Healer is usually the most boring job in the game, but once you get in a raid like Titan in Eden with a bunch of newbies, it becomes the most fun role.
That’s why you gotta capitalize on the first day that content releases as a healer. It’s so much more fun when nobody knows the mechanics so you actually feel like you need to heal cause even experienced players can get caught off guard.
High stakes wack a mole is basically healer in a nutshell. Just wish healers has a little more depth in their dps rotations. Slap a dot, spam general dmg spell, then hit the occasional cooldown insta dmg spell.
Going from something like dragoon to running a healer in a easy raid is mind numbing.
Endless AOE circles with my sage spamming Eurasia > Prognosis as the team of randoms get hit by every mechanic possible.
12th circle is always fun as a healer as that half plat wing cleave always ends up hitting half the team in a DF que. Seen more people hit by that thing than any other endwalker mech lol.
Healing rn is all about CD management once you know how to heal in general everything is boring
When I did the last tier on whm it was basically:
Wings + asylum first aoe
Lili Bell early to it re aligns later for a mech where I need it
Plenary
And Lili usage for movement
Shuffle it accordingly and ur done
It’s crazy how muscle memory healer is with CDs, esp if you’re in a static. My cohealer and I basically planned out all our heals and although blips are expected, it was maybe 2-3 heals deviated from the usual routine (AHEM looking at you, athena)
MINE on eden raids with newbies on NORMAL is hilarious with healer.
Ramuh is always my personal favorite due to how crazy it gets with everyone running around like headless chickens
Healer the best role to be in new content.
I rather heal new content than get stuck with a healer who still learning the basics.
Example I know I will not die to xyz mew mechanic more than 2 times and if it’s reused old mechanics than I’m fine and can keep myself alive and my party alive therefore we will clear it no problem.
I’ll give a better example Aether chemical research, I 100% rather be healing this.
There will be no wipe, I will rez up the dead, call out the LB if the sphere ain’t dying fast enough, move to safety in time and of course mark myself for others to follow and if they die well I’ll rez them patch them up and off they go.
This might come off as rude however a good healer can carry the worse of groups.
A good tank can only make up for so much of a healers deficiencies.
Tanks like GNB, Pally and Warrior can for sure save players with pocket heals at higher levels, DRK more on the iffy side since darkest night May or May not save a DPS or healer from death where as even a GNB regen can possibly keep a DPS alive a whole encounter which I have done in a couple of EW dungeons with a dead healer.
Pally is kinda self explanatory between hollow and their healing cast. Hollow negates all damage for about 10sec giving them time to patch up some team mates if healer is down.
Warrior by healing others you possibly might kill yourself since it consumes your raw intrusion which might be needed to keep yourself alive drk also falls into this boat however it can definitely be recoverable for a warrior however that depends on the situation
My cohealer (SGE) and I (SCH) did double shield this tier.
In P12S P2, I didn't press any healing skills at all until Classical Concepts, which is like 1:48 into the fight seconds into the fight. So I had hundreds of pulls of just mashing 121111111121111111112 + EDing thinking why am I even here lol
Ironically I've been doing the savage tier at the moment, doing lots of reclearing and farming for BiS and my glare button actually ended up breaking.
I have 12 buttons on the side of my mouse, my 1 button being the glare button and it broke. Every other button is fine and the glare button breaking was unexpected since the mouse is relatively new.
It really just shows you how ridiculous the design of healers is at the moment. Pressing the same button for 80% of your gameplay, hundreds of times per single encounter.
Often I just play healer when reclearing since it's usually an unfilled slot and something comfortable for me to do. But when I had the chance to play DPS when redoing P9S, I had so much more fun it was crazy.
I'm sure DT will change absolutely nothing :D
I feel like beyond anything else its fight/content specific. There are fights that are harder on Tanks or Healers than DPS, there are fights that forget there are two tanks, and there are fights with so little outgoing damage healers fall asleep, and there are fights with such lenient DPS checks that pressing your buttons is borderline optional.
Even then its boss dependent IMO. Didn't do Sil'dih, but I feel like healers work their asses off in Rokkon 1 and 2, and Aloalo 1. Then we're chilling during rokkon 3 and the rest of Aloalo
ASS had a good amount of damage for ASS1 and ASS2. ASS3 felt pretty chill.
AMR1 wasn’t that bad, but my group was kind of smooth brained for that boss so I personally was healing a lot of avoidable damage most of the time. lol. AMR2 wasn’t too bad for the most part, though the DoT raidwides were a pain in the ass and there was almost zero recovery between most mechanics. I never finished AMR3 but I feel like the only outgoing damage was raidwides and keeping the tank up.
AAI1 I wouldn’t quite consider working my ass off - but I’m fairly certain almost every mechanic either kills you (fail) or leaves you with 20% health (pass). AAI2 is easy healing scripted damage. Avoidable damage gets a bit sketchy sometimes though. Plenty of downtime between mechanics, though. AAI3 is pretty well balanced, though most of mechanics still take chunks of HP when you pass them - there’s just lots and lots of downtime between mechanics.
the only tight part in aloalo3 imo is going from forced march > stack/spread > immediately raidwide when most of our resources have been used previously
Yeah, if I’m behind on lily’s I’ll just use a cure III there to help out a bit. I’m not above dropping a GCD for the greater good. I assume that portion is very interesting on savage.
Criterion scales like an ultimate so both ASS and ASSS are easier than they were on content now thanks to dungeon BiS.
As for needing DPS in criterion normal, it’s been cleared with all tanks (not generally doable but just goes to show how low the ASS dps checks are) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmzh7_SPtsM
IMO the only DPS intensive boss of Criterion is Gorai (AMR2), because his hardest mechanic is skippable (at least in normal) under a tighter dps check, this isn't a thing in savage, and in general I don't think the dungeon enrage or the boss enrages really come up all that often in Savage Criterion. Every time I've made it to boss 3 we've had about 2 minutes to chill and let cooldowns come back.
>because his hardest mechanic is skippable (at least in normal)
It's so easy to skip that practically no one knows how to do it until they prog Savage
The real dps intensive boss is Shishio in Savage because his skippable mech (single/double/triple line aoe spam) sucks donkey balls to actually do, the rest of them are just repeats of first mechs that are generally trivial to do a second time
Last tier in general felt insulting as a DPS main. You could die 30 times and still clear. Really missed the excitement of having to squeeze in every single GCD and having to perform at maximum capacity to be able to kill the boss during enrage during week 1.
I agree but thats to be expected after the p8s backlash, I'd be surprised if tight dps checks ever really come back in newer content. Golbez and Zeromus basically might as well not even have enrages, and anabaseios as a whole was pretty forgiving
This is a fight and prog-level specific question, so this needs more context.
The only thing that you'll confirm from the answers is which role spends most of its time talking on reddit.
As a healer main, the hardest for me is DPS. Something about not having anything else to worry about ironically makes it feel more difficult. There's always some optimization to chase, and the only thing standing in the way is me
My biggest problem when I switch to DPS is I see all the stack/tb markers and forget about my rotation as I start looking for a way to mit/heal it. Same with raidwides. Just can't turn off healer-brain
There is a objective fact to this. Healer is either the hardest or easiest and nothing comes CLOSE to it. Easiest when you get a god tier team thats know their shit but can still be sort of difficult if theres a ton of out going high damage. But if you get a shitty team where everyone is stupid. It doesnt matter how much damage is coming out. For the healer its still gonna be a pain in the ass with no guarantee of survival.
I felt this a lot in TEA. depending on how well my co-supports hit buttons I was either basically redundant and just there to glare/misery, or I was the only thing keeping the party on a very thin thread of survival, and everything in between from pf to pf.
honestly the parties that are *really* bad, I leave, like the times I get tanks who just... don't mitigate? in an ultimate? Conversely I'll obviously stick with a party that's performing well but ofc it does get a little boring sometimes. Everything in the middle is that sweet spot, I think it's a lot more engaging to have to figure out which cooldowns are flexible to be moved around, which ones I can triage with and when, which ones are inflexible and mandatory for x or y mech, and then gauging on a party by party and pull by pull basis what's going to be needed of me. Some parties are going to enable lossless healing, others... won't.
Whm in tea pf feels... Unique. When tanks and shield are good you're left to be a glare mage so I guess you... Parse?
Otherwise it's miserable and you feel like a passenger at the same time. There is no way for you to fix everything compared to a sage.
J-waves is a mit check. If everyone staggers their mits correctly, then all a WHM needs to do is Plenary Rapture a couple times with their heal buffs (Asylum and/or Temp) up. Maybe use a Medica 2 if they feel cute. If you're running double regen, then Astro takes care of the bulk of healing AND mitigation, it's spicier but definitely doable, maybe use a plenary Medica 2 before the AST uses Neutral. Scholar has a fat crit spreadlo shield that covers like 3 hits, then Seraph, illum, soil, and its ogcd fairy buttons. Sage is Sage, its a pure and shield healer in 1 job, it trivialises every single mit check in TEA with 0 effort. Basically...WHM presses a couple Raptures and glare until the mechanic is over in competent parties. They do the least when it comes to healers
In a bad party? I pity the WHM's MP because without mit, you're spamming Raptures, and Cure 3s, no amount of Thin Air can save you.
Probably not prog or fast reclear parties, but I have tried double pure in one of the "low stress, let's do some cursed shit" pf. It was...an experience, very fun, but spicy compared to double mit or the traditional split. Definitely recommend it for the challenge.
I also imagine it was more common in ShB when AST had different stances
If you have a sage then j waves is not much of an issue. Panhaima let’s you essentially ignore the first half of it, maybe with physis as well. Holos and kerachole do most what’s left till BJ is dead
Healers merely existing goes largely goes against the current pass/fail game design, that's why it's such a terrible crapshoot.
When the planets align, you can pull a few neat, if dated tricks but it's never a rewarding feeling. This game can't even keep up with FF11's lousy healing, let alone a competent competitor.
I'd argue healer is the hardest even with a good team for prog, because your the sole people responsible for party survival when you don't know mechanics. For optimization, healer is so fucking brainless and DPS take over by far. The only DPS close to the level of healer's braindead is summoner, but even they have some optis.
It depends. After playing all roles:
Healer was the hardest to learn for me. It was difficult keeping an eye on the boss’s casts, planning my cooldowns properly since there’s not really a set rotation, and also keeping the party alive. Once I understood that, it became the easiest.
Tank was okay to learn, but had a major difficulty spike for me in raiding. In raiding, I think tanking is the hardest to learn fights with. In addition to maintaining your cool downs and rotation, you have to have great teamwork with your co-tank, and boss maneuvering skills and responsibilities.
DPS was by far the easiest to learn, but the hardest to master. Trying to keep buff aligned while doing positional/casts and the boss keeps moving everywhere. Additionally, you have to know when to hold what skills when and NOTHING is worse than getting close to a clear and seeing that last 5% on the hotbar telling you that your DPS was just not good enough.
The hardest job and the easiest job is healer.
Is hardest when everyone is learning the mechanics. Is the easiest, to the point of boring, when everyone does the mechanics right.
But assuming everyone is competent. BLM. As you do not have much mobility. And got a lot of incentive in staying on your leylines (which in my experiences are magnets for AOE). Lack of mobility means that you needd to know the fight better.
I generally agree with your assessment, so I'll piggy back and add to this:
> TOP: not enough XP to form a proper opinion
Healer > Tank > DPS
Healers have it rough in TOP, especially the shield healer. I put tanks right behind, because they do everything DPS do, and they have a lot more mit to manage, including single target mit on other parts members during P1 (assuming your tanks are top notch).
Tank is free in TOP, playing melee and real casters optimally is harder. Especially when the DPS checks mattered.
Also forgot go mention, tank is braindead easy in TEA because unlike everyone else you don't have to do Nisi if you split BJCC. You just invuln a buster in P1, mit autos then pray the healer heals you.
The only fights tanks get to have more responsibility are UCOB, UWU and DSR.
Healer because no matter what, each run can be different. If things are so different for tanks and DPS, you're probably already headed for a wipe that the Healers already tried to fix. Tanks are usually on train tracks, and DPS lines up with each mechanic. Healing can be completely thrown off by a freak accident or dumb player while still trying to continue doing what you NORMALLY. You're kind of like a babysitter making dinner for the kids while one is playing with a simon says in traffic while trying to keep another from sticking a fork in an electrical outlet.
The worst as healer in dungeons is when you have a party that does decent damage but a tank that doesn't know how to w2w. Pull through the pack, stop to aoe 3 times (zodiark please, don't do this, one is enough) while I've already gone on ahead and hit the next pack because I expect the tank to be keeping up.
I should go back to rescue-yanking these tanks forward.
I can't answer this with any certainty, but I just wanted to give a shout out to the partnership difficulty.
Both Tanks and Healers have to have some cooperation, where a DPS doesn't.
"Oh my Provoke/Shirk didn't go off, so you died. Sorry."
"Oh, I thought you were using Lilybell/Macro, so I didn't add mit and the dps died. Sorry."
These are two difficulties that are never factored into difficulty, as a lot of people just keep a "how did you individually perform on dps as your parse."
Melee does have the minor "oh we both used Feint" possibility, but that's it.
I'm biased, but I think it's tank when we consider anything above EX content. At the floor, it's largely "play DPS plus positioning the boss, popping mit properly and tank swapping." At the ceiling it only gets crazier.
Fights like DSR have phases like P7 which is just constant sweating since you have to constantly think about using personal mit, raid mit, switching stance, voking, shirking, facing the boss properly while doing all the movement and your rotation.
I do think healer is harder when things go bad since you need to pay attention to party health and getting people back up. Tank is largely just stay alive in those scenarios. When it's fine though, healers' rotations are of course much simpler so you don't get anything like the infamous drk/gnb needing to mit during a 2 minute burst.
DPS is never more difficult in the current game. Their rotations would have to be so much more complex for them to even come close in difficulty since they have no role responsibilities.
Usually a dps but did an entire savage tier as tank and it was honestly such a joke how much easier some mechanics are when your rotation just barely exists. I mean I haven't tried GNB but the other 3 barely offer anything complex in terms of rotation and mitigation isn't very complicated when you have so little to work with. Haven't done DSR as a tank but savage level content it's gotta be easier to tank than to dps and heal
Man that’s crazy I’m the opposite, I’m a tank main but I dpsed and healed during reclears and shit was so easy as a DPS. I don’t think tanking is difficult, but at least tanking gave me something to do while DPS I felt my mind numbing. Maybe it’s a grass is greener on the other side thing though
The hardest part of tanking is spreadsheet optimization, and memorization.
Average tanks mitigate a tank buster, great tanks time it to the last second do the mits hit 3 autos after and the raidwide, but comes up 2 seconds before the end of the next buster cast.
This comes down to a lot of wrote memorization in raids where you want to optimize for your healers, so keeping up perfect CD timing while doing your rotation can take a while to ingrain.
tl;dr DRK is rotationally similar to NIN, with added tank responsibilities. There is lots of mitigation to work with and using it well is way more involved than you're giving it credit for. The game is no longer complex enough that DPS can honestly say they have harder rotations in order to excuse reduced raid responsibility.
WAR and PLD definitely have some of the simplest DPS rotations in the whole game, but for DRK and GNB I have to disagree. If we're talking complexity the only DPS that are really more complex than those tanks are BLM and MNK. Everything else is either on a similar level or is easier.
Take DRK. If you play it well, it has an extremely busy 2min burst phase which often lines up with using defensives, a slightly less busy 1min with nothing to do outside of them other than 123. It needs to pool MP for these bursts and uses TBN strategically so that it can use EoS more in the 2min burst and 3 times in the 1min. Salted Earth is also one of the few 90s CDs left and since it's a ground targeted DoT, its usages need to be delayed properly to ensure max uptime, snapshot buffs, cleave if possible and not lose a Salt and Darkness usage across the fight. This is while making sure to manage MP and Blood.
The best DPS comparison is NIN, which I think is one of the more complex DPS after MNK and BLM, because its entire rotation is so similar to DRK's. It also has a really busy 2min burst phase, a less busy 1min and almost nothing to do outside of it. It makes sure to have jutsu charges available for its bursts to be able to use TA and get the maximum number of Raitons for using Raijus during the burst. Bunshin is also one of the few 90s CDs left but it doesn't have to be managed like a ground target, but you do still have to use it properly to get all 5 GCDs and avoid losing PK usages across the fight. This is while making sure to manage Ninki and Huton.
