[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[The Casualty]

I think you're missing the point here. It's not to "punish" anybody. It's to shift healing from being a role based around reaction speeds to being about longer term planning and stratergy. Having a finite resource to power your healing means there has to be some decision making that goes into how you spend it best. It creates a system where you want to maximise your efficiency rather than look to snipe as much HPS as possible.

It opens up new gearing opportunities too. Having to make a choice between healing output and having extra resources to heal with is an interesting problem for the players. The answer is going to vary from player to player, what kind of content you're doing and so on. That's a challenge to think about outside of combat. Finding that ideal balance of healing output and resource management adds a lot of depth to how you play without adding any mechanical complexities at all.

Longer term planning and strategy happens, just not in lower level content. If you look at say the second half of O12S with Final Omega, one spot I seem to recall being difficult to figure out how to cover for the healers (I must admit I don't heal in savage so this is mostly from the discord discussions during raid) when we were learning it is the Ion Efflux after Patch, then having to go into Hello World and figuring out how to best utilize cooldowns and get coverage for all the people who have Critical Synchronization Bug, deal with the Critical Overflow Bugs and have everyone healthy enough to survive the second Ion Efflux.

The same thing could be said of quite a few of the savage encounters - the problem is the bar outside of savage raiding is so low that you don't have any real decisions or planning to make.

And that doesn't just apply to healers. In an Ex Roulette, as long as the tank and healer are doing sufficient DPS, the actual DPS can basically play however they want and all it will do is slow down the chain pulling. I imagine that even if the tank and healer are strictly sticking to only heals and only aggro combos in tank stance the DPS could STILL do basically nothing and while the instance might be abysmally long would still likely be doable. Who would actually put up with that is an entirely separate matter.

Tanks, similarly, don't require a whole lot in dungeon/24 man instances. Keeping aggro is about it - and you don't even need your actual aggro combo to do that anymore. Maybe because I play one the vast majority of the time I might nit pick here, but most of what I want to see is QoL stuff like not stopping to mess around with mobs when you are pulling multiple groups and making sure to cycle through cooldowns properly on bigger pulls. That last one might be more required if you do bigger pulls, but pulls like that aren't necessary.


That being said...

My wish for the expansion would be to massively prune down skills. No one should need 3+ hotbars of routinely used abilities. A standard rotation minus cooldowns and stances shouldn't take up 2 hotbars. In most games a convoluted way to control your character is bad game design. I don't know why that shouldn't hold true in an MMORPG. I'm not asking for a jobs to become more mindless. They can give us procs to watch or a priority system or something else so we aren't just mashing the 1 key or the X button and can still make intelligent decisions.

You could still have complicated design without forcing people to remember the often-times John Madden style openers. With raising the floor on character ability, maybe they could do the same to regular group content. Maybe an Ex Dungeon could be somewhere in between where it is now and an Ex Trial.

[Granyala]

I think you're missing the point here. It's not to "punish" anybody. It's to shift healing from being a role based around reaction speeds to being about longer term planning and stratergy. Having a finite resource to power your healing means there has to be some decision making that goes into how you spend it best. It creates a system where you want to maximise your efficiency rather than look to snipe as much HPS as possible.

People do not deliberately fuck up. People cannot plan around who fucks up.
Encounters are already at their limit often to the point that if one mistake happens, the group wipes.
You want MORE punishment? Encounters would become impossible for most folks out there (sure Ultimate clearing folks wouldn't mind but very few people play at that level).
Lenient healer mana is basically the only error correction we've got right now (at least as long as you aren't instagibbed by the next unavoidable damage due to your stack).

You would have to change encounter design considerably to make such a model work and quite frankly: I doubt that most healers would like it, because ultimately it would end as it did in WoW: healers feeling pathetically weak, barely able to compensate anything because: lolmana.

No thanks. I prefer the system as it is now.

- - - Updated - - -

The same thing could be said of quite a few of the savage encounters - the problem is the bar outside of savage raiding is so low that you don't have any real decisions or planning to make.

