What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ty_taurus]

Ofc the issue with getting the other "grown up" healers deeper and more complex deepus gameplay, is then the "Complexity reward" associated with them. 3 out of 4 healers are complicated and thus logically and reasonably demand a potency reward, more work=more impact.
That leaves the 1 simple 1 button 1 dot healer as an outlier in terms of "deserved" potency.

I guess in the sense of fairness, either all healers get a rework that gives them depth to justify the balance between them or none do?

That does seem to be the logic of why we're in this predicament. Literally no one was asking for the Shadowbringers SCH changes. The job was most liked gutted specifically because the idea of making WHM competitive with SCH somehow would ruin its identity. AST changes at least were an attempt at addressing an actual concern some players had in regards to card effect consistency; I don't think there's a more tone deaf and shallow way of trying to address that, but at least it was an attempt at addressing something.

Fair? Or fair™?

We can't make WHM strong enough to compete with SCH without ruining WHM's identity™, so we are going to ruin SCH's identity to preserve WHM's identity™

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't recall every detail of Roe's White Mage rework concept, but all it has instead is like 2 or 3 new actions that result in a relatively middling improvement to total damage output.

In total it was like 4 new buttons, not including 'lower level version of something we currently have' eg Divine Seal > Temperance. In terms of damage related things specifically, it was just two: Banish, maybe Cleric Stance as a 60s burst CD (but that one can be sacrificed if it gets us the other stuff) and a rescaling of Dia's duration but that's not a new button. The main point you address is, well, yeh the main point. WHM is the 'simple healer' in our designs not because it's damage rotation is one button, but access to powerful, on-demand, no-frills PUMP healing is direct, easy to understand, and feels good to use for a new player, the effect and feedback are immediate. They press PI Rapture and the ally HP bars fill by like 50%, that feels good and does not take a university degree to understand, that's what 'simple healer' should mean

Except Sage is only like that because healers are stuck in a pit of poor design.

Yep exactly this. If WHM still had Aero3, AST still had 2 DOTs, and SCH was still... SCH, SB ver, SGE would have had a lot more GCD variety to it's rotation. It's just common sense that if all three of the healers we have are one DOT, one Nuke, one 'extra thing' (Assize, EnergyDrain, Cards), that SGE would be one DOT (EDosis), one Nuke (Dosis), one 'extra thing' (Phlegma). No Toxicon doesn't count

We can't make WHM strong enough to compete with SCH without ruining WHM's identity™, so we are going to ruin SCH's identity to preserve WHM's identity™

something something 'the WHM was forced to do all the healing while the SCH was free to just DPS', followed by a chart showing that the SCH was doing slightly more of the HPS, albeit the overall HPS values being pretty equal

If they had just made the WHM changes of 5.0, in 4.3, along with how they did a massive overhauling of DRK (like making Shadow Wall not suck), that is to say, rework lilies to be a resource to spend instead of a proc CDR crap, Misery to refund forced GCD healing, the issues with how badly WHM was viewed would be a little less 'issue'. There wouldn't have been any way to deal with the whole 'AST is plainly better because lol AOE Balance' till the next expansion, but seeing the 'pure healer' experiment of 4.0 go down in flames as hard as it did and then doubling down on it is tone deaf in the extreme

edit:

Also, something different about you (character). Did you change your hair?

I logged off on Reaper or something non-healer after doing WT for the week, and having made all the crafted sets (but not doing anything with them re: glamour), it's probably just that you saw my character without her glasses on

[ty_taurus]

Yep exactly this. If WHM still had Aero3, AST still had 2 DOTs, and SCH was still... SCH, SB ver, SGE would have had a lot more GCD variety to it's rotation. It's just common sense that if all three of the healers we have are one DOT, one Nuke, one 'extra thing' (Assize, EnergyDrain, Cards), that SGE would be one DOT (EDosis), one Nuke (Dosis), one 'extra thing' (Phlegma). No Toxicon doesn't count

I've started just reporting Toxikon as a bug because it's so poorly executed that I refuse to believe it's an intentional design feature. I mention that 1: Toxikon (the level 66 version) does not adjust its potency at level 72 making it an even bigger scam from 72 - 82, and that 2: there's no reason to generate Toxikon because it's a 100% loss of damage.

