Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

But hurt their DPS, they care about that. It gives feedback between failing a mechanic and the consequences, which vuln stacks don't really do.

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These are in game and should be expanded upon.
But people also ignore v-stacks simply because the outgoing base damage is too low. V stacks only become a concern if they cause you to die to non avoidable damage.

If, as a healer, I don't care whether I heal people with 0 or 3 stacks, then I know that the incoming damage is simply way too low.

Combine meaner V-stacks + damage debuff + harsher penalties on rezzing and you might get people to obey mechanics more.

Naah lets face it: in this MMO and in pretty much any I have played: it's always the healer that is burdened by "content difficulty" because if sth. goes wrong, we are the only ones that might be able to compensate for it.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

I would have to disagree. They've been ignoring them since... as you point out, AV even.

I still think the root problem with vuln stacks isn't healing power creep. It's that it punishes the healer for a non-healing mistake. People don't really care about how much healing they require. But hurt their DPS, they care about that. It gives feedback between failing a mechanic and the consequences, which vuln stacks don't really do.

My 2 gil anyways.

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I think this is the right angle to look at though, there needs to be something there that ONLY the healer can do, otherwise the party dies. So far that only tool is Esuna, and even then there are pots.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

They can edit rezzing so it is way more punishing. Right now you can essentially rez as much as you want. An example would be that the mana cost doubles when cast infight or sth like that.
They can also rebalance mana consumption to make overhealing more of an issue.

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The problem really is that Swiftcast exists. It results in people really having a 60 second cooldown on rezzing rather than an 8 second rez cast with a GCD cooldown. If Raise was a fixed 20-25% of the MP pool for an instant cast, it would be used more sparingly and healers would have more incentive to heal rather than risk letting someone KO which is more expensive. The healer otherwise risks being caught in the mechanics. There's typically enough time to cast raise without swiftcast in all content, but that does depend on the tank not facing you. If it's the tank you're trying to raise, you better hope you didn't already use Refresh.

More to the point though, the AI in the game is not smart enough actually see the healer casting something and try to interrupt it.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

Get your red mage up to 70, try vercuring some. That's probably what, 50-75% of a healer cure potency, and the first thing you notice is that it's a weak ass heal. It's only real benefit is that it can be instant; notice there's never any "only rdm to heal" clears posted anywhere.

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My signature pic isn't updated. I actually have Red Mage at level 70, and it heals at roughly the equivalent of Cure I. You know, the ability we largely ignore because White Mages never have mana issues anymore. I have kept Tanks alive with Vercure. Certainly more of a struggle, however that's the whole point. I actually have to stop DPSing. On White Mage? Eh, Regen will be good enough.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

With dedicated healers, the potency would have to be even lower due to HoT and off gcsd. You'd have to make it 3-5k effective HP to more or less force healers to use heals, and you;d need to nerf off gcd healing a lot. SCH in particular would need to be gutted, since it relies mainly on non-direct cures.

You guys really don;t sit down and actually think what stuff like this may mean in practice. It's easy to say "healing potency is too much" but you need to sit down and actually post some kind of rough model people can agree or disagree with; not just say something needs to happen and not define a plan.

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And yet the most popular MMO ever created plays this precise way with little issue. Kind of pokes some rather large holes in your argument. Regardless, why would heals need to be even weaker than Vercure because of HoTs? Now you're just setting up a strawman. If potencies were reduced across the board to roughly that equivalent, all that changes is healers having to dedicate more time to actually casting heals and worrying over their MP. This doom and gloom scenario simply doesn't exist, or has WoW been a figment of our imaginations?

As Tridus said, you would think healers should focus on healing, not spend 80% of their time casting Stone IV, Broil or Holy.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

They can edit rezzing so it is way more punishing. Right now you can essentially rez as much as you want. An example would be that the mana cost doubles when cast infight or sth like that.

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This only encourages people to wipe and reset the boss. In fact, a primary reason Red Mage's utility is overstated is because once you have three or four raises going out, few groups want to keep going.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

They can also rebalance mana consumption to make overhealing more of an issue.

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And make overhealing cost more MP? Although, I am all for encouraging less overhealing. Chances are, this will make people less inclined to heal...

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Originally Posted by Granyala

They can definitely up encounter damage in non savage content so we get to cast more.

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Absolutely. However, we then run into the problem which prompted this discussion: heals being so strong everything that doesn't borderline OHKO is non-threatening. God Kefka reduces everyone to a 1HP before casting a 20k raid wide. Cure III and Succor will cover it. And this assumes you don't have an Adlo. If said Adlo Crits, you literally don't have to heal at all. What makes First Forsaken scary is being forced to heal the DPS up to full HP. In both Savage encounters the devs used gimmicks that literally demand you overheal because raid wide AoEs just aren't enough. This also why so many mechanics in Savage kill you. They have to, otherwise damage isn't a threat.

I feel potencies can be reduced without going the WoW route. Like I said, there is a middle ground. Currently, you will spend more time DPSing, which kind of defeats the point of being a healer.

Try running content minimum item level, and see how healing and damage received will go.

Gear increases main stats, HP and defense. You can't have geared people taking the same damage as less geared people, and more geared healers casting the same mount of heals as non-geared healers. Intensive healing has its moments. The more people gear the less intensive it becomes, it is part of progression.

This game is a dps race, everyone is a dps (Including tanks and healers). Some people do not like this approach, others say it is what makes playing certain roles interesting for them. If you want the game to be healing heavy, they can always add more AoEs and TBs. But they need to adjust the enrage timer or increase dps potency to make up for the lack of dps from healers.

In some games, you start the fight with a nasty dot that deals damage to you. It keeps increasing throughout the fight and eventually kills you if you don't beat the content before it gets fully buffed. This is what usually kept healers busy back in old MMOs (Almagest is a close example) Even classes needed to mange their own self heals. "Your job is a healer and you'll be healing 90% of the time."

If you think about it. Keep healing and doing mechanics is much easier than knowing when to heal and when to dps while doing mechanics. Because in 1st case you're healing almost none stop it and less work on your brain. While as timing your heals + certain people that want to cheese mechanics need their own heals/shields + dps is more work on the healer.

And btw, healers keep fixing their rotation very often (Until they have BiS) unlike tanks and DPs. Because gear plays a big role for them. Their heals become stronger, people around them start taking less damage, they no longer have to cast 4 heals and reduced it to 2, and start focusing more on dealing damage. Also lets not forget crit Shields. I really don't understand when people say that playing healer role is boring.

I personally think that what we have now is far more interesting for healers. They can make them heal more and dps less (With more AoEs and TB like i said). But don't make them healing machines.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

This only encourages people to wipe and reset the boss. In fact, a primary reason Red Mage's utility is overstated is because once you have three or four raises going out, few groups want to keep going.