This.
A monkey could complete non savage/ex content.

I mean we all like to moan about ice mages... fact of the matter is: it doesn't matter whether you get 2 ice mages in your group.
Apart from the run taking 5-10 minutes longer nothing will happen.

[Rogalicus]

You would have to change encounter design considerably to make such a model work and quite frankly: I doubt that most healers would like it, because ultimately it would end as it did in WoW: healers feeling pathetically weak, barely able to compensate anything because: lolmana.

At least it enforces real trinity instead of damage dealers, damage dealers with off-heals and damage dealers that passively generate threat and use a few mitigation abilities on long CD.

[Granyala]

At least it enforces real trinity instead of damage dealers, damage dealers with off-heals and damage dealers that passively generate threat and use a few mitigation abilities on long CD.

Only thing it would change is that healers no longer DPS.
As I already said: you cannot "strategize" around player fails. It's a binary decision: you either have the resources to save ass or you "don't".
Having the resources and deciding not to rez/heal is not a valid option, because a dead player = wipe due to enrage.

So this model simply wouldn't work anyway.

[StrawberryZebra]

Longer term planning and strategy happens, just not in lower level content.

I was meaning on an indivdual level more than on the raid level. Using Largesse and dropping to your small heal to conserve your MP is something you'll never have to do at present. Blowing your MP bar early to regen it all ASAP with your cooldowns is something you'll never have to do. Simply making the MP bar something you can run out of is enough to force you to rethink your approach to individual boss fights. It opens up a lot of strategic choices that don't currently exist.

While big raid cooldowns will still need some degree of coordination, allowing the individual healers to use their personal cooldowns to preserve their MP or to push the boat out as needed does allow for more depth than what we have right now. You're adding an extra layer to the role without adding any extra skills or new mechanics.

You would have to change encounter design considerably to make such a model work and quite frankly: I doubt that most healers would like it, because ultimately it would end as it did in WoW: healers feeling pathetically weak, barely able to compensate anything because: lolmana.

We're heading into another expansion soon, if encounter design were to change, that would be the ideal time to do it. The current design encourages simply pushing out the required HPS on demand. That doesn't leave you with a lot of interesting options - You heal up, or you wipe. Having MP as an extra dial allows for a wider range of scenarios to play out across the entire spectrum of group content. I'd rather not simply be stuck with varying shades of HPS check from here until eternity.

For what it's worth, my WoW Paladin feels like a very strong healer. It's got strong cooldowns, fun abilities and interesting ways to combine the two to flesh out an individual playstyle for yourself. The fact I can run out of mana is all that stops me being able to solo M+ dungeons, not in time mind you, but I'd still get them finished eventually. The only reason that kind of healing power is balanced is because of how limited it is.

My wish for the expansion would be to massively prune down skills. No one should need 3+ hotbars of routinely used abilities.

I know WoW gets a lot of flak for this, but honestly it's probably the right way to go. I can fit all the skills my Paladin needs onto two hotbars, and have enough space left over for Mounts, Healthstones, Drinks and so on.

The best part is they're all useful in the majority of circumstances. I use my taunt often enough with my DPS and Healing specs for it to have a keybind. I use my CC abilities and defensive cooldowns enough to have them a keybind, I use my Racial ability often enough to have a keybind for it. I even have enough space left over to keybind talents I'm not currently taking. The one skill I have that almost never gets used? My res spell, because it's rare that people die on me.

You don't have many skills, but they're all used. That's good design imo, everything has a purpose and a use and there are no filler skills that are there to just make up numbers. It's great for the UI too, being just two bars it doesn't take up much real estate allowing me to see what's going on around me. My FF14 UI is such a fustercluck of bars, bloated party UI's and job gauges that it's sometimes hard to take everything in. Squenix's policy on Addons is a huge hinderance in that regard.

