Encounter Design needs to be overhauled at a fundamental level

[Kalise]

So, many people may have noted how some healers and to a lesser extent some tanks have become agitated with how their role plays out. Specifically in reference to the meme of "Green DPS" and "Blue DPS" rather than feeling like healers and tanks.

The crux of this, isn't (just) how the jobs have been designed, but is also due to how encounters have been designed. Most importantly, in how encounter design has not evolved in the 6+ years this game has been live.

"But Kalise, look at all the shiny new mechanics we now have in this new Extreme-Mega-Ultimate-Savage-Hardcore-Super-Gosu Raid encounter compared to ye olde Sastasha!" I hear you cry, but while we have more diverse mechanics, the core gameplay is still the same.

That being:

- Avoid the bad.
- If anyone doesn't avoid the bad. They die.
- Healer/SMN/RDM Swiftcast Raises them.
- Boss uses Tankbuster every ~1 minute.
- Tank uses CD(s)
- Healer uses oGCD to heal tank back up.
- Boss uses Raidbuster every ~1 minute.
- Healer uses AoE oGCD to heal everyone back up.

This fundamentally, minimizes the actual role based actions required by Tanks and Healers to essentially, a few CD's every so often. The rest of their time is spent mashing DPS skills and trying to maximize DPS.

Thus, in order to open up the design space for Tanks and Healers to utilize more role based actions, encounter design needs to evolve so that there are more times where it can be appropriate to do so.

How can this be done?

- Well, a simple change would be to increase the passive damage that bosses do. Making it so that it takes more than just a simple Regen/Shield upkeep on the tank to nullify boss auto-attacks between "Busters". In addition, this change should come with a change to Tanks so that they have more input into their own survival through passive damage.

I.e. There should be mechanics, such as gauges, that allows tank players to actively be doing stuff (Such as generating gauge) in order to access skills that increase their survivability.
As opposed to the current system where 3/4 tanks deal damage to fill a gauge that lets them deal more damage. That's a system for a DPS. No wonder "Blue DPS" memes exist...

The end result should be that healers will spend a few more GCD's on healing tanks through passive damage, while tanks focus on improving their own survival to mitigate damage. Ideally, healers won't have to spam heal tanks, but will want to toss over the occassional heal. So as to improve their engagement without simply replacing nuke spam with heal spam.

- Add in more random spikes of damage.

This can be done on a per encounter basis. Maybe one boss will crit on autos and deal more damage to the tank occasionally. Maybe another boss occasionally fires a missile at a DPS dealing unavoidable damage. Etc.

Something to make healers want to react and deviate from their standard filler duties. As well as something to put pressure on so that it's not so easy to just let everyone sit at 10% life because you put a HoT on them and it'll heal them up by the time the next source of damage will exist.

It doesn't have to take a major role in the encounter, lest healing become whack-a-mole, but having it exist in a minor form will improve healer engagement as they'll have something to react to (Especially if mechanics continue to be a binary "People are alive or dead" system due to how vuln stacks work or how their damage works at Savage+ content if not simply insta-death mechanics such as falling off the arena)

- Increase the damage of unavoidable attacks.

This one is more focused on Tank design. Tanks should have more onus in party survival as well as their own survival. Having CD's to use for Raidbusters, having CD's to use on allies being targeted by skills, "Cover" mechanics for all tanks where they can use their bodies (With higher defence and defensive CDs) to mitigate damage for allies.

Most importantly, Tanks should be rewarded for mitigating damage. Bring back the old skills that we used to have that proc'd after mitigating damage (Though, repurpose them to make them function with new generation mitigation skills as opposed to Parry/Dodge/Block procs), make TBN popping a DPS increase instead of DPS neutrality etc.

Tanks in encounters should be either MT and focusing on keeping themselves alive, or OT and focusing on keeping their allies alive. Not simply being "Herp derp gotta punch boss more gooder" irregardless of where they're positioned.

In addition, if resources are thus more focused towards building up mitigation, there should be less pressure on nerfing Tank stats, accessories or damage formulae in order to artificially gimp their damage output, as there would be less of a focus on purely maximizing DPS.

- That's about it as far as I can think.

I believe that's about what would be necessary in the fundamentals of encounter design to promote more engaging content for Tanks/Healers, with further design coming from additional mechanics.

- Bonus ideas

- Shift healing power away from oGCD's towards GCDs.

