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

[Colt47]

Somehow I ended up giving feedback for the healer issue in another thread but it was more about the all or nothing approach they are doing with savage that is making it a headache for healers. Basically, the damage is just too high and turning every step into a binary win or loss ordeal, so that people are getting road blocked on learning fights. There is such a thing as making something hard but still achievable, and current savage feels like it is failing that. The entire reason healing is both boring and stressful is that healers can heal a LOT of damage and at the same time be completely useless at healing anything. What is the point of being able to recover someones HP to full if they are just going to flat out die if they fail to mit? What is really going on is that they made a step in a fight where the tank has to mit, he takes the hit and nearly dies, and because of that the healer has to have enough power to fully refill his HP gauge. So you're healing is strong only because it has to be to fulfill this completely binary and inorganic point in a fighting scenario.

It is much better in terms of design and learning if people can screw up but survive a mechanic, with the culmination of failures in a sequence resulting in the groups death, then flat out killing everyone and people being forced to watch a video to figure out what they did wrong. For that kind of thing they do not need to have things hit for tons of damage, they could also have things hit for a reasonable amount but make healing weaker. So that way even if someone isn't at the same point as the rest of the group, the rest of the group isn't being held up by a single mechanic. It's just crappy design to have content for random groups of people where the lowest rung holds everyone back, and this is coming from someone who has been doing savage now since the middle of shadowbringers. Healers will be a lot less boring if they actually have to do things besides being a mega-potion on legs that sometimes throws a shield up. They got to be more dps focused and handling mitigation / shields just like the tanks are.

[Deceptus]

Somehow I ended up giving feedback for the healer issue in another thread but it was more about the all or nothing approach they are doing with savage that is making it a headache for healers. Basically, the damage is just too high and turning every step into a binary win or loss ordeal, so that people are getting road blocked on learning fights. There is such a thing as making something hard but still achievable, and current savage feels like it is failing that. The entire reason healing is both boring and stressful is that healers can heal a LOT of damage and at the same time be completely useless at healing anything. What is the point of being able to recover someones HP to full if they are just going to flat out die if they fail to mit? .

The Bozja raids highlighted this as well last expansion.

In them it didn't matter how much HP you had, if you got hit by 2 mechanics in a boss fight you died. Period.

No amount of healing could fix that, no amount of shielding could prevent that.

So what happened? It made the tank and healer Honors pointless and it made healers largely pointless as a role (sound familiar?). The only thing that mattered were DPS and DPS actions. Again, sound familiar?

[Aravell]

It's interesting to think about "drawing in DPS players" to tanks and healers because that goes back to the question of whether these roles were/were not being filled in duty finder or wherever. It's hard to argue without any data. If that were the case I'd also wonder what drove the philosophy behind simplifying vs some other approach-- like is it a resources issue or a creative constraint? It's also interesting to think about whether further homogenisation and simplification are even avoidable given that this is a game that is predicated on pushing every player to play every job/most jobs instead of maining the job they like, and that job pool keeps expanding. I'm definitely interested to see what's happening with DRG and the new jobs-- I've said before I think that will give us the indication of where the game is going long term. It's not because I want to be doom and gloom, but moreso because imo this game is too deep in its life cycle to course correct in any significant way. Every year it doesn't course correct makes it more resource intensive to revolutionize any given part of the game. Even with the graphics update for example--- it's easier to go back and update 10 years of content vs 15. I'm sure it would be easier to look at jobs and rotations with less jobs and even less levels. There's more inherent risk as well because more competing games release over time and they need their core base to stay subscribed. So we may just be stuck in this direction, unfortunately.

The dev team wanting to coax people from the DPS role into tanking or healing is just my guess, we obviously cannot know for sure as only the dev team knows the reasoning for what they're doing. I'm just saying that it looks like what they're doing because of how they've been emphasising accessibility and how Yoshi P asked people to give healers a try. Although, my bigger concern at the moment is that they lack a vision of their own. You mentioned the things they're doing to jobs and attribute it to their vision for the game, but what if it isn't?

Notice how when people ask Yoshi P about any changes recently, he usually replies that the changes are due to player feedback. Now, he could be deflecting so the playerbase blames each other instead of going after him, that is a possibility. But what if they just have no clear vision of their own? What if they just do what they think the playerbase is asking for and just get confused when people react badly to it? That might be a prospect more scary than them just wanting to simplify the game as their vision.

