Will Healers Still be Forced to DPS in 4.0 Due to Lax Content?

[Fyce]

I don't think anyone is saying that it is a mistake (as in accident). I know full well it is deliberate, BUT the thing is it does not have to be this way. I have played pretty much every MMO that has been on the market for the past 20 years and this is the ONLY one that has been like this. Maybe this is how they want it (clearly it is... at least for the time being) but that won't stop me from hoping that one day it may not be so. Plenty of other games have a very large casual contingency yet somehow they are able to provide more healing opportunity.

When people say that it's "badly designed", they often think that the reasons beind these design decisions are bad or that there's simply no reason behind it. So, I just wanted to remind everyone that reasons do exist and that they were good and legitimate ones.
That aside, I'll have to disagree on your stance that "evey MMORPG does it the other way". A lot of modern "action" MMORPG aren't focused on HPS that much. Besides, healers often play the role of CC supports with a variety of offensive CC skills and buffs that doesn't do much in terms of healing. "Pure healing" is something even D&D doesn't do. And successful MMO with a "WoW" gameplay are quite old now. Stuff change. The "old ways" aren't guaranteed to be the best. Especially not when the audience changes as well.

Raising HPS requirements will only do one thing only: make bad healers have to switch, or even quit the game.

I don't think that making healing harder would make it more fun. It will just take a few GCD that you'd spend on casting Stone, and make you use Cure instead. For me, both are just a button to push, it doesn't make much of a difference. It only raises the chances of failure, and thus the overall amount of wipes we'll have to deal with.

So, maybe that the current balance is a bit leaning towards the easy side slightly too much, but it's hard not to be biased as we now had to spent many months being overgeared, thanks to (or because of) the Creator being easier, and ways of getting i270 being plenty.
Hard to tell if Stormblood will be as easy.

Therein lies the problem because the devs cry foul at our expectations for healer DPS yet cannot appreciate why such expectations exist. The same applies to tanks doing mass pulls, which we know the devs are less than fond of. When content is tuned this easy, people push the limits. I don't even do mass pulls for speed, I do them to feel like a tank since anything less than six mobs means I may as well delete my cooldowns. I'll certainly have no need of them. Frankly, I would argue it is a design flaw due to the devs desire to bridge the skill gap. They have made around about amendments, which I do like, but have missed this game's lack of difficulty contributes significantly to that skill gap. When players can clear content with gear a year out of date, what incentive do they have to improve? There is no sense of urgency; no need to progress. So when they attempt Savage, it utterly demolishes them since the normal mode equivalent barely requires five people.

As I said, my post was focused on non-savage content. It's true that the only incentive to gear up in "normal" content is solely to improve clear times. But isn't that enough? Do you really want to have some 4-man dungeons in your roulette that can't be cleared simply because your healer cannot keep up with HPS just because of his gear? I don't think it'd be fun, honestly. And it appears that the devs are on my side on this.

On the other hand, regarding savage content, a lot of groups simply cannot clear a fight if they don't gear up. They just hit a wall where they say "well, we'll have to farm the previous battles to gear up a bit, and spend a few weeks of tomes as well". So, here's your incentive.

[Aramina]

I don't think that making healing harder would make it more fun. It will just take a few GCD that you'd spend on casting Stone, and make you use Cure instead. For me, both are just a button to push, it doesn't make much of a difference. It only raises the chances of failure, and thus the overall amount of wipes we'll have to deal with.

That's fair, I can see what you mean. Let's see if I can explain how I see things though.... I want my contributions to be meaningful. While doing dps is certainly not meaningless, in that damage is never meaningless, it is also not meaningful for the most part. Whether I dps or not is not going to make or break an encounter and if what I do doesn't matter in the long run... why am I there? If healing requirements were higher than I would have a sense of accomplishment knowing that had I not done my part then we would have failed. I do understand your point though about other people not wanting to be in the situation where if someone fails then they don't complete their objective, so admittedly, my views are a touch on the selfish side if I think of it that way. :P Maybe Savage raiding *is* the answer but I find it a bit sad that there is effectively nothing in between pants-on-head and must commit to x amount of time.

