Feelings on FF14's Trinity System?

[Valence]

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

Let's be honest, as a DPS player I'm completely dependent of my healer(s) to do their job and heal me. Why would tanks be exempt of this? Tanks are the most frustrating spectacle to watch those days: they can eat shit forever, break records in vuln/damage down stacks because nothing can kill them but body checks, and they can heal back up on their own (depending on the tank). They even burst better than half the DPS roster, it's ludicrous.

[ty_taurus]

Your initial proposal included none of that. You just talked about an attack doing either more enmity or more damage depending on whether or not you're main or off tank.

Was there some sort of force stopping you from coming to that conclusion yourself? If one idea posted on a forum thread is compelling enough to engage you in discussion regarding it, then I would think it isn't hard to look at an example of an idea and consider what factors might need to apply in order for that idea to function, even if different from mine. Doesn't mean that end result would work and/or be an idea you'd be in favor of 100% of the time, but assuming one idea shared on a thread can only exist as exclusively what is posted and nothing else just seems so dogmatic.

[Lyth]

To be honest, the front positional idea sounds like it comes from someone with only armchair knowledge of tanking and melee. For positionals to matter, you need to have more than one type of positional. An active tank isn't going to swap from front to flank, because the boss is going to spin with them. The 'positional' element in tanking traditionally was that if you point the boss the wrong way, then they cleave the group. I think the only thing that you'd add with such a design is having the non-active tank play chicken with cleaves (if they exist) to get in their positionals.

It's not so much a detrimental idea so much as it wasn't well thought out. I wouldn't double down on it.

[Supersnow845]

I mean while I personally am not the biggest fan of front positionals I genuinely have no idea what tank mains want at this point that isn’t game breaking

Half the tank mains like the current system where the healer is near non existent, the other half only seem to care internally about how WAR is so much better than the other tanks and not that tanks are warping the entire game around them which tends to lead to “solutions” that basically amount to “make healers do something else that’s not healing like buffing” if you ask the first group and “just give every tank bloodwhetting” if you ask the latter group. Neither of which fixes how much the tanks warp the trinity

I’ll take flawed ideas with good intentions over the absolute nothing that’s coming out of the tank camp that doesn’t amount to “my role needs to stay the best at everything every other role should change around me”

[Lyth]

I think the approach to self-sustain taken this expansion is flawed and uninteresting. The appeal in lifesteal comes down to skillful execution and surviving against all odds. Building in heals and regens into actions that you press all the time doesn't really develop that skill execution. It just creates situations where tanks are either 0% or 100%. Self-sustain needs to be deliberate, and be timing dependent. You only really get a sense of risk if you're constantly in the bottom half of your HP bar. Tank sustain needs to be revised, not just for the sake of healers, but for the sake of tanks as well. This comes back to that platformer without pitfalls analogy.

While toning back self-sustain on tanks is important, I don't think that resolves the discontent that healers have been expressing for a few expansions now. Increasing healing requirements will make your progression experience more interesting, but not necessarily satisfy you when you're farming content. If a large portion of your toolkits is dedicated to defensive actions, then you'll never have a dps rotation that's going to provide the same level of engagement as an actual Caster. Utility actions like Expedient that can impact team performance/uptime are another question, but one that is largely unexplored. The question around whether resource management could be made more interesting is another. I think the problems run much deeper than just tank design.

[Supersnow845]

It’s not the actual suggestion being offered it’s the fact that when suggestions are offered it overwhelmingly doesn’t come from tanks because they are too busy being angry at WAR to realise the collective tank role is warping the entire trinity. Tanks never offer collective solutions to the role that focus on the fact that even the weakest tank is too strong

Tank sustain is intrinsically linked to healer design because for casual content tanks take near all the the non avoidable damage and they take most of the non avoidable damage in savage as well. There are entire portions and choices built into the healer kits that are not being taken advantage of because the tanks don’t need them. Solace is a near redundant button these days because rapture is just always the better choice

Sure damage options and bloat of oGCD’s are a contributing factor but overwhelmingly healer problems come from the fact that tanks are so overtuned that their single target kits are useless and everything has to be a body check to actually challenge the tanks near immortality so DPS health bars just become proxy’s for the tanks health bar……AND then they aren’t challenged either because damage is so consistent

Meanwhile people are arguing 1500 healer potency every 25 seconds on a free CD is fine because it’s worse in AOE

[ty_taurus]

To be honest, the front positional idea sounds like it comes from someone with only armchair knowledge of tanking and melee. For positionals to matter, you need to have more than one type of positional. An active tank isn't going to swap from front to flank, because the boss is going to spin with them. The 'positional' element in tanking traditionally was that if you point the boss the wrong way, then they cleave the group. I think the only thing that you'd add with such a design is having the non-active tank play chicken with cleaves (if they exist) to get in their positionals.

It's not so much a detrimental idea so much as it wasn't well thought out. I wouldn't double down on it.

I already mentioned a major issue with that concept after recognizing how many bosses simply always have all positionals apply anyway, which is why I mentioned changing the core concept to be based around the threat table instead. And it's a mechanic I only initially mentioned because I've seen it in other games for tanks as well. If you want to blame anyone for the idea, blame those games.

[Lyth]

I'm not blaming anyone. From experience, I have seen a trend of completely arbitrary gameplay changes implemented from cherrypicking random once off threads. You do have to explicitly step in and say 'this is just forum feelycraft, no active player on this job/role actually wants this' so that they get the picture, or else you wake up one day and you're Kaitenless. It's nothing personal.

I don't think that all tanks are overtuned. DRK's current design is probably closer to where everyone should be in terms of baseline sustain, even if I'm not a fan of the conditional magic-only damage reduction. I think mitigation inflation is a combined tank and healer problem, and unless you crop back on both roles' defensive kits you're not going to feel very challenged. I tend to agree with Rinon's take on this. I also think that if tanks and healers had less of their toolkits dedicated to defensives, you'd have more room for interesting rotations, but that's another story.

[Gemina]

I’ll take flawed ideas with good intentions over the absolute nothing that’s coming out of the tank camp that doesn’t amount to “my role needs to stay the best at everything every other role should change around me”

I wonder how tank mains would feel if we told them they are essentially the Mary Sues of FFXIV?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I wonder how tank mains would feel if we told them they are essentially the Mary Sues of FFXIV?

They'll just shake it off tbh.

/j