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.

[akaneakki]

Why do you have healers when mechanics kill you instantly and healers spend most of their time DPSing? Non lethal mechanics where a healer can recover eventually give healers stuff to do and can lead to wipes if people fail too many times in most MMOs, but healing here is so overpowered that it doesn't really work in most content. One shots mean I can't do anything to save someone from a mistake except Raise.

Most MMO's doesn't even have healers, you gotta take care of your own healing. And if they made healing diffuculty higher than it is now, then a lot and I mean A LOT of people would struggle. Hell, people struggle already now. Yesterday a guy asked a tank or a melee dps to do the pink color in 06s, because he said there is ton of damage to heal when 1 healer is inside the thing that kills the wind spirits. It's just 1 aoe and it's pretty easy to heal...

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

Harder, yes. But as per usual, you over-exaggerate things.

First and foremost, those sixteen casts would be split amongst both healers whereas currently one can primarily DPS. Your example also does not account for content not necessitating the sheer amount of healing all in the span of several seconds. Ever single fight has ample downtime, thus even with a healing potency reduction you would still have time to recover. A death puts more pressure on your co-healer and support jobs, however that's the whole point. Let's look at Rabanastre. I can, and have, gone the entire run casting very few healing spells. In this hypothetical, I'd be forced to actually participate as a healer. Assume I died, 75% healing efficiency between both healers remains overkill for everything Rabanastre throws at you. Case in point, people have cleared it on all tanks, red mages or with multiple healers dead. The content simply doesn't demand what you are insinuating hence why pure healing is considered extremely easy.

You have frequently complained about the OHKO mechanics utilized, especially in Rabanastre. They exist because healers are essentially overpowered. Reducing healing potency allows for more varied mechanics, both from bosses and oGCD buffs. Largesse becomes infinitely more useful if you actually had to prioritize more GCD healing.

So add that depth back. Heaven knows Astro could use something beyond Malefic III on an endless loop. I would much prefer more varied gameplay on a healer than Stone IV/Aero II/III spam 60-80% of the time. And this is coming from someone who loves to DPS on healers. I simply find it silly you will always spend more time dealing damage than your primary role.

Most MMO's doesn't even have healers, you gotta take care of your own healing. And if they made healing diffuculty higher than it is now, then a lot and I mean A LOT of people would struggle. Hell, people struggle already now. Yesterday a guy asked a tank or a melee dps to do the pink color in 06s, because he said there is ton of damage to heal when 1 healer is inside the thing that kills the wind spirits. It's just 1 aoe and it's pretty easy to heal...

To be fair, that person has no business anywhere near Savage if they cannot handle that mechanic.

[Vahlnir]

Rival Wings was fine actually, and the only real issue they didn't address was healer potency. It's not a bad mode at all, especially once they balanced it the first time. What they needed to do was address healing at that time, because it was pretty blatant how strong and unbalanced it could be in a mode that was more defensive than other pvp modes. That they refused to do that kind of killed the mode. Stupid Feast balancing dragged it down.

Unfortunately, RW suffers like every other PvP mode does on the NA side. Bots are far too common. I've seen my fair share, and it's now to the point I simply don't participate anymore. Pretty hard to win when half your team is "afk" or feeding the other teams points. Perhaps it's not as bad on the JP side of things, but it's a pretty big issue in other places. They seriously need to consider NA and other regions into their decisions.

[KisaiTenshi]

Well, now I have what to specifically discuss. So here goes.

This is an issue that all multiplayer games have. Yet playing multiplayer, not necessarily with your neighbors only, is exactly how sport games are played the most. The latency doesn't affect them?! I'm sure it does.

Please show me where there is a MMO-FIFA Online. There isn't.

Sports games was the incentive for "4-player" console designs. You know what's funny, EA FIFA itself introduced a "solo story" campaign. They also only introduced female players in the 2016 years version... you know after having 20 versions without them. FIFA had an "online" game, it never got out of BETA. Instead they came out with a Mobile app, and we all know the kind of rubbish puts out for mobile.

Point is, there is no real way of making a real-time sport game within the confines of the FFXIV engine, nor has there ever been a successful real-time/action game that hasn't been plagued with cheaters and bots. Like just tampering with the nagle algorithm (TcpAckFrequency and TCPNoDelay to 1 in windows) gives you an advantage in MMO games that players may not otherwise have. Living in California or Montreal gives you an advantage or disadvantage depending which data center you're in.

No wonder you don't see it if you just assumed it would be in a very specific way, while completely ignoring the fact that nothing is set in stone. Now, it would be a bit more reasonable if you assumed it would be a faithful representation of blitzball from FFX, but no. Your idea of how it would HAVE to work have nothing in common with it but the name and swimming in a dome, all the while assuming all the worse case scenarios. Sorry, but you are simply overlooking way too many things in the very limited view of sport games you seem to have.
1) There is no reason why it could be played with one person per team.
2) There is no reason why it couldn't have "time stops" for battles, to give few seconds to make decisions.
3) There is no reason why, if there would be teams, it wouldn't depend on those teams logging in. That's how statics work after all.

Nothing is set, at all. You asked, I answered, then you assumed things I had not said. You asked why we couldn't have a real time sports game like FIFA, and that was how I answered it.

