What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[Aravell]

Reply

I can appreciate that you've changed from the first time I spoke with you because you didn't immediately say I attacked you, thank you for that.

As for the topic, I'm not saying you can't argue for everyone, I'm not saying you have to be selfish, but you really can't argue for everyone when the "everyone" you're arguing for don't actually agree with your ideas in the first place, that's a losing battle. Best to first pitch your idea and see if people like it. For what it's worth, your SCH rework idea wasn't offensive, although I fundamentally disagree with the idea behind it. I also fundamentally disagree with DoT mage SCH, just because it was that before doesn't mean it has to be that again, I'd much rather see it use stratagems to modify abilities and such, more of a support healer than a poison healer.

I can't speak for the people who continually attack you, perhaps their initial biases stuck, there's no helping that. As for me though, I'm not your enemy, I'm only here for discussion, I'm not here to make enemies, I hope you can understand that. We've had cordial discussions before, I like those, I'd rather have civil debate than see mud slinging everywhere.

[Icecylee]

This is deeply off topic and also wound up fairly long so I'm going to put it behind a spoiler, but in answer to your question, Ren...

For what it's worth, Ren, I have noticed (and appreciated!) the effort you've put into changing how you've been formatting your text since that thread the other week. To me, at least, you *have* been coming across as a bit calmer, a bit less shouty.

Not everyone is out to get you. There have been, on occasion, people that have popped into threads and agreed with things you've said or spoken up in your defense when the dog piling was getting particularly bad from an outside perspective. It doesn't happen a ton, but it has happened. And not everyone that's arguing with you is then immediately going on to upvote the post dunking on you; I, at least, don't usually push 'like' when Semi's just swearing forex or when Roe's in a particularly snippy mood. That said I also don't think it's that strange that the opposition opinion is typically getting less likes, and it shouldn't really be that surprising to you either. I do on occasion like your post too, as there are some points we agree on, but often you wind up writing massive posts covering a fair number of different topics, some of which I don't agree with, so it's pretty infrequent in the grand scheme of things.

With regards to the frequency of calling other people out though, that's a fair question to ask. I think in part you tend to get a lot of noise about how you present yourself specifically because you sell yourself as a nice, friendly person who only wants to reach some kind of compromise or middle ground, but for whatever reason, are often perceived as arrogant, headstrong and aggressive by others which creates a layer of dissonance that's hard to ignore. Meanwhile Semi has always presented themself as a bit of an asshole, and crucially, tends to make short one off quips and then dip out of the conversation for a week or two at a time, with the odd longer, more thoughtful, less hateful post here and there divorced from the bile. So it doesn't seem as... how to word this... worth while to address as a "problem" vs someone like you who is very frequently posting several paragraph long responses to everything that most anyone says, multiple times a day. We see a lot of what you're thinking and saying! Roe can be kind of aggressive, but she talks the same way to everyone and no one else really seems to care, and usually when she crosses the line she'll come back a few hours later and apologize before moving the topic along. So, low priority in addressing for different reasons. Ty and Sezby, on the other hand, spend the better part of 6~8 months trying to be nice and cordial and find some kind of middle ground before deciding it simply wasn't there and losing patience. And it's kind of hard to blame them. Likewise I do not, generally, blame you for getting frustrated at others because there is pretty clearly a major disconnect in thought process between you and the regulars and it does suck not being able to get your point across clearly.

For my part, and I suspect several other infrequent-poster-but-always-lurking types, I know we've argued on occasion and a few of those times after a certain number of posts I'd wind up deciding that the conversation was not worth continuing because nothing productive was going to come from it, and I just didn't feel like wasting more of my time of emotional energy on it anymore. Particularly *because* of those long post you so often make, and more specifically, because of... Hm. You sort of remind me of some of the autistic kids my mom used to work with back when she was a teacher. You seem to have this incessant need to not only explain yourself, but over explain yourself, especially if you think you're right about something and someone else is wrong, or they just can't see why you're right. Even if it's not something than an objectionable fact, but mere opinion. Most of the stuff we wind up talking or arguing about here are, ultimately, just things we'd like to personally see. Sometimes things are presented more like facts, especially when people start going into Game Design concepts, but even then it's more of an art than a science so there's still a large degree of "this is what I think based on how I feel" going on there. And you don't always need to convince everyone your feelings on a matter are the best way. I don't think you usually mean anything bad by it usually, you're just trying to explain your thought process and make sure everyone is parsing what you're saying correctly, but man, it can be exhausting to deal with. I think, ultimately what it boils down to, is that arguing with most of the regulars here feels like talking with peers at best, or slinging shit at other kids at worse. Where as arguing with you tends to feel more like arguing with a teacher or other figures that's presenting itself as authorial. Maybe that's not the way you want to come across, and maybe that's not even the way you try and come across, but that's sort of how it *feels* from over here, at least.

Anyway I this got kind of long and rambling, but it was typed in goof faith and offered because you seemed to genuinely want an answer, and I wanted to make sure you got at least once.

[ForsakenRoe]

The last half of that post reads like a journal entry in a game like Amnesia, I'm a little worried and unsettled

[Sebazy]

How do I make it stop?