[Granyala]

We're heading into another expansion soon, if encounter design were to change, that would be the ideal time to do it. The current design encourages simply pushing out the required HPS on demand. That doesn't leave you with a lot of interesting options - You heal up, or you wipe. Having MP as an extra dial allows for a wider range of scenarios to play out across the entire spectrum of group content. I'd rather not simply be stuck with varying shades of HPS check from here until eternity.

Again:
The "interesting decisions" are only in your head. In reality there are no decisions to make nor will there ever be any.

A player failed. (You cannot influence that fact, no matter what you do)
2 Options: Player dead / Player alive
You ask yourself: Do I have the resources & time to rez or heal him up?

Yes -> save his sorry ass
No -> hope s/o else can save his ass or wipe the raid

You will NEVER, I repeat: NEVER have the option to have the resources and NOT save his ass because that would ultimately result in you sabotaging the raid.

As such: there is no decision, no planning to do here. It's a binary yes/no thing, depending on your resources. Making MP more tight would only mean that you answer "no" more often which only results in less error correction, more wipes and subsequently harder boss fights.

Same goes for the "efficient" heals vs "non efficient" heals. You do NOT make a decision either. You can in lower tier content aye, but higher end content simply FORCES you to use the non efficient, strong heal in most situations, because the GameDEVs already made the decision for you and do not give you the needed time to up a person (or the group) with slow, efficient heals.

Regarding healing CDs: I already pre plan these across the fight. I know in which situations I need them and I know which situations I can handle w/o. Always funny if co healer dies and I need them ahead of time, making both of us improvise at the point I originally intended to use them. ^^

I've seen it in WoW. Blizzard changed the healing model, yet damage continued to be spiky as fuck, so you pushed your non efficient heals as much as humanly possible and only resorted to non efficient heals when you had no alternative.

I fully agree on the topic of further pruning though, esp on DPS classes.

- - - Updated - - -

I was meaning on an indivdual level more than on the raid level. Using Largesse and dropping to your small heal to conserve your MP is something you'll never have to do at present.

Blowing your MP bar early to regen it all ASAP with your cooldowns is something you'll never have to do.

No, because
a) Encounters force situations in which you need Largesse, thus reserving it for increased output.
b) Encounters do not give you the time to herp a derp with the small heal for 20 seconds. Do you know how much DPS you would lose by doing that?

In general, it is my experience that GCDs are far more valuable in FF-XIV than mana is.

Not sure about you but I constantly run out of mana, to the point that I have to use mana pots and/or stop DPSing in order to have enough of a reserve for an upcoming critical situation.
So yes: I REALLY NEED these MP regen CDs and I am pretty conscious of my mana status. (We don't have a BRD or MCH in the group)

[StrawberryZebra]

In general, it is my experience that GCDs are far more valuable in FF-XIV than mana is.

Which is exactly the design choice I was advocating against. It's the entire reason you're left with HPS checks and binary yes/no failure states. The gameplay is reduced to a simple game of "Whack-a-mole". It's extremely shallow even when compared against other FF14 Jobs, let alone when compared against other MMO's. Hell, it's even too shallow for League of Legends! To the point where Riot completely overhauled their healing Champions to fix the issue.

It's why I no longer play SCH, once I got gear the challenge just dropped out of the bottom. It never felt like I was playing smart, or skilled, only that I was going through the motions. Sure, I can carry pretty much anyone through even the most severe of fuck-up's until they have that many Vulnrability stacks that they get one shot. But that's also part of the problem as far as I'm concerned - When the difficulty of your role is determined almost exlusively by how bad other players are, then there's something very wrong at a fundamental level.

If the difference between an exceptional Healer and one who's merely competant enough to complete the content comes down to how fast they can react then we're at the point where Developers have nothing else left that they can do to challenge us. It's a highly limiting design, both for the players and for the developers. Loosening that up and adding other variables to the equation allows for more dials developers can use to challenge their players with.