Absolutely. However, we then run into the problem which prompted this discussion: heals being so strong everything that doesn't borderline OHKO is non-threatening. God Kefka reduces everyone to a 1HP before casting a 20k raid wide. Cure III and Succor will cover it. And this assumes you don't have an Adlo. If said Adlo Crits, you literally don't have to heal at all. What makes First Forsaken scary is being forced to heal the DPS up to full HP. In both Savage encounters the devs used gimmicks that literally demand you overheal because raid wide AoEs just aren't enough. This also why so many mechanics in Savage kill you. They have to, otherwise damage isn't a threat.

I feel potencies can be reduced without going the WoW route. Like I said, there is a middle ground. Currently, you will spend more time DPSing, which kind of defeats the point of being a healer.

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You don't need to decrease potencies to make stuff threatening. Threatening = my people won't survive the next hit, gotta do sth!
So they need to up the damage. Not the damage of a single attack, mind you, but the frequency of attacks.

BTW: a heavy hit + 20 seconds of recovering the group gets me casting heals, aye. But if I know "there won't be any damage for the next 25 seconds" it does not feel threatening to me at all. You basically swap out mindless stones for mindless repeated heal casting. That does NOT make the healing role more engaging at all.

If they up the frequency and severity of the hits, we'd need to start thinking again whether our tanks or our group can survive 5+ seconds w/o heal while we consider DPSing. This is the one aspect of cleric stance that I miss: the possibility of miscalculating and having people die.

Also, I really think they should tune experts to a different item level. As Yeol said: they might be interesting at minimum item level, just as leveling dungeons are actually harder to heal than expert ones but SEs inept balancing makes everything past the first dungeons in the game faceroll because instead of tuning them around the tome gear, they tune them around Tome gear MINUS 20-30 item levels, which of course renders them so trivial that our arms get numb from throwing stones and DPS can largely ignore mechanics.

Bottom line: don't nerf healing, buff the damn content! Esp the FREQUENCY of mean attacks.

PS: ever solo healed the wraith on Pazu or Pazuzu himself? That's how dungeon bosses should hit. I actually have to time my damage casts to the casts of the wraith or large CDs of my tank or else my tank will die.
Problem is: dungeons would be a nightmare with the largely incompetent community in this game and the QQ would flood Japan. :D

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Originally Posted by Granyala

Thank god!
Nothing feels more frustrating than a healing design like WoW, where you spend your majority casting weak ass heals that barely manage to move the HP bar. >.<

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From my healing main friend:

"Nothing feels more frustrating than a healing design like FF14, where you spend your majority casting DPS spells that barely do anything >.<."

Just sayin...

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

You guys really don;t sit down and actually think what stuff like this may mean in practice. It's easy to say "healing potency is too much" but you need to sit down and actually post some kind of rough model people can agree or disagree with; not just say something needs to happen and not define a plan.

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I've done it, countless times for this and many other MMOs. I envision:

A model where incoming damage and healer potency is lower, but comes much quicker and in more various forms to create a steady MP drain (i.e. FINITE resource, currently it is near infinite). You'd have more frequent damage to tanks, less predictable damage (i.e. on who and when) to throw wrenches in triage. To compensate for this healer toolkits would have spells that handle different functions with differing utility/efficiency tied to it. I.e. faster cast heals with higher MP drain for emergency healing, heals with more range, less cost, but maybe slower speed or less power, etc.

The idea would be that as damage ramps up (be it from mechanics, failed mechanics, avoidable damage, unavoidable damage, etc.) healer decisions would be less binary and more dynamic. Ideally, I'd like to see some defensive utility added to non-healer jobs to supplement this paradigm. This also allows vuln stacks to be more impactful, as well as other mechanics that impact party stability. This means that a healer can't easily delete mistakes, but allows mistakes to be more dynamic and less pass/fail.

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like one particular mode of mmo playing is the "builder." A healer would do a small, low potency cure to build resources to spend on higher potency cures or attacks. Essentially instead of hitting the aetherflow button, you need to cast a 2k potency physick for maybe 30 sec to a minute to proc your stacks, then you have your spike cures or burst cures for upcoming attacks. But building modes of play are kind of sedate and slow, really.

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Except, you gave one mere example, and it's an awfully slow and boring one. You can have a builder/spender style of gameplay that happens in a much more rapid pace as well offering choices in spenders and builders to add to the gameplay form.

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Then go play WoW, because trying to make that happen here would break the game.

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Don't be so petty and dismissive...

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You are asking for a nerf to every healing class, forcing them to spend a lot more effort to do their basic job-healing, with no benefit. I mean literally no benefit to them; reducing one hits isn't going to help any if my healing now needs a pretty strict rotation, and a slower wipe is a wipe just the same.

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Yes, I am asking healers to heal, so they aren't mistakenly called green DPS. While YOU personally may not see a benefit, there is a benefit to making healing more engaging with actual choice and consequences. There is a benefit to de-homogenizing some of the current healing jobs and carving out more defined playstyles.

I don't know where you got this concept of "strict healing rotation". I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, and isn't something anyone is advocating for as best I can tell.

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I mean, ffs, the game works fine as is. The only issue with healing potency is in pvp. People need to stop suggesting changes that would break the game for no real defined goal.

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Just because something is fine, doesn't mean it's good. It doesn't mean it can't be better, or shouldn't be improved.

The defined goal would be to switch healers away from a paradigm where they cast boring one dimensional DPS spells 80% of the time to one where dynamic healing decisions and consequences are available.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

But to be perfectly frank: I prefer the concept of strong heals and quickly moving health bars over the concept of slowly regging people back up after a hit. I' rather have more ups and downs in rapid succession than one big hit and spending the next 20 seconds trying to recoup.

There is no right or wrong here, these are 2 different design philosophies.

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I mean, we can still have powerful heals if we want (though I don't), but we'd still need to change other things to shift away from a DPS-centric paradigm. As Riyah mentioned, less access to powerful heals (a la builder/spender concept), or perhaps a drive away from efficiency (i.e. powerful heals have drawbacks, be it range, MP cost, cast time, etc.), etc.

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Naah lets face it: in this MMO and in pretty much any I have played: it's always the healer that is burdened by "content difficulty" because if sth. goes wrong, we are the only ones that might be able to compensate for it.

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Not entirely true, but I will concede that most often this is accurate. In high Mythic+ early keys, we found that a lot of difficulty was around coordinating CC, interrupts, DPS cooldowns, as well as rotating defensive cooldowns on every party member to bypass mitigation checks. In situations where healing was simply a matter of kill or be killed, we would try and do things to make it easier for the healer to do what they needed too (because if they had to move for a mechanic it could end up killing someone while they turret healed) I.e. running stacks to the healer, using BoP on them to give them time to focus on others or bypass a mechanic, etc.