It's fairly simple:

The big one is to not rise to it if you want to try and keep a sensible discussion going. If you start throwing stones it's an invitation to react in kind. It doesn't matter who throws the first one, ignore the salt, respond with reason, back it up with facts and it's very hard to continue fighting over that. Case in point, in Gaius' deleted quote thread, on page 1 Max's friend/partner/alt trying to call me out over my post commenting on the reshade quote. I didn't bite, I just explained why and how it was an odd comment and paired that with a few reasonable guesses as to how it came about. It pretty much shut down any chance for an aggressive response because I didn't give them a drop of ammo with which to do it. If I'd have taken the bait and responded in an aggressive or combative manner, I'm pretty confident it would have snowballed from there. They post here occasionally so maybe they will let us know in the name of forum science++.

Secondly, try to back up claims with data. If I put my foot down on a point or call someone out over an error or fallacy, I'll be sure to back it up with concise math and logic. There's been times where I've wanted to resub to the logs site just to get old historic data back for some of these debates

Thirdly, in tandem with the first 2, don't be afraid of being wrong. Some of the greatest successes in history came about off the back of previous mistakes. If you put down data and keep things civil, people can correct mistakes in your workings without it needing to become personal. Everyone's going to get stuff wrong at some point or the other. I was hyped for Stormblood PI as I thought it indicated that we were going to get more multi boss/target fights like Oppressor, Kaliya, T1 etc. I think you can guess how much of a mug I felt mere seconds after I stepped into O1S and I was the first to admit it as frankly it was kind of funny how much I missed the mark on that one.

Above all though, if you don't want hostility, don't stoop to it yourself. That's the key.

[ty_taurus]

What you've been asking for is generally something required to clear content that people run. Note that far more people run Extremes and Savages now than did then. Not that anyone's asking for Cleric back, but like the changes you propose aren't for use in solo content only, etc.

Except it's not required to clear the content that people run. The changes would have the largest effect on early raiders--players that are capable of clearing multiple brand new savage fights in the first week of their release. Moreover, taking potency out of your filler spell and placing in into a a few other actions actually helps the less experienced player, because it's your filler spell that you lose casts of the more you panic heal or overheal with your GCD. It means there's less consequence for healing defensively and cautiously as more of your damage is filtered through other tools with limited uses that are easier to maintain, like Phlegma with charges. Your statement was about how there were people who used Cleric only for soloing, meaning they were doing literally no damage at all outside of soloing, and still managed to clear everything shy of savage, even extremes, which is a more radical outcome than the suggestions that have been made in the past--an optimizable set of tools that not everyone might try to optimize--to which I mean, use their other DPS buttons when it's convenient to them and thus getting a fair chunk of their overall potential damage.

And the thing is, our arguments are not about making every healer equivalent to a level 90 ninja at all. Time and time again, many of us have agreed that at least one healer, typically white mage, can be a simple and forgiving healer, but can do so while still feeling like there are choices to make and optimizable elements with its damage. Roe's white mage concept is simple. My white mage concept is simple. You may not agree, but that does not sound rational to me. It sounds rigid and unyielding.

Considering my position is to ensure there's at least one Job for both camps, I can't see how you think I care more about the one than the other.

Except your position is that what we have now is the only way a simple job can exist, insisting than one water droplet more of interactivity, decision making, or opportunity for DPS optimization takes any of the presented healers from manageable and playable to a wall that will curb all novice and learning healers from ever having a chance of clearing extreme or savage for the rest of the game's lifespan, which is unreasonable. And in the other thread, you yourself stated how leaving 1 healer alone would likely end in failure because that one job's inability to keep up with the other 3 would likely result in SE either curb stomping the other three back into this mess we have now, or forcibly bringing up the 4th one anyway. Instead of fighting everyone constantly on that what we have now is the only healer design that could ever be described as "simple," why don't you try working with the rest of us to come up with a cordially agreed-upon take on a white mage, or any healer, that provides enough satisfying gameplay elements for our argument while being approachable enough for your perspective on how approachable a job needs to be for the lowest common denominator?

Much as I love vanilla ice cream, I'm inclined to agree.

Actually, I was referring to plain ice cream. Vanilla is a flavor. Plain is just milk.

[ForsakenRoe]

why don't you try working with the rest of us to come up with a cordially agreed-upon take on a white mage, or any healer, that provides enough satisfying gameplay elements for our argument while being approachable enough for your perspective on how approachable a job needs to be for the lowest common denominator?

To play devil's advocate, he did do this, I don't remember exactly which thread, but I remember us coming to an agreed position that 'something following the design choices of 4.0' would potentially be the way forward for WHM, to keep it simple yet adding something to it. It was where the idea of 'Protect as a 60s mit for WHM, which evolves into PI' was born, so that's how I remember it happened

[Renathras]

To play devil's advocate, he did do this, I don't remember exactly which thread, but I remember us coming to an agreed position that 'something following the design choices of 4.0' would potentially be the way forward for WHM, to keep it simple yet adding something to it. It was where the idea of 'Protect as a 60s mit for WHM, which evolves into PI' was born, so that's how I remember it happened

Also did it with SCH, which was generally well received despite being not much more complex than the current one, and arguably simplifying some elements - a few simplifications and a few combinations - of its healing kit, while smoothing some of the clunk and dissonances in the kit - Dissipation and shifting Energy Drain over to using Faerie Gauge as well as retooling Aetherpact into a mini-Lustrate - while slightly increasing its DPS kit in both rotation complexity and things to track/manage, and making DPS uptime more rewarding with Energy Drains: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...e-Proposal-SCH

Above all though,

if you don't want hostility, don't stoop to it yourself. That's the key.

I do try. There is a lot I don't respond to, and some stuff I get a lot more emotional about that I just choose not to reply to or come back some other time to reply to. As I said, there's a lot of flack and harassment I get here. Even in entirely neutral posts or entirely neutral things. Even when people agree with me, they do it grudgingly in a "hell has frozen over, for once I agree" way.