TL;DR I guess ultimately my complaint is less about the difficulty (or lack thereof) of story/side dungeons and more about a lack of content for people who want their play to be purposeful, even if they do not have the desire/ability to commit to a static.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

As I said, my post was focused on non-savage content. It's true that the only incentive to gear up in "normal" content is solely to improve clear times. But isn't that enough? Do you really want to have some 4-man dungeons in your roulette that can't be cleared simply because your healer cannot keep up with HPS just because of his gear? I don't think it'd be fun, honestly. And it appears that the devs are on my side on this.

On the other hand, regarding savage content, a lot of groups simply cannot clear a fight if they don't gear up. They just hit a wall where they say "well, we'll have to farm the previous battles to gear up a bit, and spend a few weeks of tomes as well". So, here's your incentive.

To an extent, yes. I don't think current Experts should be easily doable in gear a large portion of the playerbase has replaced. Xelphatol released with a minimum ilvl 210 when anyone who played throughout 3.3 had 240 while 250 was the new standard. This meant we outgeared both Experts by upwards of 40 ilvls without even touching Savage or the EX Primals. Gear levels is not the only issue. There is no mob priority or need to heal half the time. I hearken back to the healer DPS expectation and how Yoshida said he dislikes us in Cleric Stance so much. Well, I'm sorry, but if I wasn't, I may as well make dinner while playing otherwise I'll literally being standing around. Even the easiest content should incentivize the roles selected. PotD on the higher floors does a decent job without going overboard. You have to heal fairly regularly and mass pulls are ill-advised. If dungeons started off hitting pretty hard so you were less inclined to pull the room, but as you gear, you can get away with more. That would feel rewarding. Most of Heavensward's were faceroll at release. The exceptions were Leveling ironically. Balesar's Wall and Solm Al Hard had some good ideas too.

Savage doesn't have this problem but EX saw a steady decline in difficulty. Incidentally, the ease of Zurvan led to the "Skip Soar or Disband" mindset. In all fairness to the devs though, they've mentioned mechanic skips like Soar were a mistake. So hopefully they correct that.

Just to clarify since you mentioned it to Aramina. I am not advocate for just a HP spike, but instead greater variety. I often use PotD as a template because it does a lot of things right. You have priority mobs to discourage aoe spamming; surprise spawns; patrolling mobs; higher damage in lieu higher HP. All of these give PotD a bit of dynamism and make even a couple mobs more interesting. The reason people find dungeons boring, in my opinion, is there's nothing to them. We just pull everything and aoe them all down. Doesn't matter what they do or what they look like; just aoe 'em all down.

[Fyce]

-snip-

Don't get me wrong, I completly understand where you're coming from and what you want in terms of design. But, again, the more you raise healer's expectations (from a healing perspective), the more people will fail.

In the infamous 111 pages thread, one defender of the "princess healers" posted this video. The time stamp I put in the link highlight a wipe on Ziggy because of a number of bad decisions and lack of appropriate reactions from the Healer in particular (running in 3 AoE, failing to do the mechanic, and then failing to heal herself). If you ask more from that kind of healer, they will not be able to clear in a reasonable amount of time unless they get good teammates to carry them. This is already a ~38mn run on a main story dungeon. You really can't give them one or two more wipes.

So, when I say that increasing the healer's responsability in terms of healing will make some people quit the job, I really mean it. One might say something like "if they're so bad at healing, then they shouldn't be playing with that role! Especially if that lowers the skill floor for other healers". But I don't think that SE likes that idea, at all. This is why the design of the healer role is like that: you have a very low skill floor when it comes to healing, but if you want to squeeze every GCD you can, then oGCD and risk management comes in play. Besides, that goes quite well with the Final Fantasy franchise.

FFXIV is a mainstream game. So SE has to please a wide variety of players. The current healer design is a very good compromise in that aspect.

Again, I understand that people who choose to play healer want to heal. But that's not possible in the "core" content. Hardcore progression is where they should be heading if they want a challenge in terms of healing, as oGCD, GCD, MP and HPS management is crucial.

I truely think that this is the best they can do to please everyone as much as possible.

[Shurrikhan]

Snip

Resultant question then: "Would the game be in a better place if shit healers were to get good or get out?"

