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.