Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[Alleo]

The feedback is failing.

I mean, the DPS cause a wipe due to not enough dps and fail an encounter.

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.

[Granyala]

Considering that I am a mana-god (WHM :P ) and the fact that mobs hit like wet noodles with serious self esteem issues.

Erm... I can heal them until the 90 Minute timer expires.

So, yes: there is absolutely -0- feedback in the game for DPS to "up their game if they want them lootz™". They just get dragged along by the collar if necessary.
Unless they enter extreme or savage. Then they get hit by a brick wall of difficulty, because apparently the DEVs of MMOs are incapable of using the vast territory of difficulties that lie in between the two extremes. <_<

[Remedi]

tbf They did add a "DPS race" to the final boss of fractal hard, though admittedly it's very hard to mess it up, but that's not something that a better tuning can't fix

[KaldeaSahaline]

I get four or more people responding to me on posts sometimes, each with multiple points. I cull my responses so I'm not writing massive books each time I make a post.

Oh I understand trust me (i'm probably this forums worst offender in that regard).


That being said, you still haven't acknowledged it. Please go back and read it and respond. I'd appreciate it. You're being hypocritical by not responding to something you specifically asked for, and it makes me question your intent of the discussion. You're either invested and have something to say about it, or you're intentionally being inflammatory. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt (which is infinitely more generous than other posters here give you), please respect that.

It depends on the implementation of course but healing is difficult enough for most people. If you now design the classes in a way that a healer can acutally f*** up in a different manner than "forget to heal", you will make it harder for a lot of people that are already at their limit.

People like you and me would most likely cope and maybe eventually like the changes.
Though I do not want to be weak as a healer, WoW did that and it feels utterly frustrating, I play a hero damn it I want to be strong and powerful and not constantly go "yeah you just gimped, sorry, meaningful heals are on CD, nothing I can do now".

In WoW, most of the time, the only thing I can say as a healer is "You are not supposed to take so much damage, play better if you do not want to die". That sucks. Here, I just toss more healing, take the hit on DPS and save incompetent butts (within reason). Feels much better. :P

I don't know that 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.

tbf They did add a "DPS race" to the final boss of fractal hard, though admittedly it's very hard to mess it up, but that's not something that a better tuning can't fix

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[KisaiTenshi]

I get four or more people responding to me on posts sometimes, each with multiple points. I cull my responses so I'm not writing massive books each time I make a post.

Nobody on the forum has the attention span to read a novel, so the longer your post, the more likely someone will want to argue that one thing that you didn't think was important enough to elaborate on by suggesting you've never played the game. I had actually written a munch longer post in response to the WoW statement but decided that nobody would read it...

And why exactly did people go to WoW with their new PCs and internet, rather than to the games that were supposedly better...?

The old games were already established. They were already well known and didn't need as much marketing efforts, they already had friend circles playing that the new guard could join and their product had more time to mature and develop, with less bugs and server outages. Yet, people went for WoW. Because it's worse. That just doesn't quite make sense.

Wow's popularity had more to do with broadband yes, but the fact that it was casual-friendly, if not braindead easy is why people dragged their friends to it. It's very hard to drag a friend to a grindy (FFXI), expensive (Korean MMO's), punishing (Wizrdry's permadeath), PvP-oriented game. But you can drag your non-gaming friends into WoW because you can skip all the content and not be behind for 10 years.

Each country is not the vacuum everyone makes it out to be. There's three major markets, Korea, Japan and US.

Korea has many MMO's that westerners may recognize like NexusTK, Maple Story, Mabinogi, Dragon Nest, Ragnarok Online, Lineage, Guild Wars, Tera, Blade and Soul, Aion, Archeage, and so forth.

Japan's MMO's have largely made no inroads to the west (largely due to arrogance https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...japanese-games ), with only FFXI and FFXIV being present, despite foreign players wanting to play Wizardy Online (which briefly was here as a freemium P2W game), Dragon Quest X, and PSO2.

In the west, WoW is popular but it's not exported to Japan, as Japanese players are not big PC game players. There are localized versions for Korea and China however.

Europe, Runescape was a UK MMO. Minecraft was from a Swedish developer, who later sold it to Microsoft. EVE Online is from Iceland. Everything else I could find for Europe was mobile P2W rubbish. Of these, these games Minecraft's popularity explosion was like WoW's, it offers a casual environment that can be played with a low-spec computer and even works on mobile and consoles.

Sony before dumping all it's MMO's, was working on Everquest Next (later, before being canceled, Landmark) which was a much prettier Minecraft as a MMORPG. It's kindof a pity it was canceled because the resource gathering in that game put all existing MMO's gathering "nodes" to shame. But this is what some companies thought people wanted... a pretty minecraft, not "a casual friendly game free of grindy combat"

[Tridus]

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

I can already hear the howls of outrage.

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.

It's a soft check, as is the one in Hells Lid. But you know what? The fact that it exists is itself a step up. No other expert in Stormblood has one at all. A tank and a healer can do Kugane Castle as a duo just fine, albeit slower.

Dungeon ones are also heavily influenced by what kind of group you get paired up with. A pure healer, a tank who never leaves tank stance, and a BLM who doesn't understand how to use Enochian are going to make the job of that other DPS player significantly more difficult, and those three likely won't even realize they're the ones doing something wrong because the game does nothing to surface that information.

So the difficulty with tuning this is that if you want the DPS floor to clear the place to be X (for DPS) and Y (for the tank), that means all three are at that level and the healer isn't factored in at all (as they've said). Get a savage purple parsing healer in that group and suddenly a DPS can be nowhere near X but still clear just fine. In another group they may fail it entirely, and that player has no idea why.

It also can't take comp into account because DF will give you all kinds of suboptimal comps. Those need to be able to clear it if the players play reasonably well. So a optimal group will destroy it and probably wonder how it's possible to fail.

So, I mean, I think having a DPS check like they added in dungeons is a good thing. Maybe the next ones are tuned a bit tighter, but it's a step in the right direction. By itself it can't exactly solve the problem.

[Remedi]

I mean starting to cast a wipe skill at 10% and taking that long to cast really isn't that hard especially if you keep LB for that, imho they should've had him starting to cast it much earlier.
That said I totally agree that is a step up and they should do more of these