What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ty_taurus]

I firmly believe that aside from the jank and various problems associated with Cleric Stance, HW design nailed this perfectly.

WHM was never a difficult job, it was always the simplest of the healers, the 4/10, you could just react and heal whatever damage comes out, or you could meld some accuracy and throw out some damage when you were comfortable. SCH was the advanced job that you went to if you were interested in taking some of the burden of the dps check on yourself, while AST was the advanced job that you went to if you were more interested in taking a more supportive approach to combat rather than doing the damage yourself.

If they simply took this design and evolved it instead of breaking it down and rebuilding everything, the healers might actually have a solid foundation right now.

Stone III, Aero, Aero II, Aero III, Fluid Aura, Assize, Presence of Mind, Holy, and Cleric Stance. If we cut Cleric Stance and add Afflatus Misery, then consider something else that could take the spot of Fluid Aura, Aero, and Aero III--something that's maybe not just 3 DoTs (counting Dia), but something that's perhaps a bit flexible, then that could be perfectly fine for a still-approachable White Mage.

[Shurrikhan]

Ngl, I really don't want to see rehauls, reworks, or even retouches done on the basis of "Let's just grab these things, and a bit of that, and a bit of that." If we're to rework anything, I'd like to see a legitimate focus on some core theme and organic expansion therefrom.

[ty_taurus]

Ngl, I really don't want to see rehauls, reworks, or even retouches done on the basis of "Let's just grab these things, and a bit of that, and a bit of that." If we're to rework anything, I'd like to see a legitimate focus on some core theme and organic expansion therefrom.

I don't disagree, but at the same time, I also feel like Sisyphus forced to tirelessly push against the bolder of hell that is healer design in this game, and while I would like to see a really fresh reboot of the healer role entirely to actually compliment this game in any conceivable way, I'm willing to take a smaller victory of revamping an older form of these jobs. But I was also just referencing WHM having 8 different actions for offensive gameplay.

[ForsakenRoe]

pictures

For a second I got a heart attack I thought you'd pulled up my trash p12s p2 log from last week, but no it just looks similar (unsurprising given what little choice of filler GCDs we have to work with). For the RDM specifically, we don't need those 12 uses of the 123 melee combo, Scorch and Resolution to be separate if it were on a healer. Just have the 123 as a single button (wouldn't want the healer players getting stressed by complexity after all), which puts it up to '36 casts' of that button and therefore actually taking top spot of 'number of casts'.

Also, as a little thought experiment, were I to change WHM as I deem fit, the Glare count in that picture would be reduced by 3 per minute, to add some extra Dia casts, 4 per minute for Banish casts, and 4 per minute again for 'the cool heal tool', Quake, Tornado, and Flood casts. Let's be generous and ignore Quake, since it's the same button, that still means that in the 7:40 fight you refer to, that 134 Glares drops by ((3+4+3)*7), or down to 64 (plus a bit more reduction due to the other 40 seconds). With a total cast count of 233, and a new Glare total of 'roughly 60', this puts the 'percentage of actions being Glare in a given encounter' all the way down to about 25%

edit: a comparison, because pictures speak a thousand words:

But I was also just referencing WHM having 8 different actions for offensive gameplay.

I reckon I could scrounge up 8 damage actions for a WHM. How about... Glare, Dia, Holy, Misery, Banish, Quake, Tornado, Flood, Assize, POM, Cleric (maybe, not the HW version though). Wait that's more than 8, even if we took out QTF cos 'its the same button don't count' then it's 8

[ty_taurus]

For the RDM specifically, we don't need those 12 uses of the 123 melee combo, Scorch and Resolution to be separate if it were on a healer. Just have the 123 as a single button (wouldn't want the healer players getting stressed by complexity after all), which puts it up to '36 casts' of that button and therefore actually taking top spot of 'number of casts'.

For sure. It's not that WHM should have a cast list identical to the RDM cast list or anything. In fact, we can look at BLM as a better example of what a better designed WHM (or any healer potentially) cast list could look like.



