Famitsu Interview: Tuning encounters for healing

[Dogempire]

Snip.

When one side gets the kind of changes they want it's pretty understandable for them to want to keep the other side out of the discussion so that they can keep the changes that they enjoy instead of getting things reverted back, not that I condone it, but it is what it is.

The Sylphies enjoy their easy to play healing and emphasis on doing healing instead of damage, while the veterans find this easy accessibility boring and seek further challenge beyond keeping hp bars up, and both sides have valid opinions, which is why it's important to continue to have these discussions instead of shutting one side out permanently.

That being said, the problem lies with SE and their sweeping changes to healers across the board, what was once a healthy selection of healers with varying degrees of rotational and healing kit difficulty has basically been scaled back so that you'll have an easy time healing regardless of skill level and job choice.

Shadowbringers has been amazing story-wise but in terms of job design it's the most boring and uninspired expansion, and it ultimately comes down to lack of player choice and lack of skill expression. It's not just an issue with healers, remember when ranged dps had actual support skills, or when tanks could play more risky and stay in dps stance the entire fight? Heck I remember having to level white mage to get stoneskin and thaumaturge for swiftcast even though I was only interested in Scholar.

All the jobs are very samey, and the same design flaw extends to healers, they're all easy to optimize, too accessible to the point where it leaves out any element of danger or difficulty when it comes to boss encounters or raids. It's really created an element of monotony when it comes to battle content because so little can go wrong except for people dying, which again isn't too much of an issue since it's not like healers have any mp management issues. Heck tanks don't even need to think twice about their aggro anymore, they just blue dps with either the boss autoing them or not autoing them.

Hopefully come Endwalker they address the issue of making encounters too easy, and add more elements of uncertainty across all jobs and roles like resource strains or harder emnity management, something more to think about beyond the typical tank and spank while spamming your damage buttons. I kind of doubt it and expect healers to be the same difficulty or maybe even easier, but I can hope.

[Ultimatecalibur]

All the jobs are very samey, and the same design flaw extends to healers, they're all easy to optimize, too accessible to the point where it leaves out any element of danger or difficulty when it comes to boss encounters or raids. It's really created an element of monotony when it comes to battle content because so little can go wrong except for people dying, which again isn't too much of an issue since it's not like healers have any mp management issues.

The easy of optimization and high accessibility is due more to flawed fight design than flawed kit design. More complex kits would not really make fights harder to optimize nor make fights more engaging.

Consider these things:

• When was the last time using Esuna to cleanse and manage Debuffs was important in high end content?
• When was the last time a Tank needed constant healing to survive through a mechanic and could not insure they had an invuln or a large number of cooldowns ready for it?
• When was the last time the threat of a random Crit meant that a Healer should ensure that everyone be topped off to survive?
• When was the last time a Healer had to deal with mechanics that reduced their range or forced them to heal at extreme ranges?
• When was the last time a Healer had to heal targets with reduced healing received debuffs on them?

Modern Fights tend to lack mechanics that actually test healers.

Heck tanks don't even need to think twice about their aggro anymore, they just blue dps with either the boss autoing them or not autoing them.

Not needing to think twice about aggro is fine. Aggro management was never really an intended part of the tank gameplay from the start of 2.0. "Aggro management" only really became a thing when tanks discovered methods of getting significant dps gains with little chance of losing hate due to unintended interactions of various factors. The lack of the need to manage boss position and facing, manage adds, manage mitigation cooldown use and utilize stuns, interrupts and "protect other" cooldowns are bigger factors in making the tanks feel like blue dps.

[ForteNightshade]

The easy of optimization and high accessibility is due more to flawed fight design than flawed kit design. More complex kits would not really make fights harder to optimize nor make fights more engaging.

While I agree with your overall assessment. A bland fight design can be overcome with a fun job kit. What hurt Shadowbringers more than anything is the jobs themselves were dumbed down alongside encounters being simpler. That combination made many fights this expansion feel boring. If at least one aspect retained more complexity, you'd see far less complaining.

[Absurdity]

While I agree with your overall assessment. A bland fight design can be overcome with a fun job kit. What hurt Shadowbringers more than anything is the jobs themselves were dumbed down alongside encounters being simpler. That combination made many fights this expansion feel boring. If at least one aspect retained more complexity, you'd see far less complaining.

