Helare shortage in PF: what would bring you back?

[Absurdity]

lol would not be surprised.

I suspect their dev budget never gets increased and they have limited staff, so they want to design everything so it is easy to maintain and because the budget doesn't increase, SE keeps seeing the nice profits and may not want to invest more? The trouble is that 14 has massively increased its popularity and player base and potentially they haven't increased their team (I don't know) to handle it. Maybe it is hard to find good devs, or they refuse to give the 14 team a bigger budget? Either way I think they need more devs focused on tanks and healers, and maybe a few more to look at the DPS roles.

I think it's not just a budget issue in this case, they need developers who actually have experience with that kind of design and understand how the jobs work...but those basically don't exist outside of CBU3.
But they'll inevitably just have to get more devs on the job design team anyway, having only 4 people for 19 jobs, soon 21 (not counting blue mage), is just not sustainable.

[Sebazy]

IMHO it's a combination of budget and seemingly not being willing to outsource core portions of the game even in an advisory role.

The core of the problem CBU3 appear to face in recruitment is that competing against the mobile game gravy train is seriously expensive. Given how riddled Japan's gaming scene is with mobile cash grabs that's a pretty hefty hurdle that's going to take a bunch of cash to overcome.

The more efficient option that I've mentioned in some other threads would be to hire another studio with MMO experience in an advisory/consultancy role and pay them to full up some white boards with fleshed out class ideas as a means to get a fresh pool of ideas to draw from. This way CBU3 still keeps full creative control to keep the fears of a XIV 1.0 repeat at bay, but it'll give a much needed shot in the arm with some new takes to revitalise the core gameplay loop.

Eitherway, I'm firmly of the option that SE need to shake up the recipe if they can't guarantee striking gold again like they did with Shadowbringer's story.

[Thoosa]

I think it's not just a budget issue in this case, they need developers who actually have experience with that kind of design and understand how the jobs work...but those basically don't exist outside of CBU3.
But they'll inevitably just have to get more devs on the job design team anyway, having only 4 people for 19 jobs, soon 21 (not counting blue mage), is just not sustainable.

Ya that’s true. But, because the 14 endgame isn’t purely raiding/battle content focussed I worry that these changes won’t happen very quickly because most of the playerbase just do the casual content, therefore the jobs are “good enough” in order to bump this stuff down their priority list, including the expansion of staff.

[Risvertasashi]

Just thought this comment from the recent live stream might be of interest to the discussion here:

Q2: For this Savage, there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question here to you is: Are you aware of the reason and is there something you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by a long "hmmm") Things to reflect on......things to reflect on? Well for one I did read something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green skin"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also experience situations where there is a serious lack of tank participation and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....well, this is hard to answer...I mean there's also the request we got from players that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, and among other things that is asked of us...(another long pause) So in this case, due to certain circumstances and certain "wall" which caused deviations (biases?) to occur, and this is definitely a thing after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely......I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything on this matter what I am able to say at this point is "please give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you are allowed to handle multiple roles, and when you try playing a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting through that experience....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "actually a DPS job in a healer skin"

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Ok, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.

[Sebazy]

In an ideal world, SE would look at the huge disparity of healing expected in the likes of P8S vs just about everything else.

P8S is dishing out in the region of 21-23k damage per second across the party with the tanks taking ~3k+

Meanwhile in Zodiark Extreme, a ~7 minute kill will see the entire group taking as little as 3k per second. That's the entire party taking less damage than just the tank in P8S.

Now if content steadily progressed and bridged the gaps between these two extremes then IMHO it wouldn't be a problem, but that literally has never been achieved post 2.0. Casual content such as 24 man raids require people to be failing mechanics consistently to stretch our kits, get a reasonably smooth run and again, there's barely much of anything to heal, certainly not enough to stretch our bloated healing kits.

24 man's can be anywhere from ~3k to ~5k adjusted for 8 players. BarbEX is in the region of 12k DTPS, the rest of the Savage tier seems to fall around 14-16k, and then we get the jump with P8 to 22k+. There needs to be a curve, instead we just get a wall with Yoshida seemingly pulling a surprised Pikachu face when the more casual end of the player base struggles to adapt to it whilst large swathes of the hardcore healers simply quit/switched roles over the last few snorefest tiers.

I can only assume that this means we're going to get another E8S next tier. How wonderful =/

[Risvertasashi]

I can only assume that this means we're going to get another E8S next tier. How wonderful =/

At the very least, they've acknowledged that there are players just fine with the higher healing requirements, and that they don't want to simply nerf it back down as that'd just put them back in the previous situation. So, there is perhaps some hope.

[Rilifane]

The lack of difficulty curve in this game is a problem in general.
If I got a cat every time I heard or read a "I don't have it on my hotbar" about Feint, Addle, Samba, any self mit/ heal/ shield and even things like Heart of Light or Fey Illumination I would have my very own cat island. And I can't even fault them for it because absolutely nothing in this game ever asks you to even consider putting that skill on your hotbar, let alone use it. But then the one shot raidwides already start with Carby and are taken up a notch with Tapeworm Lady.
And it's the same with healing too. You can yolo through any content just by using your 2 basic, weak GCD heals like Cure I and Medica and can go several minutes in a row without using a single heal in alli raids if your party is decent and then they suddenly up it to Barbie Ex and current savage and are surprised people are overwhelmed?

