Feelings on FF14's Trinity System?

[Supersnow845]

How about as a balance compromise tank healing was nerfed but we bring back active mitigation and channeled mitigation?

I think everyone agrees that
1) the tank being a proverbial ping pong ball between the healer and the boss isn’t fun for the tank
2) the healer being deleted by the tanks gross level of incidental healing isn’t fun for the healer

So what if we made the way tanks respond to mistakes more like the way healers respond to mistakes.

Healers arguably have the most “agency” of any role in the game as they are free at any time to drop damage to correct mistakes and they can use a lot of their heals in an attempt to protect themselves against the something that would have killed them. Tanks meanwhile have near zero agency but they have “corrected” this by buffing them so far they don’t need any agency because they are immortal. What if instead of just a ridiculous amount of passive healing the tanks could use mitigation that’s on the GCD or powerful channeled mitigation like say chelnion gate they can use to correct mistakes or protect themselves even if the healer is incompetent.

So rather than bloodwhetting just healing autos passively if your healer is asleep and you are getting chunked by autos you can drop a GCD to use a GCD mitigation to better protect yourself. If you fatfingered holy Shelton and now you need to soak a tower rather than desperately hoping the healer will recognise your dilemma and shield you you can instead drop 2-3 GCD’s to chelonian gate to survive the mechanic

[Gullis]

one of the pieces are missing

If the devs continue on this path of putting more and more powerful heals on tanks then they should go all the way and reduce from a trinity to a duality of just dps and tanks. This half hearted approach is the worst of both worlds. Healers are less and less needed for their healing but their damage aspect is mindnumbingly boring. Job design in pvp is much more coherent in what it is trying to achieve and it has dialed back the trinity immensely.
I think SE needs to decide on one approach. Embrace the trinity and dial tank sustain back massively or embrace pvp logic and make every job a dps with different extras and built in healing. Both are valid approaches, this current middle path pve job design is on is not.

This said it perfectly

[Valence]

The idea was more like, the front positionals are for the main tank, not the off tank, like the positional effect is increased enmity generation. But I think the bigger flaw isn’t actually with the positionals themselves but bosses that don’t have positionals and thus always trigger them. Like if you’re facing a wall boss, the off tank would be triggering the extra enmity as well.

Maybe it would make more sense to have certain actions that have different effects based on if you’re at the top of a target’s threat table or not. Like if you’re at the top of the threat table, the action inflicts a damage down debuff and further increases enmity. If you’re second on the threat table, the attack deals increased damage.

Just add the enemity increase from front positionals baked into tank stance, problem solved.

"Additional effect: increases enmity generated from hitting certain actions from the Front."

How about as a balance compromise tank healing was nerfed but we bring back active mitigation and channeled mitigation?

I think everyone agrees that
1) the tank being a proverbial ping pong ball between the healer and the boss isn’t fun for the tank
2) the healer being deleted by the tanks gross level of incidental healing isn’t fun for the healer

So what if we made the way tanks respond to mistakes more like the way healers respond to mistakes.

Healers arguably have the most “agency” of any role in the game as they are free at any time to drop damage to correct mistakes and they can use a lot of their heals in an attempt to protect themselves against the something that would have killed them. Tanks meanwhile have near zero agency but they have “corrected” this by buffing them so far they don’t need any agency because they are immortal. What if instead of just a ridiculous amount of passive healing the tanks could use mitigation that’s on the GCD or powerful channeled mitigation like say chelnion gate they can use to correct mistakes or protect themselves even if the healer is incompetent.

So rather than bloodwhetting just healing autos passively if your healer is asleep and you are getting chunked by autos you can drop a GCD to use a GCD mitigation to better protect yourself. If you fatfingered holy Shelton and now you need to soak a tower rather than desperately hoping the healer will recognise your dilemma and shield you you can instead drop 2-3 GCD’s to chelonian gate to survive the mechanic

Yeah I like the idea of dedicated a certain amount of GCDs on tanks to dramatically protect themselves for a short duration, but that would definitely conflict with the amount of oGCD defensives they already have (rampart, etc), much like healers currently have a problem with bloated oGCD heals at no cost. They'd probably need to turn rampart and the 30% mitigation tool into those GCDs and make them more akin to chelonian and whatnot.

Pretty radical change either way.

[Lyth]

I can appreciate that Healers have issues at the moment that need to be addressed. I think this partially comes down to mitigation inflation - the fact that with every expansion, supports fill up more and more of their toolkits with stronger on-demand defensive and sustain actions. There has also been a progressive shift away from resource management, such that there's no real risk of attrition. The end result is that you're generally at either 100% or 0%, so the actual act of 'healing' is superfluous.

I know that the current design of tanks is partially to blame for this, especially due to the rapid expansion of tank self-sustain this expansion. However, I don't see how changing tanks' combat style into something completely different would address healer problems. Tanks are generally good about raising their own issues.

[Supersnow845]

Because right now the biggest problem facing the support roles as a collective is tanks and healers disagreeing on how much agency the other role should have in keeping the tank healthy (healer damage options and oGCD bloat are seperate issues that are healer specific)

Healers lean towards wanting to have a purpose in keeping the tank alive and not just be functionally ignorable while tanks would rather have complete agency over whether they can keep themselves alive

The problem ultimately boils down to not wanting your job to basically be a subsidiary of another job you have to rely on to play semi competently to keep yourself alive

Replacing tank healing with active tank mitigation allows for both roles to unilaterally force competence at the expense of the other role by dropping your own damage (healers can already do this with GCD healing) but coordination allows for both roles to do more

Thanks shouldn’t incidentally create their own survival agency just by pressing the buttons they were already going to press anyway

[Lyth]

That's not going to improve with bizarre takes about frontal positionals, though, or suggesting ways to revert to Stormblood-era tank stances that the tanking community campaigned to have removed. This is the equivalent of seeing someone offering an outside recommendation to replace one-button Broil spam on healers with a single channeled effect that automatically does damage over time continuously until you are needed to heal again. You shouldn't be surprised when it's not well received by people who actually enjoy the role.

[Supersnow845]

Oh sorry I thought you were referring to my suggestion specifically. I’m rather confused on the front positionals point myself

Sorry I should have clarified

[GoatOfWar]

What Trinity?
We have jobs that do everything now.
Jobs that we're buffing when they're already clearing the hardest content in the game without healers.
Because a streamer's ego got hurt over a 2% damage difference on a third party website.

[Oizen]

What Trinity?
We have jobs that do everything now.
Jobs that we're buffing when they're already clearing the hardest content in the game without healers.
Because a streamer's ego got hurt over a 2% damage difference on a third party website.

TOP was cleared with no healers by bringing 2 PLDS and a WAR
P12S was cleared with no healers by bringing 2 PLDS and 2 WAR

I'm starting to see a pattern

[Kaurhz]

Either fully commit to making the trinity actually matter -- and by this I mean putting more responsibility on those roles, e.g., healers need to have more use for their healing toolkit just as certain tanks need to much less sustain. What tanks can do is borderline ridiculous.

They either need to do that or they just need to scrap the idea of a trinity all together, have tanks remain as tanks, or just outright blur the divide and give players stronger toolkits to allow them to execute any role regardless of which class they are on.