Healer role design change?

[Shurrikhan]

Yes, which is also my point and why I'm consistently surprised how I can state something everyone agrees with but people want to argue about it. [EDIT: That is, people seem to love trying to "prove Ren wrong" even if it's something they agree with the overall concept of and where the minutia argument (a) doesn't prove me wrong - I can present arguments to counter the above, I just see it as pointless, and I'm trying to get better about not legitimizing the derailing and Ren bashing when there's an actual discussion to be had that isn't any of that; and (b) just gets lost in the weeds and derails the discussion away from "we all agree about X, what should be done about it?" into "I have a technical issue with Ren saying Y about X thing we all agree with, so instead of discussing solutions to X, I'm going to try to make him wrong about Y and fail at doing it because he is the white whale" or something. <_< ]

If agreement on particulars is coincidental to disagreement on the warrants themselves, then no, it's not an overall agreement.

And since you've frequently shifted goalposts surrounding or made conclusions based on conflations about particulars or chain logical steps beyond their purchase ('PLD changes were largely considered a net positive, so everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes, thus they must have hated DoTs on PLD, which implies that the SMN changes also were an unmitigated good') for instance, no shit, your minutia gets checked.



As for my overall stance on the relevant topic:

My personal preference is for a bit more melee movement requirements and constraints than are present currently, and slightly to faintly less caster movement requirements (in terms of how they affect in practice %uptime a couple thoughtful runs in) than are present currently, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with a Caster leveraging infrequently available spells or modifiers to nonetheless keep a high amount (or, %uptime) of actual casts, even in today's context. I do not consider that "shoe-horning" so much as simply additional room for skill-expression, which we already overly lack across most of the game.*

I much prefer we keep that room for skill expression, of casts on casters, melee being an actually limited range, etc., over further reducing all towards a lowest denominator of available optimization.



Of course, personally, my preference regarding something like BLM would be to make it slightly less reliant on Triplecast and Swiftcast, sure, but not by giving it numerous free instant-casts; instead, I'd simply decrease the relative cost of shorter AF strings slightly by siphoning a bit more potency towards pre-falloff Flare and later Despair and removing the 30% damage decrease on using Ice from AF3 or Fire from UI3. And, for the sake of leveling improvements and a more intuitive mechanic, I'd likely change most of the stat bonuses from their current awkward mess, wherein some effects are null until AF3/UI3, others maxed immediately, and none increase linearly (see that links above) to just 25% per stack.

But that the caster actually hard-casts... is totally fine. That it has some CDs discretely meant to help with that, so long as the kit isn't too thereby bloated (and I don't believe any case for trimming Triplecast as a "shoehorning" or "bloat" ability could be made as long as BLM's elemental pairings --F4<>B4, Flare<>Freeze, etc.-- remain on separate keys)... is likewise totally fine.



*Admittedly, room for skill expression is a nebulous topic, because the relative value of optimizations are zero-sum. The more the reward for always completing one's combo, the less there's a space for the potential reward of, say, clipping a combo early so that one can Chaos Thrust an add (that'd live for less than CT's 24 seconds, if all goes well) instantly upon its spawn. The larger the bonus in, say, Lance Mastery II (+100 potency on Move-5 of either combo), the less room there is to make decisions between where to end a combo (in that earlier hypothetical), but too little and there'd be no use case for Life Surge outside of Full Thrust. The larger the reward for hitting within raid buffs everything that can reasonably be banked for raid buffs, the less room there is for alternate functions of the skills used therein and the lower the relative value of optime optimization, positionals, or rotating correctly in any other respects. Etc., etc.

[Renathras]

Unironically, skill issue. You have, or had, an annoying habit of trying to shortcut people into agreeing with your conclusions once they agree with you on minutiae, so now everyone avoids agreeing with you on minutiae the same way a wolf won't step into a snare twice.

First, no.