Even something very simple and innocuous like, each tic of Eukrasian Dosis has a 5% chance to cause your next cast of Toxikon to deal twice as much damage, at least that would make it something worth generating and holding onto. You'd actively want to find moments to use barriers so that you have Addersting stacks when the proc activates without making it so frequent that you do nothing but spam Eukrasian Diagnosis on the main tank during savage fights.

[ForsakenRoe]

The 'bug' is that they remove the animation that's in the trailer and replace it with Tox2. Tox2's okay and all but like, come on. I'd rather have a thinner, blue cross for Tox1, upgrading as it does now to Tox2, and move the 'blender of lasers' animation from the trailer to Phlegma since it's our big hit. And the blue ball looks goofy as hell

As mentioned in the past (probably too many times now) I'd just make the proc from breaking shields be a free use of Phlegma. Use it for mobility, save it for raidbuffs, whatever, it's 600p vs the 660 of Dosis, so you'd be losing 60p from it but gaining shielding, raidbuffs would help equalize that loss out even more, and it frees up both Toxicon and the gauge to be something more interesting than 'scuffed Ruin 2'. In fact, it's almost like they made Toxicon BECAUSE of Ruin 2's existence. They had to have a R2 analogue, a case of 'well SCH has this mobility skill so SGE needs to have one. Oh, but make it more limited in accessibility, so it seems 'different' in its gameplay application'

edit before I sleep: I got it, do the above Phlegma proc, but also, make it so if the shield is broken by any means you get the proc. This doesn't mean timing out, but it would mean Pepsis. This would give SGE a way to both barrier heal with minimal cost to it's damage (you get refunded when the enemy cracks your barrier), AND a way to apply a 'pure heal' with minimal damage cost (you get refunded by using the barrier, then cracking it yourself with Pepsis). OFC, Pneuma would be better if it's available, but in a pinch, this backup strategy of E-Prog > Pepsis > Phlegma would only lose 60p (and that's assuming you don't hold onto it for 2min window)

[ty_taurus]

The 'bug' is that they remove the animation that's in the trailer and replace it with Tox2. Tox2's okay and all but like, come on. I'd rather have a thinner, blue cross for Tox1, upgrading as it does now to Tox2, and move the 'blender of lasers' animation from the trailer to Phlegma since it's our big hit. And the blue ball looks goofy as hell

As mentioned in the past (probably too many times now) I'd just make the proc from breaking shields be a free use of Phlegma. Use it for mobility, save it for raidbuffs, whatever, it's 600p vs the 660 of Dosis, so you'd be losing 60p from it but gaining shielding, raidbuffs would help equalize that loss out even more, and it frees up both Toxicon and the gauge to be something more interesting than 'scuffed Ruin 2'. In fact, it's almost like they made Toxicon BECAUSE of Ruin 2's existence. They had to have a R2 analogue, a case of 'well SCH has this mobility skill so SGE needs to have one. Oh, but make it more limited in accessibility, so it seems 'different' in its gameplay application'

edit before I sleep: I got it, do the above Phlegma proc, but also, make it so if the shield is broken by any means you get the proc. This doesn't mean timing out, but it would mean Pepsis. This would give SGE a way to both barrier heal with minimal cost to it's damage (you get refunded when the enemy cracks your barrier), AND a way to apply a 'pure heal' with minimal damage cost (you get refunded by using the barrier, then cracking it yourself with Pepsis). OFC, Pneuma would be better if it's available, but in a pinch, this backup strategy of E-Prog > Pepsis > Phlegma would only lose 60p (and that's assuming you don't hold onto it for 2min window)

I like that Addersting is connected to barrier application. It still needs to be worth generating, but I'm not a fan of the idea that Addersting generation is entirely a DPS mechanic. Being able to have healing and damage coexist is what I think can be incredibly great about healers if done correctly. Obviously we don't need much healing, and getting free healing every 20 seconds is vastly more than most content can ever hope to match with outgoing damage, but I'd rather make Eukrasian Diagnosis/Prognosis your main method of healing instead of the -choles. I would much rather dance between attacking and granting barriers than always attack and weave an overpowered 10% mitigation and regen as often as every 30 seconds. That's also why I want to disconnect Addersgall from the stale and flavourless SCH clone actions and attach them to GCD barriers.

[Renathras]

Except Sage is only like that because...

...but that's completely irrelevant to Roe's counterargument.

