Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[Granyala]

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.

These are in game and should be expanded upon.
But people also ignore v-stacks simply because the outgoing base damage is too low. V stacks only become a concern if they cause you to die to non avoidable damage.

If, as a healer, I don't care whether I heal people with 0 or 3 stacks, then I know that the incoming damage is simply way too low.

Combine meaner V-stacks + damage debuff + harsher penalties on rezzing and you might get people to obey mechanics more.

Naah lets face it: in this MMO and in pretty much any I have played: it's always the healer that is burdened by "content difficulty" because if sth. goes wrong, we are the only ones that might be able to compensate for it.

[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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Get your red mage up to 70, try vercuring some. That's probably what, 50-75% of a healer cure potency, and the first thing you notice is that it's a weak ass heal. It's only real benefit is that it can be instant; notice there's never any "only rdm to heal" clears posted anywhere.

My signature pic isn't updated. I actually have Red Mage at level 70, and it heals at roughly the equivalent of Cure I. You know, the ability we largely ignore because White Mages never have mana issues anymore. I have kept Tanks alive with Vercure. Certainly more of a struggle, however that's the whole point. I actually have to stop DPSing. On White Mage? Eh, Regen will be good enough.

With dedicated healers, the potency would have to be even lower due to HoT and off gcsd. You'd have to make it 3-5k effective HP to more or less force healers to use heals, and you;d need to nerf off gcd healing a lot. SCH in particular would need to be gutted, since it relies mainly on non-direct cures.

You guys really don;t sit down and actually think what stuff like this may mean in practice. It's easy to say "healing potency is too much" but you need to sit down and actually post some kind of rough model people can agree or disagree with; not just say something needs to happen and not define a plan.

And yet the most popular MMO ever created plays this precise way with little issue. Kind of pokes some rather large holes in your argument. Regardless, why would heals need to be even weaker than Vercure because of HoTs? Now you're just setting up a strawman. If potencies were reduced across the board to roughly that equivalent, all that changes is healers having to dedicate more time to actually casting heals and worrying over their MP. This doom and gloom scenario simply doesn't exist, or has WoW been a figment of our imaginations?

As Tridus said, you would think healers should focus on healing, not spend 80% of their time casting Stone IV, Broil or Holy.

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.

This only encourages people to wipe and reset the boss. In fact, a primary reason Red Mage's utility is overstated is because once you have three or four raises going out, few groups want to keep going.

They can also rebalance mana consumption to make overhealing more of an issue.

And make overhealing cost more MP? Although, I am all for encouraging less overhealing. Chances are, this will make people less inclined to heal...

They can definitely up encounter damage in non savage content so we get to cast more.

Absolutely. However, we then run into the problem which prompted this discussion: heals being so strong everything that doesn't borderline OHKO is non-threatening. God Kefka reduces everyone to a 1HP before casting a 20k raid wide. Cure III and Succor will cover it. And this assumes you don't have an Adlo. If said Adlo Crits, you literally don't have to heal at all. What makes First Forsaken scary is being forced to heal the DPS up to full HP. In both Savage encounters the devs used gimmicks that literally demand you overheal because raid wide AoEs just aren't enough. This also why so many mechanics in Savage kill you. They have to, otherwise damage isn't a threat.

I feel potencies can be reduced without going the WoW route. Like I said, there is a middle ground. Currently, you will spend more time DPSing, which kind of defeats the point of being a healer.

[Yeol]

Try running content minimum item level, and see how healing and damage received will go.

Gear increases main stats, HP and defense. You can't have geared people taking the same damage as less geared people, and more geared healers casting the same mount of heals as non-geared healers. Intensive healing has its moments. The more people gear the less intensive it becomes, it is part of progression.

This game is a dps race, everyone is a dps (Including tanks and healers). Some people do not like this approach, others say it is what makes playing certain roles interesting for them. If you want the game to be healing heavy, they can always add more AoEs and TBs. But they need to adjust the enrage timer or increase dps potency to make up for the lack of dps from healers.

In some games, you start the fight with a nasty dot that deals damage to you. It keeps increasing throughout the fight and eventually kills you if you don't beat the content before it gets fully buffed. This is what usually kept healers busy back in old MMOs (Almagest is a close example) Even classes needed to mange their own self heals. "Your job is a healer and you'll be healing 90% of the time."

If you think about it. Keep healing and doing mechanics is much easier than knowing when to heal and when to dps while doing mechanics. Because in 1st case you're healing almost none stop it and less work on your brain. While as timing your heals + certain people that want to cheese mechanics need their own heals/shields + dps is more work on the healer.