The argument style you're referring to is when you build up from a set of axioms to a conclusion, checking to see if people agree with the steps along the way. If the steps logically dictate the conclusion, this is a pretty valid way to outline a problem/solution to get agreement. "We agree on X. We agree on Y. We agree on Z. X + Y + Z = A, therefore we should reasonably agree on A." Sometimes people don't like this because they actually hold incongruent beliefs vs the axioms they accept, other times they disagree with the link - in which case the proper solution there is to argue whether the link is valid, which is a discussion worth having.

It's not a shortcut or a cheat. If one believes, for example, that taxes are too high but also wants government programs that require those taxes, it's fair to point out to them that they should be willing to accept cuts to services in order to achieve the cuts to taxes they desire, or alternatively, to accept the higher taxes for those services they enjoy. And it's fair to them to suggest a workaround if they can think of one, such as taxing only segments of the population or cutting some services they don't enjoy to make up the shortfall, at which point it's fair to counter that by asking why those services and not the others or why tax those people and not others, and so on.

There's no cheat or fallacy there, some people just don't like it because when arguments are broken down into steps, it often lays bare glaring errors in logic that someone may have used to reach their conclusion.

But, in either case, I haven't had that "annoying" habit. If I lay out such an argument, it's generally to try and see what all points we actually agree on so I know where we can find further points of agreement. Some people say they hold a position they actually do not, but if you can drill down to what they actually do believe, then it allows actual compromise and progress.

I hope it's the first one. Trying to shoehorn a 'magical spellcaster healer' into an action RPG framework with constant movement is conceptually loathsome.

Thing is, FFXIV wasn't designed as an ARPG and doesn't work well as one. The netcode is pretty atrocious for it (just jump in a Frontline if you doubt that). Not only would such a change alienate the people who have been playing the game long enough they didn't sign up for that, it doesn't even work well anyway. Ultimately resulting in a situation that alienates many and satisfies few, even of they who advocate for it.

I agree it's conceptually loathsome, but you have the causality backwards:

FFXIV isn't trying to shoehorn a magical spellcaster healer into an action RPG framework with constant movement.

FFXIV is trying to shoehorn an action RPG framework with constant movement onto a traditional tab targeting framework, netcode and class design.

Thus the problem isn't with the spellcaster healers, since that was the design of the game. The problem is trying to upend that entire system and impose an ARPG framework on it that it cannot support and that hasn't been the identity of the game.

Basically, more incoming damage coupled with less predictability. The sooner SE drop the weird esports mentality and stop trying to design both fights and jobs to be 'logs friendly' the better. I genuinely think it's sterilised the enjoyment out of Savage at this point.

Hear hear.

If agreement on particulars is coincidental to disagreement on the warrants themselves, then no, it's not an overall agreement.

Okay, I'm done taking your troll bait:

Do you or do you not agree that encounter design and healer kits seem to not be designed to work with one another?

If you disagree, you're not disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with most of the people posting in this thread, including Semi who brought the point up in the first place specifically regarding WHM. It's not a you vs me thing, which you seem to love. It's a you vs everyone else thing. I'm not going to be your punching bag because you disagree with everyone else and are using me as your proxy to beat on because you enjoy beating on me, and/or you want to use me as a punching bag even when you agree with me on the basic point. So let's see if you agree with me and everyone else, or if you're the island here. The question is there and it's a simple question to answer, restated so you can't miss it:

Do you or do you not agree that encounter design and healer kits seem to not be designed to work with one another?

And since you've frequently...

HAVE.
NOT.

And I'm not going to engage with people openly engaging in such bad faith. Two of you now. "Well, you did this thing (we're going to accuse you of even though you don't have a frequent habit of doing it, actually), so we can defend attacking you because we felt like it even though you're acting in good faith and trying to have a serious discussion on a topic that everyone kind of agrees on overall." No, not today.

If someone is engaging you in good faith, you should do the same, even if they HAD a history of bad faith. I actually do not, and it's been discussed to death that the cases people perceived that was due to them assuming things about what I was saying rather than asking to get clarification, and often taking part in dogpiles and stupid cliquish vendettas against people (me specifically) regardless of the topic, good faith, good will on my part, or anything that I do or have done other than whatever initially alienated you, which was a misconception on your part in most cases.

