So, in the world of MMO's, end-game progression is a gear treadmill. You do dungeons to get geared up to do raids to then progress through more and more difficult raids.

By doing this, your character gets stronger and better at its role the better gear that you acquire.

Now, the question I propose is thus: Is FFXIV doing it right?

The main thing that's noted whenever gear comes up, is the inevitable talks surrounding Tank and Healer damage outputs. There's always a keen eye on the DPS outputs of these roles and people are very quick to ensure that they don't get too high.

However, part of this leads back to the inherent notion that players, including Tanks and Healers, want to see improvements to their character when they get better gear.

This becomes an issue, when encounters deal set amounts of damage (With mechanics also meaning that the brunt of it happens at telegraphed times) so that once you overcome it at the minimum level of gear, then there's no point to having more healing or defence because the outcome is a binary case of you live or you don't. If you're living through it, more heals/defence won't let you "Live more".

On the flip side, damage scales infinitely. Every point of damage you gain means something. As it directly correlates into time needed to kill a boss. This means, that once you reach the point where you live through all mechanics, all that's left to scale your character is damage.

To which the we get back to Tank/Healer damage outputs. These roles ultimately look for ways to increase their damage. Be it by gearing for stats that increase damage instead of defensive stats or be it by trying to minimize the amount of time spent healing so you can toss out more damage spells.

Now, is this a problem and if it is, is there a solution?

According to Yoshida it appears to be, hence changes put in to limit the damage potential of Tanks and mentions of "Tank damage being too high"

Not to mention, players of these roles might also argue that they kind of just feel like they're playing DPS instead of playing a Tank/Healer (But with just lower damage compared to an actual DPS)

Though, it would be cool to hear your thoughts on if this progression of everyone just looking to amp up their damage output is a problem or not.

If it is a problem, what could be done to alleviate it?

What would make Tanks feel like it's worthwhile to gear for more defense? What would get Healers to focus more on healing and less on squeezing out DPS?

An initial thought might be to just ramp up damage and/or reduce healing output, so that it's less likely that a Healer will be able to rely on oGCD's for the majority of their healing output. However, this merely just delays the issue eventually, people will reach a gear level where the tank isn't in danger and healers will get to a point where they just want to squeeze in damage spells when they can.


Percentage based or scaling damage also won't work, since that would just actively make Tanks not feel like they're progressing as they get gear.

Tying Enmity modifiers to defensive stats is a possibility, if things are adjusted so that in order to keep aggro (Even with taunts and detaunts) you'd need to be stacking defensive stats. Though, this has some issues too, one being that well, it just wouldn't feel good for Tanks, there isn't any sort of feedback of getting stronger like seeing damage/healing numbers get bigger. Also two, it's another binary state that limits progressing here, you either have aggro or you don't. If you're keeping aggro, you don't need more enmity.

An idea would could be something like Stagger from FFXIII? A Tank specific mechanic to let them boost the damage a boss takes after stacking up a specific amount of "Stagger" that they can improve the rate of stacking by utilizing role stats. If given visual feedback for improvement, then this could be an alternative to raw damage output that still leads to the one infinitely scaling variable, the TTK of a boss.

Then for healers... A suggestion I've heard is to give them buffs/debuffs to apply in lieu of damage to fill in the periods of time where spending GCD's on heals aren't necessary. Though, what these buffs/debuffs could be are tricky to think of, given that they need to be worthwhile to cast (I.e. They need to end up not only scaling from their stats, in a way that feels rewarding as you progress in gear, but also accomplish to the main objective of progression, which is making bosses die faster)

Let me know if you have any ideas or if you have any thoughts about the comments I've made here.