Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[KisaiTenshi]

I mean, they could limit in combat rezes and make healing more demanding.... just a thought.

I'm aware this will never happen, but one can dream

This argument comes up a lot already.

There's really only three solutions:
1) Make healing hard by making gear irrelevant
2) Make healing hard by making instant-death mechanics every 5 seconds in all content.
3) Make healing hard by changing the healer's kit to cast the "Right" kind of healing (eg specific debuff remover, shield, raw heal), that you can't spam/rotate through, and you can't raw heal through actions requiring a shield or debuff removal.

As it is right now, the healing is only balanced when the content is new, and players have the tomes gear from the previous content patch cycle. Once whatever gear/tomes from the current cycle replaces it, it's again a push over, and on all older content, your healing is so pointless that you can play many of the pre-50 dungeons without any healing because the auto-heal exists. Damage in 2.0 to a tank would take a tank down 40% in 2.0 content, now it goes down like 5%, right within the realm of auto-heal.

[Cabalabob]

If they do just one mode then blitzball will inevitably be short term content.

Do it all!

Have a system similar to squads where you recruit a team and can have them do matches to learn skills and boost their stats or you can personally go in with them to actually play a match and earn skills yourself. Have NPC teams representing the cities to play against in a league or tournaments as a kind of single player mode where you can earn rewards like glamours or special techniques. While also having a free play mode where you can play against other player’s saved NPC teams or even pvp against another player and their team.

[Genz]

The answer about blitzball is worrying.
Blitzball itself isn't important ; the problem is Yoshida's mindset. Why does he want to add blitzball? Because some players asked it, and because he wants to make a fan-service FF. Not because he actually has a good idea. He looks unmotivated to actually make it, and hopes to get away with a cheap shortcut, but a squadron-bis is unneeded, since we precisely already have squadrons (and you can actually play with your squadron)
And what the **** is "MMORPG-like" in managing a team of NPC through a menu?! It's impossible to take him seriously when he spews such bs.

The game needs a fun mini-game that can be done casually with friends and guild members, like chocobo races, except current races are trash and the unneeded leveling of the chocobo makes it hard to play with friends since everyone has a different chocobo level. Update races first to show you can actually make a decent mini-game, and think about blitzball later.
And the fetishism on rewards needs to disappear. Bigger rewards doesn't make the content better, so if you think you need to put tomestones on blitzball, something is wrong.

[Stormfur]

And the fetishism on rewards needs to disappear. Bigger rewards doesn't make the content better, so if you think you need to put tomestones on blitzball, something is wrong.

Watch, blitzball will be squadrons with swimming and the reward will be kelpie.

[DrWho2010]

And the fetishism on rewards needs to disappear. Bigger rewards doesn't make the content better, so if you think you need to put tomestones on blitzball, something is wrong.

Problem is a lot of people won't do stuff if there is nothing attached to it. they may do it once or twice but without the carrot there is nothing keeping them there.

[RiyahArp]

Nerfing healers simply is going to make it impossible to fix mistakes. If healing is more involved and less potent, if the DPS stands in the fire the healer won't be able to save them; they have to save GCDs for the tank and their rotation is too strict to modify it except at certain times. It also means when the healer wipes, its a wipe period, because the other healer also can't adapt and the content needs two of you doing your rotation to succeed now.

A lot of the potency and quick healing is because you really need to have that to fix a mistake. You need huge potency instant heals because sometimes the dps eats an attack that takes off 75% of their HP and a followup aoe is coming. You need instant raises because you don't have time to hardcast them usually. Overhealing in general enables good healers to spend gcds into dps and soften the dps burden some. And healers really are the only class that can fix mistakes to any real extent; everyone else is too limited, especially when its direct damage or status effects.

I really wish people would just STFU about making things harder, because it would ruin healing in this game. There's no way healers are going to like having a gimped healset with encounter designs that routinely bring people down to 25% health on mistake, and have constant movement and damage. Old MMO healing generally was much less mobile, much more slower paced, and with much less of a tight player limit.

[Zojha]

Nerfing healers simply is going to make it impossible to fix mistakes.

That's partially the point.

When a healer can easily fix a mistake and a piece of content is not supposed to allow for many mistakes, then you need to prevent healers from being able to fix them. And instant-wipe is the hard form of that, instant death the soft form, because they bypass heals and only allow raises, which are more costly. Those are the two most common, but any measure you take will have to be aimed at healers here.

That has no bearing on how many mistakes a content may allow or how hard a content is. Even if you have no healers at all, a content may allow a lot of mistakes when mistakes simply deal very little damage.
Imagine you have 1000 HP, no means to restore it and the boss only deals damage if you make a mistake. At 1000 damage, you cannot make a mistake, at 500 damage you can make one, at 100 damage you can make nine and at 1 damage you can make a thousand mistakes (minus one).
Now imagine you have 1000 HP and your healer can restore a total of 5000 HP, then he goes OOM and cannot fix anymore mistakes. How many mistakes can you make now? With 1000 damage, you still can't make any. At 500 damage, you can make 11. At 100 damage, you can make 59. At 1 damage, you can make 5999.
Tuning with healers is actually a lot more iffy than without, especially with mana regeneration and all that jazz in the mix.