The problem with this is, when people attack me like that, they don't go away or calm down if I don't contest them. They just keep doing it well after I've signaled I'm not going to respond in-kind and that I want to disengage from the topic. They will keep doing it until they can get a rise out of me. The only ways to stop this are either to give them the rise OR for other community members to come to my defense. The latter never happens, so it's either I respond in-kind, or I just have to deal with constant harassment that doesn't stop.

Perhaps you can see why that isn't a very viable option?

I should also note, I'm generally not the one who starts throwing the stones, either. I don't like calling people out as liars, so I only do it after repeated and egregious lies. I don't like calling people names or stooping to their level, so same thing. If the forum members aren't self-policing and aren't willing to help out with this, it just doesn't work. When people are openly lying about someone, and no one contests the lie, then that makes the lie stand as if it were truth. And the worst is when I point out using evidence the lie and don't call the person any names, their post still is the one that gets upvotes and quotes in support of it.

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As for your third point: The problem is, people here aren't willing to let things go, most won't admit they were wrong, people seem to like going over my posts with a fine toothed comb to find some i not dotted or t not crossed, and then use that as a cudgel to beat me with and demand I say I was wrong. Beating someone and demanding they admit defeat isn't a good way to get them to do so, and it's certainly not cordial, especially if the mistakes were not intended/bad faith, and double-especially if the person wasn't actually wrong about a thing, they just didn't explain it well enough or estimate something correctly.

There are people who want to discredit everything a person says, meaning if that person admits wrong even once, they will never let it go. I still get people posting from time to time about the 1T/3D thing and trying to say nothing I say can ever be believed and I don't know anything I'm talking about, even though I corrected that post like 4 times to try and get it right, and even if it has literally nothing to do with the current topic of discussion - like housing availability or whatever. Making changes to try to get correct wasn't seen as admirable, it was seen as showing weakness that should and would be exploited from now on.

In general, I do hold the position in life it's better to fear being wrong than fear being perceived as being wrong, and I do try to abandon positions that are untenable. But here, admitting even once you're wrong isn't met with respect, it's met with scorn and abuse.

In that same thread (the Mods do exist, I suppose?), I pointed out to Semi that my quote was clipped to remove me saying the correct thing (well, something passingly correct), and she instead redoubled her efforts to justify her position against me, as die another poster who has followed me through three threads to attack me on that point, despite me, in all three, saying I want to disengage and not participate in her feud with me.

What you're saying does sound nice...but it doesn't seem to actually work very well here...

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Oh, and as for the data - not that I always get it right (the 1T/3D thread with FFL weirdness, for example) but I do try to use data. I have done it a lot less of late, though. Care to guess why?

Because every time I would do so, someone would attack the data, even if they had no alternate data available. People still side-attack the Wayback Machine Healer numbers data, despite proposing no alternative and not actually proving the data's wrong itself. When I use Lucky Bnacho numbers, those aren't good enough. When I do a survey on Reddit, that's not good enough (Ty's is, though; it showed the "right" result, of course).

It's hard for me to justify spending hours looking for and presenting data if it's going to just be dismissed out of hand.

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The problem ultimately comes back to how other people are behaving, not just me, and that other people's bad behavior isn't called out, nor my defense not come to. Instead, other people's bad behavior is upvoted and quoted with agreeable support. People can say in posts now and again "I don't think it's right when people dogpile on you, Ren", but the problem is, they aren't saying that when the dogpiles are happening, and to the people doing the dogpiles. So it's like seeing someone be raped in a mall, not doing anything about it (the bystander effect), seeing it happen multiple times, still not doing anything about it, occasionally commenting on how the rape victim shouldn't dress the way they are, but coming to the victim years later and saying "I don't think it was right that you were raped in the mall"...but you really shouldn't be dressed that way. Especially when other people were taking pictures and posting them to social media of the rape and getting likes and retweets on the pictures.

Not to make light of rape victims, but the point, I hope, is clear; good behavior cannot be demanded of only one person. A forum is kinda like a society, and when the society isn't policing its bad actors and is only policing the people who start swinging after they've been hit several times, saying to the person being hit "You could just not throw any punches" isn't really the best answer.

...

Going to try...

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1) There's a fantastic post in a General Discussion thread (a couple of them) I'd like you to read:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...76#post6275276
And:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6276018

I'd encourage you to not read them as something that needs to be argued against, but just sit and read them and think about what they're saying and how people feel. The particularly salient part, if you can only read it and nothing else, is this:

It's really not about just "able to clear normal content" vs. "not able to clear normal content"; that's oversimplifying the issue. People want to feel like they're playing "correctly", not "scraping by because it doesn't matter anyway".

I think this is something you fundamentally misunderstand about your solutions that are "you can just play badly and still manage" and why that really isn't a non-rigid, flexible, accommodating solution.

Note: The second is responding to this post with this TOP example - https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...12#post6275212 - but the post itself is good in its own right, pointing out that not everyone enjoys that kind of thinking/gameplay, and particularly this line that:

I really need to stress that "Oh, it's okay, you can suck and still clear content!" is actually not a satisfying "compromise" to a lot of players.

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2) I assume you mean DoTs on the potencies? The problem is that rewards DoT upkeep, which isn't a skill a lot of people are good with. Some people are very good with it, mind you, but some people are not. And as I've pointed out, the UI is pretty terrible about helping with this, especially since I can't seem to find a way to have my Focus Target show only my debuffs on the boss. If you let Dia fall off for 15 seconds, was that a gain or loss over a Glare cast? It's technically a bigger loss. And what if you have two DoTs? What's the single worst feeling thing to do on a BRD? Realize too late you didn't refresh your DoTs with Iron Jaws. Even if they're only down for a second, it's a pretty terrible feeling.

