Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[Granyala]

You can definitely find room to DPS, even in pugs. I mean heck, in one of the other posts I made, someone literally had a WHM put up 3k DPS in a pug. It just requires smart experienced play.

With elite players that negate any avoidable damage and by shoving 90%+ of the healing duty onto the other healer: maybe.
When you are learning the fight (which is the time when content difficulty matters, once the boss is on farm, no one gives a hoot): yeah: no. Just: nope.

Though I don't think that I would be able to reach 3K when standing still and doing nothing but DPS, but that's probably a gear issue.

@ lily idea: sure you could do that. But it would have to be pretty meaningless or else 90% of the community can't cope, the class does not get played and DEVs go haywire. You do realize what happened to the HW Black mage, right? In case you didn't: SE does not want too much of a gap in between a skilled player and a non skilled one. That's mainly why they simplified the Enochian mechanic.

[Tridus]

A lot of success is timing. WoW just happened along at the right time, just like Facebook did. Use in the net was booming, broadband made gaming more feasible, you had more people interested in pc gaming overall as pc prices went down etc.

This is comically wrong. Console gaming was on the rise when WoW came out, PC gaming was starting a decline. Gaming online was feasible long before then. See: Starcraft's massive success at it.

WoW took the concept of a giant world to explore with lots of other people and made it mainstream accessable with Blizzard's usual level of production quality. That's it. It was so successful because it delivered what the market wanted better than any other game did at the time and effectively created a market for itself.

Then they went astray by taking away the community aspect and making it effectively a solo game for so much of it, but that was the result of a long series of individual decisions meant to solve problems that all made sense at the time. Even the duty finder model, which has had all kinds of lousy side effects on MMO community, was a great innovation originally because it solved the problem of trying to form parties in chat when you were a DPS class that wasn't popular in parties.

This revisionist history stuff is silly. If you don't like WoW, that's fine. Claiming it's a bad game and got lucky because reasons is nonsense. By any objective measure, WoW is the most successfull MMO ever made by an order of magnitude. You have to do something right to be that successful.

They did, and they were. I think the only content that was nerfed because of community outrage was the Steps of Faith.

Steps of Faith wasn't nerfed because of outrage. It was nerfed because people started abandoning it en-masse when it came up in roulette, making it difficult for people to get past that point in the MSQ. SE had to react to a MSQ block because all of Heavensward was gated behind it.

Royal Menagerie got similar howls of outrage but didn't get nerfed. Why? Enough people stuck around to help others get clears that the same blocking problem didn't occur.

[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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

To be blunt: once a MMO introduces easy content with great rewards it is no longer possible to go back to meaner content w/o a massive backlash. Contrary to popular elitist belief, most people will NOT rise to the occasion and try to better themselves when faced with hard content. They will simply whine a bit and eventually quit.

This is not necessarily accurate. Weeping City was a noticeable step above Void Ark yet people "got over it" despite plenty of whining. Likewise, Nidhogg and Shinryu Normal were similar hurdles with equals amounts of crying about its difficulty. Both remained untouched. Increasing difficulty needs to come through smaller increments. Many games make the mistake of simply beefing up numbers to especially high values all at once. It also needs to be established early on, say at the beginning of an expansion. Looking at leveling dungeons when closer to the ilvl. They're mostly pretty consistent. Unfortunately, said consistency all be evaporates later on as the devs release far easier content at the supposed end game.

Simply put, implement a proper difficulty curve and people will up their game without even realizing. FFXIV severely lacks in this regard; going from braindead easy to "OMG" from one fight to another.

And can we knock off the "elitist" crap? It isn't elitism to ask content outside EX and Savage not be entirely braindead. No one wants regular DF dungeons to be Savage level. I, personally, just want an excuse to not have pull the entire dungeon to feel like a tank. Likewise, I want more dynamic healing so my role isn't reduced to being a gimped DPS.

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

This stems from how offensive focused FFXIV's design is. With on-demand mitigation tools, tanks scarcely have a reason to prioritize defense over offense unless something outright kills them. Bokchoy recently made a post about this on reddit, and goes into better detail.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._tank/dx6d4zw/

[Stormfur]

Steps of Faith wasn't nerfed because of outrage. It was nerfed because people started abandoning it en-masse when it came up in roulette, making it difficult for people to get past that point in the MSQ. SE had to react to a MSQ block because all of Heavensward was gated behind it.

