Encounter Design needs to be overhauled at a fundamental level

[Krotoan]

"But Kalise, look at all the shiny new mechanics we now have in this new Extreme-Mega-Ultimate-Savage-Hardcore-Super-Gosu Raid encounter compared to ye olde Sastasha!" I hear you cry, but while we have more diverse mechanics, the core gameplay is still the same.

while you bring up some interesting and completely valid new possible additions, ultra-mega-supra-level3saiyajin-avatarmode-tripleenrage-SSS modes are the content made for people who don't find challenge in the basics. If you make the normal encounters like this, the inclusiveness to all levels of players ramps down extremely quickly. Considering the amount of PuGs I get who cannot deal with the basics I am gunshy of raising the floor.

[Gemina]

while you bring up some interesting and completely valid new possible additions, ultra-mega-supra-level3saiyajin-avatarmode-tripleenrage-SSS modes are the content made for people who don't find challenge in the basics. If you make the normal encounters like this, the inclusiveness to all levels of players ramps down extremely quickly. Considering the amount of PuGs I get who cannot deal with the basics I am gunshy of raising the floor.

I don't think anyone is asking for supersaiyan mode for normal encounters. I also don't want to trivialize content outside savage/ultimate. I think the game tiers difficulty just fine. That doesn't mean encounter design is fine as is though. It's not. As someone who plays all three roles, I can attest to the demand being the most minimal with tanks and healers. As it stands right now, roles fill up their downtime gaps with DPS. DPS jobs being designated to dealing damage have no downtime outside phase transitions, and dodging. For healers and tanks it is much different. Instead of trying to think of innovative ways for them to fill up their downtime, they just have them DPS and call it a day. This gap, can be used to change up encounter design and i think that is what Kalise is getting at.

In any case she echos a lot of my thoughts I have about encounter design, and why I play DPS jobs when I want to be more engaged in an encounter.

[Kalise]

while you bring up some interesting and completely valid new possible additions, ultra-mega-supra-level3saiyajin-avatarmode-tripleenrage-SSS modes are the content made for people who don't find challenge in the basics. If you make the normal encounters like this, the inclusiveness to all levels of players ramps down extremely quickly. Considering the amount of PuGs I get who cannot deal with the basics I am gunshy of raising the floor.

Though, the difficult encounters are made difficult through the complexity of additional mechanics across the board.

They don't need to filter those down through game modes at all.

All the suggestions I've made, are to the base behaviour of bosses. Which are completely separate to the plethora of "Don't stand in the bad" mechanics that define the actual difficulty of XIV's encounters.

This puts more responsibilities on tanks and healers, thus making those jobs more important which is questionable thing to do.

It's not putting more responsibilities on them, it's shifting their responsibilities.

Shifting from being focused on pumping out maximum DPS, to instead focusing on their actual role (Mitigating/Healing). It doesn't make them any more or less important. In Savage+ content, people are already pushed to maximize DPS to beat tight enrage timers (Of course, these enrage timers would need to be addressed after such changes). In normals, Tanks and Healers are vital to keep enough people standing to have the fight continue (Since, given the lack of enrages, that's all you need to beat encounters, hence why LB's are typically reserved for Healers to mass raise everyone when people inevitably mess up mechanics and get one-shot en masse)

First and foremost it would decrease the number of players playing those jobs for obvious reason

Considering the current state of the game, where Healers are severely lacking in number these days, BECAUSE they had their responsibilities and engagement ripped out thanks to dumbing down of filler DPS duties with no change in healing responsibilities. I doubt that is the case.

We even have a thread over in the Healer section that is getting more and more full of long term healers who've quit healing to go play DPS jobs because they offer more engagement.

second is it would hurt the party more to have clueless healer and tank resulting in smaller chances of finishing the run

So... Why is it that we need to let braindead healers and tanks continue to function? We don't let braindead DPS get away with doing nothing, with various DPS checks (E8 and Cinder Drift both have phases where the boss just spams AoE until death. E7 has the adds that need to be killed before they explode and wipe the party. Even way back in ARR content we had things like Ifrit that required killing of the nail before he nuked everyone)

If people perform poorly, they either need to learn, or get kicked.

a tank dying with those changes would mean healer is going to be 1 shoot more often and from here there is a short way to wipe.

