Against his better judgement, Graham gives the hottest take known to mankind
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0:00 Intro, who are you?
2:05 Tank Role
17:07 Healer Role
27:32 Bringing it together
35:00 Answering chat comments
41:11 Closing thoughts
42:04 Thanks for watching!
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I think you have some interesting design ideas, but there are a few more fundamental considerations.
The first major contra argument to making tanks and healers more in line with the old-school hard trinity, as you are somewhat advocating for here, is market saturation and high-level product strategy. I think one of the major reasons FF14 does not strictly adhere to the hard trinity is that WoW already exists and is still massively succesful. In a saturated market like the MMO genre it is vital to set yourself apart from the established competition in some fundamental way. Which is why I think the decision was made to have a sort of soft role trinity, where the familiar roles exist, but we also let everyone contribute to dps. This was done to appeal to the veteran MMO crowd that ironically always seems to crave the familiar, while also looking for a different gameplay experience from a new MMO.
The second contra argument is high-level design vision. I believe FF14s combat is fundamentally designed around the big savage/ultimate tier single enemy, arena-style boss fights, where multiple mechanics happen in rapid succession and resolving the puzzle and the dance of the encounter is meant to be the primary challenge for all players involved. I think the devs simply determined that this part of the game was more fun, even for tanks, than the holding aggro part, but having both complex fights and complex tanking mechanics would have overwhelmed players. So something had to give and instead of giving tanks an easy version of the fight, by taking away some of the encounter mechanics for tanks specifically, they made the holding aggro part trivially easy so the intended experience could be preserved for everyone. I'm not saying either way is better, but I am confident it was a conscious design decision, one that went through many iterations and is, as you pointed out, still being iterated on.
Third and most importantly is that the current design of healers and tanks is a social engineering issue. I personally sympathize with your ideas on how to redesign tanks to execute better on the tanking fantasy, but I think you highly overestimate how many players actually want to have that exact experience.
The WoW community is notorious for having a consistent lack of players willing to play as the tank role and deferring to those that do with almost godlike reverence, precisely because it requires so much knowledge of the encounters. In WoW tanks are basically expected to know the layouts of raids and dungeons by heart, assume a leadership role and oftentimes carry newbies through the entire experience. That is a lot of pressure to put on anyone playing a videogame in their freetime and so naturally only the most determined and/or kindhearted spirits gravitate to the tank role. Heck, even FF14 youtube and forums are full of discussions about tankxiety and healxiety with people voicing these same fears of not wanting to let down their team or facing (real and imagined) social punishment for performing badly.
Lowering the barrier to entry for both healing and tanking by making it easier to get the fundamentals right (like holding aggro almost automatically or making MP management less of a concern for healers) was, in my opinion, a genius bit of social engineering on Square Enix part. I have read many accounts of people saying they have for the first time in their MMO careers felt empowered to step outside of their comfort zone of playing as dps and actually assume these other roles instead. I have played a tank in WoW Classic myself and I admit that I was somewhat hesitant to try out the tank jobs in FF14 as a result of that exact social pressure I had previously experienced. And I was pleasantly surprised at how much more manageable it felt in FF14 and how I did not feel solely responsible for the run going smoothly.
You can’t reduce Tank/Healer damage by much more. They still need to get through all the story, side quests, fates, etc. It already feels a little slower if you’re playing a tank/healer. We’re also short on those roles, and they’re always in need for matchmaking. Tank and healer need to remain accessible and easy to keep the role ratios from getting out of hand. Casual players already have anxiety about taking those important roles.
Former FFXI player here as well. Your take my not be popular, but I relate. I played Scholar, Summoner, and White Mage mostly. I enjoy healing and I don't find it boring at all. I like spending all of my time healing, buffing, removing debuffs, throwing up shields, etc. Playing a healer was a very active role in FFXI and you really had to stay on your toes and understand the fight. Yes there would be seconds of downtime, but not enough that I felt bored. Accumulating different sets for healing, buffing, mp regen, and many others was also fun.
I played Scholar in FFXIV and I just didn't get the same satisfaction.
no…. just no
Stricter healing please. I only heal in mmos. I don't care if I they can't find a tank or healer cause that's what I fill. And I want it harder.
Healing in ffxiv is so ez you dont even need one 😂 the hardest fight in the game was cleared without a healer on patch hahaha.
imo remove aggro entirely, it's only ever been there to create a condition which crashes an encounter because DPS "does too much DPS"
aggro mechanics being the majority of tank identity is tired. the current design of the FFXIV tanks is pretty peak ngl. You have DPS style rotations to maximize, boss positioning management, and augment other tanks and healers with defensive and healing abilities. If dawntrail doubles down on the timing of mitigation abilities like that did with the heavy mitigation abilities this expansion, it will be perfect.
WHM main here, Healing needs to be adjusted that is for sure ! HOWEVER ! I do not think replacing a button by another would add to the "fun" factor at all.
Replacing Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare by
Medica Medica Medica Medica Medica Medica Medica Medica
Does NOT sound like a drastic increase of fun to me
My take (and because of how ffxiv healing works) is either :
You "split" the fights into a big dmg section (let's say 2 min … just an intuition) into a MASSIVE 2 min healing phase (and i mean P10s harrowing hell kinda dmg) for 2 min and switch back and forth
OR
You reduce the amount of healing and make it part of your dmg rotation while the healing check overall is harder (similar vein of how kardia works)
Would increase the reward for doing dmg and stacking heals
The way it is now is very boring in any difficulty (and yeah i have 6000 hours on WHM alone …. so please changes would be welcome)
ONLY healing check would be boring as fuck too and get stale real quick aswell
We'll see what DT hold, See you in Dawntrail o/
Everything you suggested will never happen unfortunately for 1 simple reason: consoles.
The amount of people you gain from PC players enjoying tank/healer more will be counterbalanced by people on consoles quitting those roles with an even worse possible side effect: they may just straight up quit the game. Targeting on a console is garbage, having to cycle through targets instead of being able to click directly on them or using 7 macros plus the self target button is just not a tenable situation. Either the content is dumbed down mechanically to a point where that is possible or you just lose those players completely.
Dumbing down healers and tanks doesn't make them unplayable for PC players but increasing the burden on console players can make it unplayable. It would be very interesting to see how many console players have cleared hard content as AST for example as that's the only job in the game currently that has incentive to "spot target" different players.
And also more evidence: there's never been a mechanic where healers have had to heal an external target since Shinyru EX, that's not a coincidence.
I love playing healer but going from Glare Glare to just spamming medica doesn't sound fun to me at all. I think you're on the wrong way here. What I would like is giving me more to heal but not constantly.. I like switching back and forth at times. But making me use my Cooldowns less of a "whatever" would be great. btw Ultimates already do that, I would just like more of that in higher content even in normal make it less brain dead and give us more to heal ON the same side make dps use their fucking cooldowns. The worst thing in this game is how some dps never even press their faint before they reach endgame and get told to do so.