One thing I've been advocating quite a bit for is shifting that responsibility off the healers and onto the whole party. Making tanks more responsible for their well being and threat, DPS have actual challenges/hurdles other than a 12 minute enrage timer, and healers having to actually triage the party.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

More to the point though, the AI in the game is not smart enough actually see the healer casting something and try to interrupt it.

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One of the things I am looking forward to is trying out the new Island Expedition AI in BfA. They have the ability to line of sight casters, stun the front line and go for healers/ranged, as well as interrupt, etc. They've even claimed that their original iteration was simply too hard and they had to tone it down. Really curious how it pans out, as if it's any good, I'd LOVE to see it make its way into the already phenomenal Mythic+ system.

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Originally Posted by Yeol

Try running content minimum item level, and see how healing and damage received will go.

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I have and it's still trivial. It's why in nearly every single MMO DPS always get geared first, because defense is almost always secondary to offense because by nature the game has to give you enough defense to be able to survive.

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Originally Posted by KaldeaSahaline

The defined goal would be to switch healers away from a paradigm where they cast boring one dimensional DPS spells 80% of the time to one where dynamic healing decisions and consequences are available.

less access to powerful heals (a la builder/spender concept)

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I absolutely agree that we should not be casting a 2-3 button DPS "rotation" for pitiful contributions of 1/3rd of a red class 80% of the time.

Fill downtime with Risk-attached DPS? Sure that is fun. I always like the fact that a healer basically performs 2 roles in FF XIV and I do not want that to change.

A builder / spender kind of thing is exactly what I do NOT want though. This made the holy priest class in WoW so annoying and frustrating for me. I don't want to cast near meaningless crap as "filler heals". As I already stated: that is by no means more interesting than casting braindead DPS spells.

I still maintain that healers are largely fine and that it is the content itself that is tuned way to lax (savage excluded).

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Originally Posted by Granyala

I still maintain that healers are largely fine and that it is the content itself that is tuned way to lax (savage excluded).

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As stated, the only way that fixes anything, makes gear irrelevant. Essentially you'd be asking for all dungeons be tuned to the minimum ilevel, regardless of gear. Thus all content becomes "savage" tier.

No I think the solution has to be "give the healers more to do" and not be "give the healer stupid combos". You do not want RNG (even hoping for a crit is stupid) to be the factor that determines if you save or wipe the party. Hence the original proc's for lilies was stupid as well. If "more to do" comes in the shape of healing idiot NPC's or casting debuff removals, that does make more work for the healer, but that's not something that can retroactively be applied to content.

Another thing to keep in mind is that more involved healing doesn’t necessarily have to mean just hitting the Cure button more often. I’ve never played WoW, but I played several healers at pretty high levels of content in Everquest II, which is a similar type of game in many ways to WoW and FFXIV, and one thing I noticed from there that I really don’t see here is a variety of utility spells on healers.

In FFXIV, you’re pretty much either direct healing, including specialty heals like regen, or DPSing, without much in the way of debuffs/buffs/status cures/etc. Status curing, in particular, is potentially a great way to add more depth to healer gameplay without just reducing potencies on the green-numbers spells, but I’m not sure the basic spell infrastructure is in place to support it. We really only have one cleanse—Esuna, with its limited applicability, zero recast time and single debuff removal—which doesn’t give a whole lot of room to be creative. It also doesn’t give much reason for other roles to want to slot their own status removal abilities (mage DPS with Erase, for example).

My Defiler in EQ2 had a single-target cleanse (basically the equivalent of Esuna), an AoE cleanse with a much longer recast time, and a “special” cleanse with a very long recast time (in FFXIV terms, consider it like being able to remove certain single-target boss mechanics like Prey, Earthshakers, Shriek, etc.), and other healers had generally the same setup but possibly with class-specific variations like a total cleanse, each with power-appropriate cast/recast times. That setup forced meaningful choices, and also interactions between the healers in a group, that went beyond coordinating heals. You had to decide whether a particular debuff was worth burning a high-cost or long-recast ability to remove, and consequently risking not having that ability for something else. Do you burn your curse removal for Twintania’s fire prison, knowing that means you’ll have to heal through the Death Sentence debuff, or do you accept the downtime on one party member and needing to DPS the prison in exchange for being able to remove the healing debuff later?

There are other complexities to the healing kit that could be considered as well, like maintaining temp debuffs and party buffs or handling mechanics—either accidental failures or deliberate setups—via death preventions; imagine if you lost the ability to use Swiftcast on Raise, but in exchange, you instead had a short-duration, long-recast ability that would 100% prevent the next instance of damage on a party member or instantly heal them up to 50% the next time they dropped to 0 HP in a given time window. The ultimate effect is similar, but it shifts the emphasis from reactivity to proactivity. On the buff/debuff side, a mix of indefinite upkeep effects (along the lines of how Miasma used to apply a healing debuff, but actually meaningful) and comparably short-duration, high-impact effects like AST cards could provide a similar level of activity to what we have now while still shifting emphasis away from spamming DD spells.

All of this could be done in addition to the straightforward “make HP go up” type of healing, but it would require investment in the form of new and modified spells, as well as more fundamental systems-level changes (for a start, make debuffs more prevalent and meaningful—give regular dungeon bosses debuff-inflicting attacks on the level of pre-nerf T7’s Venomous Tail). I really do like the idea of being more than a green DPS, and the one-dimensional healing mechanics are one reason I don’t play this game all that much any more; at the same time, I’m also not sure that the complexity of healing in a game like EQ2 or, from what I hear, WoW is achievable within the bounds of where SE seems to want to keep FFXIV (and, as noted by several people, it’s not really something that applies to existing content).

1. WoW is popular not because it's good...in fact, it pretty much sucks compared to most MMOs before it in terms of mechanics and breath of gameplay. It was popular because it anticipated the need to move away from "everquest widow" style of gameplay to something a lot more casual, and fixed a lot of issues the old school style had. The long term cost has been ruining the genre, though; its shifted far from the "living world" idea of something like Star Wars Galaxies to what people call the theme park model, where we just go on different rides as we like.

2. There's no improvement going from 80% stone, to 80% busywork in maintaining selfbuffs and debuffs. AST is an example of healing busywork; pseudo rng buffs you have to decipher and cast, and I've always found it tedious. I'm afraid SE would just extend busywork, because it takes far too much to redesign the battle system to make actual balanced pure healing.

3. Hard content...look, I do trial roulette for fun sometimes. It's pretty easy. but a lot of times, I come into one in progress at the 16 min mark because people abandoned after one or two wipes. Sometimes I switch to tank because otherwise its getting vote abandoned.

