Feelings on FF14's Trinity System?

[Lyth]

From experience, the moment that you make a defensive action cost dps to use, it stops being used outside of progression. I think at that point you're better off just removing it altogether.

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.

Another approach is to have defensive cooldowns have offensive value. In Heavensward, Raw Intuition and Vengeance both generated Wrath stacks, so you wanted to use them under Berserk in order to land more Fell Cleaves. It discourages players from sitting on stockpiles of defensive actions to otherwise be pressed on demand, and encourages you to swap in a way that takes advantage of your increased tankiness during burst. It probably fits more with a Warrior aesthetic, in line with damage resistance during D&D barbarian rages.

[TBerry]

Give Tanks less HP and more Emnity management to to slow down their death and to give Healers more work. Buff enemy damage by 10 - 20%.

[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.

[Lunalepsy]

Throughout much of my life, even in games that used the classic RPG Trinity System (healers, tanks, dps), there was no hard requirement that players obey the Trinity by having a "balanced" party. Rather than the game explicitly forcing players to have a tank, a healer, and a few DPS, it would let you play with whatever combo you wanted. And then through experience and iteration, players would generally learn that having a "balanced" party helped them succeed, and so it became standard practice not because it was forced, but because it was demonstrably effective.

As games became more mainstream and tried to pull in more casual crowds, some developers stopped giving players enough rope to hang themselves; if playing with 5 dps is going to result in most players having a bad time, then why even let them make choices that set them up for failure? So forcing a "balanced" party became a fairly normal practice, in an effort to basically put guard rails around the game experience.

I'm wondering if in FF14 we've stepped into a different territory, where "balanced" parties are still forced, but not because they actually meaningfully benefit the player; in fact, it seems like in most content, having a "balanced" party actually makes combat more difficult that in would otherwise be.

But that's just my experience, so I'm curious to hear what yours is. If you weren't forced to have a "balanced" party, would you still do it because you think that's more effective? Or would you find another party structure more optimal? Feel free to specify if you feel it's different for different types of content (especially Ultimates which I have no experience with).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me so that I can better form my own!

The trinity system is boring, mediocre, and out of touch.

[Absurdity]

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.

This should've already been a thing tbh.
They emphasized correct "timing" with these new abilities, making the enhanced mitigation only last for 4 seconds. Why they didn't apply the same to the idea to the secondary effects is anyone's guess.
And I don't mean just make the healing last only 4 seconds, but having to time it for incoming damage to gain the benefit instead of it just being completely free.

[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.

[Supersnow845]

What does giving you a free clemency every minute actually achieve

Do yall really think PLD needs more healing

Honestly just make clemency instant and free and make PLD queueable as a healer then delete healers at this point

[Rithy255]

What does giving you a free clemency every minute actually achieve

Do yall really think PLD needs more healing

Honestly just make clemency instant and free and make PLD queueable as a healer then delete healers at this point

I think magic healing from magic attacks should be outright removed personally, I rather PLD get more controlled sustain, I'm not a fan of the absurd self sustain.
So this would be trading around 3200 worth of healing for 1000 that's more flexible per minute.

Most of PLD's "high healing" is just because PLD uses a lot of magic attacks per minute, Holy sheltrons regen effect is pretty good at not being too obnoxious

[Lyth]

It's hard to discuss improvements to the system if everything is going to turn into a 'delete healers' strawman.

The 'free clemency' concept already exists. It's built into the lifesteal on Holy Spirit/Circle that was added in 6.0. I personally don't think that's a good design direction. Likewise, I don't think that Clemency sitting on your hotbar for a rainy day is any better. A big problem with support job design in general is that the toolkits are packed full of defensive actions that you either don't need or don't want to use. And then we're surprised at why the offensive rotations are so boring and underdeveloped. This should be obvious, coming from a healer perspective of all things.

I think that it's fine for Clemency to have a hardcast option in an emergency. That fits with PLD's aesthetic. I think the amount healed should be context dependent, so that it's really only beneficial when a target is at low HP or has just taken a lot of damage. I would throw in a swiftcast proc if you use Intervention or Cover on a target that subsequently drops below half HP, and just have that replace the lifesteal effects that were added in 6.0.