Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[WaxSw]

You mean DPS. Tank gameplay plummeted in 5.0 when they tweaked stance dancing to emnity on, emnity off modes. As well as some other changes in 4.0 which made me personally quit the role.

No, I mean Dps AND Tanks, yes tank gameplay is simplistic but they at least have a rotation, they at least have buffs to keep an eye on and get to use most of their skills available in meaningful ways in the majority of content they play, they dont get relegated to being the party caretakers and see their role being absolutely unnecesary on a daily basis. Tanks may not have it as well as dps but they are in a better state than healers

[Semirhage]

I find a game that did that well was Tera. Yeah you were doing a shit ton of "DEX Checks" but you were actively doing "INT Checks" and if you fucked up you usually had something just as good as what fucked you up to counter it.

I.E. die in 0.5 seconds after the boss turns? Well you have a free revive buff you placed on yourself either before the fight started or during. You also relied a lot more on boss tells, how they were moving and their attack patterns more so than randomly dodging and if the boss did do random attacks then you would know they were going to randomly do it so it kept you on your toes waiting for it. That said Tera is a shit game, but the combat.

I just had one of those intrusive thoughts that's probably hilarious only to me. I imagined taking an action RPG and modding it. Replaced all of the enemy sound files with various speed and pitch-shifted versions of "A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES", for every single attack

[Nethereal]

I just had one of those intrusive thoughts that's probably hilarious only to me. I imagined taking an action RPG and modding it. Replaced all of the enemy sound files with various speed and pitch-shifted versions of "A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES", for every single attack

He says it before he steps on you.

https://youtu.be/sqI6awQM6iM?t=369

[Absurdity]

This is a trend I've noticed with modern games, and I'm pretty deep in the camp of hating it. Action combat isn't *incapable* of catching my interest, but it definitely has a steeper climb than something with complexity. I'm aware I'm in a minority in the gaming landscape here.

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard something like "finally, a system that fixes the problems with RPG combat systems". I don't see it that way at all. I see it replacing choice, clever ability stacking, and interesting interactions with *dodgeroll dodgeroll dodgeroll swing swing dodgeroll swing dodge swing dodge swing swing swing dodge* which is simply, to put it in RPG terms, replacing INT checks with DEX checks. I don't mind having my DEX checked. I mind when literally all of the challenge in a game boils down to twitch reflexes. I'll get bored pretty fast.

/unsolicited personal whining derailment

It's also a fact that regardless of whether you like the action combat design or not, it simply doesn't work in XIV. This engine is incapable of checking your twitch reflexes so the game becomes nothing more than a boring, mindless button masher.

There isn't even *dodgeroll dodgeroll dodgeroll swing swing dodgeroll swing dodge swing dodge swing swing swing dodge*, it's just *swing swing swing swing swing swing swing swing step-out-of-the-5-second-tick-tock-death-spell swing swing swing swing*.

[IdowhatIwant]

No, I mean Dps AND Tanks, yes tank gameplay is simplistic but they at least have a rotation, they at least have buffs to keep an eye on and get to use most of their skills available in meaningful ways in the majority of content they play, they dont get relegated to being the party caretakers and see their role being absolutely unnecesary on a daily basis. Tanks may not have it as well as dps but they are in a better state than healers

We definitely have differing opinions but that's fine.

[Colt47]

I think the name of the thread might need to be changed because it implies savage difficulty in general is too "easy" for all jobs when the intent is to talk about healers.

In general the kind of model that the FFXIV development team adopted was sort of a shoe in off what worked from prior games and therefore has all the same problems that the system has had for ages. We can complain about healers having it too easy, but really the problem isn't the healers.

For one, the difficulty of savage is mostly from the players being blindfolded on what is happening until it hits them on the head and the fact the game provides no tooling to allow people to analyze what happened. There is the personal responsibility aspect such as making sure you are maxing your damage and not taking hits that can be avoided, but the real issue is all the hidden garbage throughout the fights. It's basically as broken as PvP, but no one talks about it because people are used to this being the norm and don't understand it can be much better than this.

I know that Xenosys can be a subject in itself, but his p4s video illustrates the kind of problem I'm talking about. p4s phase 1 guide.

So having people need to use twitch to record a fight, then go back through it to mark everything using third party tools to help show people where to stand, is a reasonable solution for a game that actively discourages the use of third party tools? If people have to do this to understand mechanics, the designers failed at building the fight and properly informing the player in any capacity. This isn't an intelligence test, this is a test of who has the time to go download video editing tools and get an online streaming account to record a fight.

Then we have stuff like this where people have to reverse engineer the visuals in outside of game tools and post it on youtube so people can learn how to do stuff. p4s diagram video. On the upside it's indirectly supporting content creators, but on the downside these content creators are only making these videos because the game is omitting a critical in-game system.

