from direct contribution.
   [Noteable Conflicts: Would the increase in effective difficulty in casual play instill as great a value flexibility for or quality of later combat designs as it would cause frustration upon implementation for unskilled players?]
   
   
2. Increase the frailty of tank DPS stances (such as to the eHP or defense of your average melee).
   [Noteable Conflicts: Would merely delay the points at which a swap is possible, but also, in doing so, reduce the breadth of tank toolkits in many fights and the depth of their play.]
   
   
3. Universal Atrophy mechanics (whereby one's damage potential is reduced based on their percentage HP, making healing a more viable damage-support tool relative to continuing to dps until healing is urgent, given that the heal itself would otherwise be wasteful).
   [Noteable Conflicts: Overlying mechanics that seem to exist only to force role requirements tend to feel arbitrary and disempower the sense of natural choice in the surrounding game, making for a worse overall game experience, even if they may advantage certain role interactions.