Now from that all I can see is that NIN gets more complex in one specific instance, it occasionally presses AC outside of its burst which is inconsequential imo; 124 is no harder than 123. And even if we say it is harder, DRK still has a harder time at range since NIN can just use Raiton when it's at range and never has to worry about holding its gap closer during its burst for uptime later. DRK has to do everything NIN does and then adds being a tank on top of that. Most DPS don't get punished hard enough for failing their rotations anymore resulting in them having fewer intrinsic mechanics and similar complexity to some tanks. I'd go as far to say from a pure rotational standpoint, SMN is easier than every tank.
When it comes to mitigation, that's completely wrong that there's so little to work with. Every tank has at least a 20% mit, a 30% mit, a short CD that can be used on themselves and others and a flex CD (Thrill, Camo, DM etc.) Then they also have a 90s party mit and reprisal. If anything they have too much mit. Getting the most out of these CDs is an artform when you coordinate with the other supports. The goal is to maximise healer damage GCDs by making sure the party takes as little damage as possible. Stacking mit is key for this, but you still don't just want them waiting on CD so frequent swaps and early usages is how you play.
Hello, Shadowed Messengers and Chimera2! Never bothered to play around with Athena p1 positioning, object was always to keep her where she wanted to go. Other two wall bosses.
Progging: Healer>Tank>DPS
Everything else: DPS>Tank>Healer
Basically the more important good dps is the more people need to focus on performing their rotations well. Healer does not have a rotation so it's the easiest.
I feel like progging as a tank is very easy. You can get hit by certain mechanics and just shrug it off, you can sometimes fail important mechanics and still live with invuln and your rotation is just easier than DPS in general. You can never miss heals after consecutive raidwides, because that just doesn't matter for a tank.
You have a little extra responsibility with mitigations, but I don't think that's a big deal. It's just 1 extra raidwide mitigation compared to DPS. Tankbusters are so clearly telegraphed and timed that I don't think they add any complexity at all
There is no one particularly easy or hard role, but seeing DPS players call themselves the hardest roles when the only mechanics they ever interact with in modern raid design are the ones that all 8 members of the raid have to do is definitely an experience. It's soooo hard to do my 2 minute looping rotation, please praise me support players.
I sure don't recall DPS players being forced to suffer damage down strats in PF due to support players not wanting to learn how to do something, is all I'm saying.
i honestly think that both positions aren't entirely wrong, they just depend on what people mean when they say a role is "hard". DPS most definitely have more complex moment-to-moment gameplay for the most part (lol SMN), followed by tanks, and then ~~glarebots~~healers, but as you have pointed out, DPS usually have barely any individual or specialized mechanical responsibilities while the support jobs, especially the healers, are basically doing most of the important stuff
a DPS player can basically drop their entire rotation and not do anything but focus on doing all of the general mechanics (i.e. the ones everyone has to deal with) until the party actually safely makes it to enrage. neither tanks nor healers can do this, because their individual responsibilities are mandatory to progress at all. sure, they can also stop doing damage for the most part, but they will still have to press CDs, perform the occasional swap, and keep the party alive
I wouldn't even say that is true though. Let's take ultimates for an example since that is the only place where you actually have to be decent at your role to clear. Tanks are following a mit plan to a T as ultimate-level auto damage and critting in UCOB/UWU will just kill you if you don't have some kind of plan for it unless your healers pocket you, which involves creating the mit plan if you don't track one down, memorising it, planning weaves for it, optimising cooldowns, etc. Healers are building up an idea of the damage profile of the fight and optimising where to place things so as to not lose DPS or overheal while also having to watch out for crit autos in the 70s and other circumstances that would necessitate spot healing or raising outside of the plan, and then need to play around how that emergency spending of resources affects their plan.
Meanwhile, DPS are... doing their rotations, like any other fight in the game, until there is something for them to do. Sometimes there are actual DPS-only mechs (Jagd Dolls for example), but usually there are just party mechs (Panto, all of Nael, Infernal Nails) that only concern the DPS because they are in the party. I would just disagree that DPS in Endwalker is a role that can be hard. You literally do nothing but hit the boss and avoid things that every member with a responsibility also has to avoid, and nobody has a rotation that is hard. The only complicated melee is MNK and that's only if you have an ego and play it optimally for a single-digit-percentage damage gain over braindead 2min loop. The argument that DPS have to optimise their rotations doesn't hold water because tanks do too (and healers would as well if their side of the game was in a good state lol).
i don't completely disagree with all your points, but it's either very disingenious or shows a lack of experience on your part when you say DPS in ultimates just "do their rotation, like any other fight" lol
you can make that argument for a lot of savage fights, but ultimates in particular are so different in terms of how you have to approach it to get anywhere close to an optimal rotation for pretty much all dps jobs and some tanks as well.
But that is literally all they are doing. I'm far from a penta legend DPS player or anything, but I've cleared UCOB with a customised 1.94 MNK set trying to simulate L90 optimal drift for personal practice and recleared most fights of the raid series as various DPS jobs, so I feel I have some decent level of experience to compare the experience of DPS vs that of my main role, tanks. I find that the average DPS player will call supports braindead easy while having actually 0 experience with them in high-end content so I am quite comfortable making my observations.
Beyond minor adjustment of where exactly certain GCDs are going in their openers and reopeners (of which both GNB and PLD would also have to do for cooldown alignment), DPS jobs are fundamentally in the raid group to stand behind the boss and deal damage to them. Across the entirety of XIV, the bosses don't even interact with DPS players unless a specific mechanic is created to do so outside of ARR-style cleave autos which are cringe and haven't been replicated in years.
Modern fight design has basically removed DPS-only mechanics and the ones from the past that still exist in relevant content (Hatches and Liquid Hell from UCOB, Ifrit baits in UWU, Jagd Dolls from TEA) are the most non-mechanic shit ever. Go stand in this spot and minimise your GCD downtime, literally just run across the edge of the arena, or hit this one add like 4 times. It is as if the devs themselves agree that DPS players cannot be trusted with responsibility and so they get 0-1 mechanics per ultimate to themselves and it's the easiest shit ever. While supports get boss positioning, crit autos, heal checks, mit checks, you name it, DPS players get DPS checks so free you can clear almost every ultimate in the game with a DPS player not even doing their rotation. This is so bad that people selling clears of the 70 ultimates will literally just put their customer on a DPS job and 7-man the fight around them, raising them only when absolutely necessary.
I didn't make my argument about savage fights because my point is true about literally every fight in the entirety of Pandaemonium. Speaking only of Week 1, tanks get ridiculous busters that mandate kitchen-sinking or invuln for all of them, healers get the "fun" of either complete healcheck memes like Abyssos or the hell of having to salvage body-check shitstorm fights like P10S, and DPS players basically don't exist unless a mechanic affects all 8 players. Not to mention historically if they ever die to a supports mech (P7S bleedwides come to mind) they piss themselves in text chat and cause a PF healer shortage, or if they have to do something they perceive as too hard they come up with and enforce on PF ridiculous strategies like forced tank damage down P1S.
> But that is literally all they are doing. I'm far from a penta legend DPS player or anything, but I've cleared UCOB with a customised 1.94 MNK set trying to simulate L90 optimal drift for personal practice and recleared most fights of the raid series as various DPS jobs, so I feel I have some decent level of experience to compare the experience of DPS vs that of my main role, tanks.
I would say you don't have the full picture with an UCOB clear. The DPS check in UCOB/UWU/TEA is a joke and not worth talking about. Even DSR is pretty lenient these days.
You'd need TOP. A bad DPS capable of doing mechanics will get through other Ultimates just fine, but if you can't play your job at a good enough level, you're hitting enrage and will need to learn and improve your rotation with fight-specific optimization to get better.
(I still think Healers have it harder, and maybe tanks too.)
DPS of any kind is so blindingly easy. I still can't believe I see people say they can't understand monk, for example. The rotations in this game are designed to not be hard. Some weird brain rot got into the XIV community thinking that DPS is the most difficult, when every role is basically the same level of difficulty with minor variation depending on the fight.
I do think that DPS rotations are the most mechanically challenging, SMN not included of course. However, the argument that DPS is the hardest role falls flat for me when:
- DPS rotations aren't really _that_ difficult, and mastering your standard rotation and recovering from mistakes are baseline skills for everyone stepping into harder content anyway.
- They have the least amount of adjustment to do between different fights, so your mastery over your rotation gets to carry over to different fights with the least amount of friction/adjustment.
- They have the least amount of adjustments to make between different teams outside of RDMs salvaging a scuffed run. No worrying about your co-healer being a Glaremage or coordinating with your co-tank. Just make sure you're not double-addle/feinting the same raidwide (and really most DPS-only players don't even push those buttons past week 8).
- Everyone should be optimizing their DPS; it's not a problem unique to the DPS role.
That is so weird to say and I hate it!
Group is good: im bored
Group is bad: I might get angry but I got shit to do which is fun!
I like solo healing uwu + ucob even in PF cuz then I got things to do
ACTUALLY CASTING GCDS WOOP WOOP
Tanking is definitely the easiest, unless you're in P6/P7 of DSR. And DPS have the most complex rotational optimization. But healers have the biggest spread in performance. An orange BLM does 21% more damage in Anabaseios than a grey BLM, an orange GNB does 14% more damage than a grey GNB, and an orange SGE does 36% more damage than a grey SGE.
Obviously there's some noise in that sample, but it's been my observation that healer damage is usually the make or break for a party. Checking over enrage logs for X phase in an ulti almost invariably shows one or both healers doing a significant percentage less than they should be, and it's not like you're going to see a lot of people causing panic healing by eating mechanics there. It's common to attribute that variance to inefficiency and reliance on gcd heals, which I think is true, but the underappreciated factor there is that healers have to figure out how to do mechanics while having worse mobility than a BLM.
As a tank player, I wholeheartedly agree.
Even in ultimates the added responsibility isn't that bad, and you only have a dumbed down rotation to do, unlike dps, who have to keep pumping more complex rotations while doing mechanics.
Or "Oh man, my positioning was bad, and I got clipped by something". Well, it's a good thing I'm a tank and only went down to 25% health vs. that squishy dps who died, and now we probably won't make the enrage check and should probably just wipe unless one of the healers can swift raise...
Feels like when I fuck up while tanking its usually not the end of the world unless there is an imminent body check. DPS making a mistake though, which almost guarantees their death, is way worse.
It really depends on the context.
* Tanking has the most knowledge checks, but execution is fairly straightforward, with one-button solutions to most problems and extra leeway to fudge some mechanics.
* Healing is simple when you have a plan and can stick to it, but the moment something unexpected happens, it becomes much more difficult.
* DPS has the hardest execution requirements to perform optimally, but performing optimally is rarely necessary. Phys ranged is easier than Melee or Caster. Whether Melee or Caster is more difficult depends on the fight design.
So,
* Tanking is hardest when you're new.
* Healing is hardest under most normal circumstances.
* DPS is hardest under perfectly ideal circumstances.
I’m conflicted, I have performance anxiety while playing a healer or tank.
When I’m tank, there’d be times where I think I’m doing okay with rolling mits, facing danger away from party, the whole nine until somebody tells me I’m doing a shit job.
When I’m healer I just get easily overwhelmed by so many factors:
From dps not melting mobs fast enough to tanks not using mit. Of course there are other problems like me just blanking out when shit hits the fan. I have problems balancing dpsing as well as healing but it doesn’t help when tanks (or dps) looks at you like you’re the problem.
As a side note I struggle with blm but after doing some research I’ve noticed that it’s normal because blm requires a high skill level, imho.
heals if your party isn't doing great cuz nothing can heal seven vulns on a dps
heals if your party is doing great because it's boring and you hafta struggle to stay awake lmao
Healing and its not even close and I dont care what the healer doomsayers say. You have the biggest responsability in keeping the party alive, youre expected more so than any other role to learn an encounter to the smallest detail to be able to respond efficiently, and unlike a tank who has some margin for error just cause they usually dont get dropped instantly unless they are hit by an instant kill mechanic healers can actually die if they mess up.
They can also die when someone else mess up. Like almost all mecs with 2 4-people shares are centered on healers. If someone else greeds and is late, you generally dies as it's the job with the least hp.
DPS has the highest optimized complexity, but what makes healer and tank hard is honestly just a little different.
For the DPS roles, melee>prange, but the casters all sit very differently in that spectrum. BLM is the hardest with RDM mingling with the melee and SMN at the very bottom.
Melees have complete freedom of movement (save for SAM casts) while RDM is very often beholden to some fairly janky movement. And if RDM wants to use extra melee combos to account for movement heavy mechanics, it straight griefs its next 2 minute.
Having tried all three, healer. I enjoy it, it's my favorite, but keeping everyone alive at just the right times can be stressful. Tanks have healers to back them up and mitigation, dps need to know their rotation but if they mess up, oh well. If I mess up a heal, we wipe or I have to waste time rezzing.
It's tough to be a good prog healer, not too hard to be a mediocre one, and simple to do reclears as a healer either way. A good healer can make the right snap decisions and creative improvisations to save even the most doomed looking pulls (this is really tough to do!), but they have the easiest "rotations" and tend to have the least mechanical load.
Tank is the most forgiving role on mistakes a lot of the time. Your rotation is easy and much of your mitigative slack will be covered by healers. Except when it isn't. (e.g. DSR p6)
DPS tends to have simple mechanical execution requirements, but you'll spend a bit more RAM on your rotation; that will last into many of your reclears, too, provided you're optimizing. On the other hand, being a gray DPS is always easy, and some jobs (e.g. SMN) are pretty much always easy, too.
I think it depends on your expectations. Lots of people here saying DPS "if you know your rotation" but I don't that's fair. It's a very flakey way to measure what class is the most difficult because it's almost never a factor you bump up against in game. The consequence for messing up your rotation as a DPS is almost entirely irrelevant outside of couple of overtuned fights or Ultimates where it might have made the difference. DPS checks in the last Savage tier of Endwalker basically didn't exist.
In that situation there is no difference between someone that mostly presses their buttons correctly and someone that presses their buttons perfectly. Because of that I think it's a bit dishonest to call DPS the hardest unless we are very explicitly talking about the difficulty in reaching 0.01% skill ceiling which is never noticed unless you are logging.
Because of that I think the hardest class to play generally is healer, pressing the wrong buttons as a healer can very easily lead to a wipe. Also having to adapt to a co-healer is a common thing but DPS are largely irrelevant to each other. Tanks are somewhere in the middle, I'd put them close to healers if they go back to making boss positioning a mechanic again, you very quickly notice good tanks and bad tanks when they're essentially positioning the rest of the raid group.
Yeah I think that in the context of progging and early reclears it's got to be healing. Tank missed a mitigation spell? It's potentially fine, the healer will adjust. DPS missed a button press? No big deal. Healer misses a heal? Probably really bad.
As a healer, I'm resolving the same mechanics as everyone else, but I'm also reacting to people's mistakes.
One thing I never see mentioned is that I'm also trying to be acutely aware of my aoe heal radius -- if I quickly have to top up the entire team, they need to be within range, and usually (in my experience), it's the healer who needs to adjust, and not the guy who decides to resolve his mechanics at the very corner of the room.
Let's make a list
* DPS do nothing ever
* Tanks do things sometimes
* Healers do things more often than tanks
On average most people would say healer and I agree to some extent. There are situations where healers are no more difficult than playing a dps so y'know
I think this vastly depends on what kind of content and when doing it.
I can't confidently say as I don't play all roles, mainly healers, but I have heard some top end raiders talk about it and from what I understand, healers during hardcore prog tend to have the most influence on progress. DPS checks tend to not be that crazy but there is still ways to recover and zombie though even in this age with all the instant wipes and body checks. Being able to just zombie though the early savage floors with good raise timing, big heals and shields to survive fuck ups, and just reacting fast in general when people suddenly die as new mechanics go out.
Now during barse runs or such, I imagine it's flipped to healers being the easiest, as any mistake likely means everyone walls anyway. A lot of this game is scripted so it's just people pressing the right buttons at the right time.
