#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Tint]

You know, we actually had a point in this game's lifetime where the trinity functioned in dungeons, it was Stormblood.

But Stormblood also marked the beginning of the tank power creep. As a DRK I could soak up entire tankbusters with TBN and suddenly in ShB all tanks could to that. And it got even worse with EW.

Back in the day I have learned to pre-cast my heals for tank busters, today that mechanic is entirely gone from healer gameplay. I throw in a Benison for good measure, but tanks deal with busters alone these days.

[Aravell]

But Stormblood also marked the beginning of the tank power creep. As a DRK I could soak up entire tankbusters with TBN and suddenly in ShB all tanks could to that. And it got even worse with EW.

Back in the day I have learned to pre-cast my heals for tank busters, today that mechanic is entirely gone from healer gameplay. I throw in a Benison for good measure, but tanks deal with busters alone these days.

I wouldn't call that tank power creep, more like tank specialisations.

DRK could zero out a lot of singular damage sources, but they were weak in sustain against a single target and would eventually die without a dedicated healer.
WAR had strong heals and mitigation, but half their defensive kit was locked behind a -20% damage stance which also locked them out of their strongest attack.
PLD was sturdy for a longer period of time through their extra defensives and passive block, but their damage was lower and Clemency costs them damage to use.

So we had a tank that was strong against busters but weak on overall sustain, a tank that was strong in self-healing and defensives but ended up ping-ponging their HP bar in practice, and a tank that's generally sturdy with good support but doesn't contribute as much to killing the boss. I'd say they still has solid identities and weaknesses back then. ShB did ruin that balance by removing weaknesses from the tanks though.

I've said i think tank mitigation values are a issue into why healers don't actually need to heal much, I do not think sustain is even close to the issue, Taking away tank self heals and team healing is just removing more stuff from tanks to make healers feel good about themselves, it doesn't actually fix any of the core issues, I don't know why you are so insistent that making tanks worse will be your magical fix to healers.

While I agree that tanks could keep their self-healing, I think tanks should in no case have dedicated targetted party healing for free.

Stuff like Divine Veil is fine, it's just 1 instance of heal on a decent cooldown. Clemency is also fine because it cuts into your damage to use it. Stuff like Nascent Flash is not fine as it costs nothing to use and is also too strong, I think free targetted healing should stay firmly in the territory of healers and no one else.

[Rithy255]

While I agree that tanks could keep their self-healing, I think tanks should in no case have dedicated targetted party healing for free.

Stuff like Divine Veil is fine, it's just 1 instance of heal on a decent cooldown. Clemency is also fine because it cuts into your damage to use it. Stuff like Nascent Flash is not fine as it costs nothing to use and is also too strong, I think free targetted healing should stay firmly in the territory of healers and no one else.

I disagree to a extent that tanks shouldn't have targeted healing, though I think in a lot of the cases tanks target healing tools are a bit too strong.

Nascent flash being the most egregious example as its 1600 healing, that is doubled due to targeting both the warrior and their target this is of course in addition to warrior having a bunch of healing defensives that make it a clear example of where a tank is taking sustain too far, I think Gunbreakers excog is also a bit too strong in potency and aurora didn't need to be buffed but was fine before so. My issue with paladins self healing is more the selfish holyspirit/blade combo healing more then anything I don't really have a issue with the regen on Sheltron. I think if one limited target self heal can

My main issue with current tanks defensives is the stacked mitigation, I much rather we remove the double mits on a lot of them (15%+15%) and maybe make some of the healing aspects tied to them weaker But I don't think target healing needs to be fully removed.

[Aravell]

I disagree to a extent that tanks shouldn't have targeted healing, though I think in a lot of the cases tanks target healing tools are a bit too strong.

Nascent flash being the most egregious example as its 1600 healing, that is doubled due to targeting both the warrior and their target this is of course in addition to warrior having a bunch of healing defensives that make it a clear example of where a tank is taking sustain too far, I think Gunbreakers excog is also a bit too strong in potency and aurora didn't need to be buffed but was fine before so. My issue with paladins self healing is more the selfish holyspirit/blade combo healing more then anything I don't really have a issue with the regen on Sheltron. I think if one limited target self heal can

My main issue with current tanks defensives is the stacked mitigation, I much rather we remove the double mits on a lot of them (15%+15%) and maybe make some of the healing aspects tied to them weaker But I don't think target healing needs to be fully removed.

Note that I didn't say tank targetted healing should be removed, I said it shouldn't be free.

