Nobody Really Wants To Heal

[Kalise]

Tanks gear up to more easily absorb Tankbusters.

Though, that's hardly an exciting prospect.

One that's also mitigated by Scholar getting better gear to provide stronger shields.

The Tank gearing up means those smaller hits are more easily repaired via the Tanks own ability to self heal

Except the fact that Tanks self healing is pretty miniscule outside of 1m CD's which is not particularly good for dealing with fluff damage.

The more easily the Tank handles those busters, the less MP the Healer has to expend to repair it.

Except the part where oGCD's cost no MP.

Also, where MP management is barely a factor for Healers between Lucid Dreaming (Which is being buffed in 5.0) and Piety (Which is being buffed in 5.0). MP is only a concern when Raises need to be used frequently.

In that sense, their gearing has synergy, if indirectly.

Though, the reality is that their gearing has anti-synergy.

Healers don't have MP problems due to healing Tanks. Tanks don't have much issue with dealing with TB's (Even more so in 5.0 when Tanks will be able to help other Tanks mitigate them). The end result is healers make fluff damage completely irrelevant for Tanks thanks to Regen/Adlo. Adlo can also help mitigate TB's. Tanks get tankier and further reduce how much damage they take (So Regen overheals more)

However, the clockwork nature of incoming Tank damage is part of the problem. Tis the reason I suggested boss abilities move to random cooldown times within a certain range.

Except you never mentioned Tankbusters or in fact any damage to the tank.

You went on about randomized party damage and how healing the rest of the party is splitting Healers focus and thus making Tanks defences relevant while they have to go periods without Healer focus as the party is taking randomized damage.

The mere fact that a Tank CAN have a mitigation cooldown available for every single Tankbuster devalues the Tanks gearing in the present game.

But... That's literally the point of a Tankbuster. It forces you to have a mitigation cooldown available or you get busted.

The devaluing of tank mitigation comes from how easy it is to rotate Holmgang > Vengeance + Rampart > Sentinel + Rampart > Vengeance + Rampart ad infinitum.

Where a significant portion of Tankbusters can be simply immuned with Holmgang/Hallowed Ground (Living Dead and soon Superbolide also) with the rest just taking every other CD you have. Since fluff damage is completely irrelevant due to Regen+Adlo so you don't have to care about using CD's for anything else.

Other games have fluff damage that is actually threatening, with healers whom don't have infinite MP. So Tanks are incentivized to keep rolling their defensive CD's to mitigate the fluff damage, but also making sure to still have a CD to deal with the Tankbusters. Thus, mitigation from gearing maintains usefulness, as you can more easily go through the fluff damage without using your stronger CD's so you can hold them for the TB's.

Please note though, that in such a scenario, the busters themselves wouldn't hit quite so hard and would force the tank to take care to ensure a sudden spike via back to back busters is manageable for the Healer should it happen.

There should never, ever be the potential to have back to back busters (Unless it's a specific mechanic for in an encounter that is designed to use some sort of TB > Tank Swap > TB style gameplay)

That level of random is just praying that RNG doesn't decide to maul your party down by having tons of burst in quick succession. Or, alternatively, gutting the damage of skills down to near irrelevance just in case the boss decides to TB > TB > RB > RB > TB > TB > RB > RB all back to back because RNG.

Yes, things should be less strictly timed. But it should be a more reasonable variance so that it has at least SOME sort of timing, so that you can actually learn the mechanics and have some gameplay flow. Something along the lines of instead of a Tankbuster happening every 60s instead it has a 30-90s window where it can happen at best, 30s after the previous one and at worst 90s after the previous one (With timers being able to overlap, so the order in which skills happen can alter based on some skills rolling short timers while others roll longer ones)

In regards to the Tank 'protecting' the party and it feeling weird to the Tank that the party takes so much damage, how do you justify party damage in the current game?

Much of it occurs via AoE's that are indiscriminate against whom is being targeted.

Outside of that, it's generally the occasional attack being sent towards random targets, like an AoE puddle directed towards one of the people in the massive group.

Which makes sense.

But the majority of the damage is still being focused into the Tank, not the party. The tank's the one taking the constant hits. The tank's the one the boss is using their most powerful attacks on. The person who's most in danger, is the Tank (Current game balancing that makes fluff damage irrelevant and TB's not particularly exciting aside)

On a somewhat related note, with the removal of skills like Diversion, DPS will no longer be able to easily control their Enmity generation. Making the Tanks gearing more relevant beyond basic mitigation concerns. They'll need that extra DPS afforded by the higher ilvls to keep up with the DPS. That's dependent on how effective the new Tank Stances are though.

Yeah, but then we're getting back to my original statement where a Tank doesn't much care about getting Tankier from upgrading their gear as much as they care about dealing more damage from upgrading their gear.

Just like the main benefit a Healer is getting from upgrading their gear is... More damage. In this game it's due to damaging skills being used FAR more often than healing ones. In other games it can be due to higher throughput means more downtime (Also, better MP management) allowing for more time spent slinging attacks.

Which is not necessarily the optimal way of implementing things. Where Tanks and Healers don't really care too much about their role specific increases from gear and are much more invested in how much more DPS they get from upgrading their gear. (Which also means that in XIV, the Tank and Healer specific stats (Tenacity and Piety) are pretty much the lowest weighted stats for Tanks and Healers, in favour of Crit/DH/Det, the DPS stats)