And btw, healers keep fixing their rotation very often (Until they have BiS) unlike tanks and DPs. Because gear plays a big role for them. Their heals become stronger, people around them start taking less damage, they no longer have to cast 4 heals and reduced it to 2, and start focusing more on dealing damage. Also lets not forget crit Shields. I really don't understand when people say that playing healer role is boring.

I personally think that what we have now is far more interesting for healers. They can make them heal more and dps less (With more AoEs and TB like i said). But don't make them healing machines.

[Granyala]

This only encourages people to wipe and reset the boss. In fact, a primary reason Red Mage's utility is overstated is because once you have three or four raises going out, few groups want to keep going.

Absolutely. However, we then run into the problem which prompted this discussion: heals being so strong everything that doesn't borderline OHKO is non-threatening. God Kefka reduces everyone to a 1HP before casting a 20k raid wide. Cure III and Succor will cover it. And this assumes you don't have an Adlo. If said Adlo Crits, you literally don't have to heal at all. What makes First Forsaken scary is being forced to heal the DPS up to full HP. In both Savage encounters the devs used gimmicks that literally demand you overheal because raid wide AoEs just aren't enough. This also why so many mechanics in Savage kill you. They have to, otherwise damage isn't a threat.

I feel potencies can be reduced without going the WoW route. Like I said, there is a middle ground. Currently, you will spend more time DPSing, which kind of defeats the point of being a healer.

You don't need to decrease potencies to make stuff threatening. Threatening = my people won't survive the next hit, gotta do sth!
So they need to up the damage. Not the damage of a single attack, mind you, but the frequency of attacks.

BTW: a heavy hit + 20 seconds of recovering the group gets me casting heals, aye. But if I know "there won't be any damage for the next 25 seconds" it does not feel threatening to me at all. You basically swap out mindless stones for mindless repeated heal casting. That does NOT make the healing role more engaging at all.

If they up the frequency and severity of the hits, we'd need to start thinking again whether our tanks or our group can survive 5+ seconds w/o heal while we consider DPSing. This is the one aspect of cleric stance that I miss: the possibility of miscalculating and having people die.

Also, I really think they should tune experts to a different item level. As Yeol said: they might be interesting at minimum item level, just as leveling dungeons are actually harder to heal than expert ones but SEs inept balancing makes everything past the first dungeons in the game faceroll because instead of tuning them around the tome gear, they tune them around Tome gear MINUS 20-30 item levels, which of course renders them so trivial that our arms get numb from throwing stones and DPS can largely ignore mechanics.

Bottom line: don't nerf healing, buff the damn content! Esp the FREQUENCY of mean attacks.

PS: ever solo healed the wraith on Pazu or Pazuzu himself? That's how dungeon bosses should hit. I actually have to time my damage casts to the casts of the wraith or large CDs of my tank or else my tank will die.
Problem is: dungeons would be a nightmare with the largely incompetent community in this game and the QQ would flood Japan.

[KaldeaSahaline]

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. >.<

From my healing main friend:

"Nothing feels more frustrating than a healing design like FF14, where you spend your majority casting DPS spells that barely do anything >.<."

Just sayin...

You guys really don;t sit down and actually think what stuff like this may mean in practice. It's easy to say "healing potency is too much" but you need to sit down and actually post some kind of rough model people can agree or disagree with; not just say something needs to happen and not define a plan.

I've done it, countless times for this and many other MMOs. I envision:

A model where incoming damage and healer potency is lower, but comes much quicker and in more various forms to create a steady MP drain (i.e. FINITE resource, currently it is near infinite). You'd have more frequent damage to tanks, less predictable damage (i.e. on who and when) to throw wrenches in triage. To compensate for this healer toolkits would have spells that handle different functions with differing utility/efficiency tied to it. I.e. faster cast heals with higher MP drain for emergency healing, heals with more range, less cost, but maybe slower speed or less power, etc.

The idea would be that as damage ramps up (be it from mechanics, failed mechanics, avoidable damage, unavoidable damage, etc.) healer decisions would be less binary and more dynamic. Ideally, I'd like to see some defensive utility added to non-healer jobs to supplement this paradigm. This also allows vuln stacks to be more impactful, as well as other mechanics that impact party stability. This means that a healer can't easily delete mistakes, but allows mistakes to be more dynamic and less pass/fail.

like one particular mode of mmo playing is the "builder." A healer would do a small, low potency cure to build resources to spend on higher potency cures or attacks. Essentially instead of hitting the aetherflow button, you need to cast a 2k potency physick for maybe 30 sec to a minute to proc your stacks, then you have your spike cures or burst cures for upcoming attacks. But building modes of play are kind of sedate and slow, really.