It doesn't matter why SGE is the way it is, what matters is that it has always BEEN the way it is. This is the only incarnation it's had. It didn't lose anything such that jaded vets pine for getting it back. It doesn't have jaded vets who have played it since 3.0 or 2.0 or 1.4 (whenever Jobs were added to 1.X) who have gone through all the ups and downs and seen all the various iterations of their Jobs, what they lost and gained and lost other stuff to eclipse the gains. It doesn't have those jaded vets pining for what once was, or feeling betrayed by their Job moving away from what it once was, because it never was before this (6.0-Present) to have been "once was".

You can argue you'd like it different or any number of other things, but that's irrelevant to the point:

That many people want to change everything so that they get everything and leave nothing to anyone who isn't them - and godsdamned it, we've HAD this conversation before, haven't we?

Anyway, what I'm saying now is as true as the last dozen times I've said it, so I won't bother belaboring the point.

And I'd point out your definition is what's unreasonably rigid, considering mine consists of a gradient. I just want one thing to occupy the lowest end of that gradient and you do not. Hell, you've even seen my SCH rework (which you were okay with) and various WHM reworks I've mused over from time to time, which do things like break up one-button spam, they just didn't satisfy you because not enough mindless DoTs and they didn't satisfy Semi because she wants to be a druid. I also find it odd anyone would describe the use of Ley Lines as part of a "simple" system, especially since it would just be a worse PoM with a teleport when you could just give WHM PoM with a teleport (e.g. wherever you activate it, using the ability again during its duration will teleport you back to that position).

You've made it abundantly clear you love one button spam

I will never cease to be amazed by your propensity to lie both consistently and profusely. I'm not even going to try offering a rebuttal; I know you won't read/listen, and you'll lie about it again as soon as you feel like it. I could point out a lot of things - like my own WHM proposals breakup the 1 button spam, and even that no Healer right now only spams one button and hits nothing else - but you're just going to lie again the next time, so what's the point? All I can really do is call out your lies over and over again until you, maybe, someday, decide to stop lying.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting on that, though.

Something YOU need to understand is that some people don't want to have zero room for improvement, and the "things you like" are things that unreasonably restrain other people who play your job just so you don't possibly look bad.

Something YOU need to understand is that _I_ understand that. Why the hell do you think I say we should change some of the Healers, huh? Do you not get it? Why would I propose that at all if I didn't think people wanted different playstyles, avenues of improvement, and skill ceilings?

And you seem to have no capacity to NOT cast insults, that are themselves based on abject lies, in your "rebuttals".

Good gods, but you're bad at this.

Can you please stop acting like you're some magnanimous figure that's kindly understanding and wants to give us what we want?

I mean, I'm not acting. That's what I am.

I'm generally a kind person, I understand people want different things, and I want to you to have what you want since I want a solution that makes the most people happy, because I'd like people to be happy.

Should I want you NOT to be happy?

You've constantly shown that you don't care one bit about the people who liked HW and SB gameplay

Howso?

Have I not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - said to give SCH it's SB kit back?
Have I not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - said to give AST its old buffs back (or whatever we can use with current game since some things like TP don't exist anymore)?
Have I not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - said to give AST its stances back?
Have I not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - said to do this for the sake of the people who enjoyed that gameplay?

losing everything and getting pissed off, but god forbid an EW player gets pissed off instead.

I mean, yeah.

If one person is hurt, hurting someone else to make the first person feel better is wrong. It's absolutely something to speak out against, especially if there's a solution that helps the first person without injuring the second, which means injuring the second is unnecessary and doing it would be for no good reason other than to satisfy the first person's desire for vengeance and lashing out, not caring that the people they're hurting to feel better aren't even the people who hurt them in the first place.

Pretty sure speaking against that is always right.

Please get over yourself,

Please get over YOURself.

it's very tiring

Good gosh, deal with the replies to me for a day - spend one day taking my side in arguments against all the people that want to gang up on me - and you'll see what "very tiring" is.

that you consistently put yourself above others

I don't.

If I did, I wouldn't support things that help others, and I wouldn't empathize with them.

I DO correctly call out people that want to be selfish and harm others for their own gain, especially when said harm is unnecessary and totally avoidable.

when we're all arguing for our own self-interests in the end,

And yet, my argument is to give you things that you want.

That's not for my self-interest. That's because I want you to be happy. It's not an act, I genuinely DO want that, because for all the slings and arrows cast at me here, I actually am a nice person.

like how you're arguing for one healer to remain as is, except you're pretending you're holding a higher position because you already have what you want right now.