I think Clemency is a great example, it's strong and can be used to save a run but it has an opportunity cost, you cannot just spam it for free. Meanwhile, you can use Nascent Flash whenever you want at no cost to anyone, that's too far out a tank's purview in my opinion. I don't have a big issue with tanks being able to heal, I just think that free healing should only belong to the healer role because it's their main reason for even being in the party.

[Azurarok]

It seems to just come back to ShB removing aggro management and healer dps. We're kinda fighting over who gets to have fun because SE took away a toy from both healers and tanks and told us to start sharing what's left.

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't get why this is hard to understand that dungeons in general are just boring and easy and again you can clear on most comps.

It sure does matter both ways! I find it annoying that healers can make me using defensives feel invalid in bosses because they spam mit/shields/healing on me

If you nerfed tanks to the point where healers actually had to heal a lot in dungeons then they'd be melee dps lol

1: Why are we acting so defeatist about the 'fun' factor of dungeon content? Saying 'dungeons (and content of similar difficulty) aren't meant to be fun' is effectively saying 'most of the content of the game isn't meant to be fun'. Which, in a subscription based game, is a pretty ridiculous stance to have IMO. Rather than just giving up on that entire difficulty level of content, why are we not asking for it to be made more fun, given that there's, by my count, exactly 100 dungeons in the game now?

2: Next time you take a tankbuster in those dungeon bosses, check your HP bar. Even with no defensives active, you're taking only about half your Max HP. Whatever the Healer's doing to 'make your defensives feel invalid' isn't actually invalidating anything, because your defensives have been invalidated by the dungeon boss doing so little damage in the first place. Also, you say, and I quote, 'because they spam mit/shields/healing on me'. Perish the thought, that the Healer role would spam Healing on you!

3: Nah, we'd just have a more ARR-Stormblood paradigm again. Where Healers actually press healing GCDs occasionally, instead of pressing Krasis-Physis-Kerachole-Dyskrasia spam, and then ignoring the Tank's HP on every pack because 'oh it turns out the PLD can regen 1000p every time they press their 22s CD defensive, and also for 400p every time they spend Holy Spirit/Holy Circle, and also 400p every GCD in their burst combo, and also gets a 1000p shield when they press their 2min defensive (on top of it being 40% mit)'. And that's just PLD, WAR's even more ridiculous, as we're all aware.

If healers want more interesting gameplay give them more damage buttons and things to do, you can likely get away with reducing some defensive aspects about tank and allow bigger pulls with bosses dealing more damage ect.

It's not designed to have intense gameplay whether you like it or not, if dungeons were designed to actually challenge players to the point where a full standard trinity comp was required then people would get walled off.

Next we're going to complain that fates need the full on trinity system.

1: Yeh, maybe you could do that, and it'd make dungeons a bit more fun. But nerfing tank defensives means incurring the anger of the tank mains who'd have their own 'fun' infringed on, and bigger pulls/more damage would work only for certain gear levels, and outgearing the dungeon (eg if you're a Savage player) means the difficulty would disappear again, so it's a very ephemeral 'increase in fun', it doesn't last

2: This assertion (people would get walled if the challenge 'required' a correct trinity comp) A: contradicts evidence of how ARR/HW/SB dungeons played out, and B: contradicts point 1 (where you say that 'you can likely get away with making bosses do more damage'). If you make bosses do more damage, it'd enforce the Trinity comp more (until you outgear it, as mentioned above)

3: IDK if you noticed, but some Fates DO need a Tank and a Healer (Go Go Gorgimera, the turtle one in Forelands, etc.) They're special exceptions though. If you mean regular fates like 'kill a bunch of ladybugs' then you're fighting a strawman

But Stormblood also marked the beginning of the tank power creep. As a DRK I could soak up entire tankbusters with TBN and suddenly in ShB all tanks could to that. And it got even worse with EW.

You could, but you couldn't restore your HP nearly as effectively against bosses, in between those TBNs (on trash is another topic, Dark Arts>Abyssal Drain was a little silly (but still not as silly as Bloodwhetting is now)). Plus, you wouldn't be able to do the current level of damage AND be as surviveable as you currently are, as Grit penalized your damage by 20% while it was active. You had to choose if you wanted to be more defensive, or more offensive, but now we get both at the same time.

A WAR had to choose, do they want to restore their own HP with Inner Beast and Equilibrium, at the cost of being in Defiance (-25% damage unless they use Unchained), or be in Deliverance for Fell Cleave damage (5% more damage, plus bonus crit rate based on gauge). Now, there isn't a choice to make, they get the tankiness (via the Tank Mastery Trait), the selfsustain AND the damage, all at once.

