Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Thank god!
Nothing feels more frustrating than a healing design like WoW, where you spend your majority casting weak ass heals that barely manage to move the HP bar. >.<

I would like to think there exists a balance between "weak ass heals" and heals so strong, you'll spend far more time DPSing.

[Granyala]

I would like to think there exists a balance between "weak ass heals" and heals so strong, you'll spend far more time DPSing.

Yes surely.
They can edit rezzing so it is way more punishing. Right now you can essentially rez as much as you want. An example would be that the mana cost doubles when cast infight or sth like that.
They can also rebalance mana consumption to make overhealing more of an issue.
They can definitely up encounter damage in non savage content so we get to cast more.

But to be perfectly frank: I prefer the concept of strong heals and quickly moving health bars over the concept of slowly regging people back up after a hit. I' rather have more ups and downs in rapid succession than one big hit and spending the next 20 seconds trying to recoup.

There is no right or wrong here, these are 2 different design philosophies. WoW had the former up until Cataclysm and then switched to the latter. That's also when healing stopped being fun for me, I'd hate to see the same happen in FF.

I do agree wholeheartedly that mobs in 4mans should stop hitting like wet noodles. There should be more to heal. That won't be happening though, considering that people going into a new dungeon overgear it by 30 item levels, even when we only wear tome gear.

[KisaiTenshi]

I would have to disagree. They've been ignoring them since... as you point out, AV even.

I still think the root problem with vuln stacks isn't healing power creep. It's that it punishes the healer for a non-healing mistake. People don't really care about how much healing they require. But hurt their DPS, they care about that. It gives feedback between failing a mechanic and the consequences, which vuln stacks don't really do.

My 2 gil anyways.

I think this is the right angle to look at though, there needs to be something there that ONLY the healer can do, otherwise the party dies. So far that only tool is Esuna, and even then there are pots.

They can edit rezzing so it is way more punishing. Right now you can essentially rez as much as you want. An example would be that the mana cost doubles when cast infight or sth like that.
They can also rebalance mana consumption to make overhealing more of an issue.

The problem really is that Swiftcast exists. It results in people really having a 60 second cooldown on rezzing rather than an 8 second rez cast with a GCD cooldown. If Raise was a fixed 20-25% of the MP pool for an instant cast, it would be used more sparingly and healers would have more incentive to heal rather than risk letting someone KO which is more expensive. The healer otherwise risks being caught in the mechanics. There's typically enough time to cast raise without swiftcast in all content, but that does depend on the tank not facing you. If it's the tank you're trying to raise, you better hope you didn't already use Refresh.

More to the point though, the AI in the game is not smart enough actually see the healer casting something and try to interrupt it.