So this is a case of perception vs reality, but what you're saying is mathematically correct...but in perception, it feels terrible.

When when it comes to Job design and enjoyment, feeling is extremely important. It's like the person in the posts I linked said, if you have two Jobs where one has a lower damage cap but people can consistently reach it, people will probably tend to play that class more because it feels better to do well on a Job and reach its cap (to many people) than it does to do higher damage while doing the rotation imperfectly. Especially since many people don't run DPS meters and so can't really tell if they're doing 5% more damage than the lower cap Job anyway.

Note that I have pointed to abilities like Plegma (if not in melee range) as things that I support and prefer.

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3) As to Cleric - when encounters were tuned both officially and unofficially to assume 0 Healer DPS, something were all pretty sure is no longer true. Recall that many ARR fights didn't even have Enrage timers, meaning they weren't exactly tuned to require DPS at all other than the soft enrage mechanics. Can you imagine 7.X where no Extreme fight had an Enrage? Content and encounters would have go be designed and tuned differently, something you have opposed when I've suggested a far less radical redesign (having more frequent, but smaller in magnitude, unavoidable damage to heal), so would I be right in assuming you'd oppose elimination of Enrages, which is a far more radical change? And recall that in ARR, there was only one tier of Savage, and a very small sliver of the community actually did it. (Of course, the argument goes that the normals were Savage level difficulty and the one Savage was basically an Ultimate, but...)

[I think this may be an aside since neither of us are asking for Cleric to come back, but that's more what would need to be done to make that level of distinction Healer play viable.]

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4) I know you aren't asking for every healer to be a level 90 NIN. But what I seem unable to explain to you is that your argument is asking for none to be level 90 WHM. And I happen to like level 90 WHM. And see (1) for why "you can still play like you can and be suboptimal" isn't a great compromise.

What I can't understand is what's so wrong with having a gradient across the four Jobs. On a scale of 0-10, you're willing to allow 7s, 8s, and 9s in addition to 10s, but not 1s or even 3s or 4s. So you'll allow a gradient, but only one that is on the high end. It's like a food place that only has Large and Extra Large drinks when someone wants a Medium for themselves, a Small for their partner, and a Child size/Extra Small for their toddler. To my way of thinking, we have 4 and arguably could have 5 Healer Jobs (AST stances). To me, a system that has, say, SGE as a 9 or 10 with a BLM-like rotation that just happens to heal as you go, Nocturnal AST at a 7-8 with preplanning, spreading, and altering duration of abilities, SCH at a 4-6 with basically the redesign I proposed, Diurnal AST at a 2-4 still being AST but with a more accessible and reactive kit, and WHM being a 1 where it is right now. And nothing is a 0 (theoretical 0 would be "legitimate autoplay", like if SCH had two Faeires you summoned at once, one healed the party completely on its own and one did optimal damage completely on its own, and your only buttons were "Summon Eos" and "Summon Selene" and they were automatically summoned when you entered the Job so you'd have to actively dismiss them to get rid of them and the Faeries persist and do their thing even if the player is KOd, so you could just die at the start of the fight and still contribute full optimal damage and healing - a 0 is "literally, not figuratively, plays itself", since that's how I'd define "literally 0 skill or interaction required" in the most extreme case possible. Compared to that, btw, WHM is probably a 3 as it stands currently...)

To me, that doesn't sound very rigid, as it sounds the opposite of rigid. It sounds far less unyielding to me than "7, 8, 9, and 10 only; you can play as a 4, but you'll be doing poorly" does.

Maybe it's because you think what I'd call 5 is 1 and so to you, you're saying 1 5 and 10 or something, but clearly we disagree on what the low end of the scale is. It's like you're measuring in Celcius and I'm measuring in Kelvin, and you're insisting that 0 C is the lowest temperature a scale should read while I'm pointing out there are another 273 degrees that you're ignoring, and you retort that Absolute Zero is braindead and no one should want it anyway, and that the boiling point of liquid nitrogen should be sufficiently cool for anyone who wants something colder than 0C, but they also don't get to use it anywhere but in a laboratory.

Okay, tortured attempt at a comparison aside, that probably is it: We're measuring with different scales, with mine extending farther on the bottom end than yours (and possibly on the top end, as I haven't seen you support a BLM level of play). But either way, I just can't understand why my scale is seen by you as more rigid and unyielding when, as far as I can tell, mine's even wider than yours. Where your scale from 1-10 (expanded) is probably that you want Jobs to be a 6-7-8-9, Mine goes from 1 (WHM) to 10 (BLM-like SGE), and I just don't understand how that's more rigid and unyielding by any definition.

Maybe another part is you think that "you're allowed to play poorly" adds flexibility, but, again, see (1). It does not.

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5) My position isn't that what we have now is the only way a simple Job can exist, though.

What my position is, is that what we have now is a good level for the simpliest Job of the new paradigm spectrum. What WHM is now, for example, is a good "1", or what a "1" would make sense to be. I'm not saying there can't be a "2" or "3" as well. I'm not saying there can't be other things that are still simple - my SCH rework, as I said in that thread, is still fairly simple while still being more complex than current SCH and, indeed, than any of the current Healers are, DPS rotation-wise. I would rate it as a "3" from 1-5 or as a "4" from 0-10.