I cannot get why people want the content we all do to be harder. I mean, you all know how much of a pita it is to pug savage or ex content...you really want that to be spread down to lower ranks?

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

As stated, the only way that fixes anything, makes gear irrelevant. Essentially you'd be asking for all dungeons be tuned to the minimum ilevel, regardless of gear. Thus all content becomes "savage" tier.

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It does not have to be "ermagaawd savage" all the time. I know the tiny skilled (and usually quite vocal) minority would like that but that would render the game inaccessible to the rest of the playerbase. There is more than black and white here and I think SE could beef up the dungeons w/o needing to trow savage like instagibs, reaction times and enrages at people.

I am not asking for savage dungeons, I am asking for new content not to be tuned so low that it feels like outdated content the moment it is released because I happen to walk around in the casual tome gear.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

3. Hard content...look, I do trial roulette for fun sometimes. It's pretty easy. but a lot of times, I come into one in progress at the 16 min mark because people abandoned after one or two wipes. Sometimes I switch to tank because otherwise its getting vote abandoned.

I cannot get why people want the content we all do to be harder. I mean, you all know how much of a pita it is to pug savage or ex content...you really want that to be spread down to lower ranks?

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I think trials are mostly fine as is.
I thought we were talking about 4man content. That has indeed become braindead easy, where I can ignore many a mechanic even when the dungeon is brand new. Imho, that is wrong. When the dungeon is new it should be a bit meaner and over time, as people get the new tome gear, it gets easier.

As for 80% DPSing: I have been in S5 - S7 yesterday, and frankly, I am at a loss as to how people manage to do 2K DPS in there. I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I barely managed to squeeze in around 800ish.

Yeah sure, the ELITE can DPS like crazy b/c everyone has the content on farm and knows exactly what they are doing. But if you enter in there with a normal group that still struggles with mechanics, any healer is plenty busy saving butts and not busy throwing stones. If they leave that content as is and castrate the healers, savage will feel like a nightmare.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

1. WoW is popular not because it's good...

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I would dare to say that there has to be something that WoW did great otherwise you wouldnt have millions of people playing it. And if those before it were sooo great why did they not have the same big amount of subs? Maybe because those gameplay parts were more for a niche and not the mass?

Also about content being harder: Thats probably quite subjective but imo other than extreme primals and savage nothing is hard in this game. Honestly if you dont have certain DPS checks with bosses you could do most of the dungeon half-asleep and with probably two skills and still beat it. The problem is that a lot wont try to get better at their job if they can get most of the things done without at least trying a bit. And I think most people in this thread have more of a problem with the healer class being more of a DPS class than a healing one. I mean if you are a pure healer and your group is at least decent you will stand around for most of the time..not sure how this is great gameplay. (And as a scholar you have even less to do thanks to the fairy)

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Originally Posted by Alleo

The problem is that a lot wont try to get better at their job if they can get most of the things done without at least trying a bit.

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Just an FYI: WoW tried what some here suggest. Dungeons were like FF-XIVs in Wrath of the Lichking, in the subsequent expansion, Blizzard severely beefed up the content. Suddenly you had soft enrages because healers ran out of mana, debuffs were mean and needed to be dispelled ASAP or peps would die. Mobs needed to be CC'd, casts needed to be interrupted, boss mechanics mattered enough to be life threatening, the whole shabang.

For me, who went in with guild groups it was awesome and fun. For the genreral population that got thrown into it via party finder it was a nightmare. So much so that Blizzard was forced to cave and nerf stuff / make the following dungeons considerably easier.

To be blunt: once a MMO introduces easy content with great rewards it is no longer possible to go back to meaner content w/o a massive backlash. Contrary to popular elitist belief, most people will NOT rise to the occasion and try to better themselves when faced with hard content. They will simply whine a bit and eventually quit.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

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Didn't people rise up for Ozma? I remember people calling nerfs for Weeping City but people were told to "git gud" Ozma wasn't hard but for the general DF when it released was hard for people.

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Originally Posted by Remus

Didn't people rise up for Ozma? I remember people calling nerfs for Weeping City but people were told to "git gud" Ozma wasn't hard but for the general DF when it released was hard for people.

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We don't know that. We do not have empirical data about how many people actually stopped trying. Also, people did not "git gud". I remember many a catastrophic group that was dragged through by a few raiders, esp once Ozma targeted the right people. I believe that gear influx did way more to ease the burden than people gaining skills. Hell even at the end of the contents lifespan, people still stacked meteors, it was just that healers like myself knew how to compensate for it.

My above statement about people not rising to the occasion was actually uttered by a WoW Developer. I'm sure he had hard data about how many people actually "got gud" and defeated the content and how many were left as corpses on the side of the road.

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Originally Posted by Remus

Didn't people rise up for Ozma? I remember people calling nerfs for Weeping City but people were told to "git gud" Ozma wasn't hard but for the general DF when it released was hard for people.

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They rise fora laughable content,for me,ozma was super fun,at least had to reason to do that raid,but the FF comminity is just lazy people that want to play but nor invest 1% on their brain in the game.

You people tell,what was so hard with the meteor,the thing that did most of the wipe ? you just have to spread them,yet,it was a "nighmare" for people.
At some point,SE should stop making thing more and more easy and people should just invest whats left of their brain into doing things right

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Originally Posted by Remus

Didn't people rise up for Ozma? I remember people calling nerfs for Weeping City but people were told to "git gud" Ozma wasn't hard but for the general DF when it released was hard for people.

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I think I did it once on launch or so, then just skipped it. Keep in mind 24 mans only give one token per week to upgrade, and you could also do hunts instead for the same token. A lot of people just waited for the tokens to be uncapped to bother doing it.

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I think trials are mostly fine as is.
I thought we were talking about 4man content. That has indeed become braindead easy, where I can ignore many a mechanic even when the dungeon is brand new. Imho, that is wrong. When the dungeon is new it should be a bit meaner and over time, as people get the new tome gear, it gets easier.

As for 80% DPSing: I have been in S5 - S7 yesterday, and frankly, I am at a loss as to how people manage to do 2K DPS in there. I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I barely managed to squeeze in around 800ish.

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If they switch to more of a pure healer playstyle, they will make the game overall harder since DPS is optional, healing is not. People really seem obsessed with making this game harder despite the evidence when the game gets harder, you get a lot more wipes and abandons. Trials isn't too hard, but I still see people ditch groups often enough that if healing suddenly became harder, I'd start to worry.

And yeah, I think people here are full of crap about how easy things are. Not every healer has managed to memorize the fight that well save on the easiest things to do that level of dps.

