Quote Originally Posted by Erit View Post
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!

Quote Originally Posted by Erit View Post
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.