I'd go ahead and claim that an engaging job design is a lot more important than complex encounter design because it applies to all content. You can't make every fight complex because it would just frustrate the majority of people but if the jobs have enough complexity to them then even the inevitable boring fight can still be entertaining for the more skilled players.

[Dogempire]

The easy of optimization and high accessibility is due more to flawed fight design than flawed kit design. More complex kits would not really make fights harder to optimize nor make fights more engaging.

I disagree with this, limiting the strengths of jobs in certain aspects makes it so that a player has to work to overcome these limitations and ends up increasing the skill ceiling because of it.

- Melee jobs are limited by both their positional skills and their inability to stay in boss range 100% of the time, this causes people to greed GCD's and have to consider when to use their true north stacks as well as how to anticipate boss turning.
- Black mages have to know when they can pop their leylines so that they'll be in it 100% of the time while also working with keeping enochain up, their GCD rolling in moments of high movement, and how to manage their MP so they can toss out the most Fire
IV's under astral fire.
- Tanks used to have to manage their cooldowns and tank stance more smartly while watching their aggro meter, that way they could do the most damage possible while making themselves less of a burden to heal, and also not letting the boss start smacking the
dps.

Limitations to a job's strength are good, they make you have to play smartly, and making a job strong in one aspect and weak in another is what SE should aim to do with job design instead of making everything even across the board and eliminating any semblance of challenge when it comes to a job's kit.

[Ultimatecalibur]

- Melee jobs are limited by both their positional skills and their inability to stay in boss range 100% of the time, this causes people to greed GCD's and have to consider when to use their true north stacks as well as how to anticipate boss turning.

Which is complexity tied to fight design rather than rotation. Modern bosses don't turn anywhere near as much as 2.0 release bosses which could easily turn in random directions to hit random targets.

Positionals have become far less punishing and random as well. The HW Dragoon used to deal with having a random positional on the 4th part of their combos, a non-combo weaponskill that needed to be used roughly every 6th gcd with a positional, a 3 step combo that ended with a positional that the 2nd and 3rd parts of the combo inflicted a debuff and a dot with different durations, and required hitting the random positionals to maintain a gauge.

- Black mages have to know when they can pop their leylines so that they'll be in it 100% of the time while also working with keeping enochain up, their GCD rolling in moments of high movement, and how to manage their MP so they can toss out the most Fire
IV's under astral fire.

Fights have gotten a lot less mobile which punishes BLM less as well in addition to their increased mobility options and a less punishing Enochian.

- Tanks used to have to manage their cooldowns and tank stance more smartly while watching their aggro meter, that way they could do the most damage possible while making themselves less of a burden to heal, and also not letting the boss start smacking the
dps.

Not at all. Tanks have never had trouble holding hate when using Tank stance. In HW that "smart usage while watching enmity for increased dps" boiled down to Warriors starting in Defiance, abusing Unchained, an overhealing Equilibrium and a few Enmity combos before swapping to Deliverance at the start of the fight to generate a big enough enmity lead that neither tank needed to exit dps stance for the remainder of the fight as Str accessories and dps rotations would allow them to hold enmity. In StB it boiled down to swapping to dps stance after generating an enmity lead and then "circle shirking" on cooldown or after a swap to maintain and extend the enmity lead. Enmity troubles only really occurred at the start of fights when Samurai performed their burst without using Diversion before the tanks had generated their lead.

Cooldown management was also a case of fewer cooldowns relative to the number of tankbusters/heavy damage bursts in fights. Tanks went from dealing with tank busters roughly every 30 to 45 seconds with a 20% mitigation on a 90s cooldown, a 30% on a 180s cooldown and an invuln on a 180s+ cooldown to dealing tankbusters every 2 to 4 minutes with a 20% mitigation with a 15s to 30s cooldown, a 20% on a 90s cooldown, a 30% with a 120s cooldown and a invuln with a 4 to 7 min cooldown.

[Dogempire]

Positionals have become far less punishing and random as well.

That's more on job design changes instead of encounter design, if you can miss positionals all day and the only penalty is a hit to your skill potency then you're less inclined to care about learning how to adjust to boss turning.

Fights have gotten a lot less mobile which punishes BLM less as well in addition to their increased mobility options and a less punishing Enochian.

