Quote Originally Posted by Taranok View Post
The buster meta forces the tanks and healers to have their healing and mitigation to be designed functionally identically to each other, which is just boring design on a class-by-class basis when they all do their core job the same way, and it's making fight design somewhat stale. By comparison, the Triage Meta designs allows tanks and healers to be designed in wildly different ways from each other while all performing the same job, and it shows if you look at WoW's absolutely staggering tank and healer differences compared to 14's. The reason for this is that a Triage meta heavily restricts healer power and the design is built around ramping up pressure on the healers until they flat out get overwhelmed, so you can design tanks around blowing off pressure instead of around surviving the unsurvivable. But that's a topic unto itself.

In many respects, the buster meta forces enrage timers. Because you can't really pressure healers so much that they will run out of MP in the current encounter/class design, because if they ever can run out of MP in normal play, you will just wipe for the most part over the course of a fight. Triage means every healer is intended to run out of MP and you can't aoe heal the entire party for half their life without expending massive amounts of resources, typically very long cooldowns. By comparison though, so you can get far more interesting with how you design the classes because of these limitations.
partly true, and partly not true. I think it should be explained a bit further.
Busters that do more than max HP in damage, unmitigated, require a limited "type" of mitigation. (literal mitigation) fluff mitigation doesnt work on it.
Essentially you can have fluff mitigation be more useful, and the more "normal" type, which tanks need to maintain, and the TB styled mitigation being only there solely for tank busters.
Example: Convalescence, Anticipation, Blood Bath, Equilibrium, Clemency, bulwark, featherfoot, Flash, etc were all methods in which to make life easier for a healer, but werent good enough to survive a tank buster.
Mitigation for tank busters are a form of -X%(rampart/hallowed), +tempHP (Thrill/TBN), cant die (Holmgang/living dead), and "conditional" (Awareness/Stun/Silence)
These can save a tank from an attack that would do maximum HP dmg to the tank.

In short, its possible to make enough fluff mitigation to make life easier on healers, and increasing auto attack dmg from bosses.
Its also possible to up tank buster damage, and tank buster mitigation, so long as its limited for tank busters only. (short duration, and not always available)

This creates a dynamic of changing up how you mitigate dmg through out every encounter. BUT it also limits the methods in which you can base a tank thematically. (Since now all tanks require 2 types of mitigation, and making those 2 types unique amoung all the tanks would either limit your options, or create overlap in mitigation design. But to be fair, there's FAR more stypes of "literal mitigation" thats either never been done in MMOs, or hardly done in MMOs, which FFXIV can still tap into. Fluff mitigation is far more limiting. (Another option is the -5% and -10% mitigation being used for fluff, as long as all tank busters do at LEAST 15%+ more dmg than the tank has in HP, to make sure those options arent enough for busters)