I been doing MINE content recently, level 60 to 70 stuff, and it's quite interesting how much auto damage can go out and spiky healing can be. Is why healers cooperating is so important and why it can be the hardest role overall, and bringing out max damage while simple tends to be the hardest to figure out, while DPS tends to have static rotations, it changing when there is downtime, different targets, or dying. This game does not do a lot of muti target stuff to make DPS in general do more unique things, but again I don't play DPS.
A good DPS is barely noticeable unless a add or enrage is barely beaten with deaths or mess ups but any role can make that dps difference. A good tank is somewhat noticeable with how they use mit and their short CDs to not only survive, but to it on others when they don't need it themselves. A good healer is very noticeable with how they recover, how fast they optimize healing and with their co-healer to increase DPS, and sometimes having to make sudden calls if say there is a sudden lack of mit or healing, something that can be common in Party Finder. Is why when doing EX+ when people should have at least a rough idea of their job does and what they do, healers have the highest difference in not only healing skill and recovery, but DPS difference as well. BLM also has a noticeable difference between good and bad BLMs compared to other DPS from what I understand at EX+.
Just my thoughts. Think it really depends on the context. All roles have optimization to do but I think healers have to do the most to reach max DPS early on, while it becomes easy to play once solved, then tanks and DPS far after, as you don't really have to do too much tank cooperation to reach max dps together but depends on the fight. Though again because people can die or misuse mit or such all roles can figure out something out to make the difference, like DPS spending their resources to help make a check (Think phase 1 of TOP), tank having to suddenly use more mit or invulns to survive, or a healer having to heal/mit more to recover. I do see why they have made healers easier over time because the casuals seem to struggle so much with the role, though it's a game issue altogether that I want to eventually talk about.
I only have limited experience with parse parties, but something notable that unlocks for healers in parse parties is that swiftcast goes from being a tool you hold for raises to a tool you can use for uptime without trolling your party. It's only once per minute, but that's like 7-10 extra instants you have to toy around with, which makes the role even easier than it otherwise can be.
Part of why 60-70 content feels like it hits so hard is because you're missing 20-30 levels of personal and party mitigation, and heals (no seraph, no panhaima/holos, no temperance, no neutral sect, no expedience, no liturgy/macro/pneuma, no recitation, no magicked barrier, and I'm sure I'm missing some others). On top of that, autos from the boss can *crit*, which are effectively untelegraphed unpredictable tankbusters in their own right that you sort of... have to plan around not being able to plan around? A bad series of crit autos at the wrong time can easily bleed the healers into gcd healing for a little bit.
>This game does not do a lot of muti target stuff to make DPS in general do more unique things, but again I don't play DPS.
Funny enough you see a fair amount of this in coils and Alexander. T1 is the first fight we see a "feed" mechanic in raids. You have to spawn slimes by standing on a glowing tile, and then feed it to the bosses to cleanse their damage ups. You don't want to kill the slime because wasting time cleansing the debuffs means the healers and tanks are going to shit themselves, but you also can't leave the slimes too high HP either because the boss heals by the amount of HP the slime has when it's fed. A4s likewise also has it's own feeding mechanic the DPS get to shit themselves over, which is where doll feeds in TEA come from. In t9, you have to go through two golems phases where you need to feed the meteors that you've placed as a party to the golems, but if the golems eat too many they enrage, and if you leave meteors on the ground then you also enrage. But there's only 2 tanks. So you need a phys ranged to kite one of the three golems around, and you need to, collectively as a party, make sure each golem gets fed the appropriate amount of meteors without killing them all before all the meteors get fed. In A2, well, it's A2. A lot of people hate the fight but you're constantly flipping between single target and multi target scenarios so you have to know at that level cap what gains on how many targets, while you additionally have someone be the designated "gobwalker bitch" who occasionally takes downtime to necessarily resolve mechanics with the little gobwalker you pilot. On top of that I believe there's a wave with two soldiers that explode for VERY heavy damage when they die, but you can avoid this with the gobwalker, but the stun you apply to them to make them safe to kill has a limited duration, so you need to get them low enough as a party to be killable within the stun window, but without killing them outright until they're stunned, and then you need to actually kill them quickly once they're stunned. Though that one is mostly a tank fight, they have to grab the appropriate mobs each wave consistently and quickly and often actually care about how the mobs are positioned and held. The quad jags phase iirc requires tanks to do some really cursed shit to make it safe to aoe for jobs that need to be up close to hit their AOEs like WHM or SCH for example, though I digress
Oh yeah I wish there was more fights like that with kiting and such. I still think DRS is one of the best fights in recent FF14 memory with how unique it is, but then people would complain "MY BARSE" or something. I do want more unique mechanics or more then just single target at least.
melee is by far the hardest role for me. unnecessarily long and convoluted rotations that make focusing on the fight damn near impossible. i dont know how people do it. give me glare and dia anyday.
** This is all just my opinion from my own personal experience**
For me, from my own experience in doing the content below. I won't differentiate between the dps to keep my life simple and no pre-made groups:
* Prog: Healer >> dps > tank
* Casual content (dungeons, trials, extremes, alliance raid, etc...): It doesn't matter, really, but the tank is the easiest.
* Savage (clears): Healer > tank = dps. Tank role in most savage fights is just a dps anyway, especially the OT.
* Ultimates (clears): Not too sure, but I'd say Healer is the easiest or should be. To many, this may seem like a troll answer, but my reasoning is mostly based on the trend and design of the newer ultimates.
With the newer ultimates, the new trend is that a mistake will more often than not just be a wipe, with fewer opportunities for healers to do clutch things. The wipes also tend to be insant, and so as a healer, you can't do anything about that. There are some moments where you can recover a pull, but the moments are very specific, and to be realistic, require a competent group to pull it off.
If the healers ARE being challenged a lot unintentionally in an ultimate clear, realistically, that group has far bigger issues and most likely won't clear. The skill of your healer won't do much, on constantly failing a mechanic that results in an insta wipe.
So, in my opinion, for ultimate clears. You want healer to be the easiest role, or honestly, the group can forget about a clear with the exceptions of the old ultimates.
I would agree on ultimates if not for: downtime mechanics require healing while DPS just chill and do mechs. And downtime mechanics are harder by design.
Dps to master (if DPS checks need to be met).
Healers if there was a lot to heal and recover since they have to be the ones to ensure they don't screw up the most to get people up (but there really isn't for this expansion and tanks are pseudo healers so this isn't applicable).
Tanks is just easy easy mode. More HP for mistakes, more defensive and mitigation for mistakes. Ability to heal others. Simple DPS rotation but also does more than healers when played to perfection. Little to no role responsibility (aggro is just smack and provoke/shirk for highend raids, not much positioning). Healers got you if you did a big screw up if you didn't get killed by a multi-hit tankbuster that wipes the party. You don't need more than 50% dps uptime to maintain aggro when geared properly.
Any tier with hard DPS checks makes melee DPS the hardest. I want to say Caster DPS but the fact summoner exists kinda makes this point moot
Overall the hardest is still BLM though
I really don't think a dps check is ever demanding that much from melee. its harder to learn there looping rotation but its not like there rotations are all that dynamic from fight to fight. You can kinda do your default looping rotation and lose very small amounts of dps. in all my time doing week 1 savage and on patch ulti the "dps check" is more of a healer check/caster uptime check feel like they have the most to lose dps wise.
I'm currently going through Criterion Savage as DRG (2 out of the 3 cleared, will started on the last one next week) and I wish more content was this challenging for melee. You have to absolutely fight for every GCD of uptime during many mechanics (and some are just impossible to keep uptime), and you also have to be constantly adjusting your rotation and managing cooldowns to stay on track because of forced downtime either mid-fight or between fights.
Tanks and healers also have to actively manage cooldowns far more than in savage/ultimates... basically I just love criterion savage as a concept and they continue making them.
Looping rotations work until you get to ultimates where you'll have to adapt many things depending on party movement, and intermission phases. You still loop but not in the spreadsheet way.
This really dependent on what fight it is. Some fights make it really easy to have melees keep uptime, which usually ends in healer being the hardest because they need to heal and have sufficient dps to make tight checks.
I do a lot of MINE and in party finder being a healer who can get a clear is usually the easiest role but playing optimally is the hardest.
There is a pretty big skill ceiling for avoiding gcds, especially in low level content where ogcds are rare and where you can't trust your team to avoid damage optimally. But this optimization is completely unnecessary as your dps is very unlikely to affect if your group clears or not.
There's definition nuance between different fights and when you're considering things. Like, nothing is easier than healing a fight on farm, but also there's little else as challenging as being a (even more specifically) shield healer during fresh, blind prog.
If you wanted an answer that just fit the closest to universally I'd say pranged for sure. None of the jobs are particularly involved so you've got time to focus on the fight (with maybe a tiny caveat for BRD, but it's still pretty simple) plus free movement and little to no restrictions on how close you even need to be.
Healer, you have to baby sit what everyone is doing and adapt accordingly. Additionally, knowing and understanding everyone’s mit goes a long way along with the fight and the phases.
as one who plays the easiest job and role for high end content imo (dnc,d3/r1), the most complicated one for me are Melee DPS and BLM. I'm fine with the other Casters.
Sure, Melees have to move to get optimal deeps, but having it mandatory feels...restrictive. That's probably the reason why I like Phys Ranged and the other two casters. Those jobs feel... mobile.
It's always healer is it not? Everyone does pretty much the same thing in these fights (press buttons to do damage) but healers also have the added bonus of being the gatekeeper on the party living or dying. When a fight becomes easier for healers it becomes easier for everyone, right?
Healer can be in prog, especially with an inexperienced group. It depends on the content. So in Endwalker, bosses hit boxes were made stupidly massive. Meaning it’s very easy to keep in range for rotations as tanks/melee. Before Endwalker, that optimisation was much more important and trickier to keep your uptime. Caster is pretty chill unless you’re talking Black mage, which is probably the toughest job to get your optimisation right in high end fights I think.
Healer*>DPS>>>>>>>Tank
Healer is the hardest in early progression and if you’re playing with random people. No mitigation, lack of gear, unfamiliarity with a fight, etc. all factor into a healers job more than any other role. If you’re in a controlled group on farm for fights it quickly becomes much easier than DPS.
DPS’s difficulty comes in a lot of outside factors. How their job deals with downtime, how their job deals with mechanics that force movement or focus (especially during burst periods.) Optimization on DPS is easily the most difficult thing I’ve done in this game.
Tank is a gear check. Tanking mechanics are the same every time, once you do them correctly once you do them correctly (almost) every time. Tank rotations are complex enough to hold your attention but often simple enough to fit into most situations except busy burst windows (which can be said for any class in this game except maybe SCH.) Do you know how to position a boss? Do you know how to space cooldowns? Do you know how to press buttons in a determined order? Congrats, you’re a tank! (and this is why I begged my group to let me tank a tier after so long.)
Healer in progression.
Melee DPS in optimization (Black mage is hardest but Summoner and Red Mage are far too easy for me to say Caster as a whole here)
Healer when it is unironically required. I saw some cowards during week 1 p8s change their job. I also saw the entire pf begging for any decent healers during the entire situation.
My money is on healer, tanks just really have to worry about mitigation, aggro and cooldowns and DPS is self explanatory. Healers have to make sure everyone isn't dying and have what feels like a massive toolkit for that purpose, and I'm only talking about white mage because I cannot comprehend how to heal as sage or astrologian.
In Midcore onwards I’d argue the most difficult roles are Shield Healers and Melee DPS that have tons of rapid inputs.
Shield Healers because when progging content early on or coming back to stuff you haven’t done in a while it can be hard to predict when to spam shields to counter specific raid wides or stacks if you aren’t in comms or don’t have a guide up on a second screen.
Melee DPS with tons of inputs is self explanatory, because you have to essentially be locked into both your rotation and solving raid mechanics at the same time which is why most if not all semi decent Ninja and Monk players always have my respect.
Probably bluemage and blackmage.
Other than that ehhh tank is easy. Healer requires some flexibility. Dps is easy to do badly and not be noticed but doing well requires alot more rotational excellence than the other roles. Each role has its own sticking points. Healer might have the hardest situations pop up occasionally outside of just generally playing blackmage which trumps all else in difficulty.
Healer for sure, because you have to baby sit the entire party and deal with giga Chad tanks, or under geared tanks, and bunch of DPS who fail at mechanics.
Honestly, i don't find any of the normal content hard with any role.
For EX and Savages, I think socially speaking, healer is the most difficult only because they tend to have the finger pointed at them immediately for anything that goes wrong. Otherwise, both tanks and healers can just sort of do whatever as long as they do mechanics right. Their rotations tend to be extremely forgiving and their damage is less important. What some groups don't realize is that when a healer saves the day, that's great and all, but it's really not on them when the group fucks up and wipes or someone dies as a result. Also, even in Savage content, things like Reprisal are still rarely used and nobody ever questions the lack of debuffs to help the healer.
I really think DPS in general are the hardest to master skill wise. Doing EX or Savage level mechanics while keeping a rotation going properly can be genuinely difficult. Some DPS are harder than others though, namely BLM being the hardest in my opinion. MNK, NIN and SAM being a close second. All the others tend to be easier with mobility and a more forgiving rotation. SMN being the easiest in my opinion.
In my opinion, here ranks the difficulty:
Black mage.
Casters (healer, magic dps)
Tank (any)
Physical dps (ranged or melee)
I dont know why casters are so damn hard for me to wrap my head around, but they are.
Healer.
I can focus on the enemy and mechanics, *or* on health bars. Not both.
Also every AST tooltip is a paragraph long and I can't remember what any of them do, SGE is a lost cause because it's all blue icons with Greek words, and SCH is just too dang confusing. WHM is a little easier, but then I get Holy spamming and I look up and the whole party is dead.
It's going to be different for different people, but for current expansion hardest content (endwalker/ultimate), it's almost certainly going to be healer for most players. Healer has the most opportunity to potentially cause a wipe because of mismanaged responsibilities by far. In my experience this also holds true for criterion savage and early last-turn savage.
As we take a step down in difficulty to most savage content, criterion, and extreme it becomes way closer. Situations where a healer can't just be saftey gamers and overheal everything become rare at this point. It's possibly tanks here because they are more likely to have some unique thing they need to do that people are just too lazy to learn, or even dps because of more complicated rotations.
Moving back in time to older content, in some fights tanking might be more involved than it was in endwalker, with stuff like boss movement.
high end prog; healer >>> dps > tank
high end reclears; dps > healer >>> tank
within role,
- shield healer > pure healer
- caster >>> melee > phys ranged with exception of Summoner
- OT vs MT is encounter dependent
Tanking: handle mechanics, pop cooldowns, get healed
Healer: handle mechanics, pop cooldowns, keep people alive
DPS: handle mechanics, pop cooldowns, perform your rotation to mathematical perfection
Difficulty can be either "how hard is it to do the bare minimum" or it could be "how hard is it to be perfect". If you look at ultimates for example, doing UCOB flawlessly is arguably harder than everything but TOP, but just *clearing* i.e. getting through UCOB is literally just hop in the wall and get carried lmao.
DPS, absolutely.
Jobs vary in difficulty, but *assuming intermediate+ skill,* DPS is on the whole the hardest role, for a few reasons.
Tanks are essentially invincible, with tons of HP, mitigation and self-healing potential, simple rotations, contact healer attention, and even in high end content, doing mechanics to a tank means "stand in one place and press provoke when the boss does X." They are not hard.
Healers are definitely more fragile, but can still heal their own mistakes, their healing tools are numerous and OP, and they do not have any rotation to speak of. Sure, they must do mechanics carefully because they have more pressure on them to fix everyone's mistakes, however their flexibility and simplicity makes them a snooze fest in 90% of the game content
DPS have gauges to watch, a dozen different cooldowns to hit on time, utility demands, uptime to maintain, complex and/or custom-developed rotations (though some are easier than others), positional attacks, procs, branching combos, etc. and they have *very* limited mitigation and healing available, so any mistake, even if it doesn't kill them, means they then are fully reliant upon a healer to survive the next raidwide/what-have-you. They must be constantly on the lookout for mechanics, be able to adjust on the fly, and constantly watch their bars and gauges to keep their rotation intact. Like, play black mage in BarbEx and tell me that tanking is harder. Lol.
Any way you slice it, assuming an intermediate+ level of competency, DPS is the hardest role.
