Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[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.

[Granyala]

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.

It does not have to be "ermagaawd savage" all the time. I know the tiny skilled (and usually quite vocal) minority would like that but that would render the game inaccessible to the rest of the playerbase. There is more than black and white here and I think SE could beef up the dungeons w/o needing to trow savage like instagibs, reaction times and enrages at people.

I am not asking for savage dungeons, I am asking for new content not to be tuned so low that it feels like outdated content the moment it is released because I happen to walk around in the casual tome gear.

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?

I think trials are mostly fine as is.
I thought we were talking about 4man content. That has indeed become braindead easy, where I can ignore many a mechanic even when the dungeon is brand new. Imho, that is wrong. When the dungeon is new it should be a bit meaner and over time, as people get the new tome gear, it gets easier.

As for 80% DPSing: I have been in S5 - S7 yesterday, and frankly, I am at a loss as to how people manage to do 2K DPS in there. I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I barely managed to squeeze in around 800ish.

Yeah sure, the ELITE can DPS like crazy b/c everyone has the content on farm and knows exactly what they are doing. But if you enter in there with a normal group that still struggles with mechanics, any healer is plenty busy saving butts and not busy throwing stones. If they leave that content as is and castrate the healers, savage will feel like a nightmare.

[Tridus]

It does not have to be "ermagaawd savage" all the time. I know the tiny skilled (and usually quite vocal) minority would like that but that would render the game inaccessible to the rest of the playerbase. There is more than black and white here and I think SE could beef up the dungeons w/o needing to trow savage like instagibs, reaction times and enrages at people.

I am not asking for savage dungeons, I am asking for new content not to be tuned so low that it feels like outdated content the moment it is released because I happen to walk around in the casual tome gear.

I think trials are mostly fine as is.
I thought we were talking about 4man content. That has indeed become braindead easy, where I can ignore many a mechanic even when the dungeon is brand new. Imho, that is wrong. When the dungeon is new it should be a bit meaner and over time, as people get the new tome gear, it gets easier.

Yeah, people seem to think there's nothing in the middle of "Eos can heal this" and "only the top 1% can clear it."

Experts are a joke right now. If you single pull them for some reason, you literally don't need a healer. Why do you think the wall to wall pull style exists? Because that's what we're really capable of. It's kinda sad when Auran Vale is the hardest dungeon in the game to this day. (Although based on how many people wipe in Keeper of the Lake, that could also be a contender.)

As for 80% DPSing: I have been in S5 - S7 yesterday, and frankly, I am at a loss as to how people manage to do 2K DPS in there. I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I barely managed to squeeze in around 800ish.

Yeah sure, the ELITE can DPS like crazy b/c everyone has the content on farm and knows exactly what they are doing. But if you enter in there with a normal group that still struggles with mechanics, any healer is plenty busy saving butts and not busy throwing stones. If they leave that content as is and castrate the healers, savage will feel like a nightmare.

I can do 2k on WHM in there, and I'm hardly elite. Can't quite on SCH, but still over 1500 reliably. It's really about not overhealing. On something like the single Ultima Upsurges in the first half of o8n, I can use Whispering Dawn to heal it. If I just let that tick, it requires no GCD healing at all, and I'm 100% DPS uptime. Not being willing to wait for the HoTs to do their job leads to using more GCD healing and lowering DPS. WHM can let Medica II do its thing although the initial cast requires a GCD.

That is group dependent. A group that is constantly taking avoidable damage isn't going to let you do that, and you'll have to top them up and shield them or they'll keep dying. Healer DPS is extremely group dependent because if you have to do enough healing to need GCD heals, you're trading between DPS and HPS. 7 tends to be bad for this because people eat missles or stand in the airborne cannon fire or get the paralyze DoT or all kinds of other stuff that you just have to deal with. The less of that you get, the better your DPS looks.

You need to factor that in when looking at your DPS and comparing. The goal is to push what DPS you can given the time you have, so don't feel bad if you can't push high numbers in that situation. Your goal is simply to improve your own efficiency. (It's the same for tanks going in there the first time. The goals are to hold the boss, use CDs effectively, and not eat mechanics. DPS is what you worry about after you get those things down.)

[Granyala]

I can do 2k on WHM in there, and I'm hardly elite. Can't quite on SCH, but still over 1500 reliably. It's really about not overhealing. On something like the single Ultima Upsurges in the first half of o8n, I can use Whispering Dawn to heal it. If I just let that tick, it requires no GCD healing at all, and I'm 100% DPS uptime. Not being willing to wait for the HoTs to do their job leads to using more GCD healing and lowering DPS. WHM can let Medica II do its thing although the initial cast requires a GCD.

I was talking about savage, sorry if I was not precise enough.
Esp S6 where both tanks get hit like trucks I do not find that much time to DPS.

As for Sigma normal: not sure, typically I am the one that does the healing and my co healer gets the luxury of DPSing.
To be honest though: I find the FF-XIV community is far more obsessed about DPS than the WoW community. Apparently one does not need ingame parsing addons in order to breed this fixation on DPS at all. :P

[Tridus]

I was talking about savage, sorry if I was not precise enough.
Esp S6 where both tanks get hit like trucks I do not find that much time to DPS.

Oh yeah, that's different.

As for Sigma normal: not sure, typically I am the one that does the healing and my co healer gets the luxury of DPSing.
To be honest though: I find the FF-XIV community is far more obsessed about DPS than the WoW community. Apparently one does not need ingame parsing addons in order to breed this fixation on DPS at all. :P

Out of game parsers are still a thing here, so that helps. It's just that XIV is a more DPS driven game. When I played WoW (vanilla through Cataclysm), fights where as a healer I had nothing to do except DPS for extended periods were the exception. You didn't go into Icecrown Citadel and find that you didn't have enough incoming damage to keep you busy. It just didn't happen outside of a specialty fight like Vaelstraz, which was fun because it was so abormal. On the hard modes at the time, keeping people alive was all you could really do. Mimiron hard is something I remember vividly because of all the damn fire, it was a chaotic mess trying to keep a raid going during that. (And the 800 Dispels when you fought the Horde team in the Colisuem raid...)

Here? I mean, XIV devs tell us they don't expect DPS and then give us o2n, which can be healed by Regen and Eos easily. What do they expect healers to do the rest of the fight if not DPS? Nothing? Healer DPS rises up as a thing because the required level of healing simply isn't that hard to deliver in most of the game (savage being the exception, but since only a minority of players ever do that, the majority won't see those, and even there people still crank out significant quantities of DPS).

The meta is ultimately a response to the game that we have and what people can do in it. If SE really doesn't want healers DPSing, they have the means to do something about it. That they made it easier in Stormblood instead of harder says something about their intentions.