Do you not see the problem with this "logic"?

IF I was the demon you want me to be, or as self-interested as you are, I'd argue for NONE of the Healers to change. Zero. Zip. Nada.

I'd argue for them to ALL stay as they are.

Yet I don't.

Can you consider for a moment why that is?

It's not some bargaining tactic because the options are "change them all" or "change all but one". The status quo is almost always what carries forward, so the options are "change none" or "change some", with the default of "if we reach no agreement" being "then we change none".

I have no reason to give any ground at all, if my intention was selfishness.

Yet not only do I do so, I routinely do so for the majority of the Jobs in question.

Just for once, actually stop and think about that.

Ofc the issue with getting the other "grown up" healers deeper and more complex deepus gameplay, is then the "Complexity reward" associated with them. 3 out of 4 healers are complicated and thus logically and reasonably demand a potency reward, more work=more impact.
That leaves the 1 simple 1 button 1 dot healer as an outlier in terms of "deserved" potency.

I guess in the sense of fairness, either all healers get a rework that gives them depth to justify the balance between them or none do?

The game can't be balanced around damage like that - though it can be around utility. The only way it can be based on damage like that is if encounters were completely redesigned to where pushing phases/mechanics wasn't allowed and/or would result in a wipe (Ifrit Ex), and where Enrages were super lenient so any comp, even one made up of just the "bad damage" Jobs could clear, something we're already having troubles with. That's why "my job is harder, it should do more damage" doesn't work.

Moreover, when people are literally demanding they be made to do more work, then they don't deserve to be rewarded with more damage, since they're literally asking for more work because they want more work to have "fun". The reward, as it turns out, is "having more fun", not "doing more damage", as if you didn't want to do more work for the same damage, you wouldn't advocate for the Jobs to be changed to where they require more work to do damage. It's a near-tautology.

The job was most liked gutted specifically because the idea of making WHM competitive with SCH somehow would ruin its identity.

Probably not, actually.

Whether we accept his words at face value or not, Yoshi P has said that they were worried about Healer shortages (and to be fair, from the numbers I could find, SB was the lowest point of Healers, even lower than ShB, by percent of the playerbase), and that Healer players were stressed out about dealing damage and healing. And that this has been a continuous problem in the game's history, and was PART of why Cleric was removed, that some people playing Healers want to play with a more damage focus while others do not. And, apparently, there aren't enough Healers (or Yoshi P doesn't believe there are) to alienate the ones that lean towards healing and still have functional ques and such.

The problem is, not EVERYONE was stressed out and upset about that gameplay, just some/many people. For whatever reason, instead of just changing WHM to its ShB form and tuning it to have the same output as SCH, they changed SCH as well, thinking that even SCH players needed in on this "superior" gameplay. And, probably, because it made it a bit easier for the design teams to balance - I will continue to believe most of the "simplifying" changes in the game are done to make the encounter and Job design team's jobs of balance and mechanics easier, and I've seen nothing to really counter that belief.

And, as I've noted before, if they had left SCH alone, the game would probably be better off now, even with WHM in its current incarnation, since people that wanted something else would have old SB SCH to play instead.

Yep exactly this. If WHM still had Aero3, AST still had 2 DOTs, and SCH was still... SCH, SB ver, SGE would have had a lot more GCD variety to it's rotation.

I mean, it's entirely possible, were those things true, SGE just wouldn't exist.

But that also doesn't change the fact (as I said above) that it does exist, it exists in THIS form, and it has only ever existed in THIS form.

I logged off on Reaper or something non-healer after doing WT for the week, and having made all the crafted sets (but not doing anything with them re: glamour), it's probably just that you saw my character without her glasses on

Oh yeah. That's probably it.

