What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ty_taurus]

I should also note here - since we've all agreed insulting, caricatures, etc are bad...we do all agree those are bad, right? - that the idea of "If you don't want to spend ours and considerable time mastering extremely technical Jobs, you're just lazy" is kind of an insult, as would be "you just want an easy Job so you can be rewarded while being lazy". If I'm going to do my best to avoid insults and caricatures, that's a two way street...

Who said that?

It's kind of like a person in a wheelchair looking at some stairs and a person saying to them "If you want to get to the second floor bad enough, you'll force yourself to walk up the stairs". For some people it's not possible.

You seem to have this perspective that being able to be perfect is the entrance to the building, but that is completely off base. The entrance to the building is experiencing the MSQ as well as secondary storylines like alliance raid stories, the role quest stories, the normal raid stories, etc. And fortunately, FFXIV doesn't even have stairs. Every entryway is exclusively ramps because whether you have performed your job with the perfection of an angel or had to climb out of the trenches of a day 1 alliance raid massacre, you're still able to access the building. What you are describing is you see there's an obstacle course next door where some people are testing their athletic skills to complete the course, and some people are even pakouring around the obstacle course to reach the goal in an even flashier way. You feel that whether or not someone has the time or patience to learn parkour, there should be some magical device that allows you to parkour your way to the end of that obstacle course so that people who've never tried parkour can do it.

I think this stems from the difference between what you and Ty believe a well-designed job is supposed to be. You believe that a well-designed job is something that anyone can pick up and master by reading tooltips. Ty seems to believe that a well-designed job is something that gives someone room for improvement and cannot be immediately mastered. This fundamental disconnect is probably preventing you both from agreeing.

This is mostly a well-spoken explanation. But really, what makes a job well-designed in this particular game--a cooldown based MMORPG--is ensuring that the majority of actions available encourage the player to make active decisions with what to use and when. Most of your actions should have a similar amount of use in any given scenario, but you can still have room for a few more niche tools as well. But the problem is, White Mage or any other healer may have somewhere in the ballpark of 30 actions, sure, but of those actions, you largely just use around 5 with 1 in particular being used more than every other action on the hotbar combined. That is antithetical job design that goes against the entire basis of the combat system.