The State of Homogenization: A New (Healer) Player's Perspective

[Elesh]

okay good because I literally thought I was going insane, or missing some important information about the classes.

Ya no, if you just read that one post you quoted I can absolutely see where you misunderstood what I was saying. My apologies for the poor wording in that post.

Those abilities ARE identical. It's the stuff after those that aren't. And really... aside from glare and dia, you barely cast most of the 'identical' abilities so like... you're not using much of the 'basic building block' toolkit at high levels at all.

[Packetdancer]

My thought on Wildstar is they wanted to capture the segment of players that liked big time sinks or coordination efforts like guild attunement. they wanted the people who sunk 8-10 hour days into EQ and WoW, and liked the challenging of herding cats into a 54 man, or bigger, raid where the challenges were much more organizational/tactical then "skill". This is a niche market for sure, but certainly existed during Wildstar's launch time

That's more or less accurate.

Don't get me wrong, I was demonstrably very fond of the game; I still get asked periodically "are you the same Packetdancer from WildStar?" I nearly took a job at Carbine. I still am friends with some of the devs. It's the only game made after I left the game development industry as my day job where I'm in the credits. But I think they made two really big mistakes.

First... I don't actually think the action-based combat system was the wrong choice, but I do think the way they scaled it up over the level range was; the game didn't have a skill curve so much as a skill cliff. The early levels were relatively easy and accessible, but after a certain point it ramped up so abruptly that a lot of people slammed into a wall like Wile E. Coyote trying to chase the Roadrunner through a painted tunnel. ("Meep meep! Pthb." *WHAM*) As it also didn't provide a ton of things to help folks get past that sudden dramatic increase, many folks got frustrated and left. A smoother ramping up might have led to less frustration and more player retention. (Whether or not it would've been a significant amount more retention, I don't know. But I don't think a smoother difficulty curve would have made player retention worse.)

Second, the devs were predominantly veterans of the original WoW team or the Everquest and Everquest 2 teams, and when they heard a lot of raiders talk about missing the old days and wanting meaty content that required huge parties and a lot of organization... I feel like they took that very, very seriously, and tried to recapture the feel of those early days of MMO raiding. But as a result, that was basically the only endgame that existed at launch. Which meant folks more interested in other endgame activities wandered off... and it turned out that no matter how loud a lot of old-school raiders were about missing the old days, many had little things like "jobs" and "families" and "social lives" now, and did not actually want to put in the massive amount of effort required to tackle those types of endgame content any longer.

And I suspect that's part of the reason that Square-Enix tries to simplify/streamline the primary content. Because no matter how vocal folks are here on the forums, I strongly suspect we're a fairly small portion of the playerbase. And much as I really wish I had a more interesting DPS rotation (or, y'know, enough DPS button variety for something to count as a "rotation" in the first place) as a healer, I also strongly suspect that making the combat more complex would alienate many players. And no matter how it sounds here in the forums, I genuinely wonder if the vocal few here would be enough to keep the game going indefinitely were they to reverse course... or whether it'd be a situation where, a few years from now, players were reminiscing about their much-lamented MMO's demise and holding an impromptu wake on Twitter.

(As is happening for WildStar right now.)

[Elesh]

<snip>
And I suspect that's part of the reason that Square-Enix tries to simplify/streamline the primary content. Because no matter how vocal folks are here on the forums, I strongly suspect we're a fairly small portion of the playerbase. And much as I really wish I had a more interesting DPS rotation (or, y'know, enough DPS button variety for something to count as a "rotation" in the first place) as a healer, I also strongly suspect that making the combat more complex would alienate many players. And no matter how it sounds here in the forums, I genuinely wonder if the vocal few here would be enough to keep the game going indefinitely were they to reverse course... or whether it'd be a situation where, a few years from now, players were reminiscing about their much-lamented MMO's demise and holding an impromptu wake on Twitter.

(As is happening for WildStar right now.)

Agreed. And while I do think there's a bit of a middle ground they could make to add a tiny bit of skill expression, I also appreciate what we have and want it to keep going so... lol

[Packetdancer]

Agreed. And while I do think there's a bit of a middle ground they could make to add a tiny bit of skill expression, I also appreciate what we have and want it to keep going so... lol

Yeah. As a player, I tend to feel like there's got to be a middle ground.

On the other hand, as a former professional game dev, I also know that balancing things is a freakin' nightmare at the best of times; even if it all works out on paper, people will always try to find creative ways to eke just that little bit more DPS out... and you have to just pray those ways are ones you already foresaw and took into account when balancing.

And it takes less of those unexpected ways to use the system to destabilize it than you might think. Because—at least in my own personal experience—game balance is often a house of cards built on top of a table made out of dominos. And the playerbase are half a dozen cats laying on the floor with one paw out towards the first domino of that chain, staring thoughtfully as though wondering, "I wonder what happens if I bat at this domino here..."

(...I'm tired, my ability to analogy may be breaking down.)

[Semirhage]

Like down the line... the healers have toolkits that serve the same purpose, but they don't do it in the same way. It's important they have these tools. You can't have a healer that can't aoe heal because they'd be useless. So you NEED tools that serve the same purpose. But the important part is that they function in different methods - different resources used, casting methods, secondary effects, cooldowns, etc.

Only the base toolkit of like cure 1, cure 2, medica, raise, glare, dia, medica 2 are 'identical'.

AST's tools aren't identical to WHM's, that's true. AST's tools are, for the most part, what you'd do if you took a suspiciously similar ability from WHM's kit, and then made it superior in basically every single way, then called it "balanced".

[Banriikku]

Interestingly enough SGE is a better SCH and AST a better WHM but at end all hit their attack skill more often then a tank autattacks in full savage fight >.< It is pattern but a weird one. So atleast we have only boredom and can clear all content, it is a very low bar but hey ^^