[ForsakenRoe]

2: Next time you take a tankbuster in those dungeon bosses, check your HP bar. Even with no defensives active, you're taking only about half your Max HP. Whatever the Healer's doing to 'make your defensives feel invalid' isn't actually invalidating anything, because your defensives have been invalidated by the dungeon boss doing so little damage in the first place.

And in fact, as citation for this point, here's 2 pictures from current content (level 95 dungeon with Trusts, I have a WT objective to do):

(sorry about the watermarks, NVIDIA capture does not behave well on my PC for some reason)



Figure A: A screenshot of the tankbuster from the 2nd boss, moments before it snapshots and hits me. The Bole has already fallen off of me, as shown by the flying text. I have no defensives active, and the boss has no debuffs like Feint/Addle/Reprisal active (the Ewer is a Regen, the Spear is damage buff).



Figure B: A screenshot of 'literally two seconds later', after the Tankbuster 'Pummel' has hit me. It dealt 65k damage, was not Blocked (I can't, I'm a DRK) and not Parried (though the Autoattack right after it was). I was left with 65k HP after the TB AND the Autoattack, so the TB alone, with no defensives at all, did less than half of my HP. Which means that, despite Guardian now being 40% damage reduction, it would only mitigate 26k damage (out of the 141k max HP for that dungeon) from its '% reduced' effect (the part that applies to all four tanks). You know what else is 26k? The effect of Thrill of Battle, which is '20% increased Max HP' (it's actually 28k). So, we need to mitigate the enemy's damage by a factor of 40%, to match the EHP provided by a mere 20% boost to ourselves. I'd say that this illustrates quite effectively, that we're grossly overpowered compared to the enemy.

Also, I kept an eye out on the last boss of the 95 dungeon. His TB is magic, does this affect the damage dealt to me? No, of course not, it also did 65k to me out of my 141k max. At least he got to do two Tankbusters through the whole fight instead of just one.

Not only do I not need a single defensive against the 'Tankbuster' (which does not 'bust' Tanks even if they're literally AFK), I'd need to take at least SEVEN (maybe even eight, if we're not factoring in the instant autoattack's damage) Vuln Up stacks from standing in bad (10% more damage taken, multiplicative), for the Tankbuster to actually kill me. You could quite literally AFK against some bosses and the Trusts will heal you through almost anything. But it's okay, becuase 'it's just dungeons, they're not meant to be fun', right?

So why am I paying a sub for it? Can we have the sub price reduced by 70%, if 70% of the content in the game is of a difficulty level that is 'not fun, by design'?

edit: I also did an EX roulette and watched HP bars on the final boss (Yuyu-whatever new dungeon). I wasn't the tank (I was playing a DPS), but I was looking at their HP bar and their buffs (or lack thereof, since they used none). The TB there did about 100k, of their 201k max HP. So, seems that 'Tankbuster in story dungeon hits for about 50% of the Tank's HP without a single defensive used' is a recurring pattern of sorts.

[Rithy255]

I'd just to like to make it clear again, because I feel as if my point is getting misinterpreted as "Dungeons should be easy and healers should have nothing to do" No, my point is that they're currently designed to be easy, so it's not a surprise that you can run it without a healer or tank pretty easily. Saying healer isn't useful in dungeon content! is not a argument for why healer is poorly designed, it's that every job tanks included feels bored during a dungeon, your point about tanks not really needing to need mitigation for tank busters is something I don't fully disagree with at least in later dungeons, apart of that has to do with item level synch (this is a massive reason why dungeons feel super easy, that never gets brought up) and apart of that does have to do with tanks passive built in 20% mitigation and higher hp.

I'm not a fan of the strict trinity system in ff14 at the same time, it's very basic and boring to have dps "do damage no utility" healer "heal" tank "aggro" the problem is if you want the "trinity fantasy" it ends up hurting job design and variety such as paladin's having access to some healing skills wouldn't be allowed in a system that was strict enough and enforced the trinity system 100%, in a strict Trinity formular every tank and healer bring the same thing on the table because they become designed to only do one thing. I do not like strict trinity systems, I enjoy more adaptive trinity systems.

My personal thoughts are that dungeons should be more difficult but not to a drastic point where it makes new players struggle, I think a part of that is fixing item level synching, toning down some mitigation values on tanks (and things like bloodwhetting aoe healing the warrior to full every 25s), but at the same time I also think runs without healers or tanks In casual content is fine to a extent.