Essentially, make oGCD's more for panic buttons that you use when you really need to heal someone up right now, with more throughput from GCD's (You can have more instant cast GCD's that's fine, as it still causes you to stop what filler action you're partaking of)

- Make ALL stats for Tanks hybrid Damage/Defence ones.

So as to make gearing more interesting, provide defensive bonuses from Crit/DH/SkS while improving the gains from Det/Ten. So that gearing can be more interesting than "Stack the highest DPS gain stats" or if mitigation was more important "Stack Ten/Det"

Examples could be stuff like, PLD getting chances for Critical Blocks from Crit that absorb more damage. GNB getting reduced defensive CD's from SkS allowing more freedom to use them to mitigate passive damage. Etc.

[Krotoan]

"But Kalise, look at all the shiny new mechanics we now have in this new Extreme-Mega-Ultimate-Savage-Hardcore-Super-Gosu Raid encounter compared to ye olde Sastasha!" I hear you cry, but while we have more diverse mechanics, the core gameplay is still the same.

while you bring up some interesting and completely valid new possible additions, ultra-mega-supra-level3saiyajin-avatarmode-tripleenrage-SSS modes are the content made for people who don't find challenge in the basics. If you make the normal encounters like this, the inclusiveness to all levels of players ramps down extremely quickly. Considering the amount of PuGs I get who cannot deal with the basics I am gunshy of raising the floor.

[Nedkel]

The ideas look nice on paper, in reality you would have to adjust everything to exclude healers dps from equaction for example in savage mode.

This puts more responsibilities on tanks and healers, thus making those jobs more important which is questionable thing to do.
First and foremost it would decrease the number of players playing those jobs for obvious reason, second is it would hurt the party more to have clueless healer and tank resulting in smaller chances of finishing the run, a tank dying with those changes would mean healer is going to be 1 shoot more often and from here there is a short way to wipe. FFXIV is not Wow where you could increase sustained damage being dealt to players, mechanics are far more punishing to the players and teams, if you put on tanks more sustained damage its going to be a mess. Savage bosses are dealing a lot of damage from auto attacks anyway.

Damage would have to be reduced if you make it appear more often, otherwise you are going to inject frustration into the game, with damage being higher could destroy the balance between damage and ehp of the tanks and healers. Not only that but also balance between tanks as well, as some tanks are clearly superior to others in terms of self defense, healers as well with Whm having no issues with MP would make them healer #1.

[Gemina]

while you bring up some interesting and completely valid new possible additions, ultra-mega-supra-level3saiyajin-avatarmode-tripleenrage-SSS modes are the content made for people who don't find challenge in the basics. If you make the normal encounters like this, the inclusiveness to all levels of players ramps down extremely quickly. Considering the amount of PuGs I get who cannot deal with the basics I am gunshy of raising the floor.

I don't think anyone is asking for supersaiyan mode for normal encounters. I also don't want to trivialize content outside savage/ultimate. I think the game tiers difficulty just fine. That doesn't mean encounter design is fine as is though. It's not. As someone who plays all three roles, I can attest to the demand being the most minimal with tanks and healers. As it stands right now, roles fill up their downtime gaps with DPS. DPS jobs being designated to dealing damage have no downtime outside phase transitions, and dodging. For healers and tanks it is much different. Instead of trying to think of innovative ways for them to fill up their downtime, they just have them DPS and call it a day. This gap, can be used to change up encounter design and i think that is what Kalise is getting at.

In any case she echos a lot of my thoughts I have about encounter design, and why I play DPS jobs when I want to be more engaged in an encounter.

[Jonnycbad]

Imagine if instead of dpsing when healing wasn't needed, each healer had a gauge/mechanic they needed to do to recover mana or build resource actively? Like if WHM had a prayer type of mechanic where they had to do something similar to a Dancer step minigame to recover MP with each correct step while building lillies during downtime. Or SCH had a minigames to "study" by uncovering/deciphering runes somehow and that recovered MP and gave them aetherflow stacks. Basically of Healers didn't have to dps at all in raids and they needed to recover resources instead because mp costs were much higher and there was no lucid dreaming or auto mp recover.

[Liam_Harper]

- Bonus ideas

- Shift healing power away from oGCD's towards GCDs.

I agree with most points except this one. Pure GCD play isn't that fun. Those 2.4 second gaps between every action start to drag out. I'd even like to see oGCD's flow a little better and to have more weave windows as a healer for those oGCD's, things like Lily heals are a good example.