I'm not saying that we should just scrap the current design right now and replace it overnight. But we're heading into a new expansion soon, having new content bring with it new mechanics and challenges expands more than just the games content. It's the ideal opportunity to update and replace broken systems.

[Granyala]

In order to do that, DEVs would have to stop punishing every mistake with massive damage taken.
Right now, every fail is laid to rest on our shoulders.
If WE fail, it's typically a wipe.

I agree that this kind of system needs change but I don't see it happening. I also never saw a radical change happen in WoW. Healing is still a game of "react fast and pump up their HP as fast as you can before the next big unavoidable AoE kicks in" Not that far off from missing a healing GCD = a wipe like it was back in Sunwell.
I don't think you can do much else to challenge healers in games like this.

At least not if you want to provide an unrestricted healing role and the feeling of "yeah I saved your incompetent butt, I'm awesome!".

[Granyala]

I absolutely loved healing in Tier 11. I can't help but think all the complaining about that era came from people who were spoiled as hell through the XIV-like WotLK era where you just mashed all your buttons if you felt like it.

I quite liked the dungeon healing at the beginning of Cataclysm though I am happy that I wasn't a raid healer.
Compared to playing DPS, healing was super stressful.

Personally, I don't want that kind of difficulty in XIV.
I'll be honest: I barely manage to heal savage as it is with all that crap that is happening all at once and barely lets you time to actually think stuff over.
Most of it is basically pre programmed muscle memory.

[Boricha]

Thought I'd stick this here instead of making a thread:

I just got into the game, having lots of fun. I'm level 49, and I'm wondering if at 50 I can go right into the expansion main storyline stuff or do I have to finish the main story I'm on now? It's only at level 46. Also will I need to do all the Seventh Astral Era quests at level 50?

[Necroxis]

Thought I'd stick this here instead of making a thread:

I just got into the game, having lots of fun. I'm level 49, and I'm wondering if at 50 I can go right into the expansion main storyline stuff or do I have to finish the main story I'm on now? It's only at level 46. Also will I need to do all the Seventh Astral Era quests at level 50?

Yes you need to do all of the MSQ of each expansion before you move on. That includes post 'max level' content (Which for you is level 50). There's quite a lot of it in ARR. It is directly involved in the storytelling so you cannot skip it.

[Boricha]

Yes you need to do all of the MSQ of each expansion before you move on. That includes post 'max level' content (Which for you is level 50). There's quite a lot of it in ARR. It is directly involved in the storytelling so you cannot skip it.

Ok, thanks!

[Necroxis]

Ok, thanks!

Enjoy, because the end of ARR and Heavensward is great.

[Faroth]

what does mh mean in ff14?

Sorry it's really late (I've been on vacation and didn't even have Internet a few days), but as another mentioned, yes, MH just means Monster Hunter; in this case, Monster Hunter: World playing friends comparing the XIV version of Rathalos and how they interpreted it.

[Fascinate]

Does ffxiv do any referral systems for free game time? I havent played since stormblood launch and never did hit max level, looking to get back into it.

[Sorrior]

Does ffxiv do any referral systems for free game time? I havent played since stormblood launch and never did hit max level, looking to get back into it.

Not for referral buut they do offer free play periods every so often. And if you get a character on a preferred world up to 30 it will give you a one time free 15 days

[Fascinate]

Not for referral buut they do offer free play periods every so often. And if you get a character on a preferred world up to 30 it will give you a one time free 15 days

Cool was just wondering, gonna download now hope i remember my PW lol.

[Wrecktangle]

You know as well as I do, that the raiding community would "enforce" FOTM-BIS.
I've seen it with Blizzards approach to the new talents in WoD. Complicated stuff ended up FOTM because, in the hand of skilled players, the talents were stronger.

I don't know this to be a fact. My albeit anecdotal experience directly contradicts this. In all my years of pugging mythic+, or raids (Heroic/Mythic) not once has a single person told me how to play or to switch a talent. My numbers almost always speak for themselves so they have no room to comment.

