Gamespot interview with Mr. Ozma... Very disappointing

[Renathras]

I can see the attraction in wanting to give healers some 'carry potential' as far as wipe recovery goes, but you risk creating fights that people end up clearing without actually understanding the mechanics for themselves,

I'm not sure "you didn't deserve the clear" is REALLY a good excuse for lazy encounter designs. Healers and tanks are brought to parties instead of just more DPS because they're supposed to be able to do those things. One reason there's so much discontent among healers (and the "1 button spam" caricature so prevalent) is that healing doesn't work well. Either the person screwed up and died or it's unavoidable raidwides which are taken care of by the oGCD healing plan. You never have that one person you need to adjust to Cure 2 on because if they take a hit, they're dead anyway. And then the party wipes because you fail the body check that comes right afterwards. EVERY NOW AND THEN you can save a person if you blow...a bunch of oGCDs (Aquaveil, Benison, Tetra), but that's still weaving between your one-button spam because there's no point in reverting to Cure 2 or Regen since the person will either die outright (regardless of what you do; and wipe the party) or the oGCDs will handle it and it's back to the 1 button spam.

EDIT:

But they need to walk away from insta wipe/multi damage downs mechanics when 1 player messed up in Savage. Fights that are recoverable (as long as the other players perform well) are far more interesting and raidwide damage down/insta wipe is just a lazy way to add artificial difficulty.

One of the tedious thing about Savage (and yet they have always encouraged players to try it) is that you can do your utmost best but the moment one player screw up you get screwed up too.

Keep those type of mechs for ultimates. Increase savage difficulty, increase individual responsibility without it screwing up another player that do them well.

I think what's even more egregious to me is how this plague has spread TO EXTREMES.

In the past, Extremes were generally midcore and PF friendly content a step down from Savages since one person screwing up didn't often mean you couldn't clear the fight, it just meant other people would have to work harder. But in EW, Extremes have also taken on this Savage [VOICE=Buzz Lightyear]"Bodychecks. Bodychecks everywhere."[/VOICE] thing. It means if you have one person in your PF group that sucks or can't do one key mechanic, you may as well disband the PF since you aren't going to clear the fight. "Oh, someone in your group isn't good at Gales 2? Yeah, disband. That party can no longer clear the fight." While that could be true rarely in past expansion Extremes, it's EVERY SINGLE FIGHT in EW. Where in the past, Extremes were generally about personal responsibility and Savages about group, now Extremes also depend on the entire group to be on point as any one failing is often unrecoverable, even with healers and tanks using CDs and creative strategies (e.g. Tank invuln to eat two Limit Cut cleaves) just not cutting it.

Not only that, it's often more than one, and often back to back. If a person died to Limit Cut in Diamond WEAPON, the towers right after adjusted down to the number of living players. If someone dies to Gales, the two person circles/light party stacks do not adjust. And you have THAT mechanic twice towards the end of the fight and parts of it (Gales by itself early, LP and 2 man stacks during the meteor things) in other parts of the fight) as well. Golbez is parallel with Emerald WEAPON, which did have some mechanics early on (the balls in stage 1) that need people alive, but not as rampant, and later in the fight, if individuals dropped (e.g. the sword + attacks) you could generally revive people and push through to recovery. You can't do that with Golbez between the meteor drops, the knockback/flare/stacks, and the Gales 2/3 2 man/LP stack in line mechanics. Emerald, despite being hard at the time, was FAR more forgiving.

It's gutted the midcore and PF/PUG scene. I'm not sure if Savage shouldn't have them (since it always has been more group oriented) or not, and will leave that up to others to discuss, but Extremes definitely shouldn't, or not to this level of prevalence.

[Lyth]

Burst has always been important to this game. Trick Attack influenced openers design as early as Heavensward. Jobs with weaker burst or asynchronous windows have been typically been sidelined in favor of ones with 60s or 120s recasts. They've tried all those other design iterations before around burst, and they've all resulted in relatively static raid compositions where the usual jobs dominated over entire expansions.

