yes, and that is a product of letting high level players dictate how the game should be played. My thoughts about that are reflected in the video I posted earlier…
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Alright, so I went ahead and watched the entire video and I have a few discussion points. The first is that the video is mainly focused on PvP-type games, and generally speaking team-based PvE games don’t follow quite the same rules (or even just PvE games in general). I wouldn’t say Dark Souls/Elden Ring/Bloodbourne are unpopular games, but neither are they supremely random. I agree with the core message of the video, that when you design a game, you do want to keep in mind the experience of the average player, not just the pros. I also agree that some amount of variance in every game is generally a good thing. I’ve heard discussions about adding variance into Chess if you can believe it.
So I’m going to segue into talking about one of the other genres I find myself playing a lot, card games. Card games have A LOT of variance in them given that every single draw you make is literally random. This randomness does occasionally mean that a "lesser skilled’ player will beat a “more skilled player.” But skill is expressed over the course of a career. The more skilled you are as a player, the better you are at choosing the answer that leads to the greatest odds of success. Despite not knowing what card you or your opponent may draw next, the more skilled player chooses the play that gives him a 60% chance of winning while the casual chooses the one that gives him a 40% chance of winning. So what we see here is that even in games with a lot of variance, unpredictable is not the same as unprepared. While the lesser skilled player wins sometimes, the more skilled player wins most of the time. I believe the video even mentioned something along those lines, random elements doesn’t mean your game should be dominated by randomness.
But I think the heart of the video was more about designing for the average player and remembering what made your game popular than it was about variance in games specifically. Back in its heyday of WotLK, PvE encounters in WoW were just as random as they are now. You could still plan encounters based on a limited range of response from the content. That at least has not changed. We even do have variance in WoW. We have crits, we have procs, we have variable ability timers on many enemy timers, we have random targets and random placements of abilities… even the dungeon you get in your keys is random. The list goes on. This is not a game devoid of variance.
I also don’t think that we’re designing M+ purely for the ultra competitive crowd. New affixes stop at +10, after that it’s just numerical scaling. We’re not really “designing” anything there. People can chase the highest plus they can, but most people don’t and are content to play in the range that is best suited for them. I think that’s a good thing.
Now one of the things the video mentioned is Destiny offering a range of play activities. I could definitely get behind the idea of more play activities for WoW. I’d like to see something similar to the Mage Tower return and I’d like to see a deeper questing experience or more world content to partake in. You won’t find any argument from me there.
But setting all that aside, I don’t think this video is entirely relevant to how high level players make plans to beat games. Variance (in healthy amounts) does not stop good players from being good. Good players will always focus in on the win condition and find the most efficient way to accomplish it in spite of what variance occurs. They don’t make plans hoping variance won’t happen, they make plans expecting that it will. So what this means is that we would still see players who are more familiar with the content able to work in tighter margins and able to find free GCDs with which to deal damage. This discussion has never really been about whether or not WoW should be more random to cater to the average player and more about what is the best way for high level healers to play in order to see success, and the answer to that doesn’t change even if you introduce a bit more variance into the abilities enemies can bring out. As it stands, I think a better way to introduce variance into WoW is by doing things like they did in Waycrest Manor in BFA. The route through the dungeon is variable, make the enemies in packs more variable, make the boss abilities more variable (ie: pirate council in Freehold). Don’t randomly kill players in the middle of a pull.
I also don’t think that variance is the secret ingredient to making WoW appeal more to casual players. When people think of the big casual MMO, they usually think of FF14. As someone who plays both, there is actually significantly less variance in their PvE content than there is in WoW. Entire fights are scripted. Abilities will always come out in the same order and much of the fight strategy revolves around planning positioning. Damage on the party is much less random so healing in that game is actually even MORE preplanned than in WoW. Between the two games, I actually don’t enjoy the high-end content of FF14 specifically for these reasons. I play FF14 for the story and the casual content. I play WoW for the endgame dungeon and raid challenges, despite them being more variable.
EDIT: Sorry for assaulting you with this novel. But it was a decently long video with a lot of points brought up so likewise my response was also long. I wanted to give the video you shared due attention.
