[Feedback] About the Holy Trinity

[MediArgentum]

The "Holy Trinity" in Normal difficulty modes.
The "Holy Trinity" refers to inter-dependency of roles. Where you need all the roles in the party, for the party to be successful in defeating powerful enemies. Removing even one role (any role) from the party should make it either impossible or very, very difficult for that party to overcome said challenge.

The key here - is that it shouldn't be more effective to defeat powerful enemies by removing any one role from your party, even if it is ultimately possible to do so. If your group wants to go through non-standard team composition fights and win anyways, that's fine. We don't need to make that impossible. But I think we should ensure that it is less effective to do so, such as the fights simply taking longer or being significantly more difficult on a mechanic-to-mechanic basis, since the group would be missing important toolkit.

This is already the case for "hardcore" difficulty content in this game - Extreme Trial difficulty and up.
Of course, we've seen many examples of the players clearing a Savage or an Ultimate raid with only tanks in the party, or only tanks and DPS (no healers) in the party, etc. But those are exceptions and even then it is much more difficult or bothersome to clear the raid in that manner, compared to the standard team composition. Which is good, this is good design!

And that's why I would like to see the same design also hold up in normal difficulty content as well. Right now, the holy trinity simply doesn't hold up in normal duties.
Excluding Dark Knights, none of the other tanks need a healer at all.
It is significantly more effective to not invite a healer to your Expert Roulette run and instead go with 1 non-DRK Tank and 3 DPS.
Let me clarify:
Being able to clear an Expert Dungeon with 1 Tank and 3 DPS = not a problem!
Being able to clear an Expert Dungeon with 1 Tank and 3 DPS more effectively than with a standard party composition = big problem!
This is my opinion of course. Not all players care about the "Holy Trinity" like I do. Personally, I like that kind of a design and would like to see it in this game even in dungeons and normal raids, not just Savage raids.

[theunhappypotato]

Vast majority of players would struggle to clear a current dungeon without healers, and if they'd need to have a RDM or SMN in the party for rezzing and atleast PLD for tanking (best would be WAR) and this is ff14 so everyone is a DPS anyways

[Supersnow845]

Vast majority of players would struggle to clear a current dungeon without healers, and if they'd need to have a RDM or SMN in the party for rezzing and atleast PLD for tanking (best would be WAR) and this is ff14 so everyone is a DPS anyways

If when you have decent competence you don’t need a healer to heal then why do healers also do the least damage

[theunhappypotato]

í dont know i'm not a game designer i wish i could tell you why healing in this game is boring but i really cant

[Carighan]

í dont know i'm not a game designer i wish i could tell you why healing in this game is boring but i really cant

It's because you're not healing.

I mean, even if that part were fixed there's an extra wrinkle where in many other RPGs and MMORPGs, "healer" roles are declared boring in gameplay, but in the end you just spam abilities producing big green numbers instead of big white or red numbers, so you could argue DPS gameplay is no better at its core.

But, importantly, in FFXIV, you don't even do that. There is no healing spam. There is no "healing gameplay". Hence we kinda also cannot say whether it's boring, as it doesn't exist. Fun way to shield yourself from criticism as a dev, I assume. >.> One extra issue is that this also cannot quite as easily be solved as in many other games where you could just tweak the incoming damage: As a result of how oGCD-based healing is, individual hits are big but far apart, and HP is low compared to the incoming hits.

So to enable healing gameplay to begin with, we'd need a roundhouse kick of:

* Massively bumping HP pools but not regeneration outside of healers, people die slowly, but also take forever to recover.
* Then, add lots and lots and random or quasi-random non-tank damage to fights, including against trashmobs. Untelegraphed circle and line AoEs, random bolts being shot at non-tank targets, the whole shebang, and it affects every aspect of the game.
* Then, rebalance the output, mana cost and CDs of oGCDs versus GCDs for heals, enabled a way to get through this damage and recover health only if you primarily spend your time as a healer casting heals.
* Then, naturally following from that, re-evaluate every single HP pool in the game since now in raids/trials healers aren't nuking, but solo they still need to kill things.
* Oh, speaking of solo: This creates gameplay where ultimately tanks and DPS live on "borrowed time". They can survive the incoming (high) damage for a long time on their big HP pools, but not forever. DPS need to deal enough damage to kill the enemy before they die, while tanks take longer but in turn can withstand so much punishment they still kill the enemy first. Healers can spend some portion of their time healing themselves, but their damage needs to be high per-action to compensate (remember we wouldn't have time to even use these actions much in raid fights!).
* Finally, re-evaluate every single boss AoE and AoE damaging mechanic to work with these new parameters. Reduce individual 80% hits to adjust for the new HP pools, massively bump DoTs and group DoTs, that kind of stuff.