Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[RiyahArp]

You realize in the average dungeon, I will spend upwards of 80% casting Stone IV, Holy, Aero II or Aero III, yes? Both the healers in my static spend over 60% of their time casting DPS spells. No other MMO has its healers play pseudo-DPS who occasionally heals yet that is precisely how healers in FFXIV operate. Reducing their potency won't make healing "dramatically harder." It will make it so you have to spend more time healing than DPSing.

Of course it will make it harder.

Let's say there's a period of time where I have 20 GCDS as a healer. 60% DPS means about 8 casts mitigate the incoming damage raid wide. Now lets halve potency overall. That means I need 16 casts to cover raid damage.

Now imagine what happens if I get hit by a mechanic that paralyzes me, and I lose 4 GCDs. I have to be perfect with normal casts to still cover incoming damage. Now imagine if I die.

Let's say I'm raised really fast, up in 2 GCDs. Ok, that's cool. Let's say I have good MP management, so lack of MP doesn't factor in. Ok. Problem is though I now have a 25% potency hit from the raise for one minute, which may mean I need at least one more GCD every 4 for every minute. So I'm probably going to wipe the raid because I died; my casts are too few that I won't be able to keep up with damage. This is because the amount of GCDs that are required not to wipe the raid that only I can do are very high and make me vulnerable to disruption much more like a DPS is, and we all know how hard it can be for DPS.

In FFXI you were more of a pure healer, but you didn't nonstop heal either. You spent time casting debuffs (dia, para, slow) and buffs (barspells.) You spent a lot of time not even healing, you took a knee to regen MP, and you had a lot of things that helped you minimize that time spent resting, as well as a cohealer that healed while you did. And FFXI healing was pretty hard overall. FFXIV doesnt have anywhere near this depth, so we'd just be nonstop curing if they made us more pure healers, and there's no real way to balance this; we have no haste, or no buffs for short term potency up for all but one healer. Our tools are mostly for MP management, designed to have us keep casting.

I think it would be much harder as the game is now. You'd need to change a lot to make it the same difficulty.