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you can’t heal delete
This is all 100% true.
However this is the reason I really do like healing in FF14. For my Scholar the gameplay is to squeeze out as many GCDs for DPS as I can while keeping the party up and pre-shielding them for incoming damage… and knowing when I can and cannot focus on DPS is an important part of that.
I really wish I could have scholar as a WoW class. I’d probably go back to doing group content in WoW then.
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I actually think that’s in large part due to the other major difference in FF14 healing vs. WoW. In FF14, the majority of healing cooldowns are oGCD while your core damaging abilities are GCD. This means that generally speaking, your damage and your healing aren’t competing as much for your limited GCD slots as they would in WoW. It’s a lot easier to simply do both. Of course every class has one or two GCD heals… but those are usually used in very specific circumstances as I’m sure you’re aware. You go into every fight more or less knowing where each ability will be used and planning with your co-healer to avoid overkilling your healing response. A lot of healing in both FF14 and WoW is learning to never play an ace when a 2 will do.
Plus FF14 is basically always willing to one-shot people who make mistakes, especially in Extreme/Savage. Best healing spell in that case is Swiftcast-Raise. 
In short I think there’s a lot of reasons why healers doing damage is a lot more expected in FF14 than in WoW. It’s a good idea in both games, but the design of FF14 makes it much more obvious that it’s expected.
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hots
pretend to be feral druid
more hots
some boomkin stuff because why not
more hots
back to catform
I do this in raids.
Also why I don’t play Resto Druid in Mythic+.
I thought most of these mechanics just target a random member in the farthest ranges out of the party, rather than actually targeting ranged vs melee?
This.
Yes, I was may have been contributing damage, but it’s not my fault a DPS goes from 100% to 0% because they faceplanted a perfectly avoidable mechanic. -shrugs-
I’ll just say, I like that the new talent trees allow me to spec into having an interrupt on my healers. Obviously, every player regardless of the role they are playing has the capacity to screw up, but it’s wild to me that in this year 2023 people still do not know how to kick or stun and don’t understand the concept of fire = bad.
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It varies on a mechanic to mechanic basis. Some mechanics do indeed target based on distance, and sometimes they choose a random subset of players based on melee vs. range. You can actually see this in action if you do Motherlode with an all melee party. Run with one of the melee healers and all melee DPS and you’ll see that the missile from the last boss is targeting completely random people, even if the healer is a Mistweaver who is staying at range. Slip in one ranged spec like a Balance Druid in there and watch as they become the target for every single missile.
Abilities which prefer to target ranged (or melee) will usually go on a player of a spec they prefer and behave much more erratically if there aren’t enough players of their preferred spec to target.
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If you’re worried about Tight DPS checks, ya should start with… the DPS first? Instead of looking at the healers and hoping they can pull big numbers out of their butts.
That’s like looking at a burning building, going “Okay we don’t have a lot of time, so it’s an all hands on deck situation! Are you Doctors trained to save people out of burning buildings?”
You’re welcome to be ignorant of reality, but you’re not welcome promote bad gameplay that ruins the game further then it already is, for other people and not keeping the roles simple for other people. Especially since when threads like this exist at all that disproves the whole “skill” obsession that hyper-focuses on one particular thing, DPS numbers.
If you think healing is bad, then stop playing healers. Why you must homogenize and dumb down the game even further?
…Except Mana is hardly an issue in Retail WoW. For Mistweavers entirely, they can even go on at a low mana, even just playing as ranged ones.
The pros are supposed to be good at the game, not change the game so they can be good at it.
Preach.
What works in another game, doesn’t always work in another.
I mean Dragonriding is a simplified version of Griffon riding from GW2. And it’s as basic and simple as it gets to a point where it just seems like an advanced Blizzard Vehicle controls from 10 years ago.
What i’m simply saying is, they need to do better then just copying/pasting and simplifying it.
FF14, i would imagine, was built more or less with this idea in mind to begin with. That it’s more of an active modern game (well was modern a rebooted 2010 game gets).
