Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

I played the most in ARR

I'm worried that we're having a terminology/communication breakdown here. "We had no choice butt to GDC heal" and "dropped a juicy gcd here and there" aren't really compatible with "we weren't GCD healers". That's...what GCD healing is. And I've got a lot of video evidence and personal experience of WHMs, at least, not "Majority of the time was spent dpsing". So your experiences seem to not entirely match reality (or not be universal). [Though agreed on STR Tanks and Cleric.]

Another terminology thing: How are you "griefing playing a healer" in solo play? Griefing, by general definition (intentionally doing something to annoy or cause suffering and hardship on other players) cannot be done in solo play because...there are no other players. It's like the tree falling in a forest with no one around. If you're in solo content with no other players, how can you be griefing other players?

Tanks do have good overall stats for DD, yet interestingly, that doesn't make them all good at it. Note from the list he ranked PLD below WHM and SGE. This is because in PotD, PLD doesn't have good self-sustain. Clemency doesn't come until level 58, Holy Spirit until 64, and PLD's standard sword combo doesn't regenerate health. This actually makes it weaker in PotD in a lot of ways, not to mention self-healing (or any Clemency based healing) on PLD nerfs its damage vs self-healing on a SGE does not since Kardia and oGCDs don't interrupt damage.

Having "more to do" isn't always a positive if it's not useful. Pressing 1-2 before -3 is "more to do", but that "more to do" doesn't produce beneficial results mechanically. It only produces subjectively beneficial results in terms of what you consider boring vs fun, which are subjective things. Mechanically, if WAR's damage buttons could be replaced with two that did the same overall average damage, that wouldn't be detrimental as far as PotD or HoH are concerned.

First, I'm gonig to stop talking about the lore here. Video games using diagetic storytelling to communicate basic gameplay at the beginning of a game is literally everywhere in the gaming industry, but it honestly doesn't even matter for this argument as the gameplay is far more telling anyway. So for the sake or moving forward, let's just assume there was 0 intent or interest in using the story to communicate anything about the gameplay and this game is just an outlier in that regard.

Even in defeat claim victory?

For reference, FFXIV isn't an outlier in this regard - the MSQ walks players through the basics of gameplay and the basics of game mechanics. So it absolutely does that. Just not...with the CNJ questline.

Your argument appears to be, based on what you've said, that the designers expected healers would never use offensive tools in group content because offensive tools were not essential in clearing fights.

Not quite.

My argument was that the Designers did not balance content around requiring Healers to use offensive tools. I base this partly on the game mechanics and Job kits of the time, and partly based on the later statement in HW about encounter balance tuning. (And for the love of Yoshi, please stop bringing other games into the conversation unless they're directly comparable; for example, Vanilla WoW was designed with the intent Healers mostly heal or buff - PLD only had 1 damage button at the time, Judgement, which I think was on a 30 second CD originally (before 2.4 or so? I don't remember which patch they made Seals 2 min duration and NOT consumed on Judgement), so every 30 seconds you'd apply a seal and then Judge, which removed it, and that was literally Holy Paladin leveling gameplay in Vanilla and a good chunk of BC. That might be a good comparison, considering ARR was modeled partly on WoW

I don't think the designers ever wanted healers to push for DPS optimization in the way we do now,

On this, we agree.

Why do you always approach conversations this way? That you are just objectively right,

...because in this case, I am?

Further, you should note that I clearly did not "period, end of the sentence" this. I pointed out that you could reasonably argue the game has changed over time and 2 of the 3 Healers (SB) changed to reflect the gameplay you're suggesting was present. It was present in SB...on SCH. And to a variation, AST.

Moreover, I don't take a "no further questions" approach. I've repeatedly asked you questions. "If you're right, how do you explain this?" "How does this not defeat your position?" "Are you talking about the game NOW or THEN?" I ask a lot of questions for a person supposedly taking a position of "no further questions", now don't I?

When you defend your points in irrational ways or your points aren't defensible - saying the CNJ quest was designed to tell players to DPS as Healers but then turning around and saying the SCH quests not doing that is meaningless (because of 30 levels of ACN), even while the WHM quest did it and shouldn't have by that logic due to having those 30 levels of CNJ. I presented your logic ("But this questline says...") and you tried to evade on a technicality ("But ACN...") to which I noted if that was correct, then the WHM quests should have been like the SCH ones but they were more like the CNJ ones, meaning your technicality is invalid.

It's not a matter of me trying to "enlighten" you. It's me trying to tell you what the truth was so we can get over a false appeal to authority defense for your position because it tries to grant your position more strength than it has and tries to delegitimatize the people who have long played this game under a different paradigm - one that was valid. It's also used to support your position that changing to a more healing focused game would require massive changes all the way back to 2.0, when it clearly wouldn't (since 2.0 used that paradigm in its encounters anyway) [and that's kind of an irrelevant argument since the game has always more or less ignored old content when making changes - like removing PLD Raise and how that makes PLD not as good in PotD]

Have you ever even considered that perhaps I'm not the one who can't accept when they're wrong in this argument? You are.

No, you are.

When I AM proven wrong about something - actually proven - I admit it. You do not. You have yet to address that elephant: The HW era statement encounters are not based on Healer DPS.

That statement alone disproves your premise.

Instead of at least addressing it, you simply...refuse to address it.

If you had something like that on me, if you had a statement from HW of them saying "We balance encounters based on Healers doing damage", I would admit I must be wrong about their position in HW. Maybe I would still be right about ARR, but clearly I was wrong for HW and likely after.

But we reverse that and have that piece of evidence that proves you're wrong and you...refuse to address it rather than admit you're wrong.

So no, I'm not the one who can't accept being wrong. You are.

I mean, you do tend to ignore most of the different times I try to genuinely appeal to your specific tastes

Okay, so why are you outright lying now?

No, I don't.

Look at all the times you pitched an argument. All of them I've seen, I replied to. I've even said I found some acceptable. Some I did not and argue against. Others I tried to explain to you what I do and don't find fun and why your solution doesn't appeal to me because you find different things fun and are missing what I enjoy in your solutions.

Why did you tell an outright lie here?

and fight for the right to have a healer that appeals to players who don't want a DPS healer. Like the part where I mentioned having a healer who still contributes DPS in order to stay competitive with the other healers, but does so in a way that's disguised as healing and support.

SORT of. You're still missing the point. This one as lost in all that other stuff, but I even addressed it:

I've already said I think there should be 4 different gameplay styles. In short, direct healing and simple damage, buffing, plate spinning support/damage, and rotational complexity support/damage; WHM (ShB/EW, or ARR with a lot of boosts and tweaks), AST (SB with less RNG), SCH (SB), and SGE (with an actual damage rotation and Kardia interplay)

That's me replying to that with a "Yes, I think that should be an option for one of the 4 healers (probably AST)". That's me specifically addressing it.

Again, why lie?