If a Tank dies, the OT will get hit.

Unless you mean Dungeons where there is only 1 tank. In which case, well, currently, tanks are not necessary since you can just heal DPS who have aggro from their high damage given the plethora of healing tools available to healers... (Thus, if simply using those tools on the Tank then the Tank shouldn't die. Especially if Tanks have more things to do to keep themselves alive other than "Sit there being inherently tanky from defence")

Damage would have to be reduced if you make it appear more often, otherwise you are going to inject frustration into the game, with damage being higher could destroy the balance between damage and ehp of the tanks and healers.

It's not going to inject frustration into the game to make people actually have to play it.

As it stands right now, passive damage taken by tanks is pretty much covered by applying a Regen and Shield to them. Meaning that for the other GCD's between "Busters", healers spam nukes.

Simply increasing damage frequency to replace some of that nuke spam with GCD heals, shouldn't make things more frustrating, unless someone is only playing healer so they can spam nukes all day (Though, from what I gather from healer reactions, that's the exact opposite of what they want to do)

Not only that but also balance between tanks as well, as some tanks are clearly superior to others in terms of self defense, healers as well with Whm having no issues with MP would make them healer #1.

Though, that's what this sort of change is supposed to address. Going forward with encounter designs that specifically include more damage, allows for the class design team to focus on creating more parity in classes ability to function in the role. As opposed to now where their entire balance decision revolves around making sure all the jobs do equal DPS.

More emphasis on mitigation and healing means more focus on balancing mitigation and healing. More making Tanks actual tanks, not Blue DPS and more making healers actual healers not Green DPS.

I agree with most points except this one. Pure GCD play isn't that fun. Those 2.4 second gaps between every action start to drag out. I'd even like to see oGCD's flow a little better and to have more weave windows as a healer for those oGCD's, things like Lily heals are a good example.

Shifting the healing power towards GCD's doesn't mean deleting oGCD's. It just means that instead of oGCD's being like 1200 potency and nigh full healing a Tank in one go, it will be less potent like ~400 ish potency heal to use as a bonus to throughput.

If anything, shifting the healing power towards GCD's and reducing the overall potency of oGCD's can result in MORE weaving potential, as CD timers for oGCD's can be reduced since they aren't in danger of completely trivializing all damage dealt in an encounter by simply healing through every attack for 0 MP and 0 GCD cost.

[Akiudo]

Though, the difficult encounters are made difficult through the complexity of additional mechanics across the board.

They don't need to filter those down through game modes at all.

All the suggestions I've made, are to the base behaviour of bosses. Which are completely separate to the plethora of "Don't stand in the bad" mechanics that define the actual difficulty of XIV's encounters.

not going into the rest, especially as at its core i'm all for turning healers/tanks into something different from glorified dps, however you have to realize that "base behaviour" of the boss is not "completely separate to the plethora of 'Don't stand in the bad' mechanics that define the actual difficulty of XIV's encounters." as you called it, cause you only have two choices as far as those go, either you simply "add" stricter base behaviour while keeping the rest as is, those making encounters harder by default, which is the point the person was making, people are allready failing as is, or you make changes to the boss' base behaviour and in exchange tone down the "don't stand in the bad" mechanics, which would mean they are in fact not separate and directly affected aswell. Now one may say that WoW for example has a lot more active mechanics and less of a strict "now do x" aspect to it, however they openly said in the past that they tune fights under the assumption things like Deadly boss mods are used, however with final fantasys "no third party programm" policy which in turn means no addons as their is no addon api and likely never will they obviously can't do that here.