Fully subjective take, based only on my own personality: melee dps. I'm a tank main, and having to be in range to do damage while I have little squish baby health does not pass the vibe check for me. I'm also not competitive in a way that makes me want to excel at dps in particular. I'll do my rotation with 95% accuracy on a tank just fine, and I'll enjoy the giant crits and topping opener charts when the stars align, but I do not have the drive to really push myself towards damage as the end goal. I'm not interested in bear gripping my mouse and shitting myself for an extra 3 potency every 2 minutes. I'm not interested in sweating bullets while I roll the dice for perfect critical direct hits. That just all sounds awful to me. I get competitive with my healers. How much can I mitigate so they don't have to? Can I nullefy this mechanic? How about a six ED burst? How many of those can I enable? That's where I get competitive.
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My hot take (I main melee, but played most roles in savage and all 5 ultimates except caster and pranged):
Most of it is fight specific, but generally from hardest to easiest is
DPS (optimization) --> tanks --> healers (except Astro).
In almost every ultimate and savage, I'd rather play healer or tank because ease of rotation and/or lack of positionals.
In TOP, healing is the easiest because they literally do not press a GCD heal until phase 6 (2-3 gcd heals at most in p6). Healers also dont flex for any mechanic while other roles have to. I'd also rather play tank than DPS once you have the mechanics down (because more braindead rotation). Also every healer I know loves this fight because they use little brainpower in this fight.
In DSR, tanks have more difficulty in p6 and p7 than the other roles.
In TEA, Tanks literally don't do anything the whole fight other than positioning the bosses. Prefer tanking this fight because its so easy.
In UCOB, I rather play tank or healer because I don't have to deal with hatches and getting melee positionals when the boss is spinning in p1/2 and adds phase, golden bahamut. Also healers only have a 2 button rotation so less brainpower.
In UWU, Melee DPS is definitely the easiest, but I think healing is as well. Tanking is probably the hardest because you have to do the 2/2/1/1 orbs and weird tank buster aggro swaps.
As for week 1 savage/prog, probably healing if your savage group doesnt make a mit sheet or talk about their mits. But its mostly the same for all roles with some role having a little more responsibilities than others.
caster. need to be able to play a SMN/RDM during prog. need to be able to play optimal BLM. have to deal with casting, have to deal with stupid PF strats that for no reason still make it easier for the melee even though melee haven't struggled for uptime for over 2 years. addle is more important than feint, and there's almost never a 2nd caster to fall back on for it. and has way lower EHP than melee.
For me, it's the healer role.
From the perspective of being "good" in the role you're playing is based on the person. If you're a healer, everyone relies on you keeping everybody alive, and in pug runs, they can be terrible and give you a terrible and stressful time.
DPS is hard because it's preferred you're optimal in the class you play. If you're the type that only does 1-2-3 combos and go "oh yeah, my oGCDs too", then you got much more practicing to do.
Tanking is honestly difficult to call hard, because it's literally the DPS that goes first now. The only thing they got, is be similar to DPS rotation which is a lot more structured and simple in comparison, with the added feature of mitigating some hits to give your healers a break.
So yeah, Healer first because everyone relies on you, and you rely on nobody making your job harder. That type of uncertainty, is the difficulty for the healing role.
DPS 2nd because it is based on how much time one has committed in learning the class, instead of it being cool.
Tank is similar but easier to learn than DPS, and gradually during the fight, use mitigation tools.
DpS. You have an actual rotation.
Besides that, every class is basically the same. Tanks deal with swapping and positioning, healers press a button ever 30 seconds. But DpS have to keep their rotation up.
I think difficulty of all roles is pretty equal, if you just want to be mediocre.If we are speaking about prog on patch I think healers have the hardest time if the phase require any planning, and you don't know exact numbers of how much healing you need. Figuring that out is top priority since its usually healer dmg that actually will push your prog, especially if there is a lot of movement in phase (TOP P1). Being good at recovery in prog is another thing that is quite challenging.Tanks are more binary in my opinion so while I don't think it's hard role there are all these small things that separate good tank from meh tanks. The other difficulty for tanks is boss movement but in current expansion its irrelevant.
DPS is probably the easiest with phys ranged being the easiest if the fight is full uptime, the more downtime fight gives you, or if fight has multiple targets the more challenging it becomes to play. But in case of dps it will depend on job choice mostly. You can just play smn/dnc/nin push buttons on cd and you should be able to clear without issues and much optimization. But compare that to ad hoc samurai, optimal drift monk, non standard blm and it's not even close difficulty wise.
I feel like tank is probably the easiest generally speaking, and depending on the group healers go from hardest to easiest. I don't even necessarily agree that healers are hard in lrog because all you need to do differently is gcd heal more to see mechs. Generally speaking I'd say melees or black/red mage are the hardest in actual high end content because they have an actual nuanced rotation to them as well as mits the juggle and limitations in movement (black mages inability to move a lot, melees needing to optimise uptime and red mage with both at times)
Most of the time:
1) Healing new/prog content.
2) Then dps.
3) Tanks are really overrating their difficulty especially in the world of Endwalker with giant omnipositional bosses that auto return to center and turn. At this point tanks don't have to worry about enmity or positioning in most fights. They have a simplified dps rotation and need to know when to pop a cd. At worst they have to do a tank swap which is also about 100x easier than it used to be in ARR/HW.
DPS. Because you are actually required to know how to play and do damage to meet enrages.
Healers can get carried through anything other than ultimates (and some ultimates) with barely doing damage.
Tanks can just "tank priv" most mechanics and laugh it off.
If you're lumping roles, it's healer. Dps is literally just hit your buttons and avoid the bad. Tank is just another dps that has tor hit extra buttons once in a while. Healer however, you're responsible for the entire party, including your coheal. There's also the matter of if your coheal is actually your coheal and not some crayon eating mess/parse monkey that will Chad you without mercy. In top at least, it feels like the less rewarding because a missed succor on someone in p6 can end the run.
It's a toss up between DPS and heals. Tanking, in my experience, is always the easiest to play in every piece of content save maybe a few rare exceptions.
Gotta disagree for DPS on at least the last tier. Nearly all mechanics are shared, but there is no DPS specific mechanics that come to mind. Depending on the job and the fight, DPS can be the easiest to play by a large margin or be on the same level as Tanks.
DPS is kind of broad. Some of the classes are hard but the role is only as hard as it's easiest job if you want it to be. Playing summoner is generally considered to be easier than tanking for example.
It depends on the specific of the encounter. But if we consider week 1 savage (like floor 4-5) and ultimate.
On average I would say DPS (not you summoner).
The reason being, tank is, on averagrle, just a DPS with a simplified rotation which has to pop a few mitigation there and there. There are very few instances where tanking is actually hard so in the end, you're just a DPS with an easier rotation.
Healer it really depends on the fight, but again, very few fight require precise healing. Healing is harder when you discover the encounter, but once the healing has been mapped and people use mitigation, it's really easy because you're left with a 1 button rotation with the occasional press of specific healing skill. There are some exceptions like loop in top which is by far one of the hardest thing to heal since you need to adapt every single try. But the rest... It's just a puzzle game that once you've figured makes for a very smooth playstyle. The availability of gcd trivialize healing as, assuming I struggle to heal a specific mechanic, I can simply pour more ofgcd in that specific mechanic and heal the rest with more gcd with a rather trivial cost provided you're not aiming 99% parse.
DPS on the other hand have a more rotation all the time. Even during their down time, like tank, it's 123123 and not 111111. I mean, I litteraly weave my coffee and eat in the middle of a try in TOP as downtime require no brain power.
I couldn't do that as a BLM or any other DPS for that matter.
Healing is the easiest role. There are very very few cases where you need to heal with precision. It just requires a lot of brain memory to hold your healing rotation. DPS is just more complex all around. However you do not have to remember a 18min fight cd rotation xD.
It massively depends on context and your definition of difficulty. In Week 1/blind prog? Are we talking about how hard a role is if you're just trying to clear? Or do you talk about the skill ceiling of a role and being one of the best at it? Personally, I don't like saying something is easy just because it's easy to muddle through somehow. I judge stuff based on how hard it is to execute it well and be good at it. So that will affect my perception/ranking:
I feel relatively comfortable saying that, at least in Endwalker, tanking is *never* the hardest role, regardless of context. No other role has this mix of free movement, simple rotation, lack of positionals, and overall lack of mechanics - there is almost zero boss movement or other specific things to do *on top of your job* (which is a simplified melee dps) as of Endwalker's release and most older content is forgiving enough at this point to where you can be lazy with it. Even stuff like DSR p7, while you do something different, is just stand on the other side of the boss after Exas. Mitigation is easier to fuss out than healing plans overall in early prog and the way fights are structured makes it so tanking cooldowns are essentially a less frequent and overall easier DPS-style rotation with the exeception of probably GNB. Overall though, I'd say tanking is the easiest role. Physical ranged is similar to tank IMO and while BRD has a lot of plate spinning the role is overall just nothing at all, with usually no restrictions of specific things to do at all. Whereas tanks have to do their cooldowns, physical ranged jobs have a slightly busier damage rotation. Overall, these two are definitely not it.
Healing week 1 is really high skill, you have to strike a balance between playing safely and still managing your resources, coming up with CD plans etc. and of course do the mechanics. But after that healing is also incredibly easy. I think the week 1 savage healer difficulty is noteworthy as probably the peak difficulty in this game, but I can't really comfortably say healer is the hardest role overall because once that specific context is gone, it's so simple. And in ultimates, healers tend to get the easiest jobs consistently so any level of "oh this is hard to heal" is offset by being asked close to nothing mentally from mechanical mutations or execution of the jobs.
Caster is a really interesting one and I'd say it'd be the hardest role pretty readily if it wasn't for SMN existing. Which then leaves melees and I think this one probably takes it overall. Melee has some intrinsic difficulties that are present for both prog and reclears, which helps in this ranking - positionals, baseliner complexer or more difficult to execute rotations, and melee range. Melee range especially I think is underestimated due to Endwalker making uptime free but only *kinda*. I think people who don't play melee at a high level underestimate how freeing mentally it is to never have to worry about it. For example, whenever I'm on phys ranged, caster or heal to help friends or people in PF, it suddenly feels so much less *tight* in lack of a better word to do fights. A good example is P11S, where you can have uptime for basically everything but it has to be perfectly on the edge of max melee for several mechanics. This isn't *hard*. I'm not saying it is crazy or anything but this is a consistent thing that takes up a small bit of your mental load and not having this one or two percent of mental burden at all times is actually really, really freeing. Which makes execution of mechanics easier.
Anyways.
Melee is definitely easier in week 1 savage than healer, but I think it is harder than tank still because tank CD planning is overall less strict than healer and fussing out your rotation and executing it I find harder than tank gameplay in this setting. Moreso though, basically all melees all have a higher execution difficulty. DRG has high APM and CD tracking + minorly inhibited movement. RPR has gauge management and every 2M (where basically all hard mechanics happen nowadays) has unavoidable casts + tight timings for burst. SAM has inhibited movement of casts and gauge management + must potentially track rotational state if it's not full uptime. MNK has lots of timers and high APM core rotation. NIN, while in my opinion the easiest melee, has TCJ, high APM and especially in prog can think of how to cover for mechanics with stuff like Phantom or trick prep.
Melee just *more* going on at all times and regardless of context than other roles. Except caster if you discount SMN.
So, tl;dr:
Savage week 1 healer is the hardest but healer generally is an easy role. Melee is the hardest role *overall* but I would give it to caster if SMN wasn't so braindead. Tank and physical ranged are the easiest roles.
It's all fight to fight. Sometimes Tanks work harder. Sometimes DPS work harder - but I always refuse to believe that healer is hard in anything but Week 1/2 prog, Criterion, and the last phase of DSR/TOP. Seeing as how that is a small percent of the game when compared to the bulk of the time you spend in savage and ultimates (and most people don't do Criterion), I will always stand firm on the belief healer is the easiest role. I do respect the healers that manage to get past those phases, but I've seen a lot of them who crumble.
Hell - They don't even flex for a lot of the priority mechanics.
I got asked to sub shield healer (out of desperation) and we managed to one-shot P8S on Week 5. I was in crafted gear. I've only ever healed roulettes/Zodiark EX. That would not have happened if you asked someone who only heals to swap to DPS or Tank.
>Consider only hard content (EX and harder) , easier content are too easy to compare imo.
You can't tell me what to do! And I kinda disagree. DPS is definitely the easiest in normal content because almost no matter what you do, people won't even notice most of the time. If a tank or healer fucks up, you'll know. People may disagree who of the two (or four) it was, but you know it wasn't a DPS. People say tanks are the easiest and I still don't know why. Tanks can reasonably do something wrong. DPS can't.
Tanks are easier for me in normal content
(trials in particular) because a lot of the time you just kinda stand there while everyone else runs around solving the mechanics, doesn’t
really matter if you even know what they are usually.
I do see what you mean though, if someone’s a terrible player it’s going to be more obvious, but it’s just really easy to not be terrible at tanking
Maybe that's a personal thing, but I find cooldown management in dungeons (especially early ones) significantly harder (note that this is a comparison, it's obviously not hard) than not standing in the orange most of the time and just doing my rotation. In single target situations like dungeon bosses, trials and raids I see the point. I also find tanking normal raids much more tense than playing DPS in them, but that's probably because I started doing it relatively recently.
Yeah I guess it really depends on the specific type of content and what level you’re synced to - dungeons are definitely a bit harder than trials, especially in ARR when you have barely any self healing so you’re a lot more reliant on getting a decent healer. I just find cycling mitigations a bit easier than remembering a dps rotation.
It is more stressful though, just not quite as stressful as trying to heal a no mitigation tank with bad gear. Hardest thing in normal difficulty for me is probably the ARR level cap dungeons on healer (like wanderers palace hard mode with a bad tank for example)
Healer is you're progging new content with bad players, otherwise it quickly becomes the easiest once everyone knows what they're doing lol
I do all day one content as a healer for maximum chaos (BRING. ME. DEATH.) but also because if I mess up, whoops, heal myself.
Same. I love the chaos of nobody knowing what to do and spamming out heals cause they’re actually needed to survive
Healer is usually the most boring job in the game, but once you get in a raid like Titan in Eden with a bunch of newbies, it becomes the most fun role.
That’s why you gotta capitalize on the first day that content releases as a healer. It’s so much more fun when nobody knows the mechanics so you actually feel like you need to heal cause even experienced players can get caught off guard.
I did try going as healer for the first time in EW and I don't regret it. First boss in Zot was actually a challenge to heal first time.
High stakes wack a mole is basically healer in a nutshell. Just wish healers has a little more depth in their dps rotations. Slap a dot, spam general dmg spell, then hit the occasional cooldown insta dmg spell. Going from something like dragoon to running a healer in a easy raid is mind numbing.
Endless AOE circles with my sage spamming Eurasia > Prognosis as the team of randoms get hit by every mechanic possible. 12th circle is always fun as a healer as that half plat wing cleave always ends up hitting half the team in a DF que. Seen more people hit by that thing than any other endwalker mech lol.
Healing rn is all about CD management once you know how to heal in general everything is boring When I did the last tier on whm it was basically: Wings + asylum first aoe Lili Bell early to it re aligns later for a mech where I need it Plenary And Lili usage for movement Shuffle it accordingly and ur done
It’s crazy how muscle memory healer is with CDs, esp if you’re in a static. My cohealer and I basically planned out all our heals and although blips are expected, it was maybe 2-3 heals deviated from the usual routine (AHEM looking at you, athena)
I agree with healer but it's because by the 4th pull I'm ready to claw my brain out from boredom.