Except, you gave one mere example, and it's an awfully slow and boring one. You can have a builder/spender style of gameplay that happens in a much more rapid pace as well offering choices in spenders and builders to add to the gameplay form.

Then go play WoW, because trying to make that happen here would break the game.

Don't be so petty and dismissive...

You are asking for a nerf to every healing class, forcing them to spend a lot more effort to do their basic job-healing, with no benefit. I mean literally no benefit to them; reducing one hits isn't going to help any if my healing now needs a pretty strict rotation, and a slower wipe is a wipe just the same.

Yes, I am asking healers to heal, so they aren't mistakenly called green DPS. While YOU personally may not see a benefit, there is a benefit to making healing more engaging with actual choice and consequences. There is a benefit to de-homogenizing some of the current healing jobs and carving out more defined playstyles.

I don't know where you got this concept of "strict healing rotation". I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, and isn't something anyone is advocating for as best I can tell.

I mean, ffs, the game works fine as is. The only issue with healing potency is in pvp. People need to stop suggesting changes that would break the game for no real defined goal.

Just because something is fine, doesn't mean it's good. It doesn't mean it can't be better, or shouldn't be improved.

The defined goal would be to switch healers away from a paradigm where they cast boring one dimensional DPS spells 80% of the time to one where dynamic healing decisions and consequences are available.

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.

I mean, we can still have powerful heals if we want (though I don't), but we'd still need to change other things to shift away from a DPS-centric paradigm. As Riyah mentioned, less access to powerful heals (a la builder/spender concept), or perhaps a drive away from efficiency (i.e. powerful heals have drawbacks, be it range, MP cost, cast time, etc.), etc.

Naah lets face it: in this MMO and in pretty much any I have played: it's always the healer that is burdened by "content difficulty" because if sth. goes wrong, we are the only ones that might be able to compensate for it.

Not entirely true, but I will concede that most often this is accurate. In high Mythic+ early keys, we found that a lot of difficulty was around coordinating CC, interrupts, DPS cooldowns, as well as rotating defensive cooldowns on every party member to bypass mitigation checks. In situations where healing was simply a matter of kill or be killed, we would try and do things to make it easier for the healer to do what they needed too (because if they had to move for a mechanic it could end up killing someone while they turret healed) I.e. running stacks to the healer, using BoP on them to give them time to focus on others or bypass a mechanic, etc.

One thing I've been advocating quite a bit for is shifting that responsibility off the healers and onto the whole party. Making tanks more responsible for their well being and threat, DPS have actual challenges/hurdles other than a 12 minute enrage timer, and healers having to actually triage the party.

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.

One of the things I am looking forward to is trying out the new Island Expedition AI in BfA. They have the ability to line of sight casters, stun the front line and go for healers/ranged, as well as interrupt, etc. They've even claimed that their original iteration was simply too hard and they had to tone it down. Really curious how it pans out, as if it's any good, I'd LOVE to see it make its way into the already phenomenal Mythic+ system.

Try running content minimum item level, and see how healing and damage received will go.

I have and it's still trivial. It's why in nearly every single MMO DPS always get geared first, because defense is almost always secondary to offense because by nature the game has to give you enough defense to be able to survive.

[Granyala]

The defined goal would be to switch healers away from a paradigm where they cast boring one dimensional DPS spells 80% of the time to one where dynamic healing decisions and consequences are available.

less access to powerful heals (a la builder/spender concept)

I absolutely agree that we should not be casting a 2-3 button DPS "rotation" for pitiful contributions of 1/3rd of a red class 80% of the time.

Fill downtime with Risk-attached DPS? Sure that is fun. I always like the fact that a healer basically performs 2 roles in FF XIV and I do not want that to change.

A builder / spender kind of thing is exactly what I do NOT want though. This made the holy priest class in WoW so annoying and frustrating for me. I don't want to cast near meaningless crap as "filler heals". As I already stated: that is by no means more interesting than casting braindead DPS spells.

I still maintain that healers are largely fine and that it is the content itself that is tuned way to lax (savage excluded).

[KisaiTenshi]

I still maintain that healers are largely fine and that it is the content itself that is tuned way to lax (savage excluded).

As stated, the only way that fixes anything, makes gear irrelevant. Essentially you'd be asking for all dungeons be tuned to the minimum ilevel, regardless of gear. Thus all content becomes "savage" tier.

