This is depressing, please change things

[Carighan]

Tanks have been DPS who press mitigations for mechanics for a few expansions, now, too, since aggro management got lobotomized. Role balance in general has been rough for a hot minute.

Yeah, and it goes even further than that.

But just for tanks, while you could argue "But in particular Paladin and Warrior are so strong", they still don't play like tanks. It's really not fun if you want to play a tank and don't actually play one beyond the boss being turned a particular way.

And beyond tanks, melee DPS in Endwalker barely were melee insofar that most bosses had a hitbox reaching all the way to Sharlayan. One caster has essentially no cast bars. Stuff is all over the place!

As for healers in particular, while more damage buttons would be ... "nice" (in the most grandma-commenting-on-stuff way), the real fix IMO is to actually deal damage that requires healing. I got SO MANY healing buttons. I'd have more than enough complexity and variety in my button presses if there were any damage to heal!

[Alice_Rivers]

As for healers in particular, while more damage buttons would be ... "nice" (in the most grandma-commenting-on-stuff way), the real fix IMO is to actually deal damage that requires healing. I got SO MANY healing buttons. I'd have more than enough complexity and variety in my button presses if there were any damage to heal!

This, literally this.

[Erit]

Yeah, and it goes even further than that.

But just for tanks, while you could argue "But in particular Paladin and Warrior are so strong", they still don't play like tanks. It's really not fun if you want to play a tank and don't actually play one beyond the boss being turned a particular way.

And beyond tanks, melee DPS in Endwalker barely were melee insofar that most bosses had a hitbox reaching all the way to Sharlayan. One caster has essentially no cast bars. Stuff is all over the place!

As for healers in particular, while more damage buttons would be ... "nice" (in the most grandma-commenting-on-stuff way), the real fix IMO is to actually deal damage that requires healing. I got SO MANY healing buttons. I'd have more than enough complexity and variety in my button presses if there were any damage to heal!

I've been running Scholar through the DT dungeons a lot lately—and cursing a blue streak over the game dropping nothing but Fending gear when my GNB is already capped—and let me tell you, I press all my buttons a lot. Not because the mechanics hit particularly hard, but because people keep trying to die to them regardless.

I think that's what the goal is with current healer design: Absolute Babysitter Mode. That's why when everyone's playing well, the role feels unfulfilling in standard content; half your kit is intended for course-correction in some capacity. It's a bit different in high-end, but I don't know much beyond hearsay.

And you can't really buff standard content to require Savage or Ultimate level play, because then the majority of the playerbase who aren't interested in those things will up stakes and fuck off. I don't think XIV could survive hemorrhaging players like that when CBU3 seems to have been hit with the "Bigger And Bigger" bug and cannot seem to stop trying to spend more and more on each expansion.

The answer, then, is to lean more into the support aspect of the role. Give us tools that let us influence encounters beyond "Hit it 'til it dies" and "un-hit target ally." Scholar can outright invalidate mechanics, Astro if played masterfully can force skips, lean into that sort of play. The "holy trinity" used to be a quadrangle, but at some point people decided mezzing was lame when it's some of the funniest shit you can do in a game. I remember when Paladin mass-blinded as part of its AoE threat management, it was always a nice treat to get the most out of that. Give us back things like Disable, or let White Mage throw out Faith or Bravery every 30s so you have to mind other people's rotations, slap it on the Black Mage right as they hit Flare Star and dump their Xenoglossy stacks.

But perhaps these are simply the ramblings of an old man lost in his ways.

[Carighan]

I've been running Scholar through the DT dungeons a lot lately—and cursing a blue streak over the game dropping nothing but Fending gear when my GNB is already capped—and let me tell you, I press all my buttons a lot. Not because the mechanics hit particularly hard, but because people keep trying to die to them regardless.

Ah, I should also say: When I complain about a lack of healing requirement, I near-always mean Extremes/Savages.

Dungeons are moooostly fine. While I wish there were more ranged enemies that randomly (not telegraphed) target non-tanks for a certain amount of damage frequently (forcing me to split attention!), the tank does take significant damage, albeit from having 2 packs of mobs on them. Older dungeons are even between when pulling wall-to-wall.

But in raid content, the fights are designed to mostly deal no damage. Then every 20s-60s, a huge 80%-115% designed-max-HP AoE is fired off, sometimes broken into multiple hits or so. But since we have so many oGCD tools, virtually all of those we cover with them while continously spamming nukes.

That's the problem. If raids did as much and as constant damage to the tanks as 2 packs of trashmobs in a dungeon did, daaaaaang would healing be ecstatic. And fun!

The answer, then, is to lean more into the support aspect of the role. Give us tools that let us influence encounters beyond "Hit it 'til it dies" and "un-hit target ally." Scholar can outright invalidate mechanics, Astro if played masterfully can force skips, lean into that sort of play. The "holy trinity" used to be a quadrangle, but at some point people decided mezzing was lame when it's some of the funniest shit you can do in a game. I remember when Paladin mass-blinded as part of its AoE threat management, it was always a nice treat to get the most out of that. Give us back things like Disable, or let White Mage throw out Faith or Bravery every 30s so you have to mind other people's rotations, slap it on the Black Mage right as they hit Flare Star and dump their Xenoglossy stacks.

6 roles in fact. Not 4 (or 3).

The classic CRPG design has 6 roles: Tank, Healer, Damage, Crowd Control, Debuffing, Buffing. WoW was the cataclyst that mostly eliminated the later three, even though at release they still leaned into them (beta 4 billed Priest as CC and Warlock as Debuffer, for example!). Compare EQ1 with its Enchanter and Shaman and so on.