WoW really can’t support a lot of the things FF14, contrary to the questionably popular opinion here. An opinion that needed to be questioned because i’ve seen a lot of them and i’m like “How would this add to WoW meaningfully?”. The same question i’ve asked for the Afromentioned Dragonflying.
Okay. I was actually asking if there were able to heal just as fine as resto druids while in catform, but i can see the answer to that is… “no, you have to exit out of catform”.
Interesting.
once the hots are out (you gotta be in human to rejuv/wild growth but can regrowth and lifebloom in boomkin) it makes no difference if youre catweaving or twiddling ur thumbs in human form
Idk why you’re still trying to tell me “Yes”, when both your answer and Reshlek’s is a resounding “No” to my clearly defined question, with the “Catweaving” answer.
So yes, i know what Catweaving is. And it’s not doing healing spells as good as resto druids out of catform, while in catform.
youre arguing about something that doesnt matter tho
'Cept it does, and my wording strongly implies i wasn’t talking about Catweaving…
But whatever, that’s your subjective opinion Lis, and plus i’ve already got the answer to that question which is pretty much just a “No, Druids can’t heal just as good as healers in their cat forms. They have to Catweave”.
but what is the point of the arguement
When I’m worried about tight DPS checks, the number I look at is the sum total DPS of the entire group, since that’s the real number that matters. I want to raise that in any way I can. If the best way I can raise it is by having the DPS plan their CDs better, then I will do it. If I can raise it by having the healers get better about filling empty GCDs with damage then I do that too. But those solutions are not mutually exclusive. In a lot of cases, I can do both.
It really really is. Mana is still a resource and is the main attrition mechanic in both PvP and in raids. In arena if neither team is capable of breaking the other or out CCing each other, then the match is usually decided by who runs out of mana first. If someone manages to drop combat and drink, that’s considered a wild blowout play. In raids, your healer’s mana is one of the main roadblocks to simply eating mechanics even if you’re geared enough to survive them (and acts as an additional form of soft enrage.) Once the healers are out of gas, you need to wrap the fight up real quick or bad things will happen. The main punishment for failing mechanics even if they don’t outright kill you is it costs the healers more mana. So you don’t want to be making mistakes all that often.
It’s slightly different in dungeons since healers have the ability to drink between pulls… and knowing where it’s safe to do so is pretty important. There’s a lot of pulls where the group can manage without a healer just fine for the first few seconds or so and those pulls are prime opportunity for the healer to drink while the rest of the group 4-mans the pack, then the healer is ready to go when they’re needed and their mana is full.
I agree with you broadly and as someone who plays both games, I don’t want WoW to become FF14. But the core reasoning why healers doing damage is good in FF14 also exist in WoW. Those core reasons being:
- Dealing damage is the win condition, healing health is not.
- GCDs are a resource and not every GCD is required to be spent on healing.
So long as those two things are true, it is a good idea for healers to do damage. FF14 has a number of aspects that make it more obvious and easier to fill find extra GCDs with damage, but the core principle remains in both games. And in this case, WoW actually did it first.
Well it depends on what you mean by “doing healing spells as good.” Once the HoT is applied, it’s not going to suddenly start healing less once you’re in cat form. And all of your healing spells will auto-shift you if you use them in Cat Form so you’re not paying an extra GCD tax there. Feral actually suffers from this problem more than Resto does because going into Cat Form is much harder than coming out of Cat Form. Just about every single healing spell will auto-shift me to Night Elf Form, but the only way to auto-shift to Cat is by using Tiger’s Fury or Dash. So usually shifting out of Cat Form incurs a 1 GCD tax on Ferals as they have no other way to reenter Cat Form other than spending a GCD directly on using Cat Form. Something I will complain about until Blizzard remembers that they accidentally left Innervate and Rebirth off of Feline Adept/Predatory Swiftness.
For this reason I actually have Rejuv and Wild Growth on my Cat Form bar when I play Resto since those are the main two spells I use to exit Cat Form when healing needs to be done.
i dont stack innervate pots and things that reduce their cd for no reason
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