Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[MsQi]

Just to play devil's advocate here, let me ask: How is telling people bored of playing an entire role to play Ultimate a compliment?

He's saying you are ready for Ultimate. That's how progression works. You master one difficulty and go on to the next. I know I'm not ready for Ultimate, but people who care about difficulty should be proud to know they are ready for it and that Yoshi P gives them his full endorsement.

[KitingGenbu]

Unfortunately, Yoshida does have to make decisions that ultimately do not 'harm' the overall gaming experience. Prime example is when healers used to need to turn on cleric stance in order to do damage at the cost of lowering healing output. For some on here, it was obviously not a big deal (or they will say it wasn't), but he has the numbers and makes decisions accordingly, so it eventually got changed and ultimately removed. Same thing with tanks needing to level other tanks up for provoke (DRKs without provoke was a fun time....).

This also applies to content. I'm sure some people remember how 'hard' Titan (Hard) was for the majority of the playerbase when it first came out and people started getting PTSD when Titan (Extreme) got announced. Whether people on here agree with it or not, its just a decision he ultimately has to make.

One thing I can respect about the man is that he's straight-forward about it. He admits there will be content that not every can do or content that not everyone wants to do. That's just the price for trying to create a space for everyone to play in. The only thing I personally have a problem with is the reward/gearing structure being so boring for the sake of 'balance.' Still could have gear sets.....

[MsQi]

I'd just like to revisit this comment to remind everyone that they lied

I was just explaining what he said, I never said it was true.

[ForsakenRoe]

but he has the numbers and makes decisions accordingly, so it eventually got changed and ultimately removed.

He would have also had the numbers that showed that in SB, WHM was far far behind the other two healers, despite their plan of making it follow a 'pure healer' model (ie, it focuses on healing, not so much on damage). Rather than accept defeat, that the plan was the trash garbage it is, they instead reworked the other two healers downward to what WHM was, because of some BS numbers they 'had' about how SCH was forcing their WHM cohealer to do all the healing (SCH was out-HPSing WHM in high end runs at the time, and that's before the 'mit counts as HPS' change on FFLogs)

They need to remember how they even got the game to come back from the brink: by admitting they were wrong. Rather than insisting on another 2 years of 'lets split the healers into Pure and Barrier' and then having the only 'heal checks' that matter be mitigation checks, admit now that it has been a failure (as we could have told them the moment they said they were going to do it), and start working towards making the healers more interchangeable. Some might complain that 'oh thats homogenization', but I would like to know, why is SCH SGE a perfectly functional comp, but WHM AST is not? Why is SGE and SCH able to have such powerful flat HP restoration like Recit Indom, or Pneuma, but WHM isn't allowed Stoneskin anymore? The 'split' only benefits one side of the split. If this is the result of us doing the 'split', I'd rather just get rid. I'd rather see a game design, where it's equally likely that the world first for the 7.0 tier is WHM AST, or SCH SGE, or SGE AST, or whatever comp all equally possible.

They said they were going to split the tanks into MTs and OTs for SHB, with the OTs being more focused on utilities to help the party/the MT like Cover etc. That didn't happen because they realized it was a bad plan, and I respect them for changing their minds on a bad plan. So the question is, can they now do the same with healers, realize that it's a bad plan, and go back before it's too late? Or will they double down on it, and make it harder to undo when they eventually realize that it's not going to work

[RyuDragnier]

This also applies to content. I'm sure some people remember how 'hard' Titan (Hard) was for the majority of the playerbase when it first came out and people started getting PTSD when Titan (Extreme) got announced. Whether people on here agree with it or not, its just a decision he ultimately has to make.

The fight wasn't actually too hard back then, the problem was the shoddy latency where you could be out of the landslide for 2s and STILL get knocked off. Once they managed to fix the latency, Titan was a lot easier (yet still difficult) to deal with.

[Shurrikhan]

Sorry for the late reply; didn't see your edit earlier.

If a more significant portion of the game's tanks couldn't be bothered to pop even a single defensive, would that be reason to forever thereafter constraint the game around their ineptitude?

Or... would you just indirectly force them to git gud, even if it has growing pains on their and their unfortunate victims/party members' part?

To be fair, since they increased incoming damage to match, that much was largely lip service. "Don't worry, tank stance hasn't REALLY been removed; it's just passive now." But, outside of perhaps dungeons, the incoming damage was more comparable to the old norm (running without tank stance) or was matched closely by less damage taken by all other roles as well (i.e., just a basic content nerf, more so than a tank buff).

The main change of import to tanks was the same as for healers (if more noticeably for the latter): reduced agency and a lowered ceiling. Both, of course, were far from positive changes.

[ty_taurus]

In regards to level cap dungeons, older trials, and other examples where max ilevel seems to eliminate most of the outgoing damage, what if the game went through an ilevel squish?

