DualShocker Interview - 3.5 pt 2 next week, supposedly

[Kosmos992k]

Then Paladin will continue to warm the bench for yet another raid tier. They can buff Paladin's defenses through the moon. The only pertinent questions people at endgame care about are:

- Can Warrior and Dark Knight survive the incoming damage?
- Can both the healers heal either whilst maintaining high DPS relevant to the reduced damage Paladin takes?
- Does Paladin provide better utility?

If the answer to the first two questions is yes and the last no? Many raiders won't care what Paladin does. It's deemed inferior because damage is all that matters in FFXIV. White Mage suffers the same issue right now in that it's designed to be a raw burst healer yet no fight requires burst healing. And it's two counterparts can easily cover whatever incoming damage there is while providing vastly superior raid utility. The devs either have to devise a means of punishing players who value DPS above all else or overhaul the design of both jobs and give them equivalent utility.

To me, this suggests that the game might be better off without the raiding tier since it is the raiding meta that is distorting the rest of he game. I'm not suggesting that raiding should, or will be dropped, but so many points in discussions come down to whether or not the proposed change will work for raiders. To me, that says that much of the core eleent of the game is predicated on raiding, and honestly, I think that's unhealthy for the game as a whole. We've been suffering this DPS meta for almost the entire life of FFXIV since ARR. It's time to go in another direction IMHO.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

To me, this suggests that the game might be better off without the raiding tier since it is the raiding meta that is distorting the rest of he game. I'm not suggesting that raiding should, or will be dropped, but so many points in discussions come down to whether or not the proposed change will work for raiders. To me, that says that much of the core eleent of the game is predicated on raiding, and honestly, I think that's unhealthy for the game as a whole. We've been suffering this DPS meta for almost the entire life of FFXIV since ARR. It's time to go in another direction IMHO.

Because no other content matters in terms of balancing. Normal modes and dungeons are complete facerolls. You scarily even need to know your rotation, nevermind anything else. Without Extremes and Savage, the devs have to develop brand new content. Keep in mind, those harder difficulties are more or less the same fights scaled up. It's a simple task to scale existing fights whereas eliminating them completely means you're guaranteed to lose a large portion of your playerbase. The impact wouldn't just be felt on the raid scene either. No raids means you have no need of pots, food or crafted gear, thus putting a sizable dent in the crafting market. You then have to ask what keeps even the casual players interested? If Alexander Normal and Dun Scaith were all we got. Well, you certainly don't need 260 or 270 gear. What motivation do they have to repeatedly run content? There's a massive trickle down effect to removing Savage.

We're suffering this DPS meta because the devs do not offer an alternative. Fight designs all revolve around damage and nothing else. Healers are too powerful, thus they have ample down time and are expected to DPS. Tanks have little use of their tank stance because every fight is entirely predictable. After prog, you'll know when to swap and will inevitably spend the vast majority without it. That all said, plenty of players like the harder PvE focus. You can't just have a game of entirely faceroll content or people will get bored.

[Theodric]

I think one of the biggest issues is that 'regular' content is very easy outright for many players with a decent amount of experience with the game. Many encounters are very generous in regards to not punishing players for their mistakes and a lot of players have access to gear that increases their damage and health to a point where they easily survive most things that the game throws their way. I've seen people soak up multiple AoE's and survive due to an attentive healer - and it isn't unusual for a dungeon to involve pulling multiple enemies at once and then killing them with AoE.

I'd like to see more engaging content that takes a similar approach to the higher floors in POTD. You need to be cautious with how many enemies you pull at once, there's traps to watch out for and every enemy has at least one special ability to watch out for. At the very highest floors getting hit by any AoE at all will result in death. So the stakes are high and the rewards are actually pretty decent all things considered. Unfortunately actually getting there is needlessly tedious - you need to first find three other people to team up with who will be around at set times. You also need to tackle 50-100 without a single wipe which isn't too difficult in itself and most people wanting to do the higher floors will have already done already dozens of times over. One of the biggest challenges is finding people with a schedule that aligns with one's own. A lot of players in this game are very flaky in that regard.

[Ryel]

To me, this suggests that the game might be better off without the raiding tier since it is the raiding meta that is distorting the rest of he game. I'm not suggesting that raiding should, or will be dropped, but so many points in discussions come down to whether or not the proposed change will work for raiders. To me, that says that much of the core eleent of the game is predicated on raiding, and honestly, I think that's unhealthy for the game as a whole. We've been suffering this DPS meta for almost the entire life of FFXIV since ARR. It's time to go in another direction IMHO.

There's a fundamental lack of understanding of both human nature and game design 101 with comments like this.

