For those who main/semi-main a DPS (e.g. DNC, RDM) but like Healers...

[Renathras]

...

Whether intended or not, the first part of your post sounds very...aristocratic? Technocratic? "It doesn't matter if this affects other people and they don't like it, they're ignorant children who just don't know any better."

But be that as it may, my point in presenting the quotes was to show that this forum - for whatever reason you want to try to justify it as - is/has been an echo chamber on these issues, and has not been more accommodating to different ideas, which was Sebezy's argument.

Something that I need to state here: When someone presents an argument, and someone counters THAT argument, bringing up a different argument and presenting it as not countered/debunked isn't really fair. I didn't present those quotes to debunk the argument that people of certain calibers, experience, or whatever else think a certain way. That wasn't the discussion. The discussion was whether this place seemed to have a narrow set of represented/accepted views and whether Reddit was more or less accepting of diverse views.

I think I made the case pretty clearly that this place DOES have a narrow set of represented/accepted views, and that the mainsub in Reddit is more accepting of diverse views, which was debunking that argument.

If you want to engage in arguments as to WHY that might be, we can, but that's a different argument. And as I say, sounds rather aristocratic/technocratic, which I don't tend to find a good thing, personally.

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As to the likes in the above post:

As I said, people here dislike me since I'm dogged about representing a different viewpoint, and so "Attack Ren" is what gets likes. People have argued for months that isn't true (and there have been other cases I've pointed to that suggest it is), but that's the most stark example yet. So next time someone talks about which posts have likes and which don't, as if that's relevant to good or bad ideas, I will point again to this as the reason likes are a meaningless metric, as people are willing to like a post that presents the same idea I have as long as the poster attacked me before saying it.

I thought that idea to keep WHM same and make others interesting is somewhat popular, but that might be general consensus from somewhere else.

I think that's the general consensus most everywhere else that isn't here. Or, at least, that people are accepting of it.

Isn't the issue with SMN/RDM not that SMN is easier so much as that RDM does LESS damage? It's not that SMN does the same damage for less work, it's that SMN is actually an outright DPS gain over RDM. We see a similar situation with the Tanks. While WAR was doing less damage than DRK and GNB, people didn't really care (people grumbled, but it wasn't destroying the meta) and GNB was still the most played with DRK represented pretty well. With the last patch where PLD and WAR got buffed (PLD is still on the weaker end), WAR now not only is easier to play, it also has the superior personal and party mitigation and healing suite (did Shake It Off really need a HoT in addition to its other effects on the Job that already has Nascent/Bloodwhetting?), but it ALSO has on many fights the higher damage. There's literally no reason to take a DRK over a WAR unless you just like it's aesthetics as it's doing less damage, harder to play, and doesn't have a better mitigation or HEALING kit than WAR does, and PLD is likewise weaker. So we've seen WAR's use statistics explode.

So the SMN/RDM issue is less that SMN does the same damage as RDM as it is that SMN does MORE damage than RDM.

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I do think the difference between "leave WHM the same" and "completely rework SMN" is the latter was pulling the rug out from under people. A lot of people liked old SMN and not only did they lose that with new SMN, not only was the Job they liked changed, there was no alternative. There was no Caster introduced that they could even swap to for that playstyle.

On the other hand, what we're talking about here is far more likely to alienate mains of OTHER Healer Jobs who like their simple kits being robbed of them, but if WHM stays the same, people who like it right now won't be alienated, and it'll be a "port in the storm" for people that like the other Healers' current simple playstyle. They might have to level/swap Jobs, but at least they have that option, which SMN did not.

If anything, the SMN change highlights, imo, the reason we need to leave AT LEAST one Healer alone.

I agree with your assessment there on why it makes sense to leave WHM alone and why SE probably would do so. I think the important thing is that the healers be made distinct. Leaving one alone is fine as long as the other three are distinct from it. As I often say, the problem right now is that they're all the same simple, making them all the same complex wouldn't improve the situation, they'd just be homogenized a different way. Better to make them all different in that respect, so that everyone has at least one they like.

And when people bring up aesthetics, I point out that's always going to be true. Some people love BLM's looks but want a FF single-player game version of it, like Vivi from FF9 who just casts their one most powerful spell (or an elemental weakness to the enemy type) over and over then uses Osmose when they get low on MP. But people who enjoy that playstyle won't get it with BLM here. At the end of the day, you can't have every aesthetic/Job to yourself, no one can, and no one should. We each have to decide which we like better, the aesthetic or the playstyle, and as much as possible, the Devs can try to match aesthetic to playstyle. Like SGE is this big brain hyper-smart Greek doctor mixed with Gundam pilot to control their nouliths, so them being a complex Job speaks to that fantasy, while WAR also really appeals to the people that play it because the people that find "unga bunga" appealing are going to find a Job that plays "unga bunga" appealing as well. The match is strong enough WAR players seem to be very satisfied with it.

...but there will be some people whose preferred aesthetic and playstyle don't match up, but that's unfortunately life. Even if we made all the Jobs identical for that person so they could have their pick of aesthetic, that would upset everyone else who doesn't like that. And this is generally accepted in most games. If you play D&D and want to be a character that wears plate armor, casts powerful offensive magics, has the strongest healing spells in the game, can hide in shadows, and can detect and disarm traps, while also pelting enemies with your powerful composite longbow...well, that option isn't there. You can get something close by mixing multi-classes or getting to stupidly high levels where you can abuse some traits (like Rogue "Use Any Item"), but for the most part, you have to pick the parts that you like best. Maybe you choose to go with plate and healing spells and forego the rest with Priest, maybe you give up on the offensive spells and trap detection and try to keep the rest with Ranger, maybe you decide to dual class Fighter into Cleric or Thief into Mage, or maybe you go with the Fighter/Mage/Thief tripleclas Swiss Army Knife. But no matter what you do, you're still going to have to give some things up and decide which parts of aesthetic and gameplay are most important to you. We all do it, and that's just the way it is with games that don't just have an open ended skill system.

