What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[AmiableApkallu]

there is a class of people who do enjoy perfecting things, but only to a certain limit.

Yes. That shouldn't be news to anyone. Heck, I'm in that class of people.

But here's the thing: There is absolutely no reason why my limit should be everyone's limit.

For example: I think AST is super pretty -- both in visual effects and in sound effects. I'd love to play it and no other healer on that basis alone. But f*** my life if I'm going to do some double-weaving constant-target-switching opener b.s. Sorry. I'll be the AST that single weaves everything, and if that's not absolutely perfect and optimal... I'm okay with that. I can take AST into normal mode content, get my dose of pretty, and clear that content just fine. If I'm not a good enough at AST for Extreme or Savage or Ultimate, so be it.

The people who want to take AST into that harder content can have their skill ceiling or skill expression or whatever they want to call it. I'm not so selfish as to deny them that. They, too, can have their super pretty class to play.

[ForsakenRoe]

Everything should flow from the job's identity/aesthetic. Imagine the job gets, say, a two minute cutscene where it gets to be the badass in some scenario. What does it do?

SGE: hooded figure walking through a warzone, as people get injured around them, they keep walking past, but their nouliths 'automatically' heal up the person who needed the aid. Shielding circles automatically drawn around allies before hits can make contact, and when a big attack is about to hit the hooded figure, they don't even flinch. If you remember in ARR's cutscene, a magitek reaper is about to fire, until the BLM lights it up with a massive fire blast. So imagine, that reaper fires, and when the cloud of smoke dissipates, you just see the hooded figure still walking towards whatever they're walking towards, with the nouliths projecting the square shield Alph used in one of the final cutscenes when a planet was being thrown at him. Essentially, I figure something like this, but with nouliths instead of feathers

As for WHM, I imagine they'd lean heavily into the nature side of things. Decimating an opposing army with whirlwinds, earthquakes, tidal waves. The whole lightshow of holy magic is not great in terms of spectacle, if it's the entire show. Rather, using Holy as the big climactic finishing blast would be a lot cooler looking. It detracts from the supposed 'power level' of pure holy type magic, if that's the only thing the WHM were to fight with. Instead, if the battle is 'ended' because of one single cast of it, then it implies that kind of magic is incredibly powerful, perhaps prompting the viewer 'is there a reason they didn't open with it? is there a cost of some sort to it?' And then after the battle, I guess something similar to the SGE idea, where the WHM is effortlessly restoring their allies to health to imply 'hey this avatar of nature's wrath is also incredibly powerful at healing as well as destruction'. A great example of 'a healer taking the spotlight' can be found here. It even looks like an LB3. Actually, maybe that can be part of it, have SGE do the big digital tree, or an AST do Astral Stasis, that'd get people's attention

[Renathras]

But the issue is that those things are all playing within the same arena.

Three pieces to that:

1) That isn't a problem inherently. It's one thing if someone is making a hardcore game that is billed and executed as a hardcore game (Wildstar, say). But, if that's not the design intent, it's really not a problem. Especially as players aren't competing against each other. Smash Bros has a competitive scene, yet you still have simple characters in it, some of which are generally regarded as strong combatants alongside some of the highly technical fighters. This isn't inherently a problem. "Do more work, get more reward" is not always a design goal. Having a higher skill ceiling is not always, either. And it can be made available alongside options with a lower skill ceiling.

2) That aside, it's not like we have this in any game anyway. Every MMO in history has some classes with higher skill ceilings and some with lower. While you may comment that the gap between the two is what you find significant, every MMO in history has also had classes that have more narrow and more wide gaps between skill floor and ceiling. [u]Most[u] also have easy classes and/or easy roles. In some, one role or another is considered super easy. ...which is probably part of the origin of "DPS are a dime a dozen" since early MMO DPS classes and rotations were generally easy and not technical, the ones that were still pale in comparison to modern MMO ones - definitely in polish - and often, players didn't know what was optimal to begin with. For years, Hunter and Paladin in WoW were both considered easy classes. Holy Paladin's healing for a time (Wrath) literally was "Put Beacon of Light on the co-tank. Target the main tank. Press Holy Light. Repeat Holy Light until the encounter ends." 10 mans, you might do a little spot healing with Holy Shock, but especially in 25 mans, that was it. Retribution Paladin was "faceroll", and that was meant literally not figuratively, as while there was technically a very slightly superior rotation, the difference in damage was almost nothing and it was something ridiculous (something like a 49 button series), but the "First Come First Served" or "FCFS" rotation, which was literally "hit each button as it becomes available" (all of their attacks, even the sword ones, had short 6, 9, or 12 second CDs), meaning you could literally just put a ball or face or your knuckles across your hotbars and role back and forth and you were playing optimally. In Vanilla WoW, due to debuff caps and threat management tools being wonky and/or nonexistent (and the debuff limit was very tight early on), in the game's first raid, Molten Core, Hunters were literally there to autoattack. Using any attacks would draw threat and likely result in them killed, and using any of their poison/DoT shots would overwrite some more important debuff, like keeping damage dealt down debuffs on bosses or having an open buff slot for when something situational needed to be applied. Even when it could attack more, the Hunter class still generally had at least one spec that could good damage and was ridiculously easy to play.