Let me preface, I understand you think we should go in another direction when it comes to class balance due to the DPS meta but what you need to understand is that optimization will always be a thing and its a universal common in MMOs.

This is because MMOs use skinner box concepts of effort/time v reward which means efficacy, optimization and repeat success are often rewarded while outside of the box thinking (which can be fun) isn't universally adopted unless it proves to be more efficient in either ease to execute or time involved.

MMO job balance (especially in subscription based MMOs) will almost universally be based around wherever the highest level rewards are obtained due to them being the largest carrot in the game by which all other reward systems are compared to and balanced against.

So this is usually raids.

However lets put aside raids for a moment and assume they balanced jobs around say... dungeons.

Because dungeons are meant to be run more than once, players will then adopt the speed-running meta (even more-so than we already do now) because this is what class balance and reward systems would be determined by.

Faster dungeons = more dungeons completed = faster loot.

So...

The Tank able to deal with the largest pulls, hold threat and contribute damage would be the meta pick.
The DPS able to do the most AoE damage and deal with bosses would be meta pick.
The Healer able to heal the largest pulls and output the most damage would be meta pick.

This would always be the case no matter which way the devs push the numbers, because players will always gravitate towards the most successful combination.

What if they balanced around FATEs?

The jobs able to accrue the most participation values would then be the ones that shined the most. This means anything that uses DoTs (sup SMN) would instantly be tossed to the wayside as you would see massive influxes of healers and tanks spamming threat generation abilities in order to get max credit.

The list continues when applied to ANY content in the game. Players will always go with what works the best.

This doesn't even take into account that content like that isn't even difficult enough to actually see real balance against anyway, unless you're proposing they start creating savage dungeons on the level of raids in which case the meta will simply become whatever 4 job composition completes the instance easiest / fastest which makes it a moot point.

So back to raids

There are a couple of solutions to the problem.

A) Every role is able to do the exact same thing with different colored abilities AKA perfect homogenization.

This is boring because the razor thin differences in classes we already have would disappear entirely, this means DRK/PLD/WAR would have every ability do the exact same thing under every single circumstance, they would just be skinned differently.

Which incidentally is the avenue they seem to be pushing towards, they just haven't fully committed because they know people would get bored and likely unsub.

B) Aspects of the battle and encounter system would have to be redesigned from the ground up to allow more variance in the way we approach encounters.

This is massive can of worms because whatever change made will eventually be optimized on a per fight basis, its just how things always end up. Look at every single MMO in existence if you need reference on this. The woes of battle systems and class balance is something that plagues nearly every single multiplayer game because there are just massive numbers of variables in playstyles and approach that developers cannot account for.

This also works counter to the Duty Finder because a fight with too many possible encounter scenarios / strategies means the most popular / known one will likely be the one that is the easiest to execute and the jobs that favor that strategy will be preferred.

Which leads to the final issue

Players by far understand the game better than developers do.

It's funny because people always come up with the "let the devs do X because they know better" which almost universally Is not the case, developers may have a vision that they want things to fall in line with but it's almost impossible to brute force players to act in an specific manner and it still be considered fun.

Don't believe me?

Read Yoshida's comments on things like NIN/MCH/AST/WAR all when players were backing up how the jobs either performed way above or way below developer expectations because either players were just plain better than the developers at playing the game (See: NIN damage) or party composition / encounter level / tested gear did not match what the developers were planning (see jobs performing differently with gear/party variance).

It's not even a phenomenon unique to FFXIV, there are tons of game developers who have straight up admitted that classes/characters/jobs/specs/warframes/champions/heroes/etc have performed entirely different in live play than they initially planned.

It's why we have balance patches to begin with.

And why some games have public test servers.

So yeah you're looking at the symptom but not the actual problem.

Also I implore you to read this carefully should you chose to respond so we dont suffer another misunderstanding.

[Felis]

Why doesn't Ala Mhigo have its own housing plots?

If Ala Mhigo have a housing plot then it will be only for Garleans, not or adventurers.
Or a housing plot that look like a slum.

[Zojha]

[...] and every enemy has at least one special ability to watch out for.

In fairness: This is already the case. It's typically a telegraphed AoE and if you do a mass pull, you'll often have dozens of them flung right at you. Getting hit by one just... usually doesn't matter. Healers can pick up the slack easily.

The whole "insta-death" paradigm that's not just in higher floors of PotD, but also in Savage is a symptom of healer power - nothing else but death matters, because only death has a considerable cost to erase. And at times, even death only matters because of the stat debuff that might prevent you from beating enrage.

Personally, I don't think punishing people with an instant:"You're out." card, i.E. death if they make a mistake is particularly fun design. I much prefer it the way most games do it: You can get hit multiple times, but replenishments for your HP are scarce. Alas, healers again - They're too powerful to allow for that.

