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

[HyperiusUltima]

I don't really want the game to be all about who does the most damage wins the fight and the dev team doesn't want that reality either. Savage is not supposed to be the root purpose of a job, it is an extension of the base game that is designed to be as hard to beat as the game designers are willing to go, since it is very easy to make unbeatable content, but incredibly difficult to make content that is tight on "correctness" in playing a set of 8 jobs without blasting the entire group into oblivion.

Yet I think you missed the point that Liam was trying to make: Healers are extremely unengaging in 95% of content and nearly effectively braindead with heals in that unengaging content.

Dungeons - Just heal.
Normal Mode Raids - Just heal.
Alliance Raids - Just heal.
Solo Instances - Spam 1 Button and 1 DoT ad nauseum.

Yeah. You can see how boring the role is after you've done everything on your healing checklist and the Tanks/DPS aren't dying. Savage/Ultimate pushes the jobs further to their maximum because your new shiny tools actually matter in this instance. It's not about who does the most damage, but rather about healer engagement. It's what we've been yelling at them to do since we figured it out in Shadowbringers - and they still haven't listened.

If you're looking at the base game itself, excluding Savage/Ultimate, you have a game where you do not require 20% of your buttons or shiny new tools to clear content. Heck, one healer would be enough and they still wouldn't touch a whole lot of their kit. This is why raiders are focused on improving to take on Savage - because Savage is challenging. So is Ultimate to a greater extent. In these areas, you use the full extent of your kit and it's where you actually see the job's strengths and weaknesses if they weren't already pointed out in Extreme Trials for some reason or another - and this includes our engagement and where it is aligning during points of Downtime if you bother to think about where the damage is when you're healing a Savage fight. Of course, one can say that "SGE just heals by DPSing! That's engagement, right?" No. SGE is not exactly as engaging as it should be - and the other healers are in the same boat. Sure it has Phlegma and an extra damaging GCD, but I'm still pressing the 1 Button a lot when I'm not executing mechanics or don't need to heal, either because I've already done my checklist or my co-healer and I are working in tandem.

At the end of the day, what the charts say is that we hit the 1 button too much even in Savage/Ultimate when there isn't any healing needing to be done. That's why we're going to continue pointing this out until Yoshida and the Dev Team bother to do something about it.

[Saraide]

I don't really want the game to be all about who does the most damage wins the fight and the dev team doesn't want that reality either. Savage is not supposed to be the root purpose of a job, it is an extension of the base game that is designed to be as hard to beat as the game designers are willing to go, since it is very easy to make unbeatable content, but incredibly difficult to make content that is tight on "correctness" in playing a set of 8 jobs without blasting the entire group into oblivion.

Casual content doesnt need balancing at all. We already have massive balancing differences between warrior and the other tanks when it comes to dungeons. Yet no one cares because balance is completely irrelevant for that level of content.

[Liam_Harper]

Sadly, I think it goes beyond even that and the devs actively want a role where casual players can essentially get away with very little contribution. Hence the constant mention of healer DPS being optional outside of week 1 prog and Ultimate. They want better players to carry the load. Hell, Yoshida has come right out and admitted that when nobody was queuing for Castrum in Bozja. And later added they want to explore more large scale content like that because it allows better players to "help" less experienced ones.

Their concern seems to be that if they were to give healers even tank rotations, it'd immediately become the expected norm especially at the Savage level. Which it would. The fact they view that as a bad thing speaks volumes.

Unfortunately very true. I wouldn't even mind helping the less experienced players if they actually wanted help. If someone genuinely wanted to improve I'd happily set aside my free time and run over anything they wanted. If I see someone in a group doing their best and asking questions I'll be patient with any number of mistakes. But Yoshida's attitude that I'm meant to set aside my free time to carry people who don't particularly like me much and don't care about contributing is baffling. Especially when there's no reward and content I enjoy is butchered to accommodate carrying those players more easily. For me, it's a lose-lose deal.

As that type of player likes to say, "they don't pay my sub". They can carry themselves.

I don't really want the game to be all about who does the most damage wins the fight and the dev team doesn't want that reality either.

No one is saying to turn Normal mode content into tight dps checks. They're saying to give healers more to do than 1 button. The only place this would cause potential difficulty is Savage or Ultimate, since all other content doesn't require any healer dps. Thus, healers likely have 1 button dps because of Savage and Ultimate and how the devs want bad players to be able to clear it.