But well, I don't really want to read 10s of pages of posts to find out whether mine and yours idea is popular or not. But I'll stand by it (unless someone gives me some insight why it's bad idea, of course), even though I understand the risk of it being implemented the same way SMN was. My reasoning is that WHM is simply most favorite job for casuals, so I think that if SE actually did some drastic changes to healers, WHM is last job they would drastically change, especially if it meant making it more difficult. I myself would love if all 4 healers were very distinct, had a lot of space for skill expressions, and had better gameplay than 12111111, but I really think that keeping one simple job for casuals is much more realistic scenario that SE might consider and even implement. They do not want to alienate casuals which are playing WHM because of it's simplicity, it's simple as that.

Irrelevant to healers:

You mean the one where Titanmen doctored a quote from me to mislead people, cutting out the part where I said that it was doable on spells but had a very small frame to do it in and people decided to ignore that? Most of the people attacking me for that were attacking me from other threads and just saw that as something they could pounce on, not a legitimate disagreement. That seems to happen a lot around here. As far as neutral tone and escalations, I don't have quotes from other people in my signature to belittle or mock them.

I'm not always right, but I'm also not always wrong when people attack me. I don't remember everything in the post, but there were several posts in there where I WAS saying things correct and people didn't care. Because whether the information was correct or not wasn't relevant to them. Attacking me was what they cared about and wanted to do. It's kind of like the people there who will attack Renault for harassment and bullying but refuse to attack Titanmen for harassment and bullying. What that says to me is opposition to harassment and bullying isn't something they actually care about - if they did, they'd call out both - instead, it's just a thing they can use to attack the one guy they don't like while not attacking the guy they like for the same crime.

And one more thing is that a lot of times, people like reading into my posts things that aren't there. It's happened here before, and it happened in that same thread you mentioned. Someone even later seems to have realized it when I said "Why didn't you ask me to clarify instead of assuming the worst?"

Some people's opposition to me is fair, and I tend to actually respect that. Many are not. It doesn't "seem" like everyone's against you in the cases where everyone is, in fact, against you. /shrug

But this is irrelevant to all this discussion and neither here nor there. I moved on, and if other people can't, then there's nothing I can do to help that along anyway. Like your sig, for example.

I was actually curious about it, so I went back and rewatched the video in question (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbWubxOTUWU) and... yeh, there's a lot of sarcasm and cynical tone.

Thanks for the thread, will look it over.

As to the video: The guy is snarky, as that's his style, but he says twice in it this general suggestion, so it doesn't seem he was being sarcastic in it. He says it in the middle of the video and then again at the end. Around 6:15 ("You know what would be surprising though? I don't even want to remove the one DPS button playstyle. Let one healer have this stupid ass rotation - probably White Mage - that way people don't lose their unga bunga role. Embrace some uniqueness where this game allows you to.") and then at the end. And in both places he says his reason for being frustrated with SGE is how over-safe it played it. "I just don't want every single healer to feel exactly the same at the core", which is my own position as well.

He sounds snarky, but not disingenuous when he says it both times.

And, as we've discussed here before, he's actually wrong on that one thing - that encounter design has always been the way it is now. Boss autos with possible crits, random targeted damage, few oGCD heals, etc.

I would go further & say "If you want beginner/casual friendly healer go play CNJ" lol, because they do have what it takes for those MSQ encounters, dungeons, and trials! (obviously random DF groups wouldn't take that kindly, but you get the idea)

CNJ isn't a full Job. You literally cannot que for some content on it.

This is like saying "If you want a complex healer, go play BLU". Sure, that's AN answer, but is it a GOOD answer when you can't do basically any content on it? Would you accept that as the solution for your desired type of healer? For the Devs to tell you you can get that on BLU as it is right now?

Besides, we even had this same discussion once before...

Would that take more work than just giving up on that job preemptively for some sort of misguided political bargaining chip for a nebulously defined group that can't or won't speak for itself?

I mean, they do speak for themselves. I speak for me, others in places like Reddit that I quoted are speaking for themselves as well. You just dismissed their views and statements. You can't call a person a mute when they're speaking a ton and you're just choosing not to listen because you don't think their words deserve being listened to.

Oh, as for the DoTs - I know some of you love the idea of putting more damage into the DoT and less the nuke. Sebezy makes this argument intelligently and cogently. Using math, she's shown that it would be more forgiving to casual players to have more damgae in their DoT......
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...if they have decent DoT upkeep. If you have 100% DoT upkeep, then having more damage on your DoT sounds great for casual healers, since it means they can devote more GCDs to healing with less damage loss. Fantastic idea, right?

I did a DF P9N two days ago. The other healer did not use her DoT.

...no no, not "let it drop off". Not "occasionally forgot about it in a heated moment for a minute or something".

No. Didn't use it. At all. As in, the debuff NEVER appeared under the boss health bar.

But she had pretty solid Glare uptime and kept her GCD rolling as far as I could tell between Glare, Medica 2, Cure 2 spot healing, and so on. Kept Lucid rolling pretty well, and used Lilies and Misery.

The only thing she didn't use, like at all, was Dia. Meaning this proposed change that's supposed to help casuals would actually have hurt that casual. Something I don't think skilled players understand is how difficult it is for casuals to upkeep DoTs. I've mentioned it a lot, but for some reason, it's like talking to a brick wall. (I tend to have good, but not perfect, DoT upkeep because I use my 1 min CDs to keep alignment, Lucid on WHM and Aetherflow on SCH [since it's where I often look at my Aetherflow and Chain buttons since they're right next to each other and notice when they're at 30 second increments), but I struggle with that some too when things get hectic or even just not being able to see the debuff fall off the boss (as I've said many times, the native UI which I and other casual players use does not inform you in any noticeable way when your DoT falls off, and there's no way to have the boss healthbar show all buffs so you can see other important stuff on it from party members while having the Focus bar show only your own - at least, not that I've found; not that that would be a perfect solution, but it might help some......though casuals often don't use focus target, either, first time I did was in the Solus fight so I could keep track of his spells, and then I realized how amazingly useful this tool was.)