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Originally Posted by Alleo

I would dare to say that there has to be something that WoW did great otherwise you wouldnt have millions of people playing it. And if those before it were sooo great why did they not have the same big amount of subs? Maybe because those gameplay parts were more for a niche and not the mass?

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A lot of success is timing. WoW just happened along at the right time, just like Facebook did. Use in the net was booming, broadband made gaming more feasible, you had more people interested in pc gaming overall as pc prices went down etc.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

A lot of success is timing. WoW just happened along at the right time, just like Facebook did. Use in the net was booming, broadband made gaming more feasible, you had more people interested in pc gaming overall as pc prices went down etc.

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Definitely played a part in the WoW fluke, aye. But WoW also started the trend of not having to sacrifice your RL on the altar of progression in order to get anywhere. Well, except for PvP ranks. :D

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Originally Posted by Remus

Didn't people rise up for Ozma? I remember people calling nerfs for Weeping City but people were told to "git gud" Ozma wasn't hard but for the general DF when it released was hard for people.

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They did, and they were. I think the only content that was nerfed because of community outrage was the Steps of Faith.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

As stated, the only way that fixes anything, makes gear irrelevant. Essentially you'd be asking for all dungeons be tuned to the minimum ilevel, regardless of gear. Thus all content becomes "savage" tier.

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In what world are min ilvl dungeons "savage"? Min ilvl dungeons are still trivial...

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Originally Posted by Ariannaid

snip

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Great post.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

I cannot get why people want the content we all do to be harder. I mean, you all know how much of a pita it is to pug savage or ex content...you really want that to be spread down to lower ranks?

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Riyah - You claim no one ever posts any ideas for alternative solutions, but when someone does you ignore it? Why did you ignore my responses to you?

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Originally Posted by Granyala

As for 80% DPSing: I have been in S5 - S7 yesterday, and frankly, I am at a loss as to how people manage to do 2K DPS in there. I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I barely managed to squeeze in around 800ish.

Yeah sure, the ELITE can DPS like crazy b/c everyone has the content on farm and knows exactly what they are doing. But if you enter in there with a normal group that still struggles with mechanics, any healer is plenty busy saving butts and not busy throwing stones. If they leave that content as is and castrate the healers, savage will feel like a nightmare.

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You can definitely find room to DPS, even in pugs. I mean heck, in one of the other posts I made, someone literally had a WHM put up 3k DPS in a pug. It can be done. It just requires smart experienced play.

I don't think a single person here has advocated for "castrating" healers and leaving content as is. That's a ridiculously silly notion.

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I absolutely agree that we should not be casting a 2-3 button DPS "rotation" for pitiful contributions of 1/3rd of a red class 80% of the time.

Fill downtime with Risk-attached DPS? Sure that is fun. I always like the fact that a healer basically performs 2 roles in FF XIV and I do not want that to change.

A builder / spender kind of thing is exactly what I do NOT want though. This made the holy priest class in WoW so annoying and frustrating for me. I don't want to cast near meaningless crap as "filler heals". As I already stated: that is by no means more interesting than casting braindead DPS spells.

I still maintain that healers are largely fine and that it is the content itself that is tuned way to lax (savage excluded).

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I think there's a space between "meaningless filler crap heals" and "powerful heals" that could be obtained for a builder/spender playstyle and have it be fun and impactful.

In fact, I'd argue that lilies on WHM could be retrofitted fairly easily for this. (keep in mind my paradigm I discussed last page) In that you can conserve MP by "spending lilies" in lieu of more expensive spells, or even have those powerful expensive spells simply cost lilies.

Another idea could be "consuming lilies" replenishes MP or makes next cast instant or something. I.e. builder/spender concept with triage healing paradigm. You'd want to avoid overcapping lilies, so you could burn them on powerful DPS spells if no immediate triage is needed. Risk vs. Reward could be DPS spells actually grant more lilies (or higher %, etc.) over a short period of time, in that a WHM decides if players can manage not being triaged for 2.5-5s while they DPS to accrue some fast lilies to burst heal for an upcoming mechanic or stabilize, etc.

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Originally Posted by KaldeaSahaline

You can definitely find room to DPS, even in pugs. I mean heck, in one of the other posts I made, someone literally had a WHM put up 3k DPS in a pug. It just requires smart experienced play.

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With elite players that negate any avoidable damage and by shoving 90%+ of the healing duty onto the other healer: maybe.
When you are learning the fight (which is the time when content difficulty matters, once the boss is on farm, no one gives a hoot): yeah: no. Just: nope.

Though I don't think that I would be able to reach 3K when standing still and doing nothing but DPS, but that's probably a gear issue.

@ lily idea: sure you could do that. But it would have to be pretty meaningless or else 90% of the community can't cope, the class does not get played and DEVs go haywire. You do realize what happened to the HW Black mage, right? In case you didn't: SE does not want too much of a gap in between a skilled player and a non skilled one. That's mainly why they simplified the Enochian mechanic.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

A lot of success is timing. WoW just happened along at the right time, just like Facebook did. Use in the net was booming, broadband made gaming more feasible, you had more people interested in pc gaming overall as pc prices went down etc.

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This is comically wrong. Console gaming was on the rise when WoW came out, PC gaming was starting a decline. Gaming online was feasible long before then. See: Starcraft's massive success at it.

WoW took the concept of a giant world to explore with lots of other people and made it mainstream accessable with Blizzard's usual level of production quality. That's it. It was so successful because it delivered what the market wanted better than any other game did at the time and effectively created a market for itself.

Then they went astray by taking away the community aspect and making it effectively a solo game for so much of it, but that was the result of a long series of individual decisions meant to solve problems that all made sense at the time. Even the duty finder model, which has had all kinds of lousy side effects on MMO community, was a great innovation originally because it solved the problem of trying to form parties in chat when you were a DPS class that wasn't popular in parties.

This revisionist history stuff is silly. If you don't like WoW, that's fine. Claiming it's a bad game and got lucky because reasons is nonsense. By any objective measure, WoW is the most successfull MMO ever made by an order of magnitude. You have to do something right to be that successful.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

They did, and they were. I think the only content that was nerfed because of community outrage was the Steps of Faith.

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Steps of Faith wasn't nerfed because of outrage. It was nerfed because people started abandoning it en-masse when it came up in roulette, making it difficult for people to get past that point in the MSQ. SE had to react to a MSQ block because all of Heavensward was gated behind it.

Royal Menagerie got similar howls of outrage but didn't get nerfed. Why? Enough people stuck around to help others get clears that the same blocking problem didn't occur.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

It does not have to be "ermagaawd savage" all the time. I know the tiny skilled (and usually quite vocal) minority would like that but that would render the game inaccessible to the rest of the playerbase. There is more than black and white here and I think SE could beef up the dungeons w/o needing to trow savage like instagibs, reaction times and enrages at people.

