The Pure/Barrier Split and my inane ramblings about it

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't mind them classing the healers separately, just not at the expense of jobs like Astro.

I think most of us wouldn't, if they could actually find a way to distinguish them from one another, but as it stands it feels like the split was an experiment that hasn't gone well, like the SB WHM 'let's try making it have really strong healing as it's identity' experiment that lead to WHM being the black sheep of the game. The point I try to make here is that, despite having fairly similar kits in terms of mitigation options, Tanks feel 'different enough' from one another. GNB feels different to PLD, PLD feels different to WAR. This is because their damage rotations are different, which is the majority of the buttons they will be pressing in content. As such, we can make the healers feel 'different to play' via a combination of 'the DPS rotations feel different to one another', and some of the OGCDs feeling different. As an example, healing on WHM vs AST feels very different to me, as WHM is very GCD heal reliant, with systems to refund the damage lost from that GCD healing, whereas AST relies on 1min OGCDs a lot, with CU CO and Star being the primary examples. SCH and SGE are very similar to each other in terms of OGCDs which is kinda bleh, so setting them apart in gameplay by making their damage rotations the point of difference would be the way to go.

Again, for example's sake, let's assume the ideas I posted in this thread are all adopted into the game (almost impossible, but I can dream). The four healers would feel different to each other because WHM would have a very burst based damage rotation, SCH would be juggling DOTs, SGE would be managing procs like it's playing DDR, and AST would be lining up it's delayed damage 'Omen' spells to all strike the enemy at once. The fact that Lustrate and Druochole, or Indomitability and Ixochole, are exactly the same potency and range, wouldn't cross anyone's mind, because you only use those once per 30s. The damage rotation is front and center, so that's the part we should focus on when we want to make things feel different from one another.

[AmiableApkallu]

The point I try to make here is that, despite having fairly similar kits in terms of mitigation options, Tanks feel 'different enough' from one another. GNB feels different to PLD, PLD feels different to WAR. This is because their damage rotations are different, which is the majority of the buttons they will be pressing in content.

It's sad that the tanks feel different from each other because of their filler buttons, not because of their tank buttons. It's like saying your actual job is so boring and uninteresting that you have to look elsewhere for entertainment. And if you're playing them casually, even the filler buttons are basically the same: hit combos, and mash everything else when it lights up and/or on cooldown.

[Semirhage]

It's sad that the tanks feel different from each other because of their filler buttons, not because of their tank buttons. It's like saying your actual job is so boring and uninteresting that you have to look elsewhere for entertainment. And if you're playing them casually, even the filler buttons are basically the same: hit combos, and mash everything else when it lights up and/or on cooldown.

This is often the case, especially with supporting roles. Healing, mitigation, buffing, these aren't things you have to do constantly in most RPGs. By themselves, they're frequently boring. It's adding several tasks that would be boring on their own together in interesting ways that makes them interesting; I play healers because managing several high priority tasks on the fly is more engaging than "Damage? Damage. Which button does the most damage now?". FF14's job designers plainly don't like that multitasking though, so they make each half of that balancing act as simplistic and boring as possible while minimizing the swapping between them to "lower stress", and it's resulted in healer design far more boring than games that acknowledge "pure healing" not paired with other tasks is often....kinda boring.

Squeenix, you can't have your cake and eat it too. CBU3 has to realize at some point that "low stress! Breezy! Hardly ever challenged. No barrier to entry! No-brainer downtime activity. Simplistic noninteractive healing spells!" are kiiiiiiiiiiiind of synonyms for "boring" if you squint not very hard at all.

[ForsakenRoe]

It's sad that the tanks feel different from each other because of their filler buttons, not because of their tank buttons.

Well, once upon a time I had the idea of changing DRK up to be a sort of 'stagger tank' from WOW, with a heavy focus on resource management, using mana to 'purify' the staggered damage (which I tentatively named 'Suffering' because edgy) using Dark Passenger, etc. Instead we got WAR 2 in SHB. SE has this weird design tendency to, when faced with 'we cannot balance this very effectively due to it's inherent complexity', the solution they take is 'remove the complexity'.

Maybe we're lucky I don't have any say in class design, or GNB would have had 6 ammo, BLU would be real (can we get much higher), SMN would have had the current rotation in SB and built on from there instead of this hard reset we got now, and the new class would be a Kamen Rider/Sentai/Garo whichever themed Scouting melee class

[ASkellington]

This is often the case, especially with supporting roles. Healing, mitigation, buffing, these aren't things you have to do constantly in most RPGs. By themselves, they're frequently boring. It's adding several tasks that would be boring on their own together in interesting ways that makes them interesting; I play healers because managing several high priority tasks on the fly is more engaging than "Damage? Damage. Which button does the most damage now?". FF14's job designers plainly don't like that multitasking though, so they make each half of that balancing act as simplistic and boring as possible while minimizing the swapping between them to "lower stress", and it's resulted in healer design far more boring than games that acknowledge "pure healing" not paired with other tasks is often....kinda boring.