Fact of the matter is, more "active" mechanics would mean either fights simply get harder, and for in fact most players they are too hard as is, or a drastic decrease of static "you fucked up" mechanics in exchange for less punishing but more active mechanics. however these mechanics would still not nearly be as active as people like to believe, (or they would be so weak on the "punishing" side it wouldn't matter) as they simply can't design fights like for example wow does without allowing the use off addons, it just wouldn't work

[Kalise]

however you have to realize that "base behaviour" of the boss is not "completely separate to the plethora of 'Don't stand in the bad' mechanics that define the actual difficulty of XIV's encounters." as you called it

Except, there's a little thing called how these mechanics interact. Especially in the scope of XIV.

In XIV, don't stand in the bad mechanics often result in death. Meaning healers use Swiftcast Raise. Irregardless of what the boss is doing (Otherwise, they often leave the person on the floor until Swiftcast is ready).

Otherwise, all Tanks and Healers are spamming DPS skills.

Adding more Tank and Healer duties to the base boss, doesn't change this. It still doesn't interact with the other mechanics, they're still going to insta-kill at the same rate.

The only difference is, instead of Tanks and Healers spamming only DPS skills, they're now also using Tank and Healing skills. The number of GCD's being used stays the same (Since, time between "Buster" skills and mechanics are not changing), the focus on pumping out maximal numbers of GCD's stays the same (Thus, positioning to account for the mechanics to run out of).

The only difference being, that there is now a minor level of thought going into "Do I press a damage button or a heal button" or "Do I press a damage button or a mitigation button" - With potential to create some overlap to allow for more dynamic gameplay at the higher levels (I.e. Stuff like a Tank going "Oh, some DPS need healing, I better pop a defensive CD so the healer has more time to heal them up before the next mechanic" or a healer going "Oh, the tank has popped a defensive CD, I'll use this time to pump out some extra damage while healing is less required")

Overall mechanics will continue being the same, irregardless and fight difficulty will still hinge upon those mechanics because at the core, the base mechanics of bosses will continue to be simple. Merely having healing GCD's be necessary instead of some damage GCD's won't notably increase difficulty. Especially when a LOT of the bad players already play "Pure Healer".

Can I be real? I don't like the idea of healers having to just sit back and heal.

Though, the general idea is for the balance of such a thing to be that healers don't simply heal 100% of the time. Hence why I suggested Tanks get more onus on mitigating their own incoming damage.

There can be a balance between damage and healing skills for healers, it doesn't have to be pure damage like current or a pure heal rotation.

It merely requires damage to be tuned appropriately, so heals are useful and needed to top off players throughout the fight, but without being so direly needed to take over the entire gametime of a healer.

Additionally, in such a scenario where more frequent healing is being used, there offers more space for gameplay designs such as the Lily system that can cause healing and damage to be intertwined.

[Akiudo]

Except, there's a little thing called how these mechanics interact. Especially in the scope of XIV.

In XIV, don't stand in the bad mechanics often result in death. Meaning healers use Swiftcast Raise. Irregardless of what the boss is doing (Otherwise, they often leave the person on the floor until Swiftcast is ready).

Otherwise, all Tanks and Healers are spamming DPS skills.

okay, to keep this simple, say there is a mechanic that targets all 4 dps, if a dps is down it randomly targets one of the tanks/healers in addition to the remaining 3 dps. these kind of mechanic exists in the game, in fact its nearly the baseline of "1 is death, jump over to the next person" if you now add a chance for the dps to die do to random damage you raised the chance that in fact 1 dps will be dead when the mechanic comes up, therefore you raised the chance of the group wiping do to this mechanic, ergo the difficulty of the encounter. you cant just say it doesn't effect this other mechanics, either it raises the difficulty of the encounter or these other mechanics (tankbusters, don't stand in the void, split up correctly etc....) mechanics need to be made easier or less frequent, therefore it directly effects them.

