!! Fix Healer Rescue

[Packetdancer]

As I've answered "many many times," an icon can be placed on the actual character plate. If you can see where he's standing you can see whether or not Rescue will work, no additional thinking required.

Then you have to replace the status icon on the nameplate (i.e., the 'in party' or 'mentor' status stuff), which would require obscuring the mentor crown; something which, regardless of what the NA/EU opinion of mentors may be, Square-Enix demonstrably doesn't want to do. Otherwise they would not force the mentor crown on when you run mentor roulette; they want it there to indicate "you can ask this person for help on mechanics or how this duty works", and even make you click through a "Yes, I understand this is what the crown means" screen when turning your mentor crown on outside of mentor roulette.

(Whether or not the crown actually serves that purpose is a whole other—probably lengthy—discussion, but that's immaterial here to what Square-Enix's demonstrated intent is.)

So now either the "I cannot be rescued" status hides the mentor crown (something the devs probably don't want), or the mentor crown hides the "I cannot be rescued" status (thus meaning healers have no way of knowing who can or cannot be rescued).

The alternative is to write new nameplate code that has a second status slot specifically for showing this one effect (which seems like a lot of effort for one specific use case), OR using the existing status effect buff/debuff system that already exists in game (which does not involve much development effort, but has been pointed out to be a flawed way of communicating something as vital as "I have disabled your capability to use certain of your abillities").

Moreover, many, many players disable other-player nameplates to avoid visual clutter, especially during alliance raids. If you only see the HP bar, the status icon will be missing entirely anyway, so it's quite possible to see where someone is standing and still not have this communicated, thus making the entire proposed solution moot in that case to start with.

If you grant Player A the power to disable Player B's abilities, it is good to communicate that to Player B in a clear manner. The issues with communicating that in a clear and reliable manner have been reiterated in this thread, multiple times and sometimes (admittedly, probably most often by me) in potentially-exhausting detail. There is not a good quick and dirty solution which addresses those.

Either you have a hackish half-assed solution which causes most healers not to want to bother with the ability because they have no idea if it'll work or not, and—since we're discussing optimal battle performance and not wasting GCDs that could be otherwise used to damage and such—just use that time for something guaranteed to work and more efficient instead, or you come up with a more detailed and in-depth solution to communicate "I am disabling these abilities of yours" and look at whether it's something more generally applicable to other skills.

Or—as a number of healers have proposed in this thread—you just say "Rescue is causing too much trouble, remove it entirely, give healers something new and cool, bid farewell to the situations where Rescue does benefit in the name of having DPS not resent being pulled to safety."

I'm going to be a little blunt, Goji: you're coming across right now as though you really want Rescue out of the game, but you don't want to actually be in the position of saying "I don't want you other players to have this ability anymore". Which I understand; saying "I want to take away this thing from other people" isn't a comfortable position to be in, and it's more comfortable to frame it as "I don't want to have this particular mechanic able to affect me". But you keep throwing out there that this is a "simple" solution because one game did it another way.

But the two games are not the same; even you note that, saying that you prefer FFXIV to WoW for other reasons. Solutions are not interchangeable, especially in high-end content, because high-end content differs even more than casual content between the two games.

And there are more than 20 pages of people explaining why the hypothetical "simple" solutions cause other problems. Just reiterating that you think it's simple to solve does not actually do away with the complications being brought up, and you reiterating that no, no, really, it's simple doesn't actually feel like you're moving the discussion forward. It instead feels dismissive of the various flaws and concerns that the various healers in this thread have pointed out. Which comes across as though you don't actually want a solution to the problem... you just want it to go away without having to actually consider the implications of doing so.

Which, I suppose, isn't too surprising; referring to your fellow players—particularly healers—as 'the enemy" doesn't really make it feel like you want to find a collaborative solution. Whether I'm reading 'too much' into that term or not, it is a term that frames the entire discussion in an adversarial light; whether healers are "the enemy" or "an obstacle" or "a hindrance" or whatever, it frames them as something you strive against, rather than as fellow players who you want to work with.

Asking for a toggle is hardly extreme, and there have been no compelling points made against the idea; so I'm continuing to promote it. That's all that's happening with me here.

"Compelling" is in the eye of the beholder here. I find many of the arguments being made by the other healers in this thread quite compelling, both as to why Rescue can be useful right now, and why your proposed methods of dealing with it are flawed.

You may consider all of the issues and concerns brought up irrelevant; that's fine, as everyone can have an opinion. But if party A says "I want party B to no longer be able to do X" and absolutely every response from party B earns "Yeah, I don't find that compelling", then it's not a discussion; it's just party A insisting on something.

And at that point, it doesn't matter if party B says anything or not; it will have no effect on party A, so party B might as well just shrug and walk away.

(And, honestly... that's probably what I ought to do here.)