No I think the solution has to be "give the healers more to do" and not be "give the healer stupid combos". You do not want RNG (even hoping for a crit is stupid) to be the factor that determines if you save or wipe the party. Hence the original proc's for lilies was stupid as well. If "more to do" comes in the shape of healing idiot NPC's or casting debuff removals, that does make more work for the healer, but that's not something that can retroactively be applied to content.

[Ariannaid]

Another thing to keep in mind is that more involved healing doesn’t necessarily have to mean just hitting the Cure button more often. I’ve never played WoW, but I played several healers at pretty high levels of content in Everquest II, which is a similar type of game in many ways to WoW and FFXIV, and one thing I noticed from there that I really don’t see here is a variety of utility spells on healers.

In FFXIV, you’re pretty much either direct healing, including specialty heals like regen, or DPSing, without much in the way of debuffs/buffs/status cures/etc. Status curing, in particular, is potentially a great way to add more depth to healer gameplay without just reducing potencies on the green-numbers spells, but I’m not sure the basic spell infrastructure is in place to support it. We really only have one cleanse—Esuna, with its limited applicability, zero recast time and single debuff removal—which doesn’t give a whole lot of room to be creative. It also doesn’t give much reason for other roles to want to slot their own status removal abilities (mage DPS with Erase, for example).

My Defiler in EQ2 had a single-target cleanse (basically the equivalent of Esuna), an AoE cleanse with a much longer recast time, and a “special” cleanse with a very long recast time (in FFXIV terms, consider it like being able to remove certain single-target boss mechanics like Prey, Earthshakers, Shriek, etc.), and other healers had generally the same setup but possibly with class-specific variations like a total cleanse, each with power-appropriate cast/recast times. That setup forced meaningful choices, and also interactions between the healers in a group, that went beyond coordinating heals. You had to decide whether a particular debuff was worth burning a high-cost or long-recast ability to remove, and consequently risking not having that ability for something else. Do you burn your curse removal for Twintania’s fire prison, knowing that means you’ll have to heal through the Death Sentence debuff, or do you accept the downtime on one party member and needing to DPS the prison in exchange for being able to remove the healing debuff later?

There are other complexities to the healing kit that could be considered as well, like maintaining temp debuffs and party buffs or handling mechanics—either accidental failures or deliberate setups—via death preventions; imagine if you lost the ability to use Swiftcast on Raise, but in exchange, you instead had a short-duration, long-recast ability that would 100% prevent the next instance of damage on a party member or instantly heal them up to 50% the next time they dropped to 0 HP in a given time window. The ultimate effect is similar, but it shifts the emphasis from reactivity to proactivity. On the buff/debuff side, a mix of indefinite upkeep effects (along the lines of how Miasma used to apply a healing debuff, but actually meaningful) and comparably short-duration, high-impact effects like AST cards could provide a similar level of activity to what we have now while still shifting emphasis away from spamming DD spells.

All of this could be done in addition to the straightforward “make HP go up” type of healing, but it would require investment in the form of new and modified spells, as well as more fundamental systems-level changes (for a start, make debuffs more prevalent and meaningful—give regular dungeon bosses debuff-inflicting attacks on the level of pre-nerf T7’s Venomous Tail). I really do like the idea of being more than a green DPS, and the one-dimensional healing mechanics are one reason I don’t play this game all that much any more; at the same time, I’m also not sure that the complexity of healing in a game like EQ2 or, from what I hear, WoW is achievable within the bounds of where SE seems to want to keep FFXIV (and, as noted by several people, it’s not really something that applies to existing content).

[RiyahArp]

1. WoW is popular not because it's good...in fact, it pretty much sucks compared to most MMOs before it in terms of mechanics and breath of gameplay. It was popular because it anticipated the need to move away from "everquest widow" style of gameplay to something a lot more casual, and fixed a lot of issues the old school style had. The long term cost has been ruining the genre, though; its shifted far from the "living world" idea of something like Star Wars Galaxies to what people call the theme park model, where we just go on different rides as we like.

2. There's no improvement going from 80% stone, to 80% busywork in maintaining selfbuffs and debuffs. AST is an example of healing busywork; pseudo rng buffs you have to decipher and cast, and I've always found it tedious. I'm afraid SE would just extend busywork, because it takes far too much to redesign the battle system to make actual balanced pure healing.

3. Hard content...look, I do trial roulette for fun sometimes. It's pretty easy. but a lot of times, I come into one in progress at the 16 min mark because people abandoned after one or two wipes. Sometimes I switch to tank because otherwise its getting vote abandoned.

I cannot get why people want the content we all do to be harder. I mean, you all know how much of a pita it is to pug savage or ex content...you really want that to be spread down to lower ranks?