It's time to hire dedicated Tank an Healer devs!

[Deveryn]

It's not that we want complex dps rotations or that, it's the only real thing most people thought we actually had a shot at getting. Some sort of interesting interactions between abilities or interesting choices to make would make a lot of people just as happy, I feel. Or frankly, if we just had more unpredictable damage or unavoidable damage to heal more often so that we didn't have 3+ minutes of fight with no heals needed.

Yoshi-P acknowledged this in one of the recent interviews (with MTQ), saying they're looking at giving healers more to heal through.

[zcrash970]

Healers not having many DPS abilities is intentional because some healers like to just heal and SE wants to support their freedom to focus on healing. They don't want to pressure them into doing damage when that isn't the role they chose.

Tanks lacking some of the DPS complexity of a DPS is intentional because in raid content, tanks have a lot of things to focus on including boss positioning and repositioning, keeping space for DPS positionals, protecting the party with party mitigation, tank swaps and tank busters and a lot of tank-specific mechanics or non-tank mechanics that are dumped on the tanks so DPS don't have to do them. They are also doing a lot of the mechanics the rest of the party is doing.

I've played tanks for many years and tanks are currently in a really good place and I don't see the problem with them at all. They are really fun in raid content and really fun to do big pulls with in dungeons.

My only problem with this argument is that healers have so much downtime otherwise. If they made healing harder, I'll be all for that
Same thing for tanking.

[Liam_Harper]

Healers not having many DPS abilities is intentional because some healers like to just heal and SE wants to support their freedom to focus on healing. They don't want to pressure them into doing damage when that isn't the role they chose.

Tanks lacking some of the DPS complexity of a DPS is intentional because in raid content, tanks have a lot of things to focus on including boss positioning and repositioning, keeping space for DPS positionals, protecting the party with party mitigation, tank swaps and tank busters and a lot of tank-specific mechanics or non-tank mechanics that are dumped on the tanks so DPS don't have to do them. They are also doing a lot of the mechanics the rest of the party is doing.

There is more pressure to dps when we have so much downtime and it's only 1 button. If dps is as easy as pressing 1 over and over, you should absolutely be slamming it in every single spare moment. If there's more to heal and doing dps involves a few more buttons, people will be understanding if just healing the group takes most of your focus. Even now however, expectations of healers to do damage isn't that high. This imaginary "pressure" is in peoples heads.

As for tanking, you're deluding yourself. It's the easiest role in the game right now. I see this argument a lot from tanks who want to believe they're playing a role that requires a lot skill. Pointing the boss the right way, pressing a cooldown for tankbusters 3 times in an 8 minute fight, pressing provoke and remembering Reprisal exists are not rocket science when all you're doing is 1-2-3 in the meantime. Don't get me wrong, there are good tanks and knowing the class makes some difference, but it's not a demanding role to learn.

Right now, they have dedicated dps designers and dps are designed well. Many of them are really easy to pick up and you can perform reasonably well even as a casual player. However, they also have room for optimization and a skilled player can push even further from the classes and will be engaged. Tanks and healers are easy to pick up, which is fine, but it just stops there. There's almost nothing to master.

[GeminiReed]

... they just care for the money. If it's so profitable why invest more in to it. If any thing you start to see the cut 3ven more things as it go.

I don't think the XIV team is all about the money. Square's upper management might.

What you've described though is "Sacrificing long term profits for short term profits." If your product's lifecycle is front loaded than that (sorta) works. But cutting corners or producing something that doesn't fit your target demographic can do significant damage to your firm's reputation which in turn limits repeat business.

I think Square's been punishing XIV for 1.0. How many times has the excuse for fixing an old bug or refusing to implement a new feature been 'lol, spaghetti code'? IIRC the ARR team was on such a death march that Yoshida gave them a six-month sabbatical because they were that burned out. Exhausted people create far more problems than they fix.

Hopefully this latest statement is a commitment to address that mountain of tech-debt.

As for tanking, you're deluding yourself. It's the easiest role in the game right now. I see this argument a lot from tanks who want to believe they're playing a role that requires a lot skill. Pointing the boss the right way, pressing a cooldown for tankbusters 3 times in an 8 minute fight, pressing provoke and remembering Reprisal exists are not rocket science when all you're doing is 1-2-3 in the meantime

There's a bit more to it than that. To mitigate a tankbuster one must have memorized each and every castbar or telegraph. On trash you don't just need to know how much you can handle but the capabilities of the entire team. About 40% of the tanks in my recent Stone Vigil/DD/AV runs struggle with the basics much less have team awareness. It's gotten so bad that I've been comming the competent tanks by default instead of healers.

[Jeeqbit]

As for tanking, you're deluding yourself. It's the easiest role in the game right now. I see this argument a lot from tanks who want to believe they're playing a role that requires a lot skill.

No role requires a lot of skill, but that doesn't mean they are as good at it as they could be. A DPS could not press some of their cooldowns or do positionals, a tank could not use all of their utility and position the boss poorly and a healer could spam cure. There are a lot of times people clear while playing their roles this way.