Squeenix, you can't have your cake and eat it too. CBU3 has to realize at some point that "low stress! Breezy! Hardly ever challenged. No barrier to entry! No-brainer downtime activity. Simplistic noninteractive healing spells!" are kiiiiiiiiiiiind of synonyms for "boring" if you squint not very hard at all.

I mean you can still make healing somewhat interesting with healing styles: Regen vs Pure vs Barrier for example.

But yeah, it doesn't change much. Part of why I picked up Shaman in WoW was all the extra micromanagement with the totems (...BACK WHEN I ACTUALLY HAD THEM) and why I picked AST here....

[ForsakenRoe]

I had a funny thought (two actually)just before I went to sleep last night, this isn't an actual suggestion because holy heck it'd be impossible to balance, but basically I thought 'imagine if you could mark a spot and facing for a noulith on SGE to face and wait, and then when you target it with Pneuma, it ricochet's that Pneuma shot in the direction it's facing', so it'd cause a new Pneuma heal centered on itself, and a new damage beam in the direction it's facing

I also thought 'what if dps spells on SGE cost no mana, but Zoe, Eukrasia do, and we make Soteria cost MP but have a 5s CD'... Not a new idea for me, but the Soteria part is. Like, let's imagine a gameplay where we choose how to empower our skills based on the current situation. Zoe could have stacks and make the next X (let's say 4) Dosis/Phlegma do more damage (if it's a % increase you'd always want to amp Phlegma and the DOT, if it's flat like Dark Arts you'd do it for raidbuff windows I guess). Eukrasia can stay as it is, but cost mana to augment the spell (maybe add a E.Phlegma too). Toxicon could maybe be reworked so instead of needing a Sting stack, it costs mana and makes the next X spells (again, lets say 4 and make a theme of it) instantcast, creating a sort of mini-lightspeed effect. This would be at the cost of your MP economy, so you wouldn't be able to have 100% uptime on this, it'd be as much of a 'well I guess there's no other choice' moment as Ruin 2 on SCH. Soteria could have a similar effect as now, but instead be a 5-10s CD that costs mana. Instead of gating 'your Kardia heals 2x as hard for 4 hits, once per 90s' it could be 'that, but as often as you have mana to sustain it'. Krasis could be changed to also cost MP, and have a 2-5s CD, I think that'd be fine because it's single target, putting it on several targets would require multiple weave slots (and stagger the duration windows from one another).

Lastly, we could add an augmenting skill that would apply a reskinned Kardia to everyone, with X stacks (guess how many), that allows you to AOE heal by doing damage. I'm surprised 'AOE Kardia' isn't a thing already with how obvious it is as a design but hey ho. This would also allow interplay between buffs, by going Dosis-AOEKardia-Dosis-Soteria-Dosis-Toxicon-DosisDosisDosis ETC, you'd be able to put up AOE healing, then amp that AOE healing via Soteria (because it's considered a Kardia heal!), then Toxicon to get mobility for a mechanic coming up. Alternatively, Dosis-Toxicon-Dosis-AOEKardia-Soteria-DosisDosisDosis would allow you to get the movement and instacasts early, meaning you could doubleweave the healing related augments together. This would mean all 4 stacks of AOEKardia would be amped by the 4 of Soteria, but this would come at the cost of using the movement of Toxicon earlier, perhaps meaning you need a second use of Toxicon for the movement mechanic that is coming up... These decisions would allow for lots of skill expression from the toppest top players, and the players who are more 'man i don't care just let me get the loot' would be unaffected by all of this, because their solution could instead be 'drop one GCD to use E.Prognosis for safety'. I know I probably would

The '4 stacks rule' would allow some leeway in having things overlap, without letting them completely overlap, so if you wanted to refresh their effects, the refresh timings would stagger themselves naturally. I notice this happens already with Krasis and Soteria, you can't get them both up at the same time and have their durations properly lined up to get all 4 Soteria shots inside the Krasis, unless you use some form of instacast and doubleweave the two CDs together.

Dark Arts sucked for some people because it was very buttonmashy, I understand that. But I think that one of the main reasons for DRK's DA usage pattern being bad in SB, but the class being fondly remembered in it's HW incarnation, is a combination of two things. One, how often it was used. With the above idea, there'd be choice about 'when' to use an augment skill. You wouldn't have to 'Dark Arts' after every GCD to keep Zoe up, you could press it once every 4th GCD to refresh the stacks. The second reason I think DRK wasn't so hot in SB for some is the choice we had. More accurately, how much we didn't have. In HW, we could DA Souleater for big damage, DA Carve for BIG damage (can you believe 450 was considered 'big hit' back then), DA Dark Dance or Dark Mind for extra mitigation, or DA PowerSlash (rip) for bonus emnity. In SB though, this all changed, because DA's effect on any attack changed to 'increases potency by 140'. It didn't matter which attack you used it on anymore, they all equalled out. Hence I think I'd rather have, in the idea above, Zoe be a % based increase, so it's preferable to spend mana on your Phlegma's, and refreshing your DOT, and only if you have spare MP, you can dump it on using Zoe to augment 4 casts of Dosis. Of course, this all ignores the unfortunate truth that since MP would be a choice between 'more damage' and 'keep party alive', barsebrains would choose the former every time... Still, can't let cruel reality get in the way of our ideas, or we'd never come up with anything new again, would we?