The point is, while these led to insults of the class/spec name merged with the word for mentally slow...no one really cared, and the game was healthy as it could be for an MMO. There was even a song made of "It's fun to be a Hunter because my pet gets attack power...Woo! I'm makin' 12 bucks an hour!" that was joking about how easy it was to play. But again, while people mocked and joked, no one really cared and people kinda just went with it.

3) There are also ways to differentiate things that work well. Compare SMN and BLM. BLM's rotation is obviously quite a bit more difficult. It has a high gap between skill ceiling and skill floor. Skill floor (ice mage?) does pitiful damage. Skill ceiling is really competitive, though, and one of the top/leading DPSers. SMN, on the other hand, has a low skill floor and ceiling, a narrow gap between them, but also does less damage. "Why would anyone ever take a SMN?" Well, it makes up for this with some utility to boost other people's damage or help clears with a combat raise and some token healing, and because it's easy to play and master, players have a high level of consistency, which can be important.

But as much as people bemoan BLM numbers - part of that is because it's a difficult class. Low BLM numbers are not due to it being blacklisted, and groups are always happy if they have a skilled BLM among them. It's a solid Job and generally highly regarded by its players, even if people who don't play it tend to dislike it.

RDM, on the other hand, is in a weird place. It has a higher skill requirement than SMN, but doesn't have a higher damage output. In some cases, it has a lower one.

.

To date, I've never seen an MMO that didn't have easier and harder classes. So there are really only two solutions:

1) Make all classes the same difficulty (this is impossible, but let's submit it for the sake of argument). The difficulty then has to be tailored the game's prospective audience. If we did this in FFXIV, then all Jobs would need to be SMN level - no BLM allowed - as the audience is very casual. Instead of making everything BLM level, we'd have the opposite and have no high skill ceiling Jobs. But let's say we set it at a medium point. That would be every Job at, say, RDM level. That means SMN has to be made harder, but also that BLM has to be made easier. It's obviously not fair that BLM is foreclosed to the playerbase, right? If it's not fair for there to be a simple Job, then by extension, it cannot possibly be fair for their to be a more complex Job.

2) Make classes variable, as they are in FFXIV, and let players gravitate to the one they like. While this does annoy people who want a specific aesthetic, this has been true in every MMO in history. There has never been an MMO that had no classes that some people who liked but didn't like its playstyle. Every MMO has classes that people liked but couldn't play or had to adapt to. Arcane Mage in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria was a super easy class, possibly easier than EW SMN. And being the "Arcane" discipline, some people wanted it to be complex. But it wasn't. Warlock was commonly called "the complex Mage", and players that wanted that greater complexity played Warlock. Again, this is true in every MMO in history. FFXIV is not new in this way.

There's no case where every class in an MMO will be balanced with all the others, and every one have the exact same skill level of low skill floor and high skill ceiling or medium skill ceiling - and it can't be both, because then we'd have Jobs being different. Even the proposed changes like "Make SMN's skill ceiling and floor have the same spread" as RDM isn't even intellectually consistent - shouldn't they both match BLM? Or should BLM also be made to match RDM's? Surely we can't allow BLM to be different on the hard side if we disallow SMN being different on the easy side?

The position (like the "straightforward cannot be an identity but buffing can be an identity") is not consistent and requires arbitrary biases be injected to allow it to work (like defining buffer as an acceptable combat style but straightforward being an unacceptable one; who got to decide that extremely specific definition? It's like writing the definition of prime number to artificially exclude 1, since 1 matches the definition otherwise). The only way this could be consistent is if we forced BLM's skill floor to be lower and its skill ceiling to be much lower to match it to RDM's range.[/hb]

In any case, you are always going to be reducing choice. As every MMO does. You're just trying to pick a different form of restriction where one group of people have all options and another group of people have no options at all.

In my case, everyone still has a choice, but the options may be limited.

