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

[Dhalya]

(from another thread)
I am very disappointed with the direction they are taking the game in terms of job design vs. fight design difficulty and engagement.

Job design should be THE ONE that is most engaging and has high skill ceiling. This way every player is engaged in gameplay even in casual content or grinding. What they are doing is dumbing down the jobs to levels where you fall asleep in dungeons, while making the savage fights harder and harder with body checks, memory games, one shots and no way of recovery.

I completely stopped doing roulettes as I can't bear the 123 simulator on all melees including tanks, or 111 simulator on healers. Sure, in a very difficult fight like TOP or P12S I still struggle to execute perfect rotation and I am engaged a lot. But that's not enough since I only do this content for 10% of my game time and the rest feels super boring.

From the live letter it seems that they are going even more into that direction, possibly making many jobs just 1112 and oGCD weaving copies of each other. The encounters in turn will have to be really exceptional to compensate...

The other MMO I played, Aion-classic, truly not a good game content wise, but the combat is very engaging.
Every class feels different with unique things it can do and what it can optimize like normal attacks timing, dispel timing, aggro/mana/cc/pet management etc.
Sure, you can just mash your buttons and clear most of PVE content, but if you want - there are so many things to improve in. I really miss that possibility here.

[Zadood]

(from another thread)
I am very disappointed with the direction they are taking the game in terms of job design vs. fight design difficulty and engagement.

Job design should be THE ONE that is most engaging and has high skill ceiling. This way every player is engaged in gameplay even in casual content or grinding. What they are doing is dumbing down the jobs to levels where you fall asleep in dungeons, while making the savage fights harder and harder with body checks, memory games, one shots and no way of recovery.

I completely stopped doing roulettes as I can't bear the 123 simulator on all melees including tanks, or 111 simulator on healers. Sure, in a very difficult fight like TOP or P12S I still struggle to execute perfect rotation and I am engaged a lot. But that's not enough since I only do this content for 10% of my game time and the rest feels super boring.

From the live letter it seems that they are going even more into that direction, possibly making many jobs just 1112 and oGCD weaving copies of each other. The encounters in turn will have to be really exceptional to compensate...

The other MMO I played, Aion-classic, truly not a good game content wise, but the combat is very engaging.
Every class feels different with unique things it can do and what it can optimize like normal attacks timing, dispel timing, aggro/mana/cc/pet management etc.
Sure, you can just mash your buttons and clear most of PVE content, but if you want - there are so many things to improve in. I really miss that possibility here.

#3000 day since waiting for a non-p2w MMORPG that has good combat system.

[Kosachi]

Nobody ever told me anything about CS, except for one instance where I was praised for having it on 80% of an instance and us still getting through just fine.

[Sebazy]

In ARR if you were running with a group and didn't use cleric stance as a healer you were either ridiculed or kicked, it was not optional.

Meanwhile in reality:....



In ARR, the only time I can genuinely remember Cleric Stance being 'mandatory' was when I was running tank/blm/whm/whm Wanderer's Palace grind sessions before we realised locking trash out with boss room gates was a thing.

Early on in ARR the overwhelming majority of mainstream players either flat out didn't care or just wanted you to play it safe. By the tail end of HW an expectation for healer DPS was properly starting to filter down into the mainstream from high end players but it wasn't really the norm yet (As my screenshot demonstrates).

[Shurrikhan]

In ARR, the only time I can genuinely remember Cleric Stance being 'mandatory' was when I was running tank/blm/whm/whm Wanderer's Palace grind sessions before we realised locking trash out with boss room gates was a thing.

Early on in ARR the overwhelming majority of mainstream players either flat out didn't care or just wanted you to play it safe. By the tail end of HW an expectation for healer DPS was properly starting to filter down into the mainstream from high end players but it wasn't really the norm yet (As my screenshot demonstrates).

I can't remember a single time anyone got annoyed by my using Cleric Stance in ARR for which spamming Cure II / Adlo wouldn't have arrived at the exact same result (i.e., Tank pulled as much as they could either without miti or without taking threat, causing DPS to get nuked), while I can easily remember some 530+ times, across omni-leveling and expert roulettes, that the other dps or the tank asked the healer not to waste time idling between heals or by doing attacks of less than one-third power from using them outside of CS. Several of those were within the beta ("don't idle") or the first couple weeks upon ARR's release (including "don't waste your time attacking without CS" post-Stone Vigil).

