AST - Making an Easy Healer

[ty_taurus]

Part of it IS not liking complexity, and there are few ways to make a buffer that is (maybe if we had a buffing healer like Vanilla WoW's Holy Paladin, I guess?), but part of it is that I like healing and shielding not weak feeling meh damage buffs that don't appear to do anything. +3% damage isn't something I can see or feel. A yellow shield bar as large as someone's health bar - THAT I can see.

The GCD-based MMO combat system exists primarily to hide lag and create an environment that makes players equal in their performance. No one player can be inherently better for having faster internet. Beyond that, though, the system needs to appeal to its audience and feel fun to play, but there's an inherent flaw in this design: it's slow. If I were to get my mother to try FFXIV (She plays Assassin's Creed mainly) I can already hear her saying "Why do I have to wait to attack? This is stupid."

Obviously, it's not a combat system for everyone, but that criticism still creates a problem that designers need to resolve. How they do this is by creating choice and priority systems within a library of actions available to each class, along with creating OGCD buttons that are to be weaved between each cycle of the GCD. The reason why every job has upwards of 30 actions as opposed to only 5 is to draw attention and create engagement through decision-making. There is not much difficulty in achieving this in a vacuum, but when you mix that with fight design as well, you create a sense of challenge. This challenge isn't always hard to accomplish, but challenge is what inspires fun and engagement most of the time in games. That's not to say all forms of challenge are equal. Some challenges are frustrating, while others are engaging. See the issue with AST's weaving and single targeting as an example of challenge that many view as frustrating rather than engaging. But in general, challenge is what drives players to play. When there is no challenge, that slowness flaw of the GCD system becomes apparent and makes things boring for many people.

The problem that healers have is that FFXIV's content, by in large, does not encourage the bulk of these tools to be used consistently. So while every healer has around 30 actions, most of them gather dust in the face of most content. Now, this may not always be true for the novice healer and the intermediate healer, but by design, healing is a responsibility that decreases in use with skill rather than increases because in involves doing the opposite of damage. Having some tools that are situational can be a good thing, such as Interject on tanks, Second Wind on physical DPS, or Rescue on healers. These provide unique ways to engage with the game on a case-by-case basis and allow players to adapt to atypical scenarios (or in Interject's case, rare scenarios). But this is how the bulk of healer actions feel on the healers. Rather than having a small handful of situational tools and a larger library of consistent tools, healers have a small handful of consistent tools and a larger library of situational tools.

This is inherently antithetical to how classes are designed to combat the slowness of a GCD system. For players who have become comfortable with the content of this game, and are unafraid of the damage it deals, the reason why so many of us find the healers boring is because they suffer from the slowness of the GCD system, because the healers are robbed of that choice-based deicision-making experience that is meant to offset this. Not every player may feel that as mentioned prior based on skill and comfort with the game's combat stystem, and you specifically may be a rare case of someone unbothered by slowness entirely, but the proper space that every job should fill is creating a tool kit where the novice and intermediate player can succeed while the expert and master player can engage.

Fortunately, FFXIV actually has an environment very well catered to support this. The vast majority of content in this game is not difficult to succeed in. In nearly every aspect of FFXIV, damage does not matter because you have the liberty to take as much time as you need to defeat that boss. This is wonderful because it creates content that isn't very difficult to the novice and intermediate player and can be fun on its own. To the expert and master player who find it too easy, the prospect of optimizing your job's gameplay anyway, even when it doesn't actually matter, allows them to engage with the nuances of their job and create more challenge for them to overcome. But again, healers outright deny this, but that doesn't mean reworking healers to reverse this flaw has to make them complex either.

Not all jobs that have a larger selection of consistently viable actions are looked at as complex in the first place. DNC is a great example of this. Where SMN is seen as feeling incomplete with its simplicity, DNC is not seen has having this issue. I don't think anyone would describe it as complex, but it has something that is actually more important than complexity: rhythm. Now, going back to what I mentioned about having a varied selection of tools, one thing that also needed to be considered is how they flow together. Like I said with AST, a big issue it faces is its core gameplay feels clunky and frustrating. This is also why the removal of SAM's Kaiten was hit with so much criticism, because the majority of SAM players believe it was essential to the flow of the job even though it was only 1 button. Without it, there's a lack of proper buildup toward Tsubame-gaeshi, and the Kenki gauge no longer feels like an engaging resource because it's largely spent on a single action. DNC on the other hand has a very solid flow. Almost no one even talks about the job because there's very little to complain about.

Now, on a brief tangent, we can also recognize that not all games need to create challenge. There are entire genres of games designed to be relaxing, like visual novels, building games, management games. These include games like Animal Crossing, The Sims, Minecraft, Journey, Stardew Valley, etc. Some are also games that can be challenging but also offer modes without consequences like Tetris Effect which offers "chill mode" where you can't fail, or Mini-Metro which offers endless mode. I think it's really important that we have and recognize these genres because games don't exist for one singular purpose (beyond enjoyment). What people look for in a game can vary, but not every game is meant to appeal to every type of playstyle also. Animal Crossing doesn't need a hardcore mode for people looking for a challenge because if you want a challenging gameplay experience, you probably aren't going to play Animal Crossing.

The MMORPG genre, however, is not a genre that was ever designed to fall into the relaxing category by design. It's also not a genre meant to be on the opposite end of the spectrum as a high-difficulty a la Dark Souls, but rather, a genre meant to provide a range in order to appeal to a wider audience. Going back to the point I mentioned earlier, FFXIV accomplishes this by making the vast majority of content require a very low skill threshold to complete. You aren't punished for having a messy rotation, not using skills properly, or sitting on cooldowns. Even content that does set a higher bar to entry on skill does not require perfection. Literally this past Sunday, the DRG in my party was saying how he just learned he'd been doing his rotation entirely wrong this whole time, and we still have been clearing savage content regardless.

With all that in mind, the main point I'm very slowly trying to make is that every job should allow for players to engage with some kind of a rhythm, and no job should outright deny the player access to gameplay that engages with the majority of their tools. This does not mean every job needs to be complex, as having flow and rhythm in a wider selection of actions does not always equate to complexity or difficulty. And regardless, what allows nearly all of this game's content to feel easy and forgiving is the low expectations encounters have on the player to clear. If every job offered a wider array of tools that had rhythm, some still quite simple while others are more complex, content would still be just as clearable and enjoyable to the novice and intermediate player base while ensuring expert and master players can still enjoy any job offered by the game. And that is the ultimate objective of class design in the GCD system of MMORPGs.