In your case, only some people have a choice, all options, every single one - for people like you. People who are different from you have no choice, and must quit the game, as all Jobs are restricted from them in your model.

I think this is what people are not getting...

For my part, I think a system - which every other MMO in history has used - that gives each group a slate of choices - is better than a system that completely forecloses all choices from one group favoring a separate group exclusively. And again, if FFXIV did this, you guys would be the ones left out; they clearly are aiming for a lower skill ceiling, more casual audience. So this monkey's paw could easily backfire on you.

.

But here's the thing: There is absolutely no reason why my limit should be everyone's limit.

It's not.

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.

[Shurrikhan]

Three pieces to that:

1) That isn't a problem inherently. It's one thing if someone is making a hardcore game that is billed and executed as a hardcore game (Wildstar, say). But, if that's not the design intent, it's really not a problem.

In any place tight balance doesn't matter... this discussion is irrelevant from the start.

2) That aside, it's not like we have this in any game anyway. Every MMO in history has some classes with higher skill ceilings and some with lower.

Sure. Some variance is inevitable. But there's a hell of a difference between one having 90% the optimization effort of another vs. having only some 40% or less.

There are also ways to differentiate things that work well. Compare SMN and BLM. BLM's rotation is obviously quite a bit more difficult. It has a high gap between skill ceiling and skill floor. Skill floor (ice mage?) does pitiful damage. Skill ceiling is really competitive, though, and one of the top/leading DPSers. SMN, on the other hand, has a low skill floor and ceiling, a narrow gap between them, but also does less damage.

No... just... no. The latter is a bad thing. It means that now one is pushed towards SMN if at or below a certain level of willing effort, and then pushed away from it for anything above that.

You end up with hugely fewer real choices up to that point (X is overpowered), and one fewer real choice after that point (X is underpowered).

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 worse past that threshold.

[EusisLandale]

SGE: hooded figure walking through a warzone, as people get injured around them, they keep walking past, but their nouliths 'automatically' heal up the person who needed the aid. Shielding circles automatically drawn around allies before hits can make contact, and when a big attack is about to hit the hooded figure, they don't even flinch. If you remember in ARR's cutscene, a magitek reaper is about to fire, until the BLM lights it up with a massive fire blast. So imagine, that reaper fires, and when the cloud of smoke dissipates, you just see the hooded figure still walking towards whatever they're walking towards, with the nouliths projecting the square shield Alph used in one of the final cutscenes when a planet was being thrown at him. Essentially, I figure something like this, but with nouliths instead of feathers

I feel like they'd be more likely to have the WoL Icarus out of the smoke cloud and slam the thing with a Phlegma sphere.
That or fire off a Pneuma in return, blowing away the cloud and revealing all the injured people in perfect condition ready to keep up the fight.

[ty_taurus]

The MSQ is not the game.

First of all, I have not stated it as just the MSQ. That is a misrepresentation of what I'm saying. You're brushing off everything from roulettes to alliance raids to normal raids to Eureka and Bozja to treasure map farming to PVP to wonderous tails and so much more by saying "The MSQ is not the game" which, also, it kind of is. It is largely seen as the main driving point of engagement by the player base at large.

This is what I don't think you're understanding, there is a class of people who do enjoy perfecting things, but only to a certain limit.

I would insert a quote of me saying "there should be a simple and forgiving job for every role" from each example of me saying it, but I'm too lazy for that right now. In short, I have been saying over and over and over and over and over and over again that there should be a healer who is easy to pick up and forgiving to the beginner--a 4 out of 10 on the difficulty scale--the Dancer or the Red Mage of healers. That is asking very little of someone who wants to be good at one job, but isn't interested in something overly challenging like Ninja.

And regardless of how you slice it, having a job with 32 actions on their hotbar (including role actions, LB, and sprint) but only needs to use 6 of them more than 5 times in a 7 and a half minute fight, with one of those actions being used 134 times--nearly 60% of their gameplay is unacceptably bad game design. I don't care if this is an exceptionally talented player, no game should enable this design to be possible.



And I'm totally fine with trying to make the act of healing cut into that Glare usage more. I'm 100% in full support of that, but you cannot convince me that creating a environment where turning that abomination into something like the following example, but with healing instead of damage, in all forms of group-based content including those dungeons, those roulette runs, those alliance raids, etc. wouldn't tear through a massive percentage of the casual playerbase like a sci-fi body horror parasite shredding scientists in half asshole first.

