ATTN: Community Reps/Dev Team: PUPs of Vanadiel DEMAND a response on Automaton A.I.!

[Psion]

I'm glad that you took the time to respond so kindly Camate. I know it was a bit demanding of a title, and there were quite a few flared tempers in this thread. Please, by all means, we would love it if you keep us informed of this issue. As you can see, it's one that has been grating on the pup community at large for quite a while now. I'm sure you'd be the ultimate hero of pups everywhere if you can get the dev team to fix this years old buggy A.I.! ^^

(And if the dev team is reluctant, tell them my automaton is waiting with a fully charged Blizzard V surprise for them if they don't~!)

[Seha]

People just don't understand that it doesn't make sense to stalk Camate's&co. posts.

If they have something to say they'll post, if not, they won't. Askin the same things in every thread is just pathetic.

[Francisco]

http://lparchive.org/SimCity-3000/Update%2042/43-3839.gif

Below Average Melee League

Whoa there, Square Enix, have you
played Puppetmaster lately? Did you
notice our automatons can't even
out-damage a monk or a black mage?
Just how long can we go on playing
Puppetmaster without automatons that
can't even cast Meteor or use Victory
Smite? Why, my mule needed some
Herald's Gaiters off Tiamat and I was
like, "Nope, sorry, I can't solo that.
Blame SE for making PUP a bad job."

I've had it, and so have my fellow PUPs.
We're serious about quitting this game
if you don't give us better automatons.

[xbobx]

That was stupid.

[Sparthos]

lol'd @ the SimCity blurb. All you need now is the music and the horribly deformed Sims complaining in front of the flashing red background.

PUP and BST aren't just mindlessly complaining though, they have been dealt the worst hands you could possibly get.

[Supersun]

***, I would PM you but...

I'll try to make this quick then.

Imagine if there was a buff that reduced your melee to one damage per swing, but in return your melee strikes inflicted a debuff that gave the monster +1,000,000% Damage Taken. Would you invite someone for that debuff?

"But such a thing is broke...""
No *** sherlock, but if you reverse the situation to where the debuff now only gives +.0000001% Damage taken would you still invite the job?

Somewhere in the middle there lies a happy medium where the concept is balanced (the point where economically the +DT outweighs the damage reduction from the debuff, the risk of the job being at the front, and it being the best option to increase the parties damage at that point). A concept by itself cannot be broken. Only when it's implemented poorly is it overpowered or underpowered.

If such a concept has been tried and failed then the concept simply hasn't been implemented properly in the past (and if you want I could argue that such a concept actually has been successful in the past)

[Duelle]

***, I would PM you but...

You read my mind, buddy. I started thinking about the Enable PM Already thread.

Somewhere in the middle there lies a happy medium where the concept is balanced (the point where economically the +DT outweighs the damage reduction from the debuff, the risk of the job being at the front, and it being the best option to increase the parties damage at that point). A concept by itself cannot be broken. Only when it's implemented poorly is it overpowered or underpowered.

If such a concept has been tried and failed then the concept simply hasn't been implemented properly in the past (and if you want I could argue that such a concept actually has been successful in the past)

I am genuinely interested to see how it worked in other settings, because personal experience has shown me how it miserably fails.

I'll white out and hide the rest so that anyone who cares can highlight and read, while the rest of the thread can continue with the PUP discussion.

The reason I say it fails is based entirely on my experiences as a Retribution Paladin during WoW's Burning Crusade expansion. Ret was designed and limited around the idea that you deal less damage than Warriors and Rogues because the utility and buffs (heals, out-of-combat Resurrection, stuff like Blessing of Protection, Divine Intervention and so on) were supposed to justify them being in melee range instead of the then-"traditional" and "expected" role of paladins, which was heal groups/raids and spam buffs.

Let me explain the design so that I may continue. When you specced Ret, you basically used a two-handed weapon and dealt less damage than a Warrior or Rogue, in exchange for an aura that increased the damage dealt by everyone in the raid. You used an ability called Judgment of the Crusader to give a mob a debuff to increase all damage taken. You had buffs to increase offensive power and mana regeneration abilities of the your group. Your utility also included Crusader Strike, which renewed the duration of all Judgment effects on a mob (which was there to encourage having multiple paladins in a group to put up different Judgments, and thus, various debuffs that could be renewed by a Ret Paladin to last indefinitely). Of course, Paladins also have healing spells baseline, so you had Holy Light and Flash of Light for use on others, not to mention the ability to cleanse most status ailments from group members (the only thing pallys couldn't remove was curses).

