Feelings on FF14's Trinity System?

[Supersnow845]

I just think in general incidental healing shouldn’t be the purview of tanks (PLD kinda gets a partial pass as it’s a holy knight)

Why not (using an incredibly simple example) that bloodwhetting rather than triggering heals did something like if you hit 4 GCD’s under it (or used a specific GCD under it) it procced like an extra 20 seconds of 10% mitigation or 20 seconds of 10% HP up

The bigger problem with tank heals is not so much they have them it’s the fact they are overwhelmingly incidental, equilibrium and aurora are straight up just free healer heals and SIO is stronger than any single healer heal in the game

Ironically clemency is actually the best designed tank heal

[ASkellington]

I just think in general incidental healing shouldn’t be the purview of tanks (PLD kinda gets a partial pass as it’s a holy knight)

Why not (using an incredibly simple example) that bloodwhetting rather than triggering heals did something like if you hit 4 GCD’s under it (or used a specific GCD under it) it procced like an extra 20 seconds of 10% mitigation or 20 seconds of 10% HP up

The bigger problem with tank heals is not so much they have them it’s the fact they are overwhelmingly incidental, equilibrium and aurora are straight up just free healer heals and SIO is stronger than any single healer heal in the game

Ironically clemency is actually the best designed tank heal

You're gonna have to explain "incidental" in this context.

I'm assuming based on your post you mean "free of cost".

Regardless, I don't exactly agree... I don't disagree either. I suppose the best way of putting it is - I wouldn't care if there was enough damage out there to warrant the healing, free or not, on a tank. Or a DPS for that matter. Encounter design sadly doesn't support it.

[Supersnow845]

You're gonna have to explain "incidental" in this context.

I'm assuming based on your post you mean "free of cost".

Regardless, I don't exactly agree... I don't disagree either. I suppose the best way of putting it is - I wouldn't care if there was enough damage out there to warrant the healing, free or not, on a tank. Or a DPS for that matter. Encounter design sadly doesn't support it.

Not so much free more so besides Aurora and equilibrium almost all tank healing comes from pressing buttons they were already going to press at near the same time

Let’s say we removed the heal off bloodwhetting, HOC, HS and the rotational heals (including PLD’s magic healing), near nothing about when they press these buttons will actually change, it’s just now you press the same buttons and get massive amounts of healing out of it. Think of heart of stone or Shelton, they provided mitigation but not healing, you still pressed them in roughly the same places you pressed holy Shelton and HOC but now you get free healing out of it

Tank healing should either have to be planned or come at a cost. Clemency is the big example however old nascent flash is a different type of design you could look into, what if nascent flash only healed you if you used a nascent chaos skill under it but always provides the mitigation no matter when you pressed it

[ASkellington]

Not so much free more so besides Aurora and equilibrium almost all tank healing comes from pressing buttons they were already going to press at near the same time

Let’s say we removed the heal off bloodwhetting, HOC, HS and the rotational heals (including PLD’s magic healing), near nothing about when they press these buttons will actually change, it’s just now you press the same buttons and get massive amounts of healing out of it. Think of heart of stone or Shelton, they provided mitigation but not healing, you still pressed them in roughly the same places you pressed holy Shelton and HOC but now you get free healing out of it

Tank healing should either have to be planned or come at a cost. Clemency is the big example however old nascent flash is a different type of design you could look into, what if nascent flash only healed you if you used a nascent chaos skill under it but always provides the mitigation no matter when you pressed it

I mean, personally I'd take it a step further, in that you'd need to use a resource to get both, but depending on how its done I can see... some issues.

I mention HoC with the Shell gauge as an example that could be problematic for instance. But the idea isn't a bad one I don't think as long as its the heal alone.

Though... I do worry about the... "ease of access". For example, if you need the heal, but you don't have access to a nascent chaos ability to proc. I suppose it would be a decent skill expression though. To work for a heal.

Aurora I'm not sure about though. Imo its too weak and to me it supports the healer well enough. Could probably just drop the charge back to 1 or leave it.

[Supersnow845]

I mean, personally I'd take it a step further, in that you'd need to use a resource to get both, but depending on how its done I can see... some issues.

I mention HoC with the Shell gauge as an example that could be problematic for instance. But the idea isn't a bad one I don't think as long as its the heal alone.