Anyway, point is, I don't think a lot of skilled players are understanding how casuals play, so they don't understand why their solution/compromise proposals don't appeal to said casuals, and might actually make things worse for them, not better. Until that understanding is reached, it may make compromise difficult, while leaving the people on the skilled side TRYING to compromise very confused as to why their proposals keep being rejected.)

And as to your "Who benefits?" question:

Casual healers do.

I don't understand how this is hard to understand, but making Jobs more complex is going to hurt the people already not inclined towards complexity. Propsals for making WHM more complex do not make GCD heals less punishing. The only thing that would outright do that would be making the GCD heals contribute to Misery, an idea you oppose (I get why you oppose it, your reasons aren't invalid, I'm just pointing out that you do oppose the one thing that would be most casual friendly to do). On the other hand, giving it a more involved damage rotation is going to hurt casual players since it means breaking out of it to cast GCD heals, the comfy fallback of the casual, is more punishing, not less. That the damage comes from 5-10 buttons instead of 3-5 doesn't make it more friendly unless those buttons do damage even when not pressed or the Job is given mechanics to increase their damage when they engage with their GCD heals.

I'm not sure how this is difficult to understand.

The people helped by the change are the people bored right now, not the people who are not.

[ty_taurus]

NJ isn't a full Job. You literally cannot que for some content on it.

This is like complaining that a room is too dark to be used as a guest room because the lights are off. Have you tried turning them on?

I don't actually think anything useful will ever be done with the classes, nor do I think that's the smartest or best solution. The entire argument originally was to try find some way to compromise with you who is entirely unwilling to compromise an inch for the sake of conversation. But saying that Conjurer or any other class "Cannot" be used is literally stupid. All you do as the dev is assign the rest of White Mage's actions to Conjurer except for any DPS buttons they would otherwise add, swap those actions for traits that substitute those actions with added flat potency on your filler, and flip on the switches that are flipped off. Naturally, I have no experience with FFXIV's engine, so actually making that change myself would require learning that engine, but doing the equivalent in something like Unity or Unreal is something I could probably knock out in an hour mechanically. I'd probably spend more time mathing out how to make Conjurer's damage values viable. But it would take very little time to make it functionally identical to any other job.

If the dev team wanted to do it they can do it far more easily than adding an entire new job. They won't because they feel no need. They aren't in the same position of wanting healers to be healthy, well-designed jobs for their game and aren't trying to bargain with a forum white knight for some peace and quiet. But if they felt the desire to make jobs more interesting, offer more rewarding gameplay, and have a stronger appeal to more skilled players, yet provide easy-access entry points for beginners, reworking the classes to be beginner friendly, viable choices even in Savage (even if not meta choices), it's one of the fastest and most economical ways to do so. The classes were even originally intended to be interchangeable with jobs, not just incomplete stepping stones. Jobs only had a few actions the class didn't have, and classes had access to every cross class option. The problem was there weren't enough actually usable cross class actions for any given class to use that weren't also available to that class' respective job.

[Renathras]

This is like complaining that a room is too dark to be used as a guest room because the lights are off. Have you tried turning them on?

I'm not even sure what you mean by this other than "How about if SE allows Classes to be viable in all content?"; which I'd find interesting, but insanely unlikely considering they haven't added a new one since ROG and they were only debatably useful in specific casts (MRD, mostly) in ARR, and even then were largely relics of 1.0 when there weren't Jobs and they didn't even plan on adding Jobs. Besides, at that point we'd open up the floodgates; "Why isn't GLD a fully capable class like CNJ?", "Why can't I take THM into high end content?", and so on. They COULD do it, but that would be a far bigger rework than just adding a new Job at this point since it would need to be done for every Class or the whole system wouldn't even make sense at that point.

I don't actually think anything useful will ever be done with the classes,

Agreed. And that was my point as well.

The entire argument originally was to try find some way to compromise with you who is entirely unwilling to compromise an inch for the sake of conversation.

Ahem:

My initial position: Don't change any of the healers/don't make them more complex.
My second proposal: How about we change 2 to more complex and keep 2? Works with the Pure/Barrier split.
My third proposal: Okay, how about we just leave 1 the same? WHM makes the most sense.
My fourth proposal: Okay, how about SGE as the 1 we leave the same? There's a decent argument for that.
My fifth proposal: Okay, how about we leave 1 the same, and you can pick it, even the one I like the least, AST?
My sixth proposal: Okay, so I get nothing? You won't leave me even one? Okay, how about we add a new healer to be near one we already have (I suggested Druid vs White Mage with Druid being the complex elementalist dps rotation), where it can be a "complex version" and the 1 can remain unchanged as the simple one and you get all 4 of the rest and IN EFFECT also get a complex version of the one we don't change?
My seventh propsal: Okay, so you want all the existing healers (aesthetics was the argument at the time, somehow not satisfied with Druid, even though that's what people are proposing for their WHM change suggestions... <_<), so how about we give you all 4 we have and make the added/new one the simple one, even though that makes the least logical sense?
My seventh proposal: Okay, so you really want NONE to be where I can enjoy them? Alright...so here's a proposal for SCH, already arguably the most complex, to get a LITTLE more complex but MOSTLY stay the same, and you get all the rest. How's that?

VS:

Your initial position: All the healers must change to be more complex. They need something to do during downtime. They need complex DPS rotations.
Your second (final up until now) position after a lot of debates/discussions: Okay, so some people don't like doing damage. How about all healers must change to be more complex. They need something to do during down time. 3 get complex DPS rotations and 1 gets a complex buffing rotation.

...and that's also been your FINAL position. Until the post above where you suggest "White Mage Classic", your position has been unyielding across, what, a year and a half of us having these back and forths?

...right. So now that we're clear I'm not the one "unwilling to compromise an inch for the sake of conversation". Hell, I DID compromise 3 inches for the very sake of conversation, remember? Here: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...e-Proposal-SCH

Did you forget that time I compromised several inches entirely for the sake of conversation? And that I was literally the ONLY one compromising at all?