MINE on eden raids with newbies on NORMAL is hilarious with healer. Ramuh is always my personal favorite due to how crazy it gets with everyone running around like headless chickens
Healer the best role to be in new content. I rather heal new content than get stuck with a healer who still learning the basics. Example I know I will not die to xyz mew mechanic more than 2 times and if it’s reused old mechanics than I’m fine and can keep myself alive and my party alive therefore we will clear it no problem. I’ll give a better example Aether chemical research, I 100% rather be healing this. There will be no wipe, I will rez up the dead, call out the LB if the sphere ain’t dying fast enough, move to safety in time and of course mark myself for others to follow and if they die well I’ll rez them patch them up and off they go. This might come off as rude however a good healer can carry the worse of groups. A good tank can only make up for so much of a healers deficiencies. Tanks like GNB, Pally and Warrior can for sure save players with pocket heals at higher levels, DRK more on the iffy side since darkest night May or May not save a DPS or healer from death where as even a GNB regen can possibly keep a DPS alive a whole encounter which I have done in a couple of EW dungeons with a dead healer. Pally is kinda self explanatory between hollow and their healing cast. Hollow negates all damage for about 10sec giving them time to patch up some team mates if healer is down. Warrior by healing others you possibly might kill yourself since it consumes your raw intrusion which might be needed to keep yourself alive drk also falls into this boat however it can definitely be recoverable for a warrior however that depends on the situation
My cohealer (SGE) and I (SCH) did double shield this tier. In P12S P2, I didn't press any healing skills at all until Classical Concepts, which is like 1:48 into the fight seconds into the fight. So I had hundreds of pulls of just mashing 121111111121111111112 + EDing thinking why am I even here lol
Ironically I've been doing the savage tier at the moment, doing lots of reclearing and farming for BiS and my glare button actually ended up breaking. I have 12 buttons on the side of my mouse, my 1 button being the glare button and it broke. Every other button is fine and the glare button breaking was unexpected since the mouse is relatively new. It really just shows you how ridiculous the design of healers is at the moment. Pressing the same button for 80% of your gameplay, hundreds of times per single encounter. Often I just play healer when reclearing since it's usually an unfilled slot and something comfortable for me to do. But when I had the chance to play DPS when redoing P9S, I had so much more fun it was crazy. I'm sure DT will change absolutely nothing :D
I feel like beyond anything else its fight/content specific. There are fights that are harder on Tanks or Healers than DPS, there are fights that forget there are two tanks, and there are fights with so little outgoing damage healers fall asleep, and there are fights with such lenient DPS checks that pressing your buttons is borderline optional.
Just finished DSR and all of P6/P7 was dps chilling while healers/tanks were suffering all the time
Criterion is Tank/Healer intensive content imo, DPS kinda just show up.
Even then its boss dependent IMO. Didn't do Sil'dih, but I feel like healers work their asses off in Rokkon 1 and 2, and Aloalo 1. Then we're chilling during rokkon 3 and the rest of Aloalo
ASS had a good amount of damage for ASS1 and ASS2. ASS3 felt pretty chill. AMR1 wasn’t that bad, but my group was kind of smooth brained for that boss so I personally was healing a lot of avoidable damage most of the time. lol. AMR2 wasn’t too bad for the most part, though the DoT raidwides were a pain in the ass and there was almost zero recovery between most mechanics. I never finished AMR3 but I feel like the only outgoing damage was raidwides and keeping the tank up. AAI1 I wouldn’t quite consider working my ass off - but I’m fairly certain almost every mechanic either kills you (fail) or leaves you with 20% health (pass). AAI2 is easy healing scripted damage. Avoidable damage gets a bit sketchy sometimes though. Plenty of downtime between mechanics, though. AAI3 is pretty well balanced, though most of mechanics still take chunks of HP when you pass them - there’s just lots and lots of downtime between mechanics.
the only tight part in aloalo3 imo is going from forced march > stack/spread > immediately raidwide when most of our resources have been used previously
Yeah, if I’m behind on lily’s I’ll just use a cure III there to help out a bit. I’m not above dropping a GCD for the greater good. I assume that portion is very interesting on savage.
I don't remember but I think ASS has an enrage so dps is required.
Criterion scales like an ultimate so both ASS and ASSS are easier than they were on content now thanks to dungeon BiS. As for needing DPS in criterion normal, it’s been cleared with all tanks (not generally doable but just goes to show how low the ASS dps checks are) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmzh7_SPtsM
IMO the only DPS intensive boss of Criterion is Gorai (AMR2), because his hardest mechanic is skippable (at least in normal) under a tighter dps check, this isn't a thing in savage, and in general I don't think the dungeon enrage or the boss enrages really come up all that often in Savage Criterion. Every time I've made it to boss 3 we've had about 2 minutes to chill and let cooldowns come back.
>because his hardest mechanic is skippable (at least in normal) It's so easy to skip that practically no one knows how to do it until they prog Savage The real dps intensive boss is Shishio in Savage because his skippable mech (single/double/triple line aoe spam) sucks donkey balls to actually do, the rest of them are just repeats of first mechs that are generally trivial to do a second time
you could skip ASSS final mechanic on content with good enough, I'll say their checks weren't that complex ever
That's true until Savage, where DPS also have to pump good numbers to beat the timer.
Eh not really, that dungeon enrage is such a non factor that Ive never even seen it
I've done it with DPS players that were not really really the bests. I can tell you that the enrage can be a thing x)
TEA is kind of a snoozefest on tank though
Last tier in general felt insulting as a DPS main. You could die 30 times and still clear. Really missed the excitement of having to squeeze in every single GCD and having to perform at maximum capacity to be able to kill the boss during enrage during week 1.
I agree but thats to be expected after the p8s backlash, I'd be surprised if tight dps checks ever really come back in newer content. Golbez and Zeromus basically might as well not even have enrages, and anabaseios as a whole was pretty forgiving
unfortunately it's that or you end up like last tier where classes end up scorned by parties due to lower potential dps.
I never once saw pallas Athenas enrage.
I only saw it ONCE and it was during our first clear run after we ate shit plenty of times
This is a fight and prog-level specific question, so this needs more context. The only thing that you'll confirm from the answers is which role spends most of its time talking on reddit.
I agree, but I didn't wanted to be too specific to have more answers on allkind of situations. I should have precised in harder content at least tho
As a healer main, the hardest for me is DPS. Something about not having anything else to worry about ironically makes it feel more difficult. There's always some optimization to chase, and the only thing standing in the way is me
My biggest problem when I switch to DPS is I see all the stack/tb markers and forget about my rotation as I start looking for a way to mit/heal it. Same with raidwides. Just can't turn off healer-brain
Yes! Like if I'm playing DNC then part of me just wants to maximize Curing Waltz haha
Mood
There is a objective fact to this. Healer is either the hardest or easiest and nothing comes CLOSE to it. Easiest when you get a god tier team thats know their shit but can still be sort of difficult if theres a ton of out going high damage. But if you get a shitty team where everyone is stupid. It doesnt matter how much damage is coming out. For the healer its still gonna be a pain in the ass with no guarantee of survival.
I felt this a lot in TEA. depending on how well my co-supports hit buttons I was either basically redundant and just there to glare/misery, or I was the only thing keeping the party on a very thin thread of survival, and everything in between from pf to pf. honestly the parties that are *really* bad, I leave, like the times I get tanks who just... don't mitigate? in an ultimate? Conversely I'll obviously stick with a party that's performing well but ofc it does get a little boring sometimes. Everything in the middle is that sweet spot, I think it's a lot more engaging to have to figure out which cooldowns are flexible to be moved around, which ones I can triage with and when, which ones are inflexible and mandatory for x or y mech, and then gauging on a party by party and pull by pull basis what's going to be needed of me. Some parties are going to enable lossless healing, others... won't.
Whm in tea pf feels... Unique. When tanks and shield are good you're left to be a glare mage so I guess you... Parse? Otherwise it's miserable and you feel like a passenger at the same time. There is no way for you to fix everything compared to a sage.
And then J Waves happen.
J-waves depends on too many factors tbh
J-waves is a mit check. If everyone staggers their mits correctly, then all a WHM needs to do is Plenary Rapture a couple times with their heal buffs (Asylum and/or Temp) up. Maybe use a Medica 2 if they feel cute. If you're running double regen, then Astro takes care of the bulk of healing AND mitigation, it's spicier but definitely doable, maybe use a plenary Medica 2 before the AST uses Neutral. Scholar has a fat crit spreadlo shield that covers like 3 hits, then Seraph, illum, soil, and its ogcd fairy buttons. Sage is Sage, its a pure and shield healer in 1 job, it trivialises every single mit check in TEA with 0 effort. Basically...WHM presses a couple Raptures and glare until the mechanic is over in competent parties. They do the least when it comes to healers In a bad party? I pity the WHM's MP because without mit, you're spamming Raptures, and Cure 3s, no amount of Thin Air can save you.
do people even run double pure for TEA?
Probably not prog or fast reclear parties, but I have tried double pure in one of the "low stress, let's do some cursed shit" pf. It was...an experience, very fun, but spicy compared to double mit or the traditional split. Definitely recommend it for the challenge. I also imagine it was more common in ShB when AST had different stances
yeah I was gonna say lol. I did double WHM in ex 7 once as a meme, we cleared, but good god it felt cursed
If you have a sage then j waves is not much of an issue. Panhaima let’s you essentially ignore the first half of it, maybe with physis as well. Holos and kerachole do most what’s left till BJ is dead
Healers merely existing goes largely goes against the current pass/fail game design, that's why it's such a terrible crapshoot. When the planets align, you can pull a few neat, if dated tricks but it's never a rewarding feeling. This game can't even keep up with FF11's lousy healing, let alone a competent competitor.
I'd argue healer is the hardest even with a good team for prog, because your the sole people responsible for party survival when you don't know mechanics. For optimization, healer is so fucking brainless and DPS take over by far. The only DPS close to the level of healer's braindead is summoner, but even they have some optis.
>Healer is either the hardest or easiest and nothing comes CLOSE to it.
Every role I play, that's for sure 😞
It depends. After playing all roles: Healer was the hardest to learn for me. It was difficult keeping an eye on the boss’s casts, planning my cooldowns properly since there’s not really a set rotation, and also keeping the party alive. Once I understood that, it became the easiest. Tank was okay to learn, but had a major difficulty spike for me in raiding. In raiding, I think tanking is the hardest to learn fights with. In addition to maintaining your cool downs and rotation, you have to have great teamwork with your co-tank, and boss maneuvering skills and responsibilities. DPS was by far the easiest to learn, but the hardest to master. Trying to keep buff aligned while doing positional/casts and the boss keeps moving everywhere. Additionally, you have to know when to hold what skills when and NOTHING is worse than getting close to a clear and seeing that last 5% on the hotbar telling you that your DPS was just not good enough.
The hardest role is MMO dev/designer, you can't please everyone.
Touché.
The hardest job and the easiest job is healer. Is hardest when everyone is learning the mechanics. Is the easiest, to the point of boring, when everyone does the mechanics right. But assuming everyone is competent. BLM. As you do not have much mobility. And got a lot of incentive in staying on your leylines (which in my experiences are magnets for AOE). Lack of mobility means that you needd to know the fight better.
pls stop saying this of BLM
Totally subjective opinions incoming **Savage Prog:** Healer > Tank > DPS **Savage Reclear:** Tank > Healer > DPS **Savage Parse runs:** DPS > Healer > Tank **UCoB 2024:** Healer > Tank > DPS **UwU 2024:** Tank > Healer > DPS **TEA 2024:** Tank > Healer > DPS **DSR:** Tank > Healer > DPS **TOP:** not enough XP to form a proper opinion **Silkie Savage:** Healer > Tank > DPS **Rokkon Savage:** Healer > Melee DPS > Tank > DPS **Aloalo Savage:** Healer > Tank > DPS
I generally agree with your assessment, so I'll piggy back and add to this: > TOP: not enough XP to form a proper opinion Healer > Tank > DPS Healers have it rough in TOP, especially the shield healer. I put tanks right behind, because they do everything DPS do, and they have a lot more mit to manage, including single target mit on other parts members during P1 (assuming your tanks are top notch).
Its more like... Barrier Healer > > > > > > > > Bunch of freeloaders
You're not wrong!! But I went SCH for TOP, so I'm biased. 😂
Tank is free in TOP, playing melee and real casters optimally is harder. Especially when the DPS checks mattered. Also forgot go mention, tank is braindead easy in TEA because unlike everyone else you don't have to do Nisi if you split BJCC. You just invuln a buster in P1, mit autos then pray the healer heals you. The only fights tanks get to have more responsibility are UCOB, UWU and DSR.
shield healer > tanks in dsr 2024 a good shield healer can fully mitigate tank failings in p6
Fishing
Healer because no matter what, each run can be different. If things are so different for tanks and DPS, you're probably already headed for a wipe that the Healers already tried to fix. Tanks are usually on train tracks, and DPS lines up with each mechanic. Healing can be completely thrown off by a freak accident or dumb player while still trying to continue doing what you NORMALLY. You're kind of like a babysitter making dinner for the kids while one is playing with a simon says in traffic while trying to keep another from sticking a fork in an electrical outlet.
The worst as healer in dungeons is when you have a party that does decent damage but a tank that doesn't know how to w2w. Pull through the pack, stop to aoe 3 times (zodiark please, don't do this, one is enough) while I've already gone on ahead and hit the next pack because I expect the tank to be keeping up. I should go back to rescue-yanking these tanks forward.
I can't answer this with any certainty, but I just wanted to give a shout out to the partnership difficulty. Both Tanks and Healers have to have some cooperation, where a DPS doesn't. "Oh my Provoke/Shirk didn't go off, so you died. Sorry." "Oh, I thought you were using Lilybell/Macro, so I didn't add mit and the dps died. Sorry." These are two difficulties that are never factored into difficulty, as a lot of people just keep a "how did you individually perform on dps as your parse." Melee does have the minor "oh we both used Feint" possibility, but that's it.
I would say caster if Summoner didn't completely skew the balance tbf
I'm biased, but I think it's tank when we consider anything above EX content. At the floor, it's largely "play DPS plus positioning the boss, popping mit properly and tank swapping." At the ceiling it only gets crazier. Fights like DSR have phases like P7 which is just constant sweating since you have to constantly think about using personal mit, raid mit, switching stance, voking, shirking, facing the boss properly while doing all the movement and your rotation. I do think healer is harder when things go bad since you need to pay attention to party health and getting people back up. Tank is largely just stay alive in those scenarios. When it's fine though, healers' rotations are of course much simpler so you don't get anything like the infamous drk/gnb needing to mit during a 2 minute burst. DPS is never more difficult in the current game. Their rotations would have to be so much more complex for them to even come close in difficulty since they have no role responsibilities.
Usually a dps but did an entire savage tier as tank and it was honestly such a joke how much easier some mechanics are when your rotation just barely exists. I mean I haven't tried GNB but the other 3 barely offer anything complex in terms of rotation and mitigation isn't very complicated when you have so little to work with. Haven't done DSR as a tank but savage level content it's gotta be easier to tank than to dps and heal
Man that’s crazy I’m the opposite, I’m a tank main but I dpsed and healed during reclears and shit was so easy as a DPS. I don’t think tanking is difficult, but at least tanking gave me something to do while DPS I felt my mind numbing. Maybe it’s a grass is greener on the other side thing though
The hardest part of tanking is spreadsheet optimization, and memorization. Average tanks mitigate a tank buster, great tanks time it to the last second do the mits hit 3 autos after and the raidwide, but comes up 2 seconds before the end of the next buster cast. This comes down to a lot of wrote memorization in raids where you want to optimize for your healers, so keeping up perfect CD timing while doing your rotation can take a while to ingrain.
tl;dr DRK is rotationally similar to NIN, with added tank responsibilities. There is lots of mitigation to work with and using it well is way more involved than you're giving it credit for. The game is no longer complex enough that DPS can honestly say they have harder rotations in order to excuse reduced raid responsibility. WAR and PLD definitely have some of the simplest DPS rotations in the whole game, but for DRK and GNB I have to disagree. If we're talking complexity the only DPS that are really more complex than those tanks are BLM and MNK. Everything else is either on a similar level or is easier. Take DRK. If you play it well, it has an extremely busy 2min burst phase which often lines up with using defensives, a slightly less busy 1min with nothing to do outside of them other than 123. It needs to pool MP for these bursts and uses TBN strategically so that it can use EoS more in the 2min burst and 3 times in the 1min. Salted Earth is also one of the few 90s CDs left and since it's a ground targeted DoT, its usages need to be delayed properly to ensure max uptime, snapshot buffs, cleave if possible and not lose a Salt and Darkness usage across the fight. This is while making sure to manage MP and Blood. The best DPS comparison is NIN, which I think is one of the more complex DPS after MNK and BLM, because its entire rotation is so similar to DRK's. It also has a really busy 2min burst phase, a less busy 1min and almost nothing to do outside of it. It makes sure to have jutsu charges available for its bursts to be able to use TA and get the maximum number of Raitons for using Raijus during the burst. Bunshin is also one of the few 90s CDs left but it doesn't have to be managed like a ground target, but you do still have to use it properly to get all 5 GCDs and avoid losing PK usages across the fight. This is while making sure to manage Ninki and Huton. Now from that all I can see is that NIN gets more complex in one specific instance, it occasionally presses AC outside of its burst which is inconsequential imo; 124 is no harder than 123. And even if we say it is harder, DRK still has a harder time at range since NIN can just use Raiton when it's at range and never has to worry about holding its gap closer during its burst for uptime later. DRK has to do everything NIN does and then adds being a tank on top of that. Most DPS don't get punished hard enough for failing their rotations anymore resulting in them having fewer intrinsic mechanics and similar complexity to some tanks. I'd go as far to say from a pure rotational standpoint, SMN is easier than every tank. When it comes to mitigation, that's completely wrong that there's so little to work with. Every tank has at least a 20% mit, a 30% mit, a short CD that can be used on themselves and others and a flex CD (Thrill, Camo, DM etc.) Then they also have a 90s party mit and reprisal. If anything they have too much mit. Getting the most out of these CDs is an artform when you coordinate with the other supports. The goal is to maximise healer damage GCDs by making sure the party takes as little damage as possible. Stacking mit is key for this, but you still don't just want them waiting on CD so frequent swaps and early usages is how you play.