Case.
In.
Point:

"('PLD changes were largely considered a net positive, so everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes, thus they must have hated DoTs on PLD, which implies that the SMN changes also were an unmitigated good')"???

What?

I have NEVER to my awareness said "everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes". PROVE IT. Quote a post of mine where I said that. Because there isn't one and we both know it. You literally made that up. I have, since the changes in 6.3, described the response as "mixed". And even if I hadn't, I can't think of a time I've EVER said of ANY change that "everyone must surely like ever part of" it. Even changes that I like and think most people do, I'm quick to acknowledge not everyone likes the same things and it isn't universal. Indeed, I'm the most frequent poster HERE to say such things, and almost always the first to bring up that there is no universality. I even avoid using the term majority, even when I'm pretty sure there is one and what data we have backs up that there is one, instead opting for "some/many" instead of "most/majority". And where - again PROVE IT with a quote - did I say everyone hated DoTs on PLD and that implies SMN changes were an unmitigated good?

I want a QUOTE, because you made that BS up wholesale.

Not one person here will call you on it, mind you, but we all know it's a lie. Considering how often I hedge what I say and how even when I was invoking majority, I was still quick to point out there was dissent proves that's a lie, but the onus is on you to prove it's true.

QUOTE, please.

Oh, you don't have one?

Of course you don't: Because you made it up.

You either misinterpreted something, misremember something, or flat out made something up, and then used this to justify a completely separate argument and your attacks on someone, when your attacks are based on something that never even happened in the first place.

People tell me just to stop engaging with you guys when you do it. No one ever calls you out, so I don't expect anyone to this time. But I'm starting to take the advice of those like PetLalas to just not engage with you bad faith people.

You can answer the question above, or you can not. That's up to you.

If you don't, it proves my point.

If you do, then we can get back on topic, which is what we should be doing anyway.

If you just want to keep attacking me irrationally and in bad faith, then I'm not going to be a party to that childish vendetta.

[Shurrikhan]

There's no cheat or fallacy there, some people just don't like it because when arguments are broken down into steps, it often lays bare glaring errors in logic that someone may have used to reach their conclusion.

The problem is when you frame things into false ultimatums in order to try to force out your next "logical step" towards a conclusion you clearly started from.

Belabor transitive properties all you like; when those steps individually rely on reductivism or conflations, their conclusions are not going to be soundly arrived at.

Do you or do you not agree that encounter design and healer kits seem to not be designed to work with one another?

Yes.

WHICH IS NOT, HOWEVER, despite whatever you may imply, AGREEMENT THAT... fight design needs to have its mobility requirements significantly reduced (or even any amount greater than between 'not at all' and 'slightly'). I am just fine with casters and melee both having a deeper fight-specific learning curve for their movement/uptime optimization required, so long as they're compensated accordingly, and I'm just fine with movement optimizations increasing with expansions, provided we just as much toolage as we need to perform them.

I do not want to see those layers of optimization removed from jobs -- neither by homogenizing/fool-proofing their kits in regard to uptime management nor by providing significantly less challenge around which to interact in any given fight; it is perfectly fine for a level span that provides additional mobility tools to also carry additional mobility requirements. Moreover, I don't see how one could call Endwalker a sudden change into "an ARPG" except in obvious hyperbole.


Our agreement goes as far as "The current situation is not good." Beyond that incredibly nebulous point, though, we have largely disagreed:

• on the extent to which it is "not good",
• on all but one reason for why it's "not good", and
• on all but one part of reasonable solutions for the problem.

And those components are important. That we would, for instance, agree that a problem (of some extent, for some reason), on the other hand, is barely a starting point. So just, please, do not pretend that my simply agreeing that "A exists" necessitates your B, C, and D. It doesn't.

[Renathras]

The problem is...

/ignore

[EDIT: I don't mean this to be rude, but again, engaging with this is counterproductive, derailing, and legitimizes you doing it, and I don't intend to legitimize your personal attacks based on made up events. I've just decided it's better not to engage after pointing out once that it's wrong.]