As mentioned in the past (probably too many times now) I'd just make the proc from breaking shields be a free use of Phlegma. Use it for mobility, save it for raidbuffs, whatever, it's 600p vs the 660 of Dosis, so you'd be losing 60p from it but gaining shielding, raidbuffs would help equalize that loss out even more, and it frees up both Toxicon and the gauge to be something more interesting than 'scuffed Ruin 2'. In fact, it's almost like they made Toxicon BECAUSE of Ruin 2's existence. They had to have a R2 analogue, a case of 'well SCH has this mobility skill so SGE needs to have one. Oh, but make it more limited in accessibility, so it seems 'different' in its gameplay application'

Honestly, that's not a terrible idea. Personally, I'd just remove Plegma and make Toxico do what it does. Generate an Addersting once every 40 sec OR when shields break, stacks up to three. The near-melee weirdness aside, it'd be more flexible and have a higher potential burst and skill ceiling doing that, anyway. This way, it works as Plegma does now (2 in burst, 1 in the middle), but also allows you to refund (mostly) shield breaks to make them semi-damage neutral, which also lets you use Toxicon as a damage spell a bit more freely, and lets you use GCD shields as movement tools that aren't as feelsbad of a damage loss to do so, and having Toxicon's range means not having weirdness with party stacks or spread mechanics coming during burst phases.

Though, for my part, I like the big laser X. It's like a caster version of Double Down.

[ty_taurus]

...but that's completely irrelevant to Roe's counterargument.

I don't really give a shit.

It doesn't matter why SGE is the way it is, what matters is that it has always BEEN the way it is. This is the only incarnation it's had.

You mean an incarnation that has objectively failed to accomplish the identity the job was directed stated as having? MCH also was only ever gun mage during HW, and that changed too.

[Renathras]

I don't really give a shit.

Well, we WERE having a cordial conversation. Way to break it, Ty.

You mean an incarnation that has objectively failed to accomplish the identity the job was directed stated as having? MCH also was only ever gun mage during HW, and that changed too.

I mean, it heals by doing damage. But again, this is irrelevant.

.

Answer me this:

IF Yoshi P came to you right now and said "We will change 3 healers and leave 1 the same. This is non-negotiable. Choose which.", which would you pick to leave as it is?

You want WHM changed to a former incarnation and say so all the time.
You want SCH changed to a former incarnation and say so all the time.
You want AST changed to a former incarnation and say so all the time.
SGE has had no former incarnation, but you're desperate to have it for your class fantasy.

So which would you pick to not change?

.

EDIT:

I'm not going to waste another post on you when you're acting like this, Ty.

[Shurrikhan]

To skip the bulk of your post spent in ad hominem...

Have I not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - said to give SCH it's SB kit back?
Have I not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - said to give AST its old buffs back (or whatever we can use with current game since some things like TP don't exist anymore)?
Have I not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - said to give AST its stances back?
Have I not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - said to do this for the sake of the people who enjoyed that gameplay?

Have others not - OVER AND OVER AGAIN - noted the job suspiciously absent there, and there is not only no reason not to be fair to that job, too, in giving it both an accessible floor AND an expansive ceiling, but also that you'd cause significant issues for the game's broader balance if you do not?

And that this has been a continuous problem in the game's history, and was PART of why Cleric was removed, that some people playing Healers want to play with a more damage focus while others do not.

Cleric Stance wasn't removed because "some people playing Healers want to play with a more damage focus while others do not."

It was removed because it had outsized annoyance compared to the actual complexity it introduced, in no small part because they could never figure out how to make toggling it off queue correctly (and spamming it would just put it back up, because the activation --on the other hand-- did queue) nor scale with GCD speed, making what was originally a 2-GCD lock-out increase by 50% the moment anyone took any Spell Speed and made the mistake of not wasting their uptime.

It was simply badly implemented. Like (3.01) "bowmage" Wanderer's Minuet levels of bad. And, in XIV typical fashion, rather than iterate on it in any way that might require a halfway competent coder... they simply removed it.

(Why stop costing people their roundtrip ping in uptime if you could just... make Mudras GCDs and turn Hypercharge into stacks? Sure, it'd still be a massive QoL boon for the entire game, but... they're still gonna sub regardless, right?)

[ty_taurus]

Well, we WERE having a cordial conversation. Way to break it, Ty.

Complain about someone else's attitude. I'm not playing your games anymore. I was not the one who made an argument for preserving the old, so there's no reason to bring that argument to my point. That is why I don't give a shit. It wasn't about you.

Answer me this:

IF Yoshi P came to you right now and said "We will change 3 healers and leave 1 the same. This is non-negotiable. Choose which.", which would you pick to leave as it is?

This is strikingly similar to the "if you were trapped on a desert island" question you hear when someone is trying to goad vegetarians into admitting they'd eat fish to survive. In the name of survival, Astrologian. There's actually some amount of substance to Astrologian's gameplay despite the Malefic spam it's also subjected to.