take an existing encounter, say ramuh. now make it so that from time to time ramuh sends a random bolt into the direction of a player taking out half its max life.if this is truly "random" and not another "ramuh hits a player every 30 seconds, throw a single heal and keep doing what you're doing" mechanic you would now need to keep everyone topped of, instead of pre planning and maximizing your cd usage where needed, which i wouldn't even call a positive, having to pre plan at least somewhat is not a bad thing per se. either way, now imagine the healer messes that up (because the damn healer failed, he is a freaking noob and simply didn't react in time, you know people make mistakes) and a person dies, shortly before i don't know, spears ? or chain lighning ? or it hits the off tank while that one is on low health because he just took the add tankbuster with low cooldowns because he has to use them otherwise and now that one drops dead. are you saying simply adding the possibility of these things happening while changing nothing on the other side of things (i.e. mechanics as they are now) would NOT make encounters more difficult ? because if it does increase the difficulty you would need to make fights easier elsewhere, in other words the kind of mechanics we have right now, however making these easier or less frequent would again, directly affect them.

[Kalise]

say there is a mechanic that targets all 4 dps, if a dps is down it randomly targets one of the tanks/healers in addition to the remaining 3 dps. these kind of mechanic exists in the game, in fact its nearly the baseline of "1 is death, jump over to the next person" if you now add a chance for the dps to die do to random damage you raised the chance that in fact 1 dps will be dead when the mechanic comes up, therefore you raised the chance of the group wiping do to this mechanic, ergo the difficulty of the encounter. you cant just say it doesn't effect this other mechanics, either it raises the difficulty of the encounter or these other mechanics (tankbusters, don't stand in the void, split up correctly etc....) mechanics need to be made easier or less frequent, therefore it directly effects them.

Though, at the same time, the suggestion increases mitigation for scripted mechanics, via putting more emphasis on Tanks having skills to mitigate the damage, meaning it can be less likely that those instances cause wipes (I.e. Decreased difficulty due to increased ability to affect them)

To say nothing about the very notion of "Giving DPS a chance to die due to random damage" - I've already mentioned in my OP about not making random damage too frequent. It shouldn't be possible to die due to random damage unless you're specifically trying to edge as a healer by letting just a single Medica II cast fully heal everyone over its duration after taking a big raid buster that put people down to 10% life (Which only really occurs in Savage+). Or in the case that this random damage has occurred, edge that target with simply a quick Regen cast when said mechanic that targets them is coming up.

take an existing encounter, say ramuh. now make it so that from time to time ramuh sends a random bolt into the direction of a player taking out half its max life.if this is truly "random" and not another "ramuh hits a player every 30 seconds, throw a single heal and keep doing what you're doing" mechanic you would now need to keep everyone topped of, instead of pre planning and maximizing your cd usage where needed, which i wouldn't even call a positive, having to pre plan at least somewhat is not a bad thing per se.

In this scenario, you don't need to keep everyone topped up. Only above 50% health, since that's as hard as this random damage will hit. (Healer basics 101. People only need as much health as to survive the biggest hit they will take. Any more is overhealing)

The instances where Ramuh does AoE that hits everyone, give plenty of time for you to spend a GCD or 2 healing that target from 50% up to a level where they can survive the Judgment Volts (Which can be decreased by having said person also pick up another stack of Surge Protection), he doesn't insta-cast Judgement Volts out of nowhere, he sits around going "IMMA GONNA CAST MUH SPELL" for a fair while.

Even with random damage sources, you still plan around the scripted stuff, since those are still going to be the lethal damage sources. You just also factor in random damage to maybe consider tossing a heal over to the person if you know one of the scripted events is going to occur soon.

Like, the above scenario where you mention, a player is hit down to 50% life from a random attack and lets say this for some reason happens right before a Judgment Volts cast and the Healers are both braindead and don't cast a GCD heal to bring that player up... Well, that's the scenario that oGCD's would be used. A buffer, panic button that enables you to still get some healing in, in a short period of time.

