Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[Zojha]

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. >.<

Now, if only we could get a DPS design that can one-three shot anything so DPS can get the same kind of health bar moving satisfaction.

Breaking the game? Maybe. But less frustrating than looking at a boss bar barely move. And we could just, like, add more mob waves or something to compensate. Then DPS could also have that downtime feeling of healers between them, where they could throw out a group buff or heal. And we could have an endless forum debate about DPS not healing/buffing during downtime. The joy!

[RiyahArp]

Now, if only we could get a DPS design that can one-three shot anything so DPS can get the same kind of health bar moving satisfaction.!

If a DPS needed to get a boss down to 0 HP in 3 seconds or they risked wiping the raid, ok. If you want healing to be like a DPS rotation, you'd really get some boring fights.

I would like to think there exists a balance between "weak ass heals" and heals so strong, you'll spend far more time DPSing.

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.

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.

edit: 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.

[Tridus]

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.

I played WoW for years with those "weak ass heals", and their "stronger but healers still heal nearly full time" earlier incarnations, including in progression content. I know how it plays. Healers actually healed. Fights could kill you with one shots, with people eating avoidable but not lethal damage until you went OOM trying to keep up, and such.

The idea that this is some revolutionary insane concept is silly when the biggest MMO to ever exist does that exact thing to a higher degree than what's being proposed. You know what wasn't a thing in WoW? Healers spending 80% of their time DPSing and not healing.

I tend to think healers should spend more time healing than DPSing, and want a healing design to support that. Crazy stuff, right there.

[RiyahArp]

I played WoW for years with those "weak ass heals", and their "stronger but healers still heal nearly full time" earlier incarnations, including in progression content. I know how it plays. Healers actually healed. Fights could kill you with one shots, with people eating avoidable but not lethal damage until you went OOM trying to keep up, and such.

The idea that this is some revolutionary insane concept is silly when the biggest MMO to ever exist does that exact thing to a higher degree than what's being proposed. You know what wasn't a thing in WoW? Healers spending 80% of their time DPSing and not healing.

I tend to think healers should spend more time healing than DPSing, and want a healing design to support that. Crazy stuff, right there.

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

They'd have to rebalance every single encounter in this game for a much lower, slower level of healing, and reduce a lot of spike damage in frequency and severity, as well as not limit the fights to 8 man instances with very strict enrages. 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. You can maybe mitigate this by adding support abilities and keeping heals high potency but OGCD only, but that's such a radical change that would be on the level of HW bard.

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.

Pretty sure that was sarcasm.

Except my retort was explaining why DPS don't need that and healers do.

I have red mage at lvl70, poorly geared to boot at item level just barely above 300. I still heal 10000 out of ~40000-50000HP that tanks with higher than me item level have. That's A LOT. Recently I was in a party where the healer did get disconnected. I managed to keep the party alive and sending an attack or two in the middle. Sure, I didn't get to heal the members to full HP or anything, just barely kept them alive...but I was not a healer. Of course, this was only in a dungeon, and I think lvl60 one. But hey.

Go try sustain healing with that. You find quickly it's not enough.

Of course there's never any clears posted with red mages being the sole healers. Why?! Every heal that red mages use IS A DPS LOSS. Why would a red mage cast heals if they can deal more damage than the healer can with every cast, and on top of that the healer can cast only ONE heal for a similar effect that the red mage needs TWO? Red mages are able to solo-heal a LOT of content. But it's STUPID for them to do it when the party WILL have a healer.

you clear with it because you want the challenge, like clears with pld. And no, they cannot solo heal a lot of content. The tank gets hit by a 25k tankbuster, and you will get overwhelmed in time unless its a very easy fight.

[Tridus]

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

I've told you a billion times to stop exaggerating.

They'd have to rebalance every single encounter in this game for a much lower, slower level of healing, and reduce a lot of spike damage in frequency and severity, as well as not limit the fights to 8 man instances with very strict enrages. 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. You can maybe mitigate this by adding support abilities and keeping heals high potency but OGCD only, but that's such a radical change that would be on the level of HW bard.

No they wouldn't. Certain fights would need retuning. Most wouldn't, especially when they're old and vastly outgeared already anyway. Instead of it taking 2.5 seconds to recover from something, it'd take 5. Then I'm back to DPSing. Half the time no more damage is coming in that few seconds anyway, so it makes no difference whatsoever except lower healer DPS. And since people are so fond of telling us that they don't factor healer DPS into designing encounters, having less of it won't affect anything, right?

I mean, you seriously think that Xelphatol, the dungeon of 82% DPS time for healers, is going to suddenly break when that number drops to 60%? That's hilarious.

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.

For certain definitions of "works" and for a very clearly defined goal. If you think "healers should spend more time healing than DPSing" is too complicated, then I really can't help you.

[Zojha]

No they wouldn't. Certain fights would need retuning.

You don't even necessarily need to re-tune fights. It's a lot easier than that.

When the next expansion comes around, you simply ramp up health pools massively while keeping the scaling of healing relatively the same so that the same healing potencies restore a smaller percentage of the health bar. Then you use the 10 levels you add anyway to introduce new healing mechanics via skills and traits so people don't need to spam the same skills, because that'd be boring. And you can tune the new fights to the new paradigm, leaving the old as they were.

We're living in vertical progression land. Health goes up anyway, new abilities/gameplay is introduced anyway, encounters are re-tuned to the new abilities and stats anyway. The only question is whether Yoshida would like healers to be healers or if he's fine with them being green DPS. As it stands, he says he'd like them to be healers but designs them as green DPS, which is just awkward.

[kikix12]

If a DPS needed to get a boss down to 0 HP in 3 seconds or they risked wiping the raid, ok. If you want healing to be like a DPS rotation, you'd really get some boring fights.

Pretty sure that was sarcasm.

Get your red mage up to 70, try vercuring some.

I have red mage at lvl70, poorly geared to boot at item level just barely above 300. I still heal 10000 out of ~40000-50000HP that tanks with higher than me item level have. That's A LOT. Recently I was in a party where the healer did get disconnected. I managed to keep the party alive and sending an attack or two in the middle. Sure, I didn't get to heal the members to full HP or anything, just barely kept them alive...but I was not a healer. Of course, this was only in a dungeon, and I think lvl60 one. But hey.

It's only real benefit is that it can be instant; notice there's never any "only rdm to heal" clears posted anywhere.

Of course there's never any clears posted with red mages being the sole healers. Why?! Every heal that red mages use IS A DPS LOSS. Why would a red mage cast heals if they can deal more damage than the healer can with every cast, and on top of that the healer can cast only ONE heal for a similar effect that the red mage needs TWO? Red mages are able to solo-heal a LOT of content. But it's STUPID for them to do it when the party WILL have a healer.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

[Granyala]

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.

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.

[KaldeaSahaline]

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. >.<

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Don't be so petty and dismissive...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.