Can't really comment on BLM since never played it prior to ShB, but regardless, working with the movement restrictions and keeping as close to 100% uptime as possible is something a lot of people find enjoyable with the job, if every skill got changed to instant cast overnight then it would be a lot less interesting to play because there isn't any challenge to the job anymore.

Not at all. Tanks have never had trouble holding hate when using Tank stance. In HW that "smart usage while watching enmity for increased dps" boiled down to Warriors starting in Defiance, abusing Unchained, an overhealing Equilibrium and a few Enmity combos before swapping to Deliverance at the start of the fight to generate a big enough enmity lead that neither tank needed to exit dps stance for the remainder of the fight as Str accessories and dps rotations would allow them to hold enmity. In StB it boiled down to swapping to dps stance after generating an enmity lead and then "circle shirking" on cooldown or after a swap to maintain and extend the enmity lead. Enmity troubles only really occurred at the start of fights when Samurai performed their burst without using Diversion before the tanks had generated their lead.

Cooldown management was also a case of fewer cooldowns relative to the number of tankbusters/heavy damage bursts in fights. Tanks went from dealing with tank busters roughly every 30 to 45 seconds with a 20% mitigation on a 90s cooldown, a 30% on a 180s cooldown and an invuln on a 180s+ cooldown to dealing tankbusters every 2 to 4 minutes with a 20% mitigation with a 15s to 30s cooldown, a 20% on a 90s cooldown, a 30% with a 120s cooldown and a invuln with a 4 to 7 min cooldown.

I was referring more to stance dancing, and while I agree with you on the HW part, in Stormblood you couldn't rely on your OT to circle shirk outside of organized groups, which is only a small fraction of the game's content. In single tank dungeons or unorganized trials or raids you'd very much have to watch your aggro meter, which was something I liked about the role that ended up being removed come ShB.

[Saefinn]

This would create so many other problems that then need addressing.

If we take your ilvls as an example then what is the point of getting 490 gear? Your gear from the previous raid tier is already BiS, your 490 gear gets synced down and is probably worse than your 480 gear so what is the point of even getting it? An expansion only has 3 raid tiers so you're not even gearing for the next one. (granted this is also an issue with the current system but with the new system your raid gear is also useless for the raid you're currently doing.)

You are BiS geared for every raid tier after the 1st one without even setting a foot into it, making the content already easier on day 1 because 10 ilvls above minimum ilvl is quite a bit.

What are we gonna do with crafted gear? Keep it the same ilvl as the previous BiS? Then what's the point of getting that BiS gear in the first place? It gets synced down for the current raid and it's at best on-par with crafted for the next one.

What do we do with ultimates? Let's say you get an ultimate after the 1st raid tier, is it gonna be ilvl 470 or ilvl 460? And what if you don't get an ultimate? That's already a problem with the current system where there is really no point in acquiring savage gear outside of log runs.

Fair points, even if my suggested solution is terrible I feel like there does need to be some kind of limiting on the iLevels to the degree of keeping content better tuned, not just for high end encounters, but in general. EG. the difference between running Cape Westwind Min iLevel and an every roulette of Cape Westwind is massive. Min iLevel and you have stuff to do, it's not hard, but you feel like you're not face rolling it and have mechanics to do. But in a typically roulette run it's so much of a face roll that we meme how quick and easy it is because the iLevel difference is so high.

Thinking of it as if I was playing the game from level 1 again as a new player. For 95% of the game's content is a face roll, even if I was still learning because the players around me would make it so, but with so much stuff that takes so little effort to overcome that you don't get the experience intended. Cape Westwind is a walkover, Castrum and Prae are complete walkovers, just cutscenes eat your time - but everything dies laughably quick to the point if feels like you're undersizing it almost and just lacks the impact of the experience people like me got back in 2.0 when everybody was still new. They have to wait until much later content to get that experience. And I'd think the gradual progress of difficulty would be better felt (which I think is better for new players, because you learn your job as progress & the game's general mechanics)

As somebody experienced and then getting stuff in my roulettes, it's not that engaging and especially as a healer it's dull as heck because I have to do next-to-no healing.

Of course, there's other ways of making stuff interesting, but if the devs answer is "encounter balance" then I feel it should be across the board so that it is more engaging across the board.