Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
Snip
On the topic of "support" vs "healer" and what someone prefers: In a vacuum, your example with the tank is perfectly fine. If someone comes up to you and says "hey I want to play a job that soaks up lots of damage and dishes it back out" then it's a logical move to say "well GNB is a tank that is meant to soak damage, and has DPS-like gameplay and deals some of the higher numbers among the tanks." But the issue is that, prior, you were making statements about what other players were liking was Support and not Healer. This came across for many, including myself as a "you're not really a healer. You just think you're a healer" type of argument. As if a "real Healer" does not want to DPS or engage with DPS and anyone who wants to DPS in any regard isn't actually a Healer, but a Support. Perhaps that wasn't your intention, but that's what communicated from some of your earlier messages. It came across as invalidating the thoughts, opinions, and experiences of players like myself and Semirhage.

In fact, to dig into that a little deeper, Healer is a subset of Support--a Support that is able to sustain the party's HP. Not all Supports have to be Healers, but all Healers would be described by most RPG players of the modern era as Supports.

But lets back track to that friend coming up to ask you about a Final Fantasy job to play. What would you say if they said "I want to be a healer that also has a variety of offensive abilities that deal damage and make enemies weaker?" Well that doesn't really describe DNC or BRD, nor RDM or SMN, but that's what the rest of us are asking for. And let's take it a step further and say "I want to be a healer, but I want to focus on just healing and having lots of different types of heals that cater to different situations." We don't have an answer to that either, however that faces a very difficult to resolve issue with the game's core design. Healing requires that players are taking damage, but players don't' really take much damage in this game and that's a problem, because you can't exactly make a playstyle around healing no damage. The game just isn't built to support that. I've talked before about ways to try and get around that with my concept of an AST rework where the cards are GCD, but the job does need to respect that DPS contribution is a major part of what makes each job viable. If a healer were made in such a way that it couldn't contribute to DPS, it would be unusable and undesirable as it would slow down even casual gameplay. But it could be done and create a Healer that feels better for that archetype of player, but there's a limit established by the design of the game in its entirety that prevents this from being fully realized. We shouldn't be pretending that this isn't the case.

On the "Why Play FFXIV" argument: First I'll say that I was speaking to the general "you" and not you specifically with that segment, so apologies if that came across as personal. If you (a person) do not like the GCD system, why play FFXIV? But I am led to believe that's your stance based on what you've talked about. You've said you don't oppose doing damage as a healer, but you also don't want to do more than cast Glare. It's a given that you'd probably prefer healing more frequently, but there's a limit on how much healing this game can realistically ask of its playerbase, and that's not a lot. Having a more engaging set of GCD actions to diversify your gameplay doesn't actually do anything to change the frequency of healing required, so having more DPS buttons wouldn't cause you to heal less. So what's the issue exactly? Why aren't you interested in engaging with more than 1 primary tool if that's not how you feel?

I'd also disagree that ARR was designed to cater to the notion of supporting healing and not DPS on healers. First and foremost is the Conjurer class quests--your introduction to healing unless you skipped CNJ and just waited to unlock SCH. The entire theme of the CNJ questline is that no, you can't just heal. You must also use the elements and strike a balance. Just because lots of people got by not doing damage doesn't really mean anything because most of us had no idea what we were doing, myself included. It took a long time to get a better understanding of how jobs even worked, and WHM was absolutely designed with the opportunity to DPS and maintain its MP. We just sucked at MP management among many other things, and there wasn't a major crowd of people who had years of experience leading the player's general understanding of gameplay and job design. Content wasn't actually that hard back then. I remember people STRUGGLING to clear things like Titan (Hard)--not Titan (Extreme) mind you... It took me two months to clear Ramuh EX, a part of why was because we only had the DF back then and no PF, but still. And we have to acknowledge that the coils are not the savage fights we have today, and their difficulty was all over the place. One of them didn't even have a boss. One of them was a series of minibosses where the main strategy was to wait out the instance timer and let the boss enrage so that you didn't have to deal with Allagan Rot. It was highly experimental and enrage wasn't based on the start of the fight. HW is a much more consistent example of old FFXIV gameplay and game design.