I've also seen complaints that the healer toolkit is too strong. It is ...for the current design. The fix there should be to give us more things to heal, that actually put that toolkit to good use and reward us for utilizing it well. I'd actually prefer things stay unchanged than become a clunky wet noodle healer to force me to slowly spam Cure II, Cure II, Medica, Medica, Medica, Cure II all fight.

I also wouldn't want to see dps as a healer eliminated entirely. It should still be an optional bonus a great healer can add to the team.

[Kalise]

while you bring up some interesting and completely valid new possible additions, ultra-mega-supra-level3saiyajin-avatarmode-tripleenrage-SSS modes are the content made for people who don't find challenge in the basics. If you make the normal encounters like this, the inclusiveness to all levels of players ramps down extremely quickly. Considering the amount of PuGs I get who cannot deal with the basics I am gunshy of raising the floor.

Though, the difficult encounters are made difficult through the complexity of additional mechanics across the board.

They don't need to filter those down through game modes at all.

All the suggestions I've made, are to the base behaviour of bosses. Which are completely separate to the plethora of "Don't stand in the bad" mechanics that define the actual difficulty of XIV's encounters.

This puts more responsibilities on tanks and healers, thus making those jobs more important which is questionable thing to do.

It's not putting more responsibilities on them, it's shifting their responsibilities.

Shifting from being focused on pumping out maximum DPS, to instead focusing on their actual role (Mitigating/Healing). It doesn't make them any more or less important. In Savage+ content, people are already pushed to maximize DPS to beat tight enrage timers (Of course, these enrage timers would need to be addressed after such changes). In normals, Tanks and Healers are vital to keep enough people standing to have the fight continue (Since, given the lack of enrages, that's all you need to beat encounters, hence why LB's are typically reserved for Healers to mass raise everyone when people inevitably mess up mechanics and get one-shot en masse)

First and foremost it would decrease the number of players playing those jobs for obvious reason

Considering the current state of the game, where Healers are severely lacking in number these days, BECAUSE they had their responsibilities and engagement ripped out thanks to dumbing down of filler DPS duties with no change in healing responsibilities. I doubt that is the case.

We even have a thread over in the Healer section that is getting more and more full of long term healers who've quit healing to go play DPS jobs because they offer more engagement.

second is it would hurt the party more to have clueless healer and tank resulting in smaller chances of finishing the run

So... Why is it that we need to let braindead healers and tanks continue to function? We don't let braindead DPS get away with doing nothing, with various DPS checks (E8 and Cinder Drift both have phases where the boss just spams AoE until death. E7 has the adds that need to be killed before they explode and wipe the party. Even way back in ARR content we had things like Ifrit that required killing of the nail before he nuked everyone)

If people perform poorly, they either need to learn, or get kicked.

a tank dying with those changes would mean healer is going to be 1 shoot more often and from here there is a short way to wipe.

If a Tank dies, the OT will get hit.

Unless you mean Dungeons where there is only 1 tank. In which case, well, currently, tanks are not necessary since you can just heal DPS who have aggro from their high damage given the plethora of healing tools available to healers... (Thus, if simply using those tools on the Tank then the Tank shouldn't die. Especially if Tanks have more things to do to keep themselves alive other than "Sit there being inherently tanky from defence")

Damage would have to be reduced if you make it appear more often, otherwise you are going to inject frustration into the game, with damage being higher could destroy the balance between damage and ehp of the tanks and healers.

It's not going to inject frustration into the game to make people actually have to play it.

As it stands right now, passive damage taken by tanks is pretty much covered by applying a Regen and Shield to them. Meaning that for the other GCD's between "Busters", healers spam nukes.

Simply increasing damage frequency to replace some of that nuke spam with GCD heals, shouldn't make things more frustrating, unless someone is only playing healer so they can spam nukes all day (Though, from what I gather from healer reactions, that's the exact opposite of what they want to do)

Not only that but also balance between tanks as well, as some tanks are clearly superior to others in terms of self defense, healers as well with Whm having no issues with MP would make them healer #1.

Though, that's what this sort of change is supposed to address. Going forward with encounter designs that specifically include more damage, allows for the class design team to focus on creating more parity in classes ability to function in the role. As opposed to now where their entire balance decision revolves around making sure all the jobs do equal DPS.

More emphasis on mitigation and healing means more focus on balancing mitigation and healing. More making Tanks actual tanks, not Blue DPS and more making healers actual healers not Green DPS.

