From Meleewalker to Meleetrail

[SaberMaxwell]

I should have picked my wording better, I sometimes forget the internet is a terrible place to try to indicate tone (well, text in general).

Regarding raise I'm on team "yank it altogether." Humorously one of the few things the 2 minute meta has done well has been make raise exorbitantly expensive--since most mechanics that can kill people also happen during those two minute windows, a Red Mage has to cut one of their melee combos entirely to catch a raise and summoner needs to cut, erm, a swiftcasted ifrit/garuda spell I think. I can only speak to detail on RDM but there is somewhere in the thousands of potency of opportunity cost to pick someone up if they die during a burst, or even if a death happens while you're mid combo.

The capping its cast time reduction is an idea I've thought of as well, which would make sense too since RDM has a 9 or 10 second long raise cast compared to everyone else at 7.5s iirc.

[Shurrikhan]

The capping its cast time reduction is an idea I've thought of as well, which would make sense too since RDM has a 9 or 10 second long raise cast compared to everyone else at 7.5s iirc.

10s, yeah. Which seems... needless and wonky, since we aren't going to use it outside of Swiftcast or Dualcast.

The advantage of capping Dualcast's cast-time reduction would be, to me, that we could split the difference and drop Verraise down to 3 or 4 seconds of cast-time under Dualcast instead of being forced to exempt the skill or always have it offer free Swiftcast-Raises-Until-OOM. Such would still be advantageous but situational, since it then often couldn't be used mid-mechanic and would therefore face many of the same challenges as others' bare Raises, even if not to the same uptime costs.

Another idea I've being toying with, though, stacking with Dualcast being capped at 4s (and Veraero/Verthunder returning to just a 4s cast) is to stop bothering with Reprise altogether, and instead allow Black and/or White Mana to be consumed to automatically complete Black/White/Red casts when they'd otherwise be interrupted by non-manual means, based on cast time skipped over.

* (As the relative value of each point of gauge increases, decrease this cost, or add a bit of bonus potency in compensation for accelerated spells.)

In that case, you could have Verraise be a standard 8s cast that'd cost X White Mana gauge to instant-cast, and you might then add a 8s cast mitigation tool that consumes Black Mana for thematic balance. No button-bloat. A bit more utility. But you aren't as taxed for merely having it -- instead, it's more self-balancing, without relying on coinciding raid damage dealt and likelihood of death.

[Lyth]

I think there will probably be changes to how Raise works in this next expansion, given their experiments with it in the Variant/Criterion system. I think for lower difficulty content, having access to multiple raises across multiple party members is important. Your healers might not know the fight at all and may really struggle with mechanics, but the game design will still aim to help them through to experience the story, like the current raise system allows. Where it could change is in harder difficulty settings for the same fight, where you could situationally restrict the number of times you can cast raise (per specific teammate, or per group), or lock it behind a timer. You could even have 'checkpoints' where your raise uses are restored. Under such a system, you probably could have a lot of different jobs providing a raise alternatives. It could even be a channeled character action, like 'Assist' or 'Help Up', as long as there's a cap on uses per fight.

[Supersnow845]

^do we really need to prune healer responsibility any more

Just delete the role at this point

[Shurrikhan]

I don't hate the idea of capping rezzes to some degree, but at the same time it seems a slightly wonky and unnecessary solution. All difficult mainstream content has at least one backup rezzer, just by nature of being 8-man. I agree that we'd want to be able to let experience as much of the fight as possible those players who are new to a fight, especially if they are by role the ones who most permit the same for everyone else. But, let's assume for a moment the healers are guaranteed rezes because every job can rez. Does that really help them with experiencing the fight, when they're out of MP, out of sync, and more than likely out of their depth? Even ignoring the costs it'd have on healers' sense of role and responsibilities, would that actually serve that purpose more than, say, resetting after the failed mechanic?

If part of the rationale is that, say, some fights have very odd or "gotcha" mechanics (difficult until solved, and then likely as dull as the "easy" stuff before) only late in the fight, sure, those are probably worth addressing. I'm just not sure if guaranteeing that parties will have access to rezzes even after all the healers die is necessarily for the best even for said healers.