Even in FF14, I don't think I've seen a single instance where off meta picks were openly bashed/removed from consideration. I pug most tiers until the time/reward ratio no longer makes sense (historically this is the 4th fight in a tier where I finally need to find a static).

Personally I don't like fighting my classes gameplay and the boss at the same time. My class should be relatively simple, not 3 button braindead but also not adorned with artificial complexity like HWs Henochian incarnation.

Agreed. I'm firmly of the camp that baseline a class should be simple with the ability to fine tune it's playstyle a bit. Easy to do? No. Impossible? Hardly.

Everyone knows the challenge behind playing White Mage is putting as many tanks through the 1% challenge as possible (letting them get as close to 1% health as possible before they either freak out and pop their invuln CD or you get off a benediction without it getting eaten)

As an aside my FC doesn't let me WHM heal for them anymore.

I always appreciate a healer who doesn't spam heal me to keep me at 100%. As long as I am not at 0% we're good. I don't panic. I don't tell you to do XYZ. I trust you to do your job. Your job isn't to keep me at 100%. It's to not let me die.

At one point I had scripts written up for every boss in Tier 11 Heroic and most of Firelands to help healers understand threats, downtime, when to use cooldowns, if you could use a cooldown early to conserve mana and have it back for a critical time later, etc. (Actually had a guide site approach me about using them for their site once and making a healer guide, hah. No.)

Granted I haven't raided organized progression mythic since WoD, but I can say that one of the HUGE differences between a good progression guild and an average one is your healers. Not how well they manage mana, etc, but they're ability to think critically and setup cd rotations and actually adapt on the fly. I raided in one of the top 2 day guilds, 6 hours a week (US80th at the time) and our healers carried us so hard.

There is already plenty of punishment here, no need to punish us healers even more. If you let the DPS die, you are most likely hitting the enrage of a savage encounter anyway.

Stuff you propose would work in simpler content sure, but it would make savage even more of a nightmare than it already is.
BTW: if you tighten up on mana, the first thing that would go out of the window would be healer DPS. So the first consequence would be that you stand around doing nothing when there is nothing to heal.

If you want to punish DPS players for fucking up w/o putting more pressure on the healers, give them a damage down that persists through death if they fail.

The problem isn't that healers are already punished tbh. It's the current design philosophy that forces this. It's binary in execution and punishment. That's kind of what Zebra and I are trying to say. We think that a more dynamicly variable playstyle would be more rewarding and reduce stress. It's quite literally a double win.

Regarding punishment of DPS they need to make more mechanics for them other than final enrage. A good example was the Lakshmi EX add phase. It was trivial for an experienced raider (especially as one who progressed Blast Furnance Mythic), but I'd watch bad DPS fuck it up time and time again.

I imagine that even if the tank and healer are strictly sticking to only heals and only aggro combos in tank stance the DPS could STILL do basically nothing and while the instance might be abysmally long would still likely be doable. Who would actually put up with that is an entirely separate matter.

and you'd be right. A group of my friends and I went into Skalla at the minimum ilvl, and the agreed upon process was I would only use aggro combo (in shield oath full time) and healer could only use generic heal spell (I think they were on AST, no cards, no oGCDs, etc.) and DPS could only do 1-2-3. no oGCDs, or cooldowns.

The dungeon took fucking forever, but we cleared it trivially. It was still faster than a few of my pug runs.

My wish for the expansion would be to massively prune down skills. No one should need 3+ hotbars of routinely used abilities. A standard rotation minus cooldowns and stances shouldn't take up 2 hotbars. In most games a convoluted way to control your character is bad game design. I don't know why that shouldn't hold true in an MMORPG. I'm not asking for a jobs to become more mindless. They can give us procs to watch or a priority system or something else so we aren't just mashing the 1 key or the X button and can still make intelligent decisions.

