Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[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...

snip

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.

[Zojha]

PC gaming over the WoW era increased due to accessible broadband, and internet use in general boomed over that period.

And why exactly did people go to WoW with their new PCs and internet, rather than to the games that were supposedly better...?

The old games were already established. They were already well known and didn't need as much marketing efforts, they already had friend circles playing that the new guard could join and their product had more time to mature and develop, with less bugs and server outages. Yet, people went for WoW. Because it's worse. That just doesn't quite make sense.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

Spoken like someone who never ran Weeping City when it was relevant. The mechanics were never trivialized week one. Even several months in, people were still struggling because you couldn't just burn Forgale or Ozma. They forced you to pay attention. Likewise, you were not jumping 20 ilvls unless you're playing an alt job. As for Shinryu, having to throw themselves at him has no bearing on the argument. Granyala cited, when people are opposed with an obstacle, they cry until its nerfed. Why weren't Shinryu, Ozma and Nidhogg nerfed then? All three cause plenty of backlash—Shinryu even being mentioned on a Kotaku article. Evidently, some people sucked it up and got better.

Don't omit context. Zurvan EX had numerous flaws in design, hence its criticism. They were...

- Five DPS was always superior. The OT had virtually nothing to do.
- Skipping Soar was essentially "do your opener". The fact people couldn't shows how poor such information is relayed to players in this game.
- If you did skip Soar, Zurvan did essentially nothing except autos until 50%

Skip Soar or disband may have become popular for meme-ing, however Zurvan had numerous design flaws—something the devs even acknowledged was due to an inexperienced designer.

[DrWho2010]

- Skipping Soar was essentially "do your opener". The fact people couldn't shows how poor such information is relayed to players in this game.

I mean tool tips can only take you so far. The devs aren't going to hold your hand and say "to do a proper burst opener follow this rotation". This is an MMO, you're supposed to discuss with your fellow players and the community at large to figure that out.

[Hestzhyen]

I mean tool tips can only take you so far. The devs aren't going to hold your hand and say "to do a proper burst opener follow this rotation". This is an MMO, you're supposed to discuss with your fellow players and the community at large to figure that out.

That's all well and good but the vast majority of content in this game will not require you to perform well. Unless you're going into the latest Savage or Ex fights within a few months of release, you could be doing terribly and still get rewarded with a clear (provided your healer is healing and the tank is at least trying to hold aggro). People get a rude awakening with fights like release Shinryu NM because you can't just Netflix and chill through the whole thing, you have to actually pay attention and try. At that point they feel frustrated and blind-sided because the game never forced that on them before. For those of us who do the hard content and have already sought out how to be good at what we do, it's no big deal. For the people who have no interest in high-end content, it's a rude awakening because not once has the game even hinted that they might want to seek self-improvement. You just get echo stacks until you brute force your way through it with stats.

SE should do a better job of telling DPS players how they're doing. What standards to use, and how to do it, are definitely up for debate. But there needs to be more feedback beyond eventually killing your target before everyone dies of old age.

[RiyahArp]

SE should do a better job of telling DPS players how they're doing. What standards to use, and how to do it, are definitely up for debate. But there needs to be more feedback beyond eventually killing your target before everyone dies of old age.

The feedback is failing.

I mean, the DPS cause a wipe due to not enough dps and fail an encounter. Thats it. There isn't really much other way to get that feedback. And on this you really depend on the patience of others to ensure the failing isn't negative enough to turn people off the game. It's not a risk that is easy to take, especially now that console mmos aren;t a captive market and many other types of mmo games exist.

[Hestzhyen]

The feedback is failing.

Only really applies to duties with enrage timers and punishing DPS checks. You won't encounter them outside of Savage and EX for the most part, so why shouldn't players just keep being terrible since most things die eventually anyway? The only ones who really suffer for mistakes in dungeons, normal 8 man raids, trials, and 24 man raids are tanks and healers. Tanks who run out of CDs, healers who run out of mana, both who run out of emergency buttons... DPS just keep plugging away and complain when the tank dies and everyone else goes down like dominoes. The game does not tell people to monitor their aggro, read tooltips for use cases, be aware of positional advantages, or even how the targeting circle works. It just plunks you down and lets you go Blizzard things to death for a very long time without punishment. Hall of the Novice, for the little it's worth, is not required either. So we end up with people trying hard end-game fights not knowing some basic stuff like "sing songs at all times" and "know which moves do more damage from flank and rear".

The only pressure to improve DPS face in the majority of content comes from their own motivation. This places the highest visibility and responsibility on tanks and healers. It's not until people try the hard end-game stuff that they have a serious chance of causing a wipe.