If the concern is something like random damage occuring say, during a Tankbuster/Raidbuster which causes an insta-gib of a player even when CD's are used, then it's simply a case of making it so that random damage events can only occur during set times. I.e. X seconds after a "Buster" mechanic up until X seconds before a "Buster" mechanic.

If the further concern is in normal mode having random damage plus a failed mechanic which doesn't outright one-shot, causes a one-shot, it's simple enough to tune the damage of the random damage in normal mode to not be too high, just like certain mechanics can be failed in normal mode and not be a concern due to their damage being tuned really low.

[Akiudo]

snip

exactly because "only enough so they survive" is healer 101 it would mean you would have to top everyone off in the proposed scenario, you want to maximize the value of your global cooldowns, if someone is at 40% life and i HAVE to use a global cooldown that means he will get the biggest heal i've got, if 2 people get hit and are now at 40% life it will than just be the biggest aoe heal i can reasonably use, so yes you would allways top people off, cause that what happens when you use cure 3 or medica 2 on someone with half life and than just let it tick, you wouldn't just "get them above 50%" because that would mean you would have to heal them a second time before the next group wide aoe or stack mechanic or whatever, unless that one gets toned down in damage, in which case again, it was directly affected by your proposed change. yes, the 50% random bolt was my idea , or rather one example this could take, but lets change this around, what else could it be ? a random "10% aoe ?" all that would do is force the whm/astro to keep their aoe hot up and be done, randomly selected damage even less than 50% of hp, say 30%? great, you ignore it till the next aoe comes up.oh you say "but what if it hits you 4 times in a row?" and i will come back to what you yourself said "don't make it happen for x seconds before and after a buster", at just 5 seconds before or after a buster/group wide aoe/allready existing scripted mechanic which at times even happen one after another, i.e group aoe->tank buster/ attack that "randomly" hits 1-2 players, the proposed "random" mechanic you want to add to the fight would happen about as randomly as every other mechanic in the fights we have right now.

but lets keep it even easier , even your own

Like, the above scenario where you mention, a player is hit down to 50% life from a random attack and lets say this for some reason happens right before a Judgment Volts cast and the Healers are both braindead and don't cast a GCD heal to bring that player up... Well, that's the scenario that oGCD's would be used. A buffer, panic button that enables you to still get some healing in, in a short period of time.

would mean i would have to use ogcds as panic buttons, in turn meaning i would again not have them ready where i want them (say a mechanic where randomly 2 people get targeted for attacks and need to be healed through them, or the next tankbuster, or as a general buffer for the tank/someone that messed up something else shortly before the next aoe.

Also, in even more general terms, the moment it can be screwed up even if this is do to complete failure on the players part it IS adding difficulty, currently if the "heal" misses a damage global cooldown the group at the end of the fight is out 15 dps, with your proposed change the moment the heal "forgets" to get someone up the group at the absolute best loses like 1000 dps+the mana to get the dps back up, at worst they simply wipe. which isn't even going into the possibility of mistakes small as they may be simply snowballing.

Also what about mechanics that go wrong but do to sheer luck or whatever only 2 dps+1 heal die, now this other heal has to get up 1 heal+2 dps, this shouldn't happen, but it can and does happen. now imagine you are in this situation, prepping your tank for the next tankbuster while throwing your instant to your other heal, great, your other heal takes over keeping the tank up while you hardcast a rezz to the next dps, oh look , the random bolt of death just hit one of the 2 remaining dps, not to worry, will only take 1 cast+1 instant to get him up for the aoe that does 90% group damage in 10 seconds, not like you had your hands full allready

heck, all of this is even ignoring that even "random" can't be too random unless you want fights to vary between "easiest run ever" and "holy shit, how many more random bolts of death will he send?", the scripted nature of the fights simply does not leave that much room to simply fill it with randomness, adding randomness means taking out scripted aspects ,which is fine, but if you do this than at this point its simply a worse "wow" experience because fights like in wow would be literally impossible with 0 addons, which they obviously won't allow at this point.