I'm sorry, but if a player couldn't handle more than 1 button to deal damage as a healer and didn't want to learn, they have no place in Savage or Ultimate. It's meant to be designed for the players who want a challenge. This developer mentality of butchering an entire role just to try and hand hardcore content over to the entire playerbase is crazy.

[Payotz]

The design philosophy of making the gap between the skill floor and the skill ceiling barely visible so people won't feel bad when they're not good is not good.

What they're actively doing with this job design, with every role, is to effectively make it so that a new player can pick up a job, and feel like they're making optimal use of the job after barely any time investment.
("OH LITTLE TIMMY YES YOU NOW ARE A MASTER AT THIS JOB WITHIN TEN MINUTES OF HITTING THE STRIKING DUMMY!")

THAT IS A BORING WAY TO DESIGN JOBS. FUN SHOULD BE MORE OF A FACTOR IN THE DESIGN PROCESS RATHER THAN GUTTING DOWN JOBS TO GIVE PEOPLE A FAKE FEELING OF ACCOMPLISHMENT THAT THEY DONT EVEN CARE FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Adding more complexity on top of the base jobs, the base rotations, is not gonna matter for people who don't care about them. Just like how people still spam Cure 1, when Lily GCDs and Cure 2 exist.

It's not gonna lower the skill floor, cause you can still function in content designed for casuals. More dps buttons ain't gonna mean there needs to be dps checks in Casual Content. Casual content will be as clearable with a healer who 1111111 2 1111111 or actually utilizes all their dps buttons. It doesn't matter if the skill ceiling gap is wide, because the skill floor is still low. The jobs are still accessible.

Where it does matter is in Savage and Ultimate, and frankly those are the people who WANT to be better, who wants to feel like they're improving.
Who wants to feel like they're progressively inching towards a high skill ceiling.
Who WANTS a skill ceiling.
And frankly, that's what's missing from the job design ever since 5.0 .

Bring back the skill ceiling. Make being better at X job FEEL BETTER . Stop trying to forcibly remove the skill ceiling to cater to people who are perfectly content to stay at the skill floor.
People aren't asking to raise the skill floor. People are asking to raise the skill ceiling instead.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[…]Bring back the skill ceiling. Make being better at X job FEEL BETTER . Stop trying to forcibly remove the skill ceiling to cater to people who are perfectly content to stay at the skill floor.
People aren't asking to raise the skill floor. People are asking to raise the skill ceiling instead.

I don’t want to be apathetic, but part of me thinks they simply don’t want to see an excessively huge gap of performance between the experienced and inexperienced players.

At least on the jobs the dev never mains, that is… /shrug

[KDSilver]

I don't really want the game to be all about who does the most damage wins the fight and the dev team doesn't want that reality either. Savage is not supposed to be the root purpose of a job, it is an extension of the base game that is designed to be as hard to beat as the game designers are willing to go, since it is very easy to make unbeatable content, but incredibly difficult to make content that is tight on "correctness" in playing a set of 8 jobs without blasting the entire group into oblivion.

We just want most people to have fun.
Casual or veteran/experienced player.

You shouldn't have a big gap in gameplay enjoyment in a role like this.

[Nethereal]

I don’t want to be apathetic, but part of me thinks they simply don’t want to see an excessively huge gap of performance between the experienced and inexperienced players.

At least on the jobs the dev never mains, that is… /shrug

This is a very large focus of their changes. IIRC YoshiP even talked about it at one point.

They want to lower the skill gap but don't understand why it exists so they simply go back to the basics and start taking off body parts and see how many it takes before the guy missing two legs finally catches up.
A few more inches from the ankles up to the shins, we're almost getting there.

[ForteNightshade]

Unfortunately very true. I wouldn't even mind helping the less experienced players if they actually wanted help. If someone genuinely wanted to improve I'd happily set aside my free time and run over anything they wanted. If I see someone in a group doing their best and asking questions I'll be patient with any number of mistakes. But Yoshida's attitude that I'm meant to set aside my free time to carry people who don't particularly like me much and don't care about contributing is baffling. Especially when there's no reward and content I enjoy is butchered to accommodate carrying those players more easily. For me, it's a lose-lose deal.