That is, I'm not saying "WHM is the only way a simple Job can exist". I'm saying "WHM makes sense to me as the simplest Job of the post-change system". Those are two pretty different statements. I...also want to point out - respectfully and cordially - that it's a bit hyperbole on your part - respectfully - to say that I think that "one water droplet more of interactivity" will make things completely unplayable. Again, my SCH rework adds at least several "water droplets" of more interactivity, and even my WHM suggestions (I've had several, but offhand, one was to make Dia get Thundercloud procs, and another was to make the main rotation mirror PLD sorta in that every 1-2-3 [1-1-1] of Glare casts, you get a Holy cast like how PLD does its main 1-2-3 combo and then gets a Holy Spirit), which are also at least one droplet more, if not several droplets more.

So - respectfully - that isn't a...fair...representation of my position.

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6) I didn't sate that leaving 1 alone would result in that. I believe that was Roe's argument. I was only countering that by saying if that was true, all it would indicate is that making Jobs more complex doesn't work. And that even in this hypothetical, that would only result if the playerbase complained about "having to do more work and not do more damage" (I still contend that was happening in SB and was at least part of the reason for the ShB changes - as I've said before, players said "We shouldn't have to do more work and not be rewarded with more damage!" and SE pulled out the Monkey's Paw and said "Ohhhh, you want to lighten the load, do you?" <monkey's paw curls> "Excellent idea!" <throws out DPS abilities> "Now you don't have to do more work and not be rewarded any more!") [And yes, that was a Great Mouse Detective quote of Rattagan before he throws the bat off the little dirigible.]

It was a hypothetical and countering another hypothetical, and based on assumption of if the playerbase complains loudly and long enough.

...to be fair, that last point probably is a pretty good assumption. But in any case, it wasn't me stating something inevitable. And even if it was: Again, that would just suggest we shouldn't be changing any, not the opposite.

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7) As Roe pointed out: I have.

I think I have with WHM several times, SCH once which was well received generally, and I'm pretty sure I've thrown out at least one semi-simple SGE suggestion, and probably several, as well as a medium difficulty SGE suggestion that was based on RDM.

And even though I don't feel qualified to do so since I play it so little and don't have the mindset of people who enjoy it - which is a big deal, I don't want to step on the toes of people who love AST, and it is the one Healer Job I don't consistently play and hold a "Ask those people what they want because I'm genuinely not a player that enjoys AST's gameplay but don't want to take away from it from those who do" - I still tried my hand on at least one AST rework, namely making Cards GCDs and damage neutral, as well as proposing changes to make them more enjoyable in different kind of gameplay, like increasing card effects when used on themselves or agreeing with whoever suggested that they should be able to stack on themselves, etc.

So...I feel like I have done what you asked. One case it was decently received, the rest were all rebuffed outright.

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8) I prefer vanilla ice cream to milk flavored ice cream.

A 1, not a 0.

[ty_taurus]

I think this is something you fundamentally misunderstand about your solutions that are "you can just play badly and still manage" and why that really isn't a non-rigid, flexible, accommodating solution.

But I'm not actually arguing that the average player intentionally play poorly. I'm saying that players can do what is comfortable for them, whether that's optimal or not. The average player doesn't do things like drop their GCD or sit on cooldowns and think "dammit! I'm losing damage." That's not how I looked at my own performance back during ARR and HW when I was not a midcore player and would regularly stop casting altogether to play my cards, or might not reapply DoTs until I needed to reapply all of them as SCH. I wasn't measuring my performance up to what is possible of my job, I was just doing my best and enjoying beating content like extremes or some of the coils. Whether or not the average player is able to use 2 or 3 new DPS spells as optimally as humanly possible is not going to make or break a community of players. The only reason intentionally not using DPS ever came up was as a bargaining chip specifically for you and select few who seem repulsed by the prospect of additional DPS buttons at all, regardless of how easy or challenging they are to use.

I've also tried before to argue the concept of a healer that spends their GCDs setting up and activating party-wide buffs instead of attacking, and in order to stay competitive with the other healers, generates personal damage indirectly as a consequence of setting up your buffs. That way there could be a healer whos engagement stemmed from the experience of supporting most of the time and attacking as little as possible, and that seems to me like a great way to create a healer specifically for players who want to master and perfect their job without having that optimization having to come from attacking enemies, but as you mention at the bottom, was pretty much rejected outright.

To me, that doesn't sound very rigid, as it sounds the opposite of rigid. It sounds far less unyielding to me than "7, 8, 9, and 10 only; you can play as a 4, but you'll be doing poorly" does.

If we say that Ninja is a 10 in this example, I cannot agree that WHM with 2-3 additional attack spells makes it jump from a 1 to a 7. I would generously describe 2-3 extra spells as a 4. It would be more accurate to say that what I'd like to see would be something around a 4|5|5|6 spread to a 4|6|6|8 spread. The 4 should still bring value that the other healers do not have, and the DPS should still offer some opportunities to get extra damage out of using the right things at the right time, but it's overall straightforward and forgiving on the healing side.

7) As Roe pointed out: I have

That's fair; however, the reason why I don't recall this very well is you've made several posts in the past about different interpretations of each of the healers, often with different "what if"s attached, including "what if we make WHM complex and leave [this healer] in a state like this instead?" There's nothing wrong with making theorycrafts like that, but because the reasoning behind those different takes would change based on the topic, I don't feel that I have a strong understanding of what you'd collectively be content with or what was just experimental to see what people respond to. Something like having Holy buffed after every third Glare is certainly a fine step in a better direction, and I am always on board to give uses to buttons that are currently restricted to AoE only.