Yes.

WHICH IS NOT, HOWEVER, despite whatever you may imply, AGREEMENT THAT... fight design needs to have its mobility requirements significantly reduced (or even any amount greater than between 'not at all' and 'slightly').

And?

I didn't say it was.

I, myself, outlined three possible solutions that are all apparent as possibilities - change fight design, change kit design, change both - and that there are probably other possibilities.

You're doing it again - insisting that I'm saying something that I'm not saying. Maybe if you did that less, you'd be less worked up when replying to me. Stop inventing things to be angry about. I literally said there were AT LEAST three (two and a hybrid) possible solutions, AND that there were other solutions likely as well, just the 2+1 were the most apparent TO ME PERSONALLY. By saying this, there is no "pretend...that "A exists" necessitates..." when I openly said there are other possibilities.

Agreement that fight design and kits are disjointed is just that and no more.

Again, don't invent things to be angry about.

You're one of those people that invents things in my posts to be angry about (I doubt you can provide the quote I asked for; it was in an edit, but I was called away until just now, so apologies for the late edit on that, didn't see this post when I submitted it) and that festers in your mind, justifying your anger when in reality, it's not justified at all since it's based on something that never happened.

So just, please, try to stop doing that.

.

EDIT2:

The 'I'm out, but not really' any% speedrun

You're welcome to step in any time. Just keeping the soapbox warm for you. You have the floor. (Well, the offer was to Semi, but have at it, Roe). Say something contributing to the discussion, not the personal attacks or dogpile, is my only request here.

[Aravell]

Case.
In.
Point:

"('PLD changes were largely considered a net positive, so everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes, thus they must have hated DoTs on PLD, which implies that the SMN changes also were an unmitigated good')"???

What?

I have NEVER to my awareness said "everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes".

Ren says no one will defend him here, but I don't think I've ever seen him conflate all of those points together to form the conclusion you pointed out. He has said he prefers the new PLD, he has said he dislikes DoTs and he has said he likes the new SMN. But I don't think I've ever seen him add all this together and say new SMN is unmitigated good.

As for the topic, I'd say both fight design and job kits need some changing. The argument that fight design doesn't fit the job kits is partially flawed, if you want fights designed in such a way that uses the full kit that we have, you'd have to do some serious fight redesigning because we have way too much redundancies in the current kit. Although, purely just changing the kit will also not change that healers can be dropped in higher organised groups.

My opinion is that they need to change both. Cut out the redundancies in our kit, add more options to support the party or debuff the enemy. Also change fight design, bring back random targetted damage, bring back crit autos, give healers a reason to exist again, make it so tanks and DPS cannot keep up with the incoming damage.

[ASkellington]

My opinion is that they need to change both. Cut out the redundancies in our kit, add more options to support the party or debuff the enemy. Also change fight design, bring back random targetted damage, bring back crit autos, give healers a reason to exist again, make it so tanks and DPS cannot keep up with the incoming damage.

Oh they certainly need to change both the problem is the dev team is so stubborn and against it for no reason.

I can quite literally pull up Bosses in EW that are perfect for what healers and tanks are asking for - instances where you can't always use the same CD because things come too fast and too often. Bosses that I praise the design for and wish the whole damn expansion has but for every one good designed boss, even if it doesn't hit that hard for vets, they shoe horn 7+ lack luster PoS.

Hell in Shb I point out the Gulg and Amaurot required story dungeons that a person can run with the AI if they can't be bothered to do so with players should have been the base line of Shb 80 dungeons and then we got Hero's Gauntlet which was trash on arrival and good for nothing but visuals.

And that's not even getting into redundant parts of a Healer kit that they think we need oh so badly. If we need 4 oGCDs that basically do the same thing and can cycle through, please do explain to me what the hells our GCD heals are for? Aren't they supposed to be something we fall back on? Unless my tank is bad or a DRK you can bet your arse I barely touch Benefic 2 (forget 1 lol and trait upgrade it). I use ASPECTED Benefic before I touch that.

[Aravell]

Oh they certainly need to change both the problem is the dev team is so stubborn and against it for no reason.

