Another Yoshi interview: Healer DPS, Sage, Scholar, etc (MTQ)

[Semirhage]

I agree. The problems healer jobs have are endemic. They're not solvable with the addition of a skill or three. WHM and SCH in particular need overhauls. Their design issues aren't a small rotation away from perfection.

To elaborate here, my essay titled Why White Mage is Horribly Designed:

Game design is a complex process involving a lot of variables. I'll choose one aspect to focus on here. A well-designed class rewards the user for playing well. There are tons of other aspects like meaningful choice, variety in ability usage, not hampering skillful play with clunk, etc, but I'll stick with one for now.

To illustrate this, I want to look at a job that is pretty much universally considered well-designed: Black Mage. Polyglot is great. It doesn't require a lot of attention past the first cast of Enochian, but it rewards you for at bare minimum maintaining your general casting flow (and base fire/ice job mechanic) with a damage spike. Firestarter is a reward for using Fire to keep your Astral Fire timer going. It essentially gives you a stronger, instant, free version of itself. Thundercloud rewards you for maintaining your DoT uptime with a nice burst of damage, that further rewards you with even more damage if you're savvy enough to time its use well. Moreover, these systems are attached to sensible parts of the kit. You don't see a core maintenance buff granted for spamming Scathe or Blizzard 1; the other key part of that description is that these rewards are goodies you get not just for playing, but for playing well.

Now, how does White Mage reward skillful play? That's a harder question to answer, because healing fundamentally isn't a constant net positive the way damage is; rewarding healing with even more healing is a half-reward at best, considering how infrequent incoming damage is in most content. A safety net for screwing up is not exactly a reward, especially when said safety net becomes less and less useful the more skilled your team gets. It's not nothing, but it's not the same type of mechanic as a reward for playing well like a self-buff or a damage bonus or whatever else (that remains useful the more adept at playing you get) you could think of.

Now, before I get into the meat of my point about the White Mage kit, I want to address the elephant-sized flower in the room. Lilies *appear* to be a reward for playing well. This is a smokescreen. Misery only appears to be a reward, when it actually fits more definitionally in the "safety net for screwups" category. First of all, it's attached to your middling-efficiency heals. This wouldn't be a problem by itself, but as I'll outline in the next paragraph, your high-efficiency heals don't have a reward system attached to them, which makes their guidance toward skilled play...muddy at best. It's also a partial refund on taking losses. It doesn't -gain- you anything, merely mitigates a loss. Which, to me, doesn't scream "reward", not nearly with the clarity that any Black Mage subsystem would. Worse still, it's such a gain on multiple targets that it actually encourages bad play in dungeons. In order to make it a reward on trash packs, you're encouraged by mathematical efficiency to blow lilies as soon as they come up, whether they'd be a good resource use or not, just to get a blood lily. I get what they were going for with this design, but the gameplay it rewards and encourages is...weird.

So what happens when you cast Regen? And by that I mean, what happens outside its basic stated function? Nothing! What happens when you cast Glare? Nothing! What happens when you cast Dia? Nothing! What happens when you cast Medica? Nothing! What about Tetragrammaton? Nothing! Temperance? Benison? Thin Air? Holy? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! There is no self-buff for keeping your casts going. There's no proc that gives you the thumbs-up for using a key component of your kit at the opportune moment. The kit itself doesn't give a crap whether you spam Cure, refresh Dia every 3 seconds, keep your Glare uptime at maximum efficiency, jump in place, watch Netflix, nothing. Nothing lights up to tell you you're doing well.

When I say White Mage's kit is designed like crap, Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is the easiest identifiable surface source of boredom. The kit doesn't have any synergy or reward system. It doesn't do anything. Giving it a 3 part combo wouldn't solve this problem.

[CrimsonGunner]

To elaborate here, my essay titled Why White Mage is Horribly Designed:

....

When I say White Mage's kit is designed like crap, Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is the easiest identifiable surface source of boredom. The kit doesn't have any synergy or reward system. It doesn't do anything. Giving it a 3 part combo wouldn't solve this problem.

i agree with you there about white mage is horribly designed right now, the concept and idea of liles is a good direction but it was not handled properly. there is so much potential in that system that if the synergy with dps and healer was there the kit would reward you for proper managing heals and dps alike but sadly as you said it is a smoke screen as well as the skills the lilies supply themselves. i mean afflataus skills are carbon copies of cure and medica right now only instant and free mana, which i think i would have prefer if i just cast those instead of having bloated buttons that do the same. it isn't a bad idea to spend liles as soon as they came up the problem is the system itself wont reward you since if you spam lilies,as Semirhage said, would give you nothing in fact even worse then nothing you basically go negative if u do that cause u need gcd to dps if no healing is needed and we dont have exactly ogcd to spend them on so a big minus from doing that.

[Truen]

I'm convinced Yoshi should step away and let someone else take lead at this point; he's out of ideas and he's all but telling people that now.
I'm personally SICK AND TIRED of spamming 1-button endlessly too. It's created some pretty hard feelings towards the Square Enix dev team at this point.