How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[Renathras]

WHM being regarded as the 'red headed stepchild' of the day and being significantly improved (aside from losing A3) going into SHB does not undo all the losses the others faced. There is zero reason we couldn't have gained the SHB lily fix, AND kept Aero 3, for example. Trying to say that one replaced the other 'so nothing changed really' is like what SE tries to convince us with, with things like 'yeh you lost Stoneskin but here's Stoneskin with a new coat of paint (benison)', or the removal and readdition of the healing% increase CD called Divine Seal>Largesse>Temperance

Well, it's not the topic at hand, but this IS kind of a point I've made before. And why I've specifically advocated for Aero3/Banish since otherwise WHM is pretty much undisputedly better now than it was in SB. Most of the other things about SB WHM really sucked, and while people keep saying "SB was better", when pinned down on WHM, there's a lot of dithering passed Aero 3. It's also a reason for the advocation that WHM stay mostly the same since there's not really anything from that era aside from Aero 3 that people really miss when pressed on the question. And yet, people didn't complain about it being braindead back then, so apparently, having only Aero 3 that we don't know (and possibly a few less oGCDs...but with WHM, that doesn't really make a lot of sense...) was sufficient for people at the time to find WHM intensely engaging and fun to play.

Stoneskin and Benison aren't the same (one was a GCD, spamable and there was sometimes reason to do so, though by SB most people had stopped using it as much; the other is an oGCD with a CD that you weave between Nukespam casts), likewise, Divine Seal should honestly still be in the game and simply upgrade to Temperance (Largesse wasn't a separate action, it was Divine Seal converted to a Role Action).

But that's more for that other thread (guess I can cross-post it there), not this one.

This is about what makes choice.

I feel like the people saying "meaningful consequence" aren't understanding what I mean by choice. Choice has to allow a player to choose actions, and if there is only one right and the punishment severe for not choosing it, that isn't a real choice. As someone said before, it's like offering a person poison or medicine to take when ill. While technically a choice, the reality is that there's only one true option as the other is never picked.

To me, to have meaningful choice requires having - at the minimum - more than one VIABLE choice, and situations where either option can be argued to be correct. Outside of that, it's not a choice. It's being right or wrong.

[AmiableApkallu]

I feel like the people saying "meaningful consequence" aren't understanding what I mean by choice. Choice has to allow a player to choose actions, and if there is only one right and the punishment severe for not choosing it, that isn't a real choice. As someone said before, it's like offering a person poison or medicine to take when ill. While technically a choice, the reality is that there's only one true option as the other is never picked.

To me, to have meaningful choice requires having - at the minimum - more than one VIABLE choice, and situations where either option can be argued to be correct. Outside of that, it's not a choice. It's being right or wrong.

And thus have you missed the point of my earlier comment. So long as the question is ultimately about maximizing damage, once you have precisely stated the question and scenario, and the criteria by which you will evaluate answers, there is only ever one correct answer (damage is objective, just do the math), and thus by your definition, there is never a real or meaningful choice.

To the extent that one feels there is a meaningful choice to be made, it is because: you're not certain which question it is you actually care about, or you're not certain which criteria you want to use to evaluate answers, or you simply don't have enough information and time available to fully work out the answer before you need to push a button.

Put another way, Broil IV and Ruin II do not provide choice because they might both be the correct answer to a question about dealing damage (this is never the case). They provide choice because they answer different questions and scenarios, and thus provide us the agency to decide what it is we actually care about in this game.

[TheDustyOne]

I feel like the people saying "meaningful consequence" aren't understanding what I mean by choice. Choice has to allow a player to choose actions, and if there is only one right and the punishment severe for not choosing it, that isn't a real choice. As someone said before, it's like offering a person poison or medicine to take when ill. While technically a choice, the reality is that there's only one true option as the other is never picked.

To me, to have meaningful choice requires having - at the minimum - more than one VIABLE choice, and situations where either option can be argued to be correct. Outside of that, it's not a choice. It's being right or wrong.

Again, you're conflating depth with meaning. Depth is good, we should want that, but just because you have multiple choices available (again, my Garuda vs Titan example) doesn't make the choices meaningful. Broil and Ruin are meaningful as they both have consequences to the choice and it's up to us to decide when it's worth taking the risks associated with that choice. Even the poison vs water example is meaningful as it can put emphasis on how much someone values their own life, or heck, whether or not that person is bluffing (certainly wouldn't count on that in that scenario) and as such, there's meaning behind the choice, even if it's an obvious choice for nearly everyone that values their life. If instead I had to choose between 2 brands of lemonade, there's a lot less meaning, either way I have lemonade.

Compare all this with BLM, we have multiple different ways we could move when we need to, but each one has consequences involved; I could use up my Thundercloud, but risk not having it proc later if I don't have Sharpcast up, or it means I have to reapply the DoT early, I could use a stack of Xenoglossy, but I may not be able to use one under raid buffs, I could use up a Firestarter proc, but that may mean I can't Transpose > Fire III in the next UI phase later, maybe I can use that stack of Triplecast, but I may end up having to use a stack on Blizzard III if I use it too late in my AF phase, Xenoglossy and Thundercloud also risks AF running out and tanking my damage. This is gameplay depth with meaningful choices.