They gave the reasons that they're opposed to changing anything, it's just a very stupid reason. The main problem right now is that they're opposing both suggestions with the same reasoning.

- They refuse to add more complexity to healer gameplay because they don't want to stress out the new healers.
- They refuse to add higher healing requirements to encounters so we have to use our full kit because they don't want to stress out the new healers.

So what's left? The healer role is just going to decay and bleed out veterans until they actually move forward in either direction.

[ForsakenRoe]

they don't want to stress out the new healers.

Then they need to accept that, at a certain point, the 'new healer' is not new to healing anymore, preferably by gradually increasing the healing requirements as the story goes on. Everyone always gushes about how it 'looks like more healing is needed' when a Media Tour goes on. I can still close my eyes and remember the first pull of Bardam's Mettle when SB was current. Inferno, I think it's name was, the last boss of Castrum Abania, had a Bleed-TB which you'd definitely want to Esuna or powerheal through, because a crit autoattack combined with a bleed tick, on one of those 'I'm gonna drop tankstance' tanks, could do massive damage. More recently, Tower of Zot looked like a good step up at first, the final boss was chaotic and a lot of AOE healing was used because we weren't prepared for it.

But that's where the problem lies, once you ARE prepared for something it's suddenly so much easier. Knowing the fight removes so much of the healing required, and higher ILVL removes even more. Because you increase your effective 'don't need to heal' power in two ways, your heals heal for more (so you cast less heals when you do), and defense stat means you take less damage in the first place (which turns 'this needs a regen' into 'this is fine with just a Benison'

If a healer has got WHM to 85 and is in Vanaspati, they're not 'new to healing' anymore, so SE can afford to make things a little more challenging. If they ARE still new to healing at that point (ie they bought a boost), that's on the player for boosting. I don't think it's good design to make the difficulty curve be based on the assumption that the healer playerbase are all boostybois. It'd go some way to explaining why healer design is the way it is, if that WAS the design principle they're following though. But yeh, look at like, any other game. World 8 in SMB1 has harder platforming because it's assumed that the player has learned by that point how to play the game better than when they first started in World 1. The fact that a player can skip to world 8 in less than 10 minutes via WarpZones is not a factor in the design of World 8's challenge.

..But of course, SE can't do any of that, because some people wouldn't be able to keep up for various reasons, so instead the path I suggest is to make the damage side of healing have more nuance. You can't keep up with healing, that's fine. Focus on healing, and drop damage. If anyone complains about your damage being low on a healer, you can calmly explain that you were focused on keeping the team alive. And then BL them, and report them for using 3rd party tools to parse damage. If you CAN keep up with the healing, you can throw more and more parts of the damage 'rotation' into the fight. At first you just start out with sparing one GCD to put up your DOT, maybe. Then a couple of Glare/Broil/the other ones here and there. And then, since we're apparently not getting any extra healing requirements in this assumption, you get to the point where we are now: clearing the dungeon run with zero GCD heals used. It can be satisfying in it's own way to get to that point, and I'm sure a lot of players would love it (assuming they had an actual rotation as the 'reward' for their improving), as it stands the satisfaction for me is a lot lower because I know my reward is Dosis spam and lots of it

[Aravell]

Then they need to accept that, at a certain point, the 'new healer' is not new to healing anymore, preferably by gradually increasing the healing requirements as the story goes on.

The main problem is that SE is immensely stubborn. They've been presented 2 solutions by EN and JP.

EN wants more complexity in the damage kit, more to do in the downtime. It wouldn't hurt anyone if they designed the dps checks to be more akin to HW where healer dps is less emphasised if they go with a more complex kit, but if they go with the SB style of kit, that's also way better than what we have right now.

JP wants more to heal, they want to use their entire kit to the fullest and feel like an actual healer. But SE doesn't want to give them that either, they just add more and more mitigation checks instead of healing checks to the point that AST absolutely would be obsolete if they didn't have party buffs.