Though... I do worry about the... "ease of access". For example, if you need the heal, but you don't have access to a nascent chaos ability to proc. I suppose it would be a decent skill expression though. To work for a heal.

Aurora I'm not sure about though. Imo its too weak and to me it supports the healer well enough. Could probably just drop the charge back to 1 or leave it.

That’s why in previous posts I’ve discussed the return of active or GCD mitigation

If we applied my random example proposal to nascent flash and then suddenly you need to “heal” but don’t have access to nascent chaos at the time you can drop damage to apply a GCD mitigation to achieve functionally the same thing

Expression comes from using your limited healing to reduce your GCD mitigation load, similar to how the healers work outside of their god awful damage rotation because I think most people agree the healing side of healers is more interesting than the tanking side of tanks

[ASkellington]

That’s why in previous posts I’ve discussed the return of active or GCD mitigation

If we applied my random example proposal to nascent flash and then suddenly you need to “heal” but don’t have access to nascent chaos at the time you can drop damage to apply a GCD mitigation to achieve functionally the same thing

Expression comes from using your limited healing to reduce your GCD mitigation load, similar to how the healers work outside of their god awful damage rotation because I think most people agree the healing side of healers is more interesting than the tanking side of tanks

I don't see it happening, but it is something I'd like to see happen. More so for mitigations over sustain, but I'd take either.

[Oizen]

I just think in general incidental healing shouldn’t be the purview of tanks (PLD kinda gets a partial pass as it’s a holy knight)

Why not (using an incredibly simple example) that bloodwhetting rather than triggering heals did something like if you hit 4 GCD’s under it (or used a specific GCD under it) it procced like an extra 20 seconds of 10% mitigation or 20 seconds of 10% HP up

The bigger problem with tank heals is not so much they have them it’s the fact they are overwhelmingly incidental, equilibrium and aurora are straight up just free healer heals and SIO is stronger than any single healer heal in the game

Ironically clemency is actually the best designed tank heal

I think Heart of Corundum is fairly well designed as a tank heal, Its buff being fairly long means you can't really spam it on CD and expect it to work. It wont save you from lethal hits, but its a pretty powerful heal if you do it right.

Then they stopped trying when they made Holy Sheltron and Bloodwhetting

[ASkellington]

I think Heart of Corundum is fairly well designed as a tank heal, Its buff being fairly long means you can't really spam it on CD and expect it to work. It wont save you from lethal hits, but its a pretty powerful heal if you do it right.

Then they stopped trying when they made Holy Sheltron and Bloodwhetting

HoC's flaw is that its a recitation when it shouldn't be. It should require damage being taken before the heal is applied, not when the tank drops below 50%. As Lyth pointed out here:

I agree with Snow's point about tank healing being too passive, but I do think there are other approaches. A really easy way of doing this is having a healing effect scale on the amount of damage taken recently, or based off of how low your HP is (i.e. a Minus Strike type effect). This way, you have negligible healing under normal circumstances, unless you've specifically timed the move against a big damage strike. And I think that timing should always be central to tank defensives, and giving tanks lots of reactive healing solutions to compensate for a lack of anticipation doesn't really fit the role.

Clemency in it's current state is fine (mp being something PLD uses for their damage).

Where it gets dicey is in other heals a tank has.

Abyssal Drain for instance. Its on a 60s CD and is already relegated to mostly trash use, as in single target damage its for the most part worthless over Carve. That it shares a recast with Carve isn't a bad idea - to make you choose over more MP or more HP, but if the HP gain is worthless in boss situations and the MP gain isn't exactly worth using in trash... (and AD gives MP anyroad).

You could make a neater split - AD gives HP only (and make it more worth while in single target) and CaS can now affect other enemies at 50% less damage while restoring MP. This way it presents a choice and is no longer "free".

Holy Shelltron... maybe give the above damage applied = extra heal potency.

Equilibrium I don't know why it exists currently. SiO make sense - aoe defensive w/ extra healing (that we don't need but the defensive makes sense). Bloodwhetting/Nascent Flash also makes sense if I ignore my bias over it should be a DRK thing and not a WAR one. Its underneath the idea of "too angry to die" berserker motif.

Maybe it should share a recast timer with something like NF=BW or CaS=AD. Where you can get that heal but at the cost of something else.