the totems

I'm Enh in Wrath classic, I might be the Heroism bot, but I get all the mail gear in my friend group cos none of them wanted to play Hunter lmao, anyway yeh it's a little sad looking at the list of 23 or so totems in Vanilla-Wrath, then looking at retail and seeing what, 2-3 of each element maybe? IIRC certain elements only have one option, depending on your spec, eg if you're Enh you only get one Water one and its the piddly Healing Stream one. Though I guess the early days were bloated with garbo like Sentry Totem or X Resistance Totem... I've wondered for a while now, how different would the WOW landscape be if WarcraftLogs worked off of RDPS? If Power Infusion was attributed to the Priest, or Windfury's procs attributed to the Shaman? Would we have seen room for more 'support' themed DPS specs to appear? For example, with Rogues having three DPS specs, what if one of them was like our NIN, applying debuffs to increase the enemy's damage taken by the whole raid? Food for thought, but maybe the wrong forum for it =D

[Rithy255]

It's sad that the tanks feel different.

(Cut to fit my reply)

I don't know PLD feels a lot different from other tanks due to their tank buttons feeling pretty different from most tanks, although I don't think it's perfect I think it's utilities should be slightly less situational Considering it's lower DPS and it lacking personals but in general I wanna hope PLD keeps a more supportive tank "feel", Although plds rotation is also way different from other tanks, which is very fun :] (can't wait for 6.3...), Drks TBN feels very different from The other short CDs, theirs some genuinely meaningful differences to tank CDs, lack of sustain makes mitigating also a lot different on DRK, not to say I'm a fan of drk it's my least played tank, In my opinion rotation and Tank buttons are what makes tanks currently stand out as a more support focused job, I like having both a rotation and a support kit if lets say PLD spammed riot blade (other tanks would be one button too) as a rotation but had loads of tanking cds, I think I would quit ff14 lol, I like playing "support" but I like having a rotation.

I think one thing that should change is the 30% mit, right now it's kind of bland I wish they had some differences, I do wish we had some differences, I'd like more defensive differences generally, you can't make stuff required but Utility is a fun thing, I care a lot about how utility feels from a gameplay perspective what makes a Job *feel fun* Other then rotation, Even if defensives aren't really a main concern I really do think Tanks need some more possible support options.

I guess a problem with giving too much tank utility such as healing/defensives is when they can replace healers, I actually think Tanks/healers are most fun when you work as a team, both depend on each other to be playing well, both generally are support, I generally think even easier fights (dungeons, ect) could/should hit the tank a bit harder, I don't think we should design easy content around bad tanks/healers who aren't mitigating/healing correctly, obviously it doesn't need to be super hard but when jobs can Big pull and it hardly do any damage, or jobs like PLD/WAR can solo easily without any healers even in big aoe we have a bit of a issue Imo.

I don't think the direct solution is taking tanks gameplay tools, a lot of people got annoyed with the powerful short cds this expansion (actually would want more support on tanks) but to generally make fights hit harder, maybe also make bw not heal for every mob but i know warrior mains would get angry... In general I want tanks to feel a bit more support based with a good rotation, currently PLD's the best at that but even i get annoyed at some useless jank that brings the class down a bit.

I think with healers you got to keep in mind they do need a mix of OGCD/GCD healing, but having a *small* rotation wouldn't hurt anyone, I believe something very basic for most healers is fine just something better then pressing one button.

[Recon1o6]

I mean you can still make healing somewhat interesting with healing styles: Regen vs Pure vs Barrier for example.

That would be true under the following conditions

1. You actually have things to heal that requires full toolkit use
2. Your healing has an actual skill ceiling

neither condition is currently fulfilled in ff14 for 99% of fights

[ASkellington]

That would be true under the following conditions

1. You actually have things to heal that requires full toolkit use
2. Your healing has an actual skill ceiling

neither condition is currently fulfilled in ff14 for 99% of fights

No. But I want it to. Its kinda ridiculous that wall to wall pulls use more of my kit than boss fights in EX and Savage.

[Irenia]

No. But I want it to. Its kinda ridiculous that wall to wall pulls use more of my kit than boss fights in EX and Savage.

It kind of is expected though, at least with the healing kit.

The more dangerous and chaotic the encounter, the more pressure is put on healing kits. And wall-to-wall pulls are more chaotic that dungeon bosses, since they are designed such that being in the right place at the right time is way too strong mitigation for encounters.