If we were to say that is 1 additional action of DPS variety, what if anything would you be willing to add to that?

[Renathras]

I'll start with the last one first, since I have a more ready answer:

A) If we were to, say, add 1 additional DPS action (as a given/baseline), what in addition, if anything, would I be willing to add to that?

Unsatisfying as it is, there's not a direct answer to that. Not trying to waft, so let me explain some:

It largely depends on the rest of the kit, how much button bloat the kit has, interactivity with the kit (none makes it pointless to add, too much can make it...well, too much; an extreme example would be a DoT that ticks every 1 sec and procs a free Energy Drain at a 50% rate - this would make the Job insanely hectic and probably few people would find it really fun to actually play since you'd conceivably be needing to double-weave ED with a pretty high rate of probability and not even know about it in the middle of your casts, etc). It also depends on whether we're talking new abilities or not - existing abilities getting additional functionality (e.g. 3x Glare -> empowered Holy) can be done in ways that add some depth to the rotation without over complicating things or bloating the Job. On the other hand, having Presence of Mind proc "Quake Ready", and WHM having Quake, Tornado, and Flood as three distinct buttons that are used in a 1-2-3 combo but only once every 2 minutes? That's not complicated per se, but it's just bloaty.

Likewise, upkeep buffs can be annoying at the best of times, and whether they're easy or hard to keep up entirely depends on the UI - contrast Dia, Storm's Eye, and Huton. Dia you can have on multiple targets and track, at most, two of them (target and focus target), easily, and with all the debuffs on enemies, it can be hard to see it drop off. While you can get the game to show you only your buffs, then you may be missing important information like whether or not Mug, Chain Strat, etc are up, which is something you kind of need to know. Storm's Eye is likewise not well displayed, being a tiny icon on the party list or somewhere at the top of the screen above the boss health bar, both of which are easy to miss dropping off and give no information when they do. (Contrast when a SGE shield is broken and it gives an audible que to alert the player they just gained a Toxicon stack). And then you have Huton, which is on the Job gauge in the form of a pinwheel of kunei, but is visibly very easy to tell at a glance how much time you have left on it.

Finally, it depends on the Job's existing kit. In a vacuum, all the Jobs already have full hotbars. I know everyone else's definition is different, but mine is "more than 29 buttons is probably too many. The controller hotbar thing I've explained before is one reason for it, but it's also a way of saying "Is thirty (30) buttons really not enough??" Even WHM and SGE have exactly 1 too many buttons by that metric. RDM or SMN or MCH have a few free for additions, but none of the Healers really do. But AST and SCH are the worst offenders here. So adding new buttons (and by this I mean "not existing abilities with additional effects nor new abilities but which share an actionbar spot like Summon Seraph/Consolation do") is kind of an issue already.

That said, there are a few ways around this, like SGE can get more use out of Eukrasia. The name being stupid aside, they could give SGE "Eukrasia Dyskrasia" that is an AOE DoT like Eu Dosis is for Dosis.

So this depends a lot on specifically what it is.

I'm sorry there's not a...straightforward?...answer, but there just isn't. I'd be like asking "What one button would you add to a DPS Job?", the pertinent question might be "Uh...which DPS Job?", since your answer would be pretty different if you were talking about DRG vs if you were talking about BLM.


B) "I cannot agree that WHM with 2-3 additional attack spells makes it jump from a 1 to a 7" - I'd argue that depends on what spells you add. How many is less important than what they do.

Let's say you just added "Water -> Banish" as a 2 charge Plegma-type thing and "Quake -> Tornado -> Flood" as three buttons used with PoM as I described above. That's not too bad, would probably move WHM up to a 4 or so. Kind of a super lax version of RDM's burst which automatically lines up with burst windows as long s you don't drift PoM. And that as adding 4 new spells and a new trigger off of PoM.

But lets say you add one DoT and this DoT has a chance to Diacloud proc Dia. And Dia has a chance to DoTcloud the new DoT. And each of them, when the proc is used, has a chance to make Holy instant cast and cost no mana, and it has a chance to proc the refresh on Assize, and if it does, using that Assize will empower your next Glare. Suddenly this is getting a lot more complicated, and that was just adding ONE new button. Now you have a BRD branching opener based on what procs and what doesn't, and your likewise your burst window, optimizations around when to burn the procs and when to hold them based on how far you are from burst or different boss phases, etc. I'd say that takes it up to a 7 or possibly 8 just because there's a high probability of needing to alter your rotation on the fly based on what happens and you needing to know when it is and isn't optimal to burn the procs vs hold them, as well as needing more fight knowledge to decide if you should push with them or pocket them for movement tools. This would make WHM a bit more like BLM and also have all kinds of complaints about RNG variation and so on. But again, that's just adding one button and getting WHM up to a 7. You an argue the Dia and Holy and Assize changes count as 4 separate things, but it's only one additional attack spell being added.

As for your spread - respectfully (sorry if that's getting annoying, I just want to keep things...civil; it's not meant to be condescending, just a que of "I don't mean this as an attack or anything") - 4-6 or 4-8 are still narrower than 1-10.