[Shurrikhan]

And I'm totally fine with trying to make the act of healing cut into that Glare usage more. I'm 100% in full support of that, but you cannot convince me that creating a environment where turning that abomination into something like the following example, but with healing instead of damage, in all forms of group-based content including those dungeons, those roulette runs, those alliance raids, etc. wouldn't tear through a massive percentage of the casual playerbase like a sci-fi body horror parasite shredding scientists in half asshole first.

Honestly... if you swapped out only the spells with "Ver" in them with heals (so, ~40% of the CPM here)... that'd still fall well short of the % of CPM spent on healing in min/lowish ilvl runs in ARR. And it was quite doable --seemingly often even preferred-- even with Cleric Stance's pathetically unpolished implementation/coding issues annoying the heck out of optimizers and casuals alike.

(Obviously, that'd have to be split differently among GCDs and oGCDs, but the comparison will be rough regardless as we had almost no frequent oGCD throughput back then outside of SCH.)

I see no reason we can't at least go back to the relative healing requirements of Stormblood by increasing enemy damage dealt (especially) outside of the existing bursts.

The largest factor that'd gate those who want to engage very little with their kits isn't the portion of time or CPM spent healing, but rather the amount of times reaction + basic blanketing (HoTs, shields) alone wouldn't be enough to keep people alive, requiring them to have memorized when incoming damage is coming and/or to keep oGCDs stored for emergencies. But given the amount of empty space between those bursts and that hits outside of Ultimate are typically either wholly survivable or wouldn't be survivable even with all possible mitigation saved for them... that's a non-issue.


Tl;dr: I think we need to improve downtime play and the (depth of) interaction available to healers with other forms of throughput regardless, but we can definitely increase relative healing requirements well above what we see today.

[ty_taurus]

I see no reason we can't at least go back to the relative healing requirements of Stormblood by increasing enemy damage dealt (especially) outside of the existing bursts.

And I don't disagree. I'm not saying we can't increase outgoing damage at all, but increasing it to a level that is still forgiving and manageable to the average player will barely make a dent in the major problem with healer design, especially with how OGCD-focused healing has become. It'll be like pouring a single bucket of water into a kiddie pool. You've made the ground wet, but you still can't really play in it.

[Shurrikhan]

And I don't disagree. I'm not saying we can't increase outgoing damage at all, but increasing it to a level that is still forgiving and manageable to the average player will barely make a dent in the major problem with healer design, especially with how OGCD-focused healing has become. It'll be like pouring a single bucket of water into a kiddie pool. You've made the ground wet, but you still can't really play in it.

So, I imagine there are few different thresholds here.

If you're looking to make healing more interesting in the old min ilvl ARR sense of even casting Regen sometimes being risky because the tank could die in the next 1.5 GCDs' time if you don't Cure II... yeah, that can't happen.

But, that's like a 9/10 level of extremity... while we're currently at less than a 1/10 outside of Ultimate and a select few moments in very few Savage fights.

My thought is that we can get to where you're habitually saving an oGCD or two and occasionally pre-healing (starting your cast before a tankbuster hits, so you heal just after it damages)... somewhere around a 5/10... without parties being noticeably affected. And that would be more than single bucket of water. It wouldn't be any Olympic pool, but it would at least be a small standing one.

Again, we're probably in agreement regarding what all needs to happen, but I don't think we should shy so rigidly away from there being an occasional death if a healer blanks out for 3+ GCDs in a row at the wrong time. And so long as we're not babying the playerbase to that degree, we can actually manage some significantly increased interest from the healing itself.

It still won't be enough to make healing kits/gameplay as a whole interesting to most players at a whole without also giving more interesting ways to fill downtime, but leaving the healing requirements as low as they are now would also hurt the interest in/from those downtime tools, since they'd seem to come with zero risk or priority conflicts to reconcile.

I feel therefore we should look to increase it nearly as much as we can get away with, and then maybe even go a bit harder on the gas next expansion once we've pulled the average player's head out of the ass of modern normal content alone, and design our downtime tools ambitiously but with those damage intake thresholds in mind.*

*This doesn't mean shying from skill ceiling because of that added danger, but simply having that expectation that not every fight will nonetheless allow healer pairs to hit each and every one of their offensive marks, and with a typically larger difference in healer DPS between the damage of early prog and optimized run and a much larger difference in the effort required for the healer pair --or even the whole party-- to get there.

[Aravell]

In short, I have been saying over and over and over and over and over and over again that there should be a healer who is easy to pick up and forgiving to the beginner--a 4 out of 10 on the difficulty scale--the Dancer or the Red Mage of healers. That is asking very little of someone who wants to be good at one job, but isn't interested in something overly challenging like Ninja.

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.