Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[Remedi]

Very hard? It's near impossible. I don't know a single person who has EVER died to it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, that'd be stupid. I'm saying that statistically speaking, I'd be willing to put money on it (even with this playerbase) that it would be considered a statistically insignificant amount of failures.

Hence why I used air quotes.

[Granyala]

I don't knowthat I agree that most healers are at their limit. I think that if my model was implemented well the nature of healing would lend well to it. Much better than a bursty pass/fail model. I think that's much more stressful to your average healer because there's no chance for recovery. It's simply press Heal here, or someone dies, whereas my model a healer with slower reactions might struggle to top them off, but can at least stabilize them. In the event things go awry they can blow significant MP to help get things under control at a cost to their longevity. Something that the DPS can then back up and help cover (assuming encounter design shifted, which under my model it would). I think it gives them more time to make decisions and more options in how to triage various scenarios.

I think I know what you mean and I sympathize but would more time to triage make healing easier? The tough part about healing is making split second decisions.
I casted 2 spells in the wrong order in O6S and as a result the group lived and the tank died (no wipe but I was still pissed about my mistake).

To be frank though: I do not trust our developers to make it right.
WoW tried it and imho they failed to make healing fun. EG: they gave dispel a cooldown but often enough they still spam you with debuffs. Just feels bad.
They slowed down HP recovery but incoming damage is still spiky as ever.

I know I am egocentric here, but I'd hate for FF to try the same, fail and ruin what I enjoy the most about this game.

[Nestama]

DPS checks need to be organic and they need to be less pass/fail and have more dynamic consequences. Not boring/binary stuff like vuln stacks/one shots. They also don't need to be at the end of the fight, they can be in the middle, beginning, etc. They can even put competing DPS checks at the same time, forcing you to make a decision between which one to try for and have supplemental mechanics that prevent it from being a binary decision.

So something like Halicarnassus in Haukke Manor [Hard]? Once you've killed her adds, she has a 'timer' (or her timer starts the second you engage her. So ~6 minutes to kill her) until she uses Fatal Allure (not slow cast) on someone in the party, which will first instantly kill them and then the party because the player killed probably had 100% HP (you can probably survive it if the claimed player had 10% HP. Have never tested this and I have no idea if she will follow up with another Fatal Allure).

[EorzeaHero69]

A Savage like dungeon would be cool. Maybe they could do Aurum Vale Savage? JK, but maybe not lol.

[RiyahArp]

I've done it, countless times for this and many other MMOs. I envision:

A model where incoming damage and healer potency is lower, but comes much quicker and in more various forms to create a steady MP drain (i.e. FINITE resource, currently it is near infinite). You'd have more frequent damage to tanks, less predictable damage (i.e. on who and when) to throw wrenches in triage. To compensate for this healer toolkits would have spells that handle different functions with differing utility/efficiency tied to it. I.e. faster cast heals with higher MP drain for emergency healing, heals with more range, less cost, but maybe slower speed or less power, etc.

The idea would be that as damage ramps up (be it from mechanics, failed mechanics, avoidable damage, unavoidable damage, etc.) healer decisions would be less binary and more dynamic. Ideally, I'd like to see some defensive utility added to non-healer jobs to supplement this paradigm. This also allows vuln stacks to be more impactful, as well as other mechanics that impact party stability. This means that a healer can't easily delete mistakes, but allows mistakes to be more dynamic and less pass/fail.

I don't think players as it is can react much quicker to incoming damage. Both benediction and hallowed ground can misfire simply due to animation lag or latency, popping off and not activating in time. Part of the reason this game is so scripted in encounter design is that there is an upper limit to player reaction time, and older games which used that style of healing mitigate it by much slower gameplay, and ordon't limit the number of healers for raids as much as ffxiv does.

Even if we did put this in, it is a significant jump in difficulty for healers over any other class. You mention adding functions to others, but we already have trial abilities like that; my red mage can use erase to esuna a DPS debuff, and surecast to prevent knockback. You'd be surprised how few people use either, especially since surecast can prevent things like tidal wave or Kefka's knockbacks totally. DPS and tanks in general really struggle with using abilities on others.

Except, you gave one mere example, and it's an awfully slow and boring one. You can have a builder/spender style of gameplay that happens in a much more rapid pace as well offering choices in spenders and builders to add to the gameplay form.

Again, if you increase speed you increase difficulty. They are slow for a reason.

Don't be so petty and dismissive...

I'm serious, something like this is a massive change that's worse than Bard in HW. at least BRD being changed didn't affect your parties ability to clear or required every boss to change to deal with it. There's very strong "break the game" potential in changing healing.

Yes, I am asking healers to heal, so they aren't mistakenly called green DPS. While YOU personally may not see a benefit, there is a benefit to making healing more engaging with actual choice and consequences. There is a benefit to de-homogenizing some of the current healing jobs and carving out more defined playstyles.

This sounds to me more that the raiders want healing to be much harder because they are bored with spamming stone.

I don't think there is any benefit at all. I think if anything, this might make people like healing less because the difficulty of being one would explode. Again, the thing about spamming stone is that it is optional; a healer who isn't as good just does less DPS. A healer under pure healing would just fail much more often.

I don't know where you got this concept of "strict healing rotation". I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, and isn't something anyone is advocating for as best I can tell.