I am not asking for savage dungeons, I am asking for new content not to be tuned so low that it feels like outdated content the moment it is released because I happen to walk around in the casual tome gear.

I think trials are mostly fine as is.
I thought we were talking about 4man content. That has indeed become braindead easy, where I can ignore many a mechanic even when the dungeon is brand new. Imho, that is wrong. When the dungeon is new it should be a bit meaner and over time, as people get the new tome gear, it gets easier.

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Yeah, people seem to think there's nothing in the middle of "Eos can heal this" and "only the top 1% can clear it."

Experts are a joke right now. If you single pull them for some reason, you literally don't need a healer. Why do you think the wall to wall pull style exists? Because that's what we're really capable of. It's kinda sad when Auran Vale is the hardest dungeon in the game to this day. (Although based on how many people wipe in Keeper of the Lake, that could also be a contender.)

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As for 80% DPSing: I have been in S5 - S7 yesterday, and frankly, I am at a loss as to how people manage to do 2K DPS in there. I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I barely managed to squeeze in around 800ish.

Yeah sure, the ELITE can DPS like crazy b/c everyone has the content on farm and knows exactly what they are doing. But if you enter in there with a normal group that still struggles with mechanics, any healer is plenty busy saving butts and not busy throwing stones. If they leave that content as is and castrate the healers, savage will feel like a nightmare.

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I can do 2k on WHM in there, and I'm hardly elite. Can't quite on SCH, but still over 1500 reliably. It's really about not overhealing. On something like the single Ultima Upsurges in the first half of o8n, I can use Whispering Dawn to heal it. If I just let that tick, it requires no GCD healing at all, and I'm 100% DPS uptime. Not being willing to wait for the HoTs to do their job leads to using more GCD healing and lowering DPS. WHM can let Medica II do its thing although the initial cast requires a GCD.

That is group dependent. A group that is constantly taking avoidable damage isn't going to let you do that, and you'll have to top them up and shield them or they'll keep dying. Healer DPS is extremely group dependent because if you have to do enough healing to need GCD heals, you're trading between DPS and HPS. 7 tends to be bad for this because people eat missles or stand in the airborne cannon fire or get the paralyze DoT or all kinds of other stuff that you just have to deal with. The less of that you get, the better your DPS looks.

You need to factor that in when looking at your DPS and comparing. The goal is to push what DPS you can given the time you have, so don't feel bad if you can't push high numbers in that situation. Your goal is simply to improve your own efficiency. :) (It's the same for tanks going in there the first time. The goals are to hold the boss, use CDs effectively, and not eat mechanics. DPS is what you worry about after you get those things down.)

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Originally Posted by Tridus

I can do 2k on WHM in there, and I'm hardly elite. Can't quite on SCH, but still over 1500 reliably. It's really about not overhealing. On something like the single Ultima Upsurges in the first half of o8n, I can use Whispering Dawn to heal it. If I just let that tick, it requires no GCD healing at all, and I'm 100% DPS uptime. Not being willing to wait for the HoTs to do their job leads to using more GCD healing and lowering DPS. WHM can let Medica II do its thing although the initial cast requires a GCD.

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I was talking about savage, sorry if I was not precise enough. :D
Esp S6 where both tanks get hit like trucks I do not find that much time to DPS.

As for Sigma normal: not sure, typically I am the one that does the healing and my co healer gets the luxury of DPSing.
To be honest though: I find the FF-XIV community is far more obsessed about DPS than the WoW community. Apparently one does not need ingame parsing addons in order to breed this fixation on DPS at all. :P

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Originally Posted by Granyala

I was talking about savage, sorry if I was not precise enough. :D
Esp S6 where both tanks get hit like trucks I do not find that much time to DPS.

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Oh yeah, that's different. :)

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As for Sigma normal: not sure, typically I am the one that does the healing and my co healer gets the luxury of DPSing.
To be honest though: I find the FF-XIV community is far more obsessed about DPS than the WoW community. Apparently one does not need ingame parsing addons in order to breed this fixation on DPS at all. :P

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Out of game parsers are still a thing here, so that helps. It's just that XIV is a more DPS driven game. When I played WoW (vanilla through Cataclysm), fights where as a healer I had nothing to do except DPS for extended periods were the exception. You didn't go into Icecrown Citadel and find that you didn't have enough incoming damage to keep you busy. It just didn't happen outside of a specialty fight like Vaelstraz, which was fun because it was so abormal. On the hard modes at the time, keeping people alive was all you could really do. Mimiron hard is something I remember vividly because of all the damn fire, it was a chaotic mess trying to keep a raid going during that. (And the 800 Dispels when you fought the Horde team in the Colisuem raid...)

Here? I mean, XIV devs tell us they don't expect DPS and then give us o2n, which can be healed by Regen and Eos easily. What do they expect healers to do the rest of the fight if not DPS? Nothing? Healer DPS rises up as a thing because the required level of healing simply isn't that hard to deliver in most of the game (savage being the exception, but since only a minority of players ever do that, the majority won't see those, and even there people still crank out significant quantities of DPS).

The meta is ultimately a response to the game that we have and what people can do in it. If SE really doesn't want healers DPSing, they have the means to do something about it. That they made it easier in Stormblood instead of harder says something about their intentions.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

To be blunt: once a MMO introduces easy content with great rewards it is no longer possible to go back to meaner content w/o a massive backlash. Contrary to popular elitist belief, most people will NOT rise to the occasion and try to better themselves when faced with hard content. They will simply whine a bit and eventually quit.

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This is not necessarily accurate. Weeping City was a noticeable step above Void Ark yet people "got over it" despite plenty of whining. Likewise, Nidhogg and Shinryu Normal were similar hurdles with equals amounts of crying about its difficulty. Both remained untouched. Increasing difficulty needs to come through smaller increments. Many games make the mistake of simply beefing up numbers to especially high values all at once. It also needs to be established early on, say at the beginning of an expansion. Looking at leveling dungeons when closer to the ilvl. They're mostly pretty consistent. Unfortunately, said consistency all be evaporates later on as the devs release far easier content at the supposed end game.

Simply put, implement a proper difficulty curve and people will up their game without even realizing. FFXIV severely lacks in this regard; going from braindead easy to "OMG" from one fight to another.