You could still have complicated design without forcing people to remember the often-times John Madden style openers. With raising the floor on character ability, maybe they could do the same to regular group content. Maybe an Ex Dungeon could be somewhere in between where it is now and an Ex Trial.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I had a PLD rework that cut the job from like 38 keybinds to 22 while simultaneously adding a ton of synergy and depth.

Lenient healer mana is basically the only error correction we've got right now (at least as long as you aren't instagibbed by the next unavoidable damage due to your stack).

You would have to change encounter design considerably to make such a model work and quite frankly: I doubt that most healers would like it, because ultimately it would end as it did in WoW: healers feeling pathetically weak, barely able to compensate anything because: lolmana.

Lenient MP is ONE of the error correction tools, but I'd also argue that healer throughput is another. Heals are stupidly powerful. We could argue all day long about good/bad idea, but there's no discounting that with Healers that strong that it forces the incoming damage to be commensurate.

The bottom line and you've even acknowledged it above, is that in order for any meaningful (and balanced) changes to occur to Healing, it would require combat/encounter system redesigns.

I've seen it in WoW. Blizzard changed the healing model, yet damage continued to be spiky as fuck, so you pushed your non efficient heals as much as humanly possible and only resorted to non efficient heals when you had no alternative.

I fully agree on the topic of further pruning though, esp on DPS classes.

My younger brother healed a 10 a few months ago on his fresh max level bfa Monk (so stupid low ilvl) He also did near the same amount of dps as the tank. I don't know how he did it, but it lends credence that you can really push WoW's system pretty far and it's better for it IMO.

[StrawberryZebra]

Not that far off from missing a healing GCD = a wipe like it was back in Sunwell.

Did you raid Sunwell while it was current content? It's a perfect case study for why this kind of design is flawed.

It took the idea of always pushing out close to 100% of what you were capabable of to it's logical extreme and the result was a disaster. Tuning content around pushing out close to the theoretical max HPS at all times leaves your healers in a situation where delaying a heal even slightly was a tank death, where healing the wrong person was a wipe and where healing the wrong person too slowly resulted in a quick wipe. It was mechanical, rote and the margins for error were so slim that a minor mistake on the pull would be a wipe 4 minutes down the line.

It was rough on DPS classes too, anyone not specced for maximum DPS was a hinderance. Mages were left out almost entirely. Any tank that was threat capping your DPS simply had to be replaced, they just weren't good enough and were holding you back. You were burning through consumables so fast that it forced Blizzard to change how they stacked, otherwise a single wipe would cost your guild hundreds of gold, and that added up fast on progression.

Sunwell was an awful raid Tier because of it's reliance on stat checks and binary outcomes. Squenix are painting themselves into the same corner right now, if all they've got up their sleeve is more stat checks then a Sunwell is going to be the inevitable outcome of that. I don't want FF14 to end up there.

[Granyala]

Did you raid Sunwell while it was current content? It's a perfect case study for why this kind of design is flawed.

No, but I was very active in the forums and the stress levels were complaint #1.
Most healers stated that they did no longer find the healing model fun and Blizzard acknowledged that fact.

They tried to change it in Wrath but gear scaling fucked it up again later on, so they went back to the drawing board for cataclysm.

I think, the main problem of such a redesign in an existing game is player expectation. Even when faced with wipes in early Cata, I was told by randoms to "suck it up" and heal through it, despite trying to explain to them that it was no longer possible by design. A lot of aborted runs and the consequence was that I stuck to guild runs.

I think the same would happen to FF-XIV, people are used to it for years now, that virtually anything is heal-able (barring instagibs) and they play accordingly.
I agree that I too do not want XIV to end up in SWP but we're a long way from that (phases like Kefkas Forsaken excluded ofc, these indeed feel like SWP. Delay the cast -> wipe). Currently, healers still have around 50% encounter time to DPS their socks off .
Me, less so because I am the main healer of our group and allow our SCH to DPS as she pleases.

Hence why we need more mechanics and methods to fail that isn't an instagib or insta wipe w/o burdening the healers more.