Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[Grizzlpaw]

1. Do not touch Tanks' self healing. Let tanks be self-sufficient to some degree. It does not feel good having to rely on your healer for the vast majority of your survivability as a tank. Dieing a death of a thousand paper cuts as your health is chipped away and you have no way to recover. Meanwhile your friendly glare mage is busy giving a dragon nasty looks as you lay on the floor dying.

2. Make healer's DPS more complex. We don't need to be DPS levels of complex, but we can have more to manage than a single button, a DOT, and MAYBE one button you hit on CD for a slight bump in DPS.

3. Consider maybe adding more unavoidable party-wide damage to the game that needs to be managed.

4. Consider adding mechanics that require healers to pay more attention. Perahps periodic debuffs that need to be healed through or dispelled that cannot be mitigated through other means. For shield healers, consider debuffs that will apply to the target if damage is done to health, but do not apply if damage is blocked by shields. There are a lot of ways to make healing more engaging without making stripping tanks of their agency.

4. give us hard mode versions of old dungeons that we can queue for for increased xp/rewards. These should slap the party around, forcing the healer to stay on their toes. Tank healing will help to ease the burden, but will not suffice on its own.

I make this post as someone who plays almost exclusively tanks/healers.

[Denji]

tank heals help in like... normal dungeons, yeah. but if you ever do any sort of extreme/savage (or even just eureka/bozja) you'll find out very quickly that it's a fart in the wind in comparison.

i don't think the problem is really the healer abilities (although an extra button or two for some attack or ability would be nice so it'd be less boring...) and i don't think the issue is the tank heals either.

the issue is that standard content is braindead. you can just brute force it. you don't need to think, you don't need to do much of anything. there are a lot (and i mean a lot) of healers who look at a lot of their CDs and think that most of them are useless simply because they can just smash two buttons on their keyboards and be ok 99% of the time. (see: foolish whms thinking bell or cure 3(which i know its a gcd) is useless)

what's lacking is an overall challenge for everyone which means healers are just left with not much to do. that's it.

[Sebazy]

As to the designer - we know they have designers for various things. The game wouldn't exist if there were NO designers. They have 4 Job designers, and even if we assume they're all focused on DPS, there have been a lot of bad DPS Jobs, rotations, tuning, reworks, etc. While it's true that having designers should reduce the incidences of that, it doesn't guarantee it.

In my own experience at least, designers are wildly inconsistent sources of content. Stick a designer on a project they are highly motivated for and their output will go through the roof. Hit them with a task that they can't stomach and you risk getting burnout instead of solid productivity.

Then you combine that with simply running the creative well dry over extended periods of time and IMO you end up in the situation FFXIV has found itself in now. Jobs are half baked, fresh ideas are scarce and there's just no faith in what they'll do next.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, IMO SE have 2 solid routes out of this hole, IMO they should either:

Do what worked for both themselves (and Blizzard) in the past and hire a few figures out of the community, they don't even have to be placed directly onto the job design team, just use them as a fresh new well for creative ideas to draw from and make use of the fresh enthusiasm they will bring to the team.

The second approach is to hire an experienced studio like Mythic in a consultancy manner and simply buy whiteboards full of concepts and ideas from them. No direct involvement, no handing over of the reigns, just simple boards full of ideas from which to draw from.

If it isn't immediately clear, the goal with both of these routes isn't to unleash a huge shakeup on the game's core design philosophy, but rather to replenish that same energy we saw in ARR to better allow the existing team to steer the ship out of these over homogenised waters and into something that is more diverse and enjoyable.

[Absurdity]

1. Do not touch Tanks' self healing. Let tanks be self-sufficient to some degree. It does not feel good having to rely on your healer for the vast majority of your survivability as a tank. Dieing a death of a thousand paper cuts as your health is chipped away and you have no way to recover. Meanwhile your friendly glare mage is busy giving a dragon nasty looks as you lay on the floor dying.