As that type of player likes to say, "they don't pay my sub". They can carry themselves.

I want to believe Yoshida genuinely feels these players want to try instead of it being a PR statement. Unfortunately, that only showcases his naivety. A lot of people asking for "help" are, in fact, expecting a carry even through their actions alone. A perfect example is a friend of a friend who's been trying to teach her now to play SMN. She keeps arguing with him that "mechanics are more important!" as justification for literally stopping her rotation to perform them. I helped them last night in P1S going on Sage, a job I have never taken into Savage, and was only 800ish rDPS offer her. And I have less gear. This exact attitude is what Yoshida seems to willfully ignore. I'd be a lot more willing to "deal with it" if healing was fun. To be fair, I did enjoy it... but only because it was my first crack on Sage in Savage. I also sat there baffled at how little healing I actually did. Granted, I knew from my static the healing was a complete joke but feeling it out myself made it standout even more.

No one is saying to turn Normal mode content into tight dps checks. They're saying to give healers more to do than 1 button. The only place this would cause potential difficulty is Savage or Ultimate, since all other content doesn't require any healer dps. Thus, healers likely have 1 button dps because of Savage and Ultimate and how the devs want bad players to be able to clear it.

I'm sorry, but if a player couldn't handle more than 1 button to deal damage as a healer and didn't want to learn, they have no place in Savage or Ultimate. It's meant to be designed for the players who want a challenge. This developer mentality of butchering an entire role just to try and hand hardcore content over to the entire playerbase is crazy.

What irks me about Normal mode content and its ilk is this would be the perfect spot to introduce mechanics at reduced level. Alas, they make them utterly pointless. Take E4N, for example. They finally put a tank swap debuff in Normal but then made Titan's autos so laughably weak nobody ever bothers swapping. For a more recent example, Nald'thal's tank buster soak doesn't actually do anywhere near lethal damage if you solo it. I had a Warrior the other night ask if they could try. They lived with just Vengeance and Bloodwhetting. This doesn't teach players anything because if it isn't threatening, why bother? Hell, it's why I don't bother disengaging on normal mode bosses and just eat the invul stacks. Why should I care? They won't kill me.

[Deceptus]

What irks me about Normal mode content and its ilk is this would be the perfect spot to introduce mechanics at reduced level. Alas, they make them utterly pointless. Take E4N, for example. They finally put a tank swap debuff in Normal but then made Titan's autos so laughably weak nobody ever bothers swapping. For a more recent example, Nald'thal's tank buster soak doesn't actually do anywhere near lethal damage if you solo it. I had a Warrior the other night ask if they could try. They lived with just Vengeance and Bloodwhetting. This doesn't teach players anything because if it isn't threatening, why bother? Hell, it's why I don't bother disengaging on normal mode bosses and just eat the invul stacks. Why should I care? They won't kill me.

100% agree. Normal mode is the absolute best place to introduce new things because the repercussions of failure are minimal.

Pagl'than is my go to example. Lunar Bahamut, supposed to be this big scary threat.

His "tankbuster" doesn't even come out until 75% of the fight (if you even ever see it you've done poor dps) and then it barely scratches the tank.

All the aoe that goes out barely does 20% of a DPS health.

Normal mode boss damage is completely irrelevant. The only reason trash does any damage is because we have developed a culture where you pull to the wall to pose any iota of challenge.

[ASkellington]

100% agree. Normal mode is the absolute best place to introduce new things because the repercussions of failure are minimal.

Pagl'than is my go to example. Lunar Bahamut, supposed to be this big scary threat.

His "tankbuster" doesn't even come out until 75% of the fight (if you even ever see it you've done poor dps) and then it barely scratches the tank.

All the aoe that goes out barely does 20% of a DPS health.

Normal mode boss damage is completely irrelevant. The only reason trash does any damage is because we have developed a culture where you pull to the wall to pose any iota of challenge.

Don't even have to go all the way back to Pagl though I'm surprised it actually is that bad.

Smileton? I think is one of the 90 experts? Yeah the second boss is a friggin joke. I have video footage of that boss and specifically that boss for a reason:

Did you know that boss has a tank buster? I didn't! Cause majority of the time my group kills the thing before it goes off!!!! The boss opens with an AoE that you ALSO only see once on my usual runs.

...WHAT?