Question on encounter design.

[Morningstar1337]

I've been wondering about the balance of the game since lurking in the tank forms and checking out the healer forms. Namely I'm curious if the encounter design in Shadowbringers were ramped up in difficulty to compensate for the simplification of the two roles.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

It wasn't.

[GrimGale]

Healers one-button downtime problem was pointed out as soon as the FFXIV tour in 2019 allowed for journalists to try the Titania normal mode fight.

We thought SE was going to compensate with more healing to do, but turns out they didn't.

[BasicBlake]

Healers one-button downtime problem was pointed out as soon as the FFXIV tour in 2019 allowed for journalists to try the Titania normal mode fight.

We thought SE was going to compensate with more healing to do, but turns out they didn't.

God I remember how excited my healer friends were when that went out and they thought the healing load was gonna increase. Womp womp

[Liam_Harper]

No.

If anything it's easier. A few of us spent months trying to get that feedback through before release, against a wall of "it's not released yet", "it's still in beta just wait" and "Yoshi mentioned a super vague comment on pure healing so healer dps is obviously gone and we'll be spamming heals!" ...but here we are and the "told you so" isn't satisfying at all because we'd have preferred to be wrong.

[Recon1o6]

if only. encounter design hasn't evolved at all. Healing is easier than ever as scripted damage seems to be getting weaker, as is maintaining aggro (unless you have a gnb with tank stance on despite being ot)

People are afking in most duties at 50 as there isn't fun anything to do. 60 and 70 you might get something in the raids and trials but not the 24 mans unless its orbonne or construct 7.

Aggro management used to be a party wide thing until SB and heal checks were a thing back in 2.0 days (titan's tumult scaling with the hp loss, odin's bleed etc)

[EaMett]

Difficulty is still average, perhaps overall easier. E8S stands out as being one of the harder fights we've had in a while but that was mostly for early clears due to the dps check and it's a definite outlier in the 8 fights we have so far. Third floors used to be difficult but are jokes right now in comparison to last expansion.
Alexander was average for an ultimate.

Healers had their skill set gutted and nothing to show for it. I think E8S is the only fight this tier that'll push you to gcd heal, kinda sad.
Aggro is no longer something you need to manage either. Everything has been simplified so much and I'm not even sure it's achieved the purpose of getting lower tiered players into raiding. Wonder how that debrief is going at SE currently.

[GrimGale]

Difficulty is still average, perhaps overall easier. E8S stands out as being one of the harder fights we've had in a while but that was mostly for early clears due to the dps check and it's a definite outlier in the 8 fights we have so far. Third floors used to be difficult but are jokes right now in comparison to last expansion.
Alexander was average for an ultimate.

Healers had their skill set gutted and nothing to show for it. I think E8S is the only fight this tier that'll push you to gcd heal, kinda sad.
Aggro is no longer something you need to manage either. Everything has been simplified so much and I'm not even sure it's achieved the purpose of getting lower tiered players into raiding. Wonder how that debrief is going at SE currently.

E8S is hard due the ungodly combination of several one-shot mechanics in a row and the way ping works in this game.

The more one shot mechanics the less healing actually matters since, you can't heal or shield through insta kills.

[Satarn]

The other way around actually - there's been less need for tanks to control enemy position and bosses are no longer able to crit with their auto attacks, which lowers importance of good mitigation plan for tanks and makes healing them far more predictable and easier for healers.

[Enla]

Honestly had they upped the difficulty in healing I think most healers wouldn't be complaining. Sure the pruning of skills would have been annoying, and unwarranted, but an increase in difficulty would have at least allowed us to have something more engaging as compensation. Instead I really can't think of any encounter that had consistently hard healer checks that weren't reduced to a mundane nuisance once you got used to the fight.