I think SE also designs regular content in such a way that any regular Medica spammer can clear it, this is not that great as there is no difficulty curve, but it's a bigger problem because it's also affecting extremes and savage fights. So many fights where bosses do nothing but cast, some bosses can go several seconds doing absolutely no damage. They've gotten a bit better with this in Anabaseios, but you can still see it in some parts (like Kokytos spitting out a soul, teleporting to the center, then casting Ravening, that's quite a long time of absolutely nothing happening).

In the end, SE really needs to pick a road, the current design is not making many happy. I'm sure some people will say that there's happy healers, so I'll say that, yes, there absolutely are people happy with healers right now, but we also know that people who leave the healer role aren't coming back as long as it stays the way that it is.

[vetch]

There's no cheat or fallacy there, some people just don't like it because when arguments are broken down into steps, it often lays bare glaring errors in logic that someone may have used to reach their conclusion.

But, in either case, I haven't had that "annoying" habit. If I lay out such an argument, it's generally to try and see what all points we actually agree on so I know where we can find further points of agreement. Some people say they hold a position they actually do not, but if you can drill down to what they actually do believe, then it allows actual compromise and progress.

I don't agree that this is what you're doing. I believe that you think it's what you're doing, that it's a worthy standard you're trying to live up to, but for the moment, I stand by my impression that you're skipping conversational steps without noticing, or that you're misidentifying the character of discussions in some other fundamental way that causes your method to misfire. If I'm wrong, just keep being yourself and I'll notice over time.

That said, I want to add an observation that this argument style wouldn't make you well-liked even if you were employing it with perfect form. People having ordinary conversations don't like being bullied into debates. Hell, sometimes they don't even like being forced to stake out a position before they're ready to. It's inherently tiresome, which is not a word you want applied to your conversational style if you're looking to have nice chats. The result of doing it anyway is precisely as you see -- either people ghost you or they embrace the junior debate club flavor you bring to the conversation and start picking apart your arguments like they're going to score points doing it.

Normal people who haven't consented to debate are better engaged, befriended, and convinced with smaller comments, repeated over time, regardless of any logical fallacies contained therein. This is a normal facet of human, non-debate interaction. If you want to pick apart someone's logical lacunae (because you just can't help yourself from doing so) while remaining well-liked enough that people don't avoid you on sight, then you have to exercise either a whole lot more tact and warmth that you currently do, or a whole lot less and just start butting heads openly.

I agree it's conceptually loathsome, but you have the causality backwards: FFXIV isn't trying to shoehorn a magical spellcaster healer into an action RPG framework with constant movement. FFXIV is trying to shoehorn an action RPG framework with constant movement onto a traditional tab targeting framework, netcode and class design.

I didn't mention any causality and I wasn't looking to have that particular conversation. But sticking to the point, note that you can draw a straight line through CBU3's recent offerings that points to them continuing down this ill-advised road of trying to turn FF14 into a clunky ARPG MMO, which means that healer kits will be chopped and shaped to fit, regardless of what predates what.

And that will make me very sad.

And I'm not going to engage with people openly engaging in such bad faith. Two of you now. "Well, you did this thing (we're going to accuse you of even though you don't have a frequent habit of doing it, actually), so we can defend attacking you because we felt like it even though you're acting in good faith and trying to have a serious discussion on a topic that everyone kind of agrees on overall." No, not today.

And there it is. The problem plaguing modern discussion of any topic, no matter how inconsequential: if someone doesn't find my argument well-formed and convincing, it must be that they're either trolling, or a bad-faith actor, or simply stupid, or some other problem inherent to them. It can't be that my arguments aren't as good and efficacious as I think they are, or that they're just plain mistaken about some stuff in an honest, understandable way. Therefore, the proper response is to publicly pathologize them, so everyone knows it's their problem and that they're a toxic element who is unwilling to engage with my good arguments.

If someone is engaging you in good faith, you should do the same, even if they HAD a history of bad faith.

I, and everyone else on every internet discussion forum that exists or ever will exist, reserve the right to stop talking and refuse engagement with someone who becomes annoying and pushy, regardless of whether they do so in good faith. As should you.