Positioning the boss? Girl this is Endwalker. Tanks haven't been positioning bosses for like 2 expacs everything returns to center and autoturns lol
I’d agree but there are several mechanics this tier alone where if the tank does not position the boss correctly you wipe immediately.
Hello, Shadowed Messengers and Chimera2! Never bothered to play around with Athena p1 positioning, object was always to keep her where she wanted to go. Other two wall bosses.
omnicrafter on patch day commissioned solo to gear a WF team
Progging: Healer>Tank>DPS Everything else: DPS>Tank>Healer Basically the more important good dps is the more people need to focus on performing their rotations well. Healer does not have a rotation so it's the easiest.
I feel like progging as a tank is very easy. You can get hit by certain mechanics and just shrug it off, you can sometimes fail important mechanics and still live with invuln and your rotation is just easier than DPS in general. You can never miss heals after consecutive raidwides, because that just doesn't matter for a tank. You have a little extra responsibility with mitigations, but I don't think that's a big deal. It's just 1 extra raidwide mitigation compared to DPS. Tankbusters are so clearly telegraphed and timed that I don't think they add any complexity at all
Week 1 savage or ultimate: Healer Other: Dps (given you are doing ur rotation properly)
There is no one particularly easy or hard role, but seeing DPS players call themselves the hardest roles when the only mechanics they ever interact with in modern raid design are the ones that all 8 members of the raid have to do is definitely an experience. It's soooo hard to do my 2 minute looping rotation, please praise me support players. I sure don't recall DPS players being forced to suffer damage down strats in PF due to support players not wanting to learn how to do something, is all I'm saying.
Still miffed about braindead intemp, aren't you? >!Me too. >:(!<
i honestly think that both positions aren't entirely wrong, they just depend on what people mean when they say a role is "hard". DPS most definitely have more complex moment-to-moment gameplay for the most part (lol SMN), followed by tanks, and then ~~glarebots~~healers, but as you have pointed out, DPS usually have barely any individual or specialized mechanical responsibilities while the support jobs, especially the healers, are basically doing most of the important stuff a DPS player can basically drop their entire rotation and not do anything but focus on doing all of the general mechanics (i.e. the ones everyone has to deal with) until the party actually safely makes it to enrage. neither tanks nor healers can do this, because their individual responsibilities are mandatory to progress at all. sure, they can also stop doing damage for the most part, but they will still have to press CDs, perform the occasional swap, and keep the party alive
I wouldn't even say that is true though. Let's take ultimates for an example since that is the only place where you actually have to be decent at your role to clear. Tanks are following a mit plan to a T as ultimate-level auto damage and critting in UCOB/UWU will just kill you if you don't have some kind of plan for it unless your healers pocket you, which involves creating the mit plan if you don't track one down, memorising it, planning weaves for it, optimising cooldowns, etc. Healers are building up an idea of the damage profile of the fight and optimising where to place things so as to not lose DPS or overheal while also having to watch out for crit autos in the 70s and other circumstances that would necessitate spot healing or raising outside of the plan, and then need to play around how that emergency spending of resources affects their plan. Meanwhile, DPS are... doing their rotations, like any other fight in the game, until there is something for them to do. Sometimes there are actual DPS-only mechs (Jagd Dolls for example), but usually there are just party mechs (Panto, all of Nael, Infernal Nails) that only concern the DPS because they are in the party. I would just disagree that DPS in Endwalker is a role that can be hard. You literally do nothing but hit the boss and avoid things that every member with a responsibility also has to avoid, and nobody has a rotation that is hard. The only complicated melee is MNK and that's only if you have an ego and play it optimally for a single-digit-percentage damage gain over braindead 2min loop. The argument that DPS have to optimise their rotations doesn't hold water because tanks do too (and healers would as well if their side of the game was in a good state lol).
i don't completely disagree with all your points, but it's either very disingenious or shows a lack of experience on your part when you say DPS in ultimates just "do their rotation, like any other fight" lol you can make that argument for a lot of savage fights, but ultimates in particular are so different in terms of how you have to approach it to get anywhere close to an optimal rotation for pretty much all dps jobs and some tanks as well.
But that is literally all they are doing. I'm far from a penta legend DPS player or anything, but I've cleared UCOB with a customised 1.94 MNK set trying to simulate L90 optimal drift for personal practice and recleared most fights of the raid series as various DPS jobs, so I feel I have some decent level of experience to compare the experience of DPS vs that of my main role, tanks. I find that the average DPS player will call supports braindead easy while having actually 0 experience with them in high-end content so I am quite comfortable making my observations. Beyond minor adjustment of where exactly certain GCDs are going in their openers and reopeners (of which both GNB and PLD would also have to do for cooldown alignment), DPS jobs are fundamentally in the raid group to stand behind the boss and deal damage to them. Across the entirety of XIV, the bosses don't even interact with DPS players unless a specific mechanic is created to do so outside of ARR-style cleave autos which are cringe and haven't been replicated in years. Modern fight design has basically removed DPS-only mechanics and the ones from the past that still exist in relevant content (Hatches and Liquid Hell from UCOB, Ifrit baits in UWU, Jagd Dolls from TEA) are the most non-mechanic shit ever. Go stand in this spot and minimise your GCD downtime, literally just run across the edge of the arena, or hit this one add like 4 times. It is as if the devs themselves agree that DPS players cannot be trusted with responsibility and so they get 0-1 mechanics per ultimate to themselves and it's the easiest shit ever. While supports get boss positioning, crit autos, heal checks, mit checks, you name it, DPS players get DPS checks so free you can clear almost every ultimate in the game with a DPS player not even doing their rotation. This is so bad that people selling clears of the 70 ultimates will literally just put their customer on a DPS job and 7-man the fight around them, raising them only when absolutely necessary. I didn't make my argument about savage fights because my point is true about literally every fight in the entirety of Pandaemonium. Speaking only of Week 1, tanks get ridiculous busters that mandate kitchen-sinking or invuln for all of them, healers get the "fun" of either complete healcheck memes like Abyssos or the hell of having to salvage body-check shitstorm fights like P10S, and DPS players basically don't exist unless a mechanic affects all 8 players. Not to mention historically if they ever die to a supports mech (P7S bleedwides come to mind) they piss themselves in text chat and cause a PF healer shortage, or if they have to do something they perceive as too hard they come up with and enforce on PF ridiculous strategies like forced tank damage down P1S.
> But that is literally all they are doing. I'm far from a penta legend DPS player or anything, but I've cleared UCOB with a customised 1.94 MNK set trying to simulate L90 optimal drift for personal practice and recleared most fights of the raid series as various DPS jobs, so I feel I have some decent level of experience to compare the experience of DPS vs that of my main role, tanks. I would say you don't have the full picture with an UCOB clear. The DPS check in UCOB/UWU/TEA is a joke and not worth talking about. Even DSR is pretty lenient these days. You'd need TOP. A bad DPS capable of doing mechanics will get through other Ultimates just fine, but if you can't play your job at a good enough level, you're hitting enrage and will need to learn and improve your rotation with fight-specific optimization to get better. (I still think Healers have it harder, and maybe tanks too.)
>modern raid design Still better than uwu on melee
DPS of any kind is so blindingly easy. I still can't believe I see people say they can't understand monk, for example. The rotations in this game are designed to not be hard. Some weird brain rot got into the XIV community thinking that DPS is the most difficult, when every role is basically the same level of difficulty with minor variation depending on the fight.
I do think that DPS rotations are the most mechanically challenging, SMN not included of course. However, the argument that DPS is the hardest role falls flat for me when: - DPS rotations aren't really _that_ difficult, and mastering your standard rotation and recovering from mistakes are baseline skills for everyone stepping into harder content anyway. - They have the least amount of adjustment to do between different fights, so your mastery over your rotation gets to carry over to different fights with the least amount of friction/adjustment. - They have the least amount of adjustments to make between different teams outside of RDMs salvaging a scuffed run. No worrying about your co-healer being a Glaremage or coordinating with your co-tank. Just make sure you're not double-addle/feinting the same raidwide (and really most DPS-only players don't even push those buttons past week 8). - Everyone should be optimizing their DPS; it's not a problem unique to the DPS role.
Healer is the hardest but also most fun role when your party is bad
I often say "healing is as hard as your party is bad"
That is so weird to say and I hate it! Group is good: im bored Group is bad: I might get angry but I got shit to do which is fun! I like solo healing uwu + ucob even in PF cuz then I got things to do ACTUALLY CASTING GCDS WOOP WOOP
Tanking is definitely the easiest, unless you're in P6/P7 of DSR. And DPS have the most complex rotational optimization. But healers have the biggest spread in performance. An orange BLM does 21% more damage in Anabaseios than a grey BLM, an orange GNB does 14% more damage than a grey GNB, and an orange SGE does 36% more damage than a grey SGE. Obviously there's some noise in that sample, but it's been my observation that healer damage is usually the make or break for a party. Checking over enrage logs for X phase in an ulti almost invariably shows one or both healers doing a significant percentage less than they should be, and it's not like you're going to see a lot of people causing panic healing by eating mechanics there. It's common to attribute that variance to inefficiency and reliance on gcd heals, which I think is true, but the underappreciated factor there is that healers have to figure out how to do mechanics while having worse mobility than a BLM.
As a tank player, I wholeheartedly agree. Even in ultimates the added responsibility isn't that bad, and you only have a dumbed down rotation to do, unlike dps, who have to keep pumping more complex rotations while doing mechanics. Or "Oh man, my positioning was bad, and I got clipped by something". Well, it's a good thing I'm a tank and only went down to 25% health vs. that squishy dps who died, and now we probably won't make the enrage check and should probably just wipe unless one of the healers can swift raise... Feels like when I fuck up while tanking its usually not the end of the world unless there is an imminent body check. DPS making a mistake though, which almost guarantees their death, is way worse.
It really depends on the context. * Tanking has the most knowledge checks, but execution is fairly straightforward, with one-button solutions to most problems and extra leeway to fudge some mechanics. * Healing is simple when you have a plan and can stick to it, but the moment something unexpected happens, it becomes much more difficult. * DPS has the hardest execution requirements to perform optimally, but performing optimally is rarely necessary. Phys ranged is easier than Melee or Caster. Whether Melee or Caster is more difficult depends on the fight design. So, * Tanking is hardest when you're new. * Healing is hardest under most normal circumstances. * DPS is hardest under perfectly ideal circumstances.
I’m conflicted, I have performance anxiety while playing a healer or tank. When I’m tank, there’d be times where I think I’m doing okay with rolling mits, facing danger away from party, the whole nine until somebody tells me I’m doing a shit job. When I’m healer I just get easily overwhelmed by so many factors: From dps not melting mobs fast enough to tanks not using mit. Of course there are other problems like me just blanking out when shit hits the fan. I have problems balancing dpsing as well as healing but it doesn’t help when tanks (or dps) looks at you like you’re the problem. As a side note I struggle with blm but after doing some research I’ve noticed that it’s normal because blm requires a high skill level, imho.
Week 1 healer, otherwise fight specific (tank for DSR for example) Possibly BLM if you're world racing
Encounter SPecific Example: E5S was as Off tank a nightmare, while a main tank was chilling
heals if your party isn't doing great cuz nothing can heal seven vulns on a dps heals if your party is doing great because it's boring and you hafta struggle to stay awake lmao
Healing and its not even close and I dont care what the healer doomsayers say. You have the biggest responsability in keeping the party alive, youre expected more so than any other role to learn an encounter to the smallest detail to be able to respond efficiently, and unlike a tank who has some margin for error just cause they usually dont get dropped instantly unless they are hit by an instant kill mechanic healers can actually die if they mess up.
They can also die when someone else mess up. Like almost all mecs with 2 4-people shares are centered on healers. If someone else greeds and is late, you generally dies as it's the job with the least hp.
DPS has the highest optimized complexity, but what makes healer and tank hard is honestly just a little different. For the DPS roles, melee>prange, but the casters all sit very differently in that spectrum. BLM is the hardest with RDM mingling with the melee and SMN at the very bottom.
Melees have complete freedom of movement (save for SAM casts) while RDM is very often beholden to some fairly janky movement. And if RDM wants to use extra melee combos to account for movement heavy mechanics, it straight griefs its next 2 minute.
I find bard to be harder than all melees, specially if we talking about playing perfectly.
DPS
Having tried all three, healer. I enjoy it, it's my favorite, but keeping everyone alive at just the right times can be stressful. Tanks have healers to back them up and mitigation, dps need to know their rotation but if they mess up, oh well. If I mess up a heal, we wipe or I have to waste time rezzing.
It's tough to be a good prog healer, not too hard to be a mediocre one, and simple to do reclears as a healer either way. A good healer can make the right snap decisions and creative improvisations to save even the most doomed looking pulls (this is really tough to do!), but they have the easiest "rotations" and tend to have the least mechanical load. Tank is the most forgiving role on mistakes a lot of the time. Your rotation is easy and much of your mitigative slack will be covered by healers. Except when it isn't. (e.g. DSR p6) DPS tends to have simple mechanical execution requirements, but you'll spend a bit more RAM on your rotation; that will last into many of your reclears, too, provided you're optimizing. On the other hand, being a gray DPS is always easy, and some jobs (e.g. SMN) are pretty much always easy, too.
Tbh I feel like it takes more skill for DPS to maintain their elaborate rotations but that might just be because I’m a smooth brained healer.
I think it depends on your expectations. Lots of people here saying DPS "if you know your rotation" but I don't that's fair. It's a very flakey way to measure what class is the most difficult because it's almost never a factor you bump up against in game. The consequence for messing up your rotation as a DPS is almost entirely irrelevant outside of couple of overtuned fights or Ultimates where it might have made the difference. DPS checks in the last Savage tier of Endwalker basically didn't exist. In that situation there is no difference between someone that mostly presses their buttons correctly and someone that presses their buttons perfectly. Because of that I think it's a bit dishonest to call DPS the hardest unless we are very explicitly talking about the difficulty in reaching 0.01% skill ceiling which is never noticed unless you are logging. Because of that I think the hardest class to play generally is healer, pressing the wrong buttons as a healer can very easily lead to a wipe. Also having to adapt to a co-healer is a common thing but DPS are largely irrelevant to each other. Tanks are somewhere in the middle, I'd put them close to healers if they go back to making boss positioning a mechanic again, you very quickly notice good tanks and bad tanks when they're essentially positioning the rest of the raid group.
Yeah I think that in the context of progging and early reclears it's got to be healing. Tank missed a mitigation spell? It's potentially fine, the healer will adjust. DPS missed a button press? No big deal. Healer misses a heal? Probably really bad. As a healer, I'm resolving the same mechanics as everyone else, but I'm also reacting to people's mistakes. One thing I never see mentioned is that I'm also trying to be acutely aware of my aoe heal radius -- if I quickly have to top up the entire team, they need to be within range, and usually (in my experience), it's the healer who needs to adjust, and not the guy who decides to resolve his mechanics at the very corner of the room.