On the topic of WHM and stagnation: Let me put it this way instead. I don't know how familiar you are with trading card games, but if you take a look at games like Magic: The Gathering, or Yu-gi-oh, you can think of your deck as a representation of what our action list is meant to represent. One of the rules in all TCGs is that you can only have so many of 1 copy of a card in your deck (usually 3). You cannot have a deck that consists of 35 Kuribohs and 5 Monster Reborns in Yu-gi-oh. It goes against the fundamental design of how a TCG is played. Likewise, having one job that largely plays with 5 actions while others regularly engage with 18+ does not make sense and is not good game design. WHM's healing toolkit is too inconsistent because some content may demand a lot of it while other pieces of content will demand almost none of it. This is what I'm trying to say. WHM doesn't need to be hard or complex, and it doesn't even need additional, consistent engagement to be direct DPS. It doesn't have to be DoTs or combos... It can be a lot of different things. Stating that any possible change or additions to its consistent gameplay are all inherently bad and WHM cannot be more perfect than it is now can only mean that you're arguing against the GCD system in my mind. I don't understand how it could be anything else. If that's not how you perceive WHM, then I don't understand why there is resistance to wanting it to have more depth or engagement. It would make more sense to want to argue for a specific direction for that engagement, but not against the engagement altogether.

On why I like DNC: So one thing about me is that I love risk and chance based characters and classes in games, which is a part of the reason why I really enjoyed old AST. DNC's proc-based rotation is a very mild example of chance-based gameplay, but I find it not only rewarding when I get lucky with procs, but it also keeps my rotation feeling unknown. I never know what procs I will or won't have during certain parts of a fight, so it feels more like I'm adapting to something rather than just repeating a rotation. I like that it has a few pieces of healing and Shield Samba. I like using them, and wish I had way more healing power, but I understand that non-healers really don't need more healing in a game with so few healing requirements. I like that me being in the party means someone else who wants to see big numbers gets to see even bigger numbers--that I'm enhancing their gameplay experience in a way. I don't DNC is perfect right now. There are things I think it could improve on, but I like where it is and enjoy playing it for the most part. For example, I feel like DNC could have an alternative Step to Standard Step that does not apply the 5% attack buff but instead does something else. Standard Step's effect lasts 60 seconds, but the cooldown is 30, so it would feel more interesting if I had the choice to opt for a different effect at times since I don't have to worry about my buff falling off. I also think its gameplay between bursts is still quite slow and would benefit form some other ways to gain maybe Fan Dance IVs between burst windows. I've never been a huge fan of gauges that are connected to exclusively 1 action--Esprit and Saber Dance. I'd like more choices in me spending Esprit other than just always going for Saber Dance. Improvisation is still very awkward to use since the channel animation lock makes the window to double weave Improvised Finish very tight, and I often end up clipping my GCD when I try to use it. The synched experience of DNC is very lackluster. Flourish has no business being as late as level 72, having a weaker Saber Dance and Esprit at level 50 instead of AoE filler Fan Dance II would be great, and a lot of the more fun burst buttons aren't available until level 82 at this point.

On Communication and Humor vs Snark: It's tough because the language choice makes a huge difference, and ultimately you're standing in a position of opposition to most of the people on these forums--frustration opposition some might say, and that's going to make it a lot harder for people to read something meant to lighten the mood as that instead of something blunt or condescending. Maybe it's difficult to understand this from where you're standing, but many of your arguments have come across as unreasonable or elitist, and perhaps you see that the other way around, but it naturally makes it difficult to gauge someone's sincerity when that's your perception of someone's stance, from either side of the argument. From my perspective, I feel like there's a barrier between your perspective and mine that is almost like a language barrier in regards to how difficult it is to overcome. I cannot wrap my head around seeing the current healer design as anything other than a complete and total failure to listen to the community, failure to compliment the way the game is inherently designed, and failure to deliver on the gameplay side of job fantasy with how utterly homogenized the healers are. And these are all especially true of the WHM--the most skeletal, bare bones job in the entire game that has outright been denied legitimate growth and development for the third expansion in a row, laying on the floor like an emaciated child getting fist-fed flower petals by the developers of FFXIV. The new lilies are breadcrumbs in the drought that is WHM's design. That may sound like an alien language to you. Bask before the Sanskrit Rosetta Stone that is my hot take on WHM. Yes this is needlessly dramatic.