I'm trying to think where I would actually rank the Healers at right now. I'm not quite sure. Because I factor in healing needs (which is encounter, gear, and party specific). But if 0 is "plays itself" (my "0" is "Absolute Zero", recall), and 1 is "a dipping bird on the keyboard can do this" (e.g. imagine if WHM had just Glare. No Holy, Dia, Lilies/Misery, or Assize), possibly with a second "dummy proof" button or something. If that, then WHM would sit around a 2 right now. SGE is kind of a side-grade from that. AST and SCH are each a step up a smidge in different directions, so this depends on the player, as most people I think would find one or the other a bit easier and the other harder. So like an AST player might think of AST as a 3 and SCH as a 4, a SCH player might think of SCH as a 3 and AST as the 4, etc. Probably both 3.5s, we'll say. SMN is probably, by comparison, a 3-4. If it was a Healer and managing party health, it would be a 4, but without having to worry about that, it's probably a 2.5-3. (yes, yes, 2.5 would be a scale of 20, it's more than a 2. I suppose 3.5 would as well...)

So in my book, a smidge more to either AST or SCH (like my proposed SCH changes) would put them comfortably in the 4-5 range, as neither needs to go really far to get there. My SCH proposal might actually be 4.5-5 since there's a fair amount of optimization around Energy Drain and Miasma in it.

Hm...maybe I need to just think through all the Jobs in the game and assign them a value to actually attempt to quantify this. like if SMN is a 3, what would I call RDM? In ShB I'd have called it a 5, but now I'm thinking more like 7-8 - you might laugh, but look at some of the optimization high end RDMs are doing in stuff like TOP. Knowing down to a value what their Black/White Mana need to be, the specific number or range, for different phases in a fight? That's near BLM levels of precision fight knowledge to get that Pink. How much you need to stuff into the burst window to go from 50% to 85% as a player. There was some optimization in ShB, but I'm not sure there was anything nearly that precise or demanding. Now, "passable" level of RDM? Sure, 3-4. But the Job's top end isn't low, and I think a lot of people misunderstand that now.

C) So we come at last to the beginning.

Just for the sake of certainty on my part - you read those two posts I linked, right?

Because they kind of addressed "But I'm not actually arguing that the average player intentionally play poorly. I'm saying that players can do what is comfortable for them, whether that's optimal or not" and why that isn't a good argument. I'm going to assume you did, so I'm more just posting this here as a way of review:

I think that most people simply do not want to be told, "Well, you're doing it wrong, but your performance is still adequate enough to not fail completely" — which is what most of the backhanded assurances given by Discords, etc, tend to sound like to players who are trying to gauge whether they're playing correctly.

This creates a general atmosphere where, regardless of how true it is, most players tend to see the game's Jobs as having only two outcomes: "failing" (non-optimal) and "succeeding" (optimal).

And I think a lot of players just do not like the idea that they're "failing" compared to the "ideal" rotation, even if the ideal rotation is not objectively necessary just to clear content.

This is why I think it's not as simple as a lot "skill-focused" players try to make it seem — the argument, "Well, let's just make the Job harder, because you'll still be able to clear content with the easier rotation".

...

And second of all, "good enough" is just not what most people actually want.

Players don't want to think, "I'm playing the crappy version of my rotation, because it's easy, and that's what I can handle!"

They want to think, "I'm playing my rotation correctly, and I'm doing well as a result!"

The first perspective may be more realistic, but the second perspective feels far better to someone in terms of having emotional fun while playing a game.

This is why players will gravitate towards Jobs that they feel that they can intuitively play "correctly", and become averse to Jobs that they feel like they "fail" too frequently or too easily.

Let's say there's two Jobs, "Job A" and "Job B".

Job A is easy to play optimally, but has a low damage ceiling.

Job B is hard to play optimally, but has a high damage ceiling.

Let's also say that Job B played poorly ends up doing about as much damage as Job A played optimally.

I think most players will gravitate towards Job A, by a significant margin — because they don't care about their actual raw numbers nearly as much as they care about their parse colour (which has been conditioned by the community using things like "gray" and "green" as potent insults), as well as just not feeling like they're constantly messing up and failing... because that's psychologically-unpleasant.

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This is something that I think the argument, "Just make it more complex — if you don't like it, you don't need to do it", fails to take into account: people would rather decisively-succeed, than struggle and fail constantly, even if the numerical outcome is identical in both cases.

I really need to stress that "Oh, it's okay, you can suck and still clear content!" is actually not a satisfying "compromise" to a lot of players.

People often pull out the "haha ice mages" type exaggerated extremes, but I think that most players don't actually fall into those edge cases — in my experience, at least (anecdotal though it all is), most players do at least try to understand what their Job "wants" them to do, and they become frustrated and discouraged if they feel like they can't pull it off consistently.

As strange as it may seem from the perspective of someone who's seriously-dedicated to the game, a lot of players also just do not seek external resources — they will try to figure things out, but if they can't figure it out "on their own", they either stop worrying about it, or become frustrated and pick a different Job.

I want to stress that I'm not arguing "right" or "wrong" here, and I'm not saying you're "wrong" for enjoying a game that rewards you for thinking about things in a depthy, complicated, or extensive way. I'm just trying to clarify that a vast amount of the playerbase neither enjoys that, nor sees it as a valuable design pursuit, and that causes the friction you're seeing here.

It's really not about just "able to clear normal content" vs. "not able to clear normal content"; that's oversimplifying the issue. People want to feel like they're playing "correctly", not "scraping by because it doesn't matter anyway".

Note the bolded section.

It's not about "play poorly". It's "If you play what is comfortable to you, it's not optimal; you can still do things passably, but you aren't doing them optimally" that is a problematic argument, because people don't want to do things "passably". People don't want "You did good...enough... /headpat".