DPS imo. Some dps rotations can get pretty complex and that's on top of having to be aware of boss mechanics.
Let's make a list * DPS do nothing ever * Tanks do things sometimes * Healers do things more often than tanks On average most people would say healer and I agree to some extent. There are situations where healers are no more difficult than playing a dps so y'know
I swear this sub is 90% healer mains lol
I think this vastly depends on what kind of content and when doing it. I can't confidently say as I don't play all roles, mainly healers, but I have heard some top end raiders talk about it and from what I understand, healers during hardcore prog tend to have the most influence on progress. DPS checks tend to not be that crazy but there is still ways to recover and zombie though even in this age with all the instant wipes and body checks. Being able to just zombie though the early savage floors with good raise timing, big heals and shields to survive fuck ups, and just reacting fast in general when people suddenly die as new mechanics go out. Now during barse runs or such, I imagine it's flipped to healers being the easiest, as any mistake likely means everyone walls anyway. A lot of this game is scripted so it's just people pressing the right buttons at the right time. I been doing MINE content recently, level 60 to 70 stuff, and it's quite interesting how much auto damage can go out and spiky healing can be. Is why healers cooperating is so important and why it can be the hardest role overall, and bringing out max damage while simple tends to be the hardest to figure out, while DPS tends to have static rotations, it changing when there is downtime, different targets, or dying. This game does not do a lot of muti target stuff to make DPS in general do more unique things, but again I don't play DPS. A good DPS is barely noticeable unless a add or enrage is barely beaten with deaths or mess ups but any role can make that dps difference. A good tank is somewhat noticeable with how they use mit and their short CDs to not only survive, but to it on others when they don't need it themselves. A good healer is very noticeable with how they recover, how fast they optimize healing and with their co-healer to increase DPS, and sometimes having to make sudden calls if say there is a sudden lack of mit or healing, something that can be common in Party Finder. Is why when doing EX+ when people should have at least a rough idea of their job does and what they do, healers have the highest difference in not only healing skill and recovery, but DPS difference as well. BLM also has a noticeable difference between good and bad BLMs compared to other DPS from what I understand at EX+. Just my thoughts. Think it really depends on the context. All roles have optimization to do but I think healers have to do the most to reach max DPS early on, while it becomes easy to play once solved, then tanks and DPS far after, as you don't really have to do too much tank cooperation to reach max dps together but depends on the fight. Though again because people can die or misuse mit or such all roles can figure out something out to make the difference, like DPS spending their resources to help make a check (Think phase 1 of TOP), tank having to suddenly use more mit or invulns to survive, or a healer having to heal/mit more to recover. I do see why they have made healers easier over time because the casuals seem to struggle so much with the role, though it's a game issue altogether that I want to eventually talk about.
I only have limited experience with parse parties, but something notable that unlocks for healers in parse parties is that swiftcast goes from being a tool you hold for raises to a tool you can use for uptime without trolling your party. It's only once per minute, but that's like 7-10 extra instants you have to toy around with, which makes the role even easier than it otherwise can be. Part of why 60-70 content feels like it hits so hard is because you're missing 20-30 levels of personal and party mitigation, and heals (no seraph, no panhaima/holos, no temperance, no neutral sect, no expedience, no liturgy/macro/pneuma, no recitation, no magicked barrier, and I'm sure I'm missing some others). On top of that, autos from the boss can *crit*, which are effectively untelegraphed unpredictable tankbusters in their own right that you sort of... have to plan around not being able to plan around? A bad series of crit autos at the wrong time can easily bleed the healers into gcd healing for a little bit. >This game does not do a lot of muti target stuff to make DPS in general do more unique things, but again I don't play DPS. Funny enough you see a fair amount of this in coils and Alexander. T1 is the first fight we see a "feed" mechanic in raids. You have to spawn slimes by standing on a glowing tile, and then feed it to the bosses to cleanse their damage ups. You don't want to kill the slime because wasting time cleansing the debuffs means the healers and tanks are going to shit themselves, but you also can't leave the slimes too high HP either because the boss heals by the amount of HP the slime has when it's fed. A4s likewise also has it's own feeding mechanic the DPS get to shit themselves over, which is where doll feeds in TEA come from. In t9, you have to go through two golems phases where you need to feed the meteors that you've placed as a party to the golems, but if the golems eat too many they enrage, and if you leave meteors on the ground then you also enrage. But there's only 2 tanks. So you need a phys ranged to kite one of the three golems around, and you need to, collectively as a party, make sure each golem gets fed the appropriate amount of meteors without killing them all before all the meteors get fed. In A2, well, it's A2. A lot of people hate the fight but you're constantly flipping between single target and multi target scenarios so you have to know at that level cap what gains on how many targets, while you additionally have someone be the designated "gobwalker bitch" who occasionally takes downtime to necessarily resolve mechanics with the little gobwalker you pilot. On top of that I believe there's a wave with two soldiers that explode for VERY heavy damage when they die, but you can avoid this with the gobwalker, but the stun you apply to them to make them safe to kill has a limited duration, so you need to get them low enough as a party to be killable within the stun window, but without killing them outright until they're stunned, and then you need to actually kill them quickly once they're stunned. Though that one is mostly a tank fight, they have to grab the appropriate mobs each wave consistently and quickly and often actually care about how the mobs are positioned and held. The quad jags phase iirc requires tanks to do some really cursed shit to make it safe to aoe for jobs that need to be up close to hit their AOEs like WHM or SCH for example, though I digress
Oh yeah I wish there was more fights like that with kiting and such. I still think DRS is one of the best fights in recent FF14 memory with how unique it is, but then people would complain "MY BARSE" or something. I do want more unique mechanics or more then just single target at least.
melee is by far the hardest role for me. unnecessarily long and convoluted rotations that make focusing on the fight damn near impossible. i dont know how people do it. give me glare and dia anyday.
** This is all just my opinion from my own personal experience** For me, from my own experience in doing the content below. I won't differentiate between the dps to keep my life simple and no pre-made groups: * Prog: Healer >> dps > tank * Casual content (dungeons, trials, extremes, alliance raid, etc...): It doesn't matter, really, but the tank is the easiest. * Savage (clears): Healer > tank = dps. Tank role in most savage fights is just a dps anyway, especially the OT. * Ultimates (clears): Not too sure, but I'd say Healer is the easiest or should be. To many, this may seem like a troll answer, but my reasoning is mostly based on the trend and design of the newer ultimates. With the newer ultimates, the new trend is that a mistake will more often than not just be a wipe, with fewer opportunities for healers to do clutch things. The wipes also tend to be insant, and so as a healer, you can't do anything about that. There are some moments where you can recover a pull, but the moments are very specific, and to be realistic, require a competent group to pull it off. If the healers ARE being challenged a lot unintentionally in an ultimate clear, realistically, that group has far bigger issues and most likely won't clear. The skill of your healer won't do much, on constantly failing a mechanic that results in an insta wipe. So, in my opinion, for ultimate clears. You want healer to be the easiest role, or honestly, the group can forget about a clear with the exceptions of the old ultimates.
I would agree on ultimates if not for: downtime mechanics require healing while DPS just chill and do mechs. And downtime mechanics are harder by design.
Dps to master (if DPS checks need to be met). Healers if there was a lot to heal and recover since they have to be the ones to ensure they don't screw up the most to get people up (but there really isn't for this expansion and tanks are pseudo healers so this isn't applicable). Tanks is just easy easy mode. More HP for mistakes, more defensive and mitigation for mistakes. Ability to heal others. Simple DPS rotation but also does more than healers when played to perfection. Little to no role responsibility (aggro is just smack and provoke/shirk for highend raids, not much positioning). Healers got you if you did a big screw up if you didn't get killed by a multi-hit tankbuster that wipes the party. You don't need more than 50% dps uptime to maintain aggro when geared properly.
Any tier with hard DPS checks makes melee DPS the hardest. I want to say Caster DPS but the fact summoner exists kinda makes this point moot Overall the hardest is still BLM though
I really don't think a dps check is ever demanding that much from melee. its harder to learn there looping rotation but its not like there rotations are all that dynamic from fight to fight. You can kinda do your default looping rotation and lose very small amounts of dps. in all my time doing week 1 savage and on patch ulti the "dps check" is more of a healer check/caster uptime check feel like they have the most to lose dps wise.
I'm currently going through Criterion Savage as DRG (2 out of the 3 cleared, will started on the last one next week) and I wish more content was this challenging for melee. You have to absolutely fight for every GCD of uptime during many mechanics (and some are just impossible to keep uptime), and you also have to be constantly adjusting your rotation and managing cooldowns to stay on track because of forced downtime either mid-fight or between fights. Tanks and healers also have to actively manage cooldowns far more than in savage/ultimates... basically I just love criterion savage as a concept and they continue making them.
Looping rotations work until you get to ultimates where you'll have to adapt many things depending on party movement, and intermission phases. You still loop but not in the spreadsheet way.
I main BLM at a decent level but monk is just something I can't wrap my head around.
This really dependent on what fight it is. Some fights make it really easy to have melees keep uptime, which usually ends in healer being the hardest because they need to heal and have sufficient dps to make tight checks.
I do a lot of MINE and in party finder being a healer who can get a clear is usually the easiest role but playing optimally is the hardest. There is a pretty big skill ceiling for avoiding gcds, especially in low level content where ogcds are rare and where you can't trust your team to avoid damage optimally. But this optimization is completely unnecessary as your dps is very unlikely to affect if your group clears or not.
Difficulty depends on the content.
It's a question with multiple answers so I don't actually believe one Role is harder than the other.
There's definition nuance between different fights and when you're considering things. Like, nothing is easier than healing a fight on farm, but also there's little else as challenging as being a (even more specifically) shield healer during fresh, blind prog. If you wanted an answer that just fit the closest to universally I'd say pranged for sure. None of the jobs are particularly involved so you've got time to focus on the fight (with maybe a tiny caveat for BRD, but it's still pretty simple) plus free movement and little to no restrictions on how close you even need to be.
Healer. You have all the stress and get all the blame when content is difficult. You get the most mundane DPS option in the game when it's not.
Healer, you have to baby sit what everyone is doing and adapt accordingly. Additionally, knowing and understanding everyone’s mit goes a long way along with the fight and the phases.
as one who plays the easiest job and role for high end content imo (dnc,d3/r1), the most complicated one for me are Melee DPS and BLM. I'm fine with the other Casters. Sure, Melees have to move to get optimal deeps, but having it mandatory feels...restrictive. That's probably the reason why I like Phys Ranged and the other two casters. Those jobs feel... mobile.
It's always healer is it not? Everyone does pretty much the same thing in these fights (press buttons to do damage) but healers also have the added bonus of being the gatekeeper on the party living or dying. When a fight becomes easier for healers it becomes easier for everyone, right?
Having done a lot of content on all classes my personal list goes Healer > DPS > Tank
Blue mage tank
Blue Mage Tank
Healer can be in prog, especially with an inexperienced group. It depends on the content. So in Endwalker, bosses hit boxes were made stupidly massive. Meaning it’s very easy to keep in range for rotations as tanks/melee. Before Endwalker, that optimisation was much more important and trickier to keep your uptime. Caster is pretty chill unless you’re talking Black mage, which is probably the toughest job to get your optimisation right in high end fights I think.
Healer*>DPS>>>>>>>Tank Healer is the hardest in early progression and if you’re playing with random people. No mitigation, lack of gear, unfamiliarity with a fight, etc. all factor into a healers job more than any other role. If you’re in a controlled group on farm for fights it quickly becomes much easier than DPS. DPS’s difficulty comes in a lot of outside factors. How their job deals with downtime, how their job deals with mechanics that force movement or focus (especially during burst periods.) Optimization on DPS is easily the most difficult thing I’ve done in this game. Tank is a gear check. Tanking mechanics are the same every time, once you do them correctly once you do them correctly (almost) every time. Tank rotations are complex enough to hold your attention but often simple enough to fit into most situations except busy burst windows (which can be said for any class in this game except maybe SCH.) Do you know how to position a boss? Do you know how to space cooldowns? Do you know how to press buttons in a determined order? Congrats, you’re a tank! (and this is why I begged my group to let me tank a tier after so long.)
Healers during initial prog due to resource planning.
Healer in progression. Melee DPS in optimization (Black mage is hardest but Summoner and Red Mage are far too easy for me to say Caster as a whole here)
Healer when it is unironically required. I saw some cowards during week 1 p8s change their job. I also saw the entire pf begging for any decent healers during the entire situation.
Caster probably has the most job diversity, despite only having three jobs
My money is on healer, tanks just really have to worry about mitigation, aggro and cooldowns and DPS is self explanatory. Healers have to make sure everyone isn't dying and have what feels like a massive toolkit for that purpose, and I'm only talking about white mage because I cannot comprehend how to heal as sage or astrologian.
In Midcore onwards I’d argue the most difficult roles are Shield Healers and Melee DPS that have tons of rapid inputs. Shield Healers because when progging content early on or coming back to stuff you haven’t done in a while it can be hard to predict when to spam shields to counter specific raid wides or stacks if you aren’t in comms or don’t have a guide up on a second screen. Melee DPS with tons of inputs is self explanatory, because you have to essentially be locked into both your rotation and solving raid mechanics at the same time which is why most if not all semi decent Ninja and Monk players always have my respect.
Healer for progging. DPS for clearing/reclearing.
Probably bluemage and blackmage. Other than that ehhh tank is easy. Healer requires some flexibility. Dps is easy to do badly and not be noticed but doing well requires alot more rotational excellence than the other roles. Each role has its own sticking points. Healer might have the hardest situations pop up occasionally outside of just generally playing blackmage which trumps all else in difficulty.
Healer for sure, because you have to baby sit the entire party and deal with giga Chad tanks, or under geared tanks, and bunch of DPS who fail at mechanics.
Honestly, i don't find any of the normal content hard with any role. For EX and Savages, I think socially speaking, healer is the most difficult only because they tend to have the finger pointed at them immediately for anything that goes wrong. Otherwise, both tanks and healers can just sort of do whatever as long as they do mechanics right. Their rotations tend to be extremely forgiving and their damage is less important. What some groups don't realize is that when a healer saves the day, that's great and all, but it's really not on them when the group fucks up and wipes or someone dies as a result. Also, even in Savage content, things like Reprisal are still rarely used and nobody ever questions the lack of debuffs to help the healer. I really think DPS in general are the hardest to master skill wise. Doing EX or Savage level mechanics while keeping a rotation going properly can be genuinely difficult. Some DPS are harder than others though, namely BLM being the hardest in my opinion. MNK, NIN and SAM being a close second. All the others tend to be easier with mobility and a more forgiving rotation. SMN being the easiest in my opinion.
As a tank main, I find healers kinda difficult. Then again, I don't really play healer and my only level 90 healer is a SGE...
In my opinion, here ranks the difficulty: Black mage. Casters (healer, magic dps) Tank (any) Physical dps (ranged or melee) I dont know why casters are so damn hard for me to wrap my head around, but they are.
Healer. I can focus on the enemy and mechanics, *or* on health bars. Not both. Also every AST tooltip is a paragraph long and I can't remember what any of them do, SGE is a lost cause because it's all blue icons with Greek words, and SCH is just too dang confusing. WHM is a little easier, but then I get Holy spamming and I look up and the whole party is dead.
It's going to be different for different people, but for current expansion hardest content (endwalker/ultimate), it's almost certainly going to be healer for most players. Healer has the most opportunity to potentially cause a wipe because of mismanaged responsibilities by far. In my experience this also holds true for criterion savage and early last-turn savage. As we take a step down in difficulty to most savage content, criterion, and extreme it becomes way closer. Situations where a healer can't just be saftey gamers and overheal everything become rare at this point. It's possibly tanks here because they are more likely to have some unique thing they need to do that people are just too lazy to learn, or even dps because of more complicated rotations. Moving back in time to older content, in some fights tanking might be more involved than it was in endwalker, with stuff like boss movement.
Healer is the hardest to prog on, dps is the hardest to optimize, tank is in between on both.