While it was very rarely something people would kick over (I can think of only maybe a dozen times I've seen that, between Ex RLs and PuG Coils), Sebazy's anecdote above of someone getting mad over the healer not spam-overhealing for any legitimate reason (e.g., because the tank would otherwise die to a flurry attack if not topped off prior AND a heal didn't land right between them) was rarer still; almost always, it resulted simply from idiocy or blame-shifting (such as, as in Sebazy's example above, the player mistaking party-wide one-shots from failed DPS checks for healing checks, or dying before Bene/Lustrate could go off because of complete failure to use mitigation, etc.). Running out of MP before the end of the fight because of tossing out a CS DoT per its duration was pretty much only ever frowned up if there was no bard and the healer packed no Elixirs AND there was no enrage or large raid burst avoidable via that healer damage.

It's worth noting, though, that the expectation varied with content type. Healers were more expected to deal damage in (easier, such as very early or overgeared level-cap) dungeons rather than in raids, since MP was actually an issue in sustained combat those days.

[Shurrikhan]

To me this is the core of the problem. I'd rather have SE decide on one approach: go all in on the trinity or ditch it entirely. The current half measured approach just gives us the worst of both worlds.

Is what we're experiencing right now really an issue of the trinity being "half-measured", though? Or merely imbalanced in utilization?

We have ultimately two outputs: Damage and sustain.

• Effective damage makes enemies live less long. (Granted, in PvE, the difference between "effective" and "raw" is limited only to exploitation of buff windows, as enemies have no self-heals nor --at this point-- even varying mitigation.
  
  
• Effective sustain makes you and your allies live more long. (That is to say, if you put a HoT on someone who would then be unavoidably killed through it without lasting even a hit longer, that effect didn't contribute to its intended function.)

But with so little difference between "effective" and "raw" damage or sustain, there are very few means by which the actual advantages of specializing towards a role goes beyond basic output.

For instance, if healing can neither increase effective damage (by avoiding a debuff that'd otherwise ultimately reduce clear speed, preventing an important knockback, or allowing DPS to greed a mechanic for vital uptime) nor decrease the total sustain required for a given clear speed... the only potential differentiators are (A) no one dying and (B) the healer's overall DPS.

The first is painfully bimodal, such that making it significant feels worse for everyone, even in a game without hard rez caps. The second, painfully dull, especially when there's little conflict applied through rotational conflict with keeping people from dying (such as threats being too spaced and predictable).

But even then, making far more engaging use of healers doesn't require going "all in" on the trinity to the point of stripping damage actions from healers. Heck, it'd likely work better with more cognitive load and potential conflict among healers' offensive actions. But it does require amping sustain requirements and interactivity.

And that's before we even get into the further divide of highly scaled vs. relatively flat means of output, or what sustain requirements would be necessary to offset advantages of margin (such as from using shields over heals).

[ty_taurus]

Personally, I like the idea of certain tanks and DPS being able to bring healing to the party as a form of utility that can support the healers, but in order for that to feel healthy, that healing can't be frequent or effective enough to outright replace the healers, but that's an easy line to cross in FFXIV because of a number of reasons. We don't take damage very often in most content, first of all, so there's barely any pressure a non-healer can actually take off the healer's shoulders, and even when we do take damage, the healers are so ridiculously powerful that you need the utility healing to be near that level in order for it to provide enough sustain to help the healer conserve resources.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Anybody’s excited to hear anything along the line of “Healings are made easier in first tier to ease more players into savage difficulty”-kind of excuse to not give us fights that actually requires us to press our shiny healy buttons regularly?

Also Holy Carp we’ve reached 400 pages lol.

[Supersnow845]

If R1 is anything like P1 we may as well just give the healer spots to WAR on launch

[Flay_wind]

It's not like Healer's stacks somehow default to Tanks if Healer is missing already.