You look at this and may think "that's pretty nice design without allowing that ret to step on the toes of the 'real' heroes--I mean, 'real' DPS". The reason it failed was because, like it or not, if you're hitting things, you need to perform as well as the front liners you're not inviting, or at least so close that only a real number cruncher would be able to see the difference. This is what allowed people to quickly figure out that for all their utility, ret paladins were still lol-worthy because the damage was still lacking and there were plenty of ways to circumvent having one in a group or raid (the most common one being "invite a rogue or warrior to fill that slot"), and the lolRet stigma remained alive and well. We tried to argue that our utility justified our being there, and I had a flashback to the old RDM arguments of 2003 when the response was "good groups don't run into this, so lawlshutupandhealme".

Sole Concession: The stigma suffered a tiny dent when the very last raid instance in the expansion (Sunwell Plateau) came out. And that was because all the major guilds in the world could not get past the gear-check, coordination-check, skill-check, brick-wall-of-a-boss known as Brutallus with the same mindset that allowed them to get through Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, CoT: Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. Because Brutallus was so finely-tuned that you needed the extra damage taken from Judgement of the Crusader and the damage bonuses from Sanctity Aura to actually beat him. It didn't help enough, though, as it went from "lolRet" to "go heal me in my raids for most of the raiding content in the game and maybe I'll let one and only one of you melee for that boss in Sunwell".

A lot of this is eerily similar to how RDM plays. Utility out of the box, baseline access to heals, a limited selection of buffs and debuffs that are supposed to go in hand with the class' design. The only things paladins were missing at that point in time was sleep (which changed when Repentance was changed from a short-duration stun that only worked on undead to an incapacitate that affected most mobs in the game) and some sort of nuke (which also changed when Exorcism was changed from a nuke that only affected undead to a nuke that affected all targets but had bonus damage and crit chance on undead).

Unsurprisingly, Rets faced the exact same resistance to their style of play that the melee RDMs are so familiar with. Even the lead developer at the time pissed off a whole lot of paladins when he said "ret is a spec for leveling, holy (the healing spec) is your spec for groups/raiding". The only real difference as of now is that one had their problems fixed (granted, Ret wasn't really fixed until Wrath of the Lich King hit) and the other has had their problems ignored and been trolled by the developers over it on several occasions.

To those who want to bash this for mentioning WoW, I'll reiterate: Red Mage's problems are not exclusive to FFXI; Paladin is effectively Red Mage's soulmate based on both having the same problems and dealing with the same problems on a mechanics level and the myriad of "people problems" that come with it. Now, Supersun, let me hear your tale.

[Mercilessturtle]

Guys seriously, go make your own threads and stop trashing this one. Which part of "we read everything, chill out" did you think meant "spam offtopic crap anywhere I post"?

[Seriha]

Guys seriously, go make your own threads and stop trashing this one. Which part of "we read everything, chill out" did you think meant "spam offtopic crap anywhere I post"?

Do me a favor and just skim all the job forums for threads with the little crown icon. Just looking at 4 of the 20 jobs myself, there's a good 20 pages of topics or so where, while reading may have been done, we don't know much else. This isn't to say every thread is worth responding to, but if you have one that breaks 1000 replies? Some kind of nod is in order.

I don't think it's fair to pin it all on Camate, but the translation game inevitably creates a bottleneck where I can only assume it has to go through him before it gets to us... or the devs. This is also where I say some more routine Q&A can come in handy, even if it's just a weekly thing where one time they're asking about Campaign, the next Chocobo Raising, and after that Corsair. Not everyone will be equally interested, no, but simple silent reading is not much different than the old days where we could only hope our concerns were being heard.

[Alhanelem]

Camate, I think part of the problem here is that the development team has said in interviews in the past "Use light maneuver with the damage gauge to prioritize cures", when the problem is in fact that light manuvers prioritize both HP cures and status effect cures, with the latter taking priority if the player has a status effect.

Is this just a miscommunication between us and the dev team? We don't want to force automatons to just cure cure cure, we want to be able to prioritize HP curing and status curing seperately.

TL;DR: We know how to make our automatons cure. The problem is that it is impossible to make them do it when we are afflicted with any curable status effect because status cures ALWAYS have a higher priority (Even with the damage gauge).