That potential sub number of princess healers with no other role is quite a blow, but then, so too can be the numbers lost to lack of interest among more skilled players.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

snip

Likewise, I do see your side better. And while I don't necessarily disagree. I do have to posit the question of whether that should be the intent; if you aren't playing your job correctly you will eventually be unable to progress. Believe me when I say I know Kisa. Her obstinance would make even Gandhi want to smack her. But she's the perfect example of the game allowing bad players to progress. Granted, Antitower is what, a year old now? So perhaps it isn't the best example. That being said, I still feel the net positive outweighs the negative. Although some people would inevitably quit, it could also incentivize others to try healing whereas they once found it boring. People who have quit this game often cite how boring content is outside raids. While I do like a handful of dungeons, I can appreciate their arguments as to way given how straight forward everything is.

This is where we disagree though. When you can spend as much time as we do DPSing or standing around, I just can't say that's good design. Even in the video linked, they wiped because everyone didn't respond to mechanics. I know Pharos Sirius is brought up a lot, but people whined over Final Steps of Faith and Weeping yet this time the devs said no. They got over it. So it's not quite cut and dry how people would respond if the devs didn't nerf things.

[Fyce]

-Snipidisnip-

Well, I was just explaining the design choices from the point of view of SE. Yoshi-P will never say that it's actually tuned for "bad players", but it is. That's why he's forced to say that stuff like "healers DPS isn't mandatory". It's not mandatory, but the changes of Stormblood bloody well reinforce the idea that downtime should be filled with damage GCDs. Or else they wouldn't make that easier.

Personally? I think that we'd need another kind of content entirely. Currently, dungeons allow every role to be trash, not only healers. No tank buster will kill a tank even without cooldowns. No boss have enrage mechanics or DPS checks hard enough to force DPS jobs to do a proper rotation. I mean, you can still fail on some occasions, but eventually you'll clear it (38 minutes Antitower in mind).
So, if they were to raise the skill floor in dungeons, they'd have to do it for every job, not only healers. And that might be too much of a change.

Now that we know about the Stormblood cycle of 2 dungeons/1 dungeon+new content, I hope that this "new content" will be what we are looking for.

[Aramina]

Now that we know about the Stormblood cycle of 2 dungeons/1 dungeon+new content, I hope that this "new content" will be what we are looking for.

We can hope. If there ends up being Savage dungeons or something like that I will never again complain about the ease of the normal roulette dungeons.

[Shurrikhan]

Just to clarify since you mentioned it to Aramina. I am not advocate for just a HP spike, but instead greater variety. I often use PotD as a template because it does a lot of things right. You have priority mobs to discourage aoe spamming; surprise spawns; patrolling mobs; higher damage in lieu higher HP. All of these give PotD a bit of dynamism and make even a couple mobs more interesting. The reason people find dungeons boring, in my opinion, is there's nothing to them. We just pull everything and aoe them all down. Doesn't matter what they do or what they look like; just aoe 'em all down.

As much as I'm generally a critic of PotD, in odd comps or at high floors at least, this is a concept really worth enjoying and one I'd love to see entered into more of the dungeon experience. Heck, it's probably the first thing in XIV to actually feel like a (traditional/archetypal) dungeon experience. The rest, while enjoyable when making the most of the paradigm, are pedal-powered roller coasters.

[Aramina]

As much as I'm generally a critic of PotD, in odd comps or at high floors at least, this is a concept really worth enjoying and one I'd love to see entered into more of the dungeon experience. Heck, it's probably the first thing in XIV to actually feel like a (traditional/archetypal) dungeon experience. The rest, while enjoyable when making the most of the paradigm, are pedal-powered roller coasters.

To piggyback you guys a bit: I, too, am not advocating a simple "shit hits harder" deal. I want to have to think about what I am casting, when I am casting, and on whom I am casting it.

As to whether or not it would be better or not for sub numbers? Clearly I can't answer that, none of us can, but I have always been of the mind that it is better to (potentially) overtune and have to come down a notch rather than not try at all.

Also: Gear acts as a natural nerf to content. For story dungeons low (no) difficulty is fine... but there could be actual expert dungeons (seperate from MSQ) that maybe not everyone is intended to do on day 1. Maybe they need to get some more gear to cover for any lack in skill.