G-give it Back T---T; !! (Scholar Edition)

[ForsakenRoe]

That's great...but that's not FFXIV. Further, that's not even how all the Tanks worked in WoW. Nor does that change what I pointed out above that Ty himself mentioned - no one's actually asking for it. You can argue about why that is or other ancillary arguments, but the fact remains, there are some healers that do want slimmed down damage kits, there aren't Tanks asking for Flash spam. When there are seriously a lot of Tanks asking for that, then we can have that discussion and start asking the Devs to implement a Flashspam Tank into the game.

How do you know? What if there ARE tanks that want to have their gameplay be entirely focused on keeping aggro and mitigating, and nothing to do with being Blue DPS? If there's healers that say 'if i wanted to have a damage rotation i'd play DPS' then surely it makes sense for the exact same point to be made about tanks? And as shown, it is possible for a tank to be 'functional' without it dealing damage, every attack can be changed from 'deals X potency' to 'generates emnity equal to an attack of X potency'. But the problem is, it'd feel awful to do that change, because people like to deal damage as a tanks, even if it is lower than a DPS, and a bit more simple than a DPS. Because it makes zero sense to hit a mob with a 2h sword and be told 'yeh it did no damage but it really annoyed the guy so he's focused on you'

So again it comes back to a question of 'why do tanks get to have a simple rotation, but healers are not given that same care designwise' and the only thing I can come up with is, like others have said, the devs don't want to design a 'healer for healers', nor a 'healer for people who are actually competent at healers'. Rather, they are designing a 'healer so simple that it almost plays itself', so that the chance of the DPS players having their day ruined is as close to non-existent as possible. When I think about things through that lens, I remember the idea of 'DPS died to their own mistake of not using Diversion' from SB, and the following Tank Stance threat buff/damage penalty removal, well it makes sense why they did it if that lens is used: so DPS can blast and feel good at the game, without having to worry about pesky crap like 'I'm generating far too much aggro for the tank to keep up, oh well fk em that's not my problem lmao'. True North stacks added because 'it feels bad as a DPS when the tank spins the boss and you can't positionals', Arm's Length because 'it feels bad when the boss knocks you away and you lose a GCD', etc.

This 'it makes sense if you think about it from the POV of 'the devs are designing non-DPS classes in a way so as to alleviate DPS player's woes, not for the actual mains of the role'' makes more and more sense the more I consider it, and honestly that's kinda sad and scary

Somewhat off-topic, but… would it be possible for you to respond to a comment in a post that comes after it rather than doing this whole edit-a-prior-comment thing?

He does it to dodge around the post limit. I find it less of an issue with the time-travel-esque 'see the answer before the question' thing and more an issue of 'this is not a forum post, it is a short novel'. I know I'm bad for it at times but I do try to put things in tags

I'm sure this makes sense in context, but I'm still laughing

Yeh, it's an odd one. I think it was added as the 'cleanup' role, that is, if one of your roles is struggling (ie, you have a Healer who goes 'healers should heal, not do damage!!!!' for some ungodly reason), the cannons can be used to assist them, so you don't get 'softlocked'. You can use red/green/blue eggs to do damage/poison/stun, so I guess it's like a CC/support kind of role? This is what the enemies look like, so that's why it's eggs that you collect. They're so stupid looking, really nails that goofy 2007 vibe

Anyway, thanks to that minigame, I get to experience what it's like having 'close to 100% uptime on healing'. It's bloody stressful, especially when you have someone doing things that makes your job harder (in FFXIV terms, not dodging AOEs). It's fun as a oneoff thing, but it's definitely not something that you'd want to have as 'this is the daily gameplay of the role'. I kept up with it (barely), but there's plenty of people who would not. Which is why, while I'm not opposed to the idea of SE raising healing required, I'm also not of the mind that it will fix the issues the role faces. It'll either be 'not enough of an increase to satisfy bored veterans', 'too much of an increase and now casuals get stomped', or most likely knowing SE, both at the same time. There is, IMO, no sweetspot that allows casuals to still succeed well enough, while also allowing vets to feel challenged enough to find the content fun. And no, writing off content as 'its not meant for skilled players to find it fun' is a ridiculous stance to take in terms of game design

Also, like any other instance of 'healer in a cooperative setting', as you get higher level in that minigame (both in terms of your stats, and levelling up the Healer role for that minigame's system), you need to heal less. You get better gear, so you take less damage. Your Healer Role level allows you to heal 100% more per rank (so at rank 5, the maximum, you're healing 5X as much as rank 1), and so you spend less time healing. It's like an inescapable truth of how the trinity works in games. The better you get at a 'healer', in pretty much every setting, the less you need to actually 'heal'. And the solution to this is to give the healer things to do besides the required amount of healing, not to just ramp up the healing required. Runescape added 'poison the enemy healer mobs' for that reason, they managed to work that one out back in 2007. Of course, as I said above, if SE wants to ramp healing required, I can keep up. I'd just worry for the people who cannot.

now I done wrote a novel too god damnit