Unlike RDM where a lot of its 'filler' gameplay is split across 5 different actions (Verthunder, Veraero, Verfire, Verstone, and Jolt), BLM does have a rotation that centers around trying to spam a single spell, Fire IV, and as a result, you see a different curve here, and yet from the data I was able to collect, it was the highest rated job, beating DRG and RDM by roughly half a point. But there's a distinct difference regarding how BLM regularly has to engage with other parts of its tools to allow it to cast Fire IV, otherwise they'd run out of MP or drop their Enochian. And yet even being a DPS that's centered around using a single spell as much as possible, it still casts that spell half as much as a WHM casts Glare.

I'm not suggesting that the healers need to have all these other DPS outlets to support their filler per say, because the responsibility to heal should take up a percentage of that, but that healing in combination with other DPS tools together should cut Glare usage in half consistent across various types of content.

[AmiableApkallu]

There are other Jobs to pick, some which will have limits below your level, some at your level, and some above your level. Everyone, of all skills, has the same choice, just a different slate.

Again, every MMO I'm aware of has always done this. Every one I've ever played has had some easy, some medium, and some high difficulty classes. The only one I can think of that might not have (which I didn't play) was Wildstar, specifically because it was made exclusively for a hardcore audience.

WoW vaguely gets around this with talents, but we don't have those yet in FFXIV. But even there, there are some classes where no matter the talents you pick, it's still easy (or hard, in the case of the hard classes). So it's not even a perfect solution there. In FFXIV, we don't have that option, so this is what we get instead.

You're ignoring what I've said: Every player should be able to choose any class/job they want based on "identity"/"aesthetic" and find fulfillment in this game.

That's how this game is set up. At no point are you asked, "Would you like to play a hard job or an easy job? Would you like a large gap or a small gap between the skill floor and skill ceiling?" You are simply presented with a slate of jobs with various looks and feels and stories that you can choose from and play.

Or perhaps as someone else put it:

Building out kits organically from intuitive, accessible parts to a fairly high ceiling (resulting in nearish to the same skill ceiling, albeit it in varied ways) is always better for offering players breadth of choice than would be purposely stratifying the roster into S, A, B, C, and D tier jobs, where each is better than those above it up until a particular effort threshold and then worth past that threshold.

Every job in this game has a kit consisting of "intuitive, accessible parts" that, to varying degrees of success, aligns with the job's aesthetic and identity. The question is where the skill ceiling falls. And to some extent, that also flows from a job's aesthetic and identity. There is some intrinsic difficulty in being a glass cannon turret on an active battle field (BLM). There is some intrinsic simplicity in powerful, direct HP restoration (WHM).

But there is a problem when one confuses "intrinsic simplicity" for "the skill ceiling must be buried six feet under ground."

[Aravell]

I still firmly believe that HW healer design is the key to solving this problem and satisfying both sides.

WHM was plenty simple back then, they also did have small optimisations they could do. SCH and AST were both slightly harder to get into and had much higher ceilings. I believe SGE can cleanly fit into this design as well. Given that SCH is more about passive damage through DoTs and Shadowflare with a complex healing kit via fairy micromanagement, SGE can have a simpler healing kit akin to WHM but a slightly more complex damage kit more focused on direct damage, which would set it apart from SCH.

The foundation for a good design is there, was there, back in HW. People just tunnel so hard onto Cleric Stance that they forgot that the kits were well-made. It's a really big shame that Yoshi P said that he'll not go back to HW design.

[ForsakenRoe]

The foundation for a good design is there, was there, back in HW. People just tunnel so hard onto Cleric Stance that they forgot that the kits were well-made. It's a really big shame that Yoshi P said that he'll not go back to HW design.

Which is why I maintain that SB is the middle ground 'compromise' position. There's some nuance to damage kits, there's still room to optimize things, but most of the player0unfriendly stuff like Cleric Stance locking you out of healing has been fixed. This however gets derided as 'bad idea' because people who are opposed to having a skill ceiling of any kind have the easy out of saying 'you want lilies to be trash bad again???', like no of course not, the idea is to take the parts that DO work from EW and keep those, but evolve on the job's kits in a way that would make sense if it had come after 4.0, rather than the amputation of 5.0

Alternatively, the same logic applies to HW. Give back the HW kits, but keep the 'good things' that came after HW. Like, a full 100% revert to HW would include 'Cleric Stance returns' and 'pressing Deploy right after an Adlo causes the Deploy to ghost, because the animation hasn't finished yet'. And of course, 'WHM runs out of MP super fast'. We don't need those aspects back