Quote Originally Posted by Big-Isaac View Post
Heals shouldn't be made weaker. Damage overall should simply increase, so healers are forced to engage in actually healing for the majority of the fight.
I'd be fine with either one. The main difference is simply how long one can has to do that healing. If damage is increased, tanks are the ones most directly affected; they have fewer seconds of effective HP. If healing is nerfed, then it's healers; it takes more seconds of healing to restore a tank to full HP. When a tank needs to be topped off soon, there is no difference between the two, but for the majority of the time, it affects the degree to which a healer can partake in any action other than healing. If a healer must be constantly pre-casting and overhealing on the off chance that an auto-attack may two-shot a tank immediately after a cast-less special without a consistent timer, then even if most of that healing goes to waste numerically, it would also be wholly necessary, and the healer would have very, very little sense of agency in the fight. Decreasing healing itself, on the other hand, allows for a bit of leeway as not to reduce the healing experience to bar-watching. Of course, with too much lenience, the fight becomes unengaging, but I'd wager you'd get a better experience favoring reduced healing over increased damage, maintaining initial (or, from full %HP) eHP nearer to how it is presently.

Quote Originally Posted by Big-Isaac View Post
IMO, active mitigation is the best possible way to handle tanking in an MMO. If you play well, you take vastly reduced damage, and if you mess up, the boss rips you to pieces. It makes tanking infinitely more engaging than playing the undertuned DPS jobs we have masquerading as tanks right now.
I don't particularly mind being a "blue DPS", but I'd certainly prefer for the tanking itself to be engaging enough that that the term wasn't so applicable.