(Also, this comes across as just another version of "Let's have White Mage Classic" - though if you read the post I just quoted from above, I'm not opposed to that idea entirely. Hell, IT WAS ORIGINALLY MY IDEA lest your forget: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6238083

Remember? Where we had that big fallout because you were insisting it needed to be a Class and didn't read my posts? And you eventually admitted you didn't read my posts, but used the excuse of me insulting you as a reason for you not to apologize?
...I'm not intending to rehash THAT fiasco of a "discussion" other than to point out I literally proposed this before, that we add Druid as a branching Job from WHM just like how SCH/SMN both branch from ACN, and have Druid work as the simple WHM, or alternatively, WHM as the simple one and Druid the more complex nature one. (This also goes back to your unwillingness to allow a Job/aesthetic to be simple UNLESS there's an identical complex one, but you are NOT willing to share that across all the Jobs, as noted in your latest post here: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6310132 , which kind of reeks of a "As long as I have mine, I don't care; I'm only willing to share if I still get it AND OTHER THINGS TOO and you get only the breadcrumbs I give you to pacify you", which is...I've before used the word selfish, because that's what it is, but I know that offends you, I just don't know what other word to use, since it's not any positive word I can think of. A compromise that is "I get everything I want and you get only the smallest thing you want while I still get that, too, you just get a lesser copy" is effectively what it is.)

But I'm the "inflexible" one. Right... <_<

As to it being "stupid": Yeah, the Devs can program and flip flags and all that. But if they made one and only one Class viable in all content (CNJ) and no others, that would seem like a really nonsensical system. "Yeah, so classes are baby Jobs that you promote out of. You don't use them in end-game content. Oh, except this one. It's used in end-game content. It's used as a baby there, but it can be used there. But none of the others. Why not? Because we were too lazy to add another Job and we were also too lazy to make all the other Classes viable."

Imagine you're a new player and you're told Classes aren't viable. But then you have this one exception. So this new player hears that Classes (CNJ) are viable. Then goes into an end game raid on GLD and gets destroyed and berated and quits the game in frustration because they don't understand what happened.

It makes way more sense, given what's established and how the game has worked since 3.0 (adding new Jobs and no new Classes) to just make it a full Job. The alternatives of making all Classes viable OR only one (CNJ) just don't make sense, and seem more like you want all players to have some psychological clue that "the baby healer isn't a real Job" or something. There's just no logical reason to do what you propose and it would be more work than just adding a new Job.

If the dev team wanted to do it they can do it far more easily than adding an entire new job.

No. It would not be "far more easily" because, again, they'd have to rework all Classes to be viable OR have a wonky system of only one Class being viable in a system that otherwise has only Jobs and where Classes, for all practical applications, do not exist. There is no world where that's "more easily" than just adding a new Job. Especially when they can simply copy wholesale all the abilities of an existing Job and only need to swap the FVX on a dozen or so abilities, and the VFX they'd be swapping to are already in the game. Hell, making CNJ where it gaimed higher level WHM abilities like Stone IV would be harder than just coping the WHM Job and having one version that stopped at Stone IV instead of upgrading to Glare.

and aren't trying to bargain with a forum white knight for some peace and quiet.

And that, Ty, is you finally getting to the crux of the matter:

You aren't interested in compromise. You just want me to stop representing a separate position and shut up. Inflexibility, thy name is Ty.

You can keep calling me inflexible if you wish, but the record shows otherwise.

[ty_taurus]

You aren't interested in compromise. You just want me to stop representing a separate position and shut up. Inflexibility, thy name is Ty.

You can keep calling me inflexible if you wish, but the record shows otherwise.

You can keep being wrong about what "inflexible" means if you wish, but the records actually show that you are wrong.

I was fully on board with your suggestion to have White Mage's gameplay be inspired by Paladin--something that offers more like what I and others have asked for while still being straightforward and enjoyable for you. I don't know why you abandoned that train of thought. I think that's a perfectly valid compromise. It should be different than Paladin, but can feel inspiration from it and try to attain the same general level of offensive complexity or even a little less.

No. It would not be "far more easily" because, again, they'd have to rework all Classes to be viable OR have a wonky system of only one Class being viable in a system that otherwise has only Jobs and where Classes, for all practical applications, do not exist.

Listen to someone who actually works in the field. It is considerably less work and less time required to simplify and adjust 9 classes than it is to create an entire new job concept from scratch along with all the animations, weapons, visual effects, sound effects, story quests, etc. And you don't even need all 9 all at once. You could have one per role as "beginner" classes that are viable for savage even if not meta that way anyone who's trying to learn the game has something very easy to start with. And if you like the training wheels, you can keep them on if you so choose.

Remember? Where we had that big fallout because you were insisting it needed to be a Class and didn't read my posts? And you eventually admitted you didn't read my posts, but used the excuse of me insulting you as a reason for you not to apologize?

Is that like the other day when you asked if I'd play an official support role, and I kept giving you more and more detailed answers because you refused to read each answer over and over until I literally made you a flowchart, then you got pissy and told me you weren't speaking to me anymore because I wasn't answering you, even though you just were ignoring my answers time and time again. Like that?

[Renathras]

You can keep being wrong about what "inflexible" means if you wish, but the records actually show that you are wrong.

How?

As I've shown above, I've bent SEVEN TIMES from my initial position, each time giving ground. And the last bend was even giving up my "no change" position entirely.

How could I be more flexible than that?

Meanwhile, your position has consistently been change must occur. Never once have you wavered from that position, other than what I think was a sarcastic "White Mage Classic", and two times where you've said it's okay for CONJURUER, but only as a Class, not as a Job, to be a simple healer. That's like saying "How about we make Conjurer the complex healer and have the rest all be simple?", you just don't want to see it.

How is it flexible to go from "Jobs must be more complex and they must all change" to "Jobs must be more complex and they must all change"?

Your willingness to be interested - though I don't recall you fully supporting it - making WHM more complex (on the order of PLD, but that's still more complex) and changing it as opposed to leaving it alone is flexibility?

And what part of me changing my position seven (eight? I'd forgotten about the WHM proposal) times me being inflexible?