The healing requirement this tier still isn't high per se, it's just a huge jump from casual content and people get used to things and judge everything else relative to what they're used to. That's just human nature.
Jumping from a 5k clownfiesta party to a 14k in a good and smooth run will feel like an insurmountable wall.

If casual content had frequent but low to medium damage going out that don't rely on someone mitigation with a few hits that are fairly far apart (like 2min) but absolutely require more than one mit, then it would train healers to use their full toolkit more often and train non-healers to just throw mit once they see a certain castbar. Especially in optional content like alli raids and normal raids, I don't think it should be guaranteed that you always survive at all times unless you run off the platform.

[Videra]

[ForsakenRoe]

If casual content had frequent but low to medium damage going out

that gives me an idea actally. IMO, 'raid rot' is not that interesting as a mechanic, a small ticking dot that's got big uptime across the fight doesnt really have much going for it to make it 'interesting, it just means the 'Pure Healer' has to throw out a medica2/the AST one a bit more often to counter it. P3S did it a bit more interestingly by having it limited to certain phases (adds and firestorms), imagine the fight if the fire rain was up 100% of the time... anyway, there is potential to make a '100% uptime dot ticking on the raid' interesting as a mechanic i think, by having some interactivity to it. Think of Shinryu, and how in EX his 'heart' is a targettable add at times. If he casts a primal skill like Hellfire while the heart is alive, it is a wipe. But, lets take P6S as an example, not only because of the design of the boss model, but also because it doesn't have much mechanical complexity outside of it's one gimmick of 'stuff swaps places'. Imagine the Snake parasite is targettable, and can be killed. Every 15 seconds, the Snake pulses a raidwide effect that adds a stack of DOT to the team that ticks for X damage, idk tuning is up to the devs. something not too bad at low stacks but can stack up quickly to 'unmanageable' levels. Each time you 'kill' the snake, it is disabled for 30sec, and when it comes back alive, it has the 'bonus HP' effect like the Heart in Shinryu EX. The 30s gap means the DOT that has stacked up on the raid will reset, and you go back to a lower amount. This allows the raid group to choose, when do we want to reset the stacks? can we live with 10 stacks, or should we reset sooner? At lower gear levels, they'd probably need to reset more often, but with more gear, or more practice, or better planning for when to use what healing resources, they could get away with killing the add at higher stack counts. Also, since it's HP goes up each time it 'revives', that's damage that isn't getting dumped into the boss, meaning there's a specific choice to be made of 'do we put more burden on the healers by pushing boss damage, or do we keep it easier for them and make up that damage by giving the healers more room to dps the boss too?'

If it weren't for the rebalancing of potencies for EW, some classes would have been able to deal with the add a lot more effectively than others too, eg NIN could swap Bhavawhatsit's to Hellfrogs to whittle down the add on the side, MNK could use Enlightenment instead of TFC, WHM's Misery and SGE's Phlegma would see bonus use, DRK would probably be undisputed king of the tanks for that fight because it's got so much 'this also cleaves' in it's kit, so it'd probably be a balance nightmare. but something to think about because so far the idea of 'interesting healer mechanics' seems to be stuff like 'the stacks target the healers' or 'there's an add and you have to fill its hp to full' which is very different from 'theres an add and you have to drop it's hp to zero'

miasma 2 my beloved.gif

[T-Owl]

The lack of difficulty curve in this game is a problem in general.
If I got a cat every time I heard or read a "I don't have it on my hotbar" about Feint, Addle, Samba, any self mit/ heal/ shield and even things like Heart of Light or Fey Illumination I would have my very own cat island. And I can't even fault them for it because absolutely nothing in this game ever asks you to even consider putting that skill on your hotbar, let alone use it. But then the one shot raidwides already start with Carby and are taken up a notch with Tapeworm Lady.
And it's the same with healing too. You can yolo through any content just by using your 2 basic, weak GCD heals like Cure I and Medica and can go several minutes in a row without using a single heal in alli raids if your party is decent and then they suddenly up it to Barbie Ex and current savage and are surprised people are overwhelmed?

The healing requirement this tier still isn't high per se, it's just a huge jump from casual content and people get used to things and judge everything else relative to what they're used to. That's just human nature.
Jumping from a 5k clownfiesta party to a 14k in a good and smooth run will feel like an insurmountable wall.

If casual content had frequent but low to medium damage going out that don't rely on someone mitigation with a few hits that are fairly far apart (like 2min) but absolutely require more than one mit, then it would train healers to use their full toolkit more often and train non-healers to just throw mit once they see a certain castbar. Especially in optional content like alli raids and normal raids, I don't think it should be guaranteed that you always survive at all times unless you run off the platform.

I feel like it would be on solo duties to introduce certain skill checks that are in line with required mechanics and performances in upcoming content, either for the content patch or in the case of an expansion for the expansion in general.