What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't think he's being completely resistant, it looks to me like the two of you have a fundamentally different view of the matter stemming from your personal views on job design. You seem to believe that people get frustrated when they people tell them that they're merely average because people want to be the best that they can be. Ty seems to believe that certain people are happy no matter how good they are, as long as they reach their goal, whether that be 30%, 47% or 73% efficiency, they set that goal and are happy if they reach it.

I might also be wrong, but I think the reason Ty holds that position (it seems similar to mine) is that we have very few benchmarks to decide what 'max efficiency' actually looks like. Of course we have the funny numbers website, but the 'number' can be subject to factors completely outside of the player's control like crit variance, kill time, or in the case of anyone with a raidbuff, 'how good is my team during 2min windows'. So instead, my personal metric I'd be using as 'the goal to reach' is 'can I clear Savage', for example. It's ingame, immediate feedback of 'did I do well enough at the class to meet a skill check, as set by the developers themselves?' Ren believes that if someone can clear Savage now, they should be able to clear Savage even if a hypothetical rework to the classes were to occur (which, adding more damage buttons to the healers would potentially threaten). My stance is that if someone can clear Savage now, they're of a skill level that means they can learn how to implement new buttons into their rotation, being as they have to learn things like High Concept, or more recently, Superchain, Classic Concepts, or my personal wall for far too many pulls (sorry to the gamers I was with), Caloric Theory. I cleared P12S week 2, having griefed my team by failing to understand Caloric for so long (it was explained to me in a way my brain didn't comprehend), and I got an 8 for it. I don't give a damn that it was an 8, I was glad to be out of that hell, glad to be free of 'I have to hyperfocus I dont want to be the reason we wiped again', and personally, that's gonna be my stance on that fight for every time I do it. I gave up caring about logs quite a long time ago, and the majority of the playerbase does care about logs whatsoever. So if they don't use the funny number site, or care about what it says, surely they're using an ingame benchmark like 'can I clear' or 'can I beat SSS', and if they can, they're happy regardless of what optimizations they may have missed.

If it helps, maybe we could look at the classes as being different martial arts styles. It should be possible to pick up the basics of them pretty quickly. Learning the knowledge that would get you to, say, orange or green belt in Karate is not going to take the average person an insane amount of time. Being a green belt is enough to have knowledge enough for self defense purposes. But there's plenty to learn beyond that, with all the belts going up to Black Belt, and then all the Dans or whatever they're called after that. It might be possible for someone to see a master show each technique exactly once, and somehow Sharingan copy them perfectly on the first try, there's a non-zero chance of someone being able to do that sure. But the road to mastery of a discipline is usually going to take some practice, and I don't personally see why it isn't the same here. I don't expect 'you have to practice WHM for 50 years to master it' kinda thing, but as a melee for example, I do at least have to go hit the dummy for a couple hours to drill the opener into my head. As healer, there's nothing to drill. I precast a Glare, Dia on pull, Glare again, press POM at the same time everyone else uses their raidbuffs, weave an Assize on the next available OGCD window, and then Glare away.

But comparing the classes to martial arts again, if we look at, for example complexity for casters. BLM goes from white belt to black belt, with Dans included for super optimization triangulation lines or whatever they're called now. RDM is like if karate only went up to brown belt, the one before black. SMN right now is like if karate was to start at green and end at blue. And the suggestion I saw in the thread Ren linked seemed to vary from 'can we at least add the possibility for someone to reach blackbelt SMN complexity', 'we should make it so SMN starts at orange belt' (not ideal, just makes casuals have lower performance for zero gain for optimizers), and in one case, 'well SMN can only reach blue belt difficulty, so the solution is to take away RDM's brown belt'

shit I just did a hot wings I've become that which I despise