Especially when you say you supported one of the changes?

You need to stop with these petty insults. Especially when they're lies and you're describing what you do as an insult against me. I've shown far more change and flexibility on this issue than you have. I don't know how going from "change none of the healers" to "change all of the healers just leave one SOMEWHAT alone" is inflexible on my part.

Listen to someone who actually works in the field.

Appeal to authority fallacy? I also did ask you once before what game(s) you work on. You didn't answer, so I have no actual evidence you do work in the field, btw.

It is considerably less work and less time required to simplify and adjust 9 classes than it is to create an entire new job concept from scratch along with all the animations, weapons, visual effects, sound effects, story quests, etc.

Okay...first, disagree. You'd have to to make 9 sets of ability adjustments and tuning, as well as balance them going forward against all the Jobs in the game. We'd go from 19 Jobs to 29 Jobs overnight. They'd also need new animations, since they'd progress together up to a point and then diverge. For example, when WHM goes from Stone IV to Glare to Glare 2, CNJ would go from Stone IV to Stone V to Stone VI. Those are still new animations. You may or may not need new weapons, but you would need new visual effects and sound effects. The only thing you wouldn't need is a new story quest, but the new story quests (did SGE and did GNB back in ShB) weren't exactly a ton of work. A few dozen dialogue boxes, a couple of NPCs, a couple of "purple circle spawns 3 enemies", and a pair of instanced solo encounters that entirely use existing assets, like the RPR entry one that uses one room of Cutter's Cry and existing enemy assets there are probably less work than not only adjusting abilities for 9 Classes but then trying to balance 29 Class/Jobs from now on.

On the other hand, say we added Druid. It has all the same weapons as WHM. It uses the same gear as WHM/SCH/AST/SGE. You're adding one new artifact armor and Relic weapon per expansion, and you were going to do this anyway (suppose Druid was one of the two new Jobs in DT, for example). Come to it, you were going to add that new Job (Corsair and ?Green Mage?) to the game, so you allocated the assets to new story. In fact, adding Druid as a split from CNJ would be LESS work than adding a new Job like SGE, since you don't need as many new animations with it sharing gear with WHM up until level 90 probably (might get different main hands from then on); even if it was an entirely new Job that didn't split from CNJ, it's no more difficult than adding a new Job, so if we get 2 of those per expansion no matter what, making Druid one of those doesn't change anything.

As for assets: They're all in the game. Aero 1/2/3? In the game files. Stone 1/2/3/4? In the game files. Water? Fluid Aura is in the game files and many enemies like Mind Flayers cast the Water spell, meaning it's in the game files. Literally the only new things are things you're adding anyway with the new expansion's allotted 2 Jobs. So say in 8.0 they added Druid as a new healer, this would be literally no additional overhead. Meanwhile, converting all the Classes into full on Jobs, balanced against Jobs, that can participate in all content and must be balanced against Jobs in all content would be far more difficult...

...all to maintain your seeming desire that the "baby" Jobs not be allowed to be called Jobs.

Maybe you work in the field, but that seems nonsensical.

And if you're doing only one per role, that makes EVEN LESS sense - again, it makes the design convoluted to new players. "Why can I do high end content on GLD, CNJ, and ACN but not MRD or LNC or THM?"

There's zero logic to doing this as opposed to just adding a new Job.

Good gosh, SOMEONE else has to see this? For the love of Newton, back me up, totally-not-an-echo-chamber forum. >_<

[ty_taurus]

How?

Because none of your stances are actually compromising the concern in question. They're all about anchoring at least one job to remain unchanged for the rest of eternity, never allowed to change because you like it the way it is. You aren't actually budging on your stance, and you act as though it is by your mercy that we are allowed to want to rework the other jobs as long as we pinky promise we won't want to change White Mage too, or whatever job you're offering as the sacrificial lamb that particular day.

The stance of "This system does not work, and it should change to anything that isn't this" has infinite possibilities that I am 100% open to discuss. That's the opposite of Inflexible. As I said several times now, I liked your suggestion of having White Mage's offensive gameplay inspired by Paladin--a suggestion that you seem to continue to ignore for some reason. Is it because I agree with you about that? "Oh shit, he actually likes that idea. Time to backpedal!" If I didn't agree with you, would you have listed that as another example of your gracious compromises as well? Why are you pretending like that wasn't a conversation? Do you just want to disagree for the sake of disagreeing?

It's like with the support role teeth-pulling session where you shut down and completely ignore anything referencing it because you didn't like the answers I gave you about my opinion over and over, which is even weirder quite frankly. My answer wasn't a "gotcha!" moment for you so you've abandoned ship? I don't understand your modus operandi.

Appeal to authority fallacy?

I'd rather not post my job location on a public forum, so fair enough it's not fair for me to pull that card. I shouldn't do that, but I'm just annoyed because I know what I'm talking about. I've literally done it and I just don't think you understand that there's no functional difference between classes or jobs. And no I really don't care if it's called a class or a job, I'm just saying you can repurpose the asset that's already in the game as a roundabout way of securing the baby's first MMORPG playstyle without condemning any singular job to that playstyle perpetually. I'll also tolerate adding in DPS actions to every healer, and then allowing the player to manually disable them, which inversely increases the potency of your filler spell by a small amount for each one you disable. You could even disable Dia if you wanted. You only require Glare, Holy, and Afflatus Misery. If that's the bargaining chip I need to see each healer fixed and not anchored down to a Little Tike's Tricycle, then I'm all for it. But none of that should be needed.

As has been said probably hundreds of times across multiple people at this point, ensuring each healer doesn't spam any one spell more than 30%-ish of their gameplay does not instantly make them all big brain Ninja rotation high APM expert jobs that shit on any new or casual healer. What has been suggested for White Mage by a number of people is still extremely beginner friendly.

The only thing that's lost and what seems to be the only thing you care about is the ability to parse purple or higher without any effort whatsoever. Apparently we're not allowed to have every healer be rewarding because then even when you clear content, you'll be upset because you because you'd have to work harder to be better than everyone else at that clear.