And can we knock off the "elitist" crap? It isn't elitism to ask content outside EX and Savage not be entirely braindead. No one wants regular DF dungeons to be Savage level. I, personally, just want an excuse to not have pull the entire dungeon to feel like a tank. Likewise, I want more dynamic healing so my role isn't reduced to being a gimped DPS.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

To be honest though: I find the FF-XIV community is far more obsessed about DPS than the WoW community. Apparently one does not need ingame parsing addons in order to breed this fixation on DPS at all. :P

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This stems from how offensive focused FFXIV's design is. With on-demand mitigation tools, tanks scarcely have a reason to prioritize defense over offense unless something outright kills them. Bokchoy recently made a post about this on reddit, and goes into better detail.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._tank/dx6d4zw/

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Originally Posted by Tridus

Steps of Faith wasn't nerfed because of outrage. It was nerfed because people started abandoning it en-masse when it came up in roulette, making it difficult for people to get past that point in the MSQ. SE had to react to a MSQ block because all of Heavensward was gated behind it.

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Yeah... outrage is probably the wrong word for that. Protest is more like it.

I do wish we would have...not necessarily "harder" fights, but more mechanically-unique fights.

I want the Blitzball from Final Fantasy X where I (the player) gets to actually play the game, otherwise they can just drop the idea entirely, I don't want to play a stupid coach game!...

Blitzball in FFX was lots of fun and I really enjoyed it, of course FFXIV has so much to offer that Blitzball could easily be overlooked but it doesn't have to be something that enslaves us yet it could offer some exclusive rewards to keep players interested, nothing too competitive like PVP though!...

The Producer can't expect every single player to make use of the new mini game but the ones that do will surely have fun, as in Lord of Verminion!...

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Originally Posted by KaldeaSahaline

In what world are min ilvl dungeons "savage"? Min ilvl dungeons are still trivial...

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They aren't, but once you take the gear out of the equation, several dungeons go back to bosses having dps-races (like the demon wall), and the MSQ Praetorium self-destruct sequence. When not doing as much damage as people do now, they also take a lot longer, and you are much squishier. Every piece of content, before you out-gear it, is not the push-over people somehow believe it to be, because the skill level of a PUG is not ever constant.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

A lot of success is timing. WoW just happened along at the right time, just like Facebook did. Use in the net was booming, broadband made gaming more feasible, you had more people interested in pc gaming overall as pc prices went down etc.

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WoW was always an easy casual game. It came out the same year as FFXI and the people who played FFXI mocked WoW's easy-mode play style. Guess which direction MMO's went?

The fact that all these "better" MMO's keep coming out and failing is a testament to how people do not want hard games, and also do not want freemium game experiences that involve RNG lootbox/gachapon.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

With elite players that negate any avoidable damage and by shoving 90%+ of the healing duty onto the other healer: maybe.
When you are learning the fight (which is the time when content difficulty matters, once the boss is on farm, no one gives a hoot): yeah: no. Just: nope.

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Every other player in that log was either gray, like single digits, or green. So not what I personally would call elite.

The thing is, all content in this game (including UCoB) has been solo healed because healers are that powerful. So shifting responsibility to one healer and backing them up for when people mess up, or they fall behind tends to be optimal. Having both healers full time heal, just leads to staggering overheal because of how strong they are.

The thing about progression is that due to the design of the game you should effectively be a master of each phase after seeing it like 2-3x. You don't need to clear the fight and farm it to learn when it's good to DPS. Halfway through progression you should have that down already. You can optimize the back half in later clears or while pushing enrage progression

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@ lily idea: sure you could do that. But it would have to be pretty meaningless or else 90% of the community can't cope, the class does not get played and DEVs go haywire. You do realize what happened to the HW Black mage, right? In case you didn't: SE does not want too much of a gap in between a skilled player and a non skilled one. That's mainly why they simplified the Enochian mechanic.

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Not even remotely accurate. You're better than that. You sound like RiyahArp. Cut it out. It doesn't need to be meaningless. It just needs to reward you for making good decisions and stress you for making bad ones. Stress =/= wiping. Stress can be running low on MP, having several members at consistently low HP, etc. Players will try and find their own ways to improve to reduce stress, then you supplement the paradigm with encounter design that builds on itself and keeps a player engaged and learning.

Yes I am familiar with HW BLM. It was a grossly punished job for dropping its buff. They decided that they didn't want jobs to be deadweight if they dropped their buff and made them easier to maintain because Enochian was particularly tedious to maintain. That has very little to do with our discussion.

You wouldn't be 'grossly punished' for not using lilies optimally. You wouldn't be grossly punished for being poor at MP management. Enochian was an on/off switch which is why it was so punishing. MP management and lilies would be dynamic which inherently makes them less punishing, but in the same vein they give clear feedback as to areas you can improve in the moment.

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To be honest though: I find the FF-XIV community is far more obsessed about DPS than the WoW community. Apparently one does not need ingame parsing addons in order to breed this fixation on DPS at all. :P

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IMO - its because it's forbidden. I know we've previously discussed this at length, but in my experience, no one really talks about DPS in WoW anymore. Sure they did back in the day, but its common knowledge now where everyone can see theirs and yours so there's no need to tell someone they're awful. They can see it with their own eyes.

I think if parsers were made official and widespread there'd be a brief period of pain before it normalizes (harassers get punished and banned) and things go back to the way they were. My .02.

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Originally Posted by KaldeaSahaline

Riyah - You claim no one ever posts any ideas for alternative solutions, but when someone does you ignore it? Why did you ignore my responses to you?

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I get four or more people responding to me on posts sometimes, each with multiple points. I cull my responses so I'm not writing massive books each time I make a post.

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This revisionist history stuff is silly. If you don't like WoW, that's fine. Claiming it's a bad game and got lucky because reasons is nonsense. By any objective measure, WoW is the most successfull MMO ever made by an order of magnitude. You have to do something right to be that successful.

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PC gaming over the WoW era increased due to accessible broadband, and internet use in general boomed over that period. And yeah, it was popular, a lot of the consoles then had success because they could port pc games and copied them; Xbox in particular. And WoW is a bad game, because all those decisions destroyed what people liked about MMOs and replaced them with stuff that was inferior. And i feel the genre never recovered from that, because not all games can focus on convenience and survive. WoW is the Fallout 4 of MMOs.

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This is not necessarily accurate. Weeping City was a noticeable step above Void Ark yet people "got over it" despite plenty of whining. Likewise, Nidhogg and Shinryu Normal were similar hurdles with equals amounts of crying about its difficulty. Both remained untouched.

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Gear Ilvls rose enough to trivialize both. In a week most people jumped 20 ilvls, and people had no choice but to throw themselves at Shin. Weeping could just be ignored after an initial clear, like I said; it was actually better to do hunts because you could gear up faster. but I do remember both being unpleasant enough that if for some reason they had been harder, would have been a nasty experience for everyone.

We also have a pretty good upper limit to what people can't adapt to, zurvan ex and soar. All the raiders went on and on about how easy it was, but it was a nasty affair in general.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

PC gaming over the WoW era increased due to accessible broadband, and internet use in general boomed over that period.