We're suffering this DPS meta because the devs do not offer an alternative.

More precisely: We're suffering this DPS meta because the game revolves around lowering health bars to 0 in order to win a fight and the only way to do that is to deal damage. Damage is what matters, the only thing that matters. Everything else is fluff - You do it if it's required, to the degree it is required, but afterwards go back to damage, because only damage will further your win.

It's a common metagame - Every shooter, every fighting game, most bullet hell and strategy games as well as tower defense games have the same. Probably a lot more. They have different ways on how to deal that damage, but on the meta level, all of these games are identical - there are health bars, hit points or whatever and you want to reduce those to 0 to win the round/game.

As such, I have a hard time considering it inherently flawed. It just has grave consequences for the trinity design: Two parts of said trinity are only as relevant as they are required. They are fluff. And for a player, it sucks if your chosen identity is essentially fluff.

There is no systemic fix for that - You can invalidate damage as win condition to put the importance on mitigation/healing, but that only shifts the issue around: Now you only deal as much damage as required and then go to mitigation/healing, whereas previously, you'd mitigate/heal as required and then go to dealing damage. That's not making things better.

All you can try is to require so much healing/mitigation, that the respective roles cannot do much else, because they're so busy just fulfilling that role. That doesn't fix the issue, mind you - DPS is still king. But at least the players of these roles would not feel or be urged to DPS, because realistically, they can't.
For that to happen however you'd need drastic nerfs and far higher complexity - As it stands, mitigation is largely something passive, you only actively mitigate when a tankbuster comes in by pressing a single CD. It would have to change to something highly active.
Likewise, healers would need far higher complexity in their healing, because just nerfing their potencies alone would result in nothing but a boring Cure spam. That gets rid of the downtime that makes people urge them to DPS, but it's not engaging. Maximizing your AoE healing output should require far more than medica II, then spam medica I. Maximizing single target healing output should require far more than putting a regen on them and spamming Cure II. Then, maybe, we can also stop having healer checks be all about unforgiving timers, because as it is, whether it's a prey mechanic, a tank buster or AoE nukes, it's all only about knowing the timer for the mechanic by heart and pressing the solution heal for it, otherwise death/wipe happens.

[Starkbeaumont]

the "dps meta" isn't a the problem.
the problem is that what works for the pioneers is often enforced on the majority.
more damage for a faster clear was never the issue, but asking ppl to do more damage without understanding the fight itself. you often see midcore ppl or pugs try to skip certain things, cause it's too hard to learn something. though you could simply do the mechanic and deal with it. and after you understand the fight you can still try to optimize and do more damage.
just look at zurvan and soar. it's such an easy mechanic but instead of learning how it works and just assign positions before the fight, ppl were asked to skip it with damage and later in the fight to cheese is with tank lb. broken seal is the tougher mechanic.

[Shougun]

If Ala Mhigo have a housing plot then it will be only for Garleans, not or adventurers.
Or a housing plot that look like a slum.

Lol not sure how many people would want to have a house in an area like the slums but.. it would be a cool place to have, like in 2 or 3 expansions from now you have a Midgard inspired Garlean location, and you could be in part of the very lofty fancy section, middle class normal area, or like the trash heap where you might find Tifa's bar and stuff like that.

Would love to see a Zanarkand, Altissia, or Jeuno like city if it's possible in the lore. Although I guess ultimately I'd like to see these things as theme packs for an instanced housing area, so SE could design overworld content and then take those assets and make a smaller sandbox for players to dream in (rather than creating an entire district). .

On Paladin I think they could make a support tank desirable, but the support skills need to be strong AND not only about healing - right now I'd consider Warrior almost a better support, maybe actually is depending on situation, because their debuff is so good (which seems a bit backwards to me in theme). If they can't do something like that then they should just make each tank have different core design mechanics but all offer very similar end results, including damage (so that'd mean drastically increasing Paladin's output). First one would could do things similar in end results but will of course be more fun to balance lol, second one will make the tanks feel a little bit more like "pick your favorite color of the same flavor of ice cream").

[Katana190]

Snip

Very good write up! I suggest people read this one.

Idk what people expect, it will always be a DPS meta, and they'll always be a meta comp. Best the devs can do is close the gap between jobs being viable, as it stands now every job is viable but the gap is too large, ie casters, monks, paladins and white mages.

[Ririta]

If Ala Mhigo have a housing plot then it will be only for Garleans, not or adventurers.
Or a housing plot that look like a slum.

I wouldn't mind it, just wanted to live in Ala Mhigo.

Though I remember hearing that we'd have to liberate it before exploring the city so that woudn't be a problem I think.