[Shurrikhan]

Whether intended or not, the first part of your post sounds very...aristocratic? Technocratic? "It doesn't matter if this affects other people and they don't like it, they're ignorant children who just don't know any better."

Mate, you were acting like any narrowing of ideas could only come from a narrowing of interests, seemingly to then dismiss ideas coming from these forums (unless in agreement with you) as a result of interests too narrow to be worth considering remotely representative.

While the nature of the participants is a possible reason for narrowed ideas, the nature of that participation in the given venue is just as likely a reason for why discourse may vary between two locations.

Which is exactly what one will see, too, in perusing r/ffxiv and r/ffxivdiscussion. Both tend to show the same base opinions as here. It's only the more concrete, constructive theorycrafting of improvements/solutions that ends up developing differently... because r/ffxivdiscussion and especially r/ffxiv hardly has any such theorycrafting period -- again, due to the characteristics of that venue (we very rarely maintain long-form or multi-thread discussion with each other over there).

I did a DF P9N two days ago. The other healer did not use her DoT.

Which mattered oh so much... in P9 Normal? ???

Our DoTs are the value of 2.5 to 2.6 fillers per minute -- less than 11% of our total direct DPS (smaller still for SCH or AST rDPS), or at most ~5.6% of a DPS's throughput given the same ilvl and percentile. A DPS loses as much from minor misalignments.

And you're going to claim, what, that it'd be utterly abhorrent/unfair/devastating if a healer should have to hit more than a single button to get 90% of its damage potential?
???

Propsals for making WHM more complex do not make GCD heals less punishing.

Any new design lever a kit could add to make GCD heals less punishing... would be complexity. Manipulars are complexity. Lilies, themselves, are... complexity. Plenary Indulgence is... complexity.

Your proposed all-GCD-heals-feed-the-Bloodlily solution, too, relies on... complexity.

In your case, by hiding a Glare's value and effectively a 100 MP refund in every GCD heal, shifting their effective MP costs in ways that further penalize higher-MP-costing GCD heals relative to Cure/Regen, turning Glare into a trap to be removed from your hotbar, and making oGCD heals largely redundant from the sheer amount of free healing thereby possible... except when obliged to spend every 4th GCD on Misery. (Each GCD for which you forget to do so will cost you 71% of a Dia's bonus value, a far more severe and frequent rigid timing check than WHM has ever had before.)

P.S. If actually balanced, you aren't ultimately going to give GCD heals a lower relative cost at any particular HPS requirement.

If you increase offensive ppgcd but decrease the expected %offensive uptime, you make GCDs a part of gameplay but slightly increase the relative penalty of each GCD missed, even though the total rDPS dependence on management remains the same. If you make every bit of healing --GCD or otherwise-- "free", then you have to balance the kit around that fact, thus increasing the relative rDPS impact of any mismanaged healing ability while badly reducing your output ceiling in solo or little-healing-required content and far more early capping the sense of progression available to healers as they grow more experienced and/or more geared.

However, you can change how they fit within the rest of the kit to make them far more intuitive and therefore friendly to players, especially those without the experience to have yet made sense of those oddities.

The only thing that would outright do that would be making the GCD heals contribute to Misery, an idea you oppose.

Which was, among other things, because your proposed implementation was bonkers levels of broken, easily giving WHM up to triple the free healing of other healers (while devolving Solace and Rapture into solely a saving of 2s of casting time and 300-900 MP saved).

Yes, you 'reduced complexity' in effectively removing Glare from the kit and making oGCDs a less mana-intensive option in case one needed them, all by removing the core benefit of Lilies to instead add a cleaving Glare's damage value to every single GCD heal, with no complicating limitations beyond "Dump every 4th GCD," but that was largely why your suggestion was so broken. The lack of underlying complexity on your roundabout attempt to reduce GCD-healing penalties left you with no controls by which to stop your runaway train.

...But you've also added further complexity, even in a zero-nuance way, via the braindead but punishing chore of having to hit Misery every GCD it's available as not to waste Blood Lily cultivation, so that the GCDs you just lulled players into using liberally again become traps every 4th GCD (when Misery is made available).

-----

Yet the funniest thing is that the whole attempt ignores the fact that if the devs just hadn't given each job the means to maintain 100% offensive uptime in the first place, they wouldn't then have their attack potencies tuned down to balance them around that fact. You could literally just curtail WHM's oGCD healing (putting them at high MP costs) and buff their GCD actions (both output and cost-efficiency) to the same effect as making every healing action also a cleaving Glare.

If you actually approached the matter interested in efficient design and player-friendliness and wanted to reduce the skill-gap and unintuitiveness caused by the sharp gap between at-cost and "free" heals... the easiest solution is found in rebalancing the kit power itself, as not to leave a third of each healer's kit as a "fallback" to veterans but an actual trap to less experienced players.

The people helped by the change are the people bored right now, not the people who are not.

"I don't hate it" =/= "Any and all possible changes, even in keeping with and no harm to my interests, would disturb me."

And pick a damn camp. Who are you for?

Is it those whose rewards are most pronounced under the existing system? I.e., those who 'solve' the fight, then repeat at nauseum, laughing at any fool who dares use one more GCD of healing than they absolutely had to while you get your Malefic percentage that much closer to 91.7%?

Or is it casual players?

See that balance of healing kit power proposed above, by which we stop leaving healer kits a counterintuitive mess? That would primarily benefit the casual experience in healing, even while also meeting many of the requests of more veteran.

It's also a change.

[Renathras]

Mate, you were acting like any narrowing of ideas could only come from a narrowing of interests, seemingly to then dismiss ideas coming from these forums (unless in agreement with you) as a result of interests too narrow to be worth considering remotely representative.

/sigh

Good god, but we could have such good discussions if you people didn't lie. Though I think it's less lying and more you just imagine/interpret me saying things I didn't, then instead of asking for clarification, run with that.

Where - show me one place - I "dismissed" what these forums say?

I've said it doesn't represent the majority.
I've said it's an echo chamber.
I've said it doesn't allow for dissenting voices.