Right now, every even patch increases the max ilevel by 30. The former cap was 630, but now where looking at the newest raid tier where:

Crafted gear is 640
Tomestone gear is 650
Raid gear is 660

What if instead, ilevel we’re squished so that this gear growth instead looked like:

Crafted gear was 635
Tomestone gear was 640
Raid gear was 645 (weapon would be 648)

Naturally, all other sets introduced during a patch follow suit, like alliance raid gear being 640 in this example. If we went back and applied this growth logic to all past gear, that would crunch down the total ilevel quite a bit, and reduce the gap between min and max ilevel. This means damage isn’t as heavily trivialized. It also means content released earlier in an expansion doesn’t feel as trivialized by the end.

There are several knock on effects to this of course. It does make the game “harder” technically, and it would require rebalancing the numbers of past content, though that can probably be handled in a fashion similarly to the stat squish.

It’s a concept I’ve thought about in the past mainly because it never felt right to me how bloated ilevels have always appeared in contrast to our actual levels.

[Shurrikhan]

In regards to level cap dungeons, older trials, and other examples where max ilevel seems to eliminate most of the outgoing damage, what if the game went through an ilevel squish?

Honestly, I don't think it'd make any difference? In the end it's just number-aesthetics. The devs will decide the actual value of each upgrade based on what they think will be perceived as fair/sufficient (different concepts, I know) motivation for doing higher-level content; whether they compress the number thereafter or not will be irrelevant to the relative difficulty of content.

Assuming they follow through and reduce the 'real-(power-)earnings' rewards for past progression, sure, that may make it a little easier to catch up... but it's a harder way to do that than just decreasing the costs of uncapped tomes, making Normal Raids spammable a half-patch earlier, no longer requiring the last-tier Normal Raid weekly weapon drop for past weapons, etc.

And if the intent was instead just to limit how ridiculously we overgear content, the solution is simpler still: just reduce the maximum ilvl before sync.

When we would otherwise hit 4-digit item levels, I expect to see former gaps of 10 reduced to 5 and former gaps of 5 reduced to alternating 2s and 3s, sure, but... I can't think of anything that uniquely solves beyond keeping that little number in the corner of our Character Sheets from overflowing into another graphical section, if that's even a risk.

[ty_taurus]

Honestly, I don't think it'd make any difference? In the end it's just number-aesthetics. The devs will decide the actual value of each upgrade based on what they think will be perceived as fair/sufficient (different concepts, I know) motivation for doing higher-level content; whether they compress the number thereafter or not will be irrelevant to the relative difficulty of content.

Assuming they follow through and reduce the 'real-(power-)earnings' rewards for past progression, sure, that may make it a little easier to catch up... but it's a harder way to do that than just decreasing the costs of uncapped tomes, making Normal Raids spammable a half-patch earlier, no longer requiring the last-tier Normal Raid weekly weapon drop for past weapons, etc.

And if the intent was instead just to limit how ridiculously we overgear content, the solution is simpler still: just reduce the maximum ilvl before sync.

When we would otherwise hit 4-digit item levels, I expect to see former gaps of 10 reduced to 5 and former gaps of 5 reduced to alternating 2s and 3s, sure, but... I can't think of anything that uniquely solves beyond keeping that little number in the corner of our Character Sheets from overflowing into another graphical section, if that's even a risk.

I was thinking your stats would actually reflect this shift. For example, if we look at The Aetherfont which has a minimum ilvl of 605 and no ilvl cap... The 605 healing coat, the Manalis coat, has a Mind stat of 293. Meanwhile, the 650 Credendum healing coat has 374 Mind (Eorzea database isn't showing the 660 gear yet). This is a difference of 81 Mind, but if the stats are also cut alongside an ilvl shrink, the equivalent of the 650 Credendum coat would instead have a difference of 41 (rounded up)--a Mind stat of 334 instead of 374. In other words, the difference between your stats at minimum ilvl and maximum ilvl would be halved, shrinking how much more powerful you can get over any given piece of content.

[Shurrikhan]

I was thinking your stats would actually reflect this shift. For example, if we look at The Aetherfont which has a minimum ilvl of 605 and no ilvl cap... The 605 healing coat, the Manalis coat, has a Mind stat of 293. Meanwhile, the 650 Credendum healing coat has 374 Mind (Eorzea database isn't showing the 660 gear yet). This is a difference of 81 Mind, but if the stats are also cut alongside an ilvl shrink, the equivalent of the 650 Credendum coat would instead have a difference of 41 (rounded up)--a Mind stat of 334 instead of 374. In other words, the difference between your stats at minimum ilvl and maximum ilvl would be halved, shrinking how much more powerful you can get over any given piece of content.

I agree that that should be done, but that would require that the devs who have thus far run this as one of the most time-gated treadmill-ish of MMOs would be comfortable halving the size of the 'carrot' they offer for progression.

You can impact those stats without impacting ilvl, and similarly you can impact ilvl without impacting those stats. They're independent from one another.

For my part, I'd be happy just reducing the maximum ilvl for most content, especially that of key story encounters (think Loldon and Endsinger basically missing her final phase). Heck, I'd be fine with content having a maximum ilvl equal to or barely over what they reward.