[Lyth]

The timing window on the short recasts is actually backwards. During Stormblood, we had some discussions on the tank forums around making cooldowns more timing dependent. The classic example is where you only need Rampart to mitigate a single hit, so you pop the action 18 seconds early. That makes your effective recast 72 seconds, because the cooldown starts trending down earlier. A really specific case of this that I used as an example back then is where you use Living Dead shortly after pull on God Kefka to mitigate both a 0:21 Hyperdrive so that it will also be up for a 5:17 Ultimate Embrace.

In the case of something like Holy Sheltron, the equivalent would be if Knight's Resolve activated on the last 4 seconds of the effect rather than the first 4 seconds. It's a bit like those Mario RPG style games, where timing a button press mitigates more damage than you would normally. It also means that you can do more fun things like tankbusters without castbars and interesting animation tells/fake-outs/roll catches. Unfortunately, it seems like they implemented the principle backwards without really understanding it.

...

I personally think Clemency's implementation has problems. Hotbar space is at a premium such that to add new actions you often need to remove some. We're getting to a point in jobs' development where expansions tend towards animation updates on pre-existing actions (i.e. Broil 12). Having a button that you don't press outside of progression/emergencies isn't effective use of hotbar space. I think it's fine for that functionality to exist, but it should also have a reason that you want to press it under normal circumstances.

A compounding fact in this is that Endwalker indirectly devalued Clemency in 6.0 by adding lifesteal(!) to Holy Spirit/Circle, which already has half the MP cost. The end result is a button that you don't want to press under most circumstances. I think what is missing is a conditional proc that intermittently makes it damage neutral to give it baseline value. That in turn would open up the option of moving PLD's sustain off of passive lifesteal effects on their offensive spells to deliberate use of Clemency.

The Abyssal Drain/Carve and Spit merger wasn't really about introducing trade-offs in single target healing, which DRK has been historically terrible at anyways. It had more to do with the fact that DRK's gameplay has become progressively oGCD heavy with relatively few GCDs, so it was a way of cutting back on the amount of actions that you need to weave in during burst. Again, if you made Abyssal Drain into a non-damaging healing spell that is a potency loss, people are unlikely to use it. You also create this bizarre thematic mismatch where Paladins are siphoning life from their enemies with holy magic while Dark Knights are healing themselves up with non-damaging dark magic.

I think defensive actions should always have some condition under which they are damage neutral. You want to reward players for using their actions cleverly, not punish them for choosing to press a button on their hotbar. Otherwise you're better off removing the action altogether. I think what's missing is the 'clever use'. Right now, heals and mitigation are just sitting there waiting to be used. I want to see more ways to reward players for getting the timing of these actions right, instead of passive effects that occur automatically and reactive effects that you can use whenever you feel like.

[Rithy255]

I personally think Clemency's implementation has problems. Hotbar space is at a premium such that to add new actions you often need to remove some. We're getting to a point in jobs' development where expansions tend towards animation updates on pre-existing actions (i.e. Broil 12). Having a button that you don't press outside of progression/emergencies isn't effective use of hotbar space. I think it's fine for that functionality to exist, but it should also have a reason that you want to press it under normal circumstances.

While I agree Clemency does contribute to limiting Paladins hot bar space, it's actually not something that should be took off for that said reason, Personally I find clemency actually useful in fights especially when a healer is down for example you can sustain key players while the other healer is busy rezzing ect.

If I were to remove anything Shield bash would come first, and I'd even rather remove Cover before clemency as I think clemency has way more use cases then cover does, Ideally I don't want cover to be removed just to be useful again.

But here's the thing, PLD's got a lot and... I mean a lot of redundancy on skills, for example Fight or flight mainly used to buff burst damage... when you already have a burst button in req, Goring blade it serves zero purpose other then to be a high potency hit... which again you already have 4 of those, I'm sure they could be scaled up to compensate removing goring, a button that no one currently cares about. (Personally I want goring to be a second combo path again just let it do something else and be more flexible).

Not Even that Holy spirit? couldn't we just merge circle with it into a cleave attack at 72. The list goes on and on, on what can be done before clemency should be removed.

EDIT:
I will add I wouldn't mind it if clemency had a way of becoming ogcd (no cast obviously) once per minute or something ontop of its normal function.