But where did I say it has nothing of value to consider and/or dismissed it outright? If I dismissed it outright, I wouldn't support the 4 Healers Model!

While the nature of the participants is a possible reason for narrowed ideas, the nature of that participation in the given venue is just as likely a reason for why discourse may vary between two locations.

It's also likely the participants. Again, find a more general audience and you see more varied views. That was literally the only point I was making.

Which is exactly what one will see, too, in perusing r/ffxiv and r/ffxivdiscussion. Both tend to show the same base opinions as here.

Except they ALSO show OTHER opinions than here. Opinions not represented here. I represent some, but there are people there outright "healers are supposed to heal, not dps", and even I don't hold that position.

Which mattered oh so much... in P9 Normal? ???

MOVING THE GOAL POSTS AGAIN??

I was making a point. I made that specific point clear. The point was that casuals and DoTs do not mix well. If you want to address my point, address MY POINT. My point was not "DoT upkeep in normals is relevant". I DID NOT MAKE THAT POINT.

My point WAS that casuals are not good with DoT upkeep. And it was in opposition to the idea that putting more of our damage in our DoTs would help casuals, and was trying to show by example how this forum's ideas of "I'm proposing a compromise to help casuals" do not, in fact, achieve the goal of helping casuals. Good GOD!

And you're going to claim, what, that it'd be utterly abhorrent/unfair/devastating if a healer should have to hit more than a single button to get 90% of its damage potential?

GOAL POST MOVE AGAIN!@!?!?!

WHEN I have I EVER claimed that a healer should not be allowed to get more than 10% damage from buttons aside from their nukespam?

Even RIGHT NOW, if we LEFT HEALERS ENTIRELY ALONE, they get more than 10% of their damage from more than one button. Top party clear for P9S right now on the abacus has a SCH and AST. The SCH has 6,340 DPS from Broil IV and 1,271.6 from Biolysis, 462.1 from Energy Drain, 44 from Ruin 2, and even 39.5 from freakin' autoattack. Total DPS: 8,157.2 Broil IV = 6,340/8,157.2*100% = 77.7%. 77.7% << 90%.

AST: 5,538.6/7041.1*100% = 78.7%.

SGE (19th clear from the top): 5,979.9/8,478*1000% = 70.5%

WHM (27th clear, the WHM is a 91, not even 99): 5,360/8,061.4*100% = 66.5%.

NONE of the Healers RIGHT NOW get 90+% damage from one button. If we DIDN'T CHANGE THEM AT ALL, they would continue to have to press more than one button for their damage.

No one. LITERALLY no one, is making the argument "it'd be utterly abhorrent/unfair/devastating if a healer should have to hit more than a single button to get 90% of its damage potential". NO ONE IS MAKING THAT ARGUMENT, so your "rebuttal" of it or accusation I am are not only completely irrelevant, it's an outright lying straw man.

It's even WORSE since I (a) have proposed changing 3 of the healers and (b) even proposed changing ALL FOUR while making the most complex one right now the least changed.

I can't even with the rest of this post... Maybe I can come back later, but &$^# man. That's garbage.

Balancing around people's mistakes is bad.

....

You're a generally good faith person, so I suspect this was unintentional, Sebazy, but:

Goal post move.

My point was that DoTs are not the vehicle to use to improve casual player performance. Misery is a far better tool. If your goal was to devalue lost GCD Glares, upping Misery would be the solution there, since casual WHM's love the heck out of that thing and don't tend to skimp on using it.

Also, I don't think "didn't keep a DoT up or even apply it" is in the category of "mistake". Letting a DoT fall off isn't a "mistake". A mistake is when you hot a button that's not optimal, not when you lose track of something because the native UI of the game does

not present it to you well. I do agree some other fixes might help with this problem, but I again will point out to you that upkeep for DoTs is probably the biggest thing casual players (ones who DO understand ABC and oGCD > GCD) still have a problem with. If the goal is to help casual players, putting more on the DoT is the wrong call unless you make the DoT's idiot proof. It's a lot easier to fill dead GCDs with Glare or use Misery when the big pink flower opens up with a chime than it is to upkeep a DoT. I'm not sure how this is a difficult concept to comprehend and I'm not sure how to explain it better.

But the point is, if you are proposing something to help casuals (and you were), and to help people who more rely on/use GCD heals (which...are going to be casuals, so same group/lots of overlap at least), then the answer cannot be to use the DoT to do so.

Yes and no, I feel. If a job is, to the vast majority of players, more difficult to optimize than other jobs and you give it nothing compensatory for that fact... then you basically just put it on most players' avoid lists.

To me, it's fine that a given job has a bit of an advantage among your "95th percentile" and up kind of players... so long as it also is likely to underperform among your 25th and under or so. It'd just mean you couldn't balance the tiers of difficulty/optimizations among each job quite evenly which... yeah, would be nearly impossible to do and isn't worth pursuing over job identity.

Something we agree on.

Not withstanding my prior annoyance above: I agree with you on this 100%.

(To be clear, that reward doesn't always have to be total direct throughput. It could be flexibility or the like... so long as that flexibility were actually relevance.)

This is why I think things like Expedience are good options. It's why I thought ShB SMN doing comparable damage to BLM while also having a Raise was a good option. Things that are harder can offer side-grade perks without destroying balance or blacklisting/blackballing other Jobs. The issue is that they need to be things that are nice to have but not strictly necessary. A bonus but not a game changing one that makes it a must have party member for that slot.

[Sebazy]

You're a generally good faith person, so I suspect this was unintentional, Sebazy, but:

Goal post move.

My point was that DoTs are not the vehicle to use to improve casual player performance. Misery is a far better tool. If your goal was to devalue lost GCD Glares, upping Misery would be the solution there, since casual WHM's love the heck out of that thing and don't tend to skimp on using it.

At the risk of being brutally honest here....

Perhaps you don't realise you're doing it, but it feels like you come up with a theory and nothing will change your mind over it. You'll willingly die on that hill even when people come back at you with cold hard data that goes entirely against your narrative.