And if we're really aiming to address/discourse/map out the maybe-problem-maybe-not of likely-ish healer deaths, it feels like we could equally warrant that we should instead have more (perhaps at-great-cost or global-charges-constrained) means of preventing the death in the first place. Should things like Cover and Invulns and such not equally have a place in the discussion if we're considering turning Raise into a (party-wide, multi-charge) CD of sorts?

[Post]

The reality of the current game is that tanks and DPS can carry dead healers for most content in the game almost as well as healers have been able to for most of the game's life.

More times in EW than ever before have I been able to save a healerless group or clear a fight on my own as a tank, or as more than just PLD. The goal behind such a change as global Rez availability (which also exists in places like Bozja and sorta in Deep Dungeon, so no guarantee that it'd make its way to mainstream battle content) would be to put healers on equal footing with all the DPS and tanks that just get carried through fights learning nothing (though technically, the most common case for 8 man+ fights nowadays is to just completely skip everything valuable to the experience).

That removal of responsibility from healers wouldn't necessarily mean that their job would be even easier, because now players can be allowed to die more easily, especially to heal able damage since a group can much more often be counted on to have healers alive.

But, given their track record of removing responsibilities and putting nothing in their place that's more interesting (Enmity, positioning, pet management, MP management, TP management, melee downtime, resources that may be spent for mitigation/healing OR damage), if they did expanded rez availability I'd expect it'd go exactly as "now healers don't have to rez, also instead of being double raised I get quintuple raised".

Their track record for using new stuff as a test bed isn't great, either, given what they could have used from with Unreals when rebalancing for the stat squish and better balance new content, or could have used from Bozja to make for more interesting FATE/zone design... There's a lot of great little things in side stuff that just doesn't make its way into the normal stuff, so as much as I adore Criterion for its encounter design and relative lack of 'this attack always pick DPS or support', and as much as I love the diverse job design in PvP (and how often players make suggestions to incorporate PvP job elements into PvE jobs on these very forums), I'm not holding my breath for these changes, exciting as they could potentially be.

Edit: uhh and that relates to this thread because uhh... Meleewalker, Meleetrail they could really shake things up if they used bits of stuff from Criterion etc that might give jobs feelings of being distinct again and not just beholden to strict encounter design and predictable DPS performance

[GoatOfWar]

I would have been annoyed that we didn't get another tank, but they'll just be worse than warrior with extra jank that defines the job thanks to streamers that main War.

[PercibelTheren]

I think there will probably be changes to how Raise works in this next expansion, given their experiments with it in the Variant/Criterion system. I think for lower difficulty content, having access to multiple raises across multiple party members is important. Your healers might not know the fight at all and may really struggle with mechanics, but the game design will still aim to help them through to experience the story, like the current raise system allows. Where it could change is in harder difficulty settings for the same fight, where you could situationally restrict the number of times you can cast raise (per specific teammate, or per group), or lock it behind a timer. You could even have 'checkpoints' where your raise uses are restored. Under such a system, you probably could have a lot of different jobs providing a raise alternatives. It could even be a channeled character action, like 'Assist' or 'Help Up', as long as there's a cap on uses per fight.

Why? If people are dying in high end content, they're getting debuffed and the boss will enrage on you. Being able to salvage a pull that's going wrong is part of healer skill expression. It's bad enough that they've been enamored with body check mechanics that mean if people die, you wipe anyway.

[Valence]

I don't especially like the idea of going even further away from RPG mechanics to whatever farce of "execute the dance ballet flawlessly or else" this is turning into, but I could definitely see the game going that direction.

[Lyth]

...

Attendance checks are just there to ensure that every player present actually knows how to do the mechanic themselves. If you didn't have them, you could warm the floor for the entire fight and still clear. That's why story encounters don't generally have them.

Raises aren't 'healer skill expression'. I'm not sure where you got that idea from.