Healing Focus or DPS Focus

[Aravell]

Yes, healer damage is still optional (save for 3 specs) and is still lower than an actual dps, but my point is they can deal damage at all now. Before Legion or so, you would barely even be able to quest as a healer, you were worthless outside the kitchen dungeons/raids.

In other words, XIV is molding their healers into a playstyle that even WoW is expanding out from.

I wouldn't say that XIV is molding healers into a "healers only heal" style. It's more like they're trying to make healers so easy that a toddler could play it.

A "healers only heal" style would necessitate high incoming damage, something the dev team is extremely hesitant to give us. They also won't give us more to do in downtime, they also say that healer dps is not required to clear fights.

They're basically treating the healer playerbase like toddlers. You're not allowed to have more to heal, you're not allowed to have a more busy downtime, you're only allowed to press one singular key for most of the fight so you can react faster when a DPS player steps in something they shouldn't.

[rawker]

Just curious though. Was CBU3 the same team that designed the jobs in ARR and HW?

[Aravell]

Just curious though. Was CBU3 the same team that designed the jobs in ARR and HW?

It's been the same team since ARR, iirc. At least the credits always show the same names in the battle design team.

[rawker]

I see. Now i wonder what drove the team to conclude that the current healer setup is right.. surely they have taken feedback. Must've construed it differently.. i dunno. I just find it hard to believe they screwed it up. Was it the loud minority that aren't healers and got heard?

[ty_taurus]

I see. Now i wonder what drove the team to conclude that the current healer setup is right.. surely they have taken feedback. Must've construed it differently.. i dunno. I just find it hard to believe they screwed it up. Was it the loud minority that aren't healers and got heard?

My theory is that it's a continued over-correcting of Heavensward. Back then, Cleric Stance's all-or-nothing nature made DPSing very stressful for a lot of people, because they were afraid of being stuck in Cleric Stance at the wrong time and killing their team. But even when that issue was resolved with the change to Cleric Stance in Stormblood, the Devs were scarred from the Heavensward arguments, so they just kept simplifying. Like seeing your house plants wilting, then killing them by drowning them.

[Supersnow845]

The only thing about that line of thinking is that it doesn’t seem to account for the fact that tanks and healers had the same complaints about their role at the tail end of SB but square handled the two in the exact opposite way for seemingly no discernible reason

The “I like my role and I don’t want to just be a DPS but I also don’t like that my role responsibility is too reliant on the other roles and this often causes me to lose damage”

For the tank they functionally removed agro and agro combos as well as made tank stance an inherent permanent buff that generates incredibly huge agro, but they allowed them to maintain their DPS complexity, healers instead they seemed to have prescribed the playstyle of expecting large amounts of healing while DPS remains a third priority however due to this healers heal more than tanks tank so to speak

They have never seems to have explained their justification for why when they removed the last shreds of “everyone is a true DPS class but supports have to give up 50% of that damage to do their primary role” and transitioned to “supports now just do their primary role as a subsidiary of being DPS but we have baked the 50% less damage into their kits” they chose the opposing design ideas for the 2 supports nor will they acknowledge that one half of this equation definitely enjoyed the changes more than the other

[Aravell]

I see. Now i wonder what drove the team to conclude that the current healer setup is right.. surely they have taken feedback. Must've construed it differently.. i dunno. I just find it hard to believe they screwed it up. Was it the loud minority that aren't healers and got heard?

I think they're lacking in manpower to take good care of every job. So they end up focusing the majority of resources into making the DPS jobs fun because they're the most popular.

Meanwhile, parts of the healer kits are just designed entirely the same so it requires less time to balance, their end goal is probably to make healers functional, but fun isn't their priority here.

I assume that, with the coming of 2 more new DPS jobs and no news of the battle design team being expanded, they're probably going to start making the tanks bare minimum functional as well so they can put more resources into the DPS jobs.

[Supersnow845]

The tanks already pretty much fall into the “barely functioning in terms of kit” design

They basically all just play as simplified melee DPS but when a melee DPS would push an attack button a tank will instead push a defensive

If you took the tank timelines and replaced every press of a defensive with a random 4-600 potency attack or a button that generated a small combo extender you’d basically be playing a true melee DPS

Healers just get the “bare minimum to be functional” tanks get the “start with a melee DPS and rip 5-6 damage buttons out of it”

[ty_taurus]

I feel like Aggro management for tanks should've just removed the reliance on DPS and healers to manage their aggro. For what it's worth, I don't really feel like Quelling Strikes as another button to use basically on cooldown most of the time is all that enthralling of a gameplay mechanic anyway. But the tanks themselves could absolutely continued to have tools that interacted with Aggro more than just Provoke and Shirk.

[Aravell]

The tanks already pretty much fall into the “barely functioning in terms of kit” design

They basically all just play as simplified melee DPS but when a melee DPS would push an attack button a tank will instead push a defensive

If you took the tank timelines and replaced every press of a defensive with a random 4-600 potency attack or a button that generated a small combo extender you’d basically be playing a true melee DPS

Healers just get the “bare minimum to be functional” tanks get the “start with a melee DPS and rip 5-6 damage buttons out of it”

Oh I don't think tanks have hit bare minimum yet.

Healers barely need to do their main role, their only reason for existing in the party is to be the target of light party stacks. They have no optimisation to speak of and they're not allowed to have anymore.

Tanks do still need to pick up aggro, they do still need to mitigate damage and they're still allowed to be a point of failure in the party. They have a decent rotation to juggle while being given the responsibility to help protect the party with Reprisal and their party mitigation.

But they are getting tanks to bare minimum. Like how in modern normal and alliance raids, tanks (or the off-tank specifically) don't need to hold aggro because the bosses are coded to target the tanks for tankbusters. I think the next step would be bland homogenisation of their damage kit and parts of their defensive kit. Like giving every tank Bloodwhetting and Vengeance.