Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[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.