Tanks should be self-sufficient to a certain extend, but it shouldn't be as mindless as pressing a single button and then calling it a day.
Warrior and Dark Knight were self-sufficient as far back as Heavensward, but it took actual understanding of your job kit, how abilities interact with each other and proper execution to keep the self-healing rolling.

All Bloodwhetting requires you to do is pressing the button and then not falling asleep for the next 8 seconds, you could spam uncombod Mythril Tempest and get the same value out of it as someone playing the job well.

[ty_taurus]

You could have tank self-sustain exist, but come at a cost of personal DPS, like with Clemency. Tools to help you survive in a pinch, or when solo, but relying on your healer is more efficient when possible.

[Mayhemmer]

I think WAR should be the life-steal tank, but with the condition that it's tuned properly, and more importantly, you have to work for it (and doing that work being fun). Aside from that, I think maybe PLD is the only tank that should have any form of direct single-target or party heal/regen. I want jobs to fit their job fantasy.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I think the healers have enough healing options as they currently are. So I would rather they start building up their offensive options.

[Renathras]

You could have tank self-sustain exist, but come at a cost of personal DPS, like with Clemency. Tools to help you survive in a pinch, or when solo, but relying on your healer is more efficient when possible.

This.

I harp on this all the time, but I really feel Clemency and Vercure are good abilities BECAUSE they force people to consider if they need healing bad enough to abandon DPSing for it. It gives the ability to be a healer in a pinch (when you have a bad, dead, or DCed healer) but in a way that is very inefficient to use most of the time, so when you have a competent healer, you don't use it and they have gainful employment healing you and the party is more efficient than you healing yourself and dumping the healer. 1T/3DPS should not be more efficient than 1T/1H/2DPS. If it is, the Tanks/DPSers have too much healing relative to encounter damage.

This is why Bloodwhetting is bad (especially in AOE) but Clemency is good. The later requires the PLD to (mostly) abandon DPSing in order to be a healer.

The problem isn't Tanks having the ability to be self-sufficient to a degree. The problem is when they can be entirely self-sufficient without needing a healer AT ALL and also without sacrificing any DPS or mitigation/tanking ability to do so. WAR can, right now, be a Tank, DPS, and Healer all at once. PLD can be one or the other (DPS or Healer) but not both at the same time, same with RDM with Vercure.

If Bloodwhetting cut your damage by 50% to give you that healing, that MIGHT be different, as then it'd be something you use at need but that directly impacts your ability to do damage, so it would be a choice of "Do I really need this right now?" If Nascent cut your damage by 50%, only healed the target (not also you the WAR), and prevented generating Beast Gauge for its duration, it would still be there as a powerful tool in needed situations (healer DCed and you have the WAR and 1 DPS alive to finish the last 5-10% of the boss health before the Enrage) but not be overpowered as it is now.

[Shurrikhan]

You could have tank self-sustain exist, but come at a cost of personal DPS, like with Clemency. Tools to help you survive in a pinch, or when solo, but relying on your healer is more efficient when possible.

Just to be clear, do we really mean to limit all self-sustain in that way? (And by sustain do you mean everything that sustains you --increases current or current and maximum eHP-- or solely healing / healing+barriers?)

If tanks didn't have any sustain (if the term isn't reduced to be redundant with healing), wouldn't that leave them just as high aggro DPS?

In the end, nullifying damage and recovering from damage are still both just sustain, and I feel like we'd unnecessarily narrow available job themes and differences to say, for example, that free %DR is okay but free healing (even if timing-sensitive) is inherently not, leading to get more homogenization.

Just ensuring decent parity in tank sustain and keeping total tank sustain in check relative to incoming damage across all serious content types and the excess wouldn't harm other roles' gameplay (so, no nonsense like Bloodwhetting scaling linearly with target count, even if its excess is limited to non-serious content, not the least because it makes WAR itself less skill-expressive) seems guidelines/stricture enough, and would avoid purposely homogenizing tanks further (as disallowing half of tanks' free sustain forms would do).