[Colt47]

I just know that over all the way they are handling content this expansion is problematic from multiple angles. Someone can't claim that savage is hard when it is about having to watch a video and perform perfectly, while often having players grow bored because the discrepancy in progress walls or prevents learning from others. To learn people have to survive their mistakes and that is just a fundamental of life, in-game or not. In that respect the gear grinding of world of warcraft was at least more honest, as it walled people by gear score on how far they could progress rather than walling people via the unknown and/or the unknowable.

[Solakor]

I just know that over all the way they are handling content this expansion is problematic from multiple angles. Someone can't claim that savage is hard when it is about having to watch a video and perform perfectly, while often having players grow bored because the discrepancy in progress walls or prevents learning from others. To learn people have to survive their mistakes and that is just a fundamental of life, in-game or not. In that respect the gear grinding of world of warcraft was at least more honest, as it walled people by gear score on how far they could progress rather than walling people via the unknown and/or the unknowable.

When you put it that way it starts to sound more and more that they are making systems and hoping they work rather than making sure they are good and functional. A scary thought.

[Aravell]

Honestly speaking, if the dev team's idea of complex content is 'do the dance this exact way and not a bit different or you all die', I think most people would agree that they should stop trying to shift all the complexity into the encounters.

[ty_taurus]

Tangential...

Wait... that means you've greater assured offensive uptime despite movement and some additional cleave.... How is that not likely to help produce more damage in practice (i.e., in real content)? Its featural/contextual, but that's generally the more interesting means of aid (including the largest part of what Lilies+Misery offer over Glare spam and oGCD heals).

Moving this here to keep the conversation more on topic with the thread discussion.

My point was that sure, securing guaranteed mobility does theoretically produce more damage, but my point is the damage you gain is so insignificant because of Toxikon being largely gated behind GCD barrier healing that Addersting's value is functionally null. In the few examples I looked up, Toxikon comprised of approximately 1%~1.5% of each Sage's personal DPS output, but that doesn't mean that Sage couldn't have casted something else instead. Even overwriting their DOT, for example, means that none of those Toxikon casts offer the full potency value, because there was the opportunity cost to cast something else instead. And those were just the free Toxikons that you start with. Only one person I looked at used any more instances of Toxikon, and only 1 more at that.

I would love to actually calculate how many Assizes a Stormblood White Mage might've gained from the reduced cooldown from lily usage. White Mage was far more quick to use heals that generated lilies, after all, since their OGCD healing library was very shallow (and still is). It's very possible that the extra Assize casts might actually have offered more DPS for White Mage than Toxikons do for Sage, especially considering that every extra Assize has a very clear net worth, because Assize wasn't competing with any other action on your hotbar, unlike Toxikon.

[Absurdity]

Honestly speaking, if the dev team's idea of complex content is 'do the dance this exact way and not a bit different or you all die', I think most people would agree that they should stop trying to shift all the complexity into the encounters.

That very much feels like what they've been doing since at least the end of Shadowbringers.
I remember in E6S people just ignored Ifrit's football mechanic because it was easier and led to better party DPS to just sit north, stand in the explosion, take a vuln stack and ignore the entire mechanic instead of running around like headless chicken trying to find the safespot. And especially on tanks that fight was more about how many mechanics you could comfortably stand in to keep uptime than anything else because of how much forced and otherwise unavoidable downtime the fight had.

Come next raid tier and suddenly all vuln stacks were replaced by damage down so you had to do the mechanic exactly as the devs wanted, which players then cincumvented in E10S by stacking so much mitigation and shielding that it dealt 0 damage and therefore applied no damage down.

Now they went even a step further, either everyone does the mechanic exactly like they want or you wipe on the body check right afterwards.

[Turtledeluxe]

I'm not sure the devs have a vision for jobs beyond being vehicles for encounters, whether that's PvP or Savage. Isn't Yoshi P's statement evidence of that? I've said before it seems like jobs are barely talked about at all unless someone goes out of their way to ask the team about them. In a world without media, I'm 99% sure every fanfest would just be focused on new content and minor potency updates. It seems like we may just need to accept that endless new jobs are intended to try to satisfy diverse playstyles until they are inevitably nerfed/homogenised and leave you waiting on the next ones.

And imo this was bound to happen. Since devs were successful in getting the base to master multiple jobs, you inevitably end up with a significant number of players who often cannot think of original feedback because feedback occurs on a job vs job basis. In other words my theory is that the game is the way it is because lots of players who play lots of jobs want them all to feel the same, perhaps even unconsciously, which has created a feedback loop of homogeny. This is why it's always good to balance public feedback with your own creative vision.

[OgruMogru]

I'm not sure the devs have a vision for jobs beyond being vehicles for encounters, whether that's PvP or Savage.

Imo it's backwards though. The encounters should also be a vehicle for the job's gameplay.