[PyurBlue]

I'm not a fan of the strict trinity system in ff14 at the same time, it's very basic and boring to have dps "do damage no utility" healer "heal" tank "aggro" the problem is if you want the "trinity fantasy" it ends up hurting job design and variety such as paladin's having access to some healing skills wouldn't be allowed in a system that was strict enough and enforced the trinity system 100%, in a strict Trinity formular every tank and healer bring the same thing on the table because they become designed to only do one thing. I do not like strict trinity systems, I enjoy more adaptive trinity systems.

I don't have strong feelings for a rigid trinity system itself, but it is pretty core to what FF14 is supposed to be and I think it can work if the content is designed properly. Roles also don't have to impose strict limitations on class skills or abilities. The important part of balancing is making sure that every role has a purpose. Tanks and DPS can heal, they just can't have the ability to keep the entire party alive indefinitely. Healers can have shields and mitigation but these things can't be available constantly and shouldn't be able to overcome every possible instance of damage. The trinity isn't at odds PLD having heals, it's at odds with PLD having high uptime regen on top of baked in self healing on top of being able to fallback on a relatively low cost semi-party heal. The healers need to be the best at healing and there needs to be some amount of healing for them to address. SE forgot this somewhere along the game's evolution.

My personal thoughts are that dungeons should be more difficult but not to a drastic point where it makes new players struggle, I think a part of that is fixing item level synching, toning down some mitigation values on tanks (and things like bloodwhetting aoe healing the warrior to full every 25s), but at the same time I also think runs without healers or tanks In casual content is fine to a extent.

Dungeons clearly aren't meant to be this game's challenge content, that's true. However at this point gameplay has been almost thrown out the window other than keeping up your damage rotation. That's what needs to be undone. I think SE sees dungeons and roulettes as nothing more than a treadmill that players don't care about beyond what they get out of their time investment. This lead to streamlining and more streamlining until there wasn't really anything left to streamline. Content should be fun for its own sake. I see that as the first rule of game design. Unless dungeons are built with that in mind they will remain mediocre.

How to make dungeons fun without excluding casual players is another question but I think it's possible to do. Using the tank example above, we can leave damage as it is now but give bosses reactions to the amount of damage dealt. So for example if an attack deals about 50% of HP damage to a player the boss could get a buff that increases its own damage and lowers its cooldowns, maybe throw in a low chance to repeat the previous attack. This creates an incentive to heal and mitigate (prevent the 50% damage threshold) while still providing room for mistakes like forgetting to mitigate without letting that mistake go unpunished if it's made repeatedly.

[Supersnow845]

I'd just to like to make it clear again, because I feel as if my point is getting misinterpreted as "Dungeons should be easy and healers should have nothing to do" No, my point is that they're currently designed to be easy, so it's not a surprise that you can run it without a healer or tank pretty easily. Saying healer isn't useful in dungeon content! is not a argument for why healer is poorly designed, it's that every job tanks included feels bored during a dungeon, your point about tanks not really needing to need mitigation for tank busters is something I don't fully disagree with at least in later dungeons, apart of that has to do with item level synch (this is a massive reason why dungeons feel super easy, that never gets brought up) and apart of that does have to do with tanks passive built in 20% mitigation and higher hp.

I'm not a fan of the strict trinity system in ff14 at the same time, it's very basic and boring to have dps "do damage no utility" healer "heal" tank "aggro" the problem is if you want the "trinity fantasy" it ends up hurting job design and variety such as paladin's having access to some healing skills wouldn't be allowed in a system that was strict enough and enforced the trinity system 100%, in a strict Trinity formular every tank and healer bring the same thing on the table because they become designed to only do one thing. I do not like strict trinity systems, I enjoy more adaptive trinity systems.

My personal thoughts are that dungeons should be more difficult but not to a drastic point where it makes new players struggle, I think a part of that is fixing item level synching, toning down some mitigation values on tanks (and things like bloodwhetting aoe healing the warrior to full every 25s), but at the same time I also think runs without healers or tanks In casual content is fine to a extent.

That’s the thing I think you are missing though

“All roles feel boring in dungeon content”

while that may be true depending on your perspective (I don’t agree with it but I can see why others think that) that alone is not justification for the level of role encroachment that tanks exhibit on healers. Sure completely deleting tank sustain from the game wouldn’t “fix” healers but it would certainly actually allow them to heal more often.

The problem (which is ironically usually leveraged at the healerless ultimate clears) is that the vast majority of people interact with this game via the roulettes and right now tank overreach in the roulettes is excessively high (which is neither here nor there in the front of allowing clears without a particular role as this was possible in SB when we still had a trinity)

Not liking the trinity is fine but whole the game harshly enforces the trinity it’s also not an argument for why one particular role should be de-emphasised in the trinity