Another thing is that the weaker healers are, the less damage you can give your encounters, which in turn makes the party rely on them less. Example:
You have a health pool of 30k. The encounter assumes that your healer will heal you for 10k every GCD and thus deals 10k damage every GCD. How long do you survive without a healer? 2 GCDs.
Now assume the encounter assumes your healer will only heal 2k every GCD and appropriately lower the damage to 2k a GCD. How long do you survive now? 14 GCDs.
And if the damage is only 2k and healers can still heal for 10k? Then the healer is just going to be inactive for 4 GCDs. That's expert roulette.
This is actually why VIT accessories are so completely worthless - Like 99% of your health as tank comes from the healer, not your base health pool. There's no point increasing it, it doesn't make you survive any longer, you'll have long hit enrage before the healers run dry and your VIT gets its 1 autoattack of fame.

The stronger healers are, the faster health is going to move in either direction. You can see that in the first example: If you want to allow roughly 10 mistakes, the scenario without healers is going to take chunks of about 10% of your health bar for each. The scenario with healers instead takes about half of your health bar with every mistake for the same effect.

This game is pretty extreme on healer power and damage thus very spiky and burst heavy. It's similar in PvP, where healers make damage that doesn't come in bursts trivial and shift the meta to focused CC and burst.

That said, though... I must admit I also can't imagine the game working if healing (and thus encounter design) got re-designed. Not because of anything healer related, but because there'd be less group DPS to compensate for Yoshida's completely outlandish expectations towards DPS players.

[RiyahArp]

That has no bearing on how many mistakes a content may allow or how hard a content is. Even if you have no healers at all, a content may allow a lot of mistakes when mistakes simply deal very little damage.

That's generally not a good model to have, because now you need to expand the encounter time dramatically to compensate for it, and you'd end up with original steps of faith, where the fight can be lost with no way to compensate for it until the clock winds down. You'd also end up with the problem of overwatch, in where you need a healer, but the healer actually can't do anything much to compensate for the group and requires the group to act in unison and perfectly, while still getting blamed and hated a lot for failing.

There's also no real skillful healer play in saving people allowed, and no requirement for them at all if the burden is low enough; just have tanks put down a regen over time aura or or something, and remove the class.

That said, though... I must admit I also can't imagine the game working if healing (and thus encounter design) got re-designed. Not because of anything healer related, but because there'd be less group DPS to compensate for Yoshida's completely outlandish expectations towards DPS players.

DPS could be adjusted easily, its just target numbers over time. Reduce health of mobs. Issue to me is that most people would bow out of being healers, because you at least with most things being dps, you can just skip the gps gcd if you struggle and heal. The less potency and more gcds to heal, the harder it gets because each one counts much more.

As pointed out in the -many- "to dps or not to dps" threads involving healers, healers do not have enough to do -always-. Even when content is new, that wiggle room exists, as it ages, players pick the most lazy and ineffective strategy (cast regen, do nothing else) because there is nothing else for that role to do, because the game makes no requirement to be reactive in anything but extreme/savage. It would be one thing if more content had "heal the idiot NPC" type of mechanics, it's another where "the DPS are taken out of the arena, and only the tank and healer can release them, simultaneously", and we just don't see mechanics that make the healer do anything but run away when targeted.

Like in a traditional RPG (eg pen and paper) your GM would adapt to idiotic and lazy gameplay. One way of making the Healer do more work is by attaching consequences to not paying attention. We see that with half dozen versions of Doom/Death. Some of the 24-player content is so busy that you can miss things, and I'd argue that the 24-player content is actually the best content in the game for healers, because it does not let you "do nothing", there is always going to be something that you can do because the mechanics often require paying attention to the field and other players. On the opposite side of this, most of the 8-player content has no balance once players have out-geared it, and it's a choreographed dance once you remember the how it goes. The 4-player content is a mixed bag, and as Yoshi-P stated, has no instant-death mechanics, so there is never any reason for a wipe other than people not paying attention.

I don't think people really would like this. Make healers busy enough and they get overloaded and stop; healing stress is something that generally is comparable to tanking stress, but in this game is much less. You'd have to improve this without singling out healers, which I feel is what 4 man hard content does.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I really wish people would just STFU about making things harder, because it would ruin healing in this game. There's no way healers are going to like having a gimped healset with encounter designs that routinely bring people down to 25% health on mistake, and have constant movement and damage. Old MMO healing generally was much less mobile, much more slower paced, and with much less of a tight player limit.

And I wish people who stop insisting everyone needs their hands held throughout the entire game or they will fall apart. The whole DPS dilemma regarding healers stems from the fact you will spend more time DPS than healing in this game. In fact, there is not a single piece of content that cannot be solo healed. Even Ultimate does not require two healers, though obviously it takes skill to be that proficient at any role. Nevertheless, your insistence healers need to be able to essential carry parties assure the green DPS meta will continue. "Gimping" healing potency would force them to special at their actual role in lieu of being pseudo DPS.

Put another way. Do you prefer the current system where healers are expected to DPS or a system that encourages healing and fights don't have to rely on OHKO mechanics to be threatening?

[RiyahArp]

Put another way. Do you prefer the current system where healers are expected to DPS or a system that encourages healing and fights don't have to rely on OHKO mechanics to be threatening?

Yeah, I'd rather have the current system. You're asking for it to be made dramatically harder for one single class by forcing GCDs that are optional and can be used either for DPS or healing into pure healing. We have an example of that in Feast, and even though you can't one hit someone in Feast without proper timing and coordination, it's horrid to play as a healer in it. If you need two healers at full output to handle encounters in this game, you've just reduced their ability to slip up, regardless of lack of one hits. If you only have one, well, good luck with that, get used to wiping and being kicked as a dps because I can't cover for you when you stand in the bad.