The problem with WAR right now, to me, is simply that it's OP, not that it self-heals (though Nascent Flash's means of external healing thematically makes zero sense and I'd therefore happily rehaul it). All means of equal total sustain in practice nonetheless equally reduce the amount of healing a given job requires, so it's not as if a balanced WAR steps on healers' toes any more than a balanced DRK.

[ty_taurus]

Just to be clear, do we really mean to limit all self-sustain in that way? (And by sustain do you mean everything that sustains you --increases current or current and maximum eHP-- or solely healing / healing+barriers?)

If tanks didn't have any sustain (if the term isn't reduced to be redundant with healing), wouldn't that leave them just as high aggro DPS?

In the end, nullifying damage and recovering from damage are still both just sustain, and I feel like we'd unnecessarily narrow available job themes and differences to say, for example, that free %DR is okay but free healing (even if timing-sensitive) is inherently not, leading to get more homogenization.

Just ensuring decent parity in tank sustain and keeping total tank sustain in check relative to incoming damage across all serious content types and the excess wouldn't harm other roles' gameplay (so, no nonsense like Bloodwhetting scaling linearly with target count, even if its excess is limited to non-serious content, not the least because it makes WAR itself less skill-expressive) seems guidelines/stricture enough, and would avoid purposely homogenizing tanks further (as disallowing half of tanks' free sustain forms would do).


The problem with WAR right now, to me, is simply that it's OP, not that it self-heals (though Nascent Flash's means of external healing thematically makes zero sense and I'd therefore happily rehaul it). All means of equal total sustain in practice nonetheless equally reduce the amount of healing a given job requires, so it's not as if a balanced WAR steps on healers' toes any more than a balanced DRK.

I would break it down:

You can have tools restricted by cooldowns that are not a loss, but the cooldowns need to be longer or have some additional resource cost attached to them. FFXIV does not dish out damage all that frequently, so something like Bloodwhetting having a cooldown of 25 seconds is insane because you might as well just have it up permanently for how it's available for literally every mechanic. Maybe you give it an MP cost. As pretty as the MP bar is on the UI, having it actually do something is more important than having a window decal.

You can also have tools that have some sort of opportunity cost, and they don't always have to be flat GCDs like Clemency. In fact, I kinda wish Clemency perhaps costed Oath Gauge, to give Oath Gauge more things to actually be used on. But when it comes at the cost of gauge, you have to ask about what the alternative is, and having those choices can be a good thing. Clemency specifically and other of Paladin's tools would need adjustments to make that work, but the point stands.

But I also think, rather than having all self-sustain be directly healing oneself, a tank like Warrior could instead replace some of that healing with buffs that increase healing received. Like if Equilibrium increased the amount of HP Warriors receive from all healing sources by 25%, then they could interact with that themselves through other actions, or give the healer a boost. That also synergizes nicely with Scholar which some might appreciate given the relationship they had during the Scholar quests, or perhaps they have ways of increasing the amount of HP they restore the lower their HP is. Pair that with an action that converts a major chunk of their HP into a barrier, and you have a really unique combo where the Warrior lowers their actual HP, gains a barrier for what they lose, and that in turn increases the healing they'd receive to get them back up.

I know we collectively recoil at the idea of self-harm mechanics, but the more Fontaine characters that come out in Genshin that play around with party HP, the more fun I feel that type of stuff can be. Furina came out recently, a character who can summon three pets to attack enemies with Hydro--water attacks. Each pet's attacks also drains the HP of one of your other four party members, and her burst grants the party a damage buff that's represented by a cheering crowd of water pets on your UI that continue to cheer for you louder and louder the more your party's HP increases and decreases. Pair that with someone like Wriothesley who's a fast-paced martial artist whose normal attack punches reduce his HP, but also grant him a buff that restores his HP when he uses a charged attack, and you have the UI audience going ballistic while in battle, and also gives your healer a ton of value in enabling you to go on like that endlessly without worrying about losing too much HP. It's such a fun combination.