I can see the attraction in wanting to give healers some 'carry potential' as far as wipe recovery goes, but you risk creating fights that people end up clearing without actually understanding the mechanics for themselves, especially with some of the recent dps checks being so soft. Most people in PF know that if they overstate their progress the group will quickly disband if the team gets stuck before the stated progression wall. Don't worry about individual pulls or who does what mistake, focus on being extremely consistent in execution. Even if others are making mistakes, you will progress in PF if you are extremely consistent. Otherwise you will be the one to cause the wipe on that one pull where the stars align.

On the subject of ranged-only uptime, no thanks. Quick melee disengages on the other hand, are a lot of fun (AMR/AMRS provide some great examples of this), simply because you need to be clever about movement tools to minimize downtime, and there's an element of danger around whether you squeeze that last GCD in or not.

[Fourbestintoner]

t b h, while I despise current job designs, maintaining uptime has never been hard, unless you were a complete baddie, even back in hw and sb, ive only lost uptime while I had to run to the wall, even then, it was only like 1 or 2 gcd, the most evil mechanic to this day remain demonic sand from o6s, I will never stop being mad at how arbitrary and vindictive it was.

[AngelCheese77]

Am I the only one that misses the days in MMOs where people actually used ranged attacks, like when Onixia was flying around in Vanilla WoW and even the WAR tank pulls out their autoattack stat stick bow to do chip damage to her?

Every Job in this game besides MNK has a ranged attack. And even there, for long disengages, you can use Howling Fist/Enlightenment for that (even if it's clunk as hell and a DPS loss VS FULL UPTIME to do so, it's still damage while disengaged IF fights actually had extended disengage times). A lot of Jobs also have DoTs they can slap on the enemy to do damage, or have other disengage options (for example, NIN has Ninjutsu and Phantom before they need to revert to Throwing Dagger; and if they DID have super long disengages, Hellfrog can be used once they generate enough Ninki from Throwing Dagger, giving a pseudo-ranged "rotation", too).

Just give MNK a slightly more accessible ranged attack and we can go back to times where using ranged attacks makes sense. Right now, they may as well not be on anyone's bars other than Tanks for pulls, and PLD practically doesn't need that since Holy Spirit exists.

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I dunno, I thought those were neat times in MMOs. Would be neat for that to come back.

Remember your ABCs… Always Be Casting!!!

[ThaCa]

They should just make all DPS greedy and remove party buffs completely. That would open up design for each Job a lot when nobody has to align things outside of their own kit. It would also make balancing easier because they can just adjust Job spesific numbers instead of having to count on outside stuff like party buffs.

[KageTokage]

it's honestly hard to get excited about new jobs as long as things remain in their current state because having to balance around the current buff windows necessitates homogenizing things.

[Teno]

I don't mind the encounter design as much as I do the bad gameplay for so many jobs (healers !!!). If they could make some more proc and reaction based skills/combos (like in pvp), but I guess that'd detract from their boring 2-min meta.

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

I mean, every game has their type of meta. If they changed it, then what comes after would be the meta and people would complain about that.

The meta only really matters in the hardest content anyway.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I mean, every game has their type of meta. If they changed it, then what comes after would be the meta and people would complain about that.

The meta only really matters in the hardest content anyway.

The problem is when design choices catering that meta that only matters to a small amount of players in 1 specific part of content ends up negatively effecting the rest of the content for the larger part of the player base.

[Hanayumi]

So heres my gripe with all the doom and gloom with FFXIV, is there an alternative MMO? Like im genuinely interested if there is, but personally cant say that ive really found anyother MMOs worth playing... Active, growing, no PTW, not a massive grindfest, fun classes that arent too difficult, fun/difficult bosses/raids, bonus if its cross-platform, soo anything like that out there?