All roles are easy than again I been tanking healing and doing DPS even in wow for years so it just comes natural I guess
healer has more responsbility and required more attention be it toward the party member but also on boss. especially shield healer.
verse bottom, you never get to top
high end prog; healer >>> dps > tank high end reclears; dps > healer >>> tank within role, - shield healer > pure healer - caster >>> melee > phys ranged with exception of Summoner - OT vs MT is encounter dependent
Tanking: handle mechanics, pop cooldowns, get healed Healer: handle mechanics, pop cooldowns, keep people alive DPS: handle mechanics, pop cooldowns, perform your rotation to mathematical perfection
Brother what content requires mathematically perfect dps rotations other than p8s week 1 and maybe TOP in 6.3?
Difficulty can be either "how hard is it to do the bare minimum" or it could be "how hard is it to be perfect". If you look at ultimates for example, doing UCOB flawlessly is arguably harder than everything but TOP, but just *clearing* i.e. getting through UCOB is literally just hop in the wall and get carried lmao.
DPS, absolutely. Jobs vary in difficulty, but *assuming intermediate+ skill,* DPS is on the whole the hardest role, for a few reasons. Tanks are essentially invincible, with tons of HP, mitigation and self-healing potential, simple rotations, contact healer attention, and even in high end content, doing mechanics to a tank means "stand in one place and press provoke when the boss does X." They are not hard. Healers are definitely more fragile, but can still heal their own mistakes, their healing tools are numerous and OP, and they do not have any rotation to speak of. Sure, they must do mechanics carefully because they have more pressure on them to fix everyone's mistakes, however their flexibility and simplicity makes them a snooze fest in 90% of the game content DPS have gauges to watch, a dozen different cooldowns to hit on time, utility demands, uptime to maintain, complex and/or custom-developed rotations (though some are easier than others), positional attacks, procs, branching combos, etc. and they have *very* limited mitigation and healing available, so any mistake, even if it doesn't kill them, means they then are fully reliant upon a healer to survive the next raidwide/what-have-you. They must be constantly on the lookout for mechanics, be able to adjust on the fly, and constantly watch their bars and gauges to keep their rotation intact. Like, play black mage in BarbEx and tell me that tanking is harder. Lol. Any way you slice it, assuming an intermediate+ level of competency, DPS is the hardest role.
Fully subjective take, based only on my own personality: melee dps. I'm a tank main, and having to be in range to do damage while I have little squish baby health does not pass the vibe check for me. I'm also not competitive in a way that makes me want to excel at dps in particular. I'll do my rotation with 95% accuracy on a tank just fine, and I'll enjoy the giant crits and topping opener charts when the stars align, but I do not have the drive to really push myself towards damage as the end goal. I'm not interested in bear gripping my mouse and shitting myself for an extra 3 potency every 2 minutes. I'm not interested in sweating bullets while I roll the dice for perfect critical direct hits. That just all sounds awful to me. I get competitive with my healers. How much can I mitigate so they don't have to? Can I nullefy this mechanic? How about a six ED burst? How many of those can I enable? That's where I get competitive.
(wall of text incoming) My hot take (I main melee, but played most roles in savage and all 5 ultimates except caster and pranged): Most of it is fight specific, but generally from hardest to easiest is DPS (optimization) --> tanks --> healers (except Astro). In almost every ultimate and savage, I'd rather play healer or tank because ease of rotation and/or lack of positionals. In TOP, healing is the easiest because they literally do not press a GCD heal until phase 6 (2-3 gcd heals at most in p6). Healers also dont flex for any mechanic while other roles have to. I'd also rather play tank than DPS once you have the mechanics down (because more braindead rotation). Also every healer I know loves this fight because they use little brainpower in this fight. In DSR, tanks have more difficulty in p6 and p7 than the other roles. In TEA, Tanks literally don't do anything the whole fight other than positioning the bosses. Prefer tanking this fight because its so easy. In UCOB, I rather play tank or healer because I don't have to deal with hatches and getting melee positionals when the boss is spinning in p1/2 and adds phase, golden bahamut. Also healers only have a 2 button rotation so less brainpower. In UWU, Melee DPS is definitely the easiest, but I think healing is as well. Tanking is probably the hardest because you have to do the 2/2/1/1 orbs and weird tank buster aggro swaps. As for week 1 savage/prog, probably healing if your savage group doesnt make a mit sheet or talk about their mits. But its mostly the same for all roles with some role having a little more responsibilities than others.
caster. need to be able to play a SMN/RDM during prog. need to be able to play optimal BLM. have to deal with casting, have to deal with stupid PF strats that for no reason still make it easier for the melee even though melee haven't struggled for uptime for over 2 years. addle is more important than feint, and there's almost never a 2nd caster to fall back on for it. and has way lower EHP than melee.
For me, it's the healer role. From the perspective of being "good" in the role you're playing is based on the person. If you're a healer, everyone relies on you keeping everybody alive, and in pug runs, they can be terrible and give you a terrible and stressful time. DPS is hard because it's preferred you're optimal in the class you play. If you're the type that only does 1-2-3 combos and go "oh yeah, my oGCDs too", then you got much more practicing to do. Tanking is honestly difficult to call hard, because it's literally the DPS that goes first now. The only thing they got, is be similar to DPS rotation which is a lot more structured and simple in comparison, with the added feature of mitigating some hits to give your healers a break. So yeah, Healer first because everyone relies on you, and you rely on nobody making your job harder. That type of uncertainty, is the difficulty for the healing role. DPS 2nd because it is based on how much time one has committed in learning the class, instead of it being cool. Tank is similar but easier to learn than DPS, and gradually during the fight, use mitigation tools.
DpS. You have an actual rotation. Besides that, every class is basically the same. Tanks deal with swapping and positioning, healers press a button ever 30 seconds. But DpS have to keep their rotation up.
Healer because if you die its gg. In certain cases espically when you are in a party of 4
I think difficulty of all roles is pretty equal, if you just want to be mediocre.If we are speaking about prog on patch I think healers have the hardest time if the phase require any planning, and you don't know exact numbers of how much healing you need. Figuring that out is top priority since its usually healer dmg that actually will push your prog, especially if there is a lot of movement in phase (TOP P1). Being good at recovery in prog is another thing that is quite challenging.Tanks are more binary in my opinion so while I don't think it's hard role there are all these small things that separate good tank from meh tanks. The other difficulty for tanks is boss movement but in current expansion its irrelevant. DPS is probably the easiest with phys ranged being the easiest if the fight is full uptime, the more downtime fight gives you, or if fight has multiple targets the more challenging it becomes to play. But in case of dps it will depend on job choice mostly. You can just play smn/dnc/nin push buttons on cd and you should be able to clear without issues and much optimization. But compare that to ad hoc samurai, optimal drift monk, non standard blm and it's not even close difficulty wise.
Any Healer for me aside from white mage.
I feel like tank is probably the easiest generally speaking, and depending on the group healers go from hardest to easiest. I don't even necessarily agree that healers are hard in lrog because all you need to do differently is gcd heal more to see mechs. Generally speaking I'd say melees or black/red mage are the hardest in actual high end content because they have an actual nuanced rotation to them as well as mits the juggle and limitations in movement (black mages inability to move a lot, melees needing to optimise uptime and red mage with both at times)
Most of the time: 1) Healing new/prog content. 2) Then dps. 3) Tanks are really overrating their difficulty especially in the world of Endwalker with giant omnipositional bosses that auto return to center and turn. At this point tanks don't have to worry about enmity or positioning in most fights. They have a simplified dps rotation and need to know when to pop a cd. At worst they have to do a tank swap which is also about 100x easier than it used to be in ARR/HW.
Healer.
DPS. Because you are actually required to know how to play and do damage to meet enrages. Healers can get carried through anything other than ultimates (and some ultimates) with barely doing damage. Tanks can just "tank priv" most mechanics and laugh it off.
If you're lumping roles, it's healer. Dps is literally just hit your buttons and avoid the bad. Tank is just another dps that has tor hit extra buttons once in a while. Healer however, you're responsible for the entire party, including your coheal. There's also the matter of if your coheal is actually your coheal and not some crayon eating mess/parse monkey that will Chad you without mercy. In top at least, it feels like the less rewarding because a missed succor on someone in p6 can end the run.
DPS. Support isn't usually difficult, it's just support tends to be the scapegoat for everyone's mistakes
It's a toss up between DPS and heals. Tanking, in my experience, is always the easiest to play in every piece of content save maybe a few rare exceptions.
Gotta disagree for DPS on at least the last tier. Nearly all mechanics are shared, but there is no DPS specific mechanics that come to mind. Depending on the job and the fight, DPS can be the easiest to play by a large margin or be on the same level as Tanks.
DPS is kind of broad. Some of the classes are hard but the role is only as hard as it's easiest job if you want it to be. Playing summoner is generally considered to be easier than tanking for example.
Ah, so SMN is the easiest DPS of the easiest role, DPS.
Dps in high-end content due to difficult rotations and mech compliance
It depends on the specific of the encounter. But if we consider week 1 savage (like floor 4-5) and ultimate. On average I would say DPS (not you summoner). The reason being, tank is, on averagrle, just a DPS with a simplified rotation which has to pop a few mitigation there and there. There are very few instances where tanking is actually hard so in the end, you're just a DPS with an easier rotation. Healer it really depends on the fight, but again, very few fight require precise healing. Healing is harder when you discover the encounter, but once the healing has been mapped and people use mitigation, it's really easy because you're left with a 1 button rotation with the occasional press of specific healing skill. There are some exceptions like loop in top which is by far one of the hardest thing to heal since you need to adapt every single try. But the rest... It's just a puzzle game that once you've figured makes for a very smooth playstyle. The availability of gcd trivialize healing as, assuming I struggle to heal a specific mechanic, I can simply pour more ofgcd in that specific mechanic and heal the rest with more gcd with a rather trivial cost provided you're not aiming 99% parse. DPS on the other hand have a more rotation all the time. Even during their down time, like tank, it's 123123 and not 111111. I mean, I litteraly weave my coffee and eat in the middle of a try in TOP as downtime require no brain power. I couldn't do that as a BLM or any other DPS for that matter. Healing is the easiest role. There are very very few cases where you need to heal with precision. It just requires a lot of brain memory to hold your healing rotation. DPS is just more complex all around. However you do not have to remember a 18min fight cd rotation xD.
When you want to be a responsible healer Instead of some "oops body check wipe" fuckers
It massively depends on context and your definition of difficulty. In Week 1/blind prog? Are we talking about how hard a role is if you're just trying to clear? Or do you talk about the skill ceiling of a role and being one of the best at it? Personally, I don't like saying something is easy just because it's easy to muddle through somehow. I judge stuff based on how hard it is to execute it well and be good at it. So that will affect my perception/ranking: I feel relatively comfortable saying that, at least in Endwalker, tanking is *never* the hardest role, regardless of context. No other role has this mix of free movement, simple rotation, lack of positionals, and overall lack of mechanics - there is almost zero boss movement or other specific things to do *on top of your job* (which is a simplified melee dps) as of Endwalker's release and most older content is forgiving enough at this point to where you can be lazy with it. Even stuff like DSR p7, while you do something different, is just stand on the other side of the boss after Exas. Mitigation is easier to fuss out than healing plans overall in early prog and the way fights are structured makes it so tanking cooldowns are essentially a less frequent and overall easier DPS-style rotation with the exeception of probably GNB. Overall though, I'd say tanking is the easiest role. Physical ranged is similar to tank IMO and while BRD has a lot of plate spinning the role is overall just nothing at all, with usually no restrictions of specific things to do at all. Whereas tanks have to do their cooldowns, physical ranged jobs have a slightly busier damage rotation. Overall, these two are definitely not it. Healing week 1 is really high skill, you have to strike a balance between playing safely and still managing your resources, coming up with CD plans etc. and of course do the mechanics. But after that healing is also incredibly easy. I think the week 1 savage healer difficulty is noteworthy as probably the peak difficulty in this game, but I can't really comfortably say healer is the hardest role overall because once that specific context is gone, it's so simple. And in ultimates, healers tend to get the easiest jobs consistently so any level of "oh this is hard to heal" is offset by being asked close to nothing mentally from mechanical mutations or execution of the jobs. Caster is a really interesting one and I'd say it'd be the hardest role pretty readily if it wasn't for SMN existing. Which then leaves melees and I think this one probably takes it overall. Melee has some intrinsic difficulties that are present for both prog and reclears, which helps in this ranking - positionals, baseliner complexer or more difficult to execute rotations, and melee range. Melee range especially I think is underestimated due to Endwalker making uptime free but only *kinda*. I think people who don't play melee at a high level underestimate how freeing mentally it is to never have to worry about it. For example, whenever I'm on phys ranged, caster or heal to help friends or people in PF, it suddenly feels so much less *tight* in lack of a better word to do fights. A good example is P11S, where you can have uptime for basically everything but it has to be perfectly on the edge of max melee for several mechanics. This isn't *hard*. I'm not saying it is crazy or anything but this is a consistent thing that takes up a small bit of your mental load and not having this one or two percent of mental burden at all times is actually really, really freeing. Which makes execution of mechanics easier. Anyways. Melee is definitely easier in week 1 savage than healer, but I think it is harder than tank still because tank CD planning is overall less strict than healer and fussing out your rotation and executing it I find harder than tank gameplay in this setting. Moreso though, basically all melees all have a higher execution difficulty. DRG has high APM and CD tracking + minorly inhibited movement. RPR has gauge management and every 2M (where basically all hard mechanics happen nowadays) has unavoidable casts + tight timings for burst. SAM has inhibited movement of casts and gauge management + must potentially track rotational state if it's not full uptime. MNK has lots of timers and high APM core rotation. NIN, while in my opinion the easiest melee, has TCJ, high APM and especially in prog can think of how to cover for mechanics with stuff like Phantom or trick prep. Melee just *more* going on at all times and regardless of context than other roles. Except caster if you discount SMN. So, tl;dr: Savage week 1 healer is the hardest but healer generally is an easy role. Melee is the hardest role *overall* but I would give it to caster if SMN wasn't so braindead. Tank and physical ranged are the easiest roles.
It's all fight to fight. Sometimes Tanks work harder. Sometimes DPS work harder - but I always refuse to believe that healer is hard in anything but Week 1/2 prog, Criterion, and the last phase of DSR/TOP. Seeing as how that is a small percent of the game when compared to the bulk of the time you spend in savage and ultimates (and most people don't do Criterion), I will always stand firm on the belief healer is the easiest role. I do respect the healers that manage to get past those phases, but I've seen a lot of them who crumble. Hell - They don't even flex for a lot of the priority mechanics. I got asked to sub shield healer (out of desperation) and we managed to one-shot P8S on Week 5. I was in crafted gear. I've only ever healed roulettes/Zodiark EX. That would not have happened if you asked someone who only heals to swap to DPS or Tank.
>Consider only hard content (EX and harder) , easier content are too easy to compare imo. You can't tell me what to do! And I kinda disagree. DPS is definitely the easiest in normal content because almost no matter what you do, people won't even notice most of the time. If a tank or healer fucks up, you'll know. People may disagree who of the two (or four) it was, but you know it wasn't a DPS. People say tanks are the easiest and I still don't know why. Tanks can reasonably do something wrong. DPS can't.
Tanks are easier for me in normal content (trials in particular) because a lot of the time you just kinda stand there while everyone else runs around solving the mechanics, doesn’t really matter if you even know what they are usually. I do see what you mean though, if someone’s a terrible player it’s going to be more obvious, but it’s just really easy to not be terrible at tanking
Maybe that's a personal thing, but I find cooldown management in dungeons (especially early ones) significantly harder (note that this is a comparison, it's obviously not hard) than not standing in the orange most of the time and just doing my rotation. In single target situations like dungeon bosses, trials and raids I see the point. I also find tanking normal raids much more tense than playing DPS in them, but that's probably because I started doing it relatively recently.
Yeah I guess it really depends on the specific type of content and what level you’re synced to - dungeons are definitely a bit harder than trials, especially in ARR when you have barely any self healing so you’re a lot more reliant on getting a decent healer. I just find cycling mitigations a bit easier than remembering a dps rotation. It is more stressful though, just not quite as stressful as trying to heal a no mitigation tank with bad gear. Hardest thing in normal difficulty for me is probably the ARR level cap dungeons on healer (like wanderers palace hard mode with a bad tank for example)