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!

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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. >.<

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Risvertasashi]

The problem there is that healing creep just makes people ignore the vulnerability debuffs. Now if the debuffs were always negative (eg burrs from Aurum Vale) as they stack and didn't time out, then perhaps we would see a mechanic that has a damage curve that is exponential that leads into a wipe if the healer doesn't remove the debuffs.

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.

[Granyala]

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

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

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. WoW had the former up until Cataclysm and then switched to the latter. That's also when healing stopped being fun for me, I'd hate to see the same happen in FF.

I do agree wholeheartedly that mobs in 4mans should stop hitting like wet noodles. There should be more to heal. That won't be happening though, considering that people going into a new dungeon overgear it by 30 item levels, even when we only wear tome gear.

[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.