I think you might have a mindset similar to the user she's replying to there - and I don't mean this as an insult - as a player driven to do what you do. It's not bad to be driven and competitive, per se. The issue is when you lose the realization that a lot of people aren't, and thus why your offers to them fall flat, since they don't really offer them what they want.

What they want is a Job they can pick up, read the tooltips, and intuitively perform at a high level of the Job's capacity, perhaps even optimally or close enough as to be irrelevant, without knowing that The Balance or etc even exist. There are two Jobs in the game right now that come close to that: PLD and SMN (bet you thought I'd mention different ones. )

Yeah, they still require you to know what an oGCD is, which the game does not describe or explain, but the concept of "This thing increases my damage, and these are big damage spells, oh, that first thing can only be used so often, and lines up with these other things. So I guess I should use them together. And using this unlocks these, so I use this then these". That equally describes both PLD (FoF, Req; Goring, Confetti/Swords, and Royal for Atonement and Holy Spirit) and SMN (Searing Light; Bahamut; and Primals + Gemshine/Astral Flow, Energy Drain/Fester and Ruin 4, and arguably Phoenix since it doesn't at all come close to Searing but Bahamut does). Sure, there's a little wiggle there in PLD ideally wanting to get certain attacks in the damage window and SMN wanting to slightly drift Baha/Phoenix by casting a Ruin 3 per cycle. And there's a little big brain like drifting Energy drain into the second buff window slightly so you can hold the two Festers from Phoenix for the 2 min buff window, Energy Drain, then use the two more, from then on getting 4 Festers into even minute burst windows by holding them from the odd minute bursts. But the gains from all of these are pretty marginal. There's a bit of skill expression, but the "read your tooltips and try it out" can get you 80-90% of the way there.

I don't - at all - believe every Job needs to be this way.

I don't believe most should be this way.

I very much believe there is value in having high complexity Jobs and medium complexity Jobs, and even super high complexity Jobs that are gigabrain Transpose Lines Infinite Paradox insanity.

I just believe there's value in having the other end of that scale represented as well.

.

I guess my continued question is: I'm not arguing against several takes on more complex healers. Ones that spend GCDs setting up and activating buffs, could be one of them.

But what I can't figure out how to explain or convince you of is that I don't think you understand what people like me want.

"...and that seems to me like a great way to create a healer specifically for players who want to master and perfect their job without having that optimization having to come from attacking enemies..."

Read the quotes above again and try to understand, "master and perfect" is not a universal motivation.

What you're offering here in this specific instance is "Here is a complex Healer for people who don't want to DPS so they can play a complex Healer that buffs instead". This is rooted in the idea that there are Slyphies out there who aren't exactly Sylphies (because they don't "just want to heal", they want to heal and support), but offering them a complex Job that doesn't deal damage should make them happy, right?

Note what that's not "Here is a simple Healer for people who want simple and straightforward Jobs so they can play a simple and straightforward Healer".

I don't disagree - there are...at the risk of inventing a new insult, let's call them (as a descriptor, not as an insult) "Support Sylphies" who just genuinely hate attacking buttons no matter what, but they don't want to only fill health bars, as they want to buff their allies as well, and they are super competitive players who do want to research and perfect and master and squeeze everything they can out of their Job - I absolutely believe such people exist, and I agree we should have an option for them, probably AST.

That is, I absolutely agree we should have a support/buff Healer Job, again, probably AST...but that isn't addressing the needs of the people who want a SMN-like Healer. It's meeting the needs of the skill expression competitive "Support Sylphies"...

...but that isn't the people who want a simple Healer Job. That's a different group of people. That's why this answer doesn't address the need.

.

I also would note that there's a bit of a disconnect in saying that we aren't allowed to have a simple Healer, because "what about the people who like that Job's aesthetic but what a Job with depth?", but we are for some reason allowing a buff Healer that is limited to one Job. What about the people who like AST's aesthetic but not buffing? What about the people who like buffing but like SCH or SGE or WHM's aesthetic?

It seems odd to me that this form of Job differentiation is acceptable - "If you like buffing, play AST, if you don't like buffing, play something else" - but doing so with simple vs complex is unacceptable. It seems to me both should be violations of the same principle, does it not?

And sure, one could counter that by saying "But AST is and always has been all about buffs as its identity, and everyone who picks up AST knows that", but by that token, SGE has always been about simple DPS kit and healing since it was introduced, and honestly, so has WHM - even when it had all of one more DoT than it has now in SB or had two and Cleric in HW and ARR, it was still "the simple Healer" even then...

Not trying to start a fight over it, it just seems the principle is only being applied in one of those cases when it should be applied in both...

[Aravell]

And sure, one could counter that by saying "But AST is and always has been all about buffs as its identity, and everyone who picks up AST knows that", but by that token, SGE has always been about simple DPS kit and healing since it was introduced, and honestly, so has WHM - even when it had all of one more DoT than it has now in SB or had two and Cleric in HW and ARR, it was still "the simple Healer" even then...

Personally, I'm fine with SGE remaining as it is, SGE has never known any other iteration, there's no nostalgia, there is only current SGE, so leaving it as is is fine. If the dev team wants to eventually bring it up to match the other healers later on, then great.

I also don't think anyone has ever thought WHM was complex, it has always been the simple straightforward healer and that's fine, I think the reason people find WHM is unsatisfying right now is because there's no reason to use half of their kit. WHM certainly does need something more, but I'm not sure more DoTs is the correct answer.

I personally believe that SCH and AST suffer most from job design problems and WHM suffers most from fight design issues at the moment, but that's just what it looks like to me.