The more cures you add, either builder ones or what have you, the more healers become like DPS if content remains the same. If you made it so you had to chain cure 1-2-3 to proc tetra charges for a tank buster, that's a rotation because the fight generally is static. But with more heals, the stricter your rotation is, since you can miss a stone cast, you can't miss a builder heal.

Just because something is fine, doesn't mean it's good. It doesn't mean it can't be better, or shouldn't be improved.

The defined goal would be to switch healers away from a paradigm where they cast boring one dimensional DPS spells 80% of the time to one where dynamic healing decisions and consequences are available.

It's really easy to break a game if you chase perfect instead of good.

And ugh, again you are asking healing to be much harder if you do this, if the fights themselves remain at the current level. Healing as it is already has a lot to screw up; just because raiders are bored with it doesn't mean making it harder will help anyone.

And how can they truly fail if the second DD and the healer and tank can carry one really bad DD through everything in normal content? Most of the dungeons that I saw failing happened thanks to an undergeared tank or a really bad healer. A bad DD makes it often just longer and I cant remember any tight DPS check in SB dungeons. You only fail as an DD when the tank is bad, the healer is only healing and the other DD is bad too. But more often you will have situations where you simply drag that one bad DD with you and everyone has to put in more effort to clear. Because as long as healers and tanks have time to DPS too, the DDs will never have to be at least good to finish normal content.

You need enrages to make sure dps aren't carried, and you need to make it so no one can be carried, everyone has to be doing their job to proceed. However you also need to make it so people can actually finish the thing in a roulette and won't get kicked en masse either, or wont get annoyed at other players who need to fail the content to learn it. Again, this is Feast, and compared to other modes of pvp it has gone over like a lead balloon.

I think people don't realize what they ask for sometimes.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I think people don't realize what they ask for sometimes.

Or you simply refuse to grasp anything outside your own bias perception. It's a common trend given how you insist things like Shinryu are too hard and the mere idea of promoting more healing over DPS would somehow break the game. If I recall even making dungeons require more than a working pulse would spell disaster! Least they'd be more interesting than pull room and aoe everything down.

[RiyahArp]

You know, considering how much the raiding community complained over relatively minor changes to monk or drk, and continue to note balance changes that constantly affect the meta, your faith that SE somehow can promote more healing without error is pretty funny. I mean, from lilies to pvp to eureka we pretty much have SE making questionable changes in the eyes of the playerbase, and you really want them to start touching the core of one or even more of the roles?

As for hard, well, its not like its ever going to affect you any, because they can't make any expert a challenge for you. You are asking it for others, who definitely may not like it.

[Hestzhyen]

As for hard, well, its not like its ever going to affect you any, because they can't make any expert a challenge for you. You are asking it for others, who definitely may not like it.

Hi, I'm a mid-core player who used to raid Savage. I want harder stuff. I don't have the time for Savage any more but more middling content like the 24 man raids would be excellent. I'd be okay with going down to one dungeon every patch if we could get more stuff like that, honestly.

As for dev capability, they get there eventually. I'd rather see them try new things, fail, and improve than keep things as they are. I'm even willing to give players the benefit of the doubt and say that most of us can handle a bit more difficulty than what we see currently. I'm not asking for all dungeons to become savage, but they can nudge us to do a little more than space out as we push the shiny buttons.

[RiyahArp]

Hi, I'm a mid-core player who used to raid Savage. I want harder stuff.

If they made it anywhere a challenge for you as healer, it would be too hard for most people. In a 4 man, there is no other alliance healer to rez you, nor could you just have one or two dps sit on the floor and still beat add phases. And honestly, they have tried a bunch of new things, and most were flops. Even the rebalancing; they still haven't made mch playable for most people over 3+ years of balancing.

The point is to make them dungeons meaningful, to make us pay at least a little attention past mashing our given AoE as hard as we can..

If we are talking expert, people won't do them. There's no point to it now with eureka, you cap there much easier than you do running experts. Making them non-trivial doesn't do anything.

And if you made us into healers on that level, people would drop the class. It is not more fun to be spamming heals over spamming dps; its the same thing, but possibly with more margin of error. You'd have to really redesign healers to rely on more than just heals in terms of support abilities, and that's a pretty big undertaking. Most healing classes in other MMOs tend to be heal/support; youd have to fold a lot of what bard or mch does or did in the past into them to make them decent here.

[Granyala]

As for hard, well, its not like its ever going to affect you any, because they can't make any expert a challenge for you.

They can't. Everyone here knows that. The only way to make small group content a real challenge would be a race against the clock, which is pretty lame.
Challenge is not the point though. The point is to make them dungeons meaningful, to make us pay at least a little attention past mashing our given AoE as hard as we can.

I may not agree with all that they are proposing but I do agree that it is a problem when I DPS 80% of the time as a healer b/c the content is trivial in difficulty. Again: filling a little downtime with DPS, making meaningful decisions about "can I DPS now w/o s/o dying?" that is fun. Tossing a HoT and mashing my 1 button DPS "rotation" is not.

If you want me to pull a number out of my hat, I'd say in a new dungeon we should aim for around 30% DPS 70% healing with a good group that plays the mechanics well. That leaves room for bad groups to be carried through at the cost of healer DPS. Obviously as the patch goes on and we get gear, the 30% figure will rise again, nature of the beast.