I agree with most points except this one. Pure GCD play isn't that fun. Those 2.4 second gaps between every action start to drag out. I'd even like to see oGCD's flow a little better and to have more weave windows as a healer for those oGCD's, things like Lily heals are a good example.

Shifting the healing power towards GCD's doesn't mean deleting oGCD's. It just means that instead of oGCD's being like 1200 potency and nigh full healing a Tank in one go, it will be less potent like ~400 ish potency heal to use as a bonus to throughput.

If anything, shifting the healing power towards GCD's and reducing the overall potency of oGCD's can result in MORE weaving potential, as CD timers for oGCD's can be reduced since they aren't in danger of completely trivializing all damage dealt in an encounter by simply healing through every attack for 0 MP and 0 GCD cost.

[Recon1o6]

OP raises some valid points, ones that healers and tanks have been saying for a while now- that is they don't feel like their roles because the challenge isn't there in most duties and significant downtime is far too common for healers.
It is plausible that one cause of so many poor players in duty and party finder is because in most content there is no significant penalty for dying as gear strength of other members of the party can pick up the slack OR the fight is tuned so that you're either dead or you aren't (unless you are a tank. 6 vuln stacks in nier raid? pfft). Players aren't going to improve if they can clear content without trying.

The skill floor has been lowered to the point where even new extreme modes are dismissed as easy, because you can have people face planting on hades and ruby with only a single healer and still ease through the fight with mechanics to spare. Story fights like nidhogg or vishap and ex trials have also been lowered in difficulty over the last few years. You'd never have gotten away with poor performance on Sephirot, Tsuky or Ramuh extremes.

Damage being faster is a good thing, the odin trial comes to mind when it was new- fast unavoidable tank busters you had to cycle your at the time 4 mitigation tools, then invul if you flubbed a timing or you got to einherjar phase. Thunder god cid pre unneccessary nerf is also a good example- its a hard alliance fight because the damage is high enough people can't be braindead during it, but otherwise its really straightforward given you have ample time for his telegraphs compared to most fights.

OP's idea of tying mitigation to damage is a good thing. Healer threads have generally been positive about healing giving dps in the form of blood lily, since downtime for healers is most of the fight nowadays. It would also open new avenues to get rid of the terrible homogenisation these two roles have suffered this expansion. I do agree with a baseline damage increase, random spikes of damage would need to be careful though as they can spiral quickly or be unfairly targeting

[Akiudo]

Though, the difficult encounters are made difficult through the complexity of additional mechanics across the board.

They don't need to filter those down through game modes at all.

All the suggestions I've made, are to the base behaviour of bosses. Which are completely separate to the plethora of "Don't stand in the bad" mechanics that define the actual difficulty of XIV's encounters.

not going into the rest, especially as at its core i'm all for turning healers/tanks into something different from glorified dps, however you have to realize that "base behaviour" of the boss is not "completely separate to the plethora of 'Don't stand in the bad' mechanics that define the actual difficulty of XIV's encounters." as you called it, cause you only have two choices as far as those go, either you simply "add" stricter base behaviour while keeping the rest as is, those making encounters harder by default, which is the point the person was making, people are allready failing as is, or you make changes to the boss' base behaviour and in exchange tone down the "don't stand in the bad" mechanics, which would mean they are in fact not separate and directly affected aswell. Now one may say that WoW for example has a lot more active mechanics and less of a strict "now do x" aspect to it, however they openly said in the past that they tune fights under the assumption things like Deadly boss mods are used, however with final fantasys "no third party programm" policy which in turn means no addons as their is no addon api and likely never will they obviously can't do that here.

Fact of the matter is, more "active" mechanics would mean either fights simply get harder, and for in fact most players they are too hard as is, or a drastic decrease of static "you fucked up" mechanics in exchange for less punishing but more active mechanics. however these mechanics would still not nearly be as active as people like to believe, (or they would be so weak on the "punishing" side it wouldn't matter) as they simply can't design fights like for example wow does without allowing the use off addons, it just wouldn't work

[Derio]

What the OP is asking for from a developer standpoint is almost impossible. You would have to fundamentally change every fight in the game to avoid a mass spike in difficulty for the average player.

One big problem with healer dps was it was gutted this expansion with no real increase in damage the party takes.

The problem lies in how to implement this change and how to balance it to where the impact is meaningful but not detrimental to the average player.