Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[Granyala]

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.

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.

[Remus]

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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.

[Granyala]

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.

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.

[Gleipni]

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.

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

[RiyahArp]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

[Granyala]

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.

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.

[KaldeaSahaline]

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.

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

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Great post.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

[Granyala]

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.

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.

[KisaiTenshi]

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

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.

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.

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.

[RiyahArp]

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.