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And why exactly did people go to WoW with their new PCs and internet, rather than to the games that were supposedly better...?

The old games were already established. They were already well known and didn't need as much marketing efforts, they already had friend circles playing that the new guard could join and their product had more time to mature and develop, with less bugs and server outages. Yet, people went for WoW. Because it's worse. That just doesn't quite make sense.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

Gear Ilvls rose enough to trivialize both. In a week most people jumped 20 ilvls, and people had no choice but to throw themselves at Shin. Weeping could just be ignored after an initial clear, like I said; it was actually better to do hunts because you could gear up faster. but I do remember both being unpleasant enough that if for some reason they had been harder, would have been a nasty experience for everyone.

We also have a pretty good upper limit to what people can't adapt to, zurvan ex and soar. All the raiders went on and on about how easy it was, but it was a nasty affair in general.

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Spoken like someone who never ran Weeping City when it was relevant. The mechanics were never trivialized week one. Even several months in, people were still struggling because you couldn't just burn Forgale or Ozma. They forced you to pay attention. Likewise, you were not jumping 20 ilvls unless you're playing an alt job. As for Shinryu, having to throw themselves at him has no bearing on the argument. Granyala cited, when people are opposed with an obstacle, they cry until its nerfed. Why weren't Shinryu, Ozma and Nidhogg nerfed then? All three cause plenty of backlash—Shinryu even being mentioned on a Kotaku article. Evidently, some people sucked it up and got better.

Don't omit context. Zurvan EX had numerous flaws in design, hence its criticism. They were...

- Five DPS was always superior. The OT had virtually nothing to do.
- Skipping Soar was essentially "do your opener". The fact people couldn't shows how poor such information is relayed to players in this game.
- If you did skip Soar, Zurvan did essentially nothing except autos until 50%

Skip Soar or disband may have become popular for meme-ing, however Zurvan had numerous design flaws—something the devs even acknowledged was due to an inexperienced designer.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

- Skipping Soar was essentially "do your opener". The fact people couldn't shows how poor such information is relayed to players in this game.

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I mean tool tips can only take you so far. The devs aren't going to hold your hand and say "to do a proper burst opener follow this rotation". This is an MMO, you're supposed to discuss with your fellow players and the community at large to figure that out.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

They did, and they were. I think the only content that was nerfed because of community outrage was the Steps of Faith.

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I also have this nagging sensation that it also scared SE about doing anything other than boss trials in the future, but don't quote on me on that

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

I mean tool tips can only take you so far. The devs aren't going to hold your hand and say "to do a proper burst opener follow this rotation". This is an MMO, you're supposed to discuss with your fellow players and the community at large to figure that out.

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That's all well and good but the vast majority of content in this game will not require you to perform well. Unless you're going into the latest Savage or Ex fights within a few months of release, you could be doing terribly and still get rewarded with a clear (provided your healer is healing and the tank is at least trying to hold aggro). People get a rude awakening with fights like release Shinryu NM because you can't just Netflix and chill through the whole thing, you have to actually pay attention and try. At that point they feel frustrated and blind-sided because the game never forced that on them before. For those of us who do the hard content and have already sought out how to be good at what we do, it's no big deal. For the people who have no interest in high-end content, it's a rude awakening because not once has the game even hinted that they might want to seek self-improvement. You just get echo stacks until you brute force your way through it with stats.

SE should do a better job of telling DPS players how they're doing. What standards to use, and how to do it, are definitely up for debate. But there needs to be more feedback beyond eventually killing your target before everyone dies of old age.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Increasing difficulty needs to come through smaller increments. Many games make the mistake of simply beefing up numbers to especially high values all at once.

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Wise words, definitely true. I think Cataclysms dungeons would have fared much better if Blizzard had taken several tiers in order to slowly up the difficulty again b/c at 330ilvl these dungeons were quite hard. Definitely way too hard for pugs.

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Originally Posted by KaldeaSahaline

Not even remotely accurate. [...] It doesn't need to be meaningless. It just needs to reward you for making good decisions and stress you for making bad ones. Stress =/= wiping. Stress can be running low on MP, having several members at consistently low HP, etc. Players will try and find their own ways to improve to reduce stress, then you supplement the paradigm with encounter design that builds on itself and keeps a player engaged and learning.

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It depends on the implementation of course but healing is difficult enough for most people. If you now design the classes in a way that a healer can acutally f*** up in a different manner than "forget to heal", you will make it harder for a lot of people that are already at their limit.

People like you and me would most likely cope and maybe eventually like the changes.
Though I do not want to be weak as a healer, WoW did that and it feels utterly frustrating, I play a hero damn it I want to be strong and powerful and not constantly go "yeah you just gimped, sorry, meaningful heals are on CD, nothing I can do now".

In WoW, most of the time, the only thing I can say as a healer is "You are not supposed to take so much damage, play better if you do not want to die". That sucks. Here, I just toss more healing, take the hit on DPS and save incompetent butts (within reason). Feels much better. :P

This reminds me of that guild where I was who insisted that bringing 3 healers in there was the only way to do them........

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Originally Posted by Hestzhyen

SE should do a better job of telling DPS players how they're doing. What standards to use, and how to do it, are definitely up for debate. But there needs to be more feedback beyond eventually killing your target before everyone dies of old age.

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The feedback is failing.

I mean, the DPS cause a wipe due to not enough dps and fail an encounter. Thats it. There isn't really much other way to get that feedback. And on this you really depend on the patience of others to ensure the failing isn't negative enough to turn people off the game. It's not a risk that is easy to take, especially now that console mmos aren;t a captive market and many other types of mmo games exist.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

The feedback is failing.

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Only really applies to duties with enrage timers and punishing DPS checks. You won't encounter them outside of Savage and EX for the most part, so why shouldn't players just keep being terrible since most things die eventually anyway? The only ones who really suffer for mistakes in dungeons, normal 8 man raids, trials, and 24 man raids are tanks and healers. Tanks who run out of CDs, healers who run out of mana, both who run out of emergency buttons... DPS just keep plugging away and complain when the tank dies and everyone else goes down like dominoes. The game does not tell people to monitor their aggro, read tooltips for use cases, be aware of positional advantages, or even how the targeting circle works. It just plunks you down and lets you go Blizzard things to death for a very long time without punishment. Hall of the Novice, for the little it's worth, is not required either. So we end up with people trying hard end-game fights not knowing some basic stuff like "sing songs at all times" and "know which moves do more damage from flank and rear".

The only pressure to improve DPS face in the majority of content comes from their own motivation. This places the highest visibility and responsibility on tanks and healers. It's not until people try the hard end-game stuff that they have a serious chance of causing a wipe.