Each fight tests different roles a different amount too. Some fights are tank fights and boring for the DPS and some fights are boring for the tanks but a lot for the healers or the DPS.

There are definitely fights where healer is the easiest role because of it being one button compared to what tanks are doing.

Pointing the boss the right way, pressing a cooldown for tankbusters 3 times in an 8 minute fight, pressing provoke and remembering Reprisal exists are not rocket science when all you're doing is 1-2-3 in the meantime.

Tank rotations might not be as complicated as DPS, but they are not quite 1-2-3 and have other parts to their rotation like goring blade, atonement, requiescat, continuation, storm's eye, inner release/delirium, MP management and abilities to use off cooldown, which can clash with using mitigation sometimes.

I don't think it's necessary to make tanks tunnel while dragging the boss to a specific square pattern because they are doing some extremely complicated and distracting rotation. I don't think it would make a party happy to be wiping because the tank's rotation is so complicated that they wipe the party because of it.

[Deceptus]

Healers not having many DPS abilities is intentional because some healers like to just heal and SE wants to support their freedom to focus on healing. They don't want to pressure them into doing damage when that isn't the role they chose.

And that's absolutely fine for casual healers. Veteran healers realize that healing is not intensive in this game and you'll easily spend 60% or more (a lot more) of your GCDs casting damage if you are playing halfway decently.

Because every role should be doing SOMETHING beneficial every single GCD they can. For healers, when there's nothing to heal, that means they're either:

1) Mitigating damage
2) Doing damage.

All we are asking for is that damage to be meaningful and fun. Not 2 damage buttons from lvl 4 to lvl 90 like it is currently.

And the solutions aren't entirely complicated. Easy solutions would be:

Scholar: Give back the Quickened Aetherflow trait. This ENCOURAGED them to use their aetherflow stacks.

White Mage: Change the FreeCure trait from Cure1 (it's a trap currently) to their GCD filler spell Stone / Glare.

AST: Give a Slow to Gravity or have Malefic lower the CD of ED by a second or two per cast.

Correction:
Many of the players that choose to weigh in on the forums hate the current set up.
"Most players" are silent on the issue and we cannot speak for them.

There was a quote somewhere and I'm paraphrasing from memory:

A complaint is an extremely important thing. People who are upset and don't care just walk away angry. If someone is willing to give constructive criticism, it shows they still care about the product.

https://youtu.be/8uFvDXs-rLk?t=228
how's that "fool me twice" saying goes again?

Leveling dungeons have ALWAYS hit harder than the previous expansion's endgame dungeons.

Dusk Vigil, The Vault, Siresong Sea, Bardam's Mettle, Castrum Abania, Holmister Switch all hit like trucks.

[Deveryn]

And that's absolutely fine for casual healers. Veteran healers realize that healing is not intensive in this game and you'll easily spend 60% or more (a lot more) of your GCDs casting damage if you are playing halfway decently.

Because every role should be doing SOMETHING beneficial every single GCD they can. For healers, when there's nothing to heal, that means they're either:

1) Mitigating damage
2) Doing damage.

All we are asking for is that damage to be meaningful and fun. Not 2 damage buttons from lvl 4 to lvl 90 like it is currently.

And the solutions aren't entirely complicated. Easy solutions would be:

Scholar: Give back the Quickened Aetherflow trait. This ENCOURAGED them to use their aetherflow stacks.

White Mage: Change the FreeCure trait from Cure1 (it's a trap currently) to their GCD filler spell Stone / Glare.

AST: Give a Slow to Gravity or have Malefic lower the CD of ED by a second or two per cast.

AST: Spamming slow will do nothing but make mobs immune in a short time rendering arm's length useless. It sounds like you want ED to be some kind of gauge skill because playing around with recast timers like that is not something they do. This is what they've already done with Sage, where certain actions lead to others. Perhaps after 6.0, they'll start looking in that direction for the other healers.

Maybe we should wait and see how sage plays out as well as all the other healer changes.

[CrimsonGunner]

AST: Spamming slow will do nothing but make mobs immune in a short time rendering arm's length useless. It sounds like you want ED to be some kind of gauge skill because playing around with recast timers like that is not something they do. This is what they've already done with Sage, where certain actions lead to others. Perhaps after 6.0, they'll start looking in that direction for the other healers.

Maybe we should wait and see how sage plays out as well as all the other healer changes.

and then you will have a repeat of the mess that happened in 5.0 for ast and sch

[Deveryn]

and then you will have a repeat of the mess that happened in 5.0 for ast and sch

This really means nothing to me as I started after that. I've played MMOs for many years and the one big problem is communication from the players, not just in saying what they'd like, but listening and understanding what the devs communicate as far as limitations. A lot of what I see in this thread is either vague, in need of polish or just moot because 6.0 is likely to bring about these changes.

[Beddict]

There was a quote somewhere and I'm paraphrasing from memory:

A complaint is an extremely important thing. People who are upset and don't care just walk away angry. If someone is willing to give constructive criticism, it shows they still care about the product.

Here you go, point three from the presentation Yoshi-P himself gave at the 2014 Game Developers Conference 2014:



Full slideshow can be found here and the full presentation can be found here.