There's 4 scenarios

1) There is no player involvement, thus no fun, eg Retainer ventures, squadron missions. It's a collection game.
2) There is single-player vs NPC team, thus being pointless in a MMO context just like Triple Triad vs NPC's. If you want all the rewards you have to find all the players and play it thousands of times.
3) There is 1 on 1, basically "coach" mode where you essentially have a QTE of 3 seconds (same length that QTE for Shinryu is) to tell the player what to do, and the game server has to decide if that is a success or fail depending on issuing a command, ignoring a command, or which command makes sense. Some kind of tournament could be designed around this, but people would just throw it like Verminion to get rewards.
4) There is team vs team, which requires multiple players, just like existing duties, to be formed, but no tournament can be designed around. There's also nothing stopping teams from organizing just to throw it as well here.

It's not simple. There a issues with existing mini-games and existing PvP that need to be addressed, otherwise we're just extending those problems to more content, and that content will get played once and never again by most players, if not ignored entirely.

eg
- Throwing the match needs to be solved (Also a problem in PvP)
- Disconnecting to force a throw of the match needs to be solved
- Bot detection needs to be done (which is a problem in existing PvP)
- Some way of forming "static" teams that can persist beyond one play.

Like the last thing is probably the easiest to solve, but hear me out. There are already FC's and Linkshells in the game. The solution here is for a cross-server "team" being setup/signed up through a draft process like in an actual sports system. You select an "A League" and a "B League" which represent different leagues, of which you want to form a team with. "A Leagues" are cross-server, "B Leagues" are your server only. You start blitzball with no other players and a NPC team to teach you the basics, and it gives you a score of which position it thinks you should play (you can change your mind at this point.) Your draft score ensures that other teams can't just pick every best score either, as there will be a cap (eg can't have a team of all 100's.) On subsequent tournaments your score is re-evaluated if you decide to disband.

Then the game will either assign you to a team where there is a spot open for that position, or you can wait and form a team with other players you know. From that point forward all Blitzball games are played with the same players and matched against teams of the same skill level until tournament time. Then everyone has to be logged on for like 2-4 hours for the tournament to play out, and skipping out, drops your team out of the tournament entirely. If your team was assembled by PUG, then at the beginning and ending of each round you will be asked if you wish to proceed with your existing team and if you say no, the team is dissolved, and your team is withdrawn from the tournament. If someone d/c's, the tournament round will be paused for 5 minutes (timeout), at which point the team with the d/c'd player will get a "replace (player) with a free agent?" prompt and a list of available players online for that position will come up, and their W/L score up to the point they were withdrawn or eliminated from the tournament.

I'm not much of a sports-game player, and I don't really know, or care, how existing sports games deal with multiplayer, but suffice it to say if SE is hellbent on adding every minigame from FF's past to FFXIV, they really need to put more thought into it than the single-player minigames they were derived from. I don't know if these mini games were popular in Japan, but I was someone who ignored all the mini-games in the single-player FF games, primarily because they didn't advance the story. FFX's blitzball was a little different, I didn't care for it, but it was relevant because the main character, and Wakka was supposedly great at it and to get Wakka's final weapon you had to grind through it. I don't see similar rewards coming out of this for FFXIV.

Do we really want another source of grinding for tomes? Or getting "blitzball i375(BiS) gear" ? None of the other minigames give you anything that valuable.

[akaneakki]

To be fair, that person has no business anywhere near Savage if they cannot handle that mechanic.

Ikr, but the issue isn't only mechanics we talking about here. Too many healers struggle healing fights even when their own dps is super low or not even trying to dps.

[Risvertasashi]

Late as am to the thread...

* Instant death mechanics have been here since 2.0 so it's not a new thing to deal with healing power creep (although healing power creep is kind of a problem, and yeah, I'd say the ridiculous spam in o4s/o8s do show that...)
* Instant death mechanics aren't what makes healing hard. Vuln stacks and healing debuffs do. If someone fails an instant death mechanic and dies... it's acknowledged as that person's fault. Reset and soldier on. Vuln stacks, etc tend be more "Oh well the healers can just heal more, it doesn't really matter if I fail that mechanic."

My preference is more for DPS down debuffs. That really drives home the message "I shouldn't do that" without needing to instant kill someone, and doesn't punish the healer for a non-healing mistake.

[Trensharo]

Just resubbed and can't finish a Duty in the MSQ because of some massive amount of lags... Really, just logged off after about 8 failures. I'm really close to just closing my SE account and going back to WoW. I cannot take the lag.

This is the laggiest MMO I've ever played in my life. EverQuest over dial-up had a more reliable server connection.

Why is this still a problem in 2018. Tons of other games seem to have addressed it and moved on.

[Hestzhyen]

Just resubbed and can't finish a Duty in the MSQ because of some massive amount of lags... Really, just logged off after about 8 failures. I'm really close to just closing my SE account and going back to WoW. I cannot take the lag.

This is the laggiest MMO I've ever played in my life. EverQuest over dial-up had a more reliable server connection.

Why is this still a problem in 2018. Tons of other games seem to have addressed it and moved on.

Well, where are you connecting from? Are you on wired or wireless? If other games play just fine and only XIV is the problem, your connection to SE's datacenter might be very poor. SE doesn't have control over that- your ISP does. And the farther away you are, the more likely you are to have issues. You can try posting in the Technical Support forums to get some troubleshooting tips from the Community Reps that monitor those boards if you want to.

I feel like this thread got derailed somewhat, but... healing in this game is super strong. I like challenging myself to be as efficient as possible with my healing but a lot of the time that means I am a "green DPS". I don't want to be stuck healing forever in this game since there aren't very many interesting decisions for me to make, but I think the balance can be tilted a bit more towards the "need to heal" side without dramatically increasing difficulty.

Also, they can take as long as they want to on Blitzball. I hated it in X and have no burning desire to see it anywhere else any time soon.

[Stormfur]

FWIW, I'd rather see the snowboarding game than blitzball.