If they created visual markers for the savage fights, it would greatly help with balancing out the difficulty from both the developer and player aspects. The healer problem is because the fights are putting the challenge on people blindly figuring out the mechanics so they don't get hit, which means you're either doing an overwhelming amount of work on healer or doing an underwhelming amount of work on healer. Especially on fights like P3S where its like if no one dies healers have barely anything to do, but if one guy dies it turns into a death / raise katamari Damacy while your party is wondering where the heals went.

So ultimately, the only fix to the healer problem is to start really building out fights with the intent that people can learn them in-game. Yes there's going to be criticism from people used to blindly dying to things they can't see, but in real life, I'm not wearing a blind fold while driving in traffic or trying to get out of my garage. I mean, yes eventually you would learn exactly where to stand even blind folded, along with all the steps needed to turn on the car, open the garage, and get out onto the street. But the reality is we don't intentionally wear blind folds. A more realistic scenario would be having heavy fog while driving on a road. You'd still see things, but you have less time to react.

[Thoosa]

I think that the difficulty of healing in savage is massively reduced when it’s done in a static - in this scenario you (should) be around people who are of similar skill set to you and people who actually want to learn and clear, rather in a PF scenario where you get a good proportion of people who just want to be carried and who don’t want to learn, don’t know a rotation, and who stand in bad all the time. It just makes you as a healer cast gcd and ogcd heals more, but eventually you fall back to one button dps spam because the incoming damage is scripted and you just need to know when to press your heal buttons - this doesn’t make for engaging interesting healing.

They don’t seem to be willing to give healers more of a dps rotation or adjust fights to put in more random events which require you to make any kind of healing choices or the opportunity to be creative, or even amp up the healing required in fights to keep the healer busy. They seem to want to make the role as dumbed down as possible, just to act as a utility to get people through normal content. It’s sad.

[WaxSw]

snip.

Game clarity is not the problem of the healers not by fucking mile, you're watching a guide, OFC THERE IS 3rd party resources to simplify the explanation but in game people can figure out mechanics well, part of the fun of the fights is in fact that process of figuring out the mechanics and anyone willing can do it, debuffs have descriptions, a lot of new mechanics use the same notation and markers over the course of the years have been standarized, fights are designed so players can learn them ingame but for the people who want to skip that there are the guides they can search but thats once again not a problem with healers

The problem with healers is that our gameplay have been gutted to the point that no matter the content we press the same button hundreds of times without much else to do because the devs refuse to acknowledge the feedback we're been giving them for years

[WaxSw]

We definitely have differing opinions but that's fine.

I dont want to bring logs here again but there is no tank that from the easiest to the hardest content spends over 50% of their cpm pressing the same button over and over, tanks are included in speedruns, tanks have rotations and get to use the majority of their kit available no matter the difficulty of the content, I'm not saying that they are good, fine, perfect or anything like that, they are oversimplified too but they have it much better than healers

[IDontPetLalas]

I think the name of the thread might need to be changed because it implies savage difficulty in general is too "easy" for all jobs when the intent is to talk about healers.

p4s diagram video. On the upside it's indirectly supporting content creators, but on the downside these content creators are only making these videos because the game is omitting a critical in-game system.

If they created visual markers for the savage fights, it would greatly help with balancing out the difficulty from both the developer and player aspects. The healer problem is because the fights are putting the challenge on people blindly figuring out the mechanics so they don't get hit, which means you're either doing an overwhelming amount of work on healer or doing an underwhelming amount of work on healer. Especially on fights like P3S where its like if no one dies healers have barely anything to do, but if one guy dies it turns into a death / raise katamari Damacy while your party is wondering where the heals went.

So ultimately, the only fix to the healer problem is to start really building out fights with the intent that people can learn them in-game. Yes there's going to be criticism from people used to blindly dying to things they can't see, but in real life, I'm not wearing a blind fold while driving in traffic or trying to get out of my garage. I mean, yes eventually you would learn exactly where to stand even blind folded, along with all the steps needed to turn on the car, open the garage, and get out onto the street. But the reality is we don't intentionally wear blind folds. A more realistic scenario would be having heavy fog while driving on a road. You'd still see things, but you have less time to react.

The 'healer problem" for myself has nothing to do with people needing to blindly figure out mechanics. Your points also disregard multiple issue that concern healer engagement outside of group content, or even in any normal level content where often less healing is required. in any case, even in harder content there are a number of people who have spoken to how healing does not require an 'overwhelming' amount of work since healers will coordinate heals.

Don't forget that there are standard markers for spread mechanics and other mechanics, there is the trust system as well as guides for fights. There is no lack of help for fights already - however that isn't even the object of this thread. So your 'only fix" - interesting idea but that hasn't anything to do with this thread.