Case in point, I went to Kokytos normal, all reports, all kills, WHM only, clicked the first link and lo and behold.....

If you don't want to click through, that's 97% uptime on Dia and 1 Misery cast in a 6:30 clear. The other WHM had 81% on dia and 3 Miserys.

Here's another more mid to high tier log.... 78% run, 95% on Dia, 5 Miserys.

Next in line, 57% run, 84% uptime on Dia, 2 Miserys, 5:54 kill time.

The new log that isn't a 90+ log..., 67% run, 85% uptime on Dia, 3 Miserys, 6:24 kill time.

I can keep on going if you want but hopefully by now the point is made:

No, dots are not exclusively the biggest factor casuals struggle with. It's just cooldown/timed abilities in general, be it getting value from things like Benison, Aquaveil or as demonstrated, even just remembering to blast out those Lilies. Get 5 different casuals with bad logs and you'll likely find 5 different core facets of the gameplay that they struggle with. As the links above demonstrate, suggesting that Misery is somehow significantly easier for casuals to remember is patently false. It's all too easy to panic and overcap, it's easy to use Medica II as a comfort blanket and fail to throw out nearly enough Lilies under the assumption that overhealing with them is bad. As I said before, there is no perfect one size fits all solution. Dots aren't it and neither is Misery. Luckily we have 4 healers and thus SE can try different approaches with each eh? Just giving everyone damage neutral healing GCDs is a risky copout IMO.

As for letting a dot fall off not being a mistake... Goal post move.

A mistake is when you hot a button that's not optimal

Pressing Glare when Dia isn't up is not optimal. By your own definition, it's a mistake.

Seriously though, the game could do a better job of displaying dots for sure, but I've covered that topic to death already.

[Shurrikhan]

I made that specific point clear. The point was that casuals and DoTs do not mix well.

Corrections: players with high affective filter (be that from low engagement, high panic, or whatever else) and hitting things in a timely fashion do not always mix well. That's not unique to DoTs.

That also depends greatly on how focus is drawn to them. When DoTs were more integral and frequent such as back in ARR and HW, you'd see even very casual Bards maintaining their 18s duration DoTs with little issue. You'd see even casual Melees maintaining their 2-3 DoTs and their 2-4 buffs, both, with relatively little issue.

Exception: Heavy Thrust after combo length was lengthened by 2 GCDs per cycle saw a whopping <10% of players not always maintaining it. Which penalized them with 17 to ~50 potency. Oh noes?

Admittedly, yeah, if you set things up so every healing spell cultivates a Blood Lily (still ridiculously broken, btw), there'd be more focus on that previously accessible-per-60-seconds Misery. Perhaps it would even reorient attention around that previously accessible-per-60-to-100 seconds skill so much that being penalized for an entire Glare's worth of damage for each GCD past every 4th GCD in which they don't immediately pop it (e.g., if they panic-GCD-heal instead of dumping immediately from losing that rhythm (as opposed to 10.8% of a Glare per GCD for which Dia is delayed) wouldn't somehow be less player-unfriendly. But I doubt it.

Even RIGHT NOW, if we LEFT HEALERS ENTIRELY ALONE, they get more than 10% of their damage from more than one button.

GCD damage. We'd been talking about offensive spells. I wanted more. You did not. Sorry for the earlier ambiguity in the quick post.

AST and SCH can get ~90% of their GCD damage off a single button alone (and, without needing heals, even WHM does the same).

If they do not hit Combust, for instance --i.e., if somehow DoTs were uniquely or disproportionately what casual players struggle with rather than GCD minimization or CD usage in general-- then those Combust casts would become Malefics. The value of Combust, or indeed any other (soft) CD with an opportunity cost (that of a Malefic), is only its bonus (its damage over Malefic).

Each job can put out 24 GCDs per minute, pre-Spell Speed. If, per minute, they put out 24 fillers instead of 22 fillers and 2 DoTs, they average 90% of their damage potential.

Those DoTs do not simply vanish into the aether with no replacement, unless the problem is with more than DoTs (e.g., an issue with spending more than 90% of their time casting at all, even despite those DoTs being instant-casts).

Also, I don't think "didn't keep a DoT up or even apply it" is in the category of "mistake". Letting a DoT fall off isn't a "mistake". Letting a DoT fall off isn't a "mistake". A mistake is when you hot a button that's not optimal, not when you lose track of something because the native UI of the game does

It is a mistake. You hit another filler when you had the opportunity to start tapping into the bonus value of your soft-CD instead. That's hitting a non-optimal button. It's a ton less punishing than accidentally hitting Gekko after Shifu because you got your combos crossed, but it is literally hitting a non-optimal button.

I've pushed for UI adjustments since ARR, such as by allowing the DoT skill's icon itself to show the remaining time on your last enemy targeted, but seriously, it's not difficult to just put the Target's Status Effects just directly above or to the side of your own priority buffs, each expanding in the opposite direction, so you can easily track both. Voila.

The UI is customizable. If looking up per 20-30s is difficult... move it so you don't have to. We've been able to stack them neatly atop each other since the game's re-release.

I've said it doesn't represent the majority.
I've said it's an echo chamber.
I've said it doesn't allow for dissenting voices.

But where did I say it has nothing of value to consider and/or dismissed it outright?

If it weren't representative of the broader playerbase (and instead so skewed in our interests as to be incompatible with any desire for 'the greater good'), then why even bother?

If you keep hearing "echoes" of only the same thing, it might because you continue to ignore the variety in warrants for a shared conclusion, let alone the many differing conclusions themselves. When you simply classify anything disagrees with you as an echo of the same thing regardless of its motive, experiences, or underlying logics, then yeah, things will sound the same. A participants selective hearing, though, isn't the fault of a place of discourse.

If these forums don't allow for dissenting voices, then why are so few voices in agreement... on virtually anything between emotional handwaving ("things are bad/we need change") and hard facts?

But, let's you were actually right that this is a skewed echo chamber with some powerful group determining what is or is not "dissent". That would actually be damning. It'd give you, on the whole, far more reason to leave and never look back.

So which is it?