Yeah... outrage is probably the wrong word for that. Protest is more like it.

I do wish we would have...not necessarily "harder" fights, but more mechanically-unique fights.

[SigmaOZ]

I want the Blitzball from Final Fantasy X where I (the player) gets to actually play the game, otherwise they can just drop the idea entirely, I don't want to play a stupid coach game!...

Blitzball in FFX was lots of fun and I really enjoyed it, of course FFXIV has so much to offer that Blitzball could easily be overlooked but it doesn't have to be something that enslaves us yet it could offer some exclusive rewards to keep players interested, nothing too competitive like PVP though!...

The Producer can't expect every single player to make use of the new mini game but the ones that do will surely have fun, as in Lord of Verminion!...

[KisaiTenshi]

In what world are min ilvl dungeons "savage"? Min ilvl dungeons are still trivial...

They aren't, but once you take the gear out of the equation, several dungeons go back to bosses having dps-races (like the demon wall), and the MSQ Praetorium self-destruct sequence. When not doing as much damage as people do now, they also take a lot longer, and you are much squishier. Every piece of content, before you out-gear it, is not the push-over people somehow believe it to be, because the skill level of a PUG is not ever constant.

A lot of success is timing. WoW just happened along at the right time, just like Facebook did. Use in the net was booming, broadband made gaming more feasible, you had more people interested in pc gaming overall as pc prices went down etc.

WoW was always an easy casual game. It came out the same year as FFXI and the people who played FFXI mocked WoW's easy-mode play style. Guess which direction MMO's went?

The fact that all these "better" MMO's keep coming out and failing is a testament to how people do not want hard games, and also do not want freemium game experiences that involve RNG lootbox/gachapon.

[KaldeaSahaline]

With elite players that negate any avoidable damage and by shoving 90%+ of the healing duty onto the other healer: maybe.
When you are learning the fight (which is the time when content difficulty matters, once the boss is on farm, no one gives a hoot): yeah: no. Just: nope.

Every other player in that log was either gray, like single digits, or green. So not what I personally would call elite.

The thing is, all content in this game (including UCoB) has been solo healed because healers are that powerful. So shifting responsibility to one healer and backing them up for when people mess up, or they fall behind tends to be optimal. Having both healers full time heal, just leads to staggering overheal because of how strong they are.

The thing about progression is that due to the design of the game you should effectively be a master of each phase after seeing it like 2-3x. You don't need to clear the fight and farm it to learn when it's good to DPS. Halfway through progression you should have that down already. You can optimize the back half in later clears or while pushing enrage progression

@ lily idea: sure you could do that. But it would have to be pretty meaningless or else 90% of the community can't cope, the class does not get played and DEVs go haywire. You do realize what happened to the HW Black mage, right? In case you didn't: SE does not want too much of a gap in between a skilled player and a non skilled one. That's mainly why they simplified the Enochian mechanic.

Not even remotely accurate. You're better than that. You sound like RiyahArp. Cut it out. It doesn't need to be meaningless. It just needs to reward you for making good decisions and stress you for making bad ones. Stress =/= wiping. Stress can be running low on MP, having several members at consistently low HP, etc. Players will try and find their own ways to improve to reduce stress, then you supplement the paradigm with encounter design that builds on itself and keeps a player engaged and learning.

Yes I am familiar with HW BLM. It was a grossly punished job for dropping its buff. They decided that they didn't want jobs to be deadweight if they dropped their buff and made them easier to maintain because Enochian was particularly tedious to maintain. That has very little to do with our discussion.

You wouldn't be 'grossly punished' for not using lilies optimally. You wouldn't be grossly punished for being poor at MP management. Enochian was an on/off switch which is why it was so punishing. MP management and lilies would be dynamic which inherently makes them less punishing, but in the same vein they give clear feedback as to areas you can improve in the moment.

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

IMO - its because it's forbidden. I know we've previously discussed this at length, but in my experience, no one really talks about DPS in WoW anymore. Sure they did back in the day, but its common knowledge now where everyone can see theirs and yours so there's no need to tell someone they're awful. They can see it with their own eyes.

I think if parsers were made official and widespread there'd be a brief period of pain before it normalizes (harassers get punished and banned) and things go back to the way they were. My .02.