edit: and just to be clear on this, i mentioned it initially but once again, i AM in favor of giving heals more to heal, tanks more to actively mitigate damage and all, but denying that "simply adding this stuff" would make fights harder than they currently are is like denying that the sky is blue, therefore encounter design as we have now, heavy scripting and lots "you screwed up no we all die" mechanics would have to change based around it, therefore be in fact directly affected

[Nedkel]

Considering the current state of the game, where Healers are severely lacking in number these days, BECAUSE they had their responsibilities and engagement ripped out thanks to dumbing down of filler DPS duties with no change in healing responsibilities. I doubt that is the case.
We even have a thread over in the Healer section that is getting more and more full of long term healers who've quit healing to go play DPS jobs because they offer more engagement.

Its a gameplay issue which does not require to radically change entire game content. We dont need to make healers heal 100% of time, some people including myself like the FFXIV approach to healing classes, where they are able to deal damage almost equal to the tanks damage.
People complained about healer changes not because they dont heal all the time, but because their dps stuff has been simplified.

So... Why is it that we need to let braindead healers and tanks continue to function? We don't let braindead DPS get away with doing nothing, with various DPS checks (E8 and Cinder Drift both have phases where the boss just spams AoE until death. E7 has the adds that need to be killed before they explode and wipe the party. Even way back in ARR content we had things like Ifrit that required killing of the nail before he nuked everyone)
If people perform poorly, they either need to learn, or get kicked.

Ok but your suggestion is to make things harder than they currently are which is never going to happen. SE devs focus is completely different, they want all people play their game, including those playing on console which tend to be more casual than pc players.
With really strict policy on the third party apps you cant crank the difficulty up, just look at orborne monastery alliance raid and see how many people had a problem playing it and how many more avoided playing those 70 lvl raids by lowering down their ilvl. Not you give a tank a responsibility to do and share that responsbility with healer and make it 2 times harder for them.
I could see like through glass endless number of parties failing to finish raids because dps would just stand in stupid and die, healers would go green dps mode and let tank die, and tanks never using CDs. That would be a hot mess.

If a Tank dies, the OT will get hit.

Not really, OT will be at the bottom of the list, unless he is playing with turning on and off the tank stance, which i almost never seen people doing.

It's not going to inject frustration into the game to make people actually have to play it.
As it stands right now, passive damage taken by tanks is pretty much covered by applying a Regen and Shield to them. Meaning that for the other GCD's between "Busters", healers spam nukes.
Simply increasing damage frequency to replace some of that nuke spam with GCD heals, shouldn't make things more frustrating, unless someone is only playing healer so they can spam nukes all day (Though, from what I gather from healer reactions, that's the exact opposite of what they want to do)

Thats the thing for normal difficulty content, but healer does not only heal a tank, he heals dps that tend to get hit by a lot of stuff. Healers job is as easy as good their team is, but god forbid having a team with a tank that never uses CD is undergeared and casters DPS who are having their feets made out of concrete.

Though, that's what this sort of change is supposed to address. Going forward with encounter designs that specifically include more damage, allows for the class design team to focus on creating more parity in classes ability to function in the role. As opposed to now where their entire balance decision revolves around making sure all the jobs do equal DPS.
More emphasis on mitigation and healing means more focus on balancing mitigation and healing. More making Tanks actual tanks, not Blue DPS and more making healers actual healers not Green DPS.

The thing about balance is that its a matter of choice for the most part done by the players themselves.
You could balance tanks a healers to do their jobs the same way, but then players will find something that will make certain job better than everything else.
And for example you are going to make deffences of all tanks equal, DRK, WAR, GNB, PLD will have the same deffence options, what is going to happen? People will play GNB because of higher dps and PLD because of support dps and there will be no point playing war or drk over those two.
With those changes you are putting more variables into equation.
Right now all tanks are playable, because their own deffences are more than enough to cover damage mitigation